September 10, 2015 • 49 mins
Historians learn a great deal from historical texts -- and not only that which was written, but that which was unwritten. Join Robert and Christian as they explore the world of palimpsests, the erased books just under the surface of ancient tomes. Modern technology allows us to uncover more and more of their secrets, while the idea of the palimpsest itself serves as a powerful metaphor for media, the mind and maybe life itself.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert lam. Hey, I'm Christian Sager, and
this week i'm Stuff to bow your Mind. We're talking
about ancient text ancient books, ancient tones of knowledge, kind
(00:24):
of uh away, kind of spin off from our earlier
or more episode. Yeah, this is very connected and it
also made me it not only did it make me
think of that, but also like any fiction that surrounds
like occult texts or old ancient texts that have hidden
meetings or secrets hidden away in them, this is for you. Yeah,
because we're talking about lost text We're talking about texts
(00:45):
that have been written over, that have been erased, essentially
the data recovery of of texts dating back centuries or
even thousands of years. Yeah, and it's very specifically. These
are called palamp sests. And I may pronounce that wrong
throughout the podcast, but I'm I think that's how you
say it. Yeah. Uh So these are essentially books that
(01:10):
were made with they were made from the hides of
sheep or cattle. Uh And and as such, you could
scrape off the ink of them and reuse the whole
thing all over again to write a whole new book
on top of it. Yeah. The word itself comes from
from the Greek um palem sessed, meaning scraped or rubbed again. Um,
(01:32):
although the membranes of the palem sessh that we're looking
at here, Uh, we're we're not usually scrubbed additional times.
But but sometimes it just depends on how much use
it was getting it. A lot of it really comes
down to just the value and the scarcity of of
of parchment. Yeah. Absolutely, there's a whole sort of I guess,
intellectual economy surrounding these things about what is important contextually
(01:55):
at the time, what is not, what what's valued the most?
You know, we'll see what a lot of these examples
that at the time that they were being erased, religion
was more valuable than say math, so math documents were erased. Yeah,
it's it's also helpful to think about it and in
the modern way that we use our various media and
(02:16):
and use it to record what's important to us. Um.
I instantly think about VHS tapes because I use so
much in my my youth, particularly like the imagine. A
lot of people can relate on this. We have those
really old tapes. They you had them for years and
years and you had what you know, six hours extended
play on there. And so the life of one of
(02:38):
those tapes um A lot of it's essentially lost because
you can't retrieve any information from it. But it might
start off by say, oh, there's a movie coming on
on T and T. I want to tape it, So
I'm gonna leave leave it on, I'm gonna start recording.
So you end up with two hours of some B
movie you want to see, followed by another two hour
movie that you're not really that interested in, and then
(02:59):
like late nine infommercials right right, And then you had
to time it exactly right, you know, if you wanted
to record over the second movie so that you could
use the tape to its fullest extent or something like that.
I remember always trying to like reverse and and time
it just perfectly. You know. It's kind of like making
a mixtape in a way with these sets. Yeah, I mean,
if you got fancy, you you try and edit out
(03:20):
the commercials right and uh, and then every time you
would have like you would add new media. Because I
particularly remember it's like i'd have a tape that would
start with taping some movie and then I'm taping episodes
of Mystery Science Theater three thousand on there. Then I'm
taping like individual wrestling matches from late nineteen nineties, uh
pro wrestling TV shows, and so the connective tissue between
(03:41):
these things will be this like distorted see of of
weird fragments, right, Yeah, you get that effect, which I
believe our producer Tyler used a great effect in the
Monster Science series that you guys did if anybody hasn't
seen that, it's a video series that we did here
at How Stuff Works, where Robert explains the science behind
(04:03):
your favorite monsters. But Tyler used a really cool effect
by making it look like that VHS thing where it's
blending just between the two or maybe there's like maybe
there's that one little blip of white static just between
between the two recordings. You know. It also reminds me
of a bit from comedian Camail No Johnny, Yeah, if
you heard this, I have. I'm a I'm a big
(04:24):
fan of Camail's actually and his podcasts The Indoor Kids
and the X Files Files. Yeah, he does that bit
about how when he when he was a kid, he
used to like take like like like rated G family
movies and record porno reels in the middle of them, right, yeah,
like like he had a friend who had, you know,
(04:44):
through the sort of the underground connections there and in Pakistan,
had acquired these adult films and then he would take
the scenes safely in the middle of you know, like
the Lion King or something. Yeah, Lion King dress. The
kind of takes that you would innocently have at that age,
but he would use them to store this forbidden data. Yeah. Yeah,
(05:05):
So if anyone hasn't heard that, check out his his
comedy albums, because he has a whole bit about having
one of those tapes and and then the power going
off and being stuck in the family VCR. Yeah. I
think that album is called Beta Mail. Yeah, I believe
really good stuff, highly recommended. Well I don't. Of course,
podcasts themselves are palimpsests in a way. Right. Every time
(05:27):
you download a new episode of stuff to blow your
mind to your phone or your tablet or whatever, you've
got to make more room on the hard drive, so
you delete an older episode, whether it's you know, of course,
you're not deleting one of our episodes you're keeping all
the whole archive there. But but you know that I
end up doing that quite a bit where I go, Okay,
which one of these things do I want to keep?
Which one can I get rid of? You know that
(05:48):
I've listened to and I'm satisfied with. Uh. And so
in a way, they sound sort of work like that.
Although I wonder if there's going to be a period
of time, like two hundred three hundred years in the future,
where people are able to take our phones and sort
of like look at the hard drives and peel back
the layers to find these lost podcasts. Yeah, I mean,
data recovery with computers is obviously more complex than than
(06:10):
than VHS. You you have it like a deleted photo
card for a phone, uh, and it seems like you've
lost everything, but that data can sometimes be recovered. Yeah, yeah,
And and it's it's certainly more difficult than you know. Well,
although this sounds pretty difficult, like pouring acid on cattle skins,
are just scraping it with a knife. And in a
lot of cases, you know, present day cases that we'll
(06:33):
talk about, they're using some pretty high technology like infrared
imaging and things like that let's see the ink under
all the layers. But I like to mention of the
podcast example because because because some of the same energies
are going to be in played when we talk about
why particular texts were lost, why they were written over,
you know, because a lot of it comes down to,
you know, what am I into right now? Maybe I'm
(06:53):
not into Marin's podcast as much right now, So I'm
gonna delete it and then maybe I come back to
it later. Maybe I'm muh, I've already listened to it,
to this episode. I'm not interested in this new you
know ideas episodes, So I'm just gonna go ahead and
trash that now. Yeah. Yeah, it comes down to a
scarcity of resources, right, So like in in the time
that these were being made, it was a scarcity of
(07:16):
parchment in particular, and uh, and and also paper they
just we're barely using paper at all. And then there
was also the fluctuation of intellectual activity between these scholars. Yeah,
this was really interesting. Um. It's worth noting that palend
tests uh seemed to suggest you not only the scarcity
of paper, but also uh, the hunger for knowledge and
(07:36):
the demand for new texts demand that the even wealthy
centers of learning had difficulty keeping up with. And this
is backed up by the fact that the number of
palend tests appears to increase in greater ratio during periods
of intense intellectual activity, more so than it does did
during periods of economic decline. So there was more more
(07:57):
erasure and overwriting of texts just because yeah, just when
there was more exciting stuff. So it's kind of like
it's a golden age of podcast there's so many podcasts,
so we're it's has to do more with the what's
available to us rather than just how much space is
in the future, they're just going to find episodes of
Sereal and then they'll they'll peel them back and they'll
find our episodes underneath them. That's right, just a few
(08:18):
from not only serial exists, that's the only one. All
podcasts will be about investigations into murders. So we can
basically um discuss the reasons for erasure under three categories.
First of all, obsolescence, So a text is erased and
something else has written on top of it because well,
(08:39):
maybe it's it's legal, or it's liturgical in nature, and
it's just no longer relevant you know, it's like having
an old football game on a VHS tape. You know,
it's like you've already seen that game. It's not current,
wasn't a particularly great game anyway, Why should I keep it? Yeah?
Or it's an older translation. Yeah. In some of these cases,
the scholars that were scraping the palemp sets, you know,
it wasn't just that they thought, okay, this is unimportant.
(09:03):
They also thought, oh, maybe we actually already have copies
of this somewhere else, right, And as we'll learn, those
copies either ended up getting destroyed or lost in their
own way. Yeah. Other times it's an older translation. There's
a better version of that book. Why would you keep
the old one? Uh? The text is in a foreign
or just a lost language. So this text is just
taking up space on the on the bookshelf, in the
(09:26):
in the you know, why should I bother keeping it?
I can put something more valuable in there? Um Or
it's a it's an in familiar script, it's particularly difficult
to read, it's not a usable text, or it's largely
damaged and no longer useful as a tone of knowledge.
And then also literary texts plays a big role here.
So just as pagan myths often mingle with Christian beliefs,
(09:49):
so do too many pagan classics exist buried beneath Christian texts.
And they're kind of two ways of looking at that, right,
Like one is to say that it's kind of a
war on belief, right, that it's Christianity erasing, like literally
erasing and overriding older systems. Yeah, it's that old with
the adage goes the to the victor's go history or
(10:11):
history is written by the winners, that's it. Yeah, And
in that sense, they sort of won the philosophical war
at the time, so they were able to take the
information as it was and literally rewrite it. Yeah. And
you can kind of see it as you can just
kind of look at it from more of a nasty
perspective versus more just sort of than the nature of
what is popular and what is interesting. It's kind of
almost like gentrification, you know. Yeah, there's a um there, Yeah,
(10:36):
I think there there's something interesting going on, especially when
you consider the things that were being erased in some
of these examples, like the fact that we were erasing
Archimedes mathematical theories, shows what the culture valued at the time.
It's interesting to think, you know too, that we're living
in an age where a book could disappear, Like we're
(10:58):
living in a phenomen I'm an all period now where
it's increasingly hard for particularly popular text to vanish from
the face of the here. Yeah, do you think that
could happen now? Like, so, let's say I'm trying to
think of an enormously popular text that we've all read,
fifty Shades of All right, I've not read it, but
let's pretend I have fifty Shades of Gray. How do
(11:19):
we it gets completely wiped off the face of the planet.
So we've got to destroy all the physical copies, We've
got to destroy the electronic copies that are out there
now because of the books. And then what else? Well, um,
I instantly turned to Ray Bradberry fare and h fourth
fifty one. You'd have to go after the individuals who
have made it there their mission to memorize fifty Shades
(11:40):
of Gray and carry it around. That's actually quite a
few people, Okay, Okay, But then at that point we're
looking at this dystopian future in which no one's ever
heard of fifty Shades of Gray, but they somehow find
an old iPod that has sorry no, an old kindle
and they're able to somehow pull it up off of
(12:02):
the hard drive on that kindle and they find this
lost text. Yeah. Or you know, another way to think
about it too is you may have lost fifty shades
of gray, but you have reviews that refer to it
passages that have appeared from it, so you maybe have
little bits and pieces of it, but the entire text
itself is missing. That's sort of what's going on with
some of these examples. They knew that these books had
(12:23):
existed previously, but they didn't have copies of them, so
it's sort of like only the Amazon reviews were left online,
but the book itself was not right. You know. I
actually worked on a book kind of like this. Uh.
It was a previous life before I worked here at
How Stuff Works, and I was doing graphic design on
a book for Harvard University about the Iliad, and they
(12:46):
had found this was not a palace, sessed by the
way that it had not been written over, but it
was a very ancient copy of the Iliad UH called
the venus A And it was I believe in Venice,
Italy that they found it, and in order to make
it readable so that scholars could participate and kind of
look at it and compare and contrast it to other copies,
(13:09):
they had to scan it with like a like a
three D almost like a three D printer scanner. It
scanned the topography of the pages. Because the book is
so old and delicate, they couldn't move it. Okay, you
can't just throw it on the xerox machine, and yeah,
I mean, you like, moving a page in this book
is like, you know, a big deal because you could
(13:30):
potentially destroy it. It's so brittle. Um. So, just working
on that project and how delicately they treated the text
before they copied it, it really gave me kind of
an impression as I was reading about these examples here
of what these sort of archivist archaeologists almost went through
(13:50):
trying to dig up these old texts, which far more
difficult because they're literally buried under other layers of ink. Yeah,
I mean, with this example you've mentioned, I mean, to
touch the text is to risk destroying it absolutely, and
then to reveal something just beneath the visible text is
to destroy it a little bit. Yeah, exactly, they have
(14:11):
to make a decision like what what is of more
value destroying this ancient text, uh, so that we can
have access to an even older one, or is it
more valuable to hold onto this ancient text and maybe
not know what's underneath it? Now. One of the most
notable early examples of palm test recovery comes to us
(14:36):
from nineteenth century Italian priest and classical literature professor Angelo
my uh. And he made his name rediscovering medieval palms tests.
And he wasn't the first to find one, but he
was the first to really dig for them in earnest
So around eighteen nineteen, he's he's serving as a Vatican
librarian and he comes across a copy of Augustine's Psalms. Um,
(15:00):
you know nothing, nothing particularly amazing about this book, but
underneath it, when he starts uh probing a little, um,
he discovers that there is a copy of Cicero's De Republica.
So how did he like, how do how do how
do you see this? But this is the hard part
for me, Like, and I was looking for imagery of
(15:21):
this too, I'm having a hard time imagining the scenario.
So he's looking at the parchment and he can see
like maybe faint traces of ink leftover underneath the newer
layer of ink. Yeah. Basically, I mean these texts are old,
and so they're decaying a little bit. Often are they've
been damaged here and there, and sometimes that damage reveals
(15:44):
the text underneath. Other times, especially with my like, he
knows those texts are out there, he knows those palum
tests are out there, so he's maybe actively scraping a
little bit here and there, trying to just just test
the waters and see if there's something interesting beneath the surface.
And in this case he did. He found a lost text. Uh,
Sister Rose d Republica, a controversial at the time dialogue
(16:08):
on Roman politics. Uh. And this is a this is
fourth century Roman Empire stuff. So all right, maybe this
is a good analogy for how this works, sort of
something that we can all picture. It's sort of like
if you take a notepad and somebody's written on the
first layer of paper on the notepad and then they
(16:30):
ripped that off, and then you take a pencil to
the next layer underneath, and you shade it in so
you can see the impression left behind by what was
written on top of it. This is like a reverse version.
You're of course, referring to the famous Jackie Treehorn. Exactly
what I was thinking of in my head was the
big Lebowski palam sesst Yes, so that's similar here. Instead
(16:51):
of finding, you know, a pornographic doodle, Yeah, he finds
a pivotal text stuff from the details, the rise of
Julius c. Easier, the eventual fall of the Roman Republic,
the emergence of the Roman Empire. Um. And this is
a book that the scholars knew had once existed because
it's referenced in other works, you know, as zim Burrow
(17:11):
echo points out, books speak of books as if they
spoke among themselves. Um. But anyway, it ends up getting
lost centuries later, and we have only fragments, and even
today only fragments of book four and five in the
Republic are available to us. I get. I couldn't find
any clear argument as to why this book was lost,
so maybe someone can fill us in on that. But um,
(17:34):
as discussed earlier, we can chalk this up to to
various reasons, to taste, to to the scarcity of materials,
ETCETERA possible political controversy too, Yeah, yeah, especially earlier it
was intentionally destroyed. Yeah, maybe so, yeah, especially given it's
it's an initial controversial nature. I wonder what umberto Echo
thinks about Amazon reviews. They're like importance in the philosophical
(17:58):
history of human nature. I don't know, Sam, have him
on the show and asking that that would be fabulous.
It's the kind of thing that he would, he would.
I'm sure he actually has opinions. Yeah, I'm being facetious,
of course, but I'm sure he actually has deep thoughts
about because that's a glorious thing about eco. It's like
he's interested in everything from medieval poverty heresies to hum
(18:19):
superhero superheroes adults. I mean, yeah, how to travel with
the salmon, it's, etcetera. Okay, So the next really important
example of a palum test is the modern restoration of Archimedes.
And I mentioned this earlier, but it was lost text. Uh.
You know, Archimedes is one of the most celebrated mathematicians
(18:41):
of his time. But also you know, we all learn
about him when we're in school, at least I guess
we're supposed to. Uh. And you know, he invented everything
from the screw to catapults and other weapons. I saw
that you put a note here that he invented a
death ray. Yeah, it's it's been a while since I've
done any material and that I think we referenced it
in a podcast a while back. But their the their
arguments that he may have devised a quote unquote death ray,
(19:04):
may have just imagining this like this, like like arcane
system of mirrors, like generating a laser beam off of
the sun's heat or something like. Yeah, like I think
it was essentially a means of blinding or more messing
with ships that were well. And then of course he
also estimated the value of pie, which is fairly important.
(19:27):
It's far more important than theoretical death rays. Well yeah, yeah,
you could argue that. Um. So you know he's got
let's let's list a couple of his books here, just
you know, it's possible that people out there have read
them and just don't particularly recognize our comedy's name. But
he's got on the method of mechanical theorems on floating
bodies and the measurement of the circle. That's probably the
(19:48):
pie one on the sphere, and the cylinder on spiral lines.
They all there's a theme here on the on the
equilibrium of planes. That's the other one so important guy. Right. However,
there were only throughout the dark ages of medieval history
three surviving works by our comedian. Uh. And one of
(20:11):
these three d was lost when Constantinople was sacked in
twelve oh four. And this particular palmp test was made
out of goat skin. So what ends up going on?
This is the book that has the method of mechanical theorems,
the first one I mentioned, So it's got. It describes
how the law of levers works. It describes how to
calculate a body's center of gravity. Uh. There's fourteen pages
(20:34):
in it that are rare commentaries by him on the
logic of categorization. Now, so this stuff, you know, maybe
just kind of sounds like I'm breezing through a list
of bullet points here, but this is important stuff in
the history of mathematics. Um. There's ten pages recording two
unknown speeches by a guy named hyper perridities Hyperides, who
(20:54):
is an order from fourth century BC. And two things
that we're in this book that I thought that were
particularly unusual. Apparently he had a unique way of describing
infinity that mathematicians or his historians had not seen before
in a text like this. So that was an important
aspect of this. The other one was that there was
a like a math puzzle that he made in there
(21:16):
that was called still Mansion. And I had not heard
of this before, but like our comedies, was having some
fun math games, you know. It was like his version
of candy crush, and he had it in this in
this palam test. Unfortunately, all that stuff got scraped off.
What happened was Constantinople gets sacked. The book makes its
(21:36):
way to Bethele him. Nobody knows how, but a Greek
priest there scraped and washed the pages so they could
apply liturgical text to it instead. Right, so it just
is gone for centuries. People don't even know that it exists. Yeah,
because they they were just like, oh, here's this whole book,
but I actually need the pages for these liturgical materials
(21:57):
that I need on a daily base exactly. Yeah. Uh,
And this is it's its story. The history of this
palmp cessed alone is fascinating. So in nineteen o six,
this guy, Johan Ludwig Heiberg finds it okay, very similar
to the previous example with Angela My he's looking through
a bunch of palimps, not palmps as parchments in a
(22:19):
monastery's looking at prayers and he realizes, oh this, I
think this is, you know, like this important work by Archimedes.
So by hand he transcribes everything. He couldn't read some
of it though, and he also don't ask me why
completely ignored the diagrams, which seems important to me based
(22:40):
on my history with math books, but you know, which
is limited. But anyways, he leaves that out. He's he
manages to photograph just a couple of pages. Then the
book disappears again. Uh, it's right after World War One
when it disappears, and they think that it was probably
stolen from this monastery. Now who knows. Maybe these people
just thought it was more prayers, or maybe they realized
(23:02):
the importance of it. I was believed to be owned
by a French family for most of the twentieth century,
and then in this thing just all of a sudden
shows up at an auction in New York City and
an anonymous collector I'm dying to know who this is,
buys it for two million dollars. So this reminds me
(23:24):
of is we we did an episode on this TV
show just a couple of weeks ago the Strain, and
there's this whole thing going on in the Strain where
they're trying to get this ancient text at a at
an auction, you know, and I don't I don't remember
how much it goes for. But this is what I'm
thinking of while I'm reading about this. Is this Vampire
TV show. Yeah, that's exactly what's going on in the
show as we're recording this. Yeah. Yeah, they're trying to
(23:47):
buy the text and the pad guys, you're trying to
buy the text. Everybody's also trying to just steal the text.
That's what I imagine is going on here. There's all
these factions at this New York auction and the anonymous
collector manages to get it. Now, it's sounds like this
anonymous collector is a pretty benevolent person because they lent
it out to the Walters Museum for exhibition. The book
(24:07):
is in really bad shape. It's burnt, it's torn, there's
holes in all the pages. It's got purple mold covering
up certain sections of it. So they have to be
incredibly careful with this thing, uh, and to make it
even more valuable. One of the previous owners I don't know.
I couldn't tell from the research whether this was the
French family or somebody before it. They thought that it
(24:30):
would make it more valuable if they covered it in
gold leaf manuscripts, so they literally painted over this with
this this gold leaf styling. There's a there's a sense
of a housing restoration and all of this too like imagining,
Like someone's saying, all right, I want to restore this house.
But look at somebody came in and they did this
khaki restoration, and I really want to get back to
(24:50):
the you know, the heart of the building. Let me
add some crown molding here, Yeah, exactly. Uh. It was
so damaged. It took them four years just to slowly
take the book apart and clean it. Like they didn't
even get to the actual like archiving of this material.
It was just four years simply to make sure they
(25:11):
didn't destroy this thing and put it into sort of
readable condition. You know. In a way, it's it's kind
of lucky for this text that it was a vanished
for that period of time because because while it was missing,
Angelo my is essentially kind of destroying a lot of
throwing acid on books, which you know from today's perspective.
(25:31):
We look back and we say, he's kind of rough
with these materials, and in some cases he's destroying one
ancient text to try and get it another. But those
methods were I mean, it was kind of they were
the best methods of the day. And we wouldn't have
a more refined methods, uh in our modern time, and
certainly more refined methods to show to throw at this
Archimedes palem sest if if he had not done the work. That, yeah, absolutely,
(25:55):
I mean I think that there's probably a case to
be made that, like, the technology that is available now
allows us to retain a certain amount of the original documents.
Aura righte? What what makes it it? However? I wonder
if a hundred and fifty years from now there's gonna
(26:15):
be even more technology and they're gonna look at us
as being some kind of barbarians, so they're ripping this
thing apart, you know. Um. But so what's interesting is
the way that they they've actually this team has used
it and they called the book Archie for short for
our Communities. Um. They imaged it with both ultra violet
light and X rays from a particle accelerator, So you know,
(26:37):
you just take one of those out and just pop
it into the old university scanner. Uh. It's obviously a
very careful procedure. You know, every time they're they're scanning it,
they have to monitor the temperature and the humidity in
the room around the book while they're scanning it. And
this is something I remember from when I worked on
that venituse a project. I think they did a similar
(26:58):
kind of thing. Always set the proton pact of the
lowest possible yea, and they can't cross the streams of
the particle accelerator in the X ray. The last thing
the X rays this is this part was really cool.
I read this um one of the people who worked
on the project. I read sort of a feature by
her where she talked about what it was like like
a day in the life of working on this book.
(27:19):
She said that the X rays are able to read
through that gold leaf painting, So that's why they used that.
What they do is they strike the ink that's on
the page and they caused the elements inside the ink
to glow. And in this in some cases they they
set it so that it will make iron glow. In
other cases they said it so it will make calcium glow,
(27:40):
and I think that that's based on you know, how
old the ink is, when you know, the composition of
the ink that was probably used. Yeah, yeah, uh, and
they're able to use you know, these high tech scanners
that detect this particular kind of fluorescence and they convert
that into data, which then is converted into particular kinds
of es on the computer. So this isn't just you know,
(28:02):
you're not just opening up Photoshop and uh thrown it
on the old bed scanner. Right. Um. You know, so
far we've talked about a lot of palem says from
the Christian world, so I think it's it's important to
touch on some from from outside of Christian Europe. Yeah.
It's important to note here too that like those previous examples,
(28:23):
they were within the dark ages. That's when they were
sort of lost and written over because, like we mentioned earlier,
religion had more importance to it than say science. However,
there are other examples. I don't want our audience to
think that this is solely like an effective Christianity, right yeah.
And one of the one of the examples from the
(28:43):
Islamic world, uh, comes to us from nineteen seventy two,
that's when it was discovered. Uh So it's in nineteen
seventy two, and restoration is in process at the western
wall of the Great Mosque in Sauna Yemen. Okay, So
they're restoring h here and they discover a lost storeroom
(29:06):
and it's filled with manuscript fragments of the Koran Um.
And this highlights another, you know, key reason for the
survival of many religious texts. And sometimes they're they're hidden
poem sets. The reluctance to destroy sacred books. So these
are copies of the Koran that have worn out from use,
or they've you know, or they've just degraded over time.
(29:28):
But it's a it's a sacred text, so you can't
just throw it out, you can't just burn it. So
this is a place to put the damage in ruin Korans.
And yeah, it's kind of a nubleat for Koran's. I
think you're the only person who's ever tried to fit
those two words into one sentence in the history of mankind.
Well maybe, But the crazy thing here where it gets interesting.
(29:51):
It's not just that they found a whole bunch of
old Korans, but they found a Koran written over the Koran, okay, okay,
which might not seem like a big deal at first
because you've written over one text with the same text. Sure,
but it's probably a different variation exactly. Um. The palm
Tessed Koran was written just a few decades after the
(30:12):
death of the prophet Mohammed in six thirty two, and
so here you have what experts came to consider one
of the oldest Korans in existence, and it's even a
pre canonical version of the Koran. So I just remember
reading a story like three days ago that seems sort
(30:33):
of controversial about how they had found some copy of
the Koran that dated to before Mohammed and therefore, like
it called everything about Islam into question. Did you see that?
I did, and I was at the time. I was
reading some of the sources coming out about it, and
was said, this looks really fascinating. I kind of want
to wait until more first stance of China, little Lucy
(30:56):
Goosey to me, and so I didn't put a lot
of stock into it. But now I'm kind of wondering
if palam tests were part of that. It depending on
how real the whole thing is. Too. Yeah, I look
forward to following following that is is more develops on it.
But but yeah, it's it's interesting when you get into
these ancient texts, you're also you're essentially getting into earlier
drafts of faith and yeah, and that's certainly the case
(31:18):
with the Sona Qoran. You're seeing sort of a uh,
you know, an earlier draft of the Koran. Yeah, it's
sort of like you're watching as like religion adapts to
society's norms over the period of time, but you're able
to see it in this one document. Yeah. Well, another
one that I found was the Sarva Mullah Grant this
which is apparently attributed to be written by and this
(31:41):
is going to be a real tough one for me
to pronounce shre mad Facara sound about right. Sounds written
somewhere in between twelve thirty eight and thirteen seventeen UM. Now,
the same team that I was talking about before that
worked on that Archimedes palam sess they worked on this one.
It's a seven hundred year old palm leaf manuscript. And
essentially what this this you know, document contains is the
(32:04):
essence of Hindu philosophy, so pretty important. Uh, it's thirty
six works with commentaries that are written in Sanskrit on
top of sacred Hindu scriptures. So um, each one of
these leaves is twenty six inches long and two inches wide,
which seems like a very specific when you think about that,
like like trying to get that framed, that's going to
(32:26):
be a custom job. There are on a lot of
like generic twenty six inch by two inch documents. Yeah,
there's a documentary title of the Story of India that
is excellent. It's available i think, on various streaming sources,
and and there's a portion of that where they're looking
at old texts and they actually are handling some of
these palm leaf new scripts and it's really fascinating. Yeah,
(32:47):
it just sounds really neat just the construction of it.
It's also so these leaves are bound together with braided cord,
and they what what's ended up happening because their leaves
and not like goat skin like these other examples that
we talked about, is they've turned brown overtime, and it
makes it really difficult to read the Sanskrit writings there
on it. So this team spent six days imaging the document.
(33:09):
They went to Udppe, India and they used an infrared
filter to manipulate the contrast that's between the ink and
the leaf, so they're able to sort of it's it.
And again, like I keep using the photoshop example because
this is what I know from my past history as
a graphic designer. But it's sort of like playing with
the curves and photoshop and like making it so the
(33:29):
ink rises up to the top and as readable with
the leaf falling into the background. It just sounds really neat.
One of the things. They decided that they needed to
store this in a variety of different media so that
this document wouldn't be lost again. So of course we've
got you know, electronic copies, books, but you know how
they decided to store this thing, so that really last
(33:50):
how they made these things. They call them silicon wafer etchings,
and they're apparently these they take aluminum um that ole
and they etch the words into it, and they use
these because they're completely fireproof and waterproofs. So like building
that they're in the library there and could burn down
(34:11):
or there could be a flood, you can still recover
these things. Eventually, this sounded fascinating, these stacks of these
silicon wafers that that's what we need to put fifty
shades of gray on. Wouldn't be surprised if they're already
working on it. I think after they got done with
the Sarvamula grant this, this team moved on to that
would make sense. The next one we're gonna look at
(34:31):
is the Norvgarad codex Um, a hyper polem test, if
you will. So back in two thousand, archaeologists were working
in Norvgorad, Russia, and they discovered an eleventh century triptych
of waxed limewood tablets. And so this is something that
the owner of this would have used this over and
over again, perhaps hundreds of times, writing and rewriting, and
(34:54):
imagine you apply different layers of wax. I believe so.
And so this was written. The text here was written
in Old Church Slavonic using the Cyrillic alphabet, and it
was important because it's the only medieval object of its
type in the entire Slavonic world. So the preserve text
is U this is a seven Psalms and seventy six.
(35:18):
But that's just that's just the wax, okay, the wood
underneath the wax. However, so you know the wax coding
that you're writing, and then underneath the world um very
much the Jackie treehorn area where the wood underneath that
wax pers there's faint traces of of earlier lettering, psalms,
and an assortment of religious works, and taken together, these
(35:41):
are many times longer than the main text. They include
various uh texts, including a previously unknown Slavonic text reflecting
a non canonical brand of Orthodoxy. So again we see
lost faiths, lost versions of faith buried within these lost texts.
You know. The whole thing that we're talking about here
(36:01):
today really reminds me of of something that we're sort
of lacking in today's society, which is this this physical
contraption of the book, right like it used to be
this this tone, you know, and it was made out
of goat skin or wood covered in wax. But it
was a real piece of artistry. And with the mass
(36:24):
production of books that we have now, Don't get me wrong,
I love them. I read all the time, obviously, but
like can imagine just owning one of those, just having
that on your shelf. It's just there's something satisfying about that,
about the work that was put into it. Yeah, you know,
it also makes me think a lot about tract changes
and versions within say a WordPress document or Microsoft Word document,
(36:47):
where essentially you have in some cases even a hyper
palam sess, you know, especially because sometimes I'll write over
I'll use an old document as a template for a
new document, so I don't I'll say of myself, like
five seconds of picking out the right font. Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
we do that here at work all the time. Like
just this morning before we went in, I was working
(37:07):
on a script with Lauren Vogelbaum, who's on Forward Thinking, uh,
and we were bouncing. We're both in the document at
the same time, and I said, oh, I just accidentally
deleted one of the comments. We're gonna need to go
back to a revision from last night. But we could
only do that, even though we can both work on
the thing at the same time, we could only really
(37:29):
talk about the fact that I deleted something that was
irretrievable unless we went back to an earlier version of
it because we were sitting there right next to each other. Yeah.
The collaborative nature of Google Docs. Who's continues to intrigue
me is that working in these every week, because it's
just a different it's a different experience writing and reading
than I was used to just a few years. Absolutely,
(37:51):
and I am under the impression that both the people
at Google and probably Microsoft and other major corporations that
make these word processing programs, they're thinking about how we
use it. I mean, uh, one of the things that's
interesting about Google Docs is that'll it'll update continuously and
you don't have to update it yourself. So all of
a sudden, yesterday I was sitting there working on a
(38:13):
document from one of our upcoming episodes, and I was like, oh,
the formatting and this is completely changed, and and everything
is different all of a sudden, you know. But it's
because they're probably going through you know, user feedback and
getting a sense for how people use the software. Maybe
that's kind of part of what's going on here too,
is that over time, the people working on wooden wax
(38:35):
or palm leaves or whatever sort of learned from their audience.
You know, these look cool, but they're not really practical. Yeah,
I mean, it's amazing to think about a time in
the future where instead of having like that original manuscript
of this famous or important um novel, instead what what
would be submitted you know, for for care in a
(38:56):
library would be the original word document with full track
changes the original Google document with all the changes tracked. Yeah,
I um, you know, I worked in libraries before I
was here, in the special collections and archives area of
the library that I worked in. This is something that
they were just starting to deal with. Ye I left
you like three or four years ago, maybe even a
(39:17):
little further back than that. They're starting to figure out like, okay,
we're starting to get archives from people that are digitized.
What's the best way to collect these things and exactly that,
Like what do you do when you've got ten versions
of the same word document? You know, save them all
because that you're an archivist. You save everything that you
can because who knows what variations between those word documents
(39:39):
could be important down the road. Yeah, Or you're like me,
You realize you have like five to ten versions of
a short story on your computer and you're not really
sure off hand which one is the most which is
the one that you want to actually send on Yeah, yeah,
I've been there. So we've been talking about palms tests
as historical documents and as a way of digging into
(40:00):
are written past, but they also serve as an attempting
metaphor for the brain and even the soul. Yeah. Absolutely,
there's something to be said about these in terms of
the way that we layer information and how we think
about information. And I think this is important something important
to consider nowadays, because we're really in an era where
(40:22):
it feels like information is that it's prime value. Right,
Like in our industry, it's referred to as content. Right,
So all this content is important, But what is going
on with that content and the value of it, Let's say,
like the value of a BuzzFeed article that is a
bunch of photos of dogs, cute looking dogs versus uh,
(40:45):
this podcast. So you've got a kind of weigh the
two together, right, or in in in what takes up
you know, hard drive space. Yeah, and then also even
in the human human mind of course, you know, we
all have that stuff that's in our heads, some sort
of trivia that is, you know, objectively useless but subjectively
(41:05):
important to ourselves. Unless you have, right, unless you have
like a perfect what is the phrasing athetic memory, then
you have to sort of over time make decisions on
what tidbits of information you delete from your your own
personal hard drive. Yeah, Interestingly enough, one of the one
of the first people to really think about this and
(41:26):
write about it was Thomas de Quincy, who most of
you probably familiar uh with him from his work Confessions
of an English Opium Meter. I know that's the one
I have the most. I've not read that. It's It's cool,
it's I did h I think I did a paper
in college comparing that to Naked Lunch, because you know,
and essentially both of those you have an author who
(41:47):
is ingesting a lot of a lot of opium or
heroin and then writing about fantastical things. So Thomas de
Quincy is writing about I believe, like crocodiles and and uh.
And there's some parallels, loose parallel else to be made
between the two works. But he also wrote the palem
test of the human brain, published in the book A
(42:08):
Suspiria de Profundus, and I was, I have not I
have not read it in full previously, but I was.
I was looking at it for this episode, and has
a really trolling intro that is not going to drive
with modern listeners. He says, you know, perhaps masculine reader,
better than I can tell you, what is a palem test?
(42:28):
Possibly you have one in your own library. But yet,
for the sake of others who may not know or
may have forgotten, suffer me to explain it here, lest
any female reader who honors these papers with their notice
should tax me with well, yeah, that's a very particular
way of of strutting. But i'll i'll read a selection
(42:52):
here from this work that gets more to the heart
of this than i'll I'll actually drop the accent for it. Okay,
what else than a natural and mighty palam sest is
the human brain? Such a palam tesst is my brain,
Such a palam tessed, oh reader, is yours? Everlasting layers
of ideas, images, feelings have fallen upon your brain softly
as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that
(43:15):
went before, and yet in reality not one has been extinguished.
And if in the vellum palam sest lying amongst the
other diplomata of human archives or libraries, there is anything
fantastic or which moves to laughter, as oftentimes there is
in the grotesque collisions of the those successive themes having
(43:37):
no natural connection, which by pure accident have consecutively occupied
the role. Yet in our own heaven created palam sest,
the deep memorial palam sest of the brain. There are
not and cannot be such incoherencies. This guy is that's
a mouthful. I'm impressed. So here's something that that Maybe
(44:01):
this wasn't the point that Quincy was going for, but
this is what just popped into my head while we're
while you were reading that is that, uh, memory is
like palam sests. And in the same way that we
you know how some people like go under hypnosis to
recover lost memories or or or remember things from their childhood.
(44:23):
And I know that there's some sort of disputes about
whether or not that's real or not right, But that's
sort of like the that's psychology's version of of scraping
the wax off or scraping the goat skin layers off
to try to find out what's underneath. It's interesting with
the ways that we process information, whether it's in the
(44:45):
material world or in our own minds or in culture,
they're all they all sort of work in these layered systems. Yeah. Indeed, Now,
another writer who took the palm test as as a
metaphor is Elizabeth the Barrett Browning, who wrote about it
in her eighteen sixty four poem Aurora Lee. And uh,
you know this is actually more succinct and uh and
(45:08):
I think ultimately a little uh, a little more resonant
for the modern listener, modern reader, she says, Let who
says the souls a clean white paper, rather say a
palum test, a prophet's holograph defiled, erased and covered by
a monks the apocalypse by a longus pouring on which
(45:28):
obscene text we may discern perhaps some fair fine trace
of what was written once, some upstroke of an alpha
and omega expressing the old scripture. So again, she's getting
it the same thing that the clincy is getting at, really,
and that's that that you know, our our memory, our
our state of being is is essentially a a a
(45:51):
hyper palum test. Yeah, and so like one of the
things that this is making me think of, too, is
that that they're referring to it fairly casually in these
writings from you know, eighteen sixties. So, I know, I
know we talked about the etymology of the word palem, says,
but I'm wondering how far back it goes into sort
of vernacular, you know. Yeah, Well, I mean, as we
discussed um Alginalami was not the first to to discover these,
(46:14):
He just he was the first to really make it
his business to find a bunch of them. Uh So
the idea had been around for a while, like it
was these books that degraded, uh you know, to the
point and where people were noticing these lost texts. Yeah,
that's interesting. I mean to be honest, before we did
this episode, I've never even heard of them before. Yeah,
because each of us, you know, you can look at
(46:35):
who you are now, you can look at who you
worked ten years ago, and essentially that new version is
is written over the old. And sometimes you know, if
you're feeling if your your current self is feeling a
little bit tired, a little bit worn through, then maybe
some hints so that older you end up coming to
the surface. Yeah. I'm absolutely doing that right now. Um.
(46:56):
I just dug up a bunch of old journals that
I wrote from maybe fifteen years ago. Um, because I
was like, well, I wonder what I was thinking about
then that I might be able to apply to things
I'm working on now. Physical journals journal, Yeah, they're physical.
So I've just been going through them with kind of
a red pen and then, like in my current journal,
there's a section that I'm transcribing some of these things
(47:17):
into and go, oh, yeah, that was an interesting idea
I thought of when I was nineteen. You know, at
the time it seemed profound. Now I'm like, m okay, yeah,
I'll consider that, but it might have some relevance to
what I'm working on now. But yeah, that that old
version of me talking to President day me. So there
you have it. Palm sessed, Palm sess is in a
(47:37):
historical exploration, Palm sess is a modern metaphor. Palm sessed
in the old world, Palm sess in the new Yeah. So,
if you have any information about these that you want
to share with us, I'd love to learn more about them. Uh,
you know, outside of these few examples that we gave here,
there wasn't a ton of research on these. I'm sure
there's probably very niche areas of academia that you know.
(48:00):
For for licensing reasons, we don't have access to the research.
But I'd love to learn more about this. So if
you know something about these that we neglected to mention today,
let us know. You can contact us on social media
where we're available on Facebook, Twitter and Tumbler and all
of those channels we are below the Mind that's right,
(48:21):
and also head on over to stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. That's the mother ship where you'll find
all the podcast episodes, blogs, videos, and The landing page
for this episode will include links out to related related
materials on stuff to about your mind dot com, as
well as some outside materials that we may have referenced here.
Uh oh, and when you do reach out to us,
I'd also love to know about any fictional palum tests,
(48:42):
because you know, we're you know, always reading, uh, you know,
tales and novels in which there's some sort of sacred
old text. We even mentioned the one in the currently
on TV and The Strain, But I do not recall
off hand encountering, say, an evil palam sest that's hidden with,
you know, beneath the text of another book. Yeah, I
have to admit that that was one of the first
(49:03):
things that I thought of, was like this, all right,
I'm gonna store this away. This could be a potentially
great plot device where, yeah, you discover some ancient hidden
grimoire like we had talked about in that previously. Some
guys like necronomicon. I don't need a necronomicon, and I
gotta use these pages with something more practically exactly. They
cover it over with with three songs. Well yeah, if
(49:26):
you want to reach out to us directly and let
us know about any of those things that, you can
also email us at blow the Mind at how stuff
works dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert lam. Hey, I'm Christian Sager, and
this week i'm Stuff to bow your Mind. We're talking
about ancient text ancient books, ancient tones of knowledge, kind
(00:24):
of uh away, kind of spin off from our earlier
or more episode. Yeah, this is very connected and it
also made me it not only did it make me
think of that, but also like any fiction that surrounds
like occult texts or old ancient texts that have hidden
meetings or secrets hidden away in them, this is for you. Yeah,
because we're talking about lost text We're talking about texts
(00:45):
that have been written over, that have been erased, essentially
the data recovery of of texts dating back centuries or
even thousands of years. Yeah, and it's very specifically. These
are called palamp sests. And I may pronounce that wrong
throughout the podcast, but I'm I think that's how you
say it. Yeah. Uh So these are essentially books that
(01:10):
were made with they were made from the hides of
sheep or cattle. Uh And and as such, you could
scrape off the ink of them and reuse the whole
thing all over again to write a whole new book
on top of it. Yeah. The word itself comes from
from the Greek um palem sessed, meaning scraped or rubbed again. Um,
(01:32):
although the membranes of the palem sessh that we're looking
at here, Uh, we're we're not usually scrubbed additional times.
But but sometimes it just depends on how much use
it was getting it. A lot of it really comes
down to just the value and the scarcity of of
of parchment. Yeah. Absolutely, there's a whole sort of I guess,
intellectual economy surrounding these things about what is important contextually
(01:55):
at the time, what is not, what what's valued the most?
You know, we'll see what a lot of these examples
that at the time that they were being erased, religion
was more valuable than say math, so math documents were erased. Yeah,
it's it's also helpful to think about it and in
the modern way that we use our various media and
(02:16):
and use it to record what's important to us. Um.
I instantly think about VHS tapes because I use so
much in my my youth, particularly like the imagine. A
lot of people can relate on this. We have those
really old tapes. They you had them for years and
years and you had what you know, six hours extended
play on there. And so the life of one of
(02:38):
those tapes um A lot of it's essentially lost because
you can't retrieve any information from it. But it might
start off by say, oh, there's a movie coming on
on T and T. I want to tape it, So
I'm gonna leave leave it on, I'm gonna start recording.
So you end up with two hours of some B
movie you want to see, followed by another two hour
movie that you're not really that interested in, and then
(02:59):
like late nine infommercials right right, And then you had
to time it exactly right, you know, if you wanted
to record over the second movie so that you could
use the tape to its fullest extent or something like that.
I remember always trying to like reverse and and time
it just perfectly. You know. It's kind of like making
a mixtape in a way with these sets. Yeah, I mean,
if you got fancy, you you try and edit out
(03:20):
the commercials right and uh, and then every time you
would have like you would add new media. Because I
particularly remember it's like i'd have a tape that would
start with taping some movie and then I'm taping episodes
of Mystery Science Theater three thousand on there. Then I'm
taping like individual wrestling matches from late nineteen nineties, uh
pro wrestling TV shows, and so the connective tissue between
(03:41):
these things will be this like distorted see of of
weird fragments, right, Yeah, you get that effect, which I
believe our producer Tyler used a great effect in the
Monster Science series that you guys did if anybody hasn't
seen that, it's a video series that we did here
at How Stuff Works, where Robert explains the science behind
(04:03):
your favorite monsters. But Tyler used a really cool effect
by making it look like that VHS thing where it's
blending just between the two or maybe there's like maybe
there's that one little blip of white static just between
between the two recordings. You know. It also reminds me
of a bit from comedian Camail No Johnny, Yeah, if
you heard this, I have. I'm a I'm a big
(04:24):
fan of Camail's actually and his podcasts The Indoor Kids
and the X Files Files. Yeah, he does that bit
about how when he when he was a kid, he
used to like take like like like rated G family
movies and record porno reels in the middle of them, right, yeah,
like like he had a friend who had, you know,
(04:44):
through the sort of the underground connections there and in Pakistan,
had acquired these adult films and then he would take
the scenes safely in the middle of you know, like
the Lion King or something. Yeah, Lion King dress. The
kind of takes that you would innocently have at that age,
but he would use them to store this forbidden data. Yeah. Yeah,
(05:05):
So if anyone hasn't heard that, check out his his
comedy albums, because he has a whole bit about having
one of those tapes and and then the power going
off and being stuck in the family VCR. Yeah. I
think that album is called Beta Mail. Yeah, I believe
really good stuff, highly recommended. Well I don't. Of course,
podcasts themselves are palimpsests in a way. Right. Every time
(05:27):
you download a new episode of stuff to blow your
mind to your phone or your tablet or whatever, you've
got to make more room on the hard drive, so
you delete an older episode, whether it's you know, of course,
you're not deleting one of our episodes you're keeping all
the whole archive there. But but you know that I
end up doing that quite a bit where I go, Okay,
which one of these things do I want to keep?
Which one can I get rid of? You know that
(05:48):
I've listened to and I'm satisfied with. Uh. And so
in a way, they sound sort of work like that.
Although I wonder if there's going to be a period
of time, like two hundred three hundred years in the future,
where people are able to take our phones and sort
of like look at the hard drives and peel back
the layers to find these lost podcasts. Yeah, I mean,
data recovery with computers is obviously more complex than than
(06:10):
than VHS. You you have it like a deleted photo
card for a phone, uh, and it seems like you've
lost everything, but that data can sometimes be recovered. Yeah, yeah,
And and it's it's certainly more difficult than you know. Well,
although this sounds pretty difficult, like pouring acid on cattle skins,
are just scraping it with a knife. And in a
lot of cases, you know, present day cases that we'll
(06:33):
talk about, they're using some pretty high technology like infrared
imaging and things like that let's see the ink under
all the layers. But I like to mention of the
podcast example because because because some of the same energies
are going to be in played when we talk about
why particular texts were lost, why they were written over,
you know, because a lot of it comes down to,
you know, what am I into right now? Maybe I'm
(06:53):
not into Marin's podcast as much right now, So I'm
gonna delete it and then maybe I come back to
it later. Maybe I'm muh, I've already listened to it,
to this episode. I'm not interested in this new you
know ideas episodes, So I'm just gonna go ahead and
trash that now. Yeah. Yeah, it comes down to a
scarcity of resources, right, So like in in the time
that these were being made, it was a scarcity of
(07:16):
parchment in particular, and uh, and and also paper they
just we're barely using paper at all. And then there
was also the fluctuation of intellectual activity between these scholars. Yeah,
this was really interesting. Um. It's worth noting that palend
tests uh seemed to suggest you not only the scarcity
of paper, but also uh, the hunger for knowledge and
(07:36):
the demand for new texts demand that the even wealthy
centers of learning had difficulty keeping up with. And this
is backed up by the fact that the number of
palend tests appears to increase in greater ratio during periods
of intense intellectual activity, more so than it does did
during periods of economic decline. So there was more more
(07:57):
erasure and overwriting of texts just because yeah, just when
there was more exciting stuff. So it's kind of like
it's a golden age of podcast there's so many podcasts,
so we're it's has to do more with the what's
available to us rather than just how much space is
in the future, they're just going to find episodes of
Sereal and then they'll they'll peel them back and they'll
find our episodes underneath them. That's right, just a few
(08:18):
from not only serial exists, that's the only one. All
podcasts will be about investigations into murders. So we can
basically um discuss the reasons for erasure under three categories.
First of all, obsolescence, So a text is erased and
something else has written on top of it because well,
(08:39):
maybe it's it's legal, or it's liturgical in nature, and
it's just no longer relevant you know, it's like having
an old football game on a VHS tape. You know,
it's like you've already seen that game. It's not current,
wasn't a particularly great game anyway, Why should I keep it? Yeah?
Or it's an older translation. Yeah. In some of these cases,
the scholars that were scraping the palemp sets, you know,
it wasn't just that they thought, okay, this is unimportant.
(09:03):
They also thought, oh, maybe we actually already have copies
of this somewhere else, right, And as we'll learn, those
copies either ended up getting destroyed or lost in their
own way. Yeah. Other times it's an older translation. There's
a better version of that book. Why would you keep
the old one? Uh? The text is in a foreign
or just a lost language. So this text is just
taking up space on the on the bookshelf, in the
(09:26):
in the you know, why should I bother keeping it?
I can put something more valuable in there? Um Or
it's a it's an in familiar script, it's particularly difficult
to read, it's not a usable text, or it's largely
damaged and no longer useful as a tone of knowledge.
And then also literary texts plays a big role here.
So just as pagan myths often mingle with Christian beliefs,
(09:49):
so do too many pagan classics exist buried beneath Christian texts.
And they're kind of two ways of looking at that, right,
Like one is to say that it's kind of a
war on belief, right, that it's Christianity erasing, like literally
erasing and overriding older systems. Yeah, it's that old with
the adage goes the to the victor's go history or
(10:11):
history is written by the winners, that's it. Yeah, And
in that sense, they sort of won the philosophical war
at the time, so they were able to take the
information as it was and literally rewrite it. Yeah. And
you can kind of see it as you can just
kind of look at it from more of a nasty
perspective versus more just sort of than the nature of
what is popular and what is interesting. It's kind of
almost like gentrification, you know. Yeah, there's a um there, Yeah,
(10:36):
I think there there's something interesting going on, especially when
you consider the things that were being erased in some
of these examples, like the fact that we were erasing
Archimedes mathematical theories, shows what the culture valued at the time.
It's interesting to think, you know too, that we're living
in an age where a book could disappear, Like we're
(10:58):
living in a phenomen I'm an all period now where
it's increasingly hard for particularly popular text to vanish from
the face of the here. Yeah, do you think that
could happen now? Like, so, let's say I'm trying to
think of an enormously popular text that we've all read,
fifty Shades of All right, I've not read it, but
let's pretend I have fifty Shades of Gray. How do
(11:19):
we it gets completely wiped off the face of the planet.
So we've got to destroy all the physical copies, We've
got to destroy the electronic copies that are out there
now because of the books. And then what else? Well, um,
I instantly turned to Ray Bradberry fare and h fourth
fifty one. You'd have to go after the individuals who
have made it there their mission to memorize fifty Shades
(11:40):
of Gray and carry it around. That's actually quite a
few people, Okay, Okay, But then at that point we're
looking at this dystopian future in which no one's ever
heard of fifty Shades of Gray, but they somehow find
an old iPod that has sorry no, an old kindle
and they're able to somehow pull it up off of
(12:02):
the hard drive on that kindle and they find this
lost text. Yeah. Or you know, another way to think
about it too is you may have lost fifty shades
of gray, but you have reviews that refer to it
passages that have appeared from it, so you maybe have
little bits and pieces of it, but the entire text
itself is missing. That's sort of what's going on with
some of these examples. They knew that these books had
(12:23):
existed previously, but they didn't have copies of them, so
it's sort of like only the Amazon reviews were left online,
but the book itself was not right. You know. I
actually worked on a book kind of like this. Uh.
It was a previous life before I worked here at
How Stuff Works, and I was doing graphic design on
a book for Harvard University about the Iliad, and they
(12:46):
had found this was not a palace, sessed by the
way that it had not been written over, but it
was a very ancient copy of the Iliad UH called
the venus A And it was I believe in Venice,
Italy that they found it, and in order to make
it readable so that scholars could participate and kind of
look at it and compare and contrast it to other copies,
(13:09):
they had to scan it with like a like a
three D almost like a three D printer scanner. It
scanned the topography of the pages. Because the book is
so old and delicate, they couldn't move it. Okay, you
can't just throw it on the xerox machine, and yeah,
I mean, you like, moving a page in this book
is like, you know, a big deal because you could
(13:30):
potentially destroy it. It's so brittle. Um. So, just working
on that project and how delicately they treated the text
before they copied it, it really gave me kind of
an impression as I was reading about these examples here
of what these sort of archivist archaeologists almost went through
(13:50):
trying to dig up these old texts, which far more
difficult because they're literally buried under other layers of ink. Yeah,
I mean, with this example you've mentioned, I mean, to
touch the text is to risk destroying it absolutely, and
then to reveal something just beneath the visible text is
to destroy it a little bit. Yeah, exactly, they have
(14:11):
to make a decision like what what is of more
value destroying this ancient text, uh, so that we can
have access to an even older one, or is it
more valuable to hold onto this ancient text and maybe
not know what's underneath it? Now. One of the most
notable early examples of palm test recovery comes to us
(14:36):
from nineteenth century Italian priest and classical literature professor Angelo
my uh. And he made his name rediscovering medieval palms tests.
And he wasn't the first to find one, but he
was the first to really dig for them in earnest
So around eighteen nineteen, he's he's serving as a Vatican
librarian and he comes across a copy of Augustine's Psalms. Um,
(15:00):
you know nothing, nothing particularly amazing about this book, but
underneath it, when he starts uh probing a little, um,
he discovers that there is a copy of Cicero's De Republica.
So how did he like, how do how do how
do you see this? But this is the hard part
for me, Like, and I was looking for imagery of
(15:21):
this too, I'm having a hard time imagining the scenario.
So he's looking at the parchment and he can see
like maybe faint traces of ink leftover underneath the newer
layer of ink. Yeah. Basically, I mean these texts are old,
and so they're decaying a little bit. Often are they've
been damaged here and there, and sometimes that damage reveals
(15:44):
the text underneath. Other times, especially with my like, he
knows those texts are out there, he knows those palum
tests are out there, so he's maybe actively scraping a
little bit here and there, trying to just just test
the waters and see if there's something interesting beneath the surface.
And in this case he did. He found a lost text. Uh,
Sister Rose d Republica, a controversial at the time dialogue
(16:08):
on Roman politics. Uh. And this is a this is
fourth century Roman Empire stuff. So all right, maybe this
is a good analogy for how this works, sort of
something that we can all picture. It's sort of like
if you take a notepad and somebody's written on the
first layer of paper on the notepad and then they
(16:30):
ripped that off, and then you take a pencil to
the next layer underneath, and you shade it in so
you can see the impression left behind by what was
written on top of it. This is like a reverse version.
You're of course, referring to the famous Jackie Treehorn. Exactly
what I was thinking of in my head was the
big Lebowski palam sesst Yes, so that's similar here. Instead
(16:51):
of finding, you know, a pornographic doodle, Yeah, he finds
a pivotal text stuff from the details, the rise of
Julius c. Easier, the eventual fall of the Roman Republic,
the emergence of the Roman Empire. Um. And this is
a book that the scholars knew had once existed because
it's referenced in other works, you know, as zim Burrow
(17:11):
echo points out, books speak of books as if they
spoke among themselves. Um. But anyway, it ends up getting
lost centuries later, and we have only fragments, and even
today only fragments of book four and five in the
Republic are available to us. I get. I couldn't find
any clear argument as to why this book was lost,
so maybe someone can fill us in on that. But um,
(17:34):
as discussed earlier, we can chalk this up to to
various reasons, to taste, to to the scarcity of materials,
ETCETERA possible political controversy too, Yeah, yeah, especially earlier it
was intentionally destroyed. Yeah, maybe so, yeah, especially given it's
it's an initial controversial nature. I wonder what umberto Echo
thinks about Amazon reviews. They're like importance in the philosophical
(17:58):
history of human nature. I don't know, Sam, have him
on the show and asking that that would be fabulous.
It's the kind of thing that he would, he would.
I'm sure he actually has opinions. Yeah, I'm being facetious,
of course, but I'm sure he actually has deep thoughts
about because that's a glorious thing about eco. It's like
he's interested in everything from medieval poverty heresies to hum
(18:19):
superhero superheroes adults. I mean, yeah, how to travel with
the salmon, it's, etcetera. Okay, So the next really important
example of a palum test is the modern restoration of Archimedes.
And I mentioned this earlier, but it was lost text. Uh.
You know, Archimedes is one of the most celebrated mathematicians
(18:41):
of his time. But also you know, we all learn
about him when we're in school, at least I guess
we're supposed to. Uh. And you know, he invented everything
from the screw to catapults and other weapons. I saw
that you put a note here that he invented a
death ray. Yeah, it's it's been a while since I've
done any material and that I think we referenced it
in a podcast a while back. But their the their
arguments that he may have devised a quote unquote death ray,
(19:04):
may have just imagining this like this, like like arcane
system of mirrors, like generating a laser beam off of
the sun's heat or something like. Yeah, like I think
it was essentially a means of blinding or more messing
with ships that were well. And then of course he
also estimated the value of pie, which is fairly important.
(19:27):
It's far more important than theoretical death rays. Well yeah, yeah,
you could argue that. Um. So you know he's got
let's let's list a couple of his books here, just
you know, it's possible that people out there have read
them and just don't particularly recognize our comedy's name. But
he's got on the method of mechanical theorems on floating
bodies and the measurement of the circle. That's probably the
(19:48):
pie one on the sphere, and the cylinder on spiral lines.
They all there's a theme here on the on the
equilibrium of planes. That's the other one so important guy. Right. However,
there were only throughout the dark ages of medieval history
three surviving works by our comedian. Uh. And one of
(20:11):
these three d was lost when Constantinople was sacked in
twelve oh four. And this particular palmp test was made
out of goat skin. So what ends up going on?
This is the book that has the method of mechanical theorems,
the first one I mentioned, So it's got. It describes
how the law of levers works. It describes how to
calculate a body's center of gravity. Uh. There's fourteen pages
(20:34):
in it that are rare commentaries by him on the
logic of categorization. Now, so this stuff, you know, maybe
just kind of sounds like I'm breezing through a list
of bullet points here, but this is important stuff in
the history of mathematics. Um. There's ten pages recording two
unknown speeches by a guy named hyper perridities Hyperides, who
(20:54):
is an order from fourth century BC. And two things
that we're in this book that I thought that were
particularly unusual. Apparently he had a unique way of describing
infinity that mathematicians or his historians had not seen before
in a text like this. So that was an important
aspect of this. The other one was that there was
a like a math puzzle that he made in there
(21:16):
that was called still Mansion. And I had not heard
of this before, but like our comedies, was having some
fun math games, you know. It was like his version
of candy crush, and he had it in this in
this palam test. Unfortunately, all that stuff got scraped off.
What happened was Constantinople gets sacked. The book makes its
(21:36):
way to Bethele him. Nobody knows how, but a Greek
priest there scraped and washed the pages so they could
apply liturgical text to it instead. Right, so it just
is gone for centuries. People don't even know that it exists. Yeah,
because they they were just like, oh, here's this whole book,
but I actually need the pages for these liturgical materials
(21:57):
that I need on a daily base exactly. Yeah. Uh,
And this is it's its story. The history of this
palmp cessed alone is fascinating. So in nineteen o six,
this guy, Johan Ludwig Heiberg finds it okay, very similar
to the previous example with Angela My he's looking through
a bunch of palimps, not palmps as parchments in a
(22:19):
monastery's looking at prayers and he realizes, oh this, I
think this is, you know, like this important work by Archimedes.
So by hand he transcribes everything. He couldn't read some
of it though, and he also don't ask me why
completely ignored the diagrams, which seems important to me based
(22:40):
on my history with math books, but you know, which
is limited. But anyways, he leaves that out. He's he
manages to photograph just a couple of pages. Then the
book disappears again. Uh, it's right after World War One
when it disappears, and they think that it was probably
stolen from this monastery. Now who knows. Maybe these people
just thought it was more prayers, or maybe they realized
(23:02):
the importance of it. I was believed to be owned
by a French family for most of the twentieth century,
and then in this thing just all of a sudden
shows up at an auction in New York City and
an anonymous collector I'm dying to know who this is,
buys it for two million dollars. So this reminds me
(23:24):
of is we we did an episode on this TV
show just a couple of weeks ago the Strain, and
there's this whole thing going on in the Strain where
they're trying to get this ancient text at a at
an auction, you know, and I don't I don't remember
how much it goes for. But this is what I'm
thinking of while I'm reading about this. Is this Vampire
TV show. Yeah, that's exactly what's going on in the
show as we're recording this. Yeah. Yeah, they're trying to
(23:47):
buy the text and the pad guys, you're trying to
buy the text. Everybody's also trying to just steal the text.
That's what I imagine is going on here. There's all
these factions at this New York auction and the anonymous
collector manages to get it. Now, it's sounds like this
anonymous collector is a pretty benevolent person because they lent
it out to the Walters Museum for exhibition. The book
(24:07):
is in really bad shape. It's burnt, it's torn, there's
holes in all the pages. It's got purple mold covering
up certain sections of it. So they have to be
incredibly careful with this thing, uh, and to make it
even more valuable. One of the previous owners I don't know.
I couldn't tell from the research whether this was the
French family or somebody before it. They thought that it
(24:30):
would make it more valuable if they covered it in
gold leaf manuscripts, so they literally painted over this with
this this gold leaf styling. There's a there's a sense
of a housing restoration and all of this too like imagining,
Like someone's saying, all right, I want to restore this house.
But look at somebody came in and they did this
khaki restoration, and I really want to get back to
(24:50):
the you know, the heart of the building. Let me
add some crown molding here, Yeah, exactly. Uh. It was
so damaged. It took them four years just to slowly
take the book apart and clean it. Like they didn't
even get to the actual like archiving of this material.
It was just four years simply to make sure they
(25:11):
didn't destroy this thing and put it into sort of
readable condition. You know. In a way, it's it's kind
of lucky for this text that it was a vanished
for that period of time because because while it was missing,
Angelo my is essentially kind of destroying a lot of
throwing acid on books, which you know from today's perspective.
(25:31):
We look back and we say, he's kind of rough
with these materials, and in some cases he's destroying one
ancient text to try and get it another. But those
methods were I mean, it was kind of they were
the best methods of the day. And we wouldn't have
a more refined methods, uh in our modern time, and
certainly more refined methods to show to throw at this
Archimedes palem sest if if he had not done the work. That, yeah, absolutely,
(25:55):
I mean I think that there's probably a case to
be made that, like, the technology that is available now
allows us to retain a certain amount of the original documents.
Aura righte? What what makes it it? However? I wonder
if a hundred and fifty years from now there's gonna
(26:15):
be even more technology and they're gonna look at us
as being some kind of barbarians, so they're ripping this
thing apart, you know. Um. But so what's interesting is
the way that they they've actually this team has used
it and they called the book Archie for short for
our Communities. Um. They imaged it with both ultra violet
light and X rays from a particle accelerator, So you know,
(26:37):
you just take one of those out and just pop
it into the old university scanner. Uh. It's obviously a
very careful procedure. You know, every time they're they're scanning it,
they have to monitor the temperature and the humidity in
the room around the book while they're scanning it. And
this is something I remember from when I worked on
that venituse a project. I think they did a similar
(26:58):
kind of thing. Always set the proton pact of the
lowest possible yea, and they can't cross the streams of
the particle accelerator in the X ray. The last thing
the X rays this is this part was really cool.
I read this um one of the people who worked
on the project. I read sort of a feature by
her where she talked about what it was like like
a day in the life of working on this book.
(27:19):
She said that the X rays are able to read
through that gold leaf painting, So that's why they used that.
What they do is they strike the ink that's on
the page and they caused the elements inside the ink
to glow. And in this in some cases they they
set it so that it will make iron glow. In
other cases they said it so it will make calcium glow,
(27:40):
and I think that that's based on you know, how
old the ink is, when you know, the composition of
the ink that was probably used. Yeah, yeah, uh, and
they're able to use you know, these high tech scanners
that detect this particular kind of fluorescence and they convert
that into data, which then is converted into particular kinds
of es on the computer. So this isn't just you know,
(28:02):
you're not just opening up Photoshop and uh thrown it
on the old bed scanner. Right. Um. You know, so
far we've talked about a lot of palem says from
the Christian world, so I think it's it's important to
touch on some from from outside of Christian Europe. Yeah.
It's important to note here too that like those previous examples,
(28:23):
they were within the dark ages. That's when they were
sort of lost and written over because, like we mentioned earlier,
religion had more importance to it than say science. However,
there are other examples. I don't want our audience to
think that this is solely like an effective Christianity, right yeah.
And one of the one of the examples from the
(28:43):
Islamic world, uh, comes to us from nineteen seventy two,
that's when it was discovered. Uh So it's in nineteen
seventy two, and restoration is in process at the western
wall of the Great Mosque in Sauna Yemen. Okay, So
they're restoring h here and they discover a lost storeroom
(29:06):
and it's filled with manuscript fragments of the Koran Um.
And this highlights another, you know, key reason for the
survival of many religious texts. And sometimes they're they're hidden
poem sets. The reluctance to destroy sacred books. So these
are copies of the Koran that have worn out from use,
or they've you know, or they've just degraded over time.
(29:28):
But it's a it's a sacred text, so you can't
just throw it out, you can't just burn it. So
this is a place to put the damage in ruin Korans.
And yeah, it's kind of a nubleat for Koran's. I
think you're the only person who's ever tried to fit
those two words into one sentence in the history of mankind.
Well maybe, But the crazy thing here where it gets interesting.
(29:51):
It's not just that they found a whole bunch of
old Korans, but they found a Koran written over the Koran, okay, okay,
which might not seem like a big deal at first
because you've written over one text with the same text. Sure,
but it's probably a different variation exactly. Um. The palm
Tessed Koran was written just a few decades after the
(30:12):
death of the prophet Mohammed in six thirty two, and
so here you have what experts came to consider one
of the oldest Korans in existence, and it's even a
pre canonical version of the Koran. So I just remember
reading a story like three days ago that seems sort
(30:33):
of controversial about how they had found some copy of
the Koran that dated to before Mohammed and therefore, like
it called everything about Islam into question. Did you see that?
I did, and I was at the time. I was
reading some of the sources coming out about it, and
was said, this looks really fascinating. I kind of want
to wait until more first stance of China, little Lucy
(30:56):
Goosey to me, and so I didn't put a lot
of stock into it. But now I'm kind of wondering
if palam tests were part of that. It depending on
how real the whole thing is. Too. Yeah, I look
forward to following following that is is more develops on it.
But but yeah, it's it's interesting when you get into
these ancient texts, you're also you're essentially getting into earlier
drafts of faith and yeah, and that's certainly the case
(31:18):
with the Sona Qoran. You're seeing sort of a uh,
you know, an earlier draft of the Koran. Yeah, it's
sort of like you're watching as like religion adapts to
society's norms over the period of time, but you're able
to see it in this one document. Yeah. Well, another
one that I found was the Sarva Mullah Grant this
which is apparently attributed to be written by and this
(31:41):
is going to be a real tough one for me
to pronounce shre mad Facara sound about right. Sounds written
somewhere in between twelve thirty eight and thirteen seventeen UM. Now,
the same team that I was talking about before that
worked on that Archimedes palam sess they worked on this one.
It's a seven hundred year old palm leaf manuscript. And
essentially what this this you know, document contains is the
(32:04):
essence of Hindu philosophy, so pretty important. Uh, it's thirty
six works with commentaries that are written in Sanskrit on
top of sacred Hindu scriptures. So um, each one of
these leaves is twenty six inches long and two inches wide,
which seems like a very specific when you think about that,
like like trying to get that framed, that's going to
(32:26):
be a custom job. There are on a lot of
like generic twenty six inch by two inch documents. Yeah,
there's a documentary title of the Story of India that
is excellent. It's available i think, on various streaming sources,
and and there's a portion of that where they're looking
at old texts and they actually are handling some of
these palm leaf new scripts and it's really fascinating. Yeah,
(32:47):
it just sounds really neat just the construction of it.
It's also so these leaves are bound together with braided cord,
and they what what's ended up happening because their leaves
and not like goat skin like these other examples that
we talked about, is they've turned brown overtime, and it
makes it really difficult to read the Sanskrit writings there
on it. So this team spent six days imaging the document.
(33:09):
They went to Udppe, India and they used an infrared
filter to manipulate the contrast that's between the ink and
the leaf, so they're able to sort of it's it.
And again, like I keep using the photoshop example because
this is what I know from my past history as
a graphic designer. But it's sort of like playing with
the curves and photoshop and like making it so the
(33:29):
ink rises up to the top and as readable with
the leaf falling into the background. It just sounds really neat.
One of the things. They decided that they needed to
store this in a variety of different media so that
this document wouldn't be lost again. So of course we've
got you know, electronic copies, books, but you know how
they decided to store this thing, so that really last
(33:50):
how they made these things. They call them silicon wafer etchings,
and they're apparently these they take aluminum um that ole
and they etch the words into it, and they use
these because they're completely fireproof and waterproofs. So like building
that they're in the library there and could burn down
(34:11):
or there could be a flood, you can still recover
these things. Eventually, this sounded fascinating, these stacks of these
silicon wafers that that's what we need to put fifty
shades of gray on. Wouldn't be surprised if they're already
working on it. I think after they got done with
the Sarvamula grant this, this team moved on to that
would make sense. The next one we're gonna look at
(34:31):
is the Norvgarad codex Um, a hyper polem test, if
you will. So back in two thousand, archaeologists were working
in Norvgorad, Russia, and they discovered an eleventh century triptych
of waxed limewood tablets. And so this is something that
the owner of this would have used this over and
over again, perhaps hundreds of times, writing and rewriting, and
(34:54):
imagine you apply different layers of wax. I believe so.
And so this was written. The text here was written
in Old Church Slavonic using the Cyrillic alphabet, and it
was important because it's the only medieval object of its
type in the entire Slavonic world. So the preserve text
is U this is a seven Psalms and seventy six.
(35:18):
But that's just that's just the wax, okay, the wood
underneath the wax. However, so you know the wax coding
that you're writing, and then underneath the world um very
much the Jackie treehorn area where the wood underneath that
wax pers there's faint traces of of earlier lettering, psalms,
and an assortment of religious works, and taken together, these
(35:41):
are many times longer than the main text. They include
various uh texts, including a previously unknown Slavonic text reflecting
a non canonical brand of Orthodoxy. So again we see
lost faiths, lost versions of faith buried within these lost texts.
You know. The whole thing that we're talking about here
(36:01):
today really reminds me of of something that we're sort
of lacking in today's society, which is this this physical
contraption of the book, right like it used to be
this this tone, you know, and it was made out
of goat skin or wood covered in wax. But it
was a real piece of artistry. And with the mass
(36:24):
production of books that we have now, Don't get me wrong,
I love them. I read all the time, obviously, but
like can imagine just owning one of those, just having
that on your shelf. It's just there's something satisfying about that,
about the work that was put into it. Yeah, you know,
it also makes me think a lot about tract changes
and versions within say a WordPress document or Microsoft Word document,
(36:47):
where essentially you have in some cases even a hyper
palam sess, you know, especially because sometimes I'll write over
I'll use an old document as a template for a
new document, so I don't I'll say of myself, like
five seconds of picking out the right font. Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
we do that here at work all the time. Like
just this morning before we went in, I was working
(37:07):
on a script with Lauren Vogelbaum, who's on Forward Thinking, uh,
and we were bouncing. We're both in the document at
the same time, and I said, oh, I just accidentally
deleted one of the comments. We're gonna need to go
back to a revision from last night. But we could
only do that, even though we can both work on
the thing at the same time, we could only really
(37:29):
talk about the fact that I deleted something that was
irretrievable unless we went back to an earlier version of
it because we were sitting there right next to each other. Yeah.
The collaborative nature of Google Docs. Who's continues to intrigue
me is that working in these every week, because it's
just a different it's a different experience writing and reading
than I was used to just a few years. Absolutely,
(37:51):
and I am under the impression that both the people
at Google and probably Microsoft and other major corporations that
make these word processing programs, they're thinking about how we
use it. I mean, uh, one of the things that's
interesting about Google Docs is that'll it'll update continuously and
you don't have to update it yourself. So all of
a sudden, yesterday I was sitting there working on a
(38:13):
document from one of our upcoming episodes, and I was like, oh,
the formatting and this is completely changed, and and everything
is different all of a sudden, you know. But it's
because they're probably going through you know, user feedback and
getting a sense for how people use the software. Maybe
that's kind of part of what's going on here too,
is that over time, the people working on wooden wax
(38:35):
or palm leaves or whatever sort of learned from their audience.
You know, these look cool, but they're not really practical. Yeah,
I mean, it's amazing to think about a time in
the future where instead of having like that original manuscript
of this famous or important um novel, instead what what
would be submitted you know, for for care in a
(38:56):
library would be the original word document with full track
changes the original Google document with all the changes tracked. Yeah,
I um, you know, I worked in libraries before I
was here, in the special collections and archives area of
the library that I worked in. This is something that
they were just starting to deal with. Ye I left
you like three or four years ago, maybe even a
(39:17):
little further back than that. They're starting to figure out like, okay,
we're starting to get archives from people that are digitized.
What's the best way to collect these things and exactly that,
Like what do you do when you've got ten versions
of the same word document? You know, save them all
because that you're an archivist. You save everything that you
can because who knows what variations between those word documents
(39:39):
could be important down the road. Yeah, Or you're like me,
You realize you have like five to ten versions of
a short story on your computer and you're not really
sure off hand which one is the most which is
the one that you want to actually send on Yeah, yeah,
I've been there. So we've been talking about palms tests
as historical documents and as a way of digging into
(40:00):
are written past, but they also serve as an attempting
metaphor for the brain and even the soul. Yeah. Absolutely,
there's something to be said about these in terms of
the way that we layer information and how we think
about information. And I think this is important something important
to consider nowadays, because we're really in an era where
(40:22):
it feels like information is that it's prime value. Right,
Like in our industry, it's referred to as content. Right,
So all this content is important, But what is going
on with that content and the value of it, Let's say,
like the value of a BuzzFeed article that is a
bunch of photos of dogs, cute looking dogs versus uh,
(40:45):
this podcast. So you've got a kind of weigh the
two together, right, or in in in what takes up
you know, hard drive space. Yeah, and then also even
in the human human mind of course, you know, we
all have that stuff that's in our heads, some sort
of trivia that is, you know, objectively useless but subjectively
(41:05):
important to ourselves. Unless you have, right, unless you have
like a perfect what is the phrasing athetic memory, then
you have to sort of over time make decisions on
what tidbits of information you delete from your your own
personal hard drive. Yeah, Interestingly enough, one of the one
of the first people to really think about this and
(41:26):
write about it was Thomas de Quincy, who most of
you probably familiar uh with him from his work Confessions
of an English Opium Meter. I know that's the one
I have the most. I've not read that. It's It's cool,
it's I did h I think I did a paper
in college comparing that to Naked Lunch, because you know,
and essentially both of those you have an author who
(41:47):
is ingesting a lot of a lot of opium or
heroin and then writing about fantastical things. So Thomas de
Quincy is writing about I believe, like crocodiles and and uh.
And there's some parallels, loose parallel else to be made
between the two works. But he also wrote the palem
test of the human brain, published in the book A
(42:08):
Suspiria de Profundus, and I was, I have not I
have not read it in full previously, but I was.
I was looking at it for this episode, and has
a really trolling intro that is not going to drive
with modern listeners. He says, you know, perhaps masculine reader,
better than I can tell you, what is a palem test?
(42:28):
Possibly you have one in your own library. But yet,
for the sake of others who may not know or
may have forgotten, suffer me to explain it here, lest
any female reader who honors these papers with their notice
should tax me with well, yeah, that's a very particular
way of of strutting. But i'll i'll read a selection
(42:52):
here from this work that gets more to the heart
of this than i'll I'll actually drop the accent for it. Okay,
what else than a natural and mighty palam sest is
the human brain? Such a palam tesst is my brain,
Such a palam tessed, oh reader, is yours? Everlasting layers
of ideas, images, feelings have fallen upon your brain softly
as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that
(43:15):
went before, and yet in reality not one has been extinguished.
And if in the vellum palam sest lying amongst the
other diplomata of human archives or libraries, there is anything
fantastic or which moves to laughter, as oftentimes there is
in the grotesque collisions of the those successive themes having
(43:37):
no natural connection, which by pure accident have consecutively occupied
the role. Yet in our own heaven created palam sest,
the deep memorial palam sest of the brain. There are
not and cannot be such incoherencies. This guy is that's
a mouthful. I'm impressed. So here's something that that Maybe
(44:01):
this wasn't the point that Quincy was going for, but
this is what just popped into my head while we're
while you were reading that is that, uh, memory is
like palam sests. And in the same way that we
you know how some people like go under hypnosis to
recover lost memories or or or remember things from their childhood.
(44:23):
And I know that there's some sort of disputes about
whether or not that's real or not right, But that's
sort of like the that's psychology's version of of scraping
the wax off or scraping the goat skin layers off
to try to find out what's underneath. It's interesting with
the ways that we process information, whether it's in the
(44:45):
material world or in our own minds or in culture,
they're all they all sort of work in these layered systems. Yeah. Indeed, Now,
another writer who took the palm test as as a
metaphor is Elizabeth the Barrett Browning, who wrote about it
in her eighteen sixty four poem Aurora Lee. And uh,
you know this is actually more succinct and uh and
(45:08):
I think ultimately a little uh, a little more resonant
for the modern listener, modern reader, she says, Let who
says the souls a clean white paper, rather say a
palum test, a prophet's holograph defiled, erased and covered by
a monks the apocalypse by a longus pouring on which
(45:28):
obscene text we may discern perhaps some fair fine trace
of what was written once, some upstroke of an alpha
and omega expressing the old scripture. So again, she's getting
it the same thing that the clincy is getting at, really,
and that's that that you know, our our memory, our
our state of being is is essentially a a a
(45:51):
hyper palum test. Yeah, and so like one of the
things that this is making me think of, too, is
that that they're referring to it fairly casually in these
writings from you know, eighteen sixties. So, I know, I
know we talked about the etymology of the word palem, says,
but I'm wondering how far back it goes into sort
of vernacular, you know. Yeah, Well, I mean, as we
discussed um Alginalami was not the first to to discover these,
(46:14):
He just he was the first to really make it
his business to find a bunch of them. Uh So
the idea had been around for a while, like it
was these books that degraded, uh you know, to the
point and where people were noticing these lost texts. Yeah,
that's interesting. I mean to be honest, before we did
this episode, I've never even heard of them before. Yeah,
because each of us, you know, you can look at
(46:35):
who you are now, you can look at who you
worked ten years ago, and essentially that new version is
is written over the old. And sometimes you know, if
you're feeling if your your current self is feeling a
little bit tired, a little bit worn through, then maybe
some hints so that older you end up coming to
the surface. Yeah. I'm absolutely doing that right now. Um.
(46:56):
I just dug up a bunch of old journals that
I wrote from maybe fifteen years ago. Um, because I
was like, well, I wonder what I was thinking about
then that I might be able to apply to things
I'm working on now. Physical journals journal, Yeah, they're physical.
So I've just been going through them with kind of
a red pen and then, like in my current journal,
there's a section that I'm transcribing some of these things
(47:17):
into and go, oh, yeah, that was an interesting idea
I thought of when I was nineteen. You know, at
the time it seemed profound. Now I'm like, m okay, yeah,
I'll consider that, but it might have some relevance to
what I'm working on now. But yeah, that that old
version of me talking to President day me. So there
you have it. Palm sessed, Palm sess is in a
(47:37):
historical exploration, Palm sess is a modern metaphor. Palm sessed
in the old world, Palm sess in the new Yeah. So,
if you have any information about these that you want
to share with us, I'd love to learn more about them. Uh,
you know, outside of these few examples that we gave here,
there wasn't a ton of research on these. I'm sure
there's probably very niche areas of academia that you know.
(48:00):
For for licensing reasons, we don't have access to the research.
But I'd love to learn more about this. So if
you know something about these that we neglected to mention today,
let us know. You can contact us on social media
where we're available on Facebook, Twitter and Tumbler and all
of those channels we are below the Mind that's right,
(48:21):
and also head on over to stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. That's the mother ship where you'll find
all the podcast episodes, blogs, videos, and The landing page
for this episode will include links out to related related
materials on stuff to about your mind dot com, as
well as some outside materials that we may have referenced here.
Uh oh, and when you do reach out to us,
I'd also love to know about any fictional palum tests,
(48:42):
because you know, we're you know, always reading, uh, you know,
tales and novels in which there's some sort of sacred
old text. We even mentioned the one in the currently
on TV and The Strain, But I do not recall
off hand encountering, say, an evil palam sest that's hidden with,
you know, beneath the text of another book. Yeah, I
have to admit that that was one of the first
(49:03):
things that I thought of, was like this, all right,
I'm gonna store this away. This could be a potentially
great plot device where, yeah, you discover some ancient hidden
grimoire like we had talked about in that previously. Some
guys like necronomicon. I don't need a necronomicon, and I
gotta use these pages with something more practically exactly. They
cover it over with with three songs. Well yeah, if
(49:26):
you want to reach out to us directly and let
us know about any of those things that, you can
also email us at blow the Mind at how stuff
works dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com
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