Setback or Progress

After weeks of combing through the Liber Genealogus, including creating my own fully keyed versions of both Frick's and Mommsen's versions, I think I am barking up the wrong tree. My original idea was to hunt for any clues that the Liber Genealogus author might have had the Great Stemma open on the desk in front of him as he wrote. There are no such clues. The two works appear to be siblings, drawing on a common tradition but created in utter ignorance of one another.

The crux is the Table of Nations, the strange anthropological list in Genesis 10 which is the inspiration for two ancient works, the Antiquities of Josephus and the Chronicon of Hippolytus.

The Liber bases all its statements about the different ethnicities in the Mediterranean and Middle East on the Chronicon. In fact, when Bauer and Helm were compiling the critical edition of the Chronicon and came to its ethnicities chapter, the so-called Diamerismos, they often used the Liber Genealogus as a check (see Bauer/Helm, page 1).

The Great Stemma, on the other hand, offers an almost unalloyed reproduction of the ethnicities list in Josephus' Antiquities, a fact that Yolanda Zaluska published 25 years ago. It ought not to have surprised me, but I never appreciated what a black-and-white distinction this is and how starkly this difference in sourcing separates the Great Stemma from the Liber.

I always feel disappointed when a setback like this sinks in. But of course the finding is progress. And in fact it has exciting implications, because it implies yet another way in which the Great Stemma must predate the thinking and intellectual resources of the early 5th century. Its author can have known nothing of Jerome or Augustus. But the thought that he worked in a library where there was not one scrap of Hippolytus to read? Who is this guy? How far back should we be looking? This is tantalizing.

[Later note: the final two paragraphs above are mistaken. It is far more likely that the Table of Nations was worked into the Great Stemma by a Spanish recensor, using a copy of Isidore's Etymologiae. There is no evidence the Great Stemma author was even interested in the Table of Nations material, and why should he have been? The ethnicities material does not add any useful information on the genealogy of Christ or on the chronography which are his central concerns (October 1, 2010).]

[Much later note: I did finally discover sequential evidence. The Liber follows the order of the Great Stemma. This is the subject of my Oxford Patristics Conference paper (September 25, 2011).]

Lay Historians

A couple of inspiring accounts of lay historians have just appeared. The story of Tony Clunn, who discovered the site of the Battle of the Teutoberg Forest, is written up by Peter McDermott in the Free Library. Clunn has earned his living as a British Army officer. Adrian Murdoch's blog drew my attention to this. An account of Hershel Shanks, a US lawyer who has become a leader in the field of biblical archaeology, appears in the New York Times. With a degree of false modesty, Shanks describes himself as an outsider to the field, a person who wouldn’t have gotten into it had he known how much it was divided into specialties and subspecialties. Of course he would have! The vital quality in a lay historian today is enterprise: the ability to weld together the work of many specialists into a coherent whole and to perceive opportunities which the specialists do not notice because they are too close to the topic.

Liber Genealogus

Göttingen University Library in Germany has a digital version of Paul de Lagarde's 1892 edition of the Lucca Cathedral manuscript of the Liber Genealogus. This is in a very rare printed periodical, not available on Archive.org or Google Books. I can only see two libraries in Germany which catalogue this article, entitled SeptuagintStudien, II (perhaps a rare 19th century use of so-called CamelCase). Neither Göttingen nor Mainz are willing to interloan it.
The Liber is a vital text in understanding the Great Stemma. Both works belong to the same tradition (we are not yet sure how their interdependency should be described). This edition is very useful as de Lagarde went to the trouble to link each name to its biblical place with a reference, an extra duty which the Mommsen edition does not bother with. I went to the same trouble myself, and will have to see how our results compare. There is also a Greek text for comparison.
Ayuso Marazuela quotes the de Lagarde version (omitting the "de" from the name and adding a hyphen to the CamelCase), but de Lagarde is not mentioned in the Klapisch-Zuber bibliography.
Carl Frick brought out an all-Latin critical edition of yet another version, the Turin manuscript, in 1892, and published that in his handbook Chronica Minora under the title Origo Humani Generis. The Hathi Trust has placed Frick online, but unfortunately it is only accessible from inside the United States.
Here are the links:
1. de Lagarde
2. Mommsen
3. Frick

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.

Vatican Library

It seems the Vatican Library will be digital some day. The announcement has appeared here. Interestingly, there will be a feature that will help scholars search for diagrams: Another two servers have been installed to process the data to make it possible to search for images ... by a graphic pattern, that is, by looking for similar images (graphic or figurative) in the entire digital memory. The latter instrument, truly innovative and certainly interesting for all who intend to undertake research on the Vatican's manuscripts ... was developed from the technology of the Autonomy Systems company, a leading English firm. Unfortunately the entire project is scheduled to take 10 years, and I suppose we must factor in 50-per-cent mission creep, so make that 15 years right off.

Plutei Online

It's time to offer a brief review of the online access to the splendid Plutei Collection at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence. I've found this a boon, since it not only offers images of the manuscripts, but also bibliographies which seem to be generated from a database. An interesting feature is that it offers a history spanning more than 100 years, showing which scholars have worked with each document.

When I look at Plut.20.54 for example, I can click on "MOVIMENTI RECENTI and see recent users. Under MOVIMENTI PASSATI, I can trace back its uses for scholarship to Bernhard Bischoff, and go all the way back to WM Lindsay when he consulted this Isidore manuscript in 1896 while preparing his critical edition. I am sure that here in Germany the publication of library lending records would probably be interpreted as a scandalous invasion of individual privacy and lead to the sacking of all the
high officials and possibly prison terms for the librarians. At the Plutei I find it rather touching. The slips amount to a kind of roll of honour of great philologists.

Not everything is perfectly designed however. I found the scans were not really of a high enough resolution for close analysis. A stemma in the Real Academia in Madrid is available in a fantastic resolution where I can see the pores in the parchment, but the Florence scans are so much inferior that in a few cases I had to guess about the shape of penstrokes in the document.

Secondly, while I do not intend to grumble at the lack of an English interface on the site, I did find it a pity there was no easy way to link to specific pages or to download them for later use. The URL in the address bar of the browser always connects to the first page of a manuscript, not the page you may want to link to. However it is possible to count up the number of page turns between the first page and the page of interest, and add the same number to the pagina part of the URL. In fact one can automate this slightly by copying the URL into Microsoft Excel and then using the fill function to manufacture a complete series of page links for the entire MS.

To make a copy to study when not connected to the internet, I found I had to discover the absolute URL for each image first. This is done by right-clicking the image within the Java interface and looking at the properties. But one cannot save this URL: you have to instead copy it out by hand, character by character, and re-enter it in a browser address bar. Press enter and you now get only the image you want, and can save that as a JPEG file.

Hippolytus Translation

Tom Schmidt has just issued a free online English translation of Hippolytus, a chronographer who was contempory with, but worked independently from, Julius Africanus. This will be hugely helpful in exploring the early origins of the timeline contained in the Great Stemma. This is also very helpful to any non-classicist who cannot read Latin and Greek. Martin Wallraff's Iulius Africanus Chronographiae finally brought the Julius Africanus chronology into a modern language (English) in 2007, and now Schmidt has overcome the chief defect of Helm's 1955 edition of Hippolytus (its lack of a continuous German translation). See Chronicon.net.

Hypatia Movie

A movie about the pagan philosopher Hypatia is currently on the loose in European cinemas. Agora is the work of a Spanish director, Alejandro Amenábar. Let me admit from the start that I did not know the Hypatia story before I saw the movie in a Hamburg multiplex, and was somewhat startled by its anti-Christian storyline. The film (here is its website) features the Christians (the bad guys) seizing the Caesarion and the Library of Alexandria from Hypatia and her fellow-pagans (the good guys).
Some of the story I did not get: when the Christians capture the Caesarion, why do they worship amid what seem to be a couple of dozen outsized statues of Osirus and other gods? At the movie’s climax, a naked Hypatia, not looking a day over 30, is asphyxiated in the said Caesarion. The violence in the movie is thoroughly nasty.
The racial stereotyping is particularly disturbing: Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) and her fans Synesius (Rupert Evans) and Orestes (Oscar Isaac) are all north-of-the-Mediterranean types (white) and the villainous Cyril of Alexandria (Sami Samir) and his parabolani supporter Ammonius (Ashraf Barhom) are not only south-of-the-Mediterranean, swarthy, hook-nosed characters, but terrorists to boot.
So it is a movie that will appeal to people looking for an anti-Christian message, yet infuriate Coptic Christians in particular, annoy Christians in general and even irritate strongly committed members of other Middle Eastern religions.
You leave the cinema wondering how authentic this all is. The answer, surprisingly, is that the storyline is pretty close to the historical record, allowing for a little cinematic licence. The murder of Hypatia really did happen and this conflict really was one of those historical events where Christians not only sinned, but the whole Christian movement feared it was going sickeningly off the rails. Philip Rousseau's Ascetics, Authority and the Church in the Age of Jerome and Cassian mentions Hypatia's murder in the first few pages and illuminates the disgust that many "normal" people felt in this period towards early monks, who were indeed ragged radicals.
As I have thought more about the film, I have begun to value it more as a visual introduction, sketchy as it is, to a troubled period. At the same time, my exasperation at its retrograde historiography has grown. Contemporary research into Late Antiquity stresses not its weakness but its extraordinary intellectual vigour in the face of economic decline, its empowerment of minorities, its epic struggles between virtue and evil. Nothing and nobody in Late Antiquity is all good or all: it is a period of ferment, a very exciting time to be alive. Agora does not seem to have heard of this way of doing history or this way of doing movies, for that matter. Hypatia is so heroic and Ammonius is so vile that there just isn't any room left for nuance or ambiguity. The film website says the main historical adviser was a Mr Justin Pollard: he is not a distinguished scholar. Director Amenábar is not a historian at all. They honestly tried, but the result of their labours disappoints with its lack of genuine engagement with the period.

Discoveries

A game-changing discovery, thanks to the launch this month of Plutei Online in Italy. It is gradually publishing digital scans online of nearly 4,000 manuscripts from the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, plus Bandini's catalogs which were drawn up in the 18th century to describe them. This library possesses not just one stemma as I first thought, but three quite diverse biblical stemma documents. Two are now online. At first glance, they are so important that I will have to re-evaluate what I have already written.

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?

Gelzer and Africanus

The great stemma of biblical genealogy contains extensive traces of the universal chronicles devised in late antiquity, but that aspect of stemma authoring seems to have escaped serious study. The standard work describing classical-era timelines, by Heinrich Gelzer, was completed in 1898, and still remains authoritative:



Gelzer deals with the fragmentary evidence of what was in the Chronographiai, a history of the world by Sextus Julius Africanus in five books from the Creation up to the year AD 221. A quick scan suggests Gelzer did not know of the great stemma, which he would surely have appreciated as an important western witness to the influence of Africanus. Gelzer died in 1906, failing to produce a critical edition of the Chronographiai: a century later in 2007, Martin Wallraff completed that job.

Rightward Shift

After discovering in mid-January a major "wiring error" on Plate 12 of the Great Stemma that affects every extant copy of the diagram, I am now closer to understanding how this mess-up happened.

The Great Stemma appears to be a "family tree" of Christ which was compiled in late antiquity. In its section on the Judaean kings period, it includes the names of the kings' mothers. But as has already been noticed, many of the names are not those which are carefully set out in the Second Book of Kings in the Bible. A little study shows that most of the mysterious names of wives, which seem to have come out of nowhere, can in fact be found in one of the chronicles of antiquity, the Liber Genealogus, which uses slightly unfamiliar forms of the biblical names. This part of the analysis shows that a large block of names was simply shifted rightwards across the Great Stemma page to a new position. At least four wives' names were then shifted upwards to fill the gaps on the page. But what is most interesting of all is that the name of Queen Athalia, a bloodthirsty lady said to have out-heroded Herod by slaughtering children, appears twice on Plate 12.

I have made a graphic showing these corruptions here (click).

Mistakes like this are a godsend in manuscript detective work. This error offers us additional proof that there must have been a timeline originally running alongside the great stemma at mid-page height. This matters, because it reveals that the Great Stemma is not just a genealogy, but a graphic version of the universal chronicles which attempted in antiquity to cross reference the histories of different civilizations to establish an overview of Middle Eastern and Graeco-Roman history.

All this, in its turn, helps us to reconstruct how the Great Stemma looked when it was originally drawn, and indirectly proves (a) that stemma design in late antiquity was much more sophisticated than medieval copies show and (b) that the lack of proper stemma alignment in all 21 known copies of the Great Stemma is almost certainly a defect in the copying, not in the original design.

Electricians

I have been using an electrical continuity tester to discover what connects where inside a standard lamp that no longer lights up. And on the same day I have been transcribing a stemma page from the 12th-century illuminated Bible of San Millán de Cogolla. I found the coincidence illuminating (sorry, I could not resist that pun). The stemma, which presents a genealogy of Christ, contains a vast array of components (persona), which are "wired" together by connecting lines. Some authors have suggested that the stemma is a mnemonic device, but I have seen no evidence for that and doubt it. No one with a normal mind could remember all the connections simply by studying a graphic with several hundred nodes, any more than one could "learn" a wiring diagram for a complex electrical device. In fact, it is far easier to memorize the biblical passages on which the San Millán stemma is based and recite them than it would be to construct this stemma from memory. Both a wiring diagram and a complex stemma have a different purpose. They provide an analytical, information-storage method in which the user can mentally crawl along the lines to consider whether the electrical assembly is complete or whether the genealogical stemma offers all the necessary connections of descent or is marred by breaks. One must keep going back to the graphic to see the different local connections. Circuit diagrams are in fact a variety of process flow chart, which, as we know, have their origins in the stemma form.

Spelling

Some readers do seem to care strongly about the plural spelling of stemma. Dictionaries such as the OED offer three standard meanings (the simple eye of certain insects / the record of an ancient Roman genealogy / the tree diagram showing the relationships among manuscripts of a literary work) and the standard plural spelling "stemmata." On the Macro-Typography website, stemma is being used in a fourth, novel meaning, as a term for any graphical representation of any branching inter-relationships. It is a sense that Karl-August Wirth used in an article in German reviewing four typical medieval graphic forms used in educational texts: the table, stemma, arbor and rota. This usage of stemma is preferable to "tree." The objections to tree are that the word is misleading, especially because it is loaded in favour of twig-like graphic patterns, but also because it has generated a long history of confusion about that figure's "correct" orientation. A broader term would be useful. But is "stemma" in this sense ready for prime time? With a plural that is drawn from Greek, stemma is bound to remain a term of scientific and scholarly jargon. Diagram, also of Greek origin, would not be a term in international standard English if its plural were still "diagramata". We need to anglicize stemma with a regular English plural, "stemmas", if we hope to bring the term into wider currency. The spelling "stemmata" will remain in place on the Macro-Typography website, because the audience there is mainly of historians, but expect the anglicized plural "stemmas" for wider audiences interested only in graphic design.

Burgos Exhibition

With interest, I see that an exhibition of a selection of key Genealogies of Christ is currently under way at Burgos in northern Spain (link). From October 2009 till June 2010, a series of facimiles of Beatus manuscripts will be displayed. The centrepiece is of course the Burgos Bible. Also fascinating is that the San Millán de la Cogolla bible and another Madrid genealogy are now online in complete, high-quality digital editions.

Loyset Liédet

The Loyset Liédet picture mentioned below is reproduced on the French national library website. I would not entirely agree with the summary attached to it: it is somewhat confused, muddling the contradictory "tree" concepts, but the images on the page are great. As my own introduction explains, the term "tree" leads to confusion since it has a variety of overlapping meanings in a medieval context.

Diagrams or Stemmata

A scholarly correspondent has taken me to task over the term "stemmata", saying these figures in the medieval manuscripts are properly called "diagrams" in English. That rather misses the point. Conceptually, there are three different ways of seeing the figures. One is to consider their meaning as art, contemplating the world of significance behind them. That is the focus of Christiane Klapisch-Zuber's book, L'Ombre des Ancêtres, which uses the extraordinary Arbre of Loyset Liédet as its cover illustration. The wordless Liédet image, showing various well-dressed people impossibly perched in a strangely sick tree, seems senseless unless one understands the art-historical context in which it was painted. Another aspect of stemma figures is clearly diagrammatic. Like geometrical figures (for example cubes and pyramids) or plans (such as that of the locus sanctus), they engage with our spatial intelligence and illustrate text, following the dictum, "One picture is worth a thousand words." But the third aspect of the figures is typographical, considering how text can be rearranged on the page to make its meaning clearer. The stemmata of Cassiodorus do not have to be arranged in graphical form (Mynors converted most of them back to linear text in his critical edition of the Institutiones), but, like poetry, these texts are enormously improved by a sympathetic spatial arrangement. The connecting lines support and enhance the connecting words. The stemma has a dual character: it is both art and text. The word "stemma" is the appropriate term for this special type, even if the figure can also be discussed in the wider categories of art motifs or diagrams. The Macro-Typography website focuses on how text is arranged to make its meaning clear.

At the Doctor's Surgery

After a morning of thinking about stemmata, I was at the doctor's surgery in the afternoon, seeing a case where stemmata do not work at all. A German doctor takes notes as a series of abbreviations scrawled on index cards, which are actually envelopes to contain the various pieces on paper on a case. It is plain that computers have not made a breakthrough here yet, and it is obvious why. Anything that requires a doctor to start from the general and proceed to the specific, as most computer programs do, does not seem to appeal to the German clinician. A stemmatic approach would be to take perfect health as the root of medical reality and follow the lines in search of the ailment. It would take ages. What my doctor was jotting looked more like a series of "tags" about me: sick for three weeks, runny nose, allergies ... In the eyes of an experienced doctor, the tags clump together into a diagnosis. The medical mind works more like the Amazon search engine, where you enter a couple of words and the software seems to read your mind and suggest precisely the book you were looking for. Yes, the illness will have a code under the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) at the World Health Organization, which is a stemmatic scheme, but that seems a million miles from the practical world of clinical medicine.

Cassiodorus

After reading the literature and copying the stemmata from 9th-century Cassiodorus manuscripts to develop a feel for their divergent shapes, one is left to speculate on which of the various line forms is the oldest. In some of the manuscripts, the lines are minimalist in the extreme, often regularized to perfect semi-circles. Is this the feeling of Roman design? In other manuscripts, which may perhaps feature Cassiodorus's own visual creations - the images of lions, eagles, long-haired men and so on - the lines are fussy and tangled, or erupt like fountains. These lines faintly suggest the images of vines we see in some late Roman mosaics. Do they represent a Roman-period aesthetic? Perhaps we will never know.

Web Versions of the Diagrams

Rather than offering photographs of the old manuscripts, with all the attendant permissions issues, I am posting sketches of their designs, such as this one on consanguinity. Anna Catharina Esmeijer in her authoritative book, Divina Quaternitas, did the same, but the focus here will be purely on the shapes, with English translations of the Latin to make the content more easily comprehensible to the general reader. The initial drawings have been done with OpenOffice Draw or with Autosketch, and have then been converted to Adobe Flash files, which open inside a web browser. Most browser users have the Flash plug-in installed, so these files are not only accessible, but very compact. Best of all, they can be zoomed into on screen without any loss of quality. The drawing tool of OpenOffice is free and exports simple files to Flash format in a jiffy.