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fivemackOn Saturday I went with Ed and his musical friend Steve to Chedworth Roman Villa. It's an amazing place, well-preserved (if rather primitive by Byzantine standards) mosaics, a couple of bath-houses, something that might have been a fish-pond or might have been a shrine to the god of the local spring.
But the most amazing bit is that it was lost from about 450AD until 1864, except for the stones that were left above-ground and taken off to the local lime-kilns at some earlier time. And we don't know whether it was essentially a bath-house, essentially a villa or essentially a shrine.
I don't know how this information was lost. The Romans wrote letters -- letters to the Corinthians, letters to the Galicians, amusingly deferential letters to Tiberius asking him to compliment Pliny the Younger's new fire brigade, pathetic letters home from Hadrian's Wall asking Mater for more, warmer socks. Somebody must have written "Dear Mater, today I went with Flavia to the shrine at Cassius's house near Corinium"; though I don't think we have the name of any owner of the Chedworth villa and there are a dozen near Corinium, so that would be unhelpful even if the letter had survived.
And of course the letter wouldn't have survived: we read the Hadrian's Wall letters as imprints in the oaken backing of the wax tablets they were sent on, the other letters survived as copies of copies of copies, and no ninth-century Arab scribe would have bothered to copy "today I went with Flavia to the shrine".
It makes me wonder how much of current civilisation you could reconstruct if, a million years hence, excavators of the vitrified ruins of Seattle recovered the Livejournal server, fortuitously in the blast-shadow of some great reinforced structure so not irredeemably burnt around the edges; people don't mention addresses, and never mention locations by locators (grid references, longitude-and-latitude) rather than by name. You could see there was a London, that it was a popular place to visit, that it had a Victoria and Albert Museum; but you wouldn't know where it was, or who were Victoria and Albert.
But the most amazing bit is that it was lost from about 450AD until 1864, except for the stones that were left above-ground and taken off to the local lime-kilns at some earlier time. And we don't know whether it was essentially a bath-house, essentially a villa or essentially a shrine.
I don't know how this information was lost. The Romans wrote letters -- letters to the Corinthians, letters to the Galicians, amusingly deferential letters to Tiberius asking him to compliment Pliny the Younger's new fire brigade, pathetic letters home from Hadrian's Wall asking Mater for more, warmer socks. Somebody must have written "Dear Mater, today I went with Flavia to the shrine at Cassius's house near Corinium"; though I don't think we have the name of any owner of the Chedworth villa and there are a dozen near Corinium, so that would be unhelpful even if the letter had survived.
And of course the letter wouldn't have survived: we read the Hadrian's Wall letters as imprints in the oaken backing of the wax tablets they were sent on, the other letters survived as copies of copies of copies, and no ninth-century Arab scribe would have bothered to copy "today I went with Flavia to the shrine".
It makes me wonder how much of current civilisation you could reconstruct if, a million years hence, excavators of the vitrified ruins of Seattle recovered the Livejournal server, fortuitously in the blast-shadow of some great reinforced structure so not irredeemably burnt around the edges; people don't mention addresses, and never mention locations by locators (grid references, longitude-and-latitude) rather than by name. You could see there was a London, that it was a popular place to visit, that it had a Victoria and Albert Museum; but you wouldn't know where it was, or who were Victoria and Albert.
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Date: 2003-11-16 11:33 am (UTC)For the benefit of those excavators...
Date: 2003-11-16 11:38 am (UTC)Victoria was a famous hereditary titular ruler of Britain and its empire; Albert was her husband. London is the capital city of the same country, both in Victoria's time and during the lifetime of this author. Britain is an island at the northwestern extremity of Europe; Europe is the large peninsula over the sea to the east of the landmass containing Seattle (which according to our flimy hypothesis you have just dug up). "east" is the direction in which the sun rises, "west" its opposite, and "north" is the direction of the pole that does not have a corresponding landmass (though it is currently covered by ice). "south" is the opposite of north. London lies on the banks of a large river in the south-east of Britain, and is a major world centre of culture and commerce.
Do you think we need to tell them more?
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Date: 2003-11-16 11:57 am (UTC)Some lost writing by Archimdedes has turned up on a palimpsest and been painstakingly transcribed and translated: he appears to have invented differential calculus.
And a theatre in Crete is presenting what they're calling a "modern premiere" of Aeschylus' trilogy about Achilles this year, the first production in over 2000 years. It's based on papyrus unwrapped from a mummy, other ancient sources on Achilles, and ten years of work: it isn't Aeschylus throughout, but it's a lot closer than anyone in centuries would have expected to come. Euripedes we have from one volume of an anthology, ε through κ.
And we're now creating exabytes of data, much of it redundant (many copies of the same films, naked celebrities, news photos...); someone in the future may get lost trying to sift through it all.