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Category Archives: Manuscripts

The Vinland Map is Fake

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From YaleNews (hat tip: Dan Franke): 

The Vinland Map, once hailed as the earliest depiction of the New World, is awash in 20th-century ink. A team of conservators and conservation scientists at Yale has found compelling new evidence for this conclusion through the most thorough analysis yet performed on the infamous parchment map.

Acquired by Yale in the mid-1960s, the purported 15th-century map depicts a pre-Columbian “Vinlanda Insula,” a section of North America’s coastline southwest of Greenland. While earlier studies had detected evidence of modern inks at various points on the map, the new Yale analysis examined the entire document’s elemental composition using state-of-the-art tools and techniques that were previously unavailable.

The analysis revealed that a titanium compound used in inks first produced in the 1920s pervades the map’s lines and text.

“The Vinland Map is a fake,” said Raymond Clemens, curator of early books and manuscripts at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, which houses the map. “There is no reasonable doubt here. This new analysis should put the matter to rest.”

The new study also uncovered evidence that the map deception was intentional. A Latin inscription on its back, possibly a bookbinder’s note guiding the assembly of the Speculum Historiale — an authentic medieval volume and the likely source of the map’s calfskin parchment — is overwritten with modern ink to appear like instructions for binding the map within the genuine 15th-century manuscript.

“The altered inscription certainly seems like an attempt to make people believe the map was created at the same time as the Speculum Historiale,” Clemens said. “It’s powerful evidence that this is a forgery, not an innocent creation by a third party that was co-opted by someone else, although it doesn’t tell us who perpetrated the deception.”

Yale created a sensation in 1965 when it announced the Vinland Map’s existence and published a scholarly book about it by Yale librarians and curators at the British Museum in London. Its discovery seemed to demonstrate that Norsemen were the first Europeans to reach the New World, landing in the Americas well before Columbus’ first voyage. (Archeological discoveries at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland during the 1960s confirmed that the Vikings had built settlements in the Americas long before Columbus sailed.)

From the beginning, however, scholars began to question the map’s authenticity. And over time an overwhelming consensus has emerged that it is indeed a 20th-century forgery.

More at the link.

Maps and Flags

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As I was writing earlier about the Cassville Affair, I knew that what I really needed was a Civil-War-era map of this area. Well, thanks to a visit to the Kennesaw Mountain National Park, where I went hiking yesterday, I have found one! On display in the museum there is a copy of a map of north Georgia by “William E. Merrill, Captain, U.S. Army, 1864” – i.e. an essential piece of intelligence used by Sherman when he came through on the Atlanta Campaign. Park Ranger Jacob Boling informed me that, as a Library of Congress document, one can view it online, and the images below are screen shotted from this. 

So here is the triangle of Kingston, Adairsville, and Cassville, the former two connected by the Western & Atlantic railroad, the latter two by a road indicated by a line and a series of dots (there is no legend to indicate what this might mean, although I assume that line-and-dot roads were more developed than mere line roads). 

You will notice two roads leading away from Cassville to the east, with the southern one splitting just above the second S in Cassville. The northern branch, on the larger map, ends up at Pine Log, so I reckon that that is now the Cass-Pine Log Road. The southern branch, I assume, is what Albert Castel called the Canton Road, and the larger map suggests that it may have linked up with what is now Stamp Creek Road in order to get to Canton. The road that extends north-northeast from Cassville I could imagine as the (then) Spring Place Road, because it does eventually get to Spring Place on the larger map.

But note what appears on the road on the way to Adairsville, right underneath the word “Plateau” – another road heading north-northeast, and ending at what is clearly Moesteller’s Mills. So there were two possible roads on which Hood’s troops could have been stationed, waiting to ambush whatever troops came down the Adairsville-Cassville road. 

What actually happened remains a mystery, but it’s useful to have a better sense of the contemporary geography.  

A little to the east, we find notice of Rowland Springs, “most exclusive resort in Georgia,” connected to what is now Stamp Creek Road. Notice the little building on Stamp Creek itself – does this represent one of the furnaces?

A glimpse of the area to the east of Cartersville before the creation of Lake Allatoona. I assume that “Etowah” on the map is only a railway depot, the actual town of Etowah being further up the river, around “Etowah Iron Works.” You can see the railroad spur connecting the Etowah Iron Works with the W&A, which was worked by the Yonah of Great Locomotive Chase fame. I’m not sure what the separate Allatoona Iron Works are, but I guess they are now submerged in the lake? I’m curious to know what “Laffing Gall” was.

Further up the Etowah River we find Canton, the seat of Cherokee County. One road leads to Battle Ground (i.e. Ball Ground), another leads to the “Shoal Creek Post Office,” presumably an early reference to Waleska, which is just south of the intersection of Shoal Creek and what is now GA-140. Note also Buffington, one of the collection points for Cherokee Removal.

Of course, one wonders how accurately this map represents this area as it was in the 1860s.* It was “compiled from the Cherokee land maps, from surveys of the Topl. Engrs., and from the state map of Georgia,” but it would have been very difficult for the Union cartographers to check anything before publication. It has certainly changed since then – unlike in Ohio (or Ontario), Georgia’s roads were not constructed on a grid, but were much more ad hoc in their arrangement, and as new roads were created, old ones disappeared. This process continues to be true to this day. 

* UPDATE: Sure enough, other maps of Georgia from the same era in the Library of Congress collection don’t quite agree with Captain Merrill’s map, nor with each other. Dang.

Henry Schenck Tanner’s 1853 map of Georgia and Alabama has Kingston too far to the north, and Adairsville in Gordon County!

Krebs and Lindenkohl’s 1864 map of Northern Alabama and Georgia features a different set of roads radiating from Cassville.

*********

Also in the museum: flags! As you enter, two variants of the flags of the combatants in the Civil War: one USA flag with gold stars, and a CSA flag with a “couped” and unfimbriated saltire. 

I liked this flag with its Laconic phrase. 

This one is the flag of the Cobb Mountaineers, a version of the Stars and Bars with an unusual arrangement and number of stars. 

Lost Languages

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From Smithsonian Magazine (hat tip: Kristin Burkholder):

Lost Languages Discovered in One of the World’s Oldest Continuously Run Libraries

Brigit Katz

Saint Catherine’s Monastery, a sacred Christian site nestled in the shadow of Mount Sinai, is home to one of the world’s oldest continuously used libraries. Thousands of manuscripts and books are kept there—some of which contain hidden treasures.

Now, as Jeff Farrell reports for the Independent, a team of researchers is using new technology to uncover texts that were erased and written over by the monks who lived and worked at the monastery. Many of these original texts were written in languages well known to researchers—Latin, Greek, Arabic—but others were inscribed in long-lost languages that are rarely seen in the historical record….

Perhaps the most intriguing finds are the manuscripts written in obscure languages that fell out of use many centuries ago. Two of the erased texts, for instance, were inked in Caucasian Albanian, a language spoken by Christians in what is now Azerbaijan. According to Sarah Laskow of Atlas Obscura, Caucasian Albanian only exists today in a few stone inscriptions. Michael Phelps, director of the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library, tells Gray of the Atlantic that the discovery of Caucasian Albanian writings at Saint Catherine’s library has helped scholars increase their knowledge of the language’s vocabulary, giving them words for things like “net” and “fish.”

Other hidden texts were written in a defunct dialect known as Christian Palestinian Aramaic, a mix of Syriac and Greek, which was discontinued in the 13th century only to be rediscovered by scholars in the 18th century. “This was an entire community of people who had a literature, art, and spirituality,” Phelps tells Gray. “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.”

More at the link. 

Tulsa Mass Graves

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From PJMedia, a story about an obscure event that doesn’t deserve to be:

Possible Mass Graves Discovered From 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Massacre

It was the worst spasm of racial violence in the history of the United States. And it has been largely ignored in history.

The Greenwood district in Tulsa was the richest black neighborhood in the country, known at the time as “The Black Wall Street.” In 1921, a riot began over the Memorial Day weekend when a young black man was accused of assaulting a 17-year-old white girl. Angry whites gathered at the jail while some black men, hearing rumors of a lynching, also headed to the jail. At that point, history and myth merge and what happened to set off the crowd is unknown.

At one point, planes were employed to strafe the crowds of black women and children fleeing for their lives. Property damage was immense. More than 10,000 blacks were left homeless and an unknown number had been killed. Official statistics put the number of dead at 36 with about 800 seriously injured. Some believe the actual number of dead is in the hundreds.

The state established a commission in 1996 to investigate exactly what happened. At that time, the commission found evidence of three possible mass grave sites, but the evidence had been inconclusive.

A more recent survey using far more sophisticated technology may have given state authorities enough evidence to begin an archaeological dig at some of the sites.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: from Smithsonian Magazine (hat tip: Dan Franke):

A Long-Lost Manuscript Contains a Searing Eyewitness Account of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921

An Oklahoma lawyer details the attack by hundreds of whites on the thriving black neighborhood where hundreds died 95 years ago

The ten-page manuscript is typewritten, on yellowed legal paper, and folded in thirds. But the words, an eyewitness account of the May 31, 1921, racial massacre that destroyed what was known as Tulsa, Oklahoma’s “Black Wall Street,” are searing.

“I could see planes circling in mid-air. They grew in number and hummed, darted and dipped low. I could hear something like hail falling upon the top of my office building. Down East Archer, I saw the old Mid-Way hotel on fire, burning from its top, and then another and another and another building began to burn from their top,” wrote Buck Colbert Franklin (1879-1960). 

The Oklahoma lawyer, father of famed African-American historian John Hope Franklin (1915-2009), was describing the attack by hundreds of whites on the thriving black neighborhood known as Greenwood in the booming oil town. “Lurid flames roared and belched and licked their forked tongues into the air. Smoke ascended the sky in thick, black volumes and amid it all, the planes—now a dozen or more in number—still hummed and darted here and there with the agility of natural birds of the air.”

Franklin writes that he left his law office, locked the door, and descended to the foot of the steps.

“The side-walks were literally covered with burning turpentine balls. I knew all too well where they came from, and I knew all too well why every burning building first caught from the top,” he continues. “I paused and waited for an opportune time to escape. ‘Where oh where is our splendid fire department with its half dozen stations?’ I asked myself. ‘Is the city in conspiracy with the mob?’”

Franklin’s harrowing manuscript now resides among the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. The previously unknown document was found last year, purchased from a private seller by a group of Tulsans and donated to the museum with the support of the Franklin family.

More at the link. 

Avicenna in Ireland

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From Atlas Obscura:

Found: A Medical Manual Linking Medieval Ireland to the Islamic World

Knowledge transcends borders.

AN EXCITING LINK BETWEEN MEDIEVAL Ireland and the Islamic world has been discovered on two sheets of calfskin vellum lodged into the binding of a book from the 1500s. The sheets hold a rare 15th-century Irish translation of an 11th-century Persian medical encyclopedia. For 500 years, they sat in a family home in Cornwall with no one the wiser to their origins.

“I suppose [the owners] just took a notion to photograph it with their phone and they sent the photograph to one of the universities in England, who sent it to another university, and eventually it got to me,” says Pádraig Ó Macháin, who has spent his life with medieval Gaelic manuscripts and leads the modern Irish department at University College Cork. For him, identifying it as a medieval Irish medical text was a cinch, but he needed a little help to determine its source.

Ó Macháin, founder of Irish Script on Screen, Ireland’s first deep digitization project, where the manuscript and many more old Irish texts can be seen, shared the fragment with Aoibheann Nic Dhonnchadha, a specialist in Irish medical texts at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. She identified it as a passage from the first book of the seminal five-volume The Canon of Medicine.Written by 11th-century Persian physician and polymath Ibn Sina, also known as Avicenna, the work is considered the foundational textbook of early modern medicine. While many references to Ibn Sina and his work pop up in old Irish medical texts, this is the only known evidence of a full translation of his encyclopedia. He originally wrote in Arabic, and the Irish rendition is likely translated from a 13th-century Latin version by the prolific Gerard of Cremona. “This is one of the most influential medical books ever written,” says Nic Dhonnchadha. “So the fact that it was being studied in Ireland in the 15th century was certainly a link to the Islamic world.”

More at the link.