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Mysterious doodles hidden in a 1,300-year-old book
- aaron695 4y ago[dead]
- bentobean 4y agoHave they ruled out the possibility that these could be two week old doodles in a 1,300 year old book?
- mrg3_2013 4y agoyeah! I don't know how they can date the doodles. Same issue with cave paintings, unless somehow they can date the paintings
- ggm 4y agoCave paintings they date by the layering above and below the applied material. Newly applied pigment doesnt have a deposit on top and is distinct from the age and structure of the substrate. Contemporary information comes from things like the age of the smoke marks maybe: burnt things fix their C14? I imagine in this case there's a bunch of supporting forensics about these marks.
- defrost 4y agoCave paintings have been dated via radio carbon of organic structures built over the paintings .. eg: Gwion paintings in the Kimberley were created around 12,000 years ago, wasp nests suggest Enigmatic human figures with elaborate headdresses, arm and waist decorations adorn rock shelters in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. This style of art, known as Gwion, Kiro Kiro or Kujon, was painted by the ancestors of today's traditional owners around 12,000 years ago, a new study suggests. The date of the art work, published today in the journal Science Advances, is based on radiocarbon dating of mud wasp nests. https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2020-02-06/gwion-rock-art-in-kimberley-dated-using-wasp-nests/11924584 https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2020-02-06/gwion-rock-ar... Other methods exist, eg: Calcite deposits covering ancient artworks deep within limestone caves in other parts of the world such as Borneo have been reliably dated using a technique that measures how fast uranium decays into thorium. But Australian rock art is painted on sandstone — which contains no calcite — and they are in overhangs exposed to the elements. Also: 12,000-Year-old Aboriginal rock art from the Kimberley region, Western Australia https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aay3922 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aay3922
- flangola7 4y agoMeasurement of radioactive decay leads to abilities some may consider to be... unnatural.
- twic 4y agoI would have said it doesn't seem very likely that someone would have gone into a library and doodled on a book in Old English, but this is in Oxford.
- btwillard 4y agoEh, Steve!?
- davidhay 4y agoWould have been funny if it was that S thing from middle school. For reference... https://miro.medium.com/max/480/0*ypNCKOnhr4RhWR3A.png https://miro.medium.com/max/480/0*ypNCKOnhr4RhWR3A.png
- zach_garwood 4y agoWe called it the "cool S" when I was in school.
- aix1 4y agoWhat is this thing? Never seen it but you two got me curious.
- teraflop 4y agoAs one might expect, it has a Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_S https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_S
- anthropodie 4y agoLemmino did an excellent video on the S The Universal S - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQdxHi4_Pvc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQdxHi4_Pvc
- 867-5309 4y agoah, the sans-serif version of the Slipknot S https://i.pinimg.com/736x/83/2f/a4/832fa4f4985dbcb7ebce9217842fbc0a.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/736x/83/2f/a4/832fa4f4985dbcb7ebce92178...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lofatdairy 4y agoReminds me of Onfim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onfim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onfim
- TT-392 4y agoMaybe it was originally visible, but written with a kind of ink that has weathered away over the years, and only the creases the pen left behind are still visible? Or something similar, maybe a kind of ink that was easy to erase on purpose, like pencil, and after erasing, only these creases were left?
- raldi 4y agoOr maybe they put another paper on top of this one and wrote on it with a quill, leaving an impression on the sheet below.
- tiku 4y agoMore likely yeah..
- psychphysic 4y agoOr pencil given the apparent use of a "stylus".
- juliendorra 4y agoPencils are a very recent invention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil
- psychphysic 4y agoThanks for the surprisingly interesting read. I have one of those alloy pencils which seem to predate graphite pencils. Maybe that's what they used
- junofan 4y agoThey didn’t have paper. They’d scribble in a wax tablet using a stylus. Evidently sometimes they’d use the stylus to scribble in the margins on parchment or vellum.
- 4y ago
- kameit00 4y agoSponge Bob!? :-o
- evilc00kie 4y agowow, didn't know mspaint is this old :D
- telman17 4y agoI always wonder how they actually date things like this. Carbon dating? Something else? Is it obviously apparent to an expert if a manuscript is 800 or 1000 years old? (Additionally, I feel rather foolish that my first thought went to the hybrid poodle breed when I read the topic headline. My own doodle was at my feet though so it’s not completely my fault. )
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoAren't manuscripts / books usually dated? I'm reading the current-day years-based-on-the-birth-of-jesus only came in full swing around 700, which would be around the time these manuscripts were made. But there will have been other ways to indicate when it was written / what year it was.
- psychphysic 4y agoFrom records [0]. Interestingly the book had some blank pages filled with extra prayers by someone later. You can't conceivably carbon date a scratch. But the book could easily be carbon dated but that process has its own difficulty [1] and relates only to the time the animal or other organic matter the book is made of. [0] https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_8904 https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_8904 [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01499-y https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01499-y
- psychoslave 4y agoYou can rather easily infer a earliest possible date based on multiple ways, and of course intersect them to make a more solid hypothesis. One thing is that human being generally very bad at predicting specific future event, if a text depict such an event, chances are good that the document was written after this event. There are also things like which script/police was used, as well as other philologists cues. The material used to make the document can also give you a rough idea of when it was created, even without isotopic analysis: people didn’t have easy access to the same technologies and primary material over time and region. Of course, counterfeit of something that seems older than it really is always a possibility. Time travel to the past is far less probable though. :)
- 4y ago
- thedriver 4y agoHumans weren't fundamentally any different back then. Bathroom wall graffiti has been discovered from ancient Roman ruins.
- OJFord 4y agoThat was my first thought, but I found the article way more interesting than the title suggests. Lest anyone else be put off - the doodles are just one example of something not (or barely) visible without the new imaging techniques described. It's about finding new artefacts in an existing collection, not 'oh wow so weird an ancient human doodled something'.
- DrBazza 4y agoIf you visit Hadrian's Wall in the north of England you can see Roman graffiti there. I find it curious that archaeologists or historians (?) seem to take a lot of things like this so seriously and assume everything has some sort of symbolic meaning, rather than just some teenager scribbling on a page or painting his hand on the wall of a cave just 'because'.
- groffee 4y agoAlmost literally everything is called 'ritual' or done for 'religious reasons'. If you have a gnome garden ornament on your shelf, no-one would seriously think you worship it, just that it looks nice. But this entire profession will call it a 'mysterious religious figure' etc. Same with tattoos, ask any girl why they have a tramp stamp they'll say it looks 'cute' or something, these guys will call it 'symbolic'. It's embarrassing.
- themaninthedark 4y agoVarious phallic shaped objects that are recovered are also recorded as "being used in a fertility ritual"
- delecti 4y ago
- chungy 4y agohttps://archive.is/20230215040804/https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230208-the-tech-revealing-hidden-doodles-in-old-books-and-objects https://archive.is/20230215040804/https://www.bbc.com/future...
- joshu 4y agoreminds me of https://www.hpl.hp.com/research/ptm/papers/ptm.pdf https://www.hpl.hp.com/research/ptm/papers/ptm.pdf
- niemandhier 4y agoThe first of the 'Doodles in the Eadburg' looks like "Bernd das Brot", a famous German childrens TV character.
- teddyh 4y agoThey are all, like Spongebob Squarepants, “tadpole men” (a figure lacking a torso, with arms and legs – sometimes only hands and feet – attaching directly to a head) which is a common form in children’s drawings: https://www.nature.com/articles/254416a0 https://www.nature.com/articles/254416a0
- willvarfar 4y ago> Hodgkinson figured that the first symbol was a cross, followed by "Eadburg": almost certainly the name of the book's owner. > The subsequent letters were a bit more enigmatic: could it mean "bears cwærtern" – the Old English word for "prison"? The Latin passage it accompanies describes the imprisonment of the Apostles, so Eadburg might have been drawing a parallel with her own situation. A completely different interpretation jumped to my mind which I feel is at least equally plausible: A young novice, stuck in her cell and told to read the bible, vents her frustration by scratching that the abbess Eadburg is keeping her in prison. And doodles in other margins, using just her nail or sharp splinter or something because that's what she had that she could use. Its defacement, vandalism, revolt. And perhaps it was never detected?
- wrp 4y agoGiven the crude form of the letters, I like your interpretation better. Books were extremely expensive and cherished items. I expect an adult wanting to personalize a book would have taken greater care.
- ploum 4y agoCould we imagine that those notes were taken on a different material which was thin enough to let some trace on the book? I know they didn’t had paper but maybe they had some kind of tissue on which they could clean their stylus, doodling in the process and not realizing that the page was keeping a record of it.
- uhtred 4y agoYour interpretation is not very different to the journalists: > The subsequent letters were a bit more enigmatic: could it mean "bears cwærtern" – the Old English word for "prison"? The Latin passage it accompanies describes the imprisonment of the Apostles, so Eadburg might have been drawing a parallel with her own situation. I agree with the journalist though-- it seems more plausible to me that Eadburg was the doodler. It was very common when I was at school to scratch something like "SW was here" into a table. Eadburg was here in nun prison.
- 4y ago
- Femtiono 4y agoWe need to redefine what words meaiif everything we just don't know is labeled mysterious
- walnutclosefarm 4y agoBrilliant use of tech to reveal things just below our ability to perceive, and raise fascinating questions of history. Lovely article.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoCouldn't they be impressions left by writing on something laid on the page?
- pvaldes 4y agoThis drawings are recent, clearly done with a ball point pen in my opinion. Is easy to prove it with a trivial test Religious books were used to teach children for a long time. And people copying draws (the hunter scene is a copy, not an original) on papers put over schoolbooks explain the issue perfectly The small figures are an "aha!" in disguise, probably modified later by a child that had a change of mind.