Not so different from today

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, ancient history, essays

A mere 2,210 years ago the geographer Eratosthenes first measured the circumference of the Earth, using a method illustrated here. He lived near the middle of a remarkable millennium during which a number of remarkable scientific and technological achievements were made. Concrete that outlasts the usual "modern" product by a factor of 100, flammable weapons that exploded or ignited upon contact with water (including the water in an enemy's body), and the method of extracting iron from ore without actually melting it are among the achievements described by Vicki León in How to Mellify a Corpse: And Other Human Stories of Ancient Science & Superstition.

The title subject is not a chapter heading in the book, but is one subject covered in one essay. Do you know the word "mellify"? Here is a useful clue: melissa means "bee". The body of Alexander was mellified, or mummified by the drying action of honey, and continued looking remarkably lifelike for centuries. It was visited by Julius and at least one other Caesar before being destroyed in a tsunami in 365 AD, 687 years after he died.

Amidst all this scientific achievement, how were the populace affected? Only indirectly, by the improvement of infrastructure, such as the great water supply that Rome enjoyed due to its system of aqueducts. But public knowledge? Not at all.

Half the essays in the book relate superstitions and myths. Many, if not most, Athenians were buried with the little coin they'd need to pay Charon to ferry them across the River Styx, and to hold back Cerberus the 3-headed dog. Many Romans, from Caesar to peasant, believed that sealskin protected one from Zeus's thunderbolts. And the ancient provisions for avoiding the Evil Eye were as numerous as methods for producing aphrodisiacs.

Lest we laugh too quickly at their superstitions, however, we ought to consider the mental habits of moderns, even in "advanced" countries. Millions still use the thumb-in-fist gesture to avert the Evil Eye if a stranger looks at them too boldly. How many find their heart beating a bit faster to pass a graveyard after dark, or if a cat crosses their path? Who still throws a pinch of spilled salt over a shoulder? The most-read column in the newspaper is the daily horoscope. Thankfully, the number who treat a seance as more serious than an evening's entertainment are few.

But if you are ever in southern Greece and see the parallel ruts in the ground, don't take the story that wagon wheels made them. They were carved there to make it easier for wagons to take the paths! Which would take a larger investment in slave labor: a pyramid in Egypt or the four-mile train track (for wagons, though, as locomotives were yet to be invented), the diolkos, across the Isthmus of Corinth?

The book is a harvest of enjoyable insights into the lives of people in six European and Near-Eastern cultures. It is made the more enjoyable by the slightly tongue-in-cheek writing style, a method that makes one confront the similarity of the ancients and ourselves. As I read, I'd find myself thinking, "I could relate to this guy," or, "Glad I never crossed paths with him!" The amount of research behind the book is only hinted at by two pages of bibliography. All in all, about 300 pages of fun reading.

Archimedes - more modern than we knew

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, ancient history, manuscripts, history of science

It may hold the record for the most money paid at auction for the ugliest book (US$2.2 million). It was a wreck. Its sale has caused endless speculation—mainly about who bought it—and endless joy among historians of science, plus endless fascination by quite a variety of scientists who had previously had little truck with "old books."

Word of the day: palimpsest. Noun. "A manuscript that has been written on more than once; the earlier writing is often incompletely erased and partially legible." See FreeDictionary for more details) Origin: Greek palin (παλιν) "again" + psēn (πσην) "scrape". Why "again"? Parchment is animal skin, soaked and scraped to remove hair and fat. So to "erase" older writing, a sheet could be soaked and scraped again.

This helps understand the importance of a 13^th Century prayer book comprised of sheets from a number of older works, including 10^th Century manuscript copies of three documents written by Archimedes more than a millennium earlier.

This "ugly book", shown here during its display at Chicago's Field Museum, is a rare find indeed. It is the only surviving codex (bound book, as contrasted with a wound scroll) of Archimedes' work. All images in this post are Copyright the owner of the Archimedes Palimpsest, used by permission.

The Archimedes Palimpsest, AKA Archimedes Codex C, contains most or all (not yet sure) of the text of Floating Bodies, Method and Stomachion, works previously very little known from incomplete quotes. Why "C"? Two other codexes, "A" and "B", existed in "slightly modern" times, but vanished a century or two ago. We don't have them in Greek any more, but in translations...all partial, ranging from good to "interpreted" (i.e. paraphrased).

Late in 1998, when Codex C was auctioned, a museum curator somewhat hopefully contacted a well-known dealer in manuscripts with the suggestion that the Walters Art Museum might be a suitable venue for public exhibit and scholarly study. "The Walters" in Baltimore, Maryland houses and cares for a large collection of manuscripts. Imagine his surprise to find out the buyer already knew of the Walters and considered it the best such venue!

After a relatively short time (compared to the document's age) the dealer and the owner of the codex visited Will Noel to discuss its curation. This was a formality: the owner had it in a bag he was carrying, and that was that! Dr. Noel and a colleague, historian Reviel Netz of Stanford, became the lead investigators. After nearly ten amazing (and arduous) years of work, they have written The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayer Book is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity's Greatest Scientist. The work has gone amazingly fast, primarily because the owner, is a "rich patron" who makes quick decisions and is very interested in the findings.

What is it like to deal with a palimpsest? Codex C has 174 "leaves", or parchment sheets, folded in the middle and bound together. This produces 348 "pages" with 696 "sides". This photo, taken in deep blue plus near-ultraviolet, shows the state of the art for a hundred years or so, since it became feasible to produce UV light. The sheet is oriented so the Archimedes text is readable, if you read Byzantine Greek. Two diagrams are also visible. The text was written in two columns.

The way UV makes both texts visible is by fluorescence. If you have a "black light" tube, shine it on your skin in a darkened room. That dim bluish look is flourescence (your teeth are much brighter-look in a mirror, but not for too long: UV is bad for your eyes). Ink is not fluorescent, whether it is iron-based or carbon-based. So the bluish light from the parchment is blocked by the older ink almost as much as the newer, because some of it had soaked into the parchment and absorbs light from beneath. To take such an image, the camera has a filter that blocks the UV but passes the fluorescent colors. The full-size version of this image can be found at the Archimedes Palimpsest web site.

The overlay of late Byzantine Greek prayers runs vertically, which is typical of a palimpsest: cut a re-scraped sheet in half (where it was bound) and rotate it, so you can write over it with less distraction from the remaining under-text. This text is in one wider column per "side". This is sides "017r-016v", or the reverse of half-sheet 17 and obverse of 16. Adding the other side, the sheet's contents are 15r-16v-17r-18v; "r" and "v" mean recto and verso, or front and back in Latin.

"Well," you might say, "It looks straightforward. Take the sheets out of the 'book' and photograph them in UV light. Then read it right off." But you knew, didn't you, that it isn't that simple? Firstly, taking out the sheets, or disbinding, was a horrific task; the book had been rebound a number of times, most recently with something like the "white glue" named after a famous cartoon bull. Modern polymer-based glues are hard to dissolve without also dissolving parchment!

Enter Abigail Quandt. Her work is the key to all later successes. Disbinding Codex C took her four years. That is around eight days per sheet (the profession's word for sheet is "folio", the term you'll find in the book).

Once she had "released" a sheet from its binding, Drs. Noel, Netz, and an ever-growing team could begin their work on it. This corner of a page shows a rather good section that is almost readable without doing a letter-by-letter puzzling out of the text...at least for someone who is familiar with 10^th Century Greek manuscripts already! This image is a little more sophisticated than the prior one: digital images of UV and visible were subtracted to enhance a text that was all but invisible in UV light alone. But what to do with even-less visible text, and the few sheets with rather recently-forged iconography painted and gold-leafed over both older texts?!?

This image and that which follows are two similar methods of multi-spectral imaging. Several imaging teams have worked with the authors over the years, and on one occasion a competition was held between two teams. Both worked out schemes that emphasized the very slight color difference between the 10^th Century iron-based ink (seen as red) and the later carbon-based ink (seen as blue-black).

My brother, one of whose skills is "scribe", described for me how medieval ink was made using red iron oxide, oak gall bitters, and carbon black. Later inks using linseed or other oils and carbon black were used because they are easier to make, and rooms full of monks busily writing at "publishing" monasteries needed an abundant supply...carbon black is easily made and needs no grinding.

These lovely images show the same portion of a sheet, with essentially no difference in legibility, but before the computer got hold of the various narrow-band images, the sheet looked blank under any "eyeball" presentation at any wavelength...at least there was no visible under-text. To these folks, the 13^th Century text is part of "blank".

Over time, the extension of such techniques has yielded readable, or at least decipherable, text for all but the four sheets overlaid with forged images (it is supposed that someone in the 1920s or '30s tried to make the ugly book prettier for a quick, and more lucrative, sale).

X-ray fluorescence provided the answer. A proof-of-concept yielded an "iron image" right through the gold leaf...in fifteen hours for about a square inch. Work currently under weigh, or perhaps recently finished —it was just beginning as the book was printed—, uses the much brighter X-rays produced by an atom-smasher, and is much, much faster.

I've worked with folks on a project using such X-rays. You have to be careful with the beam. They typically keep a sheet of paper in front of the beam port. When it bursts into flame, the beam is "on". So you block the port, put the filters in place for your current experiment (usually, chunks of aluminum!), and open the port to make your readings. Of course, the blocking and unblocking of ports is done from outside the room!!!

What discoveries did all this lead to? Besides the texts themselves, they revealed an Archimedes who was much more modern in his thinking than we imagined. And his work was not the only material bound into the codex, but I'll leave off discussing the other documents with which his three texts have kept company for a millenium.

Firstly, Method reveals how Archimedes determined the area or volume of certain curved shapes. In at least one instance, rather than sneak up on the infinite quantities that can arise in such calculations, he used them directly. If you write your equation appropriately, you can divide two infinities and get a non-infinite result. This is the basis of all calculus, meaning all of modern engineering and much of physics. Before Codex C, it was not known that Archimedes was able to calculate using infinite quantities.

Secondly, On Floating Bodies reveals an Archimedes quite different from the legendary buffoon that ran naked through the streets shouting "Eureka!". He already understood the principle of displacement, and in this work he showed how to quantify the density of a floating, or sunken, body. I recently used his method to measure the density of a chunk of rock I've carried around since finding it in a barren field in Oklahoma. Its density is 3.6, which is dead-on for a stony meteorite, but too heavy to be a misplaced piece of basalt (3.0-3.2). Now I gotta get an expert to look at it...

Thirdly, Stomachion, the "belly-ache", is a playful puzzle, a square cut into fourteen triangles. It is rather hard to re-assemble after you mix up the pieces, yet there are 17,152 ways to put it together (and millions of ways to be wrong). Archimedes proposes determining how many ways there are, and the researchers found he had the mathematical tools to arrive at the correct answer, without need for a computer.

The story of this ugly book is not over. It has yielded conceptual beauty of several kinds, with much more to come. These people have job security!

The most celebrated triglot

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, egyptology, ancient history, translations

The boy-king is on the verge of manhood. A few months shy of age 16, having "reigned" under a series of disastrous regencies for ten years already, and having bought the favor of the priests by promising massive tax reductions and rebates, he is about to be crowned in his own right.

The priests have generously agreed to institute a personality cult in his name, to produce and revere statues in his likeness for every temple and shrine in the land, and to have their "agreement" with him quite literally engraved in stone alongside each statue.

It is left unspoken that the priests, who hold all real power in the realm, will uphold his authority and keep the people (mostly) pacified. It is unforeseen at the time, but probably not unexpected, that they will have him assassinated just fourteen years later, to prevent a war.

It is not known how many statues of the young god-king were produced, or how many copies of the royal/clerical "treaty" were produced. One stone copy of the treaty, mostly complete, survives: the Rosetta Stone, seen here in its home for the past two centures, the British Museum.

When I told my wife I was reading a book about the Rosetta Stone, she asked, "The language program?" Being from Japan, where Chinese history is taught rather than Egyptian (or British, even), she'd never heard of it. I had to do a bit of explaining. What is it that makes this chunk of granite the most famous—at least in the West—monument smaller than Mount Rushmore?

Egyptology has occupied many of the best Western and Near-Eastern minds of the past two centuries. Dynastic Egypt, whose culture and language died out fifteen centuries ago, a culture chronicled by a written history that predates Bishop Ussher's calculation of the epoch of Noah's flood, with a spoken and written language a thousand years older than Chinese, has been for several centuries the archetypical mystery of mysteries, realm of ancient masters and arcane lore.

Speculation about the Egyptian language abounded for more than a millennium, but all was swept away in a few short years after the Rosetta Stone was discovered among construction rubble in 1799. The fascinating story is told in The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt by John Ray, an Egyptologist at Cambridge University.

These hieroglyphs, from the upper section of the Rosetta Stone, represent the sole writing system used for the Egyptian language prior to about 700BCE. Thereafter, the priests continued to use them for sacred writing for another thousand years or so, but everyone else used a more streamlined written language.

Demotic, as shown here, was actually easier to use, to remember, and to read. Though it also had died out, it was understood to be a primarily phonetic script, whereas its older cousin was considered by most to be purely pictorial...until Hieroghyphs were deciphered with the help of the Rosetta Stone.

The key to it all was Greek, shown here from the bottom portion of the Rosetta Stone. I picked these three selections from similar physical locations in a large image of the stone, so there is some chance that they are saying the same thing. Regardless, those who had the whole of the triple text to work with, despite the large missing pieces, made breakthrough after breakthrough until most of the symbols' pronunciations and/or meanings had been determined.

Decipherment continues. There is a huge corpus of material, and more is discovered from time to time. The dry Egyptian sand has proven capable of preserving fragile papyrus manuscripts for several thousand years. Documents that were discarded but not burnt remain to embarrass their former owners.

Dr. Ray chronicles the history of the Stone and the students it inspired. Chief among these were the Briton Thomas Young (of Young's Modulus, the Young-Helmholtz Theory of color vision,the Young-Laplace Equation for capillary attraction, and innovations in linguistics and insurance underwriting), and the Frenchman Jean-François Champollion, a much more focused Orientalist. The author shows the amazing work done by these men and others.

Champollion's understanding of both Coptic and Chinese led him to the most significant finding: that both Demotic and Hieroglyphic writing systems were a combination of pictographic and phonetic elements. Demotic, with only a fraction of the gamut of signs compated to Hieroglyphic, is much more phonetic.

It is a pity he didn't know Japanese. I consider it today's closest analogy to Hieroglyphic. This text, clipped from an ad on amazon.co.jp, contains four kinds of signs.

The first two characters, and about half of the total, are Kanji, derived from Chinese characters. There are about 7,000 of these in common use and many more known to more educated Japanese.

The three symbols that follow are phonetic characters, Hiragana, that represent the inflection of the word (its nominative and grammatical form). These three are seen at the end of the third line also, following a different Kanji word. There are 72 Hiragana, which represent syllables such as "so"; they are not "letters" as we understand them in English.

There is a second complete set of 72 syllables, the Katakana, used only for non-Japanese words, mainly names. The first five symbols on the third line and the first four on the fourth line are Katakana. Finally, the Japanese use Romaji, or "Roman letters" for certain European words and abbreviations, as seen in the fifth line. Later in the same ad "PlayStation 2" is spelled out in Romaji.

Imagine if, knowing only an alphabetic or phonemic written language, you were confronted with a Japanese newspaper. This was the situation of most Egyptologists prior to the work of Young and Champollion. Their series of inspired guesses and head-cracking deductions led to the first understanding of a language nobody had heard or read for 1,500 years.

To these men and their successors (including Dr. Ray), and to the Rosetta Stone, we owe our ability to know the ancient culture that is Egypt.