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