Today one can behold the pyra­mids of Giza and feel the temp­ta­tion to believe that the ancient Egyp­tians knew some­thing we mod­erns did­n’t. Just imag­ine, then, what it must have felt like in the 17th cen­tu­ry, when the recov­ery of lost ancient knowl­edge was still very much an active enter­prise. Back then, no less for­mi­da­ble a mind than Sir Isaac New­ton sus­pect­ed that to under­stand the pyra­mids would be to under­stand much else besides, from the nature of grav­i­ty — a sub­ject on which he would become some­thing of an author­i­ty — to Bib­li­cal prophe­cy. The key he reck­oned, lay in an ancient Egypt­ian unit of mea­sure­ment called the roy­al cubit.

“Estab­lish­ing the pre­cise length of the Egypt­ian cubit would allow him to recon­struct in turn oth­er ancient mea­sures, cru­cial­ly the sacred cubit of the Hebrews, and so be able to recon­struct with pre­ci­sion a build­ing that was, to New­ton, of much greater import even than the Great Pyra­mid: the Tem­ple of Solomon,” says Sothe­by’s.

There, a few pages of New­ton’s notes on the sub­ject (burnt at the edges, which leg­end has it hap­pened when his dog knocked over a can­dle) recent­ly sold for £378,000, but you can still view them online. Giv­en that Ezekiel describes the Tem­ple of Solomon as the set­ting of the Apoc­a­lypse — the end of the world being anoth­er sub­ject of New­ton­ian inter­est — “an exact knowl­edge of the Tem­ple’s archi­tec­ture and dimen­sions was there­fore need­ed to cor­rect­ly inter­pret the Bible’s deep and hid­den mean­ings.” It would also reveal the even­tu­al tim­ing of the the Apoc­a­lypse.

New­ton’s belief that “the ancient Egyp­tians pos­sessed knowl­edge that had been lost in the inter­ven­ing cen­turies,” as Smithsonian.com’s Livia Ger­shon puts it, did not set him far apart from main­stream Euro­pean schol­ar­ship at the time. He also thought, Ger­shon writes, “that the ancient Greeks had suc­cess­ful­ly mea­sured Earth’s cir­cum­fer­ence using a unit called the stade, which he believed was bor­rowed from the Egyp­tians. By trans­lat­ing the ancient mea­sure­ment, New­ton hoped to val­i­date his own the­o­ry of grav­i­ty,” as he ulti­mate­ly did, though not, per­haps, in the man­ner he first expect­ed to. We must, it seems, con­sid­er the pyra­mids, along­side the Philoso­pher’s stone, the South Sea Com­pa­ny, and toad-vom­it plague cures, as anoth­er exam­ple of the great genius’ occa­sion­al­ly exces­sive enthu­si­asms — albeit an unusu­al­ly pow­er­ful one.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Stag­ger­ing Genius of Isaac New­ton

Isaac New­ton Con­ceived of His Most Ground­break­ing Ideas Dur­ing the Great Plague of 1665

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

Isaac Newton’s Recipe for the Myth­i­cal ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ Is Being Dig­i­tized & Put Online (Along with His Oth­er Alche­my Man­u­scripts)

How the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids Were Built: A New The­o­ry in 3D Ani­ma­tion

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Bud­dhism goes way back — so far back, in fact, that we’re still exam­in­ing impor­tant evi­dence of just how far back it goes. Take the exhib­it above, which may look like noth­ing more than a col­lec­tion of fad­ed scraps with writ­ing on them. In fact, they’re pieces of the labo­ri­ous­ly and care­ful­ly unrolled and scanned Gand­hara Scroll, which, hav­ing orig­i­nal­ly been writ­ten about two mil­len­nia ago, ranks as one of the old­est Bud­dhist man­u­scripts cur­rent­ly known. You can read the scrol­l’s sto­ry at the blog of the Library of Con­gress, the insti­tu­tion that pos­sess­es it and only last year was able to put it online for all to see.

“The scroll orig­i­nat­ed in Gand­hara, an ancient Bud­dhist kind­gom locat­ed in what is today the north­ern bor­der areas of Afghanistan and Pak­istan,” writes the Library’s Neely Tuck­er. “Sur­viv­ing man­u­scripts from the Gand­ha­ran realm are rare; only a few hun­dred are known to still exist.” That realm “was under the rule of numer­ous kings and dynas­ties, includ­ing Alexan­der the Great, the Mau­ryan emper­or Ashoka and the Kushan emper­or Kan­ish­ka I,” and for a time “became a major seat of Bud­dhist art, archi­tec­ture and learn­ing. One of the region’s most notable char­ac­ter­is­tics is the Hel­lenis­tic style of its Bud­dhist sculp­tures, includ­ing fig­ures of the Bud­dha with wavy hair, defined facial fea­tures, and con­toured robes rem­i­nis­cent of Gre­co-Roman deities.”

Writ­ten in the Gand­hari vari­ant of San­skrit, the “Bahubud­dha Sutra” or “Many Bud­dhas Sutra,” as this scroll has been called, con­sti­tutes part of “the much larg­er Mahavas­tu, or ‘Great Sto­ry,’ a biog­ra­phy of the Bud­dha and his past lives.” Here Tuck­er draws from the schol­ar­ship of Richard G. Salomon, emer­i­tus pro­fes­sor of San­skrit and Bud­dhist stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton, anoth­er insti­tu­tion that holds a piece of the Gand­ha­ran Bud­dhist texts. Many more reside at the British Library, which acquired them in 1994. The Library of Con­gress bought its Gand­hara Scroll from a British deal­er more recent­ly, in 2003, and it arrived in what Tuck­er describes as “an ordi­nary pen case, accom­pa­nied by a hand­writ­ten note: ‘Extreme­ly frag­ile, do not open unless nec­es­sary.’ ”

So began “sev­er­al years of thought and plan­ning to devise a treat­ment strat­e­gy,” an effort that at one point saw the Library’s con­ser­va­tor prac­tic­ing “her unrolling tech­nique on a dried-up cig­ar — an item that only approx­i­mates the dif­fi­cul­ty of work­ing with a com­pact­ed birch bark scroll.” Then came “grad­ual humid­i­fi­ca­tion over a few days, care­ful unrolling by hand with pre­ci­sion tools on a sheet of inert glass, fol­lowed by plac­ing anoth­er sheet of glass on top once the scroll was com­plete­ly unrolled,” a “dra­mat­ic and silent affair” described in greater detail by Atlas Obscu­ra’s Sab­ri­na Imbler.

The result was six large frag­ments and more than 100 small­er ones, togeth­er con­sti­tut­ing rough­ly 80 per­cent of the scrol­l’s orig­i­nal text. You can see all those frag­ments of the Gand­hara Scroll, scanned in high res­o­lu­tion, at the Library of Con­gress’ web site. This will nat­u­ral­ly be a more edi­fy­ing expe­ri­ence if, like Salomon, you hap­pen to be able to read Gand­hari. Even if you can’t, there’s some­thing to be felt in the expe­ri­ence of sim­ply behold­ing a 2,000 year old text com­posed on birch bark through the dig­i­tal medi­um on which we do most of our read­ing here in the 21st cen­tu­ry — where inter­est in Bud­dhism shows no signs of wan­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Breath­tak­ing­ly-Detailed Tibetan Book Print­ed 40 Years Before the Guten­berg Bible

The World’s Largest Col­lec­tion of Tibetan Bud­dhist Lit­er­a­ture Now Online

2,000-Year-Old Man­u­script of the Ten Com­mand­ments Gets Dig­i­tized: See/Download “Nash Papyrus” in High Res­o­lu­tion

Google Dig­i­tizes Ancient Copies of the Ten Com­mand­ments and Gen­e­sis

Google Puts The Dead Sea Scrolls Online (in Super High Res­o­lu­tion)

Archae­ol­o­gists Think They’ve Dis­cov­ered the Old­est Greek Copy of Homer’s Odyssey: 13 Vers­es on a Clay Tablet

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.