The Art of Europe’s Forgotten Avant-Garde Artists Now Digitized and Put Online

in Archives, Art, History | May 23rd, 2018

Eco­nom­i­cal­ly deplet­ed but filled with the desire to pose ques­tions about the future in rad­i­cal­ly new ways, post­war Europe would prove fer­tile ground for the devel­op­ment of avant-garde art. Though that envi­ron­ment pro­duced a fair few stars over the sec­ond half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, their work rep­re­sents only the tip of the ice­berg: bring­ing the rest out of the depths and onto the inter­net has con­sti­tut­ed the last few years’ work for For­got­ten Her­itage. A col­lab­o­ra­tion between insti­tu­tions in Poland, Bel­gium, Croa­t­ia, Esto­nia, and Ger­many sup­port­ed by Cre­ative Europe, the project offers a data­base of Euro­pean avant-garde art — includ­ing many works still dar­ing, sur­pris­ing, or just plain bizarre — nev­er prop­er­ly pre­served and made avail­able until now.

For­got­ten Her­itage’s About page describes the pro­jec­t’s goal as the cre­ation of “an inno­v­a­tive online repos­i­to­ry fea­tur­ing digi­tised archives of Pol­ish, Croa­t­ian, Eston­ian, Bel­gian and French artists of the avant-garde move­ment occur­ring in the sec­ond half of the 20th cen­tu­ry,” meant to even­tu­al­ly con­tain “approx­i­mate­ly 8 thou­sand of sort­ed and clas­si­fied archive entries, includ­ing descrip­tive data.”

Cur­rent­ly, writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Claire Voon, its site “offers vis­i­tors around 800 records to explore, from doc­u­men­ta­tion of art­works to texts.  The major­i­ty of works stem from to the ’60s and ’70s, as a time­line illus­trates, with the most recent piece dat­ing to 2005. This inter­ac­tive fea­ture, which has embed­ded links to indi­vid­ual artists’s biogra­phies and exam­ples of their art­works, is one way to explore the well-designed archive.”

For­got­ten Her­itage thus makes it easy to dis­cov­er artists pre­vi­ous­ly dif­fi­cult for even the avant-garde enthu­si­ast to encounter. Vis­i­tors can also browse the grow­ing archive by the medi­um of the work: paint­ing (like Jüri Arrak’s Artist, 1972, seen at the top of the post), instal­la­tion (Woj­ciech Bruszewski’s Visu­al­i­ty, 1980), film (Anna Kuter­a’s The Short­est Film in the World, 1975), “pho­to with inter­ven­tion” (Edi­ta Schu­bert’s Pho­ny Smile, 1997), Olav Moran’s “Konk­tal” and many more besides.

Voon cites Mari­ka Kuźmicz’s esti­mate that about 40 per­cent of it, most­ly from Bel­gian and Eston­ian artists, has nev­er before been avail­able online. Debates about whether an avant-garde still exists, in Europe or any­where else, will sure­ly con­tin­ue among observers of art, but as a vis­it to For­got­ten Her­itage’s dig­i­tal archives reveals, the avant-garde of decades past, when redis­cov­ered, retains no small amount of artis­tic vital­i­ty today.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er Euro­peana Col­lec­tions, a Por­tal of 48 Mil­lion Free Art­works, Books, Videos, Arti­facts & Sounds from Across Europe

Every­thing You Need to Know About Mod­ern Russ­ian Art in 25 Min­utes: A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Futur­ism, Social­ist Real­ism & More

Enter Dig­i­tal Archives of the 1960s Fluxus Move­ment and Explore the Avant-Garde Art of John Cage, Yoko Ono, John Cale, Nam June Paik & More

25 Mil­lion Images From 14 Art Insti­tu­tions to Be Dig­i­tized & Put Online In One Huge Schol­ar­ly Archive

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Robert Rauschenberg’s 34 Illustrations of Dante’s Inferno (1958–60)

in Art, Literature | May 23rd, 2018

Per­haps more than any oth­er post­war avant-garde Amer­i­can artist, Robert Rauschen­berg matched, and maybe exceed­ed, Mar­cel Duchamp’s puck­ish irrev­er­ence. He once bought a Willem de Koon­ing draw­ing just to erase it and once sent a telegram declar­ing that it was a por­trait of gal­lerist Iris Clert, “if I say so.” Rauschen­berg also excelled at turn­ing trash into trea­sure, repur­pos­ing the detri­tus of mod­ern life in works of art both play­ful and seri­ous, con­tin­u­ing to “address major themes of world­wide con­cern,” wrote art his­to­ri­an John Richard­son in a 1997 Van­i­ty Fair pro­file, “by uti­liz­ing tech­nol­o­gy in ever more imag­i­na­tive and inven­tive ways…. Rauschen­berg is a painter of history—the his­to­ry of now rather than then.”

What, then, pos­sessed this artist of the “his­to­ry of now” to take on a series of draw­ings between 1958 and 1960 illus­trat­ing each Can­to of Dante’s Infer­no? “Per­haps he sensed a kin­dred spir­it in Dante,” writes Gre­go­ry Gilbert at The Art News­pa­per, “that encour­aged his ver­nac­u­lar inter­pre­ta­tions of the clas­si­cal text and his rad­i­cal mix­ing of high and low cul­tures.”

Crit­ic Charles Dar­went reads Rauschenberg’s moti­va­tions through a Freudi­an lens, his Infer­no series a sub­li­ma­tion of his homo­sex­u­al­i­ty and repres­sive child­hood: “The young Rauschen­berg… came to see Mod­ernist art as a vari­ant of his Tex­an par­ents’ fun­da­men­tal Chris­tian­i­ty.”

The most straight­for­ward account has Rauschen­berg con­ceiv­ing the project in order to be tak­en more seri­ous­ly as an artist. Such bio­graph­i­cal expla­na­tions tell us some­thing about the work, but we learn as much or more from look­ing at the work itself, which hap­pens to be very much a his­to­ry of now at the end of the 1950s. Though Rauschen­berg based the illus­tra­tions on John Ciardi’s 1954 trans­la­tion of the Divine Com­e­dy, they were not meant to accom­pa­ny the text but to stand on their own, the Ital­ian epic—or its famous first third—providing a back­drop of ready-made iron­ic com­men­tary on images Rauschen­berg ripped from news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines such as Life and Sports Illus­trat­ed.

“To cre­ate these col­lages,” explains MIT’s List Visu­al Arts Cen­ter, “he would use a sol­vent to adhere the images to his draw­ing sur­face, then over­lay them with a vari­ety of media, includ­ing pen, gouache (an opaque water­col­or), and pen­cil.” Steeped in a Cold War atmos­phere, the illus­tra­tions incor­po­rate fig­ures like John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, who, in the 50s, Gilbert writes, “served as one of Joseph McCarthy’s polit­i­cal hench­men dur­ing the Red Scare.” We see in Rauschenberg’s col­lage draw­ings allu­sions to the Civ­il Rights move­ment and the decade’s anti-Com­mu­nist para­noia as well its reac­tionary sex­u­al pol­i­tics. “Polit­i­cal and sex­u­al con­tent… need­ed to be cod­ed,” Gilbert claims, in such an “ultra­con­ser­v­a­tive era.”

For exam­ple, we see a like­ly ref­er­ence to the artist’s gay iden­ti­ty in the Can­to XIV illus­tra­tion, above. The text “describes the pun­ish­ment of the Sodomites, who are con­demned for eter­ni­ty to walk across burn­ing sand. Rauschen­berg depicts the theme through a homo­erot­ic image of a male nude… jux­ta­posed with a red trac­ing of the artist’s own foot.” Maybe Dar­went is right to sup­pose that had Dante’s poem not exist­ed, Rauschen­berg “would have been the man to invent it”—or to invent its mid-20th cen­tu­ry visu­al equiv­a­lent. He draws atten­tion to the poem’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal cen­ter, its sub­ver­sive humor, and its den­si­ty of ref­er­ences to con­tem­po­rary 15th cen­tu­ry Ital­ian pol­i­tics, adapt­ing all of these qual­i­ties for moder­ni­ty.

But the illus­tra­tion of Can­to XIV—depicting “The Vio­lent Against God, Nature, and Art”—also encodes Rauschenberg’s vio­lent tram­pling of artis­tic con­ven­tion. Many crit­ics see this series as the artist’s reac­tion against Abstract Expres­sion­ism (like that of De Koon­ing). And while he “may have felt a cre­ative kin­ship with Dante,” writes Gilbert, “he also admit­ted to the art crit­ic Calvin Tomkins his impa­tience with the poet’s self-right­eous moral­i­ty, a state­ment like­ly direct­ed against this Can­to.” Like his 1953 Erased de Koon­ing Draw­ing, Rauschenberg’s Infer­no draw­ings also per­form an act of erasure—or the cre­ation of a palimpsest, with Dante’s poem scratched over by the artist’s wild, child­like strokes.

In recog­ni­tion of the way these illus­tra­tions repur­pose, rather than accom­pa­ny, the Infer­no, MoMA recent­ly com­mis­sioned an edi­tion of Rauschenberg’s 34 draw­ings, accom­pa­nied not by the straight trans­la­tion by Cia­r­di but poems by Kevin Young and Robin Coste Lewis, whose por­tion of the book is titled “Dante Comes to Amer­i­ca: 20 Jan­u­ary 17: An Era­sure of 17 Can­tos from Ciardi’s Infer­no, after Robert Rauschen­berg.” Rather than view­ing the illus­tra­tions against Dante’s work itself, we can read their par­tic­u­lar Amer­i­can pro­to-pop art char­ac­ter against lit­er­ary “era­sures” like Lewis’s “Can­to XXIII,” below. See the full series of Rauschenberg’s 34 illus­tra­tions at the Rauschen­berg Foun­da­tion web­site here.

Can­to XXIII.
by Robin Coste Lewis

                “I Go with The Body That Was Always Mine”

Silent, one fol­low­ing the oth­er,
the Fable hunt­ed us down.
O weary man­tle of eter­ni­ty,
turn left, reach us down
into that nar­row way in silence.

Col­lege of Sor­ry Hyp­ocrites, I go
with the body that was always mine,
bur­nished like coun­ter­weights to keep
the peace. One may still see the sort of peace

we kept. Mar­vel for a while over that:
the cross in Hel­l’s eter­nal exile.
Some­where there is some gap in the wall,
pit through which we may climb

to the next brink with­out the need
of sum­mon­ing the Black Angels
and forc­ing them to raise us from this sink.
Near­er than hope, there is a bridge

that runs from the great cir­cle, that cross­es
every ditch from ridge to ridge.
Except—it is broken—but with care.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Free Course on Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

New Robert Rauschen­berg Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tion Lets You Down­load Free High-Res Images of the Artist’s Work

Hear Dante’s Infer­no Read Aloud by Influ­en­tial Poet & Trans­la­tor John Cia­r­di (1954)

Artists Illus­trate Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy Through the Ages: Doré, Blake, Bot­ti­cel­li, Mœbius & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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View and Download Nearly 60,000 Maps from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)

in Maps, Science | May 22nd, 2018

By rea­sons of par­ent­ing, I’ve become well acquaint­ed with a song—perhaps you know it?— called “Fifty Nifty Unit­ed States,” taught to school­child­ren as a geo­graph­i­cal mnemon­ic device. The lyrics men­tion that “each indi­vid­ual state con­tributes a qual­i­ty that is great.” What are some great qual­i­ties of, say, Delaware, New Mex­i­co, or South Dako­ta? We aren’t told. Hey, it’s enough that a five or six-year-old can remem­ber “shout ‘em, scout ‘em, tell all about ‘em” before rat­tling off an alpha­bet­i­cal list of “ev’ry state in the good old U.S.A.”

But if you hail from the U.S., you can enu­mer­ate many con­tri­bu­tions from a few nifty states, whether culi­nary delights, his­tor­i­cal events, writ­ers, artists, sports heroes, etc. And most everyone’s got sto­ries about vis­it­ing nat­ur­al won­ders, hik­ing moun­tain trails, ford­ing rivers, gaz­ing upon breath­tak­ing vis­tas.

We may be occa­sion­al tourists, trav­el enthu­si­asts, or experts, but what­ev­er our lev­el of expe­ri­ence in the coun­try, it’s prob­a­bly kid stuff com­pared to the work of the sci­en­tists at the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey (USGS).

Estab­lished by Con­gress in 1879, this august body has doc­u­ment­ed U.S. lands and waters for 125 years, gath­er­ing an incred­i­ble amount of detailed infor­ma­tion as “the nation’s largest water, earth, and bio­log­i­cal sci­ence and civil­ian map­ping agency.” Thanks to the Libre Map Project, the gen­er­al pub­lic can view and down­load near­ly 60,000 of those topo­graph­i­cal maps, from all fifty states, and near­ly every region with­in each of those states. See Colorado’s Pike Nation­al For­est and sur­round­ing envi­rons, at the top, for exam­ple, cre­at­ed from aer­i­al pho­tographs tak­en in 1950. Above, see a map of San Fran­cis­co, com­piled in 1956, then revised in 1993 and fur­ther edit­ed in 1996.

And just above, the dev­as­tat­ing Kīlauea Vol­cano, in a map com­piled from aer­i­al pho­tos tak­en in 1954 and 1961. (See the USGS site for the lat­est info about the ongo­ing erup­tion there.) Below, a nifty map of New York City, cre­at­ed “by pho­togram­met­ric meth­ods from aer­i­al pho­tographs tak­en [in] 1954 and plan­etable sur­veys [in] 1955. Revised from aer­i­al pho­tographs tak­en [in] 1966.” Google maps may be more cur­rent, but these USGS maps have an aura of sci­en­tif­ic author­i­ty around them, evi­dence of painstak­ing sur­veys, checked and rechecked over the decades by hun­dreds of pairs of hands and eyes.

Brows­ing the archive can be a chal­lenge, since the maps are cat­a­logued by coor­di­nates rather than place names, but you can enter the names of spe­cif­ic loca­tions in the search field. Also, be advised, the maps “are best used with glob­al posi­tion­ing soft­ware,” the archive tells vis­i­tors. Nonethe­less, you can click on the first down­load option for “Mul­ti Page Processed TIFF” to pull up a huge, down­load­able image. Enter the archive here and get to scout­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

Nation­al Geo­graph­ic Has Dig­i­tized Its Col­lec­tion of 6,000+ Vin­tage Maps: See a Curat­ed Selec­tion of Maps Pub­lished Between 1888 and Today

The Illus­trat­ed Med­i­c­i­nal Plant Map of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca (1932): Down­load It in High Res­o­lu­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Bill Gates Names 5 Books You Should Read This Summer

in Books | May 22nd, 2018

It’s some­thing of a tra­di­tion. Every sum­mer, philanthropist/Microsoft founder Bill Gates rec­om­mends five books to read dur­ing the slow sum­mer months. This year’s list, he tells us, wres­tles with some big ques­tions: “What makes a genius tick? Why do bad things hap­pen to good peo­ple? Where does human­i­ty come from, and where are we head­ed?”

And now, with­out no fur­ther ado, here’s Bil­l’s list for 2018. The text below is his, not mine:

Leonar­do da Vin­ci, by Wal­ter Isaac­son. I think Leonar­do was one of the most fas­ci­nat­ing peo­ple ever. Although today he’s best known as a painter, Leonar­do had an absurd­ly wide range of inter­ests, from human anato­my to the the­ater. Isaac­son does the best job I’ve seen of pulling togeth­er the dif­fer­ent strands of Leonardo’s life and explain­ing what made him so excep­tion­al. A wor­thy fol­low-up to Isaacson’s great biogra­phies of Albert Ein­stein and Steve Jobs. [Read his blog post on the book here.]

Every­thing Hap­pens for a Rea­son and Oth­er Lies I’ve Loved, by Kate Bowler. When Bowler, a pro­fes­sor at Duke Divin­i­ty School, is diag­nosed with stage IV colon can­cer, she sets out to under­stand why it hap­pened. Is it a test of her char­ac­ter? The result is a heart­break­ing, sur­pris­ing­ly fun­ny mem­oir about faith and com­ing to grips with your own mor­tal­i­ty. [Read his blog post on the book here.]

Lin­coln in the Bar­do, by George Saun­ders. I thought I knew every­thing I need­ed to know about Abra­ham Lin­coln, but this nov­el made me rethink parts of his life. It blends his­tor­i­cal facts from the Civ­il War with fan­tas­ti­cal elements—it’s basi­cal­ly a long con­ver­sa­tion among 166 ghosts, includ­ing Lincoln’s deceased son. I got new insight into the way Lin­coln must have been crushed by the weight of both grief and respon­si­bil­i­ty. This is one of those fas­ci­nat­ing, ambigu­ous books you’ll want to dis­cuss with a friend when you’re done. [Read his blog post on this book here.]

Ori­gin Sto­ry: A Big His­to­ry of Every­thing, by David Chris­t­ian. David cre­at­ed my favorite course of all time, Big His­to­ry. It tells the sto­ry of the uni­verse from the big bang to today’s com­plex soci­eties, weav­ing togeth­er insights and evi­dence from var­i­ous dis­ci­plines into a sin­gle nar­ra­tive. If you haven’t tak­en Big His­to­ry yet, Ori­gin Sto­ry is a great intro­duc­tion. If you have, it’s a great refresh­er. Either way, the book will leave you with a greater appre­ci­a­tion of humanity’s place in the uni­verse. [Read his blog post on this book here.]

Fact­ful­ness, by Hans Rosling, with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Ronnlund. I’ve been rec­om­mend­ing this book since the day it came out. Hans, the bril­liant glob­al-health lec­tur­er who died last year, gives you a break­through way of under­stand­ing basic truths about the world—how life is get­ting bet­ter, and where the world still needs to improve. And he weaves in unfor­get­table anec­dotes from his life. It’s a fit­ting final word from a bril­liant man, and one of the best books I’ve ever read. [Read his blog post on this book here.]

You can find Gate’s read­ing lists from pre­vi­ous sum­mers in the Relat­eds below.

via Gates Notes

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bill Gates Rec­om­mends Five Books for Sum­mer 2017

5 Books Bill Gates Wants You to Read This Sum­mer (2016)

Bill Gates, Book Crit­ic, Names His Top 5 Books of 2015

Sum­mer 2014

Sum­mer 2013

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Discover David Lynch’s Bizarre & Minimalist Comic Strip, The Angriest Dog in the World (1983–1992)

in Comics/Cartoons, Film | May 22nd, 2018

Most David Lynch fans dis­cov­er him through his films. But those of us who read alter­na­tive week­ly news­pa­pers in their 1980s and 90s hey­day may well have first encoun­tered his work in anoth­er medi­um entire­ly: the com­ic strip. Like many of the best-known exam­ples of the form, Lynch’s com­ic strip stars an ani­mal, specif­i­cal­ly a dog, but a dog “so angry he can­not move. He can­not eat. He can­not sleep. He can just bare­ly growl. Bound so tight­ly with ten­sion and anger, he approach­es the state of rig­or mor­tis.” That text, which pre­pared read­ers for a read­ing expe­ri­ence some way from Mar­maduke, intro­duced each and every edi­tion of The Angri­est Dog in the World, which ran between 1983 and 1992.

Dur­ing that entire time, the strip’s art­work nev­er changed either: four pan­els in which the tit­u­lar dog strains against a rope staked down in a sub­ur­ban back­yard, in the last of which night has fall­en. The sole vari­a­tion came in the word bub­bles that occa­sion­al­ly emerged from the win­dow of the house, pre­sum­ably rep­re­sent­ing the voice of the dog’s own­ers.

You can see a few exam­ples at Lynch­net and also on this blog. “If every­thing is real… then noth­ing is real as well,” it says one week. On anoth­er: “It must be clear to even the non-math­e­mati­cian that the things in this world just don’t add up to beans.” Or, in a nod to the region of The Angri­est Dog in the World’s home paper the LA Read­er: “Bill… who is this San Andreas? I can’t believe it’s all his fault.”

“At some point David Lynch called up the edi­tor at the time, James Vow­ell, and said, ‘Hi, I’d like to do a com­ic strip for you,’” says for­mer Read­er edi­tor Richard Gehr as quot­ed by John F. Kel­ly at Spooky Comics. Every week there­after, Lynch would phone the Read­er to dic­tate the text of the lat­est strip. “We would give it to some­body in the pro­duc­tion depart­ment and they would White Out the pan­els from the week before and write in a new, quote/unquote… gag.” The clip from The Incred­i­bly Strange Film Show’s 1990 episode on Lynch above shows the evo­lu­tion of the process: some­one, one of Lynch’s assis­tants or per­haps Lynch him­self, would reg­u­lar­ly slip under the Read­er’s office door an enve­lope con­tain­ing word bal­loons writ­ten and ready to paste into the strip. (Dan­ger­ous Minds finds an inter­view where Vow­ell describes anoth­er pro­duc­tion method alto­geth­er, involv­ing wax paper.)

Lynch came up with the words, but what about the images? “I assume he drew the first iter­a­tion,” says Gehr as quot­ed by Kel­ly. “I don’t even know if the sec­ond and third [pan­els] were hand drawn. Those could have been mimeo­graphed too or some­thing.” The style does bear a resem­blance to that of the town map Lynch drew to pitch Twin Peaks to ABC. The atten­tive fan can also find a host of oth­er con­nec­tions between The Angri­est Dog in the World and Lynch’s oth­er work. That fac­to­ry in the back­ground, for instance, looks like a place he’d pho­to­graph, or even a set­ting of Eraser­head, dur­ing whose frus­trat­ing years-long shoot he came up with the strip’s con­cept in the first place. “I had tremen­dous anger,” says Lynch in David Bre­skin’s book Inner Views. “And I think when I began med­i­tat­ing, one of the first things that left was a great chunk of that.” If only the Angri­est Dog in the World could have found it in him­self to do the same.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Lynch Draws a Map of Twin Peaks (to Help Pitch the Show to ABC)

The Paint­ings of Filmmaker/Visual Artist David Lynch

David Lynch’s Pho­tographs of Old Fac­to­ries

“The Art of David Lynch”— How Rene Magritte, Edward Hop­per & Fran­cis Bacon Influ­enced David Lynch’s Cin­e­mat­ic Vision

David Lynch’s New ‘Crazy Clown Time’ Video: Intense Psy­chot­ic Back­yard Crazi­ness (NSFW)

The Incred­i­bly Strange Film Show: Revis­it 1980s Doc­u­men­taries on David Lynch, John Waters, Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky & Oth­er Film­mak­ers

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Ups & Downs of Ancient Rome’s Economy–All 1,900 Years of It–Get Documented by Pollution Traces Found in Greenland’s Ice

in History, Science | May 22nd, 2018

When we see sto­ries pop up involv­ing sci­en­tif­ic find­ings in glac­i­er ice, we might brace for unpleas­ant envi­ron­men­tal news about the future. But a paper pub­lished just recent­ly in Pro­ceed­ings of the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences instead reveals fas­ci­nat­ing find­ings about the dis­tant past—the his­to­ry of ancient Rome between 1100 B.C.E. to 800 C.E. His­to­ri­ans know this 1,900-year peri­od through archae­o­log­i­cal and lit­er­ary evi­dence. Now cli­mate sci­en­tists have pro­vid­ed a trea­sury of new data to help sub­stan­ti­ate or revise schol­ar­ly under­stand­ings of Rome’s eco­nom­ic ris­es and falls, by mea­sur­ing the strat­i­fi­ca­tions of lead pol­lu­tion in a rough­ly 400-meter ice core from Green­land.

Why lead? “It’s a proxy for coin pro­duc­tion,” says Seth Bernard, pro­fes­sor of ancient his­to­ry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to. Roman cur­ren­cy, the denar­ius, was made from sil­ver, mined pri­mar­i­ly on the Iber­ian Penin­su­la. “But these mines didn’t exca­vate pure sil­ver,” notes Robin­son Mey­er at The Atlantic. “Instead, they unearthed an ore of sil­ver, lead, and cop­per that had to be smelt­ed into sil­ver. This process filled the air with lead pol­lu­tion,” which even­tu­al­ly made its way on air cur­rents to Green­land, where “storms deposit­ed lead-taint­ed snow or sleet over the Arc­tic island.” New lay­ers formed upon the old, each one pre­served for pos­ter­i­ty.

In the mid-1990s, sci­en­tists began drilling Greenland’s ice sheet in the North Green­land Ice core Project (NGRIP). At the time, a team attempt­ed a sim­i­lar analy­sis on the lead lev­els and their cor­re­spon­dence to ancient coinage, “which used a sim­i­lar but rudi­men­ta­ry tech­nique,” Mey­er writes. But this study only drew from 18 data points. By con­trast, the new research “made 25,000 dif­fer­ent mea­sure­ments of the ice core.” Improved tech­nol­o­gy has refined the mea­sure­ment process, allow­ing researchers to detect “the pres­ence of 35 dif­fer­ent ele­ments and chem­i­cals at once,” and to tie their obser­va­tions to spe­cif­ic years, or fair­ly close to it, any­way. The chart above shows the fluc­tu­a­tions in lead emis­sions over the almost 2000-year span.

One of the study’s authors, Joseph McConnell, esti­mates the mar­gin of error as with­in one or two years. “That’s pret­ty good,” he says, “a lot bet­ter than what archae­ol­o­gists are used to, I can tell you that.” This allows the team of cli­mate sci­en­tists, archae­ol­o­gists, and his­to­ri­ans to match their obser­va­tions about lead lev­els to known his­tor­i­cal events. As The New York Times reports, “lead emis­sions rose in peri­ods of peace and pros­per­i­ty, such as the Pax Romana, which ran from 27 BC to 180 A.D. and dropped dur­ing the civ­il wars that pre­ced­ed the Pax and the rise of the emper­or Augus­tus. There were also dra­mat­ic drops that coin­cid­ed with the Anto­nine plague of 165–180 A.D., thought to have been small pox, and the Cypri­an plague, cause uncer­tain, of 250–270 A.D.”

The data, notes The Econ­o­mist, “pro­vide a new win­dow onto the work­ings of the ancient econ­o­my…. Not all of the lead trapped in the glac­i­er comes from sil­ver mind­ing, but much of it does,” and sci­en­tists can make informed guess­es about just how much. Many unan­swered ques­tions remain. “What we’d love to have is a doc­u­ment that says Rome had a state mon­e­tary pol­i­cy,” says Bernard. The empire’s spe­cif­ic eco­nom­ic poli­cies are large­ly a mys­tery, but the ice core sam­ples pro­vide a wealth of new evi­dence for the increase and decrease in cur­ren­cy pro­duc­tion, and ever-more refined tech­nolo­gies will allow for even more data to emerge from the pol­lu­tants trapped in glacial ice in the near future.

via The Atlantic

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

How Did the Romans Make Con­crete That Lasts Longer Than Mod­ern Con­crete? The Mys­tery Final­ly Solved

The Rise & Fall of the Romans: Every Year Shown in a Time­lapse Map Ani­ma­tion (753 BC ‑1479 AD)

A Huge Scale Mod­el of Ancient Rome at Its Archi­tec­tur­al Peak, Orig­i­nal­ly Com­mis­sioned by Mus­soli­ni

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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It’s the End of the World as We Know It: The Apocalypse Gets Visualized in an Inventive Map from 1486

in History, Maps | May 21st, 2018

When will the world end?

We can find seri­ous sci­en­tif­ic answers to this ques­tion, depend­ing on what we mean by “world” and “end.” If civ­i­liza­tion as we cur­rent­ly know it, cli­mate sci­en­tists’ worst-case sce­nario points toward some­where around 2100 as the begin­ning of the end. (New York mag­a­zine points out that it “prob­a­bly won’t kill all of us”). It’s pos­si­ble, but not inevitable.

If we mean the end of all life on earth, the fore­cast looks quite a bit rosier: we’ve prob­a­bly got about a bil­lion years, writes astro­physi­cist Jil­lian Scud­der, before the sun becomes “hot enough to boil our oceans.” Still not a cheer­ful thought, but per­haps many more crea­tures will take after the tardi­grade by then. That’s not even to men­tion nuclear war or the epi­demics, zom­bie and oth­er­wise, that could take us out.

But of course, for a not incon­sid­er­able num­ber of people—including a few cur­rent­ly occu­py­ing key posi­tions of pow­er in the U.S.—the ques­tion of the world’s end has noth­ing to do with sci­ence at all but with escha­tol­ogy, that branch of the­o­log­i­cal thought con­cerned with the Apoc­a­lypse.

The­o­log­i­cal thinkers have writ­ten about the Apoc­a­lypse for hun­dreds of years, and the world’s end was fre­quent­ly per­ceived as just around the cor­ner for many of the same rea­sons mod­ern sec­u­lar peo­ple feel apoc­a­lyp­tic dread: dis­ease, nat­ur­al dis­as­ters, wars, rumors of wars, impe­r­i­al pow­er strug­gles, uncom­fort­ably shift­ing demo­graph­ics….

Take 15th-cen­tu­ry Europe, when “the Apoc­a­lypse weighed heav­i­ly on the minds of the peo­ple,” as Bet­sy Mason and Greg Miller write at the Nation­al Geo­graph­ic blog All Over the Map: “Plagues were ram­pant. The once-great cap­i­tal of the Roman empire, Con­stan­tino­ple, had fall­en to the Turks. Sure­ly, the end was nigh.”

While a niche pub­lish­ing mar­ket in the nascent print era pro­duced “dozens of print­ed works” describ­ing the “com­ing reck­on­ing in gory detail… one long-for­got­ten man­u­script depicts the Apoc­a­lypse in a very dif­fer­ent way—through maps.” As you can see here, these maps con­vey the unfold­ing of worse-to-wors­er sce­nar­ios in a num­ber of visu­al reg­is­ters: tem­po­ral, sym­bol­ic, geo­graph­ic, the­mat­ic, etc.

At the top, the nest­ed tri­an­gles depict the rise of the Antichrist between the years 1570 and 1600. The cen­tral con­cern for this author was the sup­posed glob­al threat of Islam. Thus, the next map, its “T” shape a com­mon Medieval world map device, shows the world before the Apoc­a­lypse, the text around it explain­ing that “Islam is on the rise from 639 to 1514.”

Then, we have a cir­cu­lar map with five swords point­ing at the edges of the known world, illus­trat­ing the author’s con­tention that Islam­ic armies would reach the edges of the earth. The oth­er maps depict the “four horns of the Antichrist,” above, Judge­ment Day, below, (the black eye at the bot­tom is the “black abyss that leads to hell”), and, fur­ther down, a dia­gram describ­ing “the rel­a­tive diam­e­ters of Earth and Hell.”

Made in Lübeck, Ger­many some­time between 1486 and 1488, the man­u­script is writ­ten in Latin, “but it’s not as schol­ar­ly as oth­er con­tem­po­rary man­u­scripts,” write Mason and Miller, “and the pen­man­ship is fair­ly poor.” His­to­ri­an of car­tog­ra­phy Chet Van Duzer explains that “it’s aimed at the cul­tur­al elite, but not the pin­na­cle of the cul­tur­al elite.”

Point­ing out the obvi­ous, Van Duzer says, “there’s no way to escape it, this work is very anti-Islam­ic,” a wide­spread sen­ti­ment in medieval Europe, when the “clash of civ­i­liza­tions” nar­ra­tive spread its roots deep in cer­tain strains of West­ern think­ing. This par­tic­u­lar text also “includes a sec­tion on astro­log­i­cal med­i­cine and a trea­tise on geog­ra­phy that’s remark­ably ahead of its time.”

Van Duzer and Ilya Dines have stud­ied the rare man­u­script for its insight­ful pas­sages on geog­ra­phy and car­tog­ra­phy and pub­lished their research in a book titled Apoc­a­lyp­tic Car­tog­ra­phy. For all its the­o­log­i­cal alarmism, the man­u­script is sur­pris­ing­ly thought­ful when it comes to ana­lyz­ing its own for­mal prop­er­ties and per­spec­tives.

Mason and Miller note that “the author out­lines an essen­tial­ly mod­ern under­stand­ing of the­mat­ic maps as a means to illus­trate char­ac­ter­is­tics of the peo­ple or polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion of dif­fer­ent regions.” As Van Duzer puts it, “this is one of the most amaz­ing pas­sages, to have some­one from the 15th cen­tu­ry telling you their ideas about what maps can do.” This marks the work, he claims in the intro­duc­tion to Apoc­a­lyp­tic Car­tog­ra­phy, as that “of one of the most orig­i­nal car­tog­ra­phers of the peri­od.”

The Apoc­a­lypse Map now resides at the Hunt­ing­ton Library in Los Ange­les.

via Nat Geo

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ancient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Baby­lon, Rome, and the Islam­ic World

In 1704, Isaac New­ton Pre­dicts the World Will End in 2060

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

 

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How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Writing System in the World: A Short, Charming Introduction

in Education, History, K-12, Language Lessons, Museums | May 21st, 2018

Teach­ing child vis­i­tors how to write their names using an unfa­mil­iar or antique alpha­bet is a favorite activ­i­ty of muse­um edu­ca­tors, but Dr. Irv­ing Finkel, a cuneiform expert who spe­cial­izes in ancient Mesopotami­an med­i­cine and mag­ic, has grander designs.

His employ­er, the British Muse­um, has over 130,000 tablets span­ning Mesopotamia’s Ear­ly Dynas­tic peri­od to the Neo-Baby­lon­ian Empire “just wait­ing for young schol­ars to come devote them­selves to (the) monk­ish work” of deci­pher­ing them.

Writ­ing one’s name might well prove to be a gate­way, and Dr. Finkel has a vest­ed inter­est in lin­ing up some new recruits.

The museum’s Depart­ment of the Mid­dle East has an open access pol­i­cy, with a study room where researchers can get up close and per­son­al with a vast col­lec­tion of cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia and sur­round­ing regions.

But let’s not put the ox before the cart.

As the extreme­ly per­son­able Dr. Finkel shows Matt Gray and Tom Scott of Matt and Tom’s Park Bench, above, cuneiform con­sists of three components—upright, hor­i­zon­tal and diagonal—made by press­ing the edge of a reed sty­lus, or pop­si­cle stick if you pre­fer, into a clay tablet.

The mechan­i­cal process seems fair­ly easy to get the hang of, but mas­ter­ing the old­est writ­ing sys­tem in the world will take you around six years of ded­i­cat­ed study. Like Japan’s kan­ji alpha­bet, the old­est writ­ing sys­tem in the world is syl­lab­ic. Prop­er­ly writ­ten out, these syl­la­bles join up into a flow­ing cal­lig­ra­phy that your aver­age, edu­cat­ed Baby­lon­ian would be able to read at a glance.

Even if you have no plans to rus­tle up a pop­si­cle stick and some Play-Doh, it’s worth stick­ing with the video to the end to hear Dr. Finkel tell how a chance encounter with some nat­u­ral­ly occur­ring cuneiform inspired him to write a hor­ror nov­el, which is now avail­able for pur­chase, fol­low­ing a suc­cess­ful Kick­starter cam­paign.

Begin your cuneiform stud­ies with Irv­ing Finkel’s Cuneiform: Ancient Scripts.

via Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

You Could Soon Be Able to Text with 2,000 Ancient Egypt­ian Hiero­glyphs

Hear The Epic of Gil­gamesh Read in its Orig­i­nal Ancient Lan­guage, Akka­di­an

Hear the “Seik­i­los Epi­taph,” the Old­est Com­plete Song in the World: An Inspir­ing Tune from 100 BC

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her solo show Nurse!, in which one of Shakespeare’s best loved female char­ac­ters hits the lec­ture cir­cuit to set the record straight pre­mieres in June at The Tank in New York City. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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