In the world of cryptography, substitution ciphers are child’s play. Indeed, we may remember literally playing with them as children, writing secret messages to our friends by replacing all the letters with numbers, say, or shifting them one or two places over in alphabetical order. Cracking such codes was a trivial matter even before the computer age, but certain simple variations could make them more robust. Take the document known as the Copiale cipher (downloadable as a two-part PDF), a 105-page bound manuscript that stayed undecipherable for more than 260 years. Its mystery finally yielded to the efforts of University of Southern California computer scientist Kevin Knight and Uppsala University linguists Beata Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer only in the early twenty-tens.
As Tommie Trelawny tells the story of the Copiale cipher in the Hochelaga video above, the manuscript, which was originally thought to date between 1760 and 1780, first had to be converted into machine-readable code. The text’s use of 88 unique symbols, one of them shaped like an eye, necessitated coming up with names for all of them apart from the Roman letters, which had no particular meaning in isolation.
When another scan searched for repeated letter combinations, its results shed light on probable similarities with the German language. This made sense, since the book was found in Germany in the first place. Could multiple symbols in this strange cipher have been substituted for single German letters? Could the code be, in cryptographic terms, a homophonic cipher?
Approaching the text under that hypothesis revealed meanings suggesting, tantalizingly, that it had been written by a secret society. It even describes an initiation ritual in which the inductee must first “read” a blank piece of paper, then try again with eyeglasses, then again after washing his eyes, and then, finally, undergo a symbolic “operation” involving the plucking of a single eyebrow. This society, the Oculists, turns out to have been composed entirely of ophthalmologists meeting in the seventeen-forties. That they did so covertly may owe to their having been Freemasons, whose rites had recently been banned by Pope Clement XII. The Copiale cipher suggests that Oculists appear to have had no aims more sinister than the pursuit of knowledge — not that, for most of us today, the notion of eighteenth-century eye surgery isn’t terrifying enough.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
When we think of modern architecture, we often think first of what’s called the International Style, whose minimalist, rectilinear, decoration-free forms were championed by the likes of Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. Though they did build projects all over the world, that isn’t exactly the reason for the name. In fact, the International Style represents an attempt to develop a culturally neutral aesthetic for all built environments, deployable equally in Europe, Asia, the Americas, and everywhere else besides. That pretense to universality may count as the most utopian aspect of an avowedly utopian movement — and the one whose impracticality came soonest to light.
Before he became Brazil’s most famous architect, Oscar Niemeyer subscribed to the principles of the International Style. But then, as an acolyte of Le Corbusier, he could hardly have done otherwise. When the great man came to Rio de Janeiro in 1936 to design the new Ministry of Education and Health, Niemeyer was hired to work on the project.
The experience seems to have done its part to convince him that the International Style wasn’t as international as all that, and furthermore, that its rigid dictates would have to be bent to suit his homeland. This bending would, in a sense, be literal: like Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid after him, Niemeyer devoted his architecture to the pursuit of the curve, inspired by examples seen in everything from the mountains of Brazil’s landscape to the bodies of its women.
In 1956, the newly elected president Juscelino Kubitschek immediately realized the plan, written into the country’s constitution long before, of building a new central city to relieve Rio of its status as the capital. Christened Brasília, it was to be constructed on a vast, empty plateau entirely along rational, modernist guidelines, with defined districts organized along a cruciform city plan often likened to a bird or an airplane and monumental structures meant to project a forward-looking image. Niemeyer was selected to design those structures, which immediately became elements of the city’s visual signature upon its inauguration in 1960: ever since, seldom has a photograph failed to include the twin towers and domes of his National Congress or the Space-Age crown of thorns atop his Cathedral of Brasília.
The both administrative and otherworldly form of central Brasília remains alluring, though the city itself began drawing criticism even before its completion. “This is what you get when perfectly decent, intelligent and talented men start thinking in terms of space, rather than place, and about single rather than multiple meanings,” declared a frowning Robert Hughes in his 1980 TV series The Shock of the New. “It’s what you get when you design for political aspirations and not real human needs. You get miles of jerry-built platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens.” Indeed, the domination of car infrastructure and strict separation of functions hardly proved conducive to the spontaneous, convivial aspects of Brazilian life. But residents and visitors alike tend to report that Brasília’s urban design has been improved as its population has grown, and massively, with commensurate improvements to its quality of life over the decades. It may not inspire many bossa nova songs, but the capital nevertheless reflects a genuine facet of what Brazil is — and what it once dreamed of becoming.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Above and below, you can watch musicians perform “Songs of Consolation,” a 1,000-year-old song set “to the poetic portions of Roman philosopher Boethius’ magnum opus The Consolation of Philosophy,” an influential medieval text written during the 6th century. According to Cambridge University, the performance of the piece, which had been lost in time until recently, didn’t come easily:
[T]he task of performing such ancient works today is not as simple as reading and playing the music in front of you. 1,000 years ago, music was written in a way that recorded melodic outlines, but not ‘notes’ as today’s musicians would recognise them; relying on aural traditions and the memory of musicians to keep them alive. Because these aural traditions died out in the 12th century, it has often been thought impossible to reconstruct ‘lost’ music from this era – precisely because the pitches are unknown.
Now, after more than two decades of painstaking work on identifying the techniques used to set particular verse forms, research undertaken by Cambridge University’s Dr Sam Barrett has enabled him to reconstruct melodies from the rediscovered leaf of the 11th century ‘Cambridge Songs’.
The song is performed here by Benjamin Bagby, Hanna Marti and Norbert Rodenkirchen, three members of the medieval music ensemble known as Sequentia.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
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We live, as we’re often told, in the era of globalization. In fact, we’ve been told it so often over the past few decades that it now hardly seems like an observation worth making. But however thoroughly our era is defined by connections between far-flung nations, societies, economies, and cultures, we shouldn’t flatter ourselves into thinking we are pioneers in a wholly new globalized reality. As classicist Eric Cline explains in this recent Big Think interview, an interconnected world flourished in the late Bronze Age, and especially the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC. “Life was pretty good” in those days, he says, at least if you lived in one of the lands around the Mediterranean and Near East that constituted what he calls the “ancient G8.”
The member peoples of this retrospective organization included the Mycenaeans and Minoans in Greece, the Hittites in modern-day Turkey, the Assyrians and the Babylonians in modern-day Iraq, as well as the Cypriots, Egyptians, and Canaanites. Alas, as implied by the title of Cline’s 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, their good times together didn’t last.
In that book, and in lectures on YouTube, he’s explained the variety of factors that contributed to the dissolution of that once prosperous “small-world network.” His surprising popularity for a historian of the Bronze Age owes in part to his willingness to draw comparisons with that time and our own. Many of his fans surely found him out of curiosity over one question: is our “flat” twenty-first-century world similarly headed for a collapse?
If so, we might pay less attention to why the ancient G8 collapsed, and more to what became of its formerly interdependent societies when the crisis had run its course. Such is the subject of Cline’s After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations, and of the Big Think interview extract at the top of the post. Some coped, some adapted, some transformed, and others simply vanished. Cypriots and the Phoenicians of Canaan, for example, remade themselves to thrive in the chaos; the Egyptians muddled through with a mixture of adaptation and coping; the Mycenaeans and the Minoans lost more or less everything, including their writing system, and had to rebuild from square one. But the truly cautionary tale is that of the Hittites, whose civilizational annihilation appears to have been in large part self-inflicted. “Don’t be a Hittite,” is one of Cline’s pieces of advice; another is to gain an understanding of antifragility sooner rather than later.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
A philosopher perhaps more widely known for his prodigious mustache than for the varieties of his thought, Friedrich Nietzsche often seems to be misread more than read. Even someone like Michel Foucault could gloss over a crucial fact about Nietzsche’s body of work: Foucault remarked in an unpublished interview that Nietzsche’s “wonderful ideas” were “used by the Nazi Party.” But that use, he neglected to mention, came about through a scheme hatched by Nietzsche’s sister, after his mental collapse and death, to edit, change, and otherwise manipulate the thinker’s work in a way The Telegraph deemed “criminal.” Foucault may not have known the full context, but Nietzsche had about as much sympathy for fascism as he did for Christianity—both reasons for his break with composer Richard Wagner.
What Nietzsche loved most was music. Even in the wake of this scandal, with Nietzsche fully rehabilitated at the scholarly level at least, the philosopher is generally read piecemeal, used to prop up some ideology or critical theory or another, a tendency his anti-systematic, aphoristic work inspires.
A more holistic approach yields two important general observations: Nietzsche found the mundane work of politics and nationalist conquest, with its tribalism and moral pretensions, thoroughly distasteful. Instead, he considered the creative work of artists, writers, and musicians, as well as scientists, of paramount importance.
Nietzsche almost entered medicine and was himself an artist: “before he engaged himself fully as a philosopher, he had already created a substantial output as poet and composer,” writes Albany Records. In an 1887 letter written three years before his death, Nietzsche claimed, “There has never been a philosopher who has been in essence a musician to such an extent as I am,” though he also admitted he “might be a thoroughly unsuccessful musician.” In any case, he hoped that at least some of his compositions would become known and heard as complementary to his philosophical project.
Now serious readers of Nietzsche, or those simply curious about his musicianship, can hear some of his compositions online. The music ranges from sprightly to pensive, romantic to mournful, and some of it seems to come right out of the Protestant hymnals he grew up with as the son of a Lutheran minister. Nietzsche composed music throughout his life—a complete chronology spans the years 1854, when he was only ten, to 1887. See The Nietzsche Channel for a thorough list of published Nietzsche recordings and sheet music.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
Though you may not hear it every day, chimera remains an evocative word, perhaps even more so for its rarity. It descends from the Greek Khimaira, literally “year-old she-goat,” the name of a mythical fire-breathing creature with a caprine body, sure enough, but also the head of a lion and the tail of a dragon. Today the word broadly refers to any compound, usually bizarre, of parts drawn from disparate sources, a usage that dates back to the Middle Ages. Look at the illuminated manuscripts from that time, and you’ll find chimeras aplenty, a host of beastly mash-ups that look evocatively funny enough to be converted straight into twenty-first-century internet memes — most of which appear to have originally been intended as depictions of real, individual animals.
The video above from Curious Archive presents a gallery of medieval chimeras both intended and not. These include spiked sea turtles, small tigers without stripes, hippopotamuses with dorsal fins, elephants with entire stone castles on their backs, hyenas that resemble carnivorous cows, ostriches eating iron horseshoes, and scorpions with mammalian faces.
Mistakes of this kind were perhaps inevitable, given the difficulty of coming by such exotic animals in medieval Europe, even for artists with access to a royal court. Most would have had to rely on word of mouth or depictions in the Bestiary, a text that functions as both “a natural history and a series of moral and religious lessons,” according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and also incorporated “tales about the existence of bizarre and loathsome creatures.”
As in so many domains of the pre-Enlightenment world, the real and the fantastical went together in a way we can have trouble understanding today. We aren’t always aware, for example, that the lore of the time tended to link the lion — an animal locally extinct since before the Middle Ages began — with Jesus Christ. Thus “the symbolic aspects of lions were therefore as important for the artists as their actual physical features,” writes Mental Floss’ Jane Alexander, and in any case, “medieval artists typically weren’t concerned with realism.” At Hyperallergic, Elaine Velie quotes the Met’s associate curator in the Department of Medieval Art Shirin Fozi as observing that, “very often, people think that they’re laughing at the Middle Ages, and they’re actually laughing with the Middle Ages.” It may surprise us to consider that our ancestors, too, had senses of humor — and that the cultural concept of the “funny animal” has been around much longer than we might have imagined.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
A curious thing happened at the end of the 19th century and the dawning of the 20th. As European and American industries became increasingly confident in their methods of invention and production, scientists made discovery after discovery that shook their understanding of the physical world to the core. “Researchers in the 19th century had thought they would soon describe all known physical processes using the equations of Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell,” Adam Mann writes at Wired. But “the new and unexpected observations were destroying this rosy outlook.”
These observations included X‑rays, the photoelectric effect, nuclear radiation and electrons; “leading physicists, such as Max Planck and Walter Nernst believed circumstances were dire enough to warrant an international symposium that could attempt to resolve the situation.” Those scientists could not have known that over a century later, we would still be staring at what physicist Dominic Walliman calls the “Chasm of Ignorance” at the edge of quantum theory. But they did initiate “the quantum revolution” in the first Solvay Council, in Brussels, named for wealthy chemist and organizer Ernest Solvay.
“Reverberations from this meeting are still felt to this day… though physics may still sometimes seem to be in crisis” writes Mann (in a 2011 article just months before the discovery of the Higgs boson). The inaugural meeting kicked off a series of conferences on physics and chemistry that have continued into the 21st century. Included in the proceedings were Planck, “often called the father of quantum mechanics,” Ernest Rutherford, who discovered the proton, and Heike Kamerlingh-Onnes, who discovered superconductivity.
Also present were mathematician Henri Poincaré, chemist Marie Curie, and a 32-year-old Albert Einstein, the second youngest member of the group. Einstein described the first Solvay conference (1911) in a letter to a friend as “the lamentations on the ruins of Jerusalem. Nothing positive came out of it.” The ruined “temple,” in this case, was the theories of classical physics, “which had dominated scientific thinking in the previous century.” Einstein understood the dismay, but found his colleagues to be irrationally stubborn and conservative.
Nonetheless, he wrote, the scientists gathered at the Solvay Council “probably all agree that the so-called quantum theory is, indeed, a helpful tool but that it is not a theory in the usual sense of the word, at any rate not a theory that could be developed in a coherent form at the present time.” During the fifth Solvay Council, in 1927, Einstein tried to prove that the “Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (and hence quantum mechanics itself) was just plain wrong,” writes Jonathan Dowling, co-director of the Horace Hearne Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Physicist Niels Bohr responded vigorously. “This debate went on for days,” Dowling writes, “and continued on 3 years later at the next conference.” At one point, Einstein uttered his famous quote, “God does not play dice,” in a “room full of the world’s most notable scientific minds,” Amanda Macias writes at Business Insider. Bohr responded, “stop telling God what to do.” That room full of luminaries also sat for a portrait, as they had during the first Solvay Council meeting. See the assembled group at the top and further up in a colorized version in what may be, as one Redditor calls it, “the most intelligent picture ever taken.”
Back row: Auguste Piccard, Émile Henriot, Paul Ehrenfest, Édouard Herzen, Théophile de Donder, Erwin Schrödinger, JE Verschaffelt, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Ralph Fowler, Léon Brillouin.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
It must come up in every single argument, from sophisticated to sophomoric, about the practicability of non-violent pacifism. “Look what Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. were able to achieve!” “Yes, but what about Hitler? What do you do about the Nazis?” The rebuttal implies future Nazi-like entities looming on the horizon, and though this reductio ad Hitlerum generally has the effect of nullifying any continued rational discussion, it’s difficult to imagine a satisfying pacifist answer to the problem of naked, implacable hatred and aggression on such a scale as that of the Third Reich. Even Gandhi’s own proposal sounds like a joke: in 1940, Adolf Hitler abandons his plans to claim Lebensraum for the German people and to displace, enslave, or eradicate Germany’s neighbors and undesirable citizens. He adopts a posture of non-violence and “universal friendship,” and German forces withdraw from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, France, agreeing to resolve differences through international conference and committee.
Hitler may have been a vegetarian, but that’s likely where any sympathy between him and Gandhi began and ended. And yet, the above is precisely what Mahatma Gandhi asked of the Fuhrer, in a letter dated December 24, 1940. Engaged fully in the struggle for Indian independence, Gandhi found himself torn by the entry of Britain into the war against Germany. On the one hand, Gandhi initially pledged “nonviolent moral support” for the war, sensing an enemy—Germany—even more threatening to world peace and stability. (That stance would change in short order as the Indian National Congress revolted and resigned en masse rather than participate in the war). On the other hand, Gandhi did not see the British Empire as categorically different from the Nazis. As he put it in his letter to Hitler, whom he addresses as “Friend” (this is “no formality,” he writes, “I own no foes”): “If there is a difference, it is in degree. One-fifth of the human race has been brought under the British heel by means that will not bear scrutiny.”
Gandhi acknowledges the absurdity of his request: “I am aware,” he writes, “that your view of life regards such spoliations as virtuous acts.” And yet, he marshals a formidable argument for nonviolence as a force of power, not weakness, showing how it had weakened British rule: “The movement of independence has been never so strong as now,” he writes, through “the right means to combat the most organized violence in the world which the British power represents”:
It remains to be seen which is the better organized, the German or the British. We know what the British heel means for us and the non-European races of the world. But we would never wish to end the British rule with German aid. We have found in non-violence a force which, if organized, can without doubt match itself against a combination of all the most violent forces in the world. In non-violent technique, as I have said, there is no such thing as defeat. It is all ‘do or die’ without killing or hurting. It can be used practically without money and obviously without the aid of science of destruction which you have brought to such perfection. It is a marvel to me that you do not see that it is nobody’s monopoly. If not the British, some other power will certainly improve upon your method and beat you with your own weapon. You are leaving no legacy to your people of which they would feel proud. They cannot take pride in a recital of cruel deed, however skillfully planned. I, therefore, appeal to you in the name of humanity to stop the war.
As an alternative to war, Gandhi proposes an “international tribunal of your joint choice” to determine “which party was in the right.” His letter, Gandhi writes, should be taken as “a joint appeal to you and Signor Mussolini…. I hope that he will take this as addressed to him also with the necessary changes.”
Gandhi also references an appeal he made “to every Briton to accept my method of non-violent resistance.” That appeal took the form of an open letter he published that July, “To Every Briton,” in which he wrote:
You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.
When Gandhi visited England that year, he found the viceroy of colonial India “dumbstruck” by these requests, writes Stanley Wolpert in his biography of the Indian leader, “unable to utter a word in response, refusing even to call for his car to take the now more deeply despondent Gandhi home.”
Gandhi’s 1940 letter to Hitler was actually his second addressed to the Nazi leader. The first, a very short missive written in 1939, one month before the ill-fated Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, strikes a conciliatory tone. Gandhi writes that he resisted requests from friends to pen the letter “because of the feeling that any letter from me would be an impertinence,” and though he calls on Hitler to “prevent a war which may reduce humanity to a savage state,” he ends with, “I anticipate your forgiveness, If I have erred in writing to you.” But again, in this very brief letter, Gandhi appeals to the “considerable success” of his nonviolent methods. “There is no evidence,” The Christian Science Monitorremarks, “to suggest Hitler ever responded to either of Gandhi’s letters.”
As the war unavoidably raged, Gandhi redoubled his efforts at Indian independence, launching the “Quit India” movement in 1942, which—writes Open University—“more than anything, united the Indian people against British rule” and hastened its eventual end in 1947. Non-violence succeeded, improbably, against the British Empire, though certain other former colonies won independence through more traditionally warlike methods. And yet, though Gandhi believed non-violent resistance could avert the horrors of World War II, those of us without his level of total commitment to the principle may find it difficult to imagine how it might have succeeded against the Nazis, or how it could have appealed to their totalizing ideology of domination.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
The Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing’s ‘Til Madness Do Us Part, a documentary about a mental institution in Yunnan, runs three hours and 48 minutes. Beauty Lives in Freedom, on the life of imprisoned artist Gao Ertai, is five and a half hours long; Dead Souls, on the survivors of a hard-labor camp in the Gobi Desert, eight hours and fifteen minutes. Even if you know nothing else of his work, you may get the impression that Wang isn’t the most shamelessly commercial of filmmakers. The extreme duration of some of his movies surely make them a hard sell, as do his grim choices of subject matter. But if you want to understand the transformation of modern China, you could hardly find a richer body of cinematic work.
In the video essay above, YouTuber Ken Dai extols the virtues of Wang’s first film: Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, whose more than nine hours of footage depict the last years of the titular industrial district of Shenyang. Wang draws them from the more than 300 hours he shot in the years between 1999 and 2001, by which time a shift in economic policy had made redundant what had once been not just a concentration of state-owned enterprises, but “a monument to a vision of the future.”
Tie Xi employed countless many in the foundries and factories that made possible the dramatic early decades of China’s economic rise, but for its workers and their families alike, it had also become a stage on which generations of life played out.
Wang bears witness to that stage’s dismantlement. In the film’s first part, Dai says, “we watch the workers show up, day after day, to a system that has already decided they’re no longer necessary.” The second turns to “the families, and particularly the teenagers”; the third “follows a freight railway that once connected all of it, and two men, a son and a father, who live and scavenge for scrap metals.” They and the many other remaining Tie Xi denizens who pass before Wang’s camera speak for themselves. At no point does the film incorporate narration, interviews, or even non-diegetic music. (There is, however, an impromptu performance by a nude guitar-playing man in a barracks.) In its refusal to use its people as metaphorical figures or political props, Tie XiQu stands as an example of “direct cinema” at its most direct — except, perhaps, for Wang’s later clothing-factory documentary, the aptly titled 15 Hours.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
When we assume that modern improvements are far superior to the practices of the ancients, we might do well to actually learn how people in the distant past lived before indulging in “chronological snobbery.” Take, for example, the area of dental hygiene. We might imagine the ancient Greeks or Egyptians as prone to rampant tooth decay, lacking the benefits of packaged, branded toothpaste, silken ribbons of floss, astringent mouthwash, and ergonomic toothbrushes. But in fact, as toothpaste manufacturer Colgate points out, “the basic fundamentals” of toothbrush design “have not changed since the times of the Egyptians and Babylonians—a handle to grip, and a bristle-like feature with which to clean the teeth.” And not only did ancient people use toothbrushes, but it is believed that “Egyptians… started using a paste to clean their teeth around 5000 BC,” even before toothbrushes were invented.
In 2003, curators at a Viennese museum discovered “the world’s oldest-known formula for toothpaste,” writes Irene Zoech in The Telegraph, “used more than 1,500 years before Colgate began marketing the first commercial brand in 1873.” Dating from the 4th century AD, the Egyptian papyrus (not shown above), written in Greek, describes a “powder for white and perfect teeth” that, when mixed with saliva, makes a “clean tooth paste.” The recipe is as follows, Zoech summarizes: “…one drachma of rock salt—measure equal to one hundredth of an ounce—two drachmas of mint, one drachma of dried iris flower and 20 grains of pepper, all of them crushed and mixed together.”
Zoech quotes Dentist Heinz Neuman, who remarked, “Nobody in the dental profession had any idea that such an advanced toothpaste formula of this antiquity existed.” Having tried the ancient recipe at a dental conference in Austria, he found it “not unpleasant”
It was painful on my gums and made them bleed as well, but that’s not a bad thing, and afterwards my mouth felt fresh and clean. I believe that this recipe would have been a big improvement on some of the soap toothpastes used much later.
Discovered among “the largest collection of ancient Egyptian documents in the world,” the document, says Hermann Harrauer, head of the papyrus collection at the National Library in Vienna, “was written by someone who’s obviously had some medical knowledge, as he used abbreviations for medical terms.”
When we survey the dental remedies of Medieval England, we do indeed find that modern dental care is far better than much of what was available then. Most dental cures of the time, writes Trevor Anderson in aNature article, “were based on herbal remedies, charms and amulets.” For example, in the 1314 Rosa Anglica, writer John of Gaddesden reports, “some say that the beak of a magpie hung from the neck cures pain in the teeth.” Another remedy involves sticking a needle into a “many footed worm which rolls up in a ball when you touch it.” Touch the aching tooth with that roly-poly needle and “the pain will be erased.”
However, “there is also documentary evidence,” writes Anderson, “for powders to clean teeth and attempts at filling carious cavities,” as well as some surgical intervention. In Gilbertus Anglicus’ 13th century Compendium of Medicine, readers are told to rub teeth and gums with cloth after eating to ensure that “no corrupt matter abides among the teeth.” In The Trotula—a compendium of folk remedies from the 11th or 12th century—we find many recipes for what we might consider toothpaste, though their efficacy is dubious. Danièle Cybulskie at Medievalists.net quotes one recipe “for black teeth”:
…take walnut shells well cleaned of the interior rind, which is green, and… rub the teeth three times a day, and when they have been well rubbed… wash the mouth with warm wine, and with salt mixed if desired.
Another, more extravagant, recipe sounds impractical.
Take burnt white marble and burnt date pits, and white natron, a red tile, salt, and pumice. From all of these make a powder in which damp wool has been wrapped in a fine linen cloth. Rub the teeth inside and out.
Yet a third recipe gives us a luxury variety, its ingredients well out of reach of the average person. We are assured, however, that this formula “works the best.”
Take some each of cinnamon, clove, spikenard, mastic, frankincense, grain, wormwood, crab foot, date pits, and olives. Grind all of these and reduce them to a powder, then rub the affected places.
Whether any of these formulas would have worked at all, I cannot say, but they likely worked better than charms and amulets. In any case, while medieval European texts tend to confirm certain of our ideas about poor dental hygiene of the past, it seems that the daily practices of more ancient peoples in Egypt and elsewhere might have been much more like our own than we would suspect.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
Americans of a certain age may well remember growing up with an Apple II in the classroom, and the perpetual temptation it held out to play The Oregon Trail, NumberMunchers, or perhaps Lode Runner. More than a few recess gamers went on to computer-oriented careers, but only the most curious sought an answer to the question implied in the machine’s name: was there an Apple I? Half a century after the foundation of Apple, Inc., then known as Apple Computer, the product that launched what’s now one of the world’s most valuable companies remains very much an obscurity. Unless you frequent computer museums, you’re unlikely ever to have laid eyes on an Apple I, let alone used one. Even if one of the existing models were to come on the market, you’d need about half a million dollars to buy it.
It’s actually easier to buy the parts that went into an Apple I and build it yourself — which, as demonstrated by the 8‑Bit Guy in the video above, still isn’t easy at all. Yet it does convey something of what Apple’s very first customers would have experienced in 1976, when do-it-yourself was the order of the day in computing.
When I bought the MacBook on which I’m writing this post, I simply opened it up and, naturally, found it ready to use. That would scarcely have been imaginable to computer enthusiasts of the mid-seventies, accustomed as they were to soldering individually purchased chips onto electronics boards by hand. The Apple I marked a great leap forward in convenience by coming already assembled, albeit without a monitor, a keyboard, or even a case; the purchase price of USD $666.66 (closer to $4,000 today) just got you the board. But what a board.
Though we remember Steve Jobs as the mastermind, the Apple I is a tour de force of the engineering genius of his business partner Steve Wozniak. When the Steves debuted it at the Homebrew Computer Club in July of 1976, the relatively small number of chips and advanced functions (BASIC programming! Cassette-tape data storage! Actual video output, if only of teletype-like scrolling text!) created a considerable demand then and there. We often hear of Jobs and Wozniak starting Apple in a garage, and it was in that garage (as well as the house’s living room) that the first Apple I boards were put together. Ultimately, 200 were sold before the Apple II arrived the following year. Apple’s first computer may look intimidating to most of today’s Mac users. But consider the company’s reputation for minimalism, accessibility, and a knack for capturing the consumer’s imagination: all qualities present on that board 50 years ago.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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