Chapter 1: Lost Graves
As with many historical figures, we don’t know what Alexander the Great died of. Historically minded doctors have proposed everything from typhoid fever to alcoholic liver disease to strychnine poisoning. Other theories include malaria, an infected wound to his ankle, or Guillain-Barré Syndrome—the last of which might have kept him technically alive but paralyzed for several days after his retinue considered him dead.
Caesar Augustus later visited Alexandria in part to pay his respects to Alexander. After the sarcophagus was opened, Augustus laid a garland on the desiccated body and leaned down to kiss the mummy’s face—at which point, he bumped the nose, and it snapped off. (As one historian noted, “Kissing a mummy entails a certain amount of risk.”) This was beyond awkward, and viewings of the body were limited after that.
Another lost grave that it would be dandy to track down is that of Archimedes. In 222 B.C., Archimedes was murdered by an invading soldier in Syracuse. One hundred and thirty-seven years later, in 75 B.C., the Roman orator Cicero served as quaestor of Syracuse and decided to visit the master mathematician’s burial site. To this dismay, Cicero found it overrun with weeds, brambles, and thorns. But he was delighted to see, on the headstone, a geometrical diagram. It showed a sphere circumscribed by a cylinder, as well as some lines explaining that the volume and area of the sphere was exactly ⅔ that of the cylinder. Proving this result had apparently delighted Archimedes so much that he chose to make it his final words to the world, so to speak. It’s doubtful the headstone still exists, but what a delight it would be to unearth it if it does!
Before the Battle of Bosworth Field, Richard III had almost gotten his hands on Henry Tudor once before, in the summer of 1484. Henry was living in Brittany then, which is now part of France, but at the time belonged to England. Henry’s protector, a duke in France, fell ill, and his near-death threw the area into chaos. Richard took advantage of this to solicit the help of local officials in nabbing Henry, who’d been unwisely squawking about his own claims to the throne. Alas for Richard, a bishop friendly to Henry caught wind of the plan and warned him. Henry disguised himself as a page and took off for France proper, with Richard’s men galloping just an hour behind. How different history would have turned out had they made up that hour!
Here’s another point against the notion that Richard III killed his nephews, the princes in the Tower of London: After they disappeared, their mother the Queen entered into a negotiation with Richard and allowed him to arrange the marriages of her daughters—which seems hard to explain if he really had murdered her sons. Richard also had another nephew with a claim to the throne (through his older brother George), and Richard did nothing to eliminate him. Then again, something did happen—princes don’t just disappear—and it happened to them under Richard’s care. I’d wager he played some role in their disappearance, but we just don’t know.
If you ever need reminding how different archaeology was in the 1800s, read the memoirs of Giovanni d’Athanasi, the tour guide-cum-archaeologist. After finding the untouched tomb of a pharaoh—a major archaeological coup—he matter-of-factly mentions how he and his assistants marveled over the mummy for a moment, suitably awed, then immediately started hacking it to pieces looking for concealed goodies. The reverence for the dead and commitment to scholarship were nil.
Given the lack of success in locating Genghis Khan, it’s possible that his grave doesn’t lie on Burkhan Khaldun (God Mountain) after all. In support of this idea, recall that Genghis Khan’s troops allegedly drove a thousand horses over the grave to obscure it, but that story implies a broad plain, whereas Burkhan Khaldun is a rocky mountain. To add to the confusion, multiple mountains have been called Burkhan Khaldun in the past, so people might be barking up the wrong tree.
You might be wondering how we could identify Genghis Khan’s grave if someone did stumble across it. The location and the potential presence of treasures would be big clues, but a DNA test would clinch the case. Genghis Khan fathered more children than probably any person in history—up to 3,000 by one estimate. Already by 1260, reports indicate that he had 20,000 direct descendants, and today at least 16 million men can trace their paternal lines to him. This means there’s no shortage of living descendants for comparison.
As a side note, a study in 2005 surveyed Y chromosomes across Asia and found that at least 10 other potentiates over the past four millennium have fathered a disproportionately large number of children. But beyond one of them—Giocangga, who founded the Qing Dynasty in China in the 1500s—scientists have no idea who the others might be.
Chapter 2: Lost Cities
As mentioned, after discovering a golden mask at Mycenae, Heinrich Schliemann allegedly telegraphed the King of Greece and declared, “I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon.” As far as scholars can tell, the telegraph doesn’t exist. Whether it’s been lost or whether (as seems likely) it was a legend passed down by Schliemann or his family, no one knows. But he did apparently tell others that he’d found the legendary king’s remains.
Schliemann once claimed he’d visited Mecca undercover during the Hajj, and even had himself circumcised as a precaution if someone challenged him about being Muslim. In reality, he stole this story from Sir Richard Burton, the linguist and explorer, who really did do all this.
The Greeks of the Trojan War era, known today as the Mycenaean Greeks, dominated Greece between about 1700 BC and 1200 B.C. (Achilles, Odyssey, Agamemnon, Menelaus, and other heroes of the Trojan War were all kings of different regions within Mycenaean Greece.) The Mycenaeans gained wealth through trading grain, grapes, and olives, as well as producing luxury goods like olive oil, wine, perfume, and textiles—all the while documenting the flow of goods on clay tablets using Linear B.
The Epic Cycle of lost poems about the Trojan War also mentions other details omitted from Homer’s accounts: that female Amazon warriors came to Troy’s aid, as did Ethiopian soldiers, and that Odysseus was eventually slain by a bastard son he’d fathered during the wandering years of The Odyssey. To me, the most striking detail from these lost poems involves a moment during the war when Odysseus and Diomedes sneak into Troy as beggars to do some recon. At one point Helen herself sees and recognizes them. It’s a heart-stopping moment: they’re convinced she’ll sound the alarm and have them murdered. But Helen simply turns and walks off; she never breathes a word of their presence. Why? Did she still feel loyal to her Mycenaean roots? Was she tired of life in Troy and homesick for Greece? Unless the lost poems turn up, we’ll never know.
Had the lost poems of the Epic Cycle survived, would we revere them today as much The Iliad or Odyssey? For what it’s worth, Aristotle much preferred Homer to the other epics, which he criticized on various grounds: for being more catalogues of events than coherent narratives, or trying to cover too much material. Still, however astute a critic Aristotle was, that’s just one man’s opinion, and literary fashions do change over time.
Long after Troy fell, the town of Locris in Greece would pay homage to an ugly moment from the battle. Locris was the home of the legendary warrior Ajax, who raped Cassandra in a sanctuary in Troy—an act of desecration, on top of the crime itself. As mentioned, the Greeks erected a temple atop the mound of Hisarlık, so Locris began sending priestesses there. They had obligations to pray, clean the temple, and generally atone for Ajax’s disgrace.
To ratchet up the drama of the discovery of Priam’s Treasure, Schliemann told bogus stories of the hardships he and Sophia endured during the excavation. At one point, he recalls huddling in their wooden shack at night, unable to keep lamps lit due to the wind blasting through gaps in the planking. The poor pair had “nothing to keep us warm except our enthusiasm for the great work of discovering Troy,” he said. In truth, as mentioned, Sophia was did not even visit the site until April.
Another thing that got Schliemann in trouble with the reigning Ottoman authorities was his habit of rewarding (read: bribing) workers for bringing any treasures they unearthed at Hisarlık directly to him instead of alerting the government minder on site whose job it was to prevent smuggling.
Although he begged her to join him at many spots, Sophia didn’t like leaving their comfortable home in Athens for a rugged dig site—especially after she was nearly raped once by one of the extra diggers Schliemann had hired. Schliemann rather bluntly mentioned this incident in a letter to his father-in-law, who then dropped dead a week later—almost exactly the time the letter would have reached him. It’s impossible to say whether one caused the other, but if we adopt Schliemann’s romantic view of life, it sure does seem possible.
Although it proved more affectionate than his first marriage, Schliemann’s union with Sophia was still tumultuous. After initially living in Paris together, she hounded him to move back to her native Athens, and when he finally agreed, she all but refused to leave the city. And while they tended to idealize each other when apart, they fought constantly when together. In one letter to her, he snapped, “I have never done you any wrong, not even in a dream,” but then went on to threaten to divorce her, swearing that he’d sign any document put in front of him and falsely confess to “murder, piracy, adultery, and any other crime” just to rid himself of her. (He especially hounded Sophia about her weight: she was a sickly woman, never plump enough to please him.) In all, Schliemann was a needy man emotionally, and even when Sophia made perfectly reasonable decisions—like not immediately handing off their newborn baby to a sitter and coming to join him at some remote archaeological dig—he professed himself hurt and bewildered.
As mentioned, beyond the famous citadel of Troy, archaeologists recently discovered the remains of a town outside the wall. This find expanded the footprint of Troy by fifteenfold, comparable to a jump in size from Kalamazoo to Los Angeles.
As noted, the chapter discusses the possibility that the Trojan Horse was really a reference to Poseidon and an earthquake. And even if the earthquake didn’t destroy the city, the Greeks of the era might have heard about the earthquake and sailed across the sea to plunder while the plundering was good. Perhaps all this was obvious to listeners back then, and we’re too literal-minded nowadays to grasp it.
Throughout the chapter, I hammered Schliemann for his reckless excavation habits, and he deserves the opprobrium. To be fair, however, Schliemann was hardly the most reckless archaeologist working then, and he showed an admirable willingness to adopt new and superior methods as he learned about them. He also did pioneering work in some areas, and did recognize and chart distinct layers of occupation at Troy, a novel concept then. So his work wasn’t all bad.
The Dardanelles Strait that Troy once loomed over remains a strategic and contested waterway today. The infamous Battle of Gallipoli—a bloody campaign that wasted 131,000 lives during World War I—took place across the strait from where Troy sat.
(Due to changing waterways and the accumulation of silt, the site of Troy now sits several miles from the sea, but back in ancient times, the water probably lapped the city walls.)
To be fair, Schliemann was hardly the most reckless archaeologist working then, and he showed an admirable willingness to admit mistakes and change his methods. He also did pioneering work in some areas, and did recognize and chart distinct layers of occupation at Troy, a novel concept then.
Beyond Schliemann’s work, scholars have made other discoveries that bolster the historical credibility of Homer’s tales. Many historians doubted the accuracy of Homer in large part because his poems were transmitted orally for centuries and perhaps not written down until hundreds of years after his death. (The best guess is that this transcription happened in the 500s B.C.) Anyone who’s ever played the game of telephone can imagine the seeming inevitably of people forgetting or garbling details along the line. But while that’s certainly possible, scholars in modern times have recorded examples of oral bards in Yugoslavia, Turkey, and Ireland who’ve memorized poems thousands of lines long and transmitted them with nearly perfect fidelity over multiple generations. So people can transmit poems faithfully, even dense and complicated ones, if properly trained and motivated. And if they could do it, why not Homer, whose blindness would have boosted his memory anyway?
Chapter 3: Lost People
In James Mellaart’s recollection of visiting Anna Papastrati in İzmir, he initially said that she lived with her sickly father in a villa they shared. But after mentioning the man at the start of his tale, Mellaart seems to lose track of him completely.
Mellaart could be a bit of a ham if he had an audience. He liked doing accents, and he sometimes gave lectures in kilts, a nod to his Scottish roots.
Ancient texts never used the term “Sea Peoples”; that’s a modern construction. The most detailed references to these mysterious pirates, from Egyptian sources, refer instead to multiple groups in alliance: the Danuna, Peleset, Shardana, Shekelesh, Tjekker, and Weshesh. (The Peleset later morphed into the Philistines of the Bible.) If each group within the alliance came from a different land and attacked different targets for different reasons, that might explain some of the modern confusion about who exactly they were.
Again, James Mellaart’s splashy magazine article on the Dorak Treasures appeared in late 1959, and for reasons that remain obscure, the Turkish bureaucracy took a few years to begin investigating him. In that lull, Mellaart finally parlayed the enthusiasm from the article into some grants to begin excavating in Turkey. He began with a site called Hacılar, which sprang up circa 5800 B.C. and was destroyed by fire circa 5200 B.C.
He was first clued in to Hacılar after seeing some fascinating pottery for sale at a shop—some oval vessels, some diamond-shaped, some with arms, eyes, noses, and breasts. He traced several rumors about their origins through local coffee houses and finally determined the site of their excavation. Whatever his faults, he was dogged.
The pots soon became hot commodities on the international art scene—as well as prime candidates for forgeries. The sometime jazz drummer turned art smuggler Aydin Dikmen was caught selling Hacılar pots on the black market, and one art expert estimated that 90 percent of “Hacılar” pots out there are fake. Uncomfortably, Mellaart used workers from Hacılar at Çatalhöyük, workers who were later indicted in the smuggling and fraud rings.
Recall from the chapter the story about the fake Nazi eagle brooches. Definitive proof of this fraud emerged only after the war, when a German laborer applied for a job restoring museum artifacts, and blithely submitted a portfolio with several photographs of him manufacturing one of the fakes.
Sadly, no one today knows the location of the original fake, as it was whisked away from the museum where it resided along with hundreds of other artifacts before the Allied army’s advance into Germany. It was then buried at a castle that American troops later occupied. The troops regularly swept the grounds with metal detectors, perhaps hunting for booby traps, so some lucky GI no doubt unearthed it and had himself a souvenir. If so, it’s probably in one of his grandkid’s attic today.
Mellaart seemed like a warm, loving father. When his son Alan was a child, Mellaart took him along to digs at Çatalhöyük. That might have been deathly boring for a child: archaeological sites are not exactly whirligigs of excitement or drama. But to keep Alan entertained, Mellaart dubbed him an officer of the “Skeleton-Cleaning Club” and let him scour and wash old bones—a dubious idea from a professional standpoint, but surely a young boy’s dream.
This makes it all the more poignant that Alan, after letting scholars comb through Mellaart’s papers, allowed the publication of reports that permanently tarnished his father’s legacy. It couldn’t have been easy to grant permission. But Alan showed admirable integrity.
Assuming Mellaart did invent the Yortan tombs and treasures, it’s not clear why he chose Dorak as the setting. Scholars have proposed that Mellaart simply drew up a list of requirements ahead of time, then studied a map of Anatolia to find what he needed: a location east of Troy with access to the sea through lakes and rivers. Dorak was also something of an archaeological terra incognita, meaning there was no evidence to contradict him then. But these same scholars note that if you actually visit the Dorak region, it’s rugged and mountainous and not exactly welcoming: one called it a “godforsaken hole,” and noted that there’s “no reason for a king to settle there.” To be fair, Mellaart merely said the tombs were found there; perhaps the people buried kings in the mountains and actually lived lower down. But it’s another strike against him.
Although he worked far too fast by modern standards, Mellaart did take good notes, and recorded many details that his contemporaries ignored, such as the soil type and presence of seeds and animal bones. He also employed the new tool of radiocarbon dating on remains. So unlike with many archaeologists of earlier generations (Schliemann leaps to mind), his work remains useful for scholars today.
Although it’s not as hilariously sneering as John Calvin’s comment on the vast amount of Mary’s fake breast milk that was for sale, I also enjoy Erasmus’s quip that there were so many splinters of the True Cross floating around (the very wood on which Jesus was strung up) that He must have been crucified on a “whole forest.”
For what it’s worth, one of the British journalists who investigated the Dorak affair later declared her belief that Arlette was innocent of all wrongdoing, and that if Mellaart did fake anything, he did so behind her back. It’s not clear why she maintained this, but in fairness I will note that Mellaart did also, occasionally, type an I for a 1 in letters, although not nearly as often as his wife.
The true extent of Mellaart’s misdeeds might never be known—partly because of the furtive nature of his inventions, and partly because he lost a great number of papers when his in-law’s estate in Turkey burned down after a cooking fire raged out of control in the mid-1970s.
As one final bit on Anna Papastrati, I can’t help but note the perfume of sexual fantasy permeating the story of their encounter. Not to get too psychoanalytical, but Mellaart was something of a horndog—he repeatedly cheated on his wife—and in light of all we know now, the Anna fable reads like the start of a nerdy Penthouse letter.
Chapter 4: Lost Relics
It’s hard to know what to make of Muhammed Ali’s claims to have devoured his enemy’s heart after slaying him. On the one hand, it sounds fantastical, like a rumor run wild. On the other hand, Ali himself insisted he did, and said so on camera. There’s no ipso facto reason to think he’s lying.
Similar to how some early Christian sects revered the snake in the Garden of Eden for giving humankind wisdom, some sects in Ethiopia canonized Pontius Pilate as a saint. After all, his deeds led directly to Jesus’s death and thereby opened up heaven for humankind. It’s hard not to argue that Pilate was an instrument of God’s will to some degree.
As for other odd bits from those very-much-noncanonical gospels, some early Christians swore that Jesus left no footprints when he walked around, which sounds blasphemously close to vampires producing no reflections in mirrors. Another group swore that Jesus not only took on the guise of human flesh but inhabited the body of a snake sometimes. Early Christianity took all kinds.
Until quite recently, a sect that lived in the southern marshlands of Iraq, the Mandeans, venerated Adam and Noah, and revered John the Baptist. But outsiders who assumed they were Christians received a rude shock. In the Mandean gospels, Jesus was portrayed as a wicked necromancer, the “wizard Messiah, son of the spirit of lies,” who “hast lied to the Jews, and deceived man and priest.” The sect had 70,000 people but was largely wiped out in the aftermath the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when most of its followers were forced to flee or convert to Islam.
Although it’s beyond the scope of the book, there’s a roaring debate among scholars about who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. Most suspect that a sect of Jews called the Essenes penned them. The Essenes were not happy-go-lucky people. They scorned pleasure as evil and mistrusted all passion. Adherents owned white robes that they wore until the last filthy scraps disintegrated off their bodies. They also ate all meals in common, and shared all goods communally, like monastic groups. The sticking point about ascribing the scrolls to the Essenes is the fact that they were celibate and disavowed slavery, and yet certain scrolls discuss both sex and selling humans into bondage. In short, we can’t say for sure the scrolls came from the Essenes, but there aren’t any good alternatives.
Again, Jerusalem suffered a few brutal invasions in the years after the Temple relics supposedly returned there, one at the hands of the Persian army. Curiously enough, when salivating over potential loot, the Persian generals coveted not the Temple relics but another supposed treasure there—the True Cross. After an extended bout of torture, a local bishop revealed its hiding place: buried inside a golden box in someone’s vegetable garden. It was carried away in triumph. Magnanimously, though, the Persians later returned the True Cross to the Byzantine emperor, who escorted it to Jerusalem.
Animals have played a surprising role in Palestinian archaeology. Beyond Juma Khalil’s goat helping him find the Dead Sea Scrolls, a hunter discovered another cave full of scrolls when a partridge he’d crippled with a gunshot darted into a crevice that turned out to be a hidden chamber. Dogs have sniffed out scroll caves as well, and one American archaeologist’s mutt discovered the entrance to the long-buried Quarries of Solomon beneath Jerusalem while pawing in the dirt for a bone.
In addition to the Temple relics, historical sources note that, after the Romans interrogated him, the treasurer of the Temple also delivered to them sacred garments and bushels of prized spices like cinnamon.
Chapter 5: Lost Bones
For what it’s worth, after World War II, the Chinese paleoanthropologist Wenzhong Pei concluded that Japanese military officials somehow got their mitts on the Peking Man bones and carried them off as loot. He concluded this in part because the officials suddenly lost interest in searching for the fossils after a few months—proof, to Pei’s mind, that they’d already acquired them.
Again, once word leaked to the wider public that scientists were desperate for any leads in finding the Peking Man fossils, weirdos and grifters came pouring out of the woodwork. One wrote Stephen Jay Gould at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, swearing that he’d heard from someone in China that Franz Weidenreich had taken the real fossils, daubed them with plaster to look like dummies, and successfully smuggled them out of China after all. Why Weidenreich would do so and not tell anyone, he didn’t specify.
Regarding Richard Bowen and Camp Holcomb: They weren’t the only Americans in the area. Indeed, other camps and cities were being conquered all around them during the time Bowen was stationed there. At one point, the marines heard that 45 missionaries had been captured just south of their position. Crazily, Bowen’s superior officer sent several marines off in a boat to rescue them. It seemed like an obvious a suicide mission. And yet, the marines somehow succeeded in rescuing all 45. In fact, they came back with an extra person, a 46th, because one missionary gave birth on the boat ride back. The rescue seemed like a miracle, except they now had a baby in the camp to deal with as well.
Unlike the Peking Man bones, some rare hominin fossils survived World War II. An archaeologist in Java hastily buried several prehuman fossils in his garden during the Japanese invasion of that island, and while the Japan soldiers raided his lab and threw the man himself in a concentration camp, the bones survived intact.
Other fossils were not so lucky. As mentioned, the Tokyo firebombing burned some fossils to ash. The Nazis inadvertently destroyed Neanderthal remains in Czechoslovakia, while an Allied bombing raid destroyed Neanderthal remains in Berlin, as well as other hominin fragments. World War II proved a boon for physicists and chemists, but paleontologists and archaeologists can only moan.
In the 1930s, a Chinese construction worker helping to build a bridge in Manchuria for the occupying Japanese forces uncovered an astounding skull now known as the Dragon Man. It consists of the entire upper cranium of a quasi-human of some sort—perhaps related to the Denisovans or another group of hominins who interbred with human beings. (Its brain was actually slightly larger than the average modern human’s.) Upon discovering the bones, the man did not turn the skull over to his Japanese bosses, but hid it in the bottom of a well instead, where it remained for decades. He finally told his family about it just before his death in 2018. He kept the skull secret so long out of shame for having worked for the Japanese invaders. The wounds were still that raw in China.
Cut marks on other animal bones from Longgushan indicate that Peking Men and Women ate meat, but there’s little evidence they hunted. Instead, the cut marks often overlay tooth marks from predators who gnawed on the bones first, which hints that Peking Folks probably scared those animals away from kills and/or scavenged decaying corpses.
If you’re curious, there’s little chance of recovering DNA from Peking Man fossils, since the fossilization process—which involves turning bones into minerals—also destroys DNA. Other, more recent hominin bones from China could yield DNA, though.
Chapter 6: Lost Civilizations
According to contemporary reports, Alexander the Great played an odd practical joke while leaving India. He ordered his men to excavate massive ditches and build Brobdingnagian beds to leave behind, so that anyone coming across the remains of his camp would think he and his men were giants. Some scholars have dismissed this as a shameful smear on Alexander’s name—they claim he would never do something so juvenile. But I see no reason to dismiss the story on its face.
History has been no kinder to Banerji’s rival, D.R. Bhandarkar, than Banerji was. One modern archaeologist called Bhandarkar’s judgment of Mohenjo-Daro as a site of zero historical interest one of the greatest gaffes in the history of archaeology. Banerji would have been tickled to hear this.
Railroad companies in India often raided ancient structures, including Indus Valley Civilization ones, for bricks to crush into ballast for track beds. Initially, and to his later regret, John Marshall had encouraged this practice: he believed the bricks were quite young, and the more of the “recent” stuff the companies removed, the less work his men would face later to reach the important stuff.
Again, John Marshall had wanted to search for more of the enigmatic soapstone seals before 1921, but was thwarted by labor shortages and funding shortfalls. The labor shortages can be traced to the fact that India provided far more troops to fight in World War I than most people realize, all on the United Kingdom’s behalf. The first Indian troops sailed for France in August 1914, while others were dispatched to Egypt and East Africa to protect colonial interests there. Overall, India provided 877,000 combatant troops and 563,000 noncombatants; of that total, 1.1 million were ethnically Indian. The Indian government also coughed up £367 million pounds, close to £20 billion ($27 billion) today.
Some of the funding shortfalls were tied up with the infamous British opium trade in China. In short, the British grew poppies for opium in India, shipped the drug to China, and pushed it on the people there, creating addicts whose appetite for the drug kept British coffers flush with cash. When China finally demanded a reduction on opium imports, the British Raj lost a huge source of revenue, which nearly led to the zeroing-out of the archaeological budget.
Most Indus Valley Civilization sites exist in modern Pakistan and India, but there’s also one site, Shortugai, in Afghanistan—in fact, almost in Tajikistan. It’s the northernmost output of the IVC.
The Nobel Prize–winning paleogeneticist Svante Pääbo once observed, “There are probably more paleontologists than there are important fossils in the world,” and the same general notion applies to archaeologists and important artifacts. This paucity of data, along with the difficulty of interpreting it at a remove of thousands of years, leaves a lot of room for ambiguity and makes alternative readings of history (and even deliberate misreadings) almost inevitable. No wonder people believe such wildly different things about the past.
The chapter mentioned a marginal but ideologically poisonous theory among ideologues in China that human beings first arose there. No serious paleoanthropologist supports that view today, but to be generous, scientists have had to revise their views recently about the Asian contributions to modern humankind.
For several generations, some scholars opposed the out-of-Africa theory with the so-called multiregional theory, which proposed that two branches of humankind evolved independently in Africa and Asia and later mixed. The multiregional theory was all but dead by about 2010, when genetic evidence suddenly burst onto the scene showing that human beings interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans in Eurasia as they colonized the globe. So Asian hominins did contribute a little DNA to modern Homo sapiens. But it’s a vast gulf between acknowledging a few Neanderthal genes and saying that China is the very wellspring of humankind.
The Chinese government has other gripes with archaeology, too. DNA evidence reveals that the aboriginal natives of Taiwan are not closely related to the ethnic Han people who dominate China today. Instead, the natives of Taiwan are related to Polynesians, and in fact Taiwan likely supplied the brave pioneers who made the first excursions to remote islands in the Pacific Ocean. This lack of ethnic ties to Taiwan infuriates Beijing, which has made “reunification” with Taiwan a top priority.
Revisionist historians, especially in India, have slammed Marshall for penning his 1924 magazine article, since doing so fixed his name in the public mind as the man who discovered the Indus Valley Civilization. This looks all the worse considering that, at the time he wrote the article, Marshall had never even visited Harappa or Mohenjo-Daro.
But I think that’s too harsh on Marshall. It’s true that Banerji and his colleague Daya Ram Sahni have been sidelined historically, but Marshall did all he could to champion them. In the 1924 article and elsewhere, he repeatedly mentioned Banerji and Sahni by name and gave them full credit for their ideas and work. He also had Sahni pen several articles in the first scholarly treatment of the Indus civilization, a book. (As mentioned in the chapter, Banerji’s notes were too sloppy and riddled with errors to include, and his health was too fragile then anyway.) It’s unfair, unjust and rotten that Banerji and Sahni were marginalized, but it wasn’t Marshall’s fault.
One reason that some Hindu nationalists work so hard to trace the ultimate origin of Hinduism to India, and India alone, is that certain sects of Hinduism insist that people cannot consider themselves truly Hindu if they can trace their ancestry back to anywhere except India.
Another awkward fact about the Indus Valley Civilization for Hindu nationalists today is that several important IVC sites that were “Indian” under the British Raj, including Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, actually lie in modern Pakistan, which is heavily Muslim.
Narendra Modi’s ultranationalistic government has popularized the term “Bharat,” the Sanskrit word for India. To him and his minions, “India” means the geopolitical state with its overly of colonial institutions, while “Bharat” means the true, authentic—and strictly Hindu—nation that they want to bring forth.
In the 1540s, the Spanish conquistador Francisco de Orellana sailed the length of the Amazon River and reported seeing dozens of massive cities along the way. Given that later colonial officials found the Amazon largely devoid of people, Orellana was dismissed as a Munchausen fabulist, someone straining for attention. But the presence of huge garden cities beneath the jungle canopies, as revealed by LIDAR, hints that Orellana might have been telling the truth.
LIDAR has also completely rewritten our understanding of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Archaeologists have long known about the temples and religious compound there, but aerial surveys have recently revealed gigantic civilian settlements as well. By one estimate, the overall site had a footprint roughly the size of modern Los Angeles.
As mentioned in the chapter, salty groundwater has damaged several Indus Valley sites, since salt is terribly corrosive to brick. Floods have left salt deposits on exposed structures as well, as the invading water evaporates away. An archaeologist from the 1940s reported walking around on “a brittle shining crust that crushes beneath the step like a satanic mockery of snow,” and things have reportedly gotten worse since then.
Not all Pakistani people disavow IVC sites. Some adore them as a part of their heritage, even if they predate the Muslim era. And some Pakistani nationalists use the paucity of Hindu artifacts at Indus sites to bash Hinduism as an interloper on the subcontinent.
Some Dravidian nationalists have taken their pride in the Indus Valley Civilization a tad too far and made wild assertions. They insist that the IVC was not just contemporary with Mesopotamian and Egyptian cultures, but that the IVC inspired and perhaps even spawned them. In their minds, the pyramids at Giza and Hanging Gardens of Babylon and so much more were all truly Indian, truly Dravidian, at their core.
Some Dravidian apologists also invoked the legendary land of Lemuria, a “lost continent” that was supposedly destroyed long ago by a giant earthquake or volcano. (It’s essentially the Indian Ocean equivalent of Atlantis, boasting of an advanced civilization reduced to rubble.) In their fantasies, the builders of the Indus culture escaped from Lemuria to the subcontinent and started over there.
Chapter 7: Lost Languages
Regarding the 1300-room palace at Knossos on Crete: The people there venerated certain symbols, including the bull and the labrys, a double-headed axe that might have given rise to the word “labyrinth.” More controversially, there’s evidence that the people of Knossos sacrificed and ate children. Put that all together, and you have the makings of a potent myth: a maze-like structure where a half-bull wanders around and eats the poor children who get lost inside.
Writing first appeared in Mesopotamia around 3500 B.C. The oldest Egyptian hieroglyphs date from 3100 B.C., while the Indus Valley script arose around 2500 B.C. Writing emerged in Europe in Crete around 1750 B.C. and China in 1200 B.C. In the New World, the oldest scripts date to 500 B.C. in Mesoamerica.
Scholars divide on whether writing arose independently in multiple places (the majority view) or first arose in some innovative cultural center and spread via diffusion. But given the separation between the Old and New Worlds, it must have arisen at least twice.
Again, in the Rosetta Stone, Ptolemy boasts of putting down a rebellion and “impaling [his] enemies on stakes.” Although a minor affair overall, the rebellion presents some fascinating what-ifs for historians. If the rebels had overthrown Ptolemy, the famous Queen Cleopatra (his descendant) never would have risen to power. Furthermore, some scholars argue that an Egyptian victory would have kept alive the memory of native Egyptian gods such as Isis and Horus. Instead, those deities lost their identities and were quietly subsumed and transformed in the Middle East, a few centuries later, into the Mary and Jesus of Christianity.
Antoine de Sacy’s key idea in the decipherment of hieroglyphs—that the cartouches surrounding certain symbols might indicate proper names, similar to a system once used in Chinese writing—wasn’t wholly original. In the 1760s, a priest and a linguist in Paris had floated a similar theory about cartouches, and even made the connection to Chinese. Unfortunately, the linguist was something of a crank, and got sidetracked working on a wild notion that ancient Egypt had colonized China, and that Chinese writing was the true, “uncorrupted” form of hieroglyphs. Needless to say, this idea went nowhere, and people ignored his genuine insight into cartouches as well.
Beyond putting a box around the text, Chinese scholars could also signify a foreign name by underlining the text or adding a symbol (a determinative) that meant “mouth” (
).
Traditionally, archaeologists traced the first alphabet to around 1100 B.C., at which point hieroglyphs (a non-alphabetic writing system) were two millennia old. Recently, the discovery of some clay cylinders in Syria could push the origins of the alphabet back to 2400 B.C.
In the hieroglyphs reproduced in the book you might notice that “Alksentrs” shares characters with “Brneka”—the squiggly line for N and the falcon for A. But “Brneka” was Young’s decipherment, and he certainly wasn’t sharing result with Champollion. Champollion had to derive everything himself.
Amusingly, one of the most important cuneiform scholars, George Smith (the one who started tearing his clothes off in the British Library), first translated the character Gilgamesh’s name as “Izdubar.” Smith was a brilliant, groundbreaking scholar, but he was nowhere close with that one.
Like so many others mentioned in this chapter, George Smith died young. After countless hours toiling away in libraries, he finally got a chance to join a real archaeology crew in 1876, four years after his breakthrough, when the British Museum sent him on an expedition to Nineveh. He promptly caught dysentery and died in Syria, just 36 years old.
In his three-minute address on the BBC, Ventris admitted he couldn’t decipher every Linear B text yet—the longest sentence he could read was 11 words—but he shared the kinds of things he’d found on different tablets: lists of men and women and their positions (waitress, smith, slave); lists of goods like wheels made of elm or metal; and descriptors of people such as, “three waitresses whose mother was a slave and whose father was a smith.”
Recall from the chapter that, after cracking Linear B, Ventris tried to get back into architecture (i.e., designing buildings) but was reduced to putting together an architectural database instead. However tedious he found the work, the database was innovative stuff for the 1950s. As he once explained, “One might ring up the information center to ask for any information, say, on aluminum schools in Australia.” A clerk at a keyboard would punch in the codes for “aluminum,” “school,” and “Australia,” then generate a report that got transmitted electronically to the person’s office. Early Google.
The most recent undeciphered script that scholars have cracked is Linear Elamite in 2022—a project over a century in the making, and one whose ultimate success depended on the cooperation of some shady and even criminal elements.
The Elamite language arose in roughly 2600 B.C. and went extinct in the mid-300s A.D. It was spoken in a region called Elam in what’s now the southern highlands of Iran, along a tin-trading route. The Elamite kingdom later gave way to Persian kingdoms such as the famed Achaemenian Dynasty that ruled lands from India to Greece and produced legendary monarchs like Cyrus and Darius.
Elamite has no known linguistic relatives, but it’s been recorded in several written scripts. Initially, scribes used what’s called Proto-Elamite. Then, for unknown reasons, some switched to cuneiform, a widespread script featuring lines and triangles. (Cuneiform was used to record multiple languages, just as the Roman alphabet today records English, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, etc.) Other scribes switched from Proto- to Linear Elamite, which flourished between 2300 B.C. and 1800 B.C. Here are the 348 known Linear Elamite glyphs:
(Source: François Desset, Kambiz Tabibzadeh, Matthieu Kervran, Gian Pietro Basello, Gianni Marchesi. “The Decipherment of Linear Elamite Writing.” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und vorderasiatische Archäologie, 2022, 112 (1), pp.11-60. 10.1515/za-2022-0003. hal-04408238)
Fifty-one known texts written in Linear Elamite exist. Most were inscribed into clay or stone tablets, while others appeared on statues or were carved into steps. Alluringly, eight texts were etched onto thick-walled silver beakers that you can’t help but imagine belonged to royalty.
Luckily, a few of those 51 texts appeared on objects alongside other texts written in Akkadian cuneiform—a deciphered language. Unluckily, and unlike the Rosetta Stone, the Akkadian and Linear Elamite texts did not contain the same messages. Still, scholars guessed that certain proper names (gods, kings) probably appeared in both messages, and probably did so multiple times. So they took a census of proper names in the Akkadian texts and began hunting through the Linear Elamite ones for strings of characters of roughly the same length that appeared multiple times.
One advance came from a bilingual tablet in the Louvre. The Akkadian sections mentioned a god named Inshushinak and a king named Puzur-Inshushinak, long names with significant overlap. By hunting through the Elamite sections, they sussed these names out and could thereby assign sounds to several characters. Using such strategies, by the 1920s, scholars could read 9 of the 76 symbols that appeared more than once in the texts. A good start.
But that’s all it proved to be: a mere start. By 2018, nearly a century later, scholars had added just three more signs to the total. Imagine the futility—the despair! Unless something big happened, Linear Elamite seemed doomed to remain undeciphered.
But François Desset was not so easily deterred. Desset is a French archaeologist working at a university in Tehran. He knew that some Linear Elamite texts existed in private hands, including those eight silver beakers. This was not surprising: archaeology has a long, dark history of trafficking in goods, legally or not, and the practice continues in modern times. Desset decided he needed to see the beakers to have any hope of cracking Linear Elamite.
Gaining access would not be easy. One beaker belonged to a Norwegian collector but was seized during a police raid in 2021 as potentially smuggled contraband, putting its legal status in limbo. The other seven belonged to an Iranian art dealer in London once convicted of hiring burglars to steal his pieces so he could collect insurance money. (The conviction was later overturned.) In addition, these beakers had originally left Iran under cloudy circumstances.
There was also the question of whether the vessels were even real. If archaeology is lousy with smuggling, fake artifacts are an even bigger issue. Who’s to say that someone hadn’t beaten some old silver into a beaker shape, etched in some quasi-Elamite characters they looked up in an old book, and smeared the outside with dirt to make it look old? Crooks have pulled off stunts more audacious than that for a quick buck.
Given the vessels’ shady history and guarded owners, Desset had his work cut out for him even gaining access. But he managed to convince all parties to let him have a gander. And his persistence paid off handsomely.
First, chemicals tests determined the beakers were real. The ratios of impurities in the silver matched that of authentic items from the era, and the vessels’ patinas—a coating on the outside that forms from exposure to air or dirt—proved authentic as well. So far, so good.
But would Desset be able to read them? There were no bilingual texts on the beakers, making them harder to crack than the Louvre texts. But Desset guessed they would still contain kings’ names. One king in particular seemed promising to hunt for: Shilhaha. Based on the previous decipherment of Inshushinak and Puzur-Inshushinak, scholars already knew the glyph for “shi.” And the two repeated signs for “ha-ha” were easy to spot.
Using clues like this, along with the dozen previously known symbols, Desset and a team of collaborators managed to decipher 72 common Linear Elamite symbols over a period of three years. That represents roughly 96 percent of all the symbols that appear in the body of inscriptions. (Again, there are 348 symbols overall, but some appear far more commonly than others, the way that e appears more commonly than z in English.) And what did the writing say? About what you’d expect from vainglorious despots. Things like: “Puzur-Inshushinak, king of Awan, [the god] Inshushinak loves him. [The city of] Hůpošan, … he [Inshushinak] burnt, enslaved under him (and) presented to him. Whoever rebels … may be destroyed.” Look on my works, all ye mighty!
Intriguingly, the ancient Elamite empire sat between Mesopotamia and the region of the Indian subcontinent where the Indus Valley Civilization existed. We can read most Mesopotamia languages, and with Linear Elamite now cracked, could that provide clues to decipher the lost language of the IVC? Let’s hope so.
More probably, Linear Elamite could potentially help crack Proto-Elamite, the oldest known undeciphered script, which dates to before 3000 B.C. and contains roughly 5500 signs across 1600 texts. Plus, we do know the number system of Proto-Elamite, although it’s messy. The script used a base-10 system to count live things like animals and people; a sexagesimal system (base-60) to count bread loaves and jars; and a bisexagesimal (base-120) to count grain. Good luck guessing why.
Given that head start, and the large body of texts, there’s reason for hope. But given the elusive nature of the Elamite language and culture, all attempts to decipher it thus far have failed.
Before the Mayan language was deciphered, one amateur who gave it a go was the legendary physicist Richard Feynman, who saw some Mayan inscriptions on his honeymoon in June 1952—the same month Michael Ventris had his breakthrough with Linear B. Feynman loved puzzles, and upon seeing the dots and bars of the Mayan numbering system, he thought to himself, “I’m going to have some fun.” And boy, did he. He recalled spending hour after hour in his hotel room with a pencil and paper, “while my wife climbed up and down the pyramids all day.” He doesn’t mention whether Mrs. Feynman found his behavior “fun” as well.
Given the finite nature of a book, I couldn’t include everything in this one. But one scholar I’d like to mention here was vital to the decipherment of Mayan glyphs—Yuri Knorozov.
Knorozov was the same age as Michael Ventris, born in 1922. He served in the Soviet Army during World War II and helped take Berlin in 1945. Fittingly for this book, he first learned about Mayan glyphs while perusing a book that the Soviet military pillaged from a German library. He then saw an article in which a German scholar declared that no one would ever decipher Mayan. Knorozov saw this as a challenge and got to work.
As mentioned in the book, Jean-François Champollion never laid eyes on the Rosetta Stone, and Knorozov worked under a similar handicap in that he was never allowed to leave the Soviet Union and travel to Central America to study Mayan glyphs directly. Instead, he made do with poor photographs and sketches that were likely riddled with mistakes. Perhaps those handicaps account for Knorozov’s dyspeptic look in the most famous photograph of him: hair slicked back, glaring at the camera, petting a cat like a Bond villain. (But he truly loved the cat, a Siamese named Asya. He often listed her as a co-author on his articles, and fumed when editors struck her out.)
Given the Cold War, Knorozov had to color his works a certain way to get them published—denouncing his counterparts in the West for the “bourgeois idealism” of their work and the lack of class-consciousness. And of course the Westerners called Knorozov a communist stooge right back. But every true student of Mayan glyphs now acknowledges the pioneering work he did. And when the Soviet Union teetered and fell at last, all was forgiven. Knorozov even got to travel to Central America eventually and lay eyes on the glyphs he’d labored so long, and in such obscurity, to crack.
Again, Egyptian hieroglyphs are basically entirely decoded, except for a few so-called hapax legomena—one-off words whose meaning remains obscure. In general, hapax legomena are very difficult to decipher unless the context makes it utterly clear what they’re talking about.
There have been some tentative decipherments of certain symbols in the Indus Valley script. One illustrative example comes from perhaps the world’s leading scholar on the script, Asko Parpola of Finland.
As noted in the book, one very common IVC symbol looks like an upright fish. In many Dravidian languages, the word for fish is meen. Meen can also mean star, so perhaps the fish symbol stood for a star sometimes. This seems reasonable, especially considering that Egyptian hieroglyphs used similar puns where vultures stood for mothers, and so on.
Then come the leaps. In some Indus texts, the fish symbol is marked in certain ways that could alter its meaning. For instance, a line might divide it in half. In early Dravidian tongues, there happens to be a root word pacu that means half or divided. Well, pacu can also mean green-yellow. And for whatever reason, Mercury is sometimes called the “green planet” in old lists of stars from the subcontinent. So a halved fish could be referring to the smallest planet in our Solar System.
Or what about this. Sometimes the fish has a mark arching over the top that Parpola identifies as a “roof.” The Dravidian word mey can mean “to cover a house with thatch.” If you squint, that’s sorta similar to the Dravidian color term may, or black. And Saturn sometimes gets called the “black star” in old astronomical catalogues. So a roofed fish might stand for the ringed planet.
Now, if you’re raising an eyebrow right now and thinking, Maaaybe, but… then that sums up my attitude as well. Lord knows I can’t prove Parpola wrong on any one point. But each assumption builds on another assumption until you’re galloping off into the realm of speculation. It was Parpola whom I quoted in the book, moaning that the lovely Indus Valley seals and their symbols cannot simply be “receipts for fish.” But unless something radically changes, we can’t prove the fish were stars, either.
There is one text from Mesopotamia—a seal written in Akkadian cuneiform, from roughly 2300 B.C.—that gives Indus Valley linguists hope of someday deciphering the script. It shows four people: a dignitary seated on a throne, a bearded dwarf in the dignitary’s lap, and two visitors. Phonetically, the cuneiform text reads “su-i-li-su eme-bal me-luh-ha,” which means “Suilisu, the interpreter of the Meluhhan language.” Based on other records, Meluhha seems to be a village of Indus Valley expats living in the region. No one knows whether Suilisu is the dwarf or one of the dignitary’s visitors, but someone clearly spoke both Akkadian and the Indus Valley tongue. And if that’s the case, maybe there’s an IVC Rosetta Stone out there awaiting discovery.
In the early 2000s, one skeptic of the idea that the Indus script was a written language offered a $10,000 prize to anyone who could find an Indus text longer than fifty letters. He argued that real written languages sometimes string together full sentences and paragraphs, while a mere collection of symbols lacked the power to express thoughts in that manner. So far, no one has claimed the bounty, not even close.
Again, the vast majority of Indus symbols appear on the small stone seals. The Indus people probably carved them into wood as well, and perhaps wove them into tapestries, inked them onto palm leaves, and tattooed or painted them onto their skin. But if so, no such texts survive.
One vexing question about rongorongo from Easter Island (Rapa Nui) is when its scribes developed the script. Did they have it already when they first landed? Did they invent it after arriving? Or did they develop it only after contact with Europeans in 1722, when they likely saw the sailors using written language? Most scholars lean toward pre-contact, but the first recorded sighting of the script dates from 1864—by which point the island’s population was in severe decline and the meaning of the lines had all but vanished from people’s memories. The second possibility—that Easter Islanders arrived with no written language, then developed one—would be especially exciting, because it would represent the last independent invention of writing in human history.
Some Hindu nationalists have also tried, by hook and crook, to retrodate the earliest Indus writing to before 3500 B.C. and thereby crown Indus as the oldest written script in the world. It doesn’t help their case that they’ve been caught forging evidence in papers.
Linguists have also shredded their Sanskrit “decipherments” as vacuous. In particular, one highly publicized schema was so flexible that you could wring virtually any message you wanted out of the text. One symbol in this framework was declared a sort of super-vowel “wildcard” that could stand for a, e, i, o, or u, depending on what you needed.
In other contexts, the decipherers claimed that vowels were implied, similar to Hebrew and Arabic. In that case, the string mn could stand for the Sanskrit words mana, manu, miina, mene, mauna, etc.—words that mean everything from wife to revenge to fish to silence. Plus, they claimed you can read some texts either right-to-left or left-to-right. So if none of the mn possibilities produced something coherent, you could always flip it around to nm and try another dozen words. There was no wrong answer.
Chapter 8: Lost Knowledge
The first library in what’s now the United States was founded in 1638, when a Massachusetts clergyman named John Harvard donated several hundred books to a newly founded university that soon adopted his name. You might have heard of it. Benjamin Franklin founded the first subscription library in the Americas in 1731. The nation’s first public library appeared in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in 1833.
The architect of the lighthouse at Alexandria, a man named Sostratus, pulled a clever ruse to ensure that history gave him credit. He carved his name into the lighthouse’s foundational stone column, then covered it up with plaster. On the plaster, he dutifully carved the name of Ptolemy, to flatter his liege and sponsor. But Sostratus knew that the plaster would crumble over time, leaving his name alone to grace the famous structure.
One note about the date when Caesar landed in Alexandria: According to the Roman calendar, he landed in October. But the Romans didn’t have leap-days then, so the calendar was misaligned with the seasons. Astronomically, he landed in what we’d now call August. Indeed, Caesar probably first heard about leap days while in Egypt, and brought the idea back to Rome—where they promptly became incorporated in what’s now called the Julian calendar.
As mentioned in the text, Caesar’s guards seized and killed the eunuch who’d been plotting against him at a banquet. As for the other conspirators, the general escaped and gathered an army to lead Ptolemy against Caesar and the Romans. But he didn’t get a chance to lead them in battle. Cleopatra had a sister named Arsinoe who snuck out of the palace and joined with the general. But she despised the man and had him executed. Finally, the wily rhetorician survived the war and escaped the region alive, but was later caught and crucified.
Regardless of whether Julius Caesar did or did not burn down the Library at Alexandria, he did cripple the Alexandrine navy and greatly hampered their ability to conduct trade. This marked the beginning of the end for the dynasty there.
According to some ancient sources, a few Jewish scholars in Alexandria tried to rewrite certain Old Testament stories in the vein of Greek epic poems, with mythical tropes and heroes. It’s a pity the works didn’t survive.
Ironically, given the Library of Alexandria’s goal—to collect and preserve all knowledge in the ancient world—its own history is poorly documented and we know few hard facts about it today.
In founding his eponymous city, Alexander wanted to lay it out along a specific axis, so that the breeze off the sea would stream between the buildings and keep the air cool and fresh. While surveying the site beforehand, his engineers used crushed chalk to mark off the future streets. When they ran out of chalk, they substituted flour. Unfortunately, the flour attracted crows, who swept in and gobbled it up. This sight horrified Alexander, who took it as a ghastly omen. But his seers proved quick on their feet. They convinced Alexander that this was actually a good sign because it showed that, um, Alexandria would provide food for many nations. This improvisation assuaged Alexander, who allowed construction to proceed.
You can’t please everyone, and not all scholars were so impressed with the Library of Alexandria. A philosopher named Timon grumbled, “In the populous land of Egypt there is a crowd of bookish scribblers who get fed as they argue away interminably in the birdcage of the Muses.” He viewed them like exotic pets, creatures that had to be cultivated and pampered because they were too fragile to live in the real world. Less cattily, the Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger said, “What is the point of countless books and libraries, whose titles the owner can barely read through in his lifetime? … It is much better to entrust yourself to a few authors than to wander through many.”
One point about the fire near the Alexandria Harbor: Noting the amount of combustible material lying around (grain, papyrus, ships full of pitch), some modern scholars have suggested that the blaze might have reached fire-storm proportions—a fire so big and intense that it creates its own meteorology. Essentially, the hot air above the fires rises so rapidly that it creates a partial vacuum near the ground. Fresh air rushes in laterally from the surrounding area, creating a gale that provides more oxygen to fan the flames and raise the intensity even more. Temperatures in firestorms can reach 3600°F.
To be scrupulous: We don’t know for sure whether Ptolemy VII actually reigned in Egypt, or whether he was murdered before assuming the throne by his uncle, who became Ptolemy VIII. Traditionally, though, both are considered Ptolemaic kings.
The pharaoh Rameses II sponsored a library in ancient Egypt that contained texts inscribed on papyrus, of course, but also palm leaves, bark, ivory, bone, and clay.
Aristotle was reportedly the first person ever to collect books privately, rather than visit libraries to consult them.
Scrolls were such a pain to use that one school in Athens carved its catalogue into the wall for people to consult. Chiseling thousands of letters into stone was apparently less daunting than the hassle of rolling and unrolling a goddamn scroll every time.
To make rolls of papyrus, artisans laid the plant’s long fronds vertically on a board, then laid another layer horizontally on top of that. With a mallet, they pounded the two layers together and let the fronds’ sap adhere them together. After the papyrus dried, they’d brush it with stones or shells to smooth it, then slop on a mix of flour paste and water as a final coating.
One limitation of making papyrus this way is that you can write only on one side. Notice that the two layers of fronds were glued together at right angles to each other, and writing on the back would have required scribes to drag their pens across the grain of the fibers, which didn’t work well. When scrolls were rolled up, the blank back side sat on the outside to protect the writing.
As another distasteful burden, the first head librarians at Alexandria also had to tutor the king’s bratty children. This would have been all the worse because teachers back then didn’t believe in coddling children with the late B.C.s equivalent of Dick & Jane primers. Teachers tossed them right into the deep end with dense passages by Aeschylus and Euripides. I can’t imagine kids enjoyed.
The Great Library did employ the occasional silly pedant. One scholar there, Didymus, supposedly wrote 4,000 scrolls—equal to 150 modern books—and earned the nickname βιβλιολάθας (“book-forgetter”) because even he couldn’t recall everything he’d penned. During an argument once, he denounced some theory as absurd, something only a fool would believe. Perhaps that was true, because a rival ran off to the library, grabbed a scroll, and returned with an essay defending that very position—written by Didymus.
In addition to being richer and more cultured, Alexandria also smelled better than other cities, due to it being surrounded mostly by water, with fresh breezes wafting in from the Mediterranean Sea on one side and the harbor on the other.
I always liked this quote from a historian, on the fragility of knowledge: “The Alexandrian library may have preserved its books, without substantial loss, for up to 600 years. We should not be too confident that we will preserve our own literature for anything like as long.”
With regard to the professor who first tried reading the hidden inner surfaces of the blackened Herculaneum scrolls: He got decent images of the surfaces, but CT scanners work by picking up on differences in density. If you’re scanning something, and two adjacent regions have markedly different densities, the final image will show a sharp contrast between them. In contrast, if two regions have nearly identical densities, the image won’t reveal much detail. Unfortunately, the scroll’s papyrus and ink fell into the latter category, since both were carbon-based organic material. The professor could see the surface, but no writing on it.
The last known resident scholar of the Museum in Alexandria was Theon, who studied music and eclipses, and tried to prepare the definitive text of Euclid’s Elements. Theon died around 405 A.D. But given that the Great Library was distinct from the Museum, it’s not clear whether he was associated with the former as well. Some scholars also suggest that Theon’s Museum was not the original one but was founded later and merely took the same name in homage.
To save time and paper, Hernando Colón developed a form of hieroglyphs—“biblioglyphs”—for his card catalogue, a coded set of symbols that instantly revealed certain data about each book: how many pages it contained, whether it was divided into chapters, whether it was verse or prose, the language, and other traits. For instance, these runes…
…meant that the work in question (here, Thomas More’s Utopia) was a quarto volume written in Latin with a poem as a preface but lacking an index.
If you’re looking to expand your bibliographic vocabulary, here’s a new one. As noted, the recently rediscovered Book of Epitomes from Hernando Colón’s collection was missing its first hundred-plus pages. Book nerds refer to a volume that’s missing its beginning as “acephalous,” from the Greek words for “no head.”
That congressman who first spotted the December 1825 fire in the Library of Congress was Edward Everett, best known today as the featured speaker at the dedication ceremony to open Gettysburg National Cemetery during the Civil War. The follow-up act, you might recall, was President Abraham Lincoln, who delivered his two-minute Gettysburg Address. Everett, meanwhile, one of the most popular orators of his days, spoke for two hours. Barely anyone remembers a word of it now.
Written knowledge vanished in the Americas as well, mostly through colonial destruction. But not entirely. The Aztecs burned all their own histories circa 1430, claiming that those histories were full of “lies”—namely, the inconvenient fact that the Aztecs were not always a dominant warrior clan but spent several centuries wandering around as lowly nomads. Better to burn that history, they reasoned, than admit to it.
The Catholic Cardinal Angelo Mai, born in Italy in 1782, was the Heinreich Schleimann of textual analysis—a brilliant scholar who greatly advanced our knowledge of the ancient world, but only by destroying a lot along the way.
Understanding what Mai did requires some background on ancient texts. The Greeks and Romans used inks made of soot, glue, and water. This worked well for writing but the pigment faded over the centuries. With papyrus scrolls, that made little practical difference, since the material turned brittle over time and crumbled into dust. Parchment was a different story. Parchment was made of animal skin, a more durable material, and the fading of the ink eventually left manuscripts unreadable.
Still, parchment was expensive, too valuable to throw away. So later scribes would reuse the pages. Oftentimes, they washed the pages first with milk mixed with oat bran to hasten the fading of ancient ink. (More violently, Christian scholars sometimes actively scraped the ink off the pages of pagan writers with knives.) After the washing and drying, scholars simply wrote right over the top of the faded pages.
But unless the ink was scraped off, it never truly disappeared. And here, Cardinal Mai sensed an opportunity. In some cases, while holding up old parchments in the archives of churches, he could see ghostly traces of ancient writing. Was there any way to resurrect those letters—any sort of chemical solution that could draw them out? Mai began experimenting with different recipes, and discovered that there was.
The recipe involved oak-tree galls. Certain wasps inject their eggs into the trunks of oak trees. The eggs hatch to produce larvae, and the larvae release chemicals that spur the tree to produce so-called galls—circular bulbs, a mark of irritation. (You might have seen them growing from the sides of oaks before; they look a bit like apples, and they protect the vulnerable insect grubs as they’re developing.) Galls contain tannins, chemicals commonly used in tanning leather. And when galls are crushed and mixed with iron oxides and alcohol, the result is a light-brown liquid. Mai discovered that if he painted this liquid over the surface of ancient parchments—mirabile dictu!—the solution reacted with the ancient ink and turned it dark. Letters and words suddenly stood out, allowing him to read them.
He first applied this method in Milan in 1815. He started with a book that contained the minutes of a Catholic Church council from the mid-fifth century. But after the application of the gall solution, words appeared in the background. Given the crowded layers of text, it wasn’t easy to make everything out. But among the book’s pages, Mai found sections of Juvenal’s Satires, speeches from Pliny, scholarly commentaries on the Gospel of St. John, and copies of letters penned by Marcus Arelius. Quite a haul.
Even better things lay ahead. Mai’s discoveries won him renown and earned him a promotion to Rome, where he assumed control of the Vatican Library. And two days before Christmas in 1819, he applied the gall solution method to a manuscript from the 600s, a copy of St. Augustine’s commentary on the Psalms. After brushing the liquid on, Mai tapped his fingers and waited. Then the hidden letters started appearing. Mai squinted and began reading—and felt his heartbeat quicken in his chest.
He realized he was perusing part of De Re Publica, a work by Cicero; before that point, it was known only in fragments. De Re Publica details the development of the Roman government over several centuries, from the age of kings to the late first century B.C. It’s one of the most important manuscripts we have for understanding the Roman theory of government. And Mai had conjured it out of thin air after just six weeks on the job.
But, if you know anything about the history of writing, there might be little alarm bells ringing in your mind right now. Again, the solution Mai used involved mixing oak galls with iron oxides and alcohol. But if you mix crushed gall and iron oxides not with alcohol but with water, and add some gum Arabic, you can make another useful chemical—iron-gall ink. This was the pigment that most authors in the Western world used to write between the 400s A.D. and the 1800s A.D. Countless works—Shakespeare’s plays, Leonardo’s notebooks, Bach’s cantatas, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Magna Carta and Declaration of Independence—were originally penned with this ink.
Iron-gall ink is initially light tan but darkens over time as the iron reacts with the oxygen in the air and rusts into a dark brown. Which is good for inks, but bad for the manuscripts that Mai investigated. Much like the ink, the gall-alcohol solution darkened over time and turned the surface of the parchment progressively deeper shades of brown, until the entire thing was black. The solution also made the pages brittle and liable to cracking, possibly due to the dehydrating effect of alcohol.
In short, Mai had made a classic Faustian bargain. In the short term, he became the first person in a thousand years to read some classic, once-lost works of literature. But in the long term he destroyed the physical copies of these works and made it impossible for later scholars to have their own cracks at them. The parallels to Heinrich Schliemann could not be clearer.
