There are still several ancient languages modern scholars cannot decipher, like Minoan hieroglyphics (called Linear A) or Khipu, the intricate Incan system of writing in knots. These symbols contain within them the wisdom of civilizations, and there’s no telling what might be revealed should we learn to translate them. Maybe scholars will only find accounting logs and inventories, or maybe entirely new ways of perceiving reality. When it comes, however, to a singularly indecipherable text, the Voynich Manuscript, the language it contains encodes the wisdom of a solitary intelligence, or an obscure, hermitic community that seems to have left no other trace behind.
Composed around the year 1420, the 240-page manuscript appears to be in dialogue with medieval medical and alchemical texts of the time, with its zodiacs and illustrations botanical, pharmaceutical, and anatomical. But its script only vaguely resembles known European languages.
So it has seemed for the 300 years during which scholars have tried to solve its riddles, assuming it to be the work of mystics, magicians, witches, or hoaxers. Its language has been variously said to come from Latin, Sino-Tibetan, Arabic, and ancient Hebrew, or to have been invented out of whole cloth. None of these theories (the Hebrew one proposed by Artificial Intelligence) has proven conclusive.
Maybe that’s because everyone’s got the basic approach all wrong, seeing the Voynich’s script as a written language rather than a phonetic transliteration of speech. So says the Ardiç family, a father and sons team of Turkish researchers who call themselves Ata Team Alberta (ATA) and claim in the video above to have “deciphered and translated over 30% of the manuscript.” Father Ahmet Ardiç, an electrical engineer by trade and scholar of Turkish language by passionate calling, claims the Voynich script is a kind of Old Turkic, “written in a ‘poetic’ style,” notes Nick Pelling at the site Cipher Mysteries, “that often displays ‘phonemic orthography,’” meaning the author spelled out words the way he, or she, heard them.
Ahmet noticed that the words often began with the same characters, then had different endings, a pattern that corresponds with the linguistic structure of Turkish. Furthermore, Ozan Ardiç informs us, the language of the Voynich has a “rhythmic structure,” a formal, poetic regularity. As for why scholars, and computers, have seen so many other ancient languages in the Voynich, Ahmet explains, “some of the Voynich characters are also used in several proto-European and early Semitic languages.” The Ardiç family will have their research vetted by professionals. They’ve submitted a formal paper to an academic journal at Johns Hopkins University.
Their theory, as Pelling puts it, may be one more “to throw onto the (already blazing) hearth” of Voynich speculation. Or it may turn out to be the final word on the translation. Prominent Medieval scholar Lisa Fagin Davis, head of the Medieval Academy of America—who has herself cast doubt on another recent translation attempt—calls the Ardiçs’ work “one of the few solutions I’ve seen that is consistent, is repeatable, and results in sensical text.”
We don’t learn many specifics of that text in the video above, but if this effort succeeds, and it seems promising, we could see an authoritative translation of the Voynich, though there will still remain many unanswered questions, such as who wrote this strange, sometimes fantastical manuscript, and to what end?
Think “Generative Music” and what may come to mind is Brian Eno, pushing a button and letting music flow from his studio computer. But the idea is much older than that.
The “Illiac Suite” from 1952 is named after the cash-register-looking ILLIAC computer on which it was composed, and is one of the first examples of bringing computer programming into the task of creating music within some well defined parameters. The resulting score was then played by humans. You can hear the first experiment above.
The programmers were Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson, who met at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, where the ILLIAC computer was built. Interestingly, Hiller considered himself a chemist first, a composer second. He had studied classical composition under Milton Babbitt and, even while working at DuPont labs in Virginia, was composing string quartets and vocal works. Babbitt and other teachers had encouraged him to keep composing even while he turned to chemistry. Perhaps they knew that the art and the science would dovetail?
Because indeed they did. While working on the ILLIAC, Hiller realized that the methodology he was using in chemistry problems were the same as those used by composers, and decided to experiment. Isaacson would help program the new computer.
The first experiment sounds the most traditional, the most like Bach. The two created simple rules: a melody that only used notes within an octave, harmonies that tended towards the major and the minor with no dissonance, and a few other parameters.
The second experiment featured four-voice polyphony with slightly more complex rules. The third experiment is where it gets interesting, and starts to sound very “modern,” very Penderecki. Here Hiller and Isaacson tried to introduce rhythm and dynamics, although admittedly they had to shape a lot of the decisions outside the program and introduce some corrective algorithms.
The fourth and final experiment was to then replace the “musical” rules of the first three with rules from non-musical disciplines, and to show that a score could be created from pretty much anything. Hiller and Isaacson used Markov Chains to compose the final more repetitive and pulsing piece. (Markov Chains are beyond the scope of this article, but we encounter them when Google ranks search results or when our iPhones predict what we are going to type next.)
The first three scores were then performed by members of the University’s student orchestra in August of 1956 while the fourth was being completed. The finished works caught the interest of Vladimir Ussachevsky, who would set up the influential Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York City and begin releasing his own compositions the following year.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
More and more, you can get access to valuable electronic resources through your friendly local library. In the past, we’ve mentioned how anyone with a New York Public Library card can get free access to thousands of ebooks, more than 30,000 movies (including many classics from the Criterion Collection), and even suits and briefcases for job interviews.
Now consider this: The New York Times announcedthis week that nearly 1,200 public libraries across California will offer their 23 million patrons free access to the New York Times online. They write:
California’s 23 million library card holders in the state may access NYTimes.com by visiting nytimes.com/register on a library computer, or on their own device while connected to the library’s Wi-Fi. Library card holders can access nytimes.com from anywhere through their library’s website.” Residents without a library card may visit their local branch to apply for one. The program will also include monthly events at select library branches.
For more information, visit this page. And if you know of other great deals offered by public libraries, please mention them in the comments section below.
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Ancient Greece never existed. Before you click away, fearing a truly brazen attempt at historical revisionism, let’s put that statement in context. Ancient Greece “was no state with an established border or capital, but rather a multitude of distinct and completely independent cities.” So says the video above, “Ancient Greece in 18 Minutes,” which makes historical corrections — and often humorous ones — to that and a variety of other common misperceptions about perhaps the main civilizations to give rise to Western culture as we know it.
“We might think we already know everything about Ancient Greece,” says the video’s narrator, actor Brian Cox. “The Parthenon, the 300 Spartans, and blind Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are familiar to all, yet there were far more than 300 Spartans, the Parthenon was actually built as a kind of central bank, and no such unified state as ancient Greece, with Athens as its capital, ever existed.”
Some of our unwarranted intellectual confidence about Ancient Greece surely comes from the movies that draw on its history and its stories, such as the comic-book Battle of Thermopylae dramatization 300 or, a couple years earlier, Troy, which delivered Homer’s Iliad in true Hollywood fashion — with Cox himself as Agamemnon, commander of the united Greek forces in the Trojan War.
That nine-year long siege, of course, figures into “Ancient Greece in 18 Minutes” as one of its most important episodes. The other chapters cover the Creto-Mycenaean era that preceded Ancient Greece, the barbarian attacks that plunged the region into a 400-year dark age, the Archaic Period that saw the beginning of Greece’s far-flung agriculture-driven colonization, the rise of the famous Athens and Sparta, the Graeco-Persian Wars (as seen, in a sense, in 300), the Golden Age of Athens (the age of the construction of the Parthenon, without which “the Greek classics wouldn’t have existed at all: no sculpture, drama, philosophy”), the Peloponnesian War, and the time of Alexander the Great.
Alexander the Great died young in 323 BC, and Ancient Greece as we conceive of it today is thought not to have survived him. But in another sense, it not only survived but thrived: the Romans conquered Greece in 146 BC, but “Greek culture was victorious even here: spread by the Romans, it finally conquered the world. Romans began to read The Iliad and Odyssey in Greek, followed by the Greek New Testament.” (You can find out much more about the Romans in the same creators’ video “Ancient Rome in 20 Minutes.”) When in 330 the Roman emperor Constantine built his new capital on the site of the Greek colony of Byzantium, he started the Byzantine Empire, “which extended the life of Greek culture another thousand years.” This left a formidable cultural legacy of its own — including, as this Russian-made video makes a special point of telling us, “the weird Russian alphabet.”
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 or on Facebook.
Two thousand years ago, Rome was half the world. A thousand years before that, it was “a tiny tribal settlement of the Latins by the river Tiber.” So, what happened? An awful lot. But narrator Brian Cox makes the history and longevity of Ancient Rome seem simple in 20 minutes in the Arzamas video above, which brings the same talent for narrative compression as we saw in an earlier video we featured with Cox describing the history of Russian Art.
This is a far more sprawling subject, but it’s one you can absorb in 20 minutes, if you’re satisfied with very broad outlines. Or, like one YouTube commenter, you can spend six hours, or more, pausing for reading and research after each morsel of information Cox tosses out. The story begins with trade—cultural and economic—between the Latins and the Etruscans to the north and Greeks to the south. Rome grows by adding populations from all over the world, allowing migrants and refugees to become citizens.
Indeed, the great Roman epic, the Aeneid, relates its founding by refugees from Troy. From these beginnings come monumental innovations in building and engineering, as well as an alphabet that spread around the world and a language that spawned dozens of others. The Roman numeral system, an unwieldy way to do mathematics, nonetheless gave to the world the stateliest means of writing numbers. Rome gets the credit for these gifts to world civilization, but they originated with the Etruscans, along with famed Roman military discipline and style of government.
After Tarquin, the last Roman king, committed one abuse too many, the Republic began to form, as did new class divides. Plebs fought Patricians for expanded rights, Senatus Populusque Romanus (SPQR)—the senate and the people of Rome—expressed an ideal of unity and political equality, of a sort. An age of imperial war ensues, conquered peoples are ostensibly made allies, not colonials, though they are also made slaves and supply the legions with “a never ending supply of recruits.”
These sketches of major campaigns you may remember from your World Civ class: The Punic Wars with Carthage, and their commander Hannibal, conducted under the motto of Cato, the senator who beat the drums of war by repeating Carthago delenda est—Carthage must be destroyed. The conquering of Corinth and the absorption of Alexander’s Hellenist empire into Rome.
The story of the Empire resembles that of so many others: tales of hubris, ferocious brutality, genocide, and endless building. But it is also a story of political genius, in which, gradually, those peoples brought under the banners of Rome by force were given citizenship and rights, ensuring their loyalty. Relative peace—within the borders of Rome, at least—could not hold, and the Republic imploded in civil wars and the ruination of a slave economy and extreme inequality.
The wealthy gobbled up arable land. The tribunes of the people, the Gracchi brothers, suggested a redistribution scheme. The senators responded with force, killing thousands. Two mass-murdering conquering generals, Pompey and Julius Caesar, fought over Rome. Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his legions to take the city, assuming the title Imperator, a move that cost him his life.
But his murder didn’t stop the march of Empire. Under his nephew Augustus, a dictator who called himself a senator, Rome spread, flourished, and established a 200-year Pax Romana, a time of thriving arts and culture, popular entertainments, and a well-fed populace.
Augustus had learned from the Gracchi what neither the venal senatorial class nor so many subsequent emperors could. In order to rule effectively, you’ve got to have the people on your side, or have them so distracted, at least, by bread and circuses, that they won’t bother to revolt. Watch the full video to learn about the next few hundred years, and learn more about Ancient Rome at the links below.
Is the Mona Lisa really “ten times better than every other painting”? No one seriously believes this, and how would anyone measure such a thing? There may be no such critical scale, but there is a popular one. The Louvre, where the famous Leonardo da Vinci—maybe the most famous painting of all time—hangs, says that 80 percent of its visitors come just to see the Mona Lisa. Her enigmatic smile adorns merchandise the world wide. Books, essays, documentaries, songs, coffee mugs—hers may be the most recognizable face in Western art.
Learn in the Vox video above, however, how that fame came about as the result of a different kind of publicity—coverage of the Mona Lisa theft in 1911. It became an overnight sensation. “Before its theft,” notes NPR, “the ‘Mona Lisa’ was not widely known outside the art world. Leonardo da Vinci painted it in 1507, but it wasn’t until the 1860s that critics began to hail it as a masterwork of Renaissance painting. And that judgment didn’t filter outside a thin slice of French intelligentsia.”
Though the painting once hung in the bedroom of Napoleon, in the 19th century, it “wasn’t even the most famous painting in its gallery, let alone in the Louvre,” historian James Zug tells All Things Considered. Writing at Vox, Phil Edwards describes how an essay by Victorian art critic Walter Pater elevated the Mona Lisa among art critics and intellectuals like Oscar Wilde. His overwrought prose “popped up in guidebooks to the Louvre and reading clubs in Paducah.” Yet it was not art criticism that sold the painting to the general public. It was the intrigue of an art heist.
In 1911, an Italian construction worker, Vincenzo Perugia, was working for the firm Cobier, engaged in putting several paintings, including the Mona Lisa, under glass. While at the Louvre, he hatched a plan to steal the painting with two accomplices, brothers Vincenzo and Michele Lancelotti. The crime was literally notorious overnight. The theft occurred on Monday morning, August 21. By late Tuesday, the story had been picked up by major newspapers all over the world.
Pablo Picasso and poet Guillaume Apollinaire went on trial for the theft (their case was dismissed). Conspiracy theories popped up all over the place, claiming, as per usual, that the whole thing was a hoax or a distraction engineered by the French government. “Wanted posters for the painting appeared on Parisian walls,” Zug writes at Smithsonian. “Crowds massed at police headquarters. Thousands of spectators, including Franz Kafka, flooded the Salon Carré when the Louvre reopened after a week to stare at the empty wall with its four lonely iron hooks.”
Once the painting was restored, the crowds kept coming. Newspaper photos and police posters gave way to t‑shirts and mousepads. The painting’s undoubted excellence seemed incidental; it became, like Andy Warhol’s soup cans, famous for being famous. Learn more about the Mona Lisa’s long strange trip through history in the short Great Big Story video above.
It has become the norm for notable writers to bequeath documents related to their work, and even their personal correspondence, to an institution that promises to maintain it all, in perpetuity, in an archive open to scholars. Often the institution is located at a university to which the writer has some connection, and the case of the Haruki Murakami Library at Tokyo’s Waseda University is no exception: Murakami graduated from Waseda in 1975, and a dozen years later used it as a setting in his breakthrough novel Norwegian Wood.
That book’s portrayal of Waseda betrays a somewhat dim view of the place, but Murakami looks much more kindly on his alma mater now than he did then: he must, since he plans to entrust it with not just all his papers but his beloved record collection as well. If you wanted to see that collection today, you’d have to visit him at home. “I exchanged my shoes for slippers, and Murakami took me upstairs to his office,” writes Sam Anderson, having done just that for a 2011 New York Times Magazine profile of the writer. “This is also, not coincidentally, the home of his vast record collection. (He guesses that he has around 10,000 but says he’s too scared to count.)”
Having announced the plans for Waseda’s Murakami Library at the end of last year, Murakami can now rest assured that the counting will be left to the archivists. He hopes, he said at a rare press conference, “to create a space that functions as a study where my record collection and books are stored.” In his own space now, he explained, he has “a collection of records, audio equipment and some books. The idea is to create an atmosphere like that, not to create a replica of my study.” Some of Murakami’s stated motivation to establish the library comes out of convictions about the importance of “a place of open international exchanges for literature and culture” and “an alternative place that you can drop by.” And some of it, of course, comes out of practicality: “After nearly 40 years of writing, there is hardly any space to put the documents such as manuscripts and related articles, whether at my home or at my office.”
“I also have no children to take care of them,” Murakami added, “and I didn’t want those resources to be scattered and lost when I die.” Few of his countless readers around the world can imagine that day coming any time soon, turn 70 though Murakami did last month, but many are no doubt making plans even now for a trip to the Waseda campus to see what shape the Murakami Library takes during the writer’s lifetime, especially since he plans to take an active role in what goes on there. “Murakami is also hoping to organize a concert featuring his collection of vinyl records,” notes The Vinyl Factory’s Gabriela Helfet. Until he does, you can have a listen to the playlists, previously featured here on Open Culture, of 96 songs from his novels and 3,350 from his record collection — but you’ll have to recreate the atmosphere of his study yourself for now.
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 or on Facebook.
Many artists have attempted to illustrate Dante Alighieri’s epic poem the Divine Comedy, but none have made such an indelible stamp on our collective imagination as the Frenchman Gustave Doré.
Doré was 23 years old in 1855, when he first decided to create a series of engravings for a deluxe edition of Dante’s classic. He was already the highest-paid illustrator in France, with popular editions of Rabelais and Balzac under his belt, but Doré was unable to convince his publisher, Louis Hachette, to finance such an ambitious and expensive project. The young artist decided to pay the publishing costs for the first book himself. When the illustrated Inferno came out in 1861, it sold out fast. Hachette summoned Doré back to his office with a telegram: “Success! Come quickly! I am an ass!”
Hachette published Purgatorio and Paradiso as a single volume in 1868. Since then, Doré’s Divine Comedy has appeared in hundreds of editions. Although he went on to illustrate a great many other literary works, from the Bible to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” Doré is perhaps best remembered for his depictions of Dante. At The World of Dante, art historian Aida Audeh writes:
Characterized by an eclectic mix of Michelangelesque nudes, northern traditions of sublime landscape, and elements of popular culture, Doré’s Dante illustrations were considered among his crowning achievements — a perfect match of the artist’s skill and the poet’s vivid visual imagination. As one critic wrote in 1861 upon publication of the illustrated Inferno: “we are inclined to believe that the conception and the interpretation come from the same source, that Dante and Gustave Doré are communicating by occult and solemn conversations the secret of this Hell plowed by their souls, traveled, explored by them in every sense.”
The scene above is from Canto X of the Inferno. Dante and his guide, Virgil, are passing through the Sixth Circle of Hell, in a place reserved for the souls of heretics, when they look down and see the imposing figure of Farinata degli Uberti, a Tuscan nobleman who had agreed with Epicurus that the soul dies with the body, rising up from an open grave. In the translation by John Ciardi, Dante writes:
My eyes were fixed on him already. Erect, he rose above the flame, great chest, great brow; he seemed to hold all Hell in disrespect
Inferno, Canto XVI:
As Dante and Virgil prepare to leave Circle Seven, they are met by the fearsome figure of Geryon, Monster of Fraud.Virgil arranges for Geryon to fly them down to Circle Eight. He climbs onto the monster’s back and instructs Dante to do the same.
Then he called out: “Now, Geryon, we are ready: bear well in mind that his is living weight and make your circles wide and your flight steady.”
As a small ship slides from a beaching or its pier, backward, backward — so that monster slipped back from the rim. And when he had drawn clear
he swung about, and stretching out his tail he worked it like an eel, and with his paws he gathered in the air, while I turned pale.
Inferno, Canto XXXIV:
In the Ninth Circle of Hell, at the very center of the Earth, Dante and Virgil encounter the gigantic figure of Satan. As Ciardi writes in his commentary:
He is fixed into the ice at the center to which flow all the rivers of guilt; and as he beats his great wings as if to escape, their icy wind only freezes him more surely into the polluted ice. In a grotesque parody of the Trinity, he has three faces, each a different color, and in each mouth he clamps a sinner whom he rips eternally with his teeth. Judas Iscariot is in the central mouth: Brutus and Cassius in the mouths on either side.
Purgatorio, Canto II:
At dawn on Easter Sunday, Dante and Virgil have just emerged from Hell when they witness The Angel Boatman speeding a new group of souls to the shore of Purgatory.
Then as that bird of heaven closed the distance between us, he grew brighter and yet brighter until I could no longer bear the radiance,
and bowed my head. He steered straight for the shore, his ship so light and swift it drew no water; it did not seem to sail so much as soar.
Astern stood the great pilot of the Lord, so fair his blessedness seemed written on him; and more than a hundred souls were seated forward,
singing as if they raised a single voice
in exitu Israel de Aegypto. Verse after verse they made the air rejoice.
The angel made the sign of the cross, and they cast themselves, at his signal, to the shore. Then, swiftly as he had come, he went away.
Purgatorio, Canto IV:
The poets begin their laborious climb up the Mount of Purgatory. Partway up the steep path, Dante cries out to Virgil that he needs to rest.
The climb had sapped my last strength when I cried: “Sweet Father, turn to me: unless you pause I shall be left here on the mountainside!”
He pointed to a ledge a little ahead that wound around the whole face of the slope. “Pull yourself that much higher, my son,” he said.
His words so spurred me that I forced myself to push on after him on hands and knees until at last my feet were on that shelf.
Purgatorio, Canto XXXI:
Having ascended at last to the Garden of Eden, Dante is immersed in the waters of the Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, and helped across by the maiden Matilda. He drinks from the water, which wipes away all memory of sin.
She had drawn me into the stream up to my throat, and pulling me behind her, she sped on over the water, light as any boat.
Nearing the sacred bank, I heard her say in tones so sweet I cannot call them back, much less describe them here: “Asperges me.”
Then the sweet lady took my head between her open arms, and embracing me, she dipped me and made me drink the waters that make clean.
Paradiso, Canto V:
In the Second Heaven, the Sphere of Mercury, Dante sees a multitude of glowing souls. In the translation by Allen Mandelbaum, he writes:
As in a fish pool that is calm and clear, the fish draw close to anything that nears from outside, it seems to be their fare, such were the far more than a thousand splendors I saw approaching us, and each declared: “Here now is one who will increase our loves.” And even as each shade approached, one saw, because of the bright radiance it set forth, the joyousness with which that shade was filled.
Paradiso, Canto XXVIII:
Upon reaching the Ninth Heaven, the Primum Mobile, Dante and his guide Beatrice look upon the sparkling circles of the heavenly host. (The Christian Beatrice, who personifies Divine Love, took over for the pagan Virgil, who personifies Reason, as Dante’s guide when he reached the summit of Purgatory.)
And when I turned and my own eyes were met By what appears within that sphere whenever one looks intently at its revolution, I saw a point that sent forth so acute a light, that anyone who faced the force with which it blazed would have to shut his eyes, and any star that, seen from the earth, would seem to be the smallest, set beside that point, as star conjoined with star, would seem a moon. Around that point a ring of fire wheeled, a ring perhaps as far from that point as a halo from the star that colors it when mist that forms the halo is most thick. It wheeled so quickly that it would outstrip the motion that most swiftly girds the world.
Paradiso, Canto XXXI:
In the Empyrean, the highest heaven, Dante is shown the dwelling place of God. It appears in the form of an enormous rose, the petals of which house the souls of the faithful. Around the center, angels fly like bees carrying the nectar of divine love.
So, in the shape of that white Rose, the holy legion has shown to me — the host that Christ, with His own blood, had taken as His bride. The other host, which, flying, sees and sings the glory of the One who draws its love, and that goodness which granted it such glory, just like a swarm of bees that, at one moment, enters the flowers and, at another, turns back to that labor which yields such sweet savor, descended into that vast flower graced with many petals, then again rose up to the eternal dwelling of its love.
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Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in October 2013.
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