Posts Tagged ‘Archaeology’
“All cannot be lost when there is still so much being found”*…
We may be close to rediscovering thousands of texts that had been lost for millennia. As Justin Germain explains, their contents may reshape how we understand the ancient world…
We used to play this game in graduate school: find one, lose one. Find one referred to finding a lost ancient text, something that we know existed at one time because other ancient sources talk about it, but which has been lost to the ages. What if someone was digging somewhere in Egypt and found an ancient Greco-Roman trash dump with a complete copy of a precious text – which one would we wish into survival? Lose one referred to some ancient text we have, but we would give up in some Faustian bargain to resurrect the former text from the dead. Of course there is a bit of the butterfly effect; that’s what made it fun. As budding classicists, we grew up in an academic world where we didn’t have A, but did have B. How different would classical scholarship be if that switched? If we had had A all along, but never had B? For me, the text I always chose to find was a little-known pamphlet circulated in the late fourth century by a deposed Spartan king named Pausanias. It’s one of the few texts about Sparta written by a Spartan while Sparta was still hegemonic. I always lost the Gospel of Matthew. It’s basically a copy of Mark, right down to the grammar and syntax. Do we really need two?
What would you choose? Consider that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are only two of the poems that make up the eight-part Epic Cycle. Or that Aristotle wrote a lost treatise on comedy, not to mention his own Socratic dialogues that Cicero described as a ‘river of gold’. Or that only eight of Aeschylus’s estimated 70 plays survive. Even the Hebrew Old Testament refers to 20 ancient texts that no longer exist. There are literally lost texts that, if we had them, would in all likelihood have made it into the biblical canon.
The problem is more complex than the fact that many texts were lost to the annals of history. Most people just see the most recent translation of the Iliad or works of Cicero on the shelf at a bookstore, and assume that these texts have been handed down in a fairly predictable way generation after generation: scribes faithfully made copies from ancient Greece through the Middle Ages and eventually, with the advent of the printing press, reliable versions of these texts were made available in the vernacular of the time and place to everyone who wanted them. Onward and upward goes the intellectual arc of history! That’s what I thought, too.
But the fact is, many of even the most famous works we have from antiquity have a long and complicated history. Almost no text is decoded easily; the process of bringing readable translations of ancient texts into the hands of modern readers requires the cooperation of scholars across numerous disciplines. This means hours of hard work by those who find the texts, those who preserve the texts, and those who translate them, to name a few. Even with this commitment, many texts were lost – the usual estimate is 99 percent – so we have no copies of most of the works from antiquity. Despite this sobering statistic, every once in a while, something new is discovered. That promise, that some prominent text from the ancient world might be just under the next sand dune, is what has preserved scholars’ passion to keep searching in the hope of finding new sources that solve mysteries of the past.
And scholars’ suffering paid off! Consider the Villa of the Papyri, where in the eighteenth century hundreds, if not thousands, of scrolls were discovered carbonized in the wreckage of the Mount Vesuvius eruption (79 AD), in a town called Herculaneum near Pompeii. For over a century, scholars have hoped that future science might help them read these scrolls. Just in the last few months – through advances in computer imaging and digital unwrapping – we have read the first lines. This was due, in large part, to the hard work of Dr. Brent Seales, the support of the Vesuvius Challenge, and scholars who answered the call. We are now poised to read thousands of new ancient texts over the coming years.
But first, a bit of background on the provenance of ancient texts. We don’t have original copies of anything, not of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or Herodotus, or the Bible. Instead of originals, we find ourselves dealing with copies. These were first written on scrolls but later in books – the Romans called books codexes – starting in the first century AD.
Did I say copies? That’s actually not correct either. We don’t have first copies of anything. What we do have is copies of copies, most of which date hundreds of years after the original was penned. Even many of our copies are not complete copies. Take, for example, the earliest surviving piece of the New Testament: a fragment from the Gospel of John known as P52. Far from a complete copy of the book, this fragment is about the size of a credit card and dates to, in the earliest estimation, 125 AD. That is over 100 years after Christ was crucified. The fragment is without a doubt at least a copy of a copy because its dating is too late to be either an original or a first copy. It was also found in Egypt, far from both Judea or Syria, where John is thought to have originated. Finding a complete copy of a text – let alone an early Christian Bible – is a home run. We have only found two such Bibles, the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, both dating to the mid-fourth century.
More often than finding such complete copies, scholars instead compile the various fragments of copies and try to reconstruct the original work. Once scholars agree on what the original text should be, and in some cases they never reach agreement, the text is ready for publication in the original language. Where there are still variants in the text, scholars will include an apparatus criticus citing the manuscript from which the text is published and listing manuscripts with variant readings. The last step is to add a translation in the vernacular, and there are bilingual and even polyglot editions. These could range from the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, a magnificent, six-volume work printed in Madrid in 1519 giving the scriptural text in no less than four languages – Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Aramaic – to the popular Loeb editions printed with both the ancient text and an English translation, for those with some limited knowledge of the ancient languages.
To most fully acclimate the reader to how tenuous this process is, this essay will focus on three different texts. The first will be a very well-known work that was never lost. Nevertheless, almost no one read it in earnest until the nineteenth century. I will then focus on a text that was lost to history, but that we were able to recover from the annals of time. Such examples are fortuitous. Our third example will be a text that we know existed, but of which we have no copies, and consider what important ramifications its discovery could hold. Finally, we’ll turn our attention again to the Villa of the Papyri and the gold mine of texts discovered there that new technologies are currently making available to classicists. By examining the history of the first three texts, I hope to sketch out a picture of how new discoveries from the villa might change our understanding of the ancient world…
[Germain considers Aristotle’s Poetics (“While it’s not accurate to say, as one of Aristotle’s unpublished works, the Politics was ever lost, it was certainly rediscovered”), the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia (a group of fragments that cover Greek history in same period– from the closing years of the Peloponnesian War into the middle of the fourth century BCE– covered by Xenophon, but that tell a different story), and the Constitution of the Spartans, also by Aristotle– a work often cited in other extant texts, but never found (“Imagine an alternate universe where all sources about America were written by Soviets at the height of the Cold War. The historians of the future might get a warped sense of reality. That’s exactly the case with ancient Sparta [e.g., Thucydides]… Although still an outsider and Athenian, Aristotle wrote about the Spartan state in the Politics, and he did not have good things to say. It is safe to assume that whatever Aristotle’s Constitution said, its testimony was not influenced by the Spartan mirage, giving us perhaps a more accurate picture of life inside the city-state.”)]…
… Resurrecting the dead is difficult; Jesus knew that. And the only reason we know that he knew that is because the church saw the preservation of scripture as a core duty. Not one scrap of text from the ancient world has come to us without untold numbers of heroes quietly working to hand down, from generation to generation, the texts that have primarily shaped the modern world. We are thankful for documents like the Politics, documents whose life cycle we can narrate from conception to the present moment. Even then, such texts can fall in and out of fashion, and their knowledge can be lost to entire generations. Texts such as the Hellenic Oxyrhynchia are windfalls of good fortune, ones that are completely forgotten in their own day, then lost a second time to history, buried in some ancient Egyptian trash heap. All the work necessary to make texts like the Politics accessible need also be done for texts like the Hellenica Oxyrhinchia.
Yet there is still another monumental step: the texts must first be discovered. Dwarfed in comparison to the first two groups are texts – such as Aristotle’s Constitution of the Spartans – that were attested to by ancient sources but have been completely lost to the annals of time, like the vast majority of Greek and Latin texts. These sources, while now completely unavailable to us, might yet be discovered at any time, on any dig. On any given day the earth might bestow its blessing, uncovering wonders from the past, as was the case with many of the works of Epicurus, which would have fallen into this latter category of lost works, until we discovered the Villa of the Papyri. Yet even such a fortuitous discovery could not be taken advantage of were new techniques not developed for reading scrolls whose survival depends on not opening them. I always tell my Greek and Latin students that there is a point where the science of translating becomes pure art. Likewise, there is a point at which the recovery, translation, restoration, and, finally, the study of ancient texts becomes treasure seeking. You never know what treasure might be hiding in the next ancient Egyptian trash heap…
Filling in the blanks in ancient history: “Doom Scrolling” in @WorksInProgMag.
For more on the Vesuvius Challenge– its process and progress– see here (source of the image above).
* Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler)
###
As we revise, we might send carefully excavated birthday greeting to Karl Alfred von Zittel; he was born on this date in 1839. A geologist and paleontologist, he was a pioneer of evolutionary paleontology and was widely recognized as the leading teacher of paleontology in the 19th century. His five-volume Handbuch der Paläonologie (1876-93) was arguably his greatest service to science, and it remains one of the most comprehensive and trustworthy paleontological reference books.
But he also noteworthily proved that the Sahara had not been under water during the Pleistocene Ice Age.
“The braid is always stronger than the strand”*…
From Grace Ebert, a novel look at the world’s densest “city”…
At its height in the 1990s, Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong housed about 50,000 people. Its population is unremarkable for small cities, but what set Kowloon apart from others of its size was its density. Spanning only 2.6 hectares, the tiny enclave contained [the equivalent of] 1,255,000 people per square kilometer, making it the densest city in the world. For context, New York City boasts about 11,300 per square kilometer, while Manila, the most highly concentrated municipality today, tops out at about 42,000.
Kowloon was built as a small military fort around the turn of the 20th century. When the Chinese and English governments abandoned it after World War II, the area attracted refugees and people in search of affordable housing. With no single architect, the urban center continued to grow as people stacked buildings on top of one another and tucked new structures in between existing ones to accommodate the growing population without expanding beyond the original fort’s border.
With only a small pocket of community space at the center, Kowloon quickly morphed into a labyrinth of shops, services, and apartments connected by narrow stairs and passageways through the buildings. Rather than navigate the city through alleys and streets, residents traversed the structures using slim corridors that always seemed to morph, an experience that caused many to refer to Kowloon as “a living organism.”
The city devolved into a slum with crime and poor living conditions and was razed in 1994. Before demolition, though, a team of Japanese researchers meticulously documented the architectural marvel, which had become a sort of cyberpunk icon that even inspired a gritty arcade as tribute.
For a now out-of-print book titled Kowloon City: An Illustrated Guide, artist Hitomi Terasawa drew a meticulous cross-sectioned rendering of the urban phenomenon to preserve its memory. The massive panorama peers into the compact neighborhood, glimpsing narrow dance halls, laundry dangling from balconies, and entire factories tucked inside cramped quarters.
Thanks to psychologist Greg Jensen, we now have a stunning high-resolution scan of Terasawa’s illustration complete with annotations and diagramming. It’s worth viewing the full panorama in its entirety to zoom in on all the details of this infamous city [and here, animated]. And, for photos of Kowloon and its inhabitants, check out this incredibly informative video detailing its history…
A real-life human hive: “A Rare Cross-Section Illustration Reveals the Infamous Happenings of Kowloon Walled City,” from @Colossal.
* Ryan Graudin, The Walled City
###
As we pack it in, we might we might send the simplest of birthday greetings to a writer, philosopher, and naturalist who might not have gravitated naturally to Kowloon City, Henry David Thoreau; he was born on this date in 1817. From 1845 to 1847, Thoreau lived in a small cabin on the banks of Walden Pond, a small lake near Concord, Massachusetts. Striving to “simplify, simplify,” he strictly limited his expenditures, his possessions, and his contact with others, intending “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.”
Thoreau became a pillar of New England Transcendentalism, embracing and exemplifying the movement’s belief in the universality of creation and the primacy of personal insight and experience. Perhaps best remembered for his advocacy of simple, principled living, his writings on the relationship between humans and the environment also helped define the nature essay.
“History is not the past but a map of the past, drawn from a particular point of view”*…
To that point, The Economist reviews Josephine Quinn’s new book, How the World Made the West, a re-examination of what we think we know about civilizations…
Asked what he thought of Western civilisation, Mahatma Gandhi is said to have quipped that such a thing “would be a good idea”. (The West, he suggested, was not so enlightened.) But as Josephine Quinn makes clear in her new book, Western civilisation has always been a bad idea, or at any rate a wrong-headed one. To compartmentalise history into a set of distinct and essentially self-contained civilisations is a misguided quest that has dangerously distorted our understanding of the world, Ms Quinn asserts: “It is not peoples that make history, but people, and the connections that they create with one another.”
Ms Quinn, a historian and archaeologist who teaches at Oxford, does not spend 500-odd pages trashing what generations of schoolchildren have been taught to take pride in as European achievements. Instead, she demolishes the underlying concept of what she calls “civilisational thinking”. Her argument is simple, persuasive and deserving of attention.
The idea of civilisation, Ms Quinn points out, is relatively recent. The word was first used only in the mid-18th century and did not take hold of Western imaginations until the late 19th century. In that imperialist age, historians found that Greek, Roman and Christian civilisations made nice building blocks that could be stacked into a grand-looking construct, which they labelled “Western” or “European” civilisation. To this they attributed a host of inherited “classical” virtues: vigour, rationality, justice, democracy and courage to experiment and explore. Other civilisations, by contrast, were regarded as inferior.
It does not take much unpacking by Ms Quinn to expose the folly of this approach. Behold, for instance, John Stuart Mill, a philosopher in the 19th century, claiming that the Battle of Marathon, Persia’s first invasion of Greece in 490BC, was more important to English history than William the Conqueror’s triumph at Hastings in 1066. (Without an Athenian victory, the logic goes, the magical seed of Greek civilisation might never have grown into Western civilisation.) Or consider “The Clash of Civilisations” (1996) by Samuel Huntington, an American historian, who declared it impossible to understand history without classifying humanity into mutually hostile civilisations between which, “during most of human existence”, contact has been “intermittent or non-existent”.
What is non-existent is any truth to that notion. Ms. Quinn’s brisk, scholarly romp across the arc of European history shows that, far from being rare, contact across and between cultures, often over surprisingly long distances, has been the main motor of human advancement in every age. Rather than being prickly and inward-looking, most societies have proved receptive to ideas, fashions and technologies from their neighbours…
As The Economist observes, “anyone who thought history was passé could not be more wrong”: “The history of the West is not quite what you learned in school” (gift link)– @TheEconomist on @josephinequinn.
###
As we ponder the past’s presence in our present, we might send civilized birthday greetings to a man who contributed mightily to the paradigms that Quinn questions, Bernard Ashmole; he was born on this date in 1894. A historian, archaeologist, and art historian, he taught at both the University of London and Oxford and served as Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum from 1939 to 1956.
“A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!”*…
The horse transformed human history—and now, as Christina Larson reports, scientists have a clearer idea of when humans began to transform the horse…
Around 4,200 years ago, one particular lineage of horse quickly became dominant across Eurasia, suggesting that’s when humans started to spread domesticated horses around the world, according to research published [recently] in the journal Nature.
There was something special about this horse: It had a genetic mutation that changed the shape of its back, likely making it easier to ride.
“In the past, you had many different lineages of horses,” said Pablo Librado, an evolutionary biologist at the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona and co-author of the new study. That genetic diversity was evident in ancient DNA samples the researchers analyzed from archaeological sites across Eurasia dating back to 50,000 years ago.
But their analysis of 475 ancient horse genomes showed a notable change around 4,200 years ago.
That’s when a specific lineage that first arose in what’s known as the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, a plains region that stretches from what is now northeastern Bulgaria across Ukraine and through southern Russia, began to pop up all across Eurasia and quickly replaced other lineages. Within three hundred years, the horses in Spain were similar to those in Russia.
“We saw this genetic type spreading almost everywhere in Eurasia—clearly this horse type that was local became global very fast,” said co-author Ludovic Orlando, a molecular archaeologist at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France.
The researchers believe that this change was because a Bronze Age people called the Sintashta had domesticated their local horse and begun to use these animals to help them dramatically expand their territory.
Domesticating wild horses on the plains of Eurasia was a process, not a single event, scientists say.
Archaeologists have previously found evidence of people consuming horse milk in dental remains dating to around 5,500 years ago, and the earliest evidence of horse ridership dates to around 5,000 years ago. But it was the Sintashta who spread the particular horses they had domesticated across Eurasia, the new study suggests…
People had domesticated other animals several thousand years before horses—including dogs, pigs, cattle, goats and sheep. But the new research shows that the shrinking genetic diversity associated with domestication happened much faster in horses.
“Humans changed the horse genome stunningly quickly, perhaps because we already had experience dealing with animals,” said Laurent Frantz, who studies the genetics of ancient creatures at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and was not involved in the study.
“It shows the special place of horses in human societies.”…
“Scientists have traced the origin of the modern horse to a lineage that emerged 4,200 years ago,” from @larsonchristina in @physorg_com.
* Shakespeare, Richard III
###
As we mount up, we might recall that it was on this date in 1878 that Eadweard Muybridge took a series of photographs to prove that all four feet of a horse leave the ground when it runs. He had been retained by former California Governor (and university founder) Leland Stanford to help settle a bet. While Muybridge was best known in his own day for his large photographs of Yosemite Valley, he did seminal early work on motion picture projection, and the approaches he developed for the study of motion are at the heart of both animation and computer analysis today.
“The evolution of language is widely judged to be the culminating event in the emergence of humanity as we know it today”*…
Linguists and archaeologists have argued for decades about where, and when, the first Indo-European languages were spoken, and what kind of lives those first speakers led. As Kurt Kleiner reports, a controversial new analytic technique offers a fresh answer…
Almost half of all people in the world today speak an Indo-European language, one whose origins go back thousands of years to a single mother tongue. Languages as different as English, Russian, Hindustani, Latin and Sanskrit can all be traced back to this ancestral language.
Over the last couple of hundred years, linguists have figured out a lot about that first Indo-European language, including many of the words it used and some of the grammatical rules that governed it. Along the way, they’ve come up with theories about who its original speakers were, where and how they lived, and how their language spread so widely.
Most linguists think that those speakers were nomadic herders who lived on the steppes of Ukraine and western Russia about 6,000 years ago. Yet a minority put the origin 2,000 to 3,000 years before that, with a community of farmers in Anatolia, in the area of modern-day Turkey. Now a new analysis, using techniques borrowed from evolutionary biology, has come down in favor of the latter, albeit with an important later role for the steppes.
The computational technique used in the new analysis is hotly disputed among linguists. But its proponents say it promises to bring more quantitative rigor to the field, and could possibly push key dates further into the past, much as radiocarbon dating did in the field of archaeology…
Fascinating– both for what it suggests about our linguistic roots and for the epistemological questions it raises: “A new look at our linguistic roots,” from @kgkleiner in @KnowableMag.
Apposite: “Flow of time: reality or illusion?” (on language and our experience of time)
* Richard Leakey
###
As we untangle tongues, we might spare a thought for Leonard Woolley; he died on this date in 1960. An archaeologist, he is best known for his excavations at Ur in Mesopotamia— for which he is recognized as one of the first “modern” archaeologists, who excavated in a methodical way, keeping careful records, and using them to reconstruct ancient life and history.
His work greatly advanced knowledge of ancient Mesopotamian civilization, enabling scholars to trace the history of the city from its final days during the 4th century BC back to its prehistoric beginnings (c. 4000 BC). His finds revealed much about everyday life, art, architecture, government, religion– and relevantly to the piece above, language and literature– in this “cradle of civilization.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.