For 500 Years, Every Student Who Attained a BA from Oxford Had to Swear Enmity Towards a Person Named Henry Symeonis

in History | December 26th, 2023

Image via The Bodleian Library

If you were to ask a cer­tain kind of Eng­lish­man what sets his home­land apart from the rest of the world, he might point to the strength of its tra­di­tions. And what holds true for Eng­land itself holds even truer for its most renowned insti­tu­tions, espe­cial­ly its most pres­ti­gious uni­ver­si­ties. Those who dream of attend­ing Oxford dream not least of its dis­tinc­tive tra­di­tions: from the rel­a­tive­ly fre­quent For­mal Hall, to the var­i­ous cer­e­mo­ni­al rit­u­als on Ascen­sion Day, to the Mal­lard Song sung just once per cen­tu­ry by the elites of All Souls Col­lege, dat­ing back to that col­lege’s foun­da­tion in 1438— which was still long after the time of Oxford’s ulti­mate per­sona non gra­ta, a long-mys­te­ri­ous fig­ure named Hen­ry Syme­o­nis.

As recent­ly as the time of Dick­ens (or at least the era in which he set his nov­els), Bach­e­lors of Arts stu­dents turn­ing Mas­ter of Arts stu­dents at Oxford were, accord­ing to the blog of the Archives and Man­u­scripts at the Bodleian Library, “required to swear that they would observe the University’s statutes, priv­i­leges, lib­er­ties and cus­toms, as you might expect; and not to lec­ture else­where, or resume their bach­e­lor stud­ies after get­ting their MA.” But they “also had to swear that they would nev­er agree to the rec­on­cil­i­a­tion of Hen­ry Syme­o­nis,” who­ev­er that was. “Nowhere in the statutes did it explain who this Hen­ry Syme­o­nis (or Sime­o­nis) was, what he was sup­posed to have done or why those get­ting their MAs should nev­er agree to be rec­on­ciled with him.”

The clause in ques­tion came up for review in the ear­ly 1650s, but “even by that time, one sus­pects that the oath was of such antiq­ui­ty that no-one knew any­thing about it and it was thought best to leave it be.” Not until 1912 did Regi­nald Lane Poole, Keep­er of the Uni­ver­si­ty Archives, deter­mine that Syme­o­nis was the son of “a very wealthy towns­man of Oxford.” In 1242, “he and a num­ber of oth­er men of the town of Oxford were found guilty of mur­der­ing a stu­dent of the Uni­ver­si­ty. Hen­ry and his accom­plices were fined £80 by King Hen­ry III in May 1242 and were made to leave Oxford as a result.” Two decades after the mur­der, Hen­ry III issued Syme­o­nis (who had, in any case, long since returned to town) an offi­cial par­don.

“The Gov­ern­ment was aware of the volatile rela­tion­ship between town and gown and was con­cerned, in 1264, at the prospect of the Uni­ver­si­ty leav­ing Oxford in protest if Hen­ry was allowed to return.” What seems to have hap­pened is that “Hen­ry Syme­o­nis had bought the King’s par­don and his per­mis­sion to return to Oxford. The King was will­ing to allow his return if the Uni­ver­si­ty agreed to it. But the Uni­ver­si­ty refused and chose to ignore the King’s order” — and even “gave Hen­ry Syme­o­nis the unique hon­or of being named in its own statutes, mak­ing the University’s dis­like of him offi­cial and per­pet­u­al.” There his name stayed, receiv­ing the sworn enmi­ty of five and a half cen­turies’ worth of Oxford stu­dents, until the removal of the rel­e­vant oath in 1827. “No back­ground infor­ma­tion nor rea­son for the deci­sion is record­ed,” notes the Bodleian’s blog, pos­si­bly because “nobody knew exact­ly what they were abol­ish­ing.”

via Archives and Man­u­scripts at the Bodleian Library

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Inter­ac­tive “Mur­der Map” Reveals the Mean­est Streets of Medieval Lon­don

Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Presents the 550-Year-Old Guten­berg Bible in Spec­tac­u­lar, High-Res Detail

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Man Hiding from the Nazis Made 95 Issues of a Highly Creative Zine (1943–1945)

in Art, History, Life, Magazines | December 26th, 2023

Copy­right by Char­i­ties Aid Foun­da­tion Amer­i­ca thanks to the gen­er­ous sup­port of the Bloch fam­i­ly; restora­tion and dig­i­ti­za­tion: Jew­ish Muse­um Berlin. This per­tains to all images on this page.

Per­haps at some point in the future,

the poems in your tongue I com­posed,

will be brought to your notice,

and if so, to delight will I then be dis­posed.

— Curt Bloch, Het Onder­wa­ter Cabaret

Zines typ­i­cal­ly tend toward the ephemer­al, owing to their small cir­cu­la­tions, errat­ic pub­li­ca­tion sched­ules, and the unpre­dictable lives of their cre­ators. 

Curt Bloch’s zine, Het Onder­wa­ter Cabaret (The Under­wa­ter Cabaret) defies these odds.

Bloch not only pro­duced an impres­sive 95 issues between August 1943 and April 1945, he did so as a Ger­man Jew hid­ing from the Nazis in the rafters of a pri­vate home in the Dutch city of Enschede, not far from the Ger­man bor­der.

His cut-and-paste illus­tra­tions are part of a long-stand­ing zine con­tin­u­um, made pos­si­ble in part by helpers who fur­nished him with pens, glue, news­pa­pers and oth­er col­lage-wor­thy mate­ri­als, in addi­tion to food and oth­er neces­si­ties. 

His print run was sub-minis­cule. Dupli­cat­ing his work was not an option, so Het Onder­wa­ter Cabaret cir­cu­lat­ed in its orig­i­nal form, passed from hand to hand at great risk.

The zine’s title is a play on onder­duiken (to dive under), which Dutch peo­ple under­stood as a ref­er­ence to the 10,000 Jews hid­ing from the Nazis in their coun­try.

Ger­ard Groen­eveld, author of The Under­wa­ter Cabaret: The Satir­i­cal Resis­tance of Curt Bloch, cred­its the “huge orga­ni­za­tion” who helped Bloch and oth­ers sequestered Jews with cir­cu­lat­ing the zine:

(It) includ­ed couri­ers, who brought food, but who could also bring the mag­a­zine out, to share with oth­er peo­ple in the group who could be trust­ed. The mag­a­zines are very small, you can eas­i­ly put one in your pock­et or hide it in a book. He got them all back. They must have also returned them in some way.

It’s noth­ing short of a mir­a­cle that all 95 install­ments sur­vive. Many zinesters fall short of pre­serv­ing their work, but Bloch could not ignore this pro­jec­t’s per­son­al and his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance.

Aubrey Pomer­ance, co-cura­tor of the Jüdis­ches Muse­um Berlin’s upcom­ing exhib­it, “My Vers­es Are Like Dyna­mite, Curt Bloch’s Het Onder­wa­ter Cabaret”, notes that “the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of writ­ings that were cre­at­ed in hid­ing were destroyed.” 

For half a cen­tu­ry, these zines were known to a select few — fam­i­ly mem­bers, their orig­i­nal read­ers, and a hand­ful of guests whom Bloch enter­tained by read­ing pas­sages aloud after din­ner par­ties in the family’s New York home. 

Pomer­ance sus­pects that Bloch always intend­ed for his work to have a per­for­mance aspect, and that the cou­ple who shared his crawl­space quar­ters may well have been his first audi­ence for dit­ties like the one below.

Hye­nas and jack­als

Look on with jeal­ousy

For they now seem as choir­boys

Com­pared to human­i­ty.

Bloch’s daugh­ter, Simone, who describes her dad as a smar­tass, is work­ing on a web­site ded­i­cat­ed to his work. Read more about Bloch’s zine at The New York Times.

The images on this page thanks to the gen­er­ous sup­port of the Bloch fam­i­ly; restora­tion and dig­i­ti­za­tion comes thanks to the Jew­ish Muse­um Berlin.

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear the Haunting Aztec “Death Whistle,” the Instrument That Made Sounds Resembling a Human Scream

in History, Music | December 20th, 2023

The received image of the Aztecs, with their sav­age bat­tles and fre­quent acts of human sac­ri­fice, tends to imply a vio­lence-sat­u­rat­ed, death-obsessed cul­ture. Giv­en that, it will hard­ly come as a sur­prise to learn of an Aztec musi­cal instru­ment dis­cov­ered in the hands of a sac­ri­ficed human body, or that the instru­ment has come to be known as the “death whis­tle.” Not that it was an espe­cial­ly recent find: the exca­va­tion in ques­tion hap­pened in Mex­i­co City in the late nine­teen-nineties. But only over the past decade, with the cre­ation of repli­cas like the one played by the late Xavier Qui­jas Yxay­otl in the clip above, have lis­ten­ers around the world been able to hear the death whis­tle for them­selves.

“The sound of the death whis­tle is the most fright­en­ing thing we’ve ever heard,” writes Reuben West­maas at Discovery.com. “It lit­er­al­ly sounds like a screech­ing zom­bie. We can only imag­ine what it would be like to hear hun­dreds of whis­tles from an Aztec army on the march. We’re not entire­ly cer­tain what the whis­tles were used for, how­ev­er.”

What­ev­er its appli­ca­tion, the dis­tinc­tive sound of the death whis­tle is cre­at­ed by blown air inter­act­ing “with a well or ‘spring’ of air inside a round­ed inter­nal cham­ber, cre­at­ing dis­tor­tions,” as Dave Roos writes at How Stuff Works. In his analy­sis of the death whistle’s inner work­ings, mechan­i­cal engi­neer Rober­to Velázquez Cabr­era gives that com­po­nent the evoca­tive name “chaos cham­ber.”

That the death whis­tle would be used in war and human sac­ri­fice cer­tain­ly aligns with the rep­u­ta­tion of the Aztecs, but the instru­ment has also inspired oth­er his­tor­i­cal­ly informed spec­u­la­tions. In the video from Giz­mo­do just above, pro­fes­sor of Mesoamer­i­can and Lati­no stud­ies Jaime Arredon­do even sug­gests that it could have had its ther­a­peu­tic uses, as a tool to cre­ate a “hyp­not­ic, sort of sooth­ing atmos­phere.” It could well have been designed to imi­tate the sound of the wind, giv­en that the sac­ri­fi­cial vic­tim had been buried at the tem­ple of the wind god Ehe­catl. And though the death whis­tle may seem the least like­ly tool of relax­ation imag­in­able, put your mind to it and just hear it as sound­ing less like the screech of a zom­bie than like the fif­teenth-cen­tu­ry equiv­a­lent of a white-noise machine.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed con­tent:

Dis­cov­er the Appre­hen­sion Engine: Bri­an Eno Called It “the Most Ter­ri­fy­ing Musi­cal Instru­ment of All Time”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Why Abel Gance’s 1927 Napoléon Is “the Most Creative Film Ever Made”

in Film, History | December 20th, 2023

Since it came out this past Novem­ber, Rid­ley Scot­t’s Napoleon has drawn a vari­ety of crit­i­cal reac­tions. What­ev­er else can be said about it, it cer­tain­ly takes a dif­fer­ent tack from past depic­tions of that par­tic­u­lar French Emper­or. It was, per­haps, Scot­t’s good luck not to have to go up against the Napoleon pic­ture that Stan­ley Kubrick dreamed of mak­ing, but even so, there are plen­ty of oth­er prece­dents dat­ing from through­out cin­e­ma his­to­ry. The most for­mi­da­ble must sure­ly be Napoléon, from 1927, also known as Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (Abel Gance being one of France’s fore­most silent-era auteurs), which depicts the pro­tag­o­nist’s ear­ly years over the course of, in at least one of its many ver­sions, five and a half hours.

Grant­ed that, almost a cen­tu­ry lat­er, a silent his­tor­i­cal epic as long as three aver­age movies may be con­sid­ered some­thing of a “hard sell.” But if you’re intrigued, con­sid­er start­ing with the half-hour-long intro­duc­tion to Napoléon above by The Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy’s Lewis Bond, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for his exe­ge­sis of every­thing from the rule-break­ing of the French New Wave to the poet­ry of Andrei Tarkovsky and the copy­cat-ism of Quentin Taran­ti­no to the aes­thet­ic of ani­me. We can thus rest assured that when Bond says that Napoléon, “with­out hyper­bole, is the most inven­tive cin­e­mat­ic endeav­or in the his­to­ry of the medi­um,” he does­n’t do so light­ly.

Like any good video essay­ist, Bond first pro­vides con­text, fram­ing Gance as a kind of ear­ly nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry Roman­tic artist work­ing in the ear­ly twen­ti­eth, a descen­dant of Vic­tor Hugo work­ing in film rather than lit­er­a­ture. But what­ev­er this infor­ma­tion may do to enrich your view­ing expe­ri­ence, “many of the great works don’t hide their great­ness away,” and Napoléon is one of the works in which that great­ness is “vis­i­ble from the moment you set your eyes to it.” Even its very first sequence, in which a young Napoleon leads his mil­i­tary-school com­pa­tri­ots in a large-scale snow­ball fight, is exe­cut­ed with the kind of cam­era moves and image dis­solves that would only find their way into stan­dard cin­e­mat­ic gram­mar decades lat­er.

This tech­ni­cal and for­mal inge­nu­ity con­tin­ues through­out the film: “with the sheer breadth of tech­niques, and just how osten­ta­tious they are, it’s dif­fi­cult to pack every­thing Napoléon presents us into a cohe­sive pack­age.” This makes Gance, who always had “a pen­chant for dis­pleas­ing his pro­duc­ers due to his con­stant desire to dis­rupt film lan­guage,” look like a Nou­velle Vague film­mak­er avant la let­tre. It also reveals his under­stand­ing that cin­e­ma, far from the nov­el­ty enter­tain­ment some had dis­missed in his time, “was to be the medi­um in which our next great Home­r­ic epic will emerge.” With Napoléon, Gance and his col­lab­o­ra­tors cre­at­ed not just a movie but a “panora­ma of exis­tence, which would entrance the view­ers in an almost reli­gious delir­i­um” — an expe­ri­ence sure to be inten­si­fied, for those whose reli­gious lean­ings tend toward the cin­e­mat­ic, by the restored sev­en-hour cut sched­uled to debut next year.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch the New­ly Released Trail­er for Rid­ley Scott’s Napoleon, Star­ring Joaquin Phoenix

Napoleon: The Great­est Movie Stan­ley Kubrick Nev­er Made

Vin­tage Pho­tos of Vet­er­ans of the Napoleon­ic Wars, Tak­en Cir­ca 1858

Napoleon’s Dis­as­trous Inva­sion of Rus­sia Detailed in an 1869 Data Visu­al­iza­tion: It’s Been Called “the Best Sta­tis­ti­cal Graph­ic Ever Drawn”

Why Is Napoleon’s Hand Always in His Waist­coat?: The Ori­gins of This Dis­tinc­tive Pose Explained

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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

in History, Maps | December 19th, 2023

FYI: The Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Press has made avail­able online — at no cost –five vol­umes of The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy. Or what Edward Roth­stein, of The New York Times, called “the most ambi­tious overview of map mak­ing ever under­tak­en.” He con­tin­ues:

Peo­ple come to know the world the way they come to map it—through their per­cep­tions of how its ele­ments are con­nect­ed and of how they should move among them. This is pre­cise­ly what the series is attempt­ing by sit­u­at­ing the map at the heart of cul­tur­al life and reveal­ing its rela­tion­ship to soci­ety, sci­ence, and reli­gion…. It is try­ing to define a new set of rela­tion­ships between maps and the phys­i­cal world that involve more than geo­met­ric cor­re­spon­dence. It is in essence a new map of human attempts to chart the world.

If you head over to this page, you will see links (in the left mar­gin) to five vol­umes avail­able in a free PDF for­mat. The image above, appear­ing in Vol. 2, dates back to 1534. Cre­at­ed by Oronce Fine, the first chair of math­e­mat­ics in the Col­lège Roy­al (aka the Col­lège de France), the map fea­tures the world drawn in the shape of a heart. A pret­ty beau­ti­ful design. Below you can find links to the indi­vid­ual vol­umes avail­able online.

Vol­ume 1

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy: Car­tog­ra­phy in Pre­his­toric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediter­ranean

Vol­ume 2: Book 1

Car­tog­ra­phy in the Tra­di­tion­al Islam­ic and South Asian Soci­eties

Vol­ume 2: Book 2

Car­tog­ra­phy in the Tra­di­tion­al East and South­east Asian Soci­eties

Vol­ume 2: Part 3

Car­tog­ra­phy in the Tra­di­tion­al African, Amer­i­can, Arc­tic, Aus­tralian, and Pacif­ic Soci­eties

Vol­ume 3: 

Car­tog­ra­phy in the Euro­pean Renais­sance: Part 1

Car­tog­ra­phy in the Euro­pean Renais­sance, Part 2 

Vol­ume 4:

Car­tog­ra­phy in the Euro­pean Enlight­en­ment

Vol­ume 5:

Car­tog­ra­phy in the Nine­teenth Cen­tu­ry, Forth­com­ing

Vol­ume 6:

Car­tog­ra­phy in the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry

If you buy any of the print­ed ver­sions on Ama­zon, each edi­tion will cost you $400-$500. As beau­ti­ful as the book prob­a­bly is, you’ll like­ly appre­ci­ate this free dig­i­tal offer­ing.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

40,000 Ear­ly Mod­ern Maps Are Now Freely Avail­able Online (Cour­tesy of the British Library)

Behold an Incred­i­bly Detailed, Hand­made Map Of Medieval Trade Routes

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

The World Map That Intro­duced Sci­en­tif­ic Map­mak­ing to the Medieval Islam­ic World (1154 AD)

 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The History of the Earth (All 4.5 Billion Years) in 1 Hour: A Million Years Covered Every Second

in History, Science | December 19th, 2023

From Kurzge­sagt comes the his­to­ry of our plan­et in one hour. They write: “Earth is 4.5 bil­lion years old — which is approx­i­mate­ly the same amount of time it took us to cre­ate this video. We’ve scaled the com­plete time­line of our Earth’s life into our first ani­mat­ed movie! Every sec­ond shows about a mil­lion years of the planet’s evo­lu­tion. Hop on a musi­cal train ride and expe­ri­ence how long a bil­lion years real­ly is.” Below, you can find the time­stamps for the geo­log­ic peri­ods cov­ered in the video.

0:00 Intro
0:51 Hadean
8:04 Eoarchean
13:20 Pale­oarchean
18:35 Mesoarchean
23:51 Neoarchean
27:47 Sider­ian
30:24 Rhy­a­cian
33:42 Orosiri­an
36:58 Stather­ian
39:38 Calym­mi­an
42:15 Ectasian
44:52 Sten­ian
47:30 Ton­ian
51:12 Cryo­gen­ian
52:18 Edi­acaran
53:35 Cam­bri­an
54:17 Ordovi­cian
54:49 Sil­uri­an
55:08 Devon­ian
55:55 Car­bonif­er­ous
56:43 Per­mi­an
57:21 Tri­as­sic
58:02 Juras­sic
58:46 Cre­ta­ceous
59:48 Pale­o­gene
1:00:21 Neo­gene
1:00:38 Qua­ter­nary
1:00:45 End­ing

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The World Map That Introduced Scientific Mapmaking to the Medieval Islamic World (1154 AD)

in History, Maps | December 15th, 2023

Cast your mind, if you will, to the city of Ceu­ta. If you’ve nev­er heard of it, or can’t quite recall its loca­tion, you can eas­i­ly find out by search­ing for it on your map appli­ca­tion of choice. Back in the twelfth cen­tu­ry, how­ev­er, you might have had to con­sult an image of the known world engraved on a 300-pound, six-and-a-half-foot wide sil­ver disk — but then, if you had access to that disk, you’d know full well where Ceu­ta was in the first place. For it belonged to King Roger II of Sici­ly, who’d com­mis­sioned it from the geo­g­ra­ph­er, trav­el­er, and schol­ar Abū Abdal­lāh Muham­mad ibn Muham­mad ibn Abdal­lāh ibn Idrīs al-sharif al-Idrīsī — more suc­cinct­ly known as Muham­mad al-Idrisi — per­haps Ceu­ta’s most accom­plished son.

“Al-Idrisi stud­ied in Cor­do­ba and trav­eled wide­ly as a young man, vis­it­ing Asia Minor, Hun­gary, the French Atlantic coast, and even as far north as York, Eng­land,” writes Big Think’s Frank Jacobs. In 1138, Roger II “invit­ed al-Idrisi to his court at Paler­mo, pos­si­bly to explore whether he could install the Mus­lim noble­man as a pup­pet ruler in the bits of North Africa under his domin­ion, or in Spain, which he hoped to con­quer.” The project that result­ed from this meet­ing, fif­teen years of work lat­er, was “a new and accu­rate map of the world.” In addi­tion to knowl­edge gained on his own exten­sive trav­els, Al-Isidiri con­sult­ed ancient sources like Ptolemy’s Geog­ra­phy and “inter­viewed ship’s crews and oth­er sea­soned trav­el­ers, but retained only those sto­ries on which all were in agree­ment,” leav­ing out the myth­i­cal tribes and fan­tas­ti­cal crea­tures.

In addi­tion to the grand disk, Al-Idrisi cre­at­ed an atlas con­sist­ing of 70 detailed, anno­tat­ed maps called Nuzhat al-mushtāq fi’khtirāq āl-āfāq. That Ara­bic title has been var­i­ous­ly trans­lat­ed — “the book of pleas­ant jour­neys into far­away lands,” “the excur­sion of the one who yearns to pen­e­trate the hori­zons,” “the excur­sion of one who is eager to tra­verse the regions of the world” — but in Latin, the book was sim­ply called the Tab­u­la Roge­ri­ana. Alas, writes Jacobs, “the orig­i­nal Latin ver­sion of the atlas (and the sil­ver disk) were destroyed in 1160 in the chaos of a coup against William the Wicked, Roger’s unpop­u­lar son and suc­ces­sor.” Still, Al-Idrisi did man­age to bring the Ara­bic ver­sion back with him to North Africa, where it became an influ­en­tial exam­ple of sci­en­tif­ic car­tog­ra­phy for the Islam­ic world.

A glance at the Library of Con­gress’ Ger­man fac­sim­i­le from 1928 at the top of the post reveals that Al-Idrisi’s world map looks quite unlike the ones we know today. He put south, not north, at the top, the bet­ter for Islam­ic con­verts to ori­ent them­selves toward Mec­ca. “His Europe is sketchy, his Asia amor­phous, and his Africa man­ages to be both par­tial and over­sized,” Jacobs notes, but nev­er­the­less, he got a lot right, includ­ing such lit­tle-known regions as the king­dom of Sil­la (locat­ed in mod­ern-day Korea) and cal­cu­lat­ing — approx­i­mate­ly, but still impres­sive­ly — the cir­cum­fer­ence of the entire Earth. We might con­sid­er pay­ing trib­ute to Al-Idrisi’s achieve­ments by mak­ing a trip to his home­town (a Span­ish-held city, for the record, at the very tip of Africa north-east of Moroc­co), which seems like a pleas­ant place to spend a few weeks — and a promis­ing start­ing point from which to pen­e­trate a few hori­zons of our own.

via Big Think

Relat­ed con­tent:

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

How Did Car­tog­ra­phers Cre­ate World Maps before Air­planes and Satel­lites? An Intro­duc­tion

The Evo­lu­tion of the World Map: An Inven­tive Info­graph­ic Shows How Our Pic­ture of the World Changed Over 1,800 Years

40,000 Ear­ly Mod­ern Maps Are Now Freely Avail­able Online (Cour­tesy of the British Library)

500+ Beau­ti­ful Man­u­scripts from the Islam­ic World Now Dig­i­tized & Free to Down­load

The Birth and Rapid Rise of Islam, Ani­mat­ed (622‑1453)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

The Ten Earliest Depictions of Jesus: How Art Visualized Jesus in the First Centuries After His Death

in Art, History, Religion | December 13th, 2023

Jesus Christ: as soon as you hear those words, assum­ing they’re not being used exclam­a­to­ri­ly, you see a face. In almost all cas­es, that face is beard­ed and framed by long brown hair. Usu­al­ly it has strong, some­what sharp fea­tures and an expres­sion of benev­o­lence, patience, faint expectan­cy, or (depend­ing on the rel­e­vant Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion) com­plete agony. What­ev­er the details of his appear­ance, even the least reli­gious among us has a per­son­al Jesus in our imag­i­na­tion, a com­pos­ite of the many depic­tions we’ve seen through­out our lives. But where, exact­ly, did those depic­tions come from?

The Use­fulCharts video above assem­bles the ten ear­li­est known images of Jesus in art, orga­niz­ing them in a count­down that works its way back from the sixth cen­tu­ry. Remark­ably, these exam­ples remain imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able even a mil­len­ni­um and a half back, though beyond that point the son of God becomes rather more clean-cut.

“Orig­i­nal­ly, Jesus was always depict­ed with­out a beard,” explains Use­ful­Carts cre­ator Matt Bak­er, “and as we’re about to see, he usu­al­ly just looks like a typ­i­cal Roman from the time of the Roman Empire.” Ancient-Rome enthu­si­asts will rec­og­nize his man­ner of dress, although they might be sur­prised to see him using a mag­ic wand, in one late-third-cen­tu­ry image, to raise Lazarus from the dead.

The hol­i­day sea­son is an espe­cial­ly appro­pri­ate time to con­sid­er where our cul­tur­al con­cep­tion of Jesus comes from, giv­en that he is — at least as some Chris­tians put it — the very “rea­son for the sea­son.” And indeed, among these ten ear­li­est art­works fea­tur­ing Jesus is a sar­coph­a­gus lid inscribed with a clas­sic Christ­mas tableau, which depicts him as a “baby being held by his moth­er, Mary. Stand­ing behind them is, pre­sum­ably, Joseph, and in front of them are the three wise men and the star of Beth­le­hem.” That’s cer­tain­ly a depic­tion of Jesus for all time. As for what depic­tion of Jesus reflects our own time, we can hard­ly stop a cer­tain “restored” nine­teen-thir­ties Span­ish fres­co turned inter­net phe­nom­e­non from com­ing to mind.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Makes Caravaggio’s The Tak­ing of Christ a Time­less, Great Paint­ing?

Behold! The Very First Christ­mas Card (1843)

Did Psy­che­del­ic Mush­rooms Appear in Medieval Chris­t­ian Art?: A Video Essay

Sal­vador Dalí’s Avant-Garde Christ­mas Cards

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast