"An English historian has come across the word ‘fuck’ in a court case dating to the year 1310, making it the earliest known reference to the swear word." Source: Medievalists.net (2015).
"Dr Paul Booth of Keele University spotted the name in ‘Roger Fuckebythenavele’ in the Chester county court plea rolls beginning on December 8, 1310. The man was being named three times part of a process to be outlawed, with the final mention coming on September 28, 1311.
"Dr Booth believes that 'this surname is presumably a nickname. I suggest it could either mean an actual attempt at copulation by an inexperienced youth, later reported by a rejected girlfriend, or an equivalent of the word ‘dimwit’ i.e. a man who might think that that was the correct way to go about it.'"
Note: The origin of the F-bomb is still kind of murky. There are several bogus etymologies floating around out there; for example, one popular explanation is that the word started off an acronym meaning "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge," but that's effing nonsense. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "the word is 'probably cognate' with a number of Germanic words with meanings involving striking, rubbing and having sex or is derivative of the Old French word that meant 'to have sex'." (Wikipedia)
Wherever it came from, the F-Word is one of the most essential words in the English language. American society, in particular, couldn't function without it and we can't avoid blurting it out even on live TV.
"The [St. Cuthbert's Gospel], which is a manuscript copy of the Gospel of St John, is the earliest intact European book and is intimately associated with Cuthbert, one of Britain's foremost saints. It was created in the late 7th century in the north-east of England and placed in St Cuthbert's coffin, apparently in 698. It was discovered when the coffin was opened in Durham Cathedral in 1104 on the occasion of the removal of Cuthbert's body to a new shrine. The Gospel has a beautifully-worked, original, red leather binding in excellent condition, and is the only surviving high-status manuscript from this crucial period in British history to retain its original appearance, both inside and out." Source: British Library Medieval Manuscripts Blog.
Note: "With a page size of only 138 by 92 millimetres (5.4 in × 3.6 in), the St Cuthbert Gospel is one of the smallest surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. The essentially undecorated text is the Gospel of John in Latin, written in a script that has been regarded as a model of elegant simplicity." (Wikipedia)
Comment: This fantastic book is over 1300 years old, but it's still perfectly clear and legible. Compare that to the average lifespan of digital documents, which can probably be measured in a few decades at most.
Preserving digital files is a labor-intensive process. According to the Digital Preservation Coalition, the longevity of these documents can be extended with periodic refreshing (moving a file from one physical storage medium to another), migration (changing them from one format to another) and emulation (creating software that can read a variety of formats), but only a small percentage of the digital material being produced today will ever get this kind of archival treatment.
Physical books, on the other hand, will last for centuries, if not millennia, if they're kept in relatively dry, shaded and -- as in the case of the St. Cuthbert Gospel -- airtight spaces. And they frequently don't need any specialized handling at all to survive for thousands of years. For instance, look at all the ancient papyri scrolls that have been discovered which are still readable even though they were just stuffed into amphorae and buried in the sand. When it comes to longevity, the old technologies are still the best and this includes things like photographs recorded on film rather than digital media:
"We know that photographic negatives, transparencies and prints last a long time. They are reliable forms of storing data. Recently the Royal Geographic Society reprinted Frank Hurley's pictures from the 1913 Antarctic Exhibition - from his original glass negatives, nearly 100 years old. An example of how robust the storage medium was - remember these negatives had been in sub-zero conditions and transported across an ocean in a tiny lifeboat!" (Digital Preservation Coalition)
The digital revolution which was supposed to make us all smarter has not only shortened the lifespan of written material but has actually caused a general decline in reading and writing. The number of people who read for pleasure has been going down for decades now. The deterioration in writing skills is obvious all over the western world, and cursive handwriting is no longer being taught in many schools (though it has been making a comeback recently in some areas). One of the consequences of this is that "toddler's’ excessive use of touchscreens is leaving the muscles in their hands so weak they cannot grip a pencil," according to the Sunday Express. That seems unbelievable, but apparently it's true.
What does this have to do with the Cuthbert Gospel? Nothing directly, I guess, but look at what the Gospel represents. What we have here is an approximately 1,300-year-old book which has survived into an age when print is dying in favor of digital media with an average lifespan of less than 20 years (at best). The Cuthbert Gospel was written by hand -- a skill that most people don't learn or use anymore -- in a language that most people can't understand -- that came down to us from a period that most people don't know anything about.
I wouldn't call this progress. The Cuthbert Gospel, among other things, is a reminder of how much the West has deteriorated.
Note: The entire Cuthbert Gospel can be viewed online in the British Museum's digitized manuscripts collection. Scanning the book makes it available to people who can't visit the museum, but I have to wonder if the digitized version will last anywhere near as long as the original.
"An ancient Greek inscription dating to the second century A.D. is essentially a thank-you note for a shady cash gift, a new translation reveals. The inscription immortalized the words of a Roman emperor who accepted piles of silver from a city anxious to demonstrate its loyalty." Source: Live Science (2020).
"During a time of political upheaval in the Roman Empire, residents of the city Nicopolis ad Istrum, in what is now Bulgaria, backed an unsuccessful contender for the emperor's seat. After their champion's loss, they promptly sent the victor — Emperor Septimus Severus — 700,000 silver coins, as a sign of fealty.
"Emperor Severus openly acknowledged accepting their donation in a letter that was sent to the town in A.D. 198, written in ancient Greek. The letter's text was then immortalized by the city as a stone monument. Scholars recently restored the broken artifact and translated the inscription, making it available to the public for the first time, a researcher with the restoration project told Live Science in an email."
To the victor goes the spoils.
Background: Septimus Severus rose to power during a chaotic period called the Year of the Five Emperors (193 AD) which followed the murder of the emperor Commodus, the son of the famous Marcus Aurelius. It's a crazy story:
Commodus had appointed Severus to the governorship of Pannonia Superior in 191 AD. The following year, Commodus was assassinated by the Praetorian Prefect and a soldier/politician named Publius Helvius Pertinax was acclaimed emperor. Pertinax, however, was also assassinated, again by the Praetorians, after a glorious reign of three months. The Praetorians, needless to say, were the real power in Rome at this time.
When they heard about the death of Pertinax, Severus' legion in Pannonia, XIV Gemina, proclaimed Severus emperor. Several other legions joined in and Severus marched on Italy, where a politician named Didius Julianus had bought the emperorship in an auction conducted by the Praetorians. This is hilarious, if you ask me. The greed and cynicism of the Praetorians is breathtaking. They had become so powerful that they could actually sell the throne to the highest bidder.
The hapless Julianus didn't last very long, however. He was emperor for a grand total of nine weeks before he was murdered in turn and Severus, having arrived with his armies, "took possession of Rome without opposition," according to Wikipedia. But it didn't turn out to be as easy as all that. The governor of Syria, some guy named Pescennius Niger, didn't like the new arrangement, proclaimed himself emperor and raised an army, setting off a civil war that lasted about a year, I think, until he was defeated by Severus's forces.
Severus was now emperor. He very wisely purged the Praetorians and replaced them with loyal troops, but he apparently needed some help in running the empire so he made another general/politician named Clodius Albinus his co-Caesar. This turned out to be a mistake because Albinus had ambitions of his own, declared himself emperor, raised an army, etc. etc., and set off yet another civil war which didn't end until he was defeated at the Battle of Lugdunum in 197 AD.
This insane story, I'm glad to say, has a happy ending:
"Albinus was defeated and killed himself, or was captured and executed on the orders of Severus. Severus had his naked body laid out on the ground before him, so that he could ride his horse over it, in a final act of humiliation. Albinus' wife and sons were initially pardoned by Severus, he appeared to change his mind almost immediately afterwards, for as the dead Albinus was beheaded, so were they. Albinus' headless body was thrown into the Rhône, together with the corpses of his murdered family." (Wikipedia)
Coins and a bust of the soon-to-be-headless Clodius Albinus.
The story of the rise of Septimus Severus is all too typical of the political chaos which was engulfing Rome and would eventually lead to the collapse of the empire in the west. Navigating the turmoil must have been a nightmare for the leaders of a town like Nicopolis ad Istrum. Backing the wrong contender could be fatal, but how could they decide who to back when emperors were rising and falling in a matter of weeks or months? In the case of Nicopolis ad Istrum, they apparently supported a loser at first, but when they realized their mistake they hurriedly made a payoff to Septimus Severus to gain his friendship. It cost them a small fortune and it must have been a gamble at the time, but they got lucky and the expense was worth it in the long run:
"The city prospered ... in the 2nd and 3rd centuries under the Severan dynasty (193-235). In 193 the city endowed Septimius Severus, then still pretender to the throne, with 700000 denarii (a fortune at the time) for which a copy of the letter of thanks to the city from the emperor, after he succeeded, is recorded in an inscription. He made several visits to the city subsequently." (Wikipedia)
Ultimately it didn't matter, though. Nicopolis ad Istrum (possibly already abandoned at the time) was destroyed by the Huns in 447 AD.
"A seemingly dull marble slab, used for 10 years as a stepping stone in an English garden, is actually a rare ancient Roman engraving, a new analysis finds." Source: Live Science.
"The discovery surprised its owner, who learned that the 25-inch-long (63 centimeters) slab — a stone she had previously used as a stair while mounting her horse — dated to the second century A.D. and was worth about $20,400 (£15,000).
"However, no one knows how the marble masterpiece ended up in England. It was likely carved in Greece or Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), according to a statement from Woolley and Wallis, a U.K auction house that is handling the sale of the slab."
Note: This stone was dug up in an English "rock garden" about 20 years ago, apparently. The woman used it as a mounting block for about a decade before " she noticed a laurel wreath carved on its surface." The Live Science story doesn't go into any details, but she must have asked an archaeologist to look at it and he realized it was a "rare find" probably brought to England around 300 years ago:
"'Artifacts of this type often came into England as the result of Grand Tours in the late 18th and 19th century, when wealthy aristocrats would tour Europe, learning about classical art and culture,'" according to a specialist at the auction house. It would be interesting to know how it ended up in an English garden, but I'll be surprised if that discovery, should it happen, ever makes the news.
A 2016 interview with Christoper de Hamel, historian, academic librarian and expert on medieval manuscripts. His enthusiasm for these fantastic old books comes through in his every word and expression.
I'm an atheist but I must have something of the monk in me because I would love to work in the Parker Library, spending my time studying and taking care of these ancient manuscripts. "The Parker Library is the rare books and manuscripts library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. It is known throughout the world due to its invaluable collection of over 600 manuscripts, particularly medieval texts, the majority of which were bequeathed to the College by Archbishop of CanterburyMatthew Parker, a former Master of Corpus Christi College." (Wikipedia)
Bad audio (closed-captions sort of helpful), but great views of several documents.
The Parker Library is a priceless store of historical knowledge and British cultural heritage. Dating back to 1376 A.D., "The library houses a significant proportion of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, including the earliest copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Version A of the ASC, Corp. Chris. MS 173, known as the Winchester Chronicle or the Parker Chronicle, c. 890), the Old EnglishBede, and King Alfred’s translation of Pastoral Care (a manual for priests), as well as the Latin St Augustine Gospels, one of the oldest bound books in existence. The collection also includes key Middle English texts, such as the Ancrene Wisse, the Brut Chronicle and Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. Other items include medieval travelogues and maps, apocalypses, bestiaries, one of the oldest pieces of extant written music, and illuminated manuscripts, such as the two giant Romanesque bibles of Bury (c. 1135) and Dover (c.1150) and the Chronica Majora by Matthew Paris (c. 1250). A full, alphabetised catalogue is available here." (Wikipedia)
Christopher de Hamel has written nine books about old manuscripts, including Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts: Twelve Journeys Into The Medieval World (2019). He is suffering from a "lifelong obsession," according to BBC Newsnight, and a NY Times review of the book described him as "...voraciously completist, recording impressions of each journey, place, building and reading room, as well as every coverage detail of each manuscript’s creation, content and existence as a physical object through time and space." I can understand his obsessiveness. Whenever I try to do deep historical research I get the feeling that I've wandered into a fascinating maze that could go on forever.
The Parker Library is a rabbit hole. Each manuscript is a rabbit hole. You could easily spend years, if not your entire life, researching the history of one of these old manuscripts, with each question leading to new questions which lead to other manuscripts and new areas of research, on and on ad infinitum. The guy in the next video describes how he fell into one of these rabbit holes when he tried to determine the provenance, "the chronology of the ownership, custody or location," of the Parker Chronicle, the earliest copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles held at the library.
Some of the manuscripts in the Parker Library are extremely old. The [A] manuscript of the Parker Chronicle, for instance, has entries thought to have been made by scribes in the late 9th century AD and they're still perfectly legible. Compare that to the lifetime of the average digital document. The fact that the Parker manuscript still exists after a thousand years is remarkable in itself and it's easy to see why tracing the chronicle's provenance could turn into an endless quest.
"Ashurbanipal's Library gives modern historians information regarding people of the ancient Near East. In his Outline of History, H. G. Wells calls the library 'the most precious source of historical material in the world.'"
Ashurbanipal was an unusual character, to say the least. The last great king of Assyria, he was a literate intellectual, a scribe and a "passionate collector of texts and tablets" (Wikipedia). He was also a particularly ferocious military commander who used war loot in part to stock his impressive library and boasted about his victories and bloody massacres in various inscriptions:
"Like the onset of a terrible hurricane I overwhelmed Elam in its entirety. I cut off the head of Teumann, their king, – the haughty one, who plotted evil. Countless of his warriors I slew. Alive, with my hands, I seized his fighters. With their corpses I filled the plain about Susa as with baltu and ashagu [probably types of thorny shrubs]. Their blood I let run down the Ulai; its water I dyed red like wool."
In another inscription, Ashurbanipal goes into some detail describing the way he treated his vanquished foes and you can practically hear him gloating over their grisly fates:
"Those of them who fled before the murderous iron dagger, famine, want and flaming fire, and found a refuge, – the net of the great gods, my lords, which cannot be eluded, brought them low. Not one escaped; not one sinner slipped through my hands, of those whom the gods had counted for my hands. The chariots, coaches, palanquins, his concubines, the goods of his palace, they brought before me. As for those men and their vulgar mouths, who uttered vulgarity against Assur, my god, and plotted evil against me, the prince who fears him, – I slit their tongues and brought them low. The rest of the people, alive, by the colossi, between which they had cut down Sennacherib, the father of the father who begot me, – at that time, I cut down those people there, as an offering to his shade. Their dismembered bodies I fed to the dogs, swine, wolves and eagles, to the birds of heaven and the fish of the deep."
Ashurbanipal was my kind of intellectual. We could use more like him in our modern universities.
"One of the oldest extant hand-written gospels, written in Greek between the end of the 10th century and the start of the 11th, is on its way to being returned to the monastery it was stolen from in northeastern Greece by its latest owner, a museum [the Museum of the Bible] in Washington, DC, the Metropolis of Drama said." Source: Archaeology News Network.
"The document was stolen in 1917 by the Bulgarian occupying army from the historic monastery of the Virgin Eikossifinissa ('the luminous red one'), built on Mt. Pangeon, and it is the second manuscript after the 9th-century Codex 1424 to have been returned to the monastery. The codex was returned in 2016 by the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago."
Comment: The Museum of the Bible should be commended for returning this document once it was determined to have been looted from a Greek monastery. I'm not a Christian, but the more I read about this museum the more I'm impressed with its professionalism, not to mention its high-tech displays and interesting collections.
This gospel, handwritten on vellum, isn't the earliest New Testament document, but it's over a thousand years old and still perfectly legible. Compare that to digital documents which have an average lifespan of a few decades at best without special archival treatment, something that most computer files will never get.
"Petroglyphs found across North America have suggested that ancient Chinese explorers made contact with Native Americans. Yaoliang Song, a professor at the East China Normal University in Shanghai who has studied petroglyphs as a visiting scholar at Harvard University, recently announced that he supports the interpretation that the petroglyphs are of ancient Chinese origin." Source: Ancient Origins. (This is the 2016 article reviewed in the video.)
"John A. Ruskamp Jr., Ed.D., has led the research on the petroglyphs over the past few years, enlisting the help of experts such as David N. Keightley, Ph.D., who is considered by many to be the leading analyst in America of early Chinese oracle-bone writings."
I have no idea what to make of this. The theory is controversial, naturally, and I'm not sure where it stands as of 2020. If prehistoric Chinese mariners did reach the Americas it would have required a long, dangerous voyage, but we know that ancient Austronesians were island-hopping across the Pacific back then so I suppose it's possible. The similarity of the petroglyphs found in Arizona and New Mexico with the written characters in China is a matter of interpretation, but they do look similar even if they're not exactly the same:
"These ancient scripts were not 100 percent uniform, some variance was employed by each artist. But Ruskamp has determined that the glyphs are close enough to known examples of ancient Chinese script that it is more than 95 percent likely the similarity is due to direct contact with the Chinese and not due to chance."
The petroglyphs in question here are a couple thousand years old. I'm not sure if anyone has dated them more precisely than that, but Ruskamp has said (according to Ancient Origins) that the Chinese oracle-bone writings they supposedly match are from the Shang Dynasty ( app. 1600-1050 BC).
Note: This theory shouldn't be confused with the 1421 Theory, which argues that a Chinese fleet reached the Americas around 70 years before Columbus. This idea, proposed by British author Gavin Menzies, has been widely dismissed as pseudo-history, but I can't comment on it because I haven't read Menzies' book.
"Researchers have analyzed 18 ancient texts dating back to around 600 BCE from the Tel Arad military post [1] using state-of-the-art image processing, machine learning technologies, and the expertise of a senior handwriting examiner, and concluded that the texts were written by no fewer than 12 authors, suggesting that many of the inhabitants of the kingdom of Judah during that period were able to read and write." Source: Science Daily.
[1] The Tel Arad site (originally a Canaanite settlement which was deserted around 2650 BC) was turned into a citadel during the time of the Biblical (and probably legendary) King David and Solomon. "It is believed that several citadels were built one upon the other and existed in the Hellenistic and Roman periods." (Wikipedia)
According to Science Daily, "...the researchers examined the ostraca (fragments of pottery vessels containing ink inscriptions) writings discovered at the Tel Arad site in the 1960s. Tel Arad was a small military post on the southern border of the kingdom of Judah; its built-up area was about 20,000 square feet and it housed between 20 and 30 soldiers."
Note: The argument here is based on computerized and more traditional forensic handwriting analysis. This isn't the same thing as Graphology, which claims to be able to analyze personalities and detect a person's psychological state from their handwriting.
If the researchers in this study are correct when they say that the inscriptions on the Tel Arad fragments were written by at least 12 people, this would imply that literacy was fairly widespread at the time because it would be unusual otherwise to find so many writers in a place so small:
"'It should be remembered that this was a small outpost, one of a series of outposts on the southern border of the kingdom of Judah. Since we found at least 12 different authors out of 18 texts in total, we can conclude that there was a high level of literacy throughout the entire kingdom. The commanding ranks and liaison officers at the outpost, and even the quartermaster Eliashib and his deputy, Nahum, were literate. Someone had to teach them how to read and write, so we must assume the existence of an appropriate educational system in Judah at the end of the First Temple period.'"
The question, naturally, is whether handwriting analysis can detect different hands in inscriptions this old.
"Proto-Elamite is the last undeciphered writing system from the Ancient Near East with a substantial number of sources (more than 1600 published texts). It was used for a relatively short period around 3000 BC across what is today Iran." Source: Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CLDI, 2013).
Note: Wikipedia describes the Proto-Elamite script as "largely" undeciphered, so there may have been some progress in translation recently.
Reflectance Transformation Imaging, the technology Oxford used to study their proto-Elamite tablets (see video above), "...is a computational photographic method that captures a subject’s surface shape and color and enables the interactive re-lighting of the subject from any direction," according to Cultural Heritage Imaging.
"For a majority of the tablets the only available images are hand copies, drawn 80-100 years ago, but for a growing number of texts kept in the Louvre Museum high quality images are available," according to the CDLI.
The St. Cuthbert's Gospel, The Digital Dark Age & The Decline In Basic Literacy
Video from 2012.
"The [St. Cuthbert's Gospel], which is a manuscript copy of the Gospel of St John, is the earliest intact European book and is intimately associated with Cuthbert, one of Britain's foremost saints. It was created in the late 7th century in the north-east of England and placed in St Cuthbert's coffin, apparently in 698. It was discovered when the coffin was opened in Durham Cathedral in 1104 on the occasion of the removal of Cuthbert's body to a new shrine. The Gospel has a beautifully-worked, original, red leather binding in excellent condition, and is the only surviving high-status manuscript from this crucial period in British history to retain its original appearance, both inside and out." Source: British Library Medieval Manuscripts Blog.
Note: "With a page size of only 138 by 92 millimetres (5.4 in × 3.6 in), the St Cuthbert Gospel is one of the smallest surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. The essentially undecorated text is the Gospel of John in Latin, written in a script that has been regarded as a model of elegant simplicity." (Wikipedia)
Comment: This fantastic book is over 1300 years old, but it's still perfectly clear and legible. Compare that to the average lifespan of digital documents, which can probably be measured in a few decades at most.
Preserving digital files is a labor-intensive process. According to the Digital Preservation Coalition, the longevity of these documents can be extended with periodic refreshing (moving a file from one physical storage medium to another), migration (changing them from one format to another) and emulation (creating software that can read a variety of formats), but only a small percentage of the digital material being produced today will ever get this kind of archival treatment.
Physical books, on the other hand, will last for centuries, if not millennia, if they're kept in relatively dry, shaded and -- as in the case of the St. Cuthbert Gospel -- airtight spaces. And they frequently don't need any specialized handling at all to survive for thousands of years. For instance, look at all the ancient papyri scrolls that have been discovered which are still readable even though they were just stuffed into amphorae and buried in the sand. When it comes to longevity, the old technologies are still the best and this includes things like photographs recorded on film rather than digital media:
"We know that photographic negatives, transparencies and prints last a long time. They are reliable forms of storing data. Recently the Royal Geographic Society reprinted Frank Hurley's pictures from the 1913 Antarctic Exhibition - from his original glass negatives, nearly 100 years old. An example of how robust the storage medium was - remember these negatives had been in sub-zero conditions and transported across an ocean in a tiny lifeboat!" (Digital Preservation Coalition)
The digital revolution which was supposed to make us all smarter has not only shortened the lifespan of written material but has actually caused a general decline in reading and writing. The number of people who read for pleasure has been going down for decades now. The deterioration in writing skills is obvious all over the western world, and cursive handwriting is no longer being taught in many schools (though it has been making a comeback recently in some areas). One of the consequences of this is that "toddler's’ excessive use of touchscreens is leaving the muscles in their hands so weak they cannot grip a pencil," according to the Sunday Express. That seems unbelievable, but apparently it's true.
What does this have to do with the Cuthbert Gospel? Nothing directly, I guess, but look at what the Gospel represents. What we have here is an approximately 1,300-year-old book which has survived into an age when print is dying in favor of digital media with an average lifespan of less than 20 years (at best). The Cuthbert Gospel was written by hand -- a skill that most people don't learn or use anymore -- in a language that most people can't understand -- that came down to us from a period that most people don't know anything about.
I wouldn't call this progress. The Cuthbert Gospel, among other things, is a reminder of how much the West has deteriorated.
Note: The entire Cuthbert Gospel can be viewed online in the British Museum's digitized manuscripts collection. Scanning the book makes it available to people who can't visit the museum, but I have to wonder if the digitized version will last anywhere near as long as the original.
Posted at 07:00 AM in Ancient Britain, Ancient Literature, Ancient Writing, Books, Christianity, Commentary, Culture, Current Affairs, Europe, Medieval, Religion, Videos | Permalink