"When is a tattoo parlor the perfect venue for a contemporary art show? When the art on view is Nicole Wilson’s nearly decade-long project 'Ötzi,' in which she recreated each of 61 tattoos found on the over 5,000-year-old Ice Age mummy of the same name on her own body, using her own blood in lieu of ink—and documented the healing process, photographing as the marks slowly faded away." Source: ArtNet.
I'm not sure how permanent these tattoos are. According to Wilson, "In 2012 and using existing research, I tattooed — to scale and in the same location on my body — images of Ötzi’s 59 tattoos in my own blood. My body reabsorbed almost all of the blood back into itself immediately following the process of tattooing, but left behind dark scars where heme, the pigment within blood, slowly disappeared from the skin’s surface.
"In December 2016, I re-executed this project in light of a newly published study that used non-invasive multi spectral photographic imaging techniques and found that there are more tattoos on Ötzi than originally believed. Researchers have confirmed that the corpse contains 61 total tattoos divided into 19 groups. I worked with these researchers and Three Kings Tattoo in order to redo this project and ensure that all 61 of Ötzi’s tattoos were tattooed into my skin."
Comment: I can't decide if this is an interesting attempt to connect with the past or just another example of hipsterish performance-art nonsense. In any case, Wilson does seem to be genuinely interested in mummies and tattoos. In the next video (2021), for instance, she moderates a Q & A about the subject with Dr. Albert Zink, head of the Institute for Mummy Studies in Italy.
"The apparently anthropomorphic appearance and meaning of (at least some of) the T-shaped pillars known from Göbekli Tepe, Nevalı Çori (and likely many of the other sites with similar pillars in the area too) could have been convincingly explained by a number of very characteristic details depicted in reliefs on these pillars. Among them arms and hands as well as stola-like garments and, in the case of Göbekli Tepe’s Pillars 18 and 31 (in Building D), even belts and loincloths." Source: Gobekli Tepe Research Project (many excellent photographs of the sculpture can be found here).
"It was the discovery of these peculiar new type of T-shaped pillars, for the first time excavated in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic settlement of Nevalı Çori on the middle Euphrates (like Göbekli Tepe in Şanlıurfa Province) in the 1980s ... which also shed new light onto another find – until then rather considered an archaeological oddity – of a unique piece of sculpture: The so-called Kilisik Sculpture found in 1965 near Adıyaman in southeastern Turkey.
This is a really unusual sculpture, especially considering its age. "...Although its original find context still could not have been figured out (Hauptmann (2012, 18) suggested an early Neolithic settlement north of the village), the Kilisik Sculpture is an extraordinary find among depictions and sculptures of that period due to its specific shape, apparently combining characteristics of very different elements of other types of known Neolithic sculpture..."
"When the papal envoy John of Plano Carpini protested Mongol attacks on the Catholic kingdoms of Europe, Güyük stated that these people had slain Mongol envoys in the time of Genghis Khan and Ogedei Khan. He also claimed that 'from the rising of the sun to its setting, all the lands have been made subject to the Great Khan', proclaiming an explicit ideology of world conquest. The Khagan wrote a letter to Pope Innocent IV on the relations between the Church and the Mongols. 'You must say with a sincere heart: "We will be your subjects; we will give you our strength". You must in person come with your kings, all together, without exception, to render us service and pay us homage. Only then will we acknowledge your submission. And if you do not follow the order of God, and go against our orders, we will know you as our enemy.'" (Wikipedia)
Guyuk Khan didn't have the strength (or the time, perhaps) to force the pope into submission, but he didn't stop killing Christians, either.
Note: In 1219, Guyuk Khan's grandfather, Genghis Khan, wrote a very different kind of letter to a famous Taoist monk named Qiu Chuji, asking him to visit the Mongol court so the great but aging Khan could learn the secret of immortality. The story of Qiu Chuji's travels to meet the Khan is interesting reading.
The ancient Greek in this video sounds very sophisticated. The Viking language sounds almost as hard-ass as classical Latin, while ancient Egyptian is incredibly sinister. It reminds me of the voice Eleanor hears through the wall in The Haunting -- the classic 1963 film, not the execrable 1999 remake.
"The mystery of Stonehenge may be solved, thanks to a new study that reveals the iconic rock structure may have originated from a single hunter gatherer society in France 7000 years ago." Source: Russia Today (2019).
"...A new study [2019]suggests the impressive ring of stones was created thanks to a hunter gatherer society in Brittany in northwest France, which first started building the impressive structures and monuments 7,000 years ago."
Note: The RT article is kind of misleading. This study doesn't actually "solve the mystery" of Stonehenge since it doesn't explain why the monument was built. If you check the study itself, it's mostly concerned with the origin of the megalith culture characterized by "such phenomena as mounds with interior stone structures, cairns, dolmens, standing stones, passage monuments, and similar structures" (NewGrange).
According to this research, the monuments in Britain were probably built by Stone Age sailors who crossed over from the area of modern Britanny on the northwestern coast of France. In other words, this is a maritime diffusion model. If accurate, the study provides evidence that megaliths were first constructed on the European mainland:
According to the study, "a Bayesian statistical approach to 2,410 currently available radiocarbon results from megalithic, partly premegalithic, and contemporaneous nonmegalithic contexts in Europe" suggests that "megalithic graves emerged within a brief time interval of 200 y to 300 y in the second half of the fifth millennium calibrated years BC in northwest France, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic coast of Iberia."
"The adoption of agriculture and husbandry and the shift from hunting-and-gathering to food-producing subsistence strategies in the course of the so-called Neolithization process seems to have been accompanied (and partly even preceded) by significant mental change. The sudden appearance of a variety of symbolic depictions hints at a new 'psycho-cultural' mindset and a new way of viewing the world and humankind´s role in it. The oldest yet known evidence for monumental architecture was discovered at Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey, created in exactly this period. The site is interpreted as a social hub for meetings and feasts of different hunter groups of the region, and its iconographic repertoire gives ample examples of this new symbolic art. The imagery of this site in particular focuses on strong and dangerous animals, apparently emphasizing ideas of death and threat ... the monuments of Göbekli Tepe could have served as arenas for orchestrated rituals necessary to create and strengthen group identity and social cohesion among the early-Neolithic hunter groups at this crucial transition phase of cultural and economic change." Source: "Handbook of Cognitive Archaeology. Psychology in Prehistory," quoted in a review at Tepe Telegrams -- From The Gobekli Tepe Research Project. Most of the information in the video above came from this site.
Talk from 2014. The speaker is the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt who led the excavations at Gobekli Tepe from 1996 to 2014. He apparently died a few days after this presentation.
Johannes Gutenberg (1400 - 1468 AD) is famous for his invention of the printing press, the most revolutionary technological development in the history of the world. As it turns out, though, Gutenberg's press wasn't actually the first. The Chinese beat him to it by several centuries:
"The world's first movable type printing press technology for printing paper books was made of ceramic porcelain china materials and invented in ancient China around A.D 1040 by the Han Chinese innovator Bi Sheng (990–1051) during the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127). In 1377, currently the oldest extant movable metal print book, Jikji, was printed in Korea. The diffusion of both movable-type systems was, however, limited. They were expensive, and required a high amount of labor involved in manipulating the thousands of ceramic tablets or metal tablets, required for scripts based on the ancient Chinese writing script, which has thousands of characters." Source: Wikipedia.
Gutenberg's innovations were a major step forward, however. It also helped that European languages didn't include as many characters as found in the Chinese script.
Gutenberg is best known, perhaps, for printing the Gutenberg Bible, a Vulgate Latin edition "valued and revered for its high aesthetic and artistic qualities as well as its historic significance." (Wikipedia) But he also produced other, more commercial books and texts in his workshop, the first publishing house in the West, so to speak.
"Gutenberg's workshop was set up at Hof Humbrecht, a property belonging to a distant relative. It is not clear when Gutenberg conceived the Bible project, but for this he borrowed another 800 guilders from [Johann Fust, a moneylender who had financed some of Gutenberg's earlier projects], and work commenced in 1452. At the same time, the press was also printing other, more lucrative texts (possibly Latin grammars). There is also some speculation that there may have been two presses, one for the pedestrian texts, and one for the Bible. One of the profit-making enterprises of the new press was the printing of thousands of indulgences for the church, documented from 1454 to 1455." (Wikipedia)
Comment: I've always loved old books. They're beautiful, for one thing, and they were made to last, unlike today's throwaway books which are mass-produced in quantities that Gutenberg could never have dreamed of. And old books have an atmosphere about them that's hard to describe. I've probably been influenced too much by H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard and movies like The Ninth Gate, but these books always look like they contain ancient, secret and possibly dangerous information.
"Palaeography can be an essential skill for historians and philologists, as it tackles two main difficulties. First, since the style of a single alphabet in each given language has evolved constantly, it is necessary to know how to decipher its individual characters as they existed in various eras. Second, scribes often used many abbreviations, usually so as to write more quickly and sometimes to save space, so the specialist-palaeographer must know how to interpret them. Knowledge of individual letter-forms, ligatures, punctuation, and abbreviations enables the palaeographer to read and understand the text." (Wikipedia)
Paleography isn't very reliable when it comes to dating manuscripts. According to Wikipedia, "Palaeography can be used to provide information about the date at which a document was written. However, 'paleography is a last resort for dating' and, 'for book hands, a period of 50 years is the least acceptable spread of time' with it being suggested that the 'rule of thumb' should probably be to avoid dating a hand more precisely than a range of at least seventy or eighty years."
The margin of error here can be a significant issue when it comes to certain documents. For example, if an ancient New Testament manuscript is dated using paleographic techniques only it would be hard to say with any certainty if it was written in the first or second century AD. This would make a huge amount of difference, for instance, if you're trying to argue that a particular gospel was composed by one of the original apostles. You'd need something more solid to support your case, some kind of internal evidence such as the name of a city known from other sources to have been founded at a certain date or the name of a historical person known to have been born in a certain year.
Script changes can be used to assign manuscripts to certain periods, however, as seen in the following video.
One of the problems paleographers face is the fact that some of these old manuscripts have to be read letter by letter:
"When reading modern text, we generally identify whole words at a glance. Look at this sentence:
"The huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. The oredr of the ltteers in the wrod can be in a total mses but you can sitll raed it wouthit any porbelm.
"While this way of reading and comprehending whole words at a glance is very useful in the modern world, it can lead to incomprehension and mistakes when trying to read documents written in an old and unfamiliar style of handwriting." Source: Paleography: Where to Start," the National Archives.
Paleography is a huge discipline that covers the entire history of writing all around the world. The area of Latin writing alone is a gigantic subject. This is a fascinating field if you're into old books and cursive writing like I am. H.P. Lovecraft, one of my favorite writers, had a similar fascination. He could be called an amateur paleographer in a sense. For example, he must have made an extensive study of colonial-period American English because he reproduced it down to its typographical peculiarities in several letters in his great novella, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. As a side note, in case you're interested in this kind of thing, Lovecraft in that novella also used a Latin chant that he quoted from Transcendental Magic, a book by the French occultist Eliphas Levi (1810-1875). I'm a bookish nerd, I guess, because I find this stuff interesting.