The Indiana Jones of Ancient Texts
This man is reading books no-one has read before
28 November, 2017 // in The Coffeehouse Cleric // by Alex Rowe.
Gregory Heyworth is the Indiana Jones of ancient texts — minus the whip. Whilst other university professors are reading and teaching the same classic texts that have been read and taught for decades and centuries, Heyworth is out to discover “unknown classics” that have been long lost. Yesterday I watched his 2015 TED talk, and now I am totally inspired.
Heyworth is a “textual scientist,” a new discipline that he has pioneered. Textual science, according to his academic page is “a combination of the traditional scholarly skills of paleography, codicology and bibliography, with material-, imaging-, and data-science.” Its goal is to utilise these skills, both traditional and modern, to recover faded or damaged manuscripts whose writing is either hidden or illegible.
This work isn’t only revolutionary in academic circles, says Heyworth. More than that, by (re)introducing these unknown classics into the world, textual science can “rewrite our cultural identities.” People and societies are shaped and influenced by the texts they read.
“Like starlight, which can convey images of the way the Universe looked in the distant past, so multispectral light can take us back to the first stuttering moments of an object’s creation. Through this lens, we witness the mistakes, the changes of mind, the naïvetés, the uncensored thoughts, the imperfections of the human imagination that allow these hallowed objects and their authors to become more real, that make history closer to us.”
Textual science has applications for a number different academic fields. Heyworth makes mention, for instance of a number of ancient Jewish and Christian religious manuscripts. The gelatinizing of the Dead Sea Scrolls, texts of a Jewish sectarian group at Qumran existing around 150 BCE-70 CE but only discovered from 1947, meant that writing around the edges of manuscripts was rendered illegible. Now, with multispectral imaging, this writing is once again made visible.
Another example is the Codex Vercellensis, an early Latin translation of the Bible from the third century CE. Apart from fading due to old age, some of its leaf-pages exhibit wear-and-tear allegedly from the book’s repeated use in “swearing-in ceremonies” in the early chruch. Here also, the modern technologies utilised in textual science allow for this text to be read, and a transcription made, for the first time in centuries.
I love TED for how it introduces exciting work like this into the public domain, and I encourage any reader to stop what they’re doing right away and watch Heyworth explain his work for himself. You won’t be disappointed.
Thank you for reading. The Coffeehouse Cleric is a Medium publication dedicated to asking the big questions of life. It features writing on three main areas: minimalism, spirituality, and learning. If you enjoyed this piece, please do share it with friends and family on social media.
