Royal Gift

It may rate as the grandest facsimile atlas of all time: the Monumenta Cartographica Africae et Egyptiae of Prince Youssouf Kamal of Egypt. Sixteen volumes of reproductions of old maps and texts concerned with historical geography, in a limited edition of 100 deposited in the great libraries.

There's some good news. A few weeks ago, the National Library of Spain's digitization program scanned three of its fascicles as the bound volumes are designated. You can now turn some of the pages of this fascinating book from home, a privilege previously only open to the royalty who got suchlike as gifts, or billionaires who could bribe their way to interloan it :-).

The links are below. Why the BNE is omitting parts of the series (perhaps it does not own them?) is unclear. I introduced Prince Kamal's unique research and publishing project in a post in May where his motivations are considered. Certainly nothing of its kind will ever be attempted in print again, since today digital is far easier.

The 16 fascicles by number, highlights indicate the three online:

1    ; Époque avant Ptolémée (pp 1-107)
2,1 ; Ptolémée et époque Gréco-Romano
2,2 ; Ptolémée et époque Gréco-Romano
2,3 ; Ptolémée et époque Gréco-Romano (pp 362-480)
2,4 ; Atlas antiquus et index
3,1 ; Époque arabe (pp 482-583)
3,2 ; Époque arabe
3,3 ; Époque arabe
3,4 ; Époque arabe
3,5 : Title? pp 946-1072
4,1 ; Époque des portulans, suivie par l'époque des découvertes
4,2 ; Époque des portulans, suivie par l'époque des découvertes
4,3 ; Époque des portulans, suivie par l'époque des découvertes
4,4 ; Époque des portulans, suivie par l'époque des découvertes
5,1 ; Additamenta : Naissance et évolution de la cartographie moderne
5,2 ; Additamenta : Naissance et évolution de la cartographie moderne

This Oldest Map is a Beauty

The oldest surviving Latin diagram of the world was rediscovered by accident in the Vatican Library in the 1920s. Youssouf Kamal (1882-1965), an Egyptian prince and aesthete, had financed a huge undertaking to publish a collection of ancient maps depicting Africa fully or obliquely. While combing through the Vatican, the scholars stumbled on a lavish, full-page colored spread, folios 64v-65r in Vat.lat.6018, which had been completely overlooked in all previous historical research.

A few weeks ago I digitally plotted a simpler diagram of similar age which is now held by the archives of Albi, France and has been recognized as a UNESCO world heritage treasure. The Vatican Mappamundi was drawn in about 760 or 770 CE and has been a good deal more difficult to plot, since the photographic images compress the central part into the gutter of the book binding.

This is the first-ever color plot to be published. Zoom in and you will see that the diagram has south at the top and therefore Europe at bottom right. The scribe evidently turned the parchment as he worked and wrote place names from every side.

Six cities are represented by star-shaped symbols: Constantinople, Rome, Alexandria, Carthage, Jerusalem and Babylon. The big island at left is Sri Lanka and at lower right are the British Isles. The meaning of the "fourth continent" at top right has been much debated. The crescenty things on the rim are thought to represent sun and moon.

The current received wisdom is that this is a Christian adaptation of a diagram which had been used to teach (secular) geographical knowledge in late antique schools in the Latin West. The Vatican Mappamundi is probably contemporary with the original of the 12th-century Tabula Peutingeriana, a Latin diagram in roll form which shows the whole known world as a very long strip. My view is that abstract diagrams (of which both are fine examples) are an invention of late antiquity, not earlier.

For this digital plot I used the Vatican Library's scans, uncurling the center part with the lattice deformation tool in Inkscape. The transcriptions are mostly Francois Glorie's, while a black and white engraving by Menéndez Pidal helped decode some of the ambiguities. The color adaptation is my own. The SVG file will soon appear in my Library of Latin Diagrams where you will be able to read it with a tablet computer and rotate it to your heart's content.

Now, back to the discoverer. Prince Youssouf belonged to a dynasty of Albanian origin who ruled Egypt until the army-led revolution of 1952. Through polygamy it was a large family and Youssouf held back from the jostling for leadership, instead founding seats of learning and cultivating the arts. Such was his wealth that he built three palaces and financed culture.

He seems to have been interested in two major topics: the depiction of North Africa in ancient cartography and the contributions of Islamic learning to cartography. That is why he financed the Monumenta cartographica Africae et Aegypti, a catalogue of facsimile images of manuscript maps.

He is listed as author, but the research and compilation was done by Frederik Caspar Wieder (1874-1943) of the Netherlands. Only 100 copies of the 16-part series published in Cairo between 1926 and 1951 were ever printed, with a few sold to collectors and most given away to libraries and institutions. It was never digitized, meaning it is a very hard-to-access resource.

Chekin, L. S. (1999). Easter tables and the Pseudo-Isidorean Vatican map. Imago Mundi, 51(1), 13–23. DOI 10.1080/03085699908592900.

Edson, E. (1998). Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World. London: British Library.

Englisch, B. (2002). Ordo Orbis Terrae: Die Weltsicht in den Mappae mundi des frühen und hohen Mittelalters. Akademie Verlag.

Glorie, F. (1965). Mappa Mvndi (Vat. lat. 6108). In P. Geyer, O. Cuntz, A. Francheschini, R. Weber, L. Bieler, J. Fraipont, & F. Glorie (Eds.), Itineraria et alia geographica (pp. 456–466). Brepols.

Menéndez Pidal, G. (1954). Mozárabes y asturianos en la cultura de la Alta Edad Media, en relación especial con la Historia de los conocimientos geográficos. Boletín de La Real Academia de La Historia, 134, 137–292.

Uhden, R. (1935). Die Weltkarte des Isidorus von Sevilla. Mnemosyne, 3rd series, 3, 1–28

Fresh Life for Roman Map

The most famous map in the world is the Tabula Peutingeriana, a Roman chart of roads and seas. In 2007, UNESCO placed it on its Memory of the World Register, a global list of 301 documents (as of 2013) which are irreplaceable to comprehend our recent and distant past.

The 12th-century sole copy of the chart is locked in a library vault in Vienna, Austria. So the only decent access you'll get is either to look up a high-resolution photograph (see Richard Talbert's Map Viewer) or check out the the first fully digital edition. The latter, which is my work, arrived online today, and it's #free.

With the digital edition, your browser can:

• search for any of the 3,000+ names (press Ctrl + F)
• use live links (signaled by a hand cursor) to get more info
• zoom in (press Ctrl and mouse wheel) without loss of quality
• reveal manuscript errors (hover cursor over yellow boxes)

Back in March I foreshadowed this edition, which has been the work of several months and is based on the phenomenal earlier work of Talbert and Tom Elliott (@paregorios). The credits line says:

• Richard Talbert and Tom Elliott (transcription, projection, colors, original typology); 
• Jean-Baptiste Piggin (replot, object modelling, interpretational overlayers, revised typology).

The live links lead to the interpretative database which Richard Talbert very generously placed online as a free resource several years ago. The colors of the lettering and roads are not medieval or ancient, but my own choice to make the document more accessible. Other alterations to give it fresh life include reducing spaced-out lettering to make it easily legible. For the sake of a compact file and fast loading I am not reproducing the little vignettes that show towns, temples and spas.

Here is the link to the Piggin Peutinger Diagram and here is the table of contents for my site. Download your own copy to preserve this astonishing artifact of the fourth-century Roman Empire.

Other online Tabula Peutingeriana resources you can consult are:

• Konrad Miller's 1887 lithograph plot of the Tabula, Castori Romanorum cosmographi tabula quae dicitur Peutingeriana / Die Weltkarte des Castorius genannt die Peutingersche Tafel (Ravensburg: Otto Maier) which can be seen in the original sections at http://www.doria.fi/handle/10024/90222 or stitched into a panorama at http://archive.org/details/Tabula_Peutingeriana_complete
• René Voorburg's 2011 Omnes Viae: a mapping of the TP onto a GIS map (Google Maps) of the world: http://omnesviae.org/

Digital Humanities

The introduction to my text-archaeology project has just been revised, and now I need your input on how I could make it even better. The site should be like the ruins of Pergamum, a place any literate tourist can explore unaided, enjoying the pleasures of discovery at every corner. Here's the new introductory text:

The fifth-century Great Stemma was probably drawn on a roll of papyrus of standard height (30 centimetres say) and at least as long as the bed you sleep in. My reconstruction proposal, the Piggin Stemma, obviously can't be viewed on a smartphone or any other digital device unless you move it around. So scroll left and right; zoom in to read words (and zoom out to see the full expanse); use the built-in controls.

... If the Romans had had computers, this is how they would have read their scroll-format books on them.

As an example of the digital humanities, the Piggin Stemma invites you to explore beyond first sight and enjoy the pleasures of discovery. This innovative chart was rebuilt with a coding language named SVG. It enables me to hide a guidebook in 12 overlays that remain invisible until you need them. ...

It's not a film. Once you are ready, you will have to tap some controls to make the interactive layers appear. Each right button makes a new effect visible: the corresponding left button makes the overlay go away. Try it. The overlay entitled "Damage" even includes an animation ... showing how roundels were moved. ...

A reassurance: you came here because you are attuned to graphic desígn and the psychology of visualization. You will see here hundreds of Hebrew names you may not know. I have translated them from Latin into English to make them less alien, but don't be overwhelmed by names or glosses. You are on a guided tour of an exotic place: late-antique graphics technology. Don't be sidetracked by the late-antique theology (unless that is your passion).

First up, just concentrate on how a fifth-century designer uses circles to visualize kinship and depict eras of time. The leftmost flag ... of each overlay offers you enough context to get started on your walk through this text-archaeology excavation.

If you like this new method of presentation, and I am sure you will, recommend the site to your friends. Send them [the] URL: http://piggin.net/stemmahist/envelopereconstructor.htm Don't send them a direct link to the SVG file, or they may get baffled.... Enjoy the tour.

Are my ideogram pictures above coherent? Does anything about the project puzzle you or remain unexplained? Do you have any other digital humanities examples you can point me to that present historic charts interactively with overlays? One way to reply is to use the comments box below.

Vatican Euclid Online

Probably the most famous mathematical manuscript in the world, the Vatican Euclid, arrived online on 2016 February 15, marking a major moment in the democratization of culture as well as a key milestone in the donor-funded efforts to digitize the 83,000 manuscripts at the Vatican Library in Rome.

Ivor Bulmer-Thomas argues that Euclid (who lived about 300 BCE) is the most celebrated mathematician of all time on account of the precocity and volume of his work. The 9th-century Vatican manuscript, Vat. gr. 190, is the only codex in the world containing Euclid's work without major adulteration.

Every other surviving manuscript contains alterations by the 4th-century-CE mathematician Theon of Alexandria, who altered Euclid's language, interpolated intermediate steps and supplied alternative proofs, separate cases and corollaries. As the only non-Theonian witness, Vat. gr. 190, now bound in two parts in Rome, is one of the most precious cultural treasures of humankind.

Here is its Pythagorean Theorem, Book I Proposition 47, perhaps the most famous proof in all mathematics, on folio 39r. You could understand it without knowing a word of Greek:

The purity of the Vatican Euclid was discovered by the mathematical historian Francois Peyrard in 1808 and the codex became the basis of Heiberg’s definitive edition of Euclid's Elements.

Its arrival online overshadows everything else in the following list, even the unique Vatican Pappus, Mathematical Collections Books 2-8, Vat. gr. 218, by another Greek mathematician of vast stature, the 4th-century-CE writer Pappus. Every other Pappus in the world depends on this incomplete Rome copy, and as you can see, Book 1 is forever lost. Here's a diagram from fol. 38v:

When the Pappus figured in the Rome Reborn exhibition, Anthony Grafton described it as the "last important work in Greek mathematics". As Jeremy Norman comments, it is sometimes the only source of information about Pappus's predecessors. But the thunder of even its release is stolen by the Euclid. Both were apparently sponsored by the Polonsky project.

Here is the full list of new uploads at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, which brings the posted total on Digita Vaticana to 3,852.

1. Barb.gr.39, Cyril of Alexandria, Lexicon
2. Barb.gr.70,
3. Barb.gr.281,
4. Ott.gr.85,
5. Ott.gr.181,
6. Ott.gr.232,
7. Ott.gr.233,
8. Ott.gr.237,
9. Ott.gr.249.pt.1,
10. Ott.gr.249.pt.2,
11. Ott.gr.260,
12. Ott.gr.335,
13. Ott.gr.338,
14. Ott.gr.352,
15. Ott.gr.365,
16. Ott.gr.366,
17. Ott.gr.367,
18. Ott.gr.373,
19. Ott.gr.379,
20. Ott.gr.380,
21. Ott.gr.385,
22. Urb.gr.15,
23. Urb.gr.61, Theophrastus, Historia Plantarum and De Causis Plantarum
24. Urb.gr.136,
25. Urb.gr.137,
26. Urb.lat.143, Bonaventura
27. Urb.lat.203, Plato's Timaeus in Latin, translation
28. Urb.lat.243, Medical, Joannis filii Serapionis
29. Urb.lat.261, Archimedes, Sphere and Cylinder etc, in Latin, with Archimedes at his desk on folio 102r: Surely that's not an electric reading lamp he is snipping on in ancient Syracuse?
    
     
    But a smart historian just explained to me that he is holding up a compass, and the green "lampshade" is actually a windowsill.
30. Urb.lat.305, Valla Laurentius, on Latin style
31. Urb.lat.310, Attic Nights, Aulius Gellius
32. Urb.lat.318, Cicero, Letters
33. Urb.lat.328, Cicero, with commentary by Boethius
34. Urb.lat.360, Constantius Antonius, commentary on Ovid
35. Urb.lat.383, Cassiodorus
36. Urb.lat.387, Giannozzo Manetti, works
37. Urb.lat.400, Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, in Latin translation
38. Urb.lat.406, Pope Pius II, bulls
39. Urb.lat.407.pt.2, Pius II, writings
40. Urb.lat.433, Eutropius, De gestis romanorum
41. Urb.lat.438, Iustini M. Iuniani
42. Urb.lat.450, Boccaccio, Genealogia Deorum (1360), a kind of study edition, with a 60-page alphabetical index of gods which Colluccio Salutati commissioned from Domenico Bandini (c.1335-1418) (discussed 1927 by Wilkins, who uses the 1879 Hortis list of Genealogia manuscripts). Compare this to Boccaccio's second autograph of the same work, online at Florence. Urb.lat.450 features Boccaccio's famous leaf-form stemmata:
    
43. Urb.lat.452, Boccaccio, etc, descriptions of Italy
44. Urb.lat.493, Genealogies of noble families of Castille and Navarre, in Spanish, dated 1620; these are textual, not diagrammatic
45. Urb.lat.495, Cafari de Caschifellone
46. Urb.lat.496, Bartholomaeus Fatius, De rebus gestis ab Alfonso I neapolitanorum rege
47. Urb.lat.501,
48. Urb.lat.510,
49. Urb.lat.514,
50. Urb.lat.525,
51. Urb.lat.556,
52. Vat.ebr.144,
53. Vat.gr.190.pt.1, Euclid, Elements, see above
54. Vat.gr.190.pt.2, Euclid and Theon, see above
55. Vat.gr.218, the Vatican Pappus, St Louis description.
56. Vat.gr.333, the Vatican Book of Kings, a richly illustrated 11th- or 12th-century manuscript which is often resorted to as a document of Byzantine warfare and customs. Here is the first washing of a newborn child (Solomon) (top), compared with a similar scene (not sure what baby) from Vat.gr.746, fol 59r (below):
    
    
57. Vat.gr.351,
58. Vat.gr.460,
59. Vat.gr.666,
60. Vat.gr.746.pt.2,
61. Vat.gr.788.pt.A,
62. Vat.gr.788.pt.B,
63. Vat.gr.853.pt.1,
64. Vat.gr.853.pt.2,
65. Vat.gr.1522,
66. Vat.gr.1594, this is the most famous and best of all the manuscripts of Ptolemy's Almagest, originally entitled "Μαθηματικὴ Σύνταξις" (Mathēmatikē Syntaxis). The work was written by the great Alexandrian scientist in the 2nd century and this is a 9th-century copy. The work describes the apparent motions of the stars and planets. See a description in the Rome Reborn exhibition.
67. Vat.gr.1666,
68. Vat.gr.1851,
69. Vat.gr.2249,
70. Vat.lat.34,
71. Vat.lat.46,
72. Vat.lat.131,
73. Vat.lat.141,
74. Vat.lat.157, Nicholas of Lyra, Postillae with fine coloured maps of temple
    
75. Vat.lat.159, Nicholas of Lyra, Postillae
76. Vat.lat.169, Dionysius Areopagita
77. Vat.lat.191, Tertullian, Against Marcion and other works
78. Vat.lat.208, Origen, homilies, and Gregory Nazianz
79. Vat.lat.214, John Scotus Eriugena and Didymus
80. Vat.lat.218, Lactantius, Divinarum Institutionum, De Ira Dei and some Augustine of Hippo
    
81. Vat.lat.219, Lactantius, Divinarum Institutionum
82. Vat.lat.231, Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica
83. Vat.lat.247, Eusebius, Chronological Canons
84. Vat.lat.4817, Angelo Colocci autograph?

It remains to note that one item was withdrawn from the site on Feb 12:
Borg.copt.109.cass.VII.fasc.65.2

At the same time, the ranks of the Palatina library online grew, not on the BAV website, but on the portal in Heidelberg, Germany which has the first right as sponsor to issue these online:

1. Pal. lat. 712 Manuale collectum de summa confessorum (Raymundi de Pennaforti) (14. Jh.)
2. Pal. lat. 718 Sammelhandschrift (15.-16. Jh.), important as a source of the Tractatus de usuris of Antoninus of Florence (1389-1459) See note 
3. Pal. lat. 717 Sammelhandschrift (14.-15. Jh.)
4. Pal. lat. 713 Fr. Baetholomei de Chaimis de Mediolano ord. minorum, Interrorogatorium siue confessionale (1477)
5. Pal. lat. 716 Michaelis Gass: Archimusici Principis Ludovici Palatini tercii directorium omnium eorum quae per tocius anni curriculum in sacello illustrissimi Principis Palatini canuntur et aguntur (1533)
6. Pal. lat. 707 Iohannis (Friburgensis): Lectoris idem opus integrum (14. Jh.)
7. Pal. lat. 705 Sammelhandschrift (15. Jh.)
8. Pal. lat. 704 Mag. Raymundi (de Pennaforti), Summa de poenitentia et de matrimonio (14. Jh.)
9. Pal. lat. 702 Summa de vitiis (13.-14. Jh.) 
10. Pal. lat. 724 Sammelhandschrift (15. Jh.) 
11. Pal. lat. 731 Digestum vetus (14. Jh.)

As I noted in my previous post, interest is now growing in the original diagrams which the Greek mathematicians drew and in undoing the editorial vandalism which Heiberg and others did to these figures.

Professor Ken Saito of Osaka, the leading figure in this work of diagrammatic reconstruction, kindly sent me earlier this month an offprint of his very important and difficult-to-find 2006 article in which he launched this returning to the source for Euclid's Elements. His precise plots of the Euclidean diagrams continue to be published on his website, GreekMath.org, and each of his surveys naturally always begins with the Vatican Euclid as its prime source. If you get puzzled, the pagination in his two PDFs is as follows:

• The Diagrams of Book II and III [and of Book IV and of Book VI] of the Elements in Greek Manuscripts: pages 39-80; 161-196 
• The Greek Manuscript Diagrams of the Elements: Book VI, Book XI, Book XII, Book XIII: pages 71-179

Of the other five Euclids used by Heiberg (Pinakes has a much longer list), most are already online:

• B: Oxford, Bodleian, D'Orville 301; (avoid http://www.claymath.org/euclids-elements, which has a lousy interface that has been broken these past two or three years)
• F: Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut.28.03
• V: Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. Phil. gr. 31 Han, alternatively XXXI, 13 (Nessel) = philos. Gr. 103 (Lambert)
• B: Bologna, Bib. comunale dell'Archiginnasio 18-19; not digitized, see listing
• P: Paris, BNF, gr. 1042 and gr. 2739

If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to Digita Vaticana. [This is Piggin's Unofficial List 39.]

Bulmer-Thomas, Ivor. “Euclid: Life and Works.” Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 1971. Online.

Heiberg, Johan Ludvig. Euclidis Elementa. 6 vols. Leipzig: Teubner, 1883. Online.

Murdoch, John E. “Euclid: Transmission of the Elements.” Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 1971. Online.

Saito, Ken. “A Preliminary Study in the Critical Assessment of Diagrams in Greek Mathematical Works.” SCIAMVS 7 (2006): 81-144.

Heron's Automatic Machines

Among ancient diagrams, none exercise greater fascination for modern people than the sketches of amusing little self-driven machines by the first-century engineer Hero of Alexandria (or Heron to use the Greek form). These diagrams were effectively discarded and redrawn from scratch in the Nix-Schmidt edition of the Automata of 1899 (downloadable as Hero, vol I at WilbourHall.org).

Heron's designs are especially interesting because the motions of the gadgets are semi-programmable, thanks to cords that unroll from rods with reversing windings. With our refound interest in how the antique world visualized, it is naturally desirable to see what the manuscript tradition tells us about Heron's own drawings, rather than what a 19th-century scholar did to "correct" them.

This return to the sources has come a long way, especially in regard to diagrams of ancient geometry. Professor Ken Saito (who is one of the stars of Netz and Noel's The Archimedes Codex) compares plots of Euclidean geometrical diagrams from the different manuscripts in profound detail, both on his website GreekMath.org and in SCIAMVS, the journal where he sits on the editorial board. But on Heron, there seems to be less available. The dean of antiquities bloggers, Roger Pearse, threw out the question some years back about where the manuscripts are and recently returned to the question.

From Francesco Grillo, I learn that 39 manuscripts survive of the Automata or Περὶ αὐτοματοποιητικῆς (‘On the Making of Automata’). Ambrosetti (below) offers a database of them. Schmidt used the following four of them for his 1899 edition:

• A cod Marcianus 516, 13th century, not online
• G cod Gudianus 19, 16th century, not online
• T cod Taurinensis B.V.20, dated 1541, not online
• M cod Magliabecchianus II. III 36, 16th century, not online

Only one of these, A, was listed as of 2016-02-13 on the page dealing with the Automata at Pinakes, the best online springboard to Greek manuscripts. As far as I can tell, M is an item in the collection of Antonio Magliabechi (1633-1714) at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze but I cannot find a catalog link to any shelf-mark Magl. III II 36 there. Grillo indicates that T and M are now regarded as the 'worst' branch of the tradition.

I actually had far more difficulty matching Schmidt's drawings to those in the manuscripts than I was expecting to have. After some fumbling, I have gathered here images of one of Heron's devices, a kind of mechanical dimmer switch which allows a flame to gradually flare up, which turns out to be Schmidt figure 107. Comparing this to the manuscripts, one sees how peremptory he was in simply inventing a whole new figure:

1. BAV: Barb.gr.261  
   
2. BL: Harley 5605  
   
3. BL: Harley 5589
   
4. BL: Burney 108 
   

It will be interesting to see if the whole manuscript tradition is uniform in the way these diagrams are formed. Not yet online are:

1. ÖNB 
2. BNF
3. BNE, MSS/4788
4. BSB graec. 431
5. BSB graec. 577 
6. Copenhagen 

Also of interest is the 1589 Venice edition of Heron in Italian by Bernardino Baldi (BSB) printed before some of the above manuscripts were made. It ends before the figure above.

Here is some of the literature I have consulted:

Ambrosetti, Nadia. “Cultural Roots of Technology: An Interdisciplinary Study of Automated Systems from the Antiquity to the Renaissance.” Milano, 2010. PDF.

Asaro, Peter. “Hero (2003).” An attempt to make a Heron device work. Accessed February 21, 2013.

Drachmann, A G. “Hero of Alexandria.” Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 2008. Online.

Grillo, Francesco. “Hero of Alexandria’s Περὶ αὐτοματοποιητικῶν: The Collation of the ‘Worst’ Manuscripts.” Abstract.

McCourt, Finlay. “An Examination of the Mechanisms of Movement in Heron of Alexandria’s On Automaton-Making.” In Explorations in the History of Machines and Mechanisms: Proceedings of HMM2012, edited by Teun Koetsier and Marco Ceccarelli. Springer, 2012. DOI.

McKenzie, Judith. “Heron of Alexandria, Mechanikos.” In The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, C. 300 B.C. to A.D. 700, 323–25. Yale University Press, 2007.

Murphy, Susan. “Heron of Alexandria’s ‘On Automaton-Making.’” History of Technology 17 (1995): 1–44.

Sharkey, Noel. “The Programmable Robot of Ancient Greece.” New Scientist 195 (July 7, 2007): 2611.

Tybjerg, Karin. “Hero of Alexandria’s Mechanical Geometry.” Apeiron 37, no. 4 (January 2004). doi:10.1515/APEIRON.2004.37.4.29.

———. “Wonder-Making and Philosophical Wonder in Hero of Alexandria.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 34, no. 3 (2003): 443–66.

Vitrac, Bernard. “Faut-il réhabiliter Héron d’Alexandrie?” Les Actes du Congrès de l’Association Guillaume Budé l’homme et la Science à Montpellier, 2008, 01–04.

If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more posts.

His and Hers

Our latest investigation concerns a curious courtroom scene possibly drawn by Nicolò da Bologna in Urb.lat.160 at folio 5r. I introduced this manuscript in November 2015 when it was brought online by Digita Vaticana. The St Louis catalog discusses the codex in some detail, as does Stornajolo's Codices Urbinates Latini, Codices 1-500, pp 166-167.

The caption under the scene says "Bonifatius". The miniature appears on the opening page of the Liber Sextus, a compilation of decretals issued under the authority of Pope Bonifatius (Boniface) VIII in 1298. The text on the two columns of this manuscript page has not been fully set up in print since 1582 but can be easily read in a reproduction in the UCLA Digital Collections here at the UCLA Library.

The manuscript dates from about 1380, but the anonymous St Louis cataloger thinks the art may be from 50 years later, noting "The Liber Sextus appears to be written around the same time, but its decoration was probably executed in the 15th century, around 1420-1440, in northern Italy, perhaps Ferrara."

Who is the man in the blue tunic on the far left of the image? My interpretation of the scene is that it shows Bonifatius at centre consulting his law book. Kneeling in front of him are two advocates. The advocate at right is pointing to the woman and is apparently speaking on her behalf. The left advocate appears to represent the man in the blue hat. The setting is Renaissance Italy.

It would be plausible to suppose the two litigants are husband and wife, as couples were frequent parties in canonical courts. The other four seated men in red hats appear to be part of the panel of judges. They are evidently listening to what is being said. The room is low and has a daytime garden visible through the four windows, but that is probably an artistic framing device only, not a real location.

What is going on? The man in blue on the left is scowling. The woman has drawn up her skirt to expose her hem, her blue-slippered foot and an ankle. Perhaps she is avowing she has nothing to hide. @zippyman818 notes that her white/blue garment is the opposite in decoration to the man's blue/white combination at the hem, which must symbolize some irreconcilable difference.

Both man and woman are wearing blue slippers. They are both clearly well-off. And here is the big question: what is the man holding?

It's black, it has a bulb at the bottom left end and it looks as if it is about 60 centimetres long. @zippyman818 and I have been having some fun in a Twitter exchange (expand from this one to see the whole conversation) trying to work out the puzzle.

The first consideration is whether it might be a gun. The first firearm in Europe was the arquebus, and I read that it was employed in the army of Matthias Corvinus, which might get us back to a date of 1460. But this image long predates that, and in any case the object does not have a hook, which is essential to cope with gun recoil (and muzzle loading), and the bulb cannot have a function in any firearm.

Another early answer was a horn, but there is no mouthpiece on the thing. Again the bulb is the puzzle. It's not a klaxon, as rubber bulbs had not been invented. Besides why would a rich litigant take a horn to court? @zippyman818 has also suggested a long-handed chisel or a herb cutter with a mezzaluna blade, but again, why would the pope let you bring one into his courtroom?

[A completely different approach proposes that the object is ceremonial in nature. The arguments are set out in the comments below. Armin argues that it is a sconce, a kind of torch (in case the trial goes on past nightfall?) Ilya Graubart is proposing a mace (if medieval popes had armies, perhaps they had maces or sceptres as well). These arguments would suggest that Mr Blue Tunic is not a litigant, but maybe the pope's majordomo or some other papal panjandrum.]

It has been suggested the black thing might be an artistic emblem identifying some historic person who sought justice from the real-life jurist Bonifatius, or a speaking stick entitling the person to hold the floor, but Blue Tunic's mouth is shut. Or it might be a ritual object like an aspergillum or some entirely forgotten symbol.

My own tendency is believe it is an item of evidence connected to a marital lawsuit, perhaps a sword scabbard. Is the wife being accused of adultery with the sword's owner perhaps? At this point we become fanciful. But clearly, when the miniature was drawn, this object was immediately recognizable and perhaps it even elicited a laugh from the Renaissance reader.

Prudentius and the odd word

Sometimes we get asked what use old European manuscripts are. The simple answer is that we need them to recover the literature and the histories of antiquity, the medieval period and the Renaissance, and we need to compare lots of manuscripts if we are to establish the most faithful editions of those texts.

Sometimes, though, when you are busy with a topic, a particular manuscript suddenly expands in importance and seems like missive from the past directed at you personally.

I am writing a book about the invention during antiquity of node-link diagrams. The book mentions the probable Latin term for such a diagram, stemma. This is not a book about linguistics, but you need to make sure there is no unseen linguistic evidence lurking there.

As often happens in research, both journalistic and scholarly, you can spend a whole day combing the forest for a catch and come home empty-handed.

In this case, there is no trace of anyone living during antiquity proper who calls one of these diagrams a stemma. My book will simply skip the whole matter, because it will not be an academic thesis and will only concentrate on the fruitful and interesting things I found. What I did discover about the word, I lodged as a bunch of notes in a new page on my website. I don't need such notes, but I routinely archive such things because they might help someone else some day.

What that page says is that stemma meant:

• a garland of leaves, straw, wool or other materials (in Greece)
• a niche in a Roman palazzo containing paintings of noble ancestors (in the Republic)
• a snob's genealogy (under the Empire)
• ancient glories (in literary vocabulary in Late Antiquity)
• a twig-like node-link diagram as drawn by lawyers (in 620 CE)

In a poem, Hymnus Epiphaniae, Prudentius, who is among the most obscure of Latin poets, uses a formula, apostolorum stemmata, to refer to 12 rocks set up next to the River Jordan.

The Hymnus Epiphaniae can be conveniently read in full at the Perseus Digital Library if you read Latin.

The Australian coast of Victoria has got a famed set of rocks, the Twelve Apostles, off the shore of the Port Campbell National Park, and South Africa has a Twelve Apostles Range, but Prudentius (348-about 405) seems to have beaten both to the name. Perhaps pilgrims did once get such a feature pointed out to them in the Jordan. [Late addition: It seems Prudentius is referring to the biblical Book of Joshua, the writer of which says 12 stones were taken from the Joshua in the river and placed nearby and are "still" there.]

Why does the poet call the 12 rocks a stemma of the apostles? Could he have possibly meant:

• an ancient glory of apostles?
• a node-link diagram of apostles?

[Late correction: A recent translator and commentator on the poetry, Gerard O'Daly, thinks the proper meaning is simply "pedigree".]

As it happens, a bunch of manuscript releases by Digita Vaticana this week (here's my news item) includes a manuscript of Prudentius's poetry. Cilian O'Hogan says it is actually an important one:

Vat Reg 321, an important MS of Prudentius, now digitised http://t.co/DRL5Cv5fwZ (via @JBPiggin) pic.twitter.com/WEKbVtoFHh
— Cillian O'Hogan (@CillianOHogan) March 24, 2015

What makes codex Reg. lat. 321 so interesting is that its 10th-century editor has packed it with glosses and annotations. What I liked was that the editor seemed to have been baffled by the odd word "stemmata" too. He glossed it with the meaning "ordines" written above it here.

I'm still not clear about this. A similar word does show up in one description of the Great Stemma, Genealogia ab Adam usque ad Christum per ordines linearum. But I doubt if Prudentius had diagrams in mind. More likely the poet simply imagined those rocks in a orderly row or circle to represent the rock-like perpetual authority of the church. Stemma (ancestry) was a way to say in the language of Latin poets that the rocks were a precursor to the apostles [as Daly argues].

All very arcane, and from the manuscript, I knew that an unknown editor of 1,000 years ago had been baffled and had also done his best to unpuzzle Prudentius's odd word.

Ladder to Heaven at the BAV

Among the more remarkable items to be admire in the 13 codices placed online March 23 by Digita Vaticana is Ross.251 containing the Ladder of Divine Ascent by the 7th-century Greek-speaking monk John Climacus.

I am told this is Lenten reading among Greek-speaking Christians. There are some vivid illuminations in this Greek manuscript giving you a good idea of how medieval readers imagined the long steady climb through 30 steps of the ladder, assisted by angels if you were doing it right:

This crop of releases takes the tally of Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV) digitizations so far to 1,865. After this Lenten issue, I wonder if they are planning any Easter presents for us?

1. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.H.56, possibly from the collection of Cardinal Jacopo Stefaneschi (c.1270–1343).
2. Ott.lat.3119, engravings of Roman personalities of the 18th century.
3. Reg.lat.321: a fine old 10th-century manuscript of the poems of the Latin author Prudentius (348-405).
4. Ross.251, with the ladder to heaven (above). Pinakes tells you which folios to consult for the Scala Paradisi of Iohannes Climacus.
5. Ross.555, a beautiful Hebrew codex with four fine Italian miniatures. From Evelyn Cohen I read that this is Jacob ben Asher's legal treatise, the Arba'ah Turim, and that the images depict a synagogue scene, animals being slaughtered according to Jewish ritual, a wedding and a courtroom scene. Here is the synagogue, where men and women seem to be mixed:
   
6. Urb.gr.2, the Urbino Gospels in Greek with gold-leaf illuminations. Here is a most unusual Nativity composition and washing of the newborn, both at folio 20v:
   
   
7. Urb.gr.162
8. Urb.lat.346, Commentary on the Aeneid, 15th-century copy, attributed to Tiberius Claudius Donatus, but believed in fact to be the work of Suetonius.
9. Urb.lat.508, poetry from Duke Federico's collection. This item figured in the Rome Reborn exhibition at the US Library of Congress and St Louis University, where the catalogue identified it as the Camaldulensian Disputations by Cristoforo Landino and Anthony Grafton noted of the image below: "This portrait on the inside cover shows Federigo, duke of Urbino, standing behind a parapet holding a book, gazing intently at his companion, who is probably to be identified with Cristoforo Landino."
   
   Federico always appeared thus: check another image at his old home.
10. Vat.gr.344
11. Vat.gr.699, the Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes, one of the believers in a flat earth in the face of majority educated opinion in even his own day. This is a 9th-century illuminated copy with copious imagery.
12. Vat.gr.746.pt.1
13. Vat.lat.14933, Carlo Labruzzi vedute, possibly a volume inadvertently missed last week.

 If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to Digita Vaticana. [This is Piggin's Unofficial List 7.]

Treasures of Urbino

Here's a list of the latest rush of newly digitized manuscripts at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. This release of 52 items was uploaded late on March 12 and brings the total number of Vatican Library works available on the internet to 1,839.

The oldest treasures this time are from the chapter library (Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.) which has only been part of the BAV since 1940.

Nearly half the items this week come from the great Renaissance library created by Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino, who died in 1482 after a rambunctious life as a brutal mercenary general (he never fought for free) and refined man of culture (he had his own team of scribes at Urbino and a library considered the greatest in Italy after the pope's).

A couple of centuries after his death, that envied library was integrated into the Papal Library at the Vatican in 1657. We are now all privileged to be able to read Federico's exquisite books online. Here is a fine illuminated capital "S" from one of them, Urb. lat. 348, in a passage explaining the word stemmata.

1. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.A.13, Augustine of Hippo, sermons
2. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.B.63, Bolognese missal, 14th century, with lustrous miniatures that are now attributed to a painter known as Pseudo-Niccolò. See his Risen Christ and an image described as defence of the book. See listing Ebner.
   
   
3. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.C.103
4. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.D.173, Augustine of Hippo?
5. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.D.200, Nicholas of Lyra’s Quaestio de Adventu Christi and Contra Judaeos
6. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.E.15
7. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.F.16, liturgical (Salerno Pontificale) with wonderful initials, including the sun and moon:
   
8. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.G.39
9. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.G.42
10. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.G.43, possibly the Elucidarium of Honorius Augustodunensis, 12th century
11. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.H.26, Chinese?
12. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.I.17, autograph? Gregory XVI (1837)
13. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.I.18.
14. Borgh.14, liturgical
15. Borgh.95, 14th century, legal, Arnoldus de Augusta
16. Borgh.109, Thomas Aquinas, Summa
17. Borgh.110, Thomas Aquinas, Summa
18. Borgh.120, Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones
19. Borgh.154, Tancredus, 1185-1236, Opera, 13th-14th century
20. Borgh.194, Tuscan translation of the poem De rerum natura by Lucretius (97-55 BC); check out the 2014 book by Ada Palmer on its influence in Renaissance Italy.
21. Borgh.195, 18th-century European politics
22. Borgh.230, Iohannes de Lignano, 1320-1383 Lectura super decretales
23. Borgh.326
24. Borgh.343
25. Borgh.367, Il Governatore Politico e Christiano by Mezentius Carbonari
26. Borgh.377, Scripturales
27. Pal.gr.192, Hippocratic text
28. Reg.lat.525, hagiography
29. Reg.lat.554, universal chronicle, description of Holy Land, copy of BN lat. 4892?
30. Urb.ebr.3
31. Urb.ebr.13
32. Urb.ebr.32
33. Urb.ebr.35
34. Urb.ebr.36
35. Urb.ebr.41
36. Urb.ebr.42
37. Urb.ebr.43
38. Urb.ebr.44
39. Urb.ebr.45
40. Urb.ebr.48
41. Urb.ebr.49
42. Urb.ebr.50
43. Urb.ebr.52
44. Urb.ebr.53
45. Urb.ebr.54
46. Urb.ebr.55
47. Urb.ebr.56
48. Urb.lat.19, Psalter
49. Urb.lat.260, Columella's Roman-era treatise on agriculture (frontispiece below).
    
    This is one of about 40 copies deriving from Poggio Bracciolini's rediscovery of the work in Fulda, Germany, while he was in the north for the Council of Constance exactly 600 years ago. Poggio probably stole it, as it ended up in Milan in the early fifteenth century, where is it now Biblioteca Ambrosiana L.85 su; summary. At the end of the BAV copy is a fragment of Augustine, Retractationes.
50. Urb.lat.348, Renaissance: poems, commentary on Horace: initial at the top of this post.
51. Urb.lat.349, Homer in Latin
52. Vat.lat.3836, Sermons of Augustine of Hippo, Leo the Great and others.

As always, if you see an unmarked gem here, or can explain to us the significance of one of these items to scholarship, or can point out an error, please add a comment in the box below. Most of these items have been discussed in scholarly literature that is not mentioned in the BAV's own very sketchy online bibliographies, but often with variant shelfmarks. Scholarly publications use a great variety of abbreviations to denote such manuscripts. For Arch.Cap.S.Pietro. above, try alternate searches using forms such as "cod. ..." or "cod. cap. ..." or "arch. cap. s. petri ..." or ACP.

If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to Digita Vaticana. [This is Piggin's Unofficial List 5.]