The palimpsest

Sophocles was a classical Greek playwright, whose beautiful and haunting tragedies Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus are standard fare in college literature classes.  Those three plays are his most famous, but there are four others still read and performed -- Ajax, The Women of Trachis, Electra, and Philoctetes.

Those seven plays are all that is left of the 120 plays he wrote.

Nineteen of Euripides's plays survive, out of nearly a hundred.  Seven of Aeschylus's plays still exist, from an estimated eighty.  Nothing is left of the work of the great scientists Anaxagoras, Eratosthenes, Aristarchus, and Thales except for fragments.

What we have from the classical Greek and Roman world is just what happened to survive, sometimes by design and sometimes by pure accident.  Fires claimed a great many ancient manuscripts, some of which were set deliberately.  The Great Library of Alexandria, which housed huge numbers of these works, endured loss after loss.  A fire set by the troops of Julius Caesar in 48 B.C.E. that was intended to destroy Egyptian ships at the port spread to the rest of the city and burned an estimated forty thousand scrolls in the Library.  Repeated sieges of the city under the Roman Emperors Aurelian and Diocletian three hundred years later destroyed a good percentage of what was left.  The rest of the surviving manuscripts met their end under two onslaughts from organized religion.  The first came in the early fifth century C.E. from the Christian Bishop Cyril, who not only worked to destroy the remnants of the Library, but had one of its leading scholars -- Hypatia -- brutally murdered by a mob.  (Cyril, on the other hand, went on to be canonized.)  The second came after the Muslim takeover of Egypt in the seventh century C.E., when the Caliph Omar ordered all of the remaining scrolls collected and burned for fuel.  Omar famously remarked, "If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if they are opposed to the Quran, destroy them."

What we know of pre-Dark-Ages European science and literature is so sparse that "fragmentary" seems a significant understatement.  It's as if we were trying to understand the works of William Shakespeare while having in hand Timon of Athens, Cymbeline, the last twenty pages of Coriolanus, and five randomly chosen sonnets.

There still remains some shred of hope for recovering some of this lost wealth of knowledge, however.  Researchers believe they have found pieces of the second century B.C.E. astronomer Hipparchus's lost manuscript Star Catalogue on a palimpsest -- a piece of parchment that had been erased for reuse.  Because parchment was expensive (it was made from specially tanned lamb or calf skin), used parchment was often scraped to remove the previous writing and then repurposed.  Using multispectral imaging, non-destructive technique for picking up faint traces of ink on manuscripts, a team from the Université Sorbonne and Cambridge University have uncovered what seems to be the beginning of Hipparchus's lost work in the background of the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, a Syriac Greek document from the eleventh century C.E.

You have to wonder what other gems from the ancient world lie hidden on palimpsests.

A piece of the document, showing the background writing that appears to be the introduction to Hipparchus's Star Catalogue

How amazing would that be to reclaim some of these windows into the past from manuscripts currently sitting in libraries and museums?  What would we learn about our forebears' history, science, and philosophy?  Until we can invent a time machine and go back to visit the Library of Alexandria -- the pipe-dream of many a scholar -- the best we can do is apply our modern technology to what we have.

And to judge by the recent discoveries, there may be more to find than we ever realized.

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Voices from the past

Sometimes I'll bump into a story that is so down my alley that I'm surprised I didn't find out about it earlier.  That was my reaction to the link sent to me by a friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia, about a discovery back in 2017 of some samples of two languages that were up till then almost completely unknown.

The discovery was made because of palimpsests, which are documents that have been erased and written over.  This happened because the writing surfaces available -- mostly parchment made from lambskin -- were often considered more valuable than the text written on them, so when it was in short supply people would erase what was there (often it was sanded off with a stone) and rewrite over the new surface.  Some parchments were reused multiple times this way.

The erasing process, though -- just like using an eraser on a piece of paper today -- was never perfect, and traces of the original document(s) were left behind.  Which is why some researchers studying parchments at one of the oldest continuously-run libraries in the world, Saint Catherine's Monastery in Sinai, Egypt, were able to detect passages from two languages for which there were almost no samples left, Caucasian Albanian and Christian Palestinian Aramaic.

Saint Catherine's Monastery [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Berthold Werner / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA.]

The palimpsests were read by photographing them repeatedly in different frequencies of light (including ultraviolet and infrared) and turning a computer loose on the composite images to see what was there that might not be visible to the naked eye.  The results were stunning -- new text from one hundred and thirty different palimpsests that has drastically increased our knowledge of the two extinct languages.

Caucasian Albanian (the language, and place, are unrelated to the present country of Albania), in the Lezgic family of languages -- its closest currently-spoken relative is Udi, spoken by about four thousand people in Azerbaijan and the Caucasian region of Russia.  Caucasian Albanian seems to have vanished from the region some time around 1000 C.E., and until now was only known from a handful of inscriptions on stone tablets.  Linguist Josh Gippert, who is an expert in this language family, is unequivocal about the find.  "This one discovery has brought about a twenty-five percent increase in the readability of Caucasian Albanian," Gippert said.

Christian Palestinian Aramaic is a dialect of Aramaic spoken between the fifth and thirteenth centuries C.E. by the Melkites, a Christian group in Syria.  Over the years, the speaking of Christian Palestinian Aramaic dwindled, replaced by Arabic, and seems to have vanished completely some time in the Middle Ages.  "This was an entire community of people who had a literature, art, and spirituality," said Michael Phelps, director of the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library, who oversaw the project. "Almost all of that has been lost, yet their cultural DNA exists in our culture today.  These palimpsest texts are giving them a voice again and letting us learn about how they contributed to who we are today."

The whole thing is pretty stupendous, not only for the ingenuity of the discovery but because it gives us at least a little bit more information about languages that haven't been spoken for eight hundred years or more.  We're seeing language extinctions today at an increasing rate, as the world's dominant languages (primarily Mandarin, English, Russian, Spanish, and Arabic) replace small/isolated languages.  There are hundreds of languages for which there are only a handful of remaining native speakers -- primarily older people -- which will be extinct without intervention (and possibly even with intervention) in the next twenty years.  Indigenous languages in Australia and South America are especially at risk.  There are places where indigenous people in two villages ten miles apart speak mutually unintelligible languages, and the natives there have mostly adopted the lingua franca (English and Spanish, respectively) in order to be able to travel and communicate.

You can understand why they do it, but it's still kind of sad, considering the cultural knowledge that is vanishing before our eyes.

In any case, the discovery in Egypt is a happy note, giving us a window into the speech of people from over a thousand years ago.  It's nice to know that we can still hear the voices of people who were thought to be silenced forever.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is about one of the most terrifying viruses known to man: rabies.

In Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, we learn about the history and biology of this tiny bit of protein and DNA that has, once you develop symptoms, a nearly 100% mortality rate.  Not only that, but it is unusual amongst pathogens at having extremely low host specificity.  It's transmissible to most mammal species, and there have been cases of humans contracting rabies not from one of the "big five" -- raccoons, foxes, skunks, bats, and dogs -- but from animals like deer.

Rabid goes through not only what medical science has to say about the virus and the disease it causes, but its history, including the possibility that it gave rise to the legends of lycanthropy and werewolves.  It's a fascinating read.

Even though it'll make you a little more wary of wildlife.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Ancient Egyptian helicopters

I find it amusing to note how often woo-woo headlines are phrased as questions, e.g. "Did Aliens Build Stonehenge?"  "Does A Plesiosaur Live In The Hudson River?"  "Is Graceland Haunted By Elvis's Ghost?"

I live in constant hope that one day, I'll open one of these articles, and the entire article will consist of one word: "NO."  It hasn't happened yet, but it's this sort of cheery thought that keeps me going.

I thought for sure that would be the case this morning, when I took a look at an article entitled "Mysteries of Abydos: Egyptian Flying Machines?"  The article that followed (1) did not say "NO" anywhere, and (2) sadly, was serious, featuring the following photograph, a close-up of a panel from the Temple of Seti I in Abydos, Egypt:

There then follows some fairly hysterical (in every sense of the word) descriptions about how the Ancient Egyptians apparently spent a great deal of time zooming about in helicopters, because there is clearly one depicted here.  There is, according to the author, also a submarine and a Back to the Future-style hoverboard shown on the panel, as well as several other "futuristic craft."

Now, at first I was optimistically certain that this had to be an isolated phenomenon; no one, with the exception of the author of the article, could possibly take this seriously.  Sadly, I was mistaken.  I did a bit of research, and was appalled to find that this panel is one of the main pieces of "evidence" used by the von Däniken Descent Of The Gods cadre to support their conjecture that the Earth was the alien version of Grand Central Station three thousand years ago.  Amongst the ancient-aliens crowd, the Abydos helicopter is apparently hugely popular, not to mention amongst those who think that Stargate is a historical documentary.

Which may well be the same people.

The interesting thing is that the whole thing was adequately explained years ago; a French UFO aficionado named Thierry Wathelet took the time to query some Egyptologists about the panel, and put together a nice explanation.  Several of the Egyptologists, evidently fed up with all of the nonsense that has grown up around Egyptian archaeology, told Wathelet to piss off, but a few of them were kind enough to give him detailed information about how the panel had been created, and what it meant.  The simple answer: the apparent helicopter is a palimpsest -- a place where a written text was effaced or altered to make room for new writing.  The "helicopter" is a combination of (at least) two hieroglyphs, and the fact that it looks a bit like an aircraft a complete coincidence.  Wathelet quotes an email he received from Katherine Griffis-Greenberg, a professor of archaeology at the University of Alabama:

It was decided in antiquity to replace the five-fold royal titulary of Seti I with that of his son and successor, Ramesses II. In the photos, we clearly see "Who repulses the Nine Bows," which figures in some of the Two-Ladies names of Seti I, replaced by "Who protects Egypt and overthrows the foreign countries," a Two-Ladies name of Ramesses II.  With some of the plaster that once covered Seti I's titulary now fallen away, certain of the superimposed signs do indeed look like a submarine, etc., but it's just a coincidence.   Well, hallelujah, and kudos to Wathelet for putting the whole thing together, and on a UFO site, no less.  Now, if a UFOologist can summon up this kind of skeptical facility, it shouldn't be that hard for the rest of us, right?

Unfortunately, the answer seems to be "no," and I base this on the fact that my perusal of the first few pages of the 787,000 hits I got from Googling "Abydos helicopter" seemed to be mostly in favor of the theory that the ancient Egyptians spent a good bit of their time sightseeing from the air.  So I guess my search will have to continue for an article whose headline asks a question, and the article itself just says, "No" (or even better, "What are you, a moron?  Stop fucking around on the internet and go learn some critical thinking skills.").  Until then, at least one more ridiculous woo-woo theory has been laid to rest -- at least for the seeming minority of folks who take the time to evaluate the evidence skeptically and scientifically.