Time Trials

Regular readers of this blog will know that a big topic hereabouts is the origin of timelines generally, and in particular how humans got the idea of construing synchronous series of events graphically by picturing them on parallel horizontal tracks.

Here is how it is done in the fifth century in the Great Stemma, with a track at top representing kings of Judah, at centre kings of Samaria and below it, the ancestors listed by the Gospel of Luke:

It is helpful here to use certain fundamental cognitive distinctions laid out by Rafael Núñez and Kensy Cooperrider not long ago in a review paper.

Humans can use (abstract) space to map the passage of time in three distinct fashions in their gesture and speech: projecting deictic time (from where "I" stand), setting an order of events in sequence time (distinguishing the placement of "landmarks" in time), and comparing one or more temporal spans. Scholarly discussions of time sometimes muddle these. As two authors remark:

Philosophers, physicists, and cognitive scientists have long theorized about time –along with domains such as cause and number – as a monumental and monolithic abstraction. In fact, however, the way humans make sense of time for everyday purposes is, as in the case of biological time tracking, more patchwork.

There is no reason to suppose that this typology in the mind transfers easily to a drawing. In fact, the two authors point out that investigating space-time mappings in non-English-speaking cultures by asking people to demonstrate with cards and paper may be handicapped by the fact that this "material realization " needs to itself be learned first:

... arrangement tasks are not well-suited for use in such populations, because they presuppose familiarity with materials and practices that, in fact, require considerable cultural scaffolding.

A similar point was made 20 years ago by Mary Bouquet, who rebuked anthropologists for asking Portuguese people unfamiliar with stemmata to draw their kinship bonds this way.

So what are the tracks in the Great Stemma doing? They don't tell us anything about the Latin concept of deictic time (though that has been very expertly figured out by Maurizo Bettini, who shows the Romans faced the past with their backs to the future), whereas the three tracks seem to demonstrate a Latin tendency to set out a sequence of time from left to right, in accord with the Latin writing system, and they do indeed suggest that Latin-speakers would have compared durations of temporal spans in a spatial way when speaking of them.

It could well be argued that the invention of this type of timeline was inspired by gesture, though I have considered other origins such as game-play. The spans are not exactly calibrated with one another, but match one another in lengths more precisely than a speaker would ever intend to do in gesture.

An intriguing aspect of the Núñez and Cooperrider paper is its mention of the spiral of time perceived in some cultures. The Great Stemma might have something going on in this respect where it loops up at the end and flips, with the script gradually rotating and terminating in a plaque with several upside-down sentences:

These are all aspects that require further study and analysis.

Bettini, Maurizio. Anthropology and Roman Culture: Kinship, Time, Images of the Soul. Translated by John Van Sickle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1991.

Bouquet, Mary. ‘Family Trees and Their Affinities: The Visual Imperative of the Genealogical Diagram’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2, no. 1 (1996): 43–66. doi:10.2307/3034632.

Núñez, Rafael, and Kensy Cooperrider. ‘The Tangle of Space and Time in Human Cognition’. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17, no. 5 (2013): 220–29. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2013.03.008.

Timelines Go 3D

It's always interesting to see where fifth-century educational techniques are getting us to, 1,600 years later. A couple of modern items from a single issue of the journal Instructional Science, arguing the agelessness of the timeline technique, caught my eye as I was doing some literature research for the philosophical/psychological section of my book.

Sadly, as one might expect, neither article mentions the origins of this venerable technique in the Great Stemma, its fresh exploitation in the Compendium of Petrus Pictaviensis and its great spread in the nineteenth century.

Prangsma et al. found that kids find it easier to learn history when they have both a timeline and a text, and younger children cope better if there are little pictures on the timeline as well.

Foreman found primary and secondary children learn best with a static series of images, but university undergraduates could also remember the correct order of events with the help of a "fly-through" in a virtual-experience game on a computer screen. For some reason, Foreman does not list this article on his academic publications tally at the University of Trier in Germany but does list a couple of more recent items dealing with virtual reality timelines in 3D.
 

Foreman, Nigel, Stephen Boyd-Davis, Magnus Moar, Liliya Korallo, and Emma Chappell. ‘Can Virtual Environments Enhance the Learning of Historical Chronology?’ Instructional Science 36, no. 2 (2008): 155–173.

Prangsma, Maaike E., Carla AM Van Boxtel, and Gellof Kanselaar. ‘Developing a “Big Picture”: Effects of Collaborative Construction of Multimodal Representations in History’. Instructional Science 36, no. 2 (2008): 117–136.

Farewell Hippolytus

In the past day I have been re-analysing some of the data which I examined and proceeded to describe two years ago in a blog post entitled Setback or Progress. At that time I was trying to discover the source of manuscript data which portrayed different ethnicities of the western world as tribal descendants of the biblical patriarch Noah. I was able to establish that this data was not part of the original version of the Great Stemma.

In the course of that research I took a closer look at the Chronicle (about 235 AD) of Hippolytus of Rome and formed the mistaken impression that Hippolytus had been a believer in a certain inflated and baroque chronology which had been abstracted from the biblical Book of Judges by an early Christian or Jewish chronographer.

Finding one's way among the subtle differences in Antique chronography (which is only preserved in fragmentary manuscripts based on repeated revisions of the original works) is an immensely tedious and complex affair which has never been the main focus of my research. The modern scholarly analysis of this material often employs elaborate arguments which magnify the faintest of evidence to arrive at some kind of usable conclusion.

In this case, much of the argument turns on how many phases make up the Book of Judges chronology and which phases were included. My Studia Patristica article, which is already in press, states:

Distinctively Hippolytan elements in the account can be found for example in the period from Joshua to Eli inclusive, which is divided by the Great Stemma into 22 political phases. Hippolytan features here include the rule of an apocryphal judge Shamgar (6th phase) and his alter ego Samera (21st). Both phases were witnessed as present in the Great Stemma when it was seen by the author of the Liber Genealogus in 427, whereas their existence had been firmly ruled out by Eusebius. This would suggest that the author was either hostile to or ignorant of Eusebius.

However I have now read and re-read Rudolf Helm's 1955 edition of the Hippolytus Chronicle (particularly pages 164-167) and understood that (at least in the editor Helm's view), Hippolytus divided the period (Joshua to Eli inclusive) into only 20 phases and excluded the rule of an apocryphal judge Shamgar (6th phase) and his alter ego Samera (21st). These are tiny distinctions, but are enough to derail the argument that Hippolytus was involved.

Farewell Hippolytus: you are no longer on the Great Stemma team.

I have duly changed the page on my website that deals with the matter. In the Studia Patristica article, which can no longer be altered, I would now want to say that there are elements in the diagram which clash with the theories of Eusebius and plainly come from an older, as-yet unidentified chronographer. The misidentification of that chronographer as Hippolytus is a very minor issue, and does not in any way weaken the main thrust of the article: that the Liber Genealogus is a description of an early version of the Great Stemma diagram.

The necessary conclusion after dumping Hippolytus is that some other chronological tradition influenced the Great Stemma. Perhaps the chronographer involved was Julius Africanus, perhaps not. I am not intending to research the issue further. If my error proves to be the stalking horse for a future scholarly article by a specialist, so much the better. I would welcome scholars in the history-of-chronography field taking up the matter and giving it a thorough review.

Number Lines Not Innate

A publication in the past week in PLoS (Núñez, Rafael, Kensy Cooperrider, and Jürg Wassmann. “Number Concepts Without Number Lines in an Indigenous Group of Papua New Guinea.” PLoS ONE 7, no. 4 (April 25, 2012): e35662. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0035662) offers some interesting new data that relates to the origin of timelines. In essence, Núñez and his fellow researchers have found a people in New Guinea who do not arrange numerical quantities in a strictly calibrated way along a line because they do not actually work with a mental number line. There is a news release by Inga Kiderra too.

A more readable account of the ideas behind the research can be found in an article published last year: Núñez, Rafael. “No Innate Number Line in the Human Brain.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 7 (2011): 651. http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~nunez/web/Nunez_JCCP11.pdf.

This is highly suggestive of the environment in which the Great Stemma was written, and circles were arranged in approximate fashion in left-right space without being calibrated to a scale. Núñez argues that conceptual mappings onto space are culturally and historically determined and rejects the nativist hypothesis that they are hard-wired into the human brain.

My hypothesis is that the 5th-century Latin author of the Great Stemma mapped time onto the space of a long papyrus roll, but felt no compulsion to finely calibrate it as a number line. We have an author with a high classical education who is comparable to the Yupno people with grade-school education that Núñez and his fellow researchers encountered in New Guinea. Both the author and the Yupno are carrying out mapping operations, but have not yet entered a cultural environment where they are obliged to do this in a strict way on pain of being labelled uneducated if they do not.

A Latin Counterpart to Eusebius?

Six years ago, Roger Pearse led a magnificent distributed effort to create an English translation of the Chronological Canons of Eusebius. This was a work in Greek, now mostly lost, that we know through a Latin translation by Jerome and through Armenian translations from the Greek. The translation of the Canons is freely available as two (very large) HTML tables, beginning here on Tertullian.org or mirrored at CCEL here. They may take a while to download to your screen. The Latin of Jerome has also been tabulated on the same websites.
The chronological canons explore synchronisms in the histories of the cultures arrayed between Rome and Persia, keyed to biblical history starting at the birth of Abraham.

So what has this got to do with the Great Stemma? Well, it seems that both are essentially about the same thing, synchronisms. Eusebius created what was in a sense the world's first spreadsheet, with a patient scribe doing the autofill of dates in sequence down the left column. Eusebius then filled in events across the rows from the chronicles of the various civilizations he knew, Graeco-Roman and barbarian. Anthony Grafton in Christianity and the Transformation of the Book explores how revolutionary this method of visualizing information was. One point he might have made, but I don't think he did, is the importance of blank space in this content. The blanks are a key to reading the tabulation. There's a certain tension about it, because Eusebius obviously knew a lot of the content was rubbish, but he puts it in and lets the reader judge.

Now, the Great Stemma, in my view, must have done the same thing, but working left to right, and takes another step forward technically by eliminating the scale of years.
I've now posted a hypothetical reconstruction (link) of how the chronographical elements in the Great Stemma might have looked.

How was it progress to simplify Eusebius? The chart shows the reader the various synchronisms in the Bible: the descendants of Seth with the offspring of Cain, the offspring of Nathan with those of Solomon, the kings of Judah with those of Samaria, the founders of Rome with the Persians. But it finds a way to mix the resolution of the matches. In some cases it can state in a gloss to an exact year what is synchronous. In other cases it gives just a rough estimate of synchronicity, give or take a few hundred years. The author was probably teaching his students that the offspring of Cain were wiped out by the Great Flood, but thanks to his page design he does not need to say exactly when Lamech the Boaster lived or when Noema introduced her a capella music: he just draws them as a series of roundels crawling along the foot of the page till they stop. Big fat roundels don't need to be precisely placed. So in a sense, the Great Stemma is the first mind map: information in bubbles. If it had any kind of exactitude, this was probably confined to a separate tabulation. Perhaps the Ordo Annorum Mundi is that tabulation. We'll have to keep looking into this.

Eusebius obviously had the same issue to contend with. In fact he explains that some of his data is less exact, with a resolution in the order of decades only, not years, or at least that is one of the implications I draw from the following remark. Here is Grafton's translation (p. 140) of Chronici Canones, 14:

To prevent the long list of numbers from causing any confusion, I have cut the entire mass of years into decades. Gathering these from the histories of individual peoples, I have set them across from each other, so that anyone may easily determine in which Greek or barbarian's time the Hebrew prophets and kings and priests were, and similarly which men of the different kingdoms were falsely seem as gods, which were heroes, which cities were founded when, and, from the ranks of illustrious men, who were philosophers, poets, princes and writers.

Eusebius's thoughts on this are useful to an understanding of the Great Stemma. Understanding that Eusebius decided to simply ignore what he saw as prehistory, the time before Abraham, suggested to me that the Great Stemma author also probably decided to treat it differently, arranging it in unform arches and not bothering too closely about its possible synchronisms.
It still seems odd that the Great Stemma seems serenely unaware of Eusebius. Still, if the author worked entirely from Latin sources and did not have any of Jerome's translations to hand, neither the Vulgate nor the Chronici Canones, that would be understandable.
The Roger Pearse translation and Latin allows me to hunt and look for any resemblances and I find no matches in the proto-text of the Stemma. Something only shows up in a later recension, Urgell, where we have: Sexaginario Isaac nascuntur filii gemini: primus Esau, qui est Edom, a quo gens Iudamaeorum; secundus Jacob, qui posthea Israhel, a quo Israhelitae, qui nunc Iudaei. This matches Jerome's Latin translation of Eusebius: Sexagenario Isaac nascuntur filii gemini: primus Esau, qui et Edom, a quo gens Idumaeorum. Secundus Jacob, qui postea Israel, a quo Israelitae, qui nunc Judaei.

Now I don't wish to suggest that the Great Stemma is contemporary with the Canons, which were drawn up in the decade or so after 300 CE. The Stemma might have been drawn up 100 or even 150 years later. But in a wonderful way it is a kind of Latin counterpart to the Canons, finding new conventions to visualize a similar kind of content, preferring traditional roll form to new-fangled codex format, devising new ways to mix exactitude and vagueness, yet very successfully getting its message about synchronisms in biblical history across to the student who reads it. Or more correctly, who read it, past tense. By the time the document reached Spain, most of the careful parallelisms had probably been ruined by careless scribes, and the reader was left to guess at what episode above matched which episode in the rows below.

A History of the Timeline

An impressive new illustrated history of timelines has just appeared in the United States. Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline is the work of Daniel Rosenberg, an associate professor in Oregon, with help from Anthony Grafton. I have not bought a copy yet, but can see the first 34 pages as a sample on Google Books here. Thanks to Nat Taylor for pointing out this publication. The formal launch date seems to have been May 1, but there are bibliographic references suggesting it was in circulation earlier.

Rosenberg's book deals with a topic closely related to the stemma: the long history of vertical, horizontal (and curled-up) timelines to represent history.

One gem of a story I noticed at first glance on the Google preview was the account on page 27 of the Milanese publisher Boninus Mombritius boasting that no scribe could have copied such an intricate and extensive work as accurately as he did with his printed version of Eusebius. Mombritius declared he had kept all the tables in order and put all the kings in their places.

This alludes to the muddle which hampered the diffusion of both the stemma and timeline in the medieval period, and erased almost all documentary evidence of their Late Antique models. It is challenging for any reader to grasp and to remember complex technical drawings which require careful measurement and layout. It is difficult for even a scribe with artistic skills to copy one correctly. And with fewer skills, time pressure and inadequate remuneration, it is practically impossible. Thus, the serious corruption done to the Great Stemma early in its diffusion led to it ultimately being discarded and begun all over again by medieval writers such as Peter of Poitiers.

I cannot see the index and I have not read the book yet, but on the pages I did read, Rosenberg seems to jump his history from Eusebius (who arranged his chronography in vertical columns, with the synchronous entries all carefully aligned with one another) straight to Peter of Poitiers with no mention of the Great Stemma.

The Great Stemma's arcade, which marks out the patriarchs from Adam to Abraham in a series of arches, each containing a span of years between each begetting, is incontestably the oldest left-to-right timeline extant in the West. The manuscripts date from 945 and later. If Rosenberg's valuable book were not to mention them, it would be incomplete.

It can also be argued that the Great Stemma contains a more sophisticated timeline than this simple arcade of patriarchs. I am exploring this on the latest page of the Piggin.Net website. The Great Stemma was undoubtedly created before the 8th century, perhaps in Visigothic Spain, perhaps in North Africa. It could even be that the Great Stemma pre-dates Eusebius, but those are matters that are still the subject of ongoing research.

Timelines

Readers may care to look at the mounting evidence that a timeline once ran through the Great Stemma. Gotolia offered the first clue. This widow of a Judaean king managed to achieve power later in her own right. And we find that she figures in the Great Stemma twice! The duplication can only mean that she was present in her separate capacities as both a spouse and a ruler. This has provided me with the first clue that there are two different streams of information present in the layout. That has in turn prompted a fresh look at the information arranged in the arcade on plates one and two. I have realized that the series of arches is a most natural way of portraying a timeline: it represents time as grasshopper springs. Could an antique graphics draftsman have conceived the distance of such leaps as being in scale to the passage of years?