Download 91,000 Historic Maps from the Massive David Rumsey Map Collection

in History, Maps | May 28th, 2019

Three years ago, we highlighted one of the most comprehensive map collections in existence, the David Rumsey Map Collection, then newly moved to Stanford University. The Rumsey Collection, we wrote then, “contains a seemingly inexhaustible supply of cartographic images”—justifiable hyperbole, considering the amount of time it would take any one person to absorb the over 150,000 physical artifacts Rumsey has amassed in one place.

By 2016, Rumsey had made almost half the collection—over 67,000 images—freely available in a digital archive that has been growing since 1996. Each entry features high-resolution scans for specialists (you can download them for free) and more manageable image sizes for enthusiasts; a wealth of data about provenance and historical context; and digital, user-friendly tools that use crowd-sourcing to measure the accuracy of antiquated maps against GPS renderings.

A completist’s dream, the archive “includes rare 16th through 21st century maps of America, North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Pacific, Arctic, Antarctic, and the World.” Among the seemingly innumerable examples of cartographic ingenuity we find early data visualizations, utilitarian primers, photographic surveys, intricate topographies, abstract objets d’art, and historical cornerstones of European map-making like Abraham Ortellus’s 1570 map of “Flandria” at the top.

The Ortellus “Theatrum” holds “a unique position in the history of cartography,” notes the Rumsey Collection, as “’the world’s first regularly produced atlas.’” It was also the first example of a “Theatre of the World,” a style that would become ubiquitous in the following century, and it was “the first undertaking of its kind to reduce the best available maps to a uniform format.”

To make this document even more compelling, it contains its own bibliography. Ortellus “mentioned the names of the authors of the original maps” he drew from “and added a great many names of other cartographers and geographers.” Not all of the 91,000 and counting maps in the Rumsey digital collection combine this degree of stylistic mastery, historical import, and scholarly rigor. But a survey of the Collection’s categories will produce few that disappoint in any one of these areas.

The “important and rare” 1806 map of the U.S. and West Indies by Charles Piquet; the Tolkien-like Vergleichendes Tableau der bedeutendsten Hoehen der Erde, from 1855, a “decorative chart… showing comparative tables of the greatest mountains and volcanoes of the world”; the almost-expressionist map of Cheltenham from 1899 by the Geological Survey of Great Britain and Ireland; the fancifully-illustrated star-shaped star chart made by Ignace Gaston Pardies in 1693; Mike Cressy’s 1988 “Literary Map of Latin America”…..

This briefest overview of the Collection’s highlights already feels exhaustive. No matter your level of interest in maps, from the casual to the lifelong obsessive, The David Rumsey collection will deliver multiple points of entry to maps you never knew existed, and with them, new ways of seeing cities, regions, nations, territories, continents, planets, and beyond. Enter the collection here.

The History of Cartography, “the Most Ambitious Overview of Map Making Ever Undertaken,” Is Free Online

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

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Andy Warhol Demystified: Four Videos Explain His Groundbreaking Art and Its Cultural Impact

in Art, History | May 28th, 2019

We all have a few images to associate with Andy Warhol — Campbell’s soup cans, colorized Marilyns and duplicated Elvises, that wig — and also a few words, usually something to the effect of everyone in the future being famous for fifteen minutes. Now that we seem nearly to have arrived in that future, we might well wonder what else Warhol understood about our world. But we can’t know that until we have a clearer sense of just what he was up to, and these four short primers offer a solid start on grasping the whole Warholian project. Just above, Alain de Botton’s School of Life introduces Warhol as “the most glamorous figure of 20th century art” whose great achievement was to “develop a generous and helpful view of two major forces in modern society: commerce and celebrity.”

“We spend too much of our life wanting something better and extraordinary,” says de Botton. “Andy Warhol aims to remedy this by getting us to look again at things in everyday life” — the soup cans stacked up at the grocery store, for instance. Warhol’s work also reveals an understanding of glamor and prestige, ever more powerful forces in the 20th century in which he lived as well as ones that, in his view, “needed to be redistributed in such a way that society could work better.”

His dual interests in art and changing the world in an unprecedentedly industrial age led him to mass production: “He wanted to translate the things he cared about, like sensitivity, a love of glamor and spectacle, and playfulness into objects and experiences that could touch many people” — as many people and as often, ideally, as Coca-Cola.

But does what Warhol did quite count as art? Khan Academy founder Sal Khan and its Co-Dean of Art and History Steven Zucker get into that question in their Smarthistory video on the silkscreened soup cans from the early 1960s. On one hand, the cans exemplify what Zucker calls “one of the central ideas of modern art,” that you can “take something that’s not necessarily based in technical skill” and relocate it so as to make us “think about it in a different way.” But on the other, Khan says, if Warhol had made them half a century earlier, “people would have thought, ‘This guy’s a quack,’ ” and if he did it now, “they would think he was just derivative.” Was it really “just that time where people happened to think this was art?”

Certainly there can be no separating Warhol from his time. He asked, as Zucker puts it, “What is it about our culture that is really authentic and important?” The answer, as he saw it, “was about mass production, it was about factory.” No coincidence, then, that he named his New York studio “The Factory,” nor that he displayed a great fascination with industry and commerce in all its forms. He started his career as a commercial illustrator, but ultimately, “instead of making art for advertisements, he started making advertisements as art.” Those words come from the Art Assignment video above, which makes “the case for Andy Warhol,” whose work, says host Sarah Urist Green, “charts the development of our obsession with fame and questions the growing commercialization and uniformity of most areas of American life.”

Warhol wasn’t just an artist, Green says, “but also a filmmaker, band manager, magazine publisher, and TV producer who fearlessly explored and embraced new media.” Writing a diet book was perhaps the only way Warhol didn’t tap into the American zeitgeist, but perhaps, as demonstrated in the longer Art Assignment video called “Eat Like Andy Warhol” above, that task is best left to his scholars. In it Green and company work through “a tasting menu that explores Warhol’s life through the food he depicted as well as the food he actually ate.” It includes not just Campbell’s soup and Coca-Cola but frozen hot chocolate, a banana (remember, he gave Velvet Underground their start), diet pills (now known as amphetamines), and perhaps most Warholian of all, something listed only as “cake.” It’s a diet fit for what Green describes as “the ultimate producer and consumer and product all in one” — as well as an artist who both defined and embodied 20th-century America.

When Steve Jobs Taught Andy Warhol to Make Art on the Very First Macintosh (1984)

Andy Warhol Digitally Paints Debbie Harry with the Amiga 1000 Computer (1985)

Warhol’s Cinema: A Mirror for the Sixties (1989)

When Andy Warhol Made a Batman Superhero Movie (1964)

Andy Warhol’s 15 Minutes: Discover the Postmodern MTV Variety Show That Made Warhol a Star in the Television Age (1985–87)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

New Web Project Immortalizes the Overlooked Women Who Helped Create Rock and Roll in the 1950s

in History, Music | May 23rd, 2019

“For sixty years, conventional wisdom has told us that women generally did not perform rock and roll during the 1950s,” writes Leah Branstetter, Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Case Western Reserve University. Like so many cultural forms into which we are initiated, through education, personal interest, and general osmosis, this popular form of Western music—now a genre with seventy years under its belt—has functioned as an almost ideal example of the great man theory of history.

It can seem like settled fact that Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and their celebrated male contemporaries invented the music; and that women played passive roles as fans, studio audience members, groupies, personifications of cars and guitars.…

The recognition of rare exceptions, like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, does not challenge the rule. But Branstetter’s Women in Rock and Roll’s First Wave project almost single-handedly does.

The reality is, however, that hundreds—or maybe thousands—of women and girls performed and recorded rock and roll in its early years. And many more participated in other ways: writing songs, owning or working for record labels, working as session or touring musicians,designing stage wear, dancing, or managing talent…. [W]omen’s careers didn’t always resemble those of their more famous male counterparts. Some female performers were well known and performed nationally as stars, while others had more influence regionally or only in one tiny club. Some made the pop charts, but even more had impact through live performance. Some women exhibited the kind of wild onstage behavior that had come to be expected from figures Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard—but that wasn’t the only way to be rebellious, and others found their own methods of being revolutionary.

Branstetter’s project, a digital dissertation, covers dozens of musicians from the period, just a fraction of the names she has uncovered in her research. Some of the women profiled were never particularly well-known. Many more were accomplished stars before the 60’s girl group phenomenon, and continued performing into the 21st century.

Meet rockers like Sparkle Moore (see up top), born in Omaha, Nebraska and inspired by Bill Haley in the mid-fifties to play rockabilly in her hometown. She went on to tour the country, putting out record after record. “By 1957,” writes Branstetter, “she had about forty songwriting credits to her name.” Teen magazine Dig wrote that Moore had “an amazing resemblance to the late James Dean… Presley’s style and Dean’s looks.” She is still a “favorite with rockabilly fans,” notes her biography. Moore “has been inducted into the Iowa Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and also made a new album in 2010 entitled Spark-a-Billy.”

Meet Lillie Bryant, one half of duo Billie & Lillie, whose breezier R&B sounds and more wholesome image resonated with early rock and roll fans, promoters, and stars. Bryant began performing in New York City clubs as a teenager. Then producers Bob Crewe and Frank Slay turned her and singer Billie Ford into a duo who went on to star in legendary DJ Alan Freed’s stage shows, “including a six-week tour with Chuck Berry and Frankie Lymon” and an appearance on American Bandstand. Bryant still performs in her hometown of Newburgh, New York.

Meet The Chantels. “Formed in the Bronx, New York in the early 1950s,” they were “among the first African-American female vocal groups to gain national attention.” They also toured with Alan Freed and appeared on American Bandstand and The Dick Clark Show. In 1961, their hit “Look in My Eyes” went to number 14 on the pop charts and 6 on the R&B charts. (Thirty years later, it appeared on the Goodfellas soundtrack.)

Most people who grew up on the music of the 50s and 60s have likely heard of many of these women rockers, or have at least heard their music if they didn’t know the names and faces. But Branstetter’s project does more than tell the stories of individuals—in biographies, interviews (with, for one, Jerry Lee Lewis’s sister, singer and piano player Linda Gail Lewis), blog posts, playlists (hear one below), song analyses, and essays.

She also substantiates her larger claim that women’s “contributions shaped the culture and sound of rock and roll,” in numerous well-documented ways. This despite the fact that women in early rock were told versions of the same thing Joan Jett heard 20 years later—“girls don’t play rock and roll.” They sometimes heard it from other women in the music business. Pop singer Connie Frances, for example, offered her opinion in a 1958 issue of Billboard: “A girl can’t sing rock and roll. It’s basically too savage for a girl singer to handle.”

Attitudes like these persisted so long, and became so unconscious, that one of the largest guitar makers in the world, Fender, and several other musical instrument makers, may have lost millions in sales before they finally realized that women make up half of new guitar players. Women in Rock and Roll’s First Wave will inspire and enlighten many of those young musicians who didn’t grow up knowing anything about Sparkle Moore or The Chantels, but should have. Unless rock historians willingly ignore the work of scholars like Branstetter, subsequent accounts should reflect a more expansive, inclusive, view of the territory. Start here.

via WFMU

How Joan Jett Started the Runaways at 15 and Faced Down Every Barrier for Women in Rock and Roll

33 Songs That Document the History of Feminist Punk (1975–2015): A Playlist Curated by Pitchfork

Chrissie Hynde’s 10 Pieces of Advice for “Chick Rockers” (1994)

Four Female Punk Bands That Changed Women’s Role in Rock

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 18 ) |

The Creative Life of Jim Henson Explored in a Six-Part Documentary Series

in History, Television | May 23rd, 2019

What is a Muppet? Homer Simpson once offered this explanation: “It’s not quite a mop and it’s not quite a puppet, but man…” — before cracking up with amusement. “So to answer your question, I don’t know.” That episode of The Simpsons aired in the mid-1990s, a somewhat fallow period for Jim Henson’s puppet-like (though less so mop-like) creations, but the decades between now and then have shown them to be at least as culturally influential as Matt Groening’s family of Springfieldians. What gives the Muppets, who made their television debut in 1955 and have now survived their creator by nearly thirty years, their power to endure?

Insight into that question is on offer right now in a new six-part documentary series on Jim Henson’s life and work. It comes as a part of Defunctland, “a YouTube series discussing the history of extinct theme parks and themed entertainment experiences” that has recently expanded its cultural purview.

The first episode of Defunctland’s Jim Henson explores “the history of Jim’s beginnings and his first television show, Sam and Friends”; the second “the origins of Sesame Street, the Muppetland specials, and the failed Muppet pilots”; and the third the proper beginnings of The Muppet Show, whose creators didn’t know they were “about to make the most popular show in the world.” After you’ve caught up with the first three episodes of Jim Henson, the next three episodes will appear on the series’ Youtube playlist.

As you’ll know if you’ve seen the surreal early films, experimental animations, and violent coffee commercials made by Jim Henson previously featured here on Open Culture, the man behind the Muppets hardly sought to produce entertainment for children alone: one of the pilots of The Muppet Show, in fact, was titled “Sex and Violence.” Defunctland’s documentary series gets into that and all the other aspects of Henson’s life and work, two concepts hardly separable for such a famously dedicated creator. There’s much more to Henson’s legacy than a childhood full of Sesame Street — now in its 50th year on the air — would suggest. As for how rigorous a definition of “Muppet” the series will leave us with, we’ll have to wait until it concludes to find out.

Jim Henson’s Violent Wilkins Coffee Commercials (1957–1961)

A Young Jim Henson Teaches You How to Make Puppets with Socks, Tennis Balls & Other Household Goods (1969)

Watch Twin Beaks, Sesame Street’s Parody of David Lynch’s Iconic TV Show (1990)

Watch The Surreal 1960s Films and Commercials of Jim Henson

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Strikingly Beautiful Maps & Charts That Fired the Imagination of Students in the 1880s

in Education, History, Maps | May 22nd, 2019

We all remember the world maps that hung on the walls of our classrooms, the ones at which we spent countless hours staring when we couldn’t focus on the lesson at hand. Did we look at them and imagine fleeing school for one of the far-off lands they pictured — or indeed finding a way to escape planet Earth itself? Such time-passing fantasies unite schoolchildren of all eras, though some eras have provided their schoolchildren richer material to fire up their imaginations than others.

Take, for instance, the rich, vivid maps of Yaggy’s Geographical Study, which depict not just the world but the cosmos, and which were first produced for classrooms in 1887. The eponymous Levi Walter Yaggy, says Boston Rare Maps, “seems to have viewed himself as an innovator and entrepreneur tapping into a transformational moment in American education.”

An advertisement for Yaggy’s Chicago-based Western Publishing House lays out the company’s mission: “Instead of offering the public old things ‘made over,’ it has come to the help of teachers and schools with a series of appliances which in design, mechanism and manner of illustration, are new, elegant and practical.”

It also points to “the enthusiasm which has been aroused in educational circles by this new departure” as “proof of the fact that teachers are tired of stereotyped and worn-out means of school-room illustration.”

One can well imagine the enthusiasm aroused among schoolchildren of the late 19th century when the teacher brought out Yaggy’s Geographical Study, a plywood box filled with colorful, large-format maps measuring roughly two by three feet that revealed a wealth of knowledge about the Earth and outer space.

The David Rumsey Map Collection has digitized and made available to download everything that came inside, including the cross-section of the geological strata of “pre-Adamite Earth”; the illustration of the civilizations of five climatic zones “Showing in a Graphic Manner the Climates, Peoples, Industries & Productions of The Earth”; the 3D relief map of the United States built into the back of the box; and the jewel in the crown of Yaggy’s Geographical Study, the star chart.

The star chart, as National Geographic’s Greg Miller describes it, “has five panels held in place by tiny metal latches. Each panel can be opened to reveal a more detailed diagram. One shows the phases of the moon, for example, while another includes a slider to illustrate how the position of the sun changes relative to Earth with the seasons,” the whole thing “designed to highlight certain features when a bright light is placed behind it.”

Despite displaying here and there what we now regard as scientific inaccuracies (Miller points to how the elliptical orbit of planets are shown as circles) and unfashionable social attitudes, Yaggy’s Geographical Study also embodies the spirit of its time in a way that still fires up the imagination. The golden age of exploration had already entered its final chapter and space travel remained the stuff of science fiction (a genre that had only recently taken the form in which we know it today), but with maps like these on the wall, no daydreaming student of the 1880s could doubt that reality still offered much to discover.

via Flashbak

A Planetary Perspective: Trillions of Pictures of the Earth Available Through Google Earth Engine

3D Map of Universe Captures 43,000 Galaxies

A Massive, Knitted Tapestry of the Galaxy: Software Engineer Hacks a Knitting Machine & Creates a Star Map Featuring 88 Constellations

How Leonardo da Vinci Drew an Accurate Satellite Map of an Italian City (1502)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Bauhaus Bookshelf: Download Original Bauhaus Books, Journals, Manifestos & Ads That Still Inspire Designers Worldwide

in Art, Design, History | May 21st, 2019

The Bauhaus, Barry Bergdoll writes in the New York Times of the German design school founded a century ago last month, “lasted just 14 years before the Nazis shut it down. And yet in that time it proved a magnet for much that was new and experimental in art, design and architecture — and for decades after, its legacy played an outsize role in changing the physical appearance of the daily world, in everything from book design to household lighting to lightweight furniture.” Celebrations of the Bauhaus’ centenary have taken many forms, including the documentary series Bauhaus World, the reimagining of modern corporate logos in the classic Bauhaus style, and now the free online resource Bauhaus Bookshelf.

Bauhaus Bookshelf creator Andrea Riegel calls the site “my modest contribution to #bauhaus100 and beyond: (almost) all Bauhaus books and journals in a virtual bookcase — with the possibility to download and take a closer look at the media and original sources, supplemented by short excerpts and contributions by Bauhaus people and contemporary witnesses or other content in context.”

In other worlds, you’ll find there not just the original Bauhaus manifesto, but sections on the series of “Bauhaus books” published by Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy; Bauhaus-associated creators and teachers like Paul Klee; Bauhaus advertising; the women of the Bauhaus (a subject previously featured here on Open Culture); and materials from the 1938 exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art that introduced the Bauhaus to the world.

And 100 years after its founding, the world is still thinking about the Bauhaus, which, in Bergdoll’s words, “produced one of the most powerful expressions of a view that design was everything. It served, in a way, as the embassy of modernist design. But its success has often led to a reductionism in our understanding of the rich nexus of artistic movements that crisscrossed at the school itself, as well as the diverse developments it helped inspire.” For a better understanding of the Bauhaus, perhaps we must go back to the Bauhaus itself, not just in the sense of looking at the art, craft, design, and buildings its teachers and students produced, but the documents it issued on its mission and ideals. Whether in its English or German versions, Riegel’s Bauhaus Bookshelf serves as an intellectually and aesthetically stimulating place to find them.

32,000+ Bauhaus Art Objects Made Available Online by Harvard Museum Website

How the Radical Buildings of the Bauhaus Revolutionized Architecture: A Short Introduction

Watch Bauhaus World, a Free Documentary That Celebrates the 100th Anniversary of Germany’s Legendary Art, Architecture & Design School

Modern Corporate Logos Reimagined in a Classic Bauhaus Style: Celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Bauhaus Movement Today

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

A New Archive Transcribes and Puts Online the Diaries & Notebooks of Women Artists, Art Historians, Critics and Dealers

in Art, History, Life, Museums | May 17th, 2019

While one is still comparatively young, one has many more thoughts & certainly sentiments than one is able to make use of. It seems as if these might be stored up so that in old age or when one became less prolific one could find matter to use. Every thought or suggestion could be of use.

- Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, sculptor, collector, founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1906

There are very few moral defenses for rummaging inside another’s private diary or sketchbook, until that person shuffles off this mortal coil … and even then snoopers may get burned by what they read.

Or not.

Boredom is another strong possibility.

Best to stick with figures of historical import.

With all due respect to Frida Kahlo, I prefer those whom history hasn’t turned into mega-celebs.

It’s fun to discover a fascinating person via her own words and doodles, rather than seek them out as a bedazzled fan girl.

The Women’s History Project at the Archives of American Art is scanning a trove of handwritten papers as part of a year long mission to preserve and pass along the creative processes and daily doings of various women artists, art historians, critics, dealers, and gallery owners. Fascinating reading awaits those who can get past the enigmatic antique scrawl. More on that below.

A sample:

Portraitist Cecilia Beaux’s letters to her friend, frequent sitter, and possible lover, actress Dorothea Gilder. (See Beaux’s painting of “Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and daughter Ethel” from 1902 up top.)

The notebook of sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd, stuffed with quotes, poems, research, definitions, and autobiographical musings, dated the same year that she founded the American Red Cross Studio for Portrait Masks for severely disfigured WW1 vets.

The above mentioned Whitney’s 1914 travel diary, when she made several trips to France in the name of establishing and supporting a hospital in north-central France.

Ready to explore?

You can do more than that.

The project is a part of the Smithsonian Transcription Center, which depends upon the public to take a crack at deciphering the obscure cursive of these handwritten pages, strike-throughs, marginalia, and all. You can try your hand at a single sentence or tackle an entire collection or diary. No worries if you have no transcription experience. The Center has easy to follow instructions here.

Your efforts will make the digitized documents keyword searchable, while preserving the original creators’ memories for future generations. New content will be added monthly through March 2020.

Begin your explorations of the Women’s History Project at the Archives of American Art here.

via Hyperallergic

The Daily Rituals of 143 Famous Female Creators: Octavia Butler, Edith Wharton, Coco Chanel & More

“The Artist Project” Reveals What 127 Influential Artists See When They Look at Art: An Acclaimed Video Series from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her in New York City this June for the next installment of her book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

What Did Etruscan Sound Like? An Animated Video Pronounces the Ancient Language That We Still Don’t Fully Understand

in History | May 17th, 2019

Readers of Open Culture no doubt have more pronounced polyglot tendencies than average web-surfers, and perhaps even toward relatively unlikely languages, but let us ask this: how many Etruscan speakers do you know? You’ve probably heard that name, which refers to the civilization that existed in ancient Italy between roughly the eleventh and third century BC and in roughly the era of modern-day Tuscany. The Etruscans had their own language, but it didn’t survive their civilization’s assimilation into the Roman Republic in complete enough shape for us to understand it today. But even if we can’t understand texts composed in Etruscan, we’ve at least determined what spoken Etruscan sounded like.

The animated NativLang video above tells the story of the Etruscan language’s rediscovery, from its appearance on the linen wrappings of a mummy in a sarcophagus purchased by a European in the mid-1800s; to the determination that many of the letters European languages use descended from it (first passed down from the Phoenicians and then to the Greeks); to the frustrated search for an “Etruscan Rosetta Stone.”

It also breaks down several Etruscan words : creice, meaning “Greece”; ruma, meaning “Rome”; and phersu, meaning “mask,” but which “lives on right at the heart of our English vocabulary as person.” Along the way, the video’s narrator provides examples of quite a few Etruscan sounds and how we now know they were pronounced.

Linguists have figured all this out with a relative paucity of sources, making each and every artifact inscribed with Etruscan writing invaluable to their quest for full comprehension: the Cippus Perusinus, for example, a legal contract literally etched in stone, or the aforementioned mummy wrappings, the meaning of which remains obscure. “We don’t know how this text got to Egypt. But thanks to all this work, we can tell it’s a kind of ritual calendar, and sometimes we can follow whole threads of text.” The narrator pronounces a few of them, and “it’s almost like, if you close your eyes, I could take you right back to the days of fluent Etruscan. But ask how to say a simple yes or no, and we’re lost again.”

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

Learn Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, Classical Greek & Other Ancient Languages in 10 Lessons

What Ancient Latin Sounded Like, And How We Know It

Hear What Homer’s Odyssey Sounded Like When Sung in the Original Ancient Greek

The Evolution of the Alphabet: A Colorful Flowchart, Covering 3,800 Years, Takes You From Ancient Egypt to Today

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Download 91,000 Historic Maps from the Massive David Rumsey Map Collection

Andy Warhol Demystified: Four Videos Explain His Groundbreaking Art and Its Cultural Impact

New Web Project Immortalizes the Overlooked Women Who Helped Create Rock and Roll in the 1950s

The Creative Life of Jim Henson Explored in a Six-Part Documentary Series

The Strikingly Beautiful Maps & Charts That Fired the Imagination of Students in the 1880s

The Bauhaus Bookshelf: Download Original Bauhaus Books, Journals, Manifestos & Ads That Still Inspire Designers Worldwide

A New Archive Transcribes and Puts Online the Diaries & Notebooks of Women Artists, Art Historians, Critics and Dealers

What Did Etruscan Sound Like? An Animated Video Pronounces the Ancient Language That We Still Don’t Fully Understand

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