Palimpsests: Reading History's Blank Pages

or more episode. Yeah, this is very connected and it also made me it not only did it make me think of that, but also like any fiction that surrounds like occult texts or old ancient texts that have hidden meetings or secrets hidden away in them, this is for you. Yeah, because we're talking about lost text We're talking about texts that have been written over, that have been erased, essentially the data recovery of of texts dating back centuries or

even thousands of years. Yeah, and it's very specifically. These are called palamp sests. And I may pronounce that wrong throughout the podcast, but I'm I think that's how you say it. Yeah. Uh So these are essentially books that were made with they were made from the hides of sheep or cattle. Uh And and as such, you could scrape off the ink of them and reuse the whole thing all over again to write a whole new book on top of it. Yeah. The word itself comes from

from the Greek um palem sessed, meaning scraped or rubbed again. Um, although the membranes of the palem sessh that we're looking at here, Uh, we're we're not usually scrubbed additional times. But but sometimes it just depends on how much use it was getting it. A lot of it really comes down to just the value and the scarcity of of

of parchment. Yeah. Absolutely, there's a whole sort of I guess, intellectual economy surrounding these things about what is important contextually at the time, what is not, what what's valued the most? You know, we'll see what a lot of these examples that at the time that they were being erased, religion was more valuable than say math, so math documents were erased. Yeah, it's it's also helpful to think about it and in the modern way that we use our various media and

and use it to record what's important to us. Um. I instantly think about VHS tapes because I use so much in my my youth, particularly like the imagine. A lot of people can relate on this. We have those really old tapes. They you had them for years and years and you had what you know, six hours extended play on there. And so the life of one of those tapes um A lot of it's essentially lost because

you can't retrieve any information from it. But it might start off by say, oh, there's a movie coming on on T and T. I want to tape it, So I'm gonna leave leave it on, I'm gonna start recording.

So you end up with two hours of some B movie you want to see, followed by another two hour movie that you're not really that interested in, and then like late nine infommercials right right, And then you had to time it exactly right, you know, if you wanted to record over the second movie so that you could use the tape to its fullest extent or something like that. I remember always trying to like reverse and and time it just perfectly. You know. It's kind of like making

a mixtape in a way with these sets. Yeah, I mean, if you got fancy, you you try and edit out the commercials right and uh, and then every time you would have like you would add new media. Because I particularly remember it's like i'd have a tape that would start with taping some movie and then I'm taping episodes

of Mystery Science Theater three thousand on there. Then I'm taping like individual wrestling matches from late nineteen nineties, uh pro wrestling TV shows, and so the connective tissue between these things will be this like distorted see of of weird fragments, right, Yeah, you get that effect, which I believe our producer Tyler used a great effect in the Monster Science series that you guys did if anybody hasn't seen that, it's a video series that we did here

at How Stuff Works, where Robert explains the science behind your favorite monsters. But Tyler used a really cool effect by making it look like that VHS thing where it's blending just between the two or maybe there's like maybe there's that one little blip of white static just between between the two recordings. You know. It also reminds me of a bit from comedian Camail No Johnny, Yeah, if you heard this, I have. I'm a I'm a big fan of Camail's actually and his podcasts The Indoor Kids

and the X Files Files. Yeah, he does that bit about how when he when he was a kid, he used to like take like like like rated G family movies and record porno reels in the middle of them, right, yeah, like like he had a friend who had, you know, through the sort of the underground connections there and in Pakistan, had acquired these adult films and then he would take the scenes safely in the middle of you know, like

the Lion King or something. Yeah, Lion King dress. The kind of takes that you would innocently have at that age, but he would use them to store this forbidden data. Yeah. Yeah, So if anyone hasn't heard that, check out his his comedy albums, because he has a whole bit about having one of those tapes and and then the power going off and being stuck in the family VCR. Yeah. I think that album is called Beta Mail. Yeah, I believe really good stuff, highly recommended. Well I don't. Of course,

podcasts themselves are palimpsests in a way. Right. Every time you download a new episode of stuff to blow your mind to your phone or your tablet or whatever, you've got to make more room on the hard drive, so you delete an older episode, whether it's you know, of course, you're not deleting one of our episodes you're keeping all the whole archive there. But but you know that I end up doing that quite a bit where I go, Okay, which one of these things do I want to keep?

Which one can I get rid of? You know that I've listened to and I'm satisfied with. Uh. And so in a way, they sound sort of work like that. Although I wonder if there's going to be a period of time, like two hundred three hundred years in the future, where people are able to take our phones and sort of like look at the hard drives and peel back the layers to find these lost podcasts. Yeah, I mean, data recovery with computers is obviously more complex than than

than VHS. You you have it like a deleted photo card for a phone, uh, and it seems like you've lost everything, but that data can sometimes be recovered. Yeah, yeah, And and it's it's certainly more difficult than you know. Well, although this sounds pretty difficult, like pouring acid on cattle skins,

are just scraping it with a knife. And in a lot of cases, you know, present day cases that we'll talk about, they're using some pretty high technology like infrared imaging and things like that let's see the ink under all the layers. But I like to mention of the podcast example because because because some of the same energies are going to be in played when we talk about why particular texts were lost, why they were written over, you know, because a lot of it comes down to,

you know, what am I into right now? Maybe I'm not into Marin's podcast as much right now, So I'm gonna delete it and then maybe I come back to it later. Maybe I'm muh, I've already listened to it, to this episode. I'm not interested in this new you know ideas episodes, So I'm just gonna go ahead and

trash that now. Yeah. Yeah, it comes down to a scarcity of resources, right, So like in in the time that these were being made, it was a scarcity of parchment in particular, and uh, and and also paper they just we're barely using paper at all. And then there was also the fluctuation of intellectual activity between these scholars. Yeah,

this was really interesting. Um. It's worth noting that palend tests uh seemed to suggest you not only the scarcity of paper, but also uh, the hunger for knowledge and the demand for new texts demand that the even wealthy centers of learning had difficulty keeping up with. And this is backed up by the fact that the number of palend tests appears to increase in greater ratio during periods of intense intellectual activity, more so than it does did

during periods of economic decline. So there was more more erasure and overwriting of texts just because yeah, just when there was more exciting stuff. So it's kind of like it's a golden age of podcast there's so many podcasts, so we're it's has to do more with the what's available to us rather than just how much space is in the future, they're just going to find episodes of Sereal and then they'll they'll peel them back and they'll find our episodes underneath them. That's right, just a few

from not only serial exists, that's the only one. All podcasts will be about investigations into murders. So we can basically um discuss the reasons for erasure under three categories. First of all, obsolescence, So a text is erased and something else has written on top of it because well, maybe it's it's legal, or it's liturgical in nature, and it's just no longer relevant you know, it's like having an old football game on a VHS tape. You know,

it's like you've already seen that game. It's not current, wasn't a particularly great game anyway, Why should I keep it? Yeah? Or it's an older translation. Yeah. In some of these cases, the scholars that were scraping the palemp sets, you know, it wasn't just that they thought, okay, this is unimportant. They also thought, oh, maybe we actually already have copies of this somewhere else, right, And as we'll learn, those copies either ended up getting destroyed or lost in their

own way. Yeah. Other times it's an older translation. There's a better version of that book. Why would you keep the old one? Uh? The text is in a foreign or just a lost language. So this text is just taking up space on the on the bookshelf, in the in the you know, why should I bother keeping it?

I can put something more valuable in there? Um Or it's a it's an in familiar script, it's particularly difficult to read, it's not a usable text, or it's largely damaged and no longer useful as a tone of knowledge. And then also literary texts plays a big role here. So just as pagan myths often mingle with Christian beliefs, so do too many pagan classics exist buried beneath Christian texts.

And they're kind of two ways of looking at that, right, Like one is to say that it's kind of a war on belief, right, that it's Christianity erasing, like literally erasing and overriding older systems. Yeah, it's that old with the adage goes the to the victor's go history or history is written by the winners, that's it. Yeah, And in that sense, they sort of won the philosophical war at the time, so they were able to take the

information as it was and literally rewrite it. Yeah. And you can kind of see it as you can just kind of look at it from more of a nasty perspective versus more just sort of than the nature of what is popular and what is interesting. It's kind of

almost like gentrification, you know. Yeah, there's a um there, Yeah, I think there there's something interesting going on, especially when you consider the things that were being erased in some of these examples, like the fact that we were erasing Archimedes mathematical theories, shows what the culture valued at the time.

It's interesting to think, you know too, that we're living in an age where a book could disappear, Like we're living in a phenomen I'm an all period now where it's increasingly hard for particularly popular text to vanish from the face of the here. Yeah, do you think that could happen now? Like, so, let's say I'm trying to think of an enormously popular text that we've all read, fifty Shades of All right, I've not read it, but

let's pretend I have fifty Shades of Gray. How do we it gets completely wiped off the face of the planet. So we've got to destroy all the physical copies, We've got to destroy the electronic copies that are out there now because of the books. And then what else? Well, um, I instantly turned to Ray Bradberry fare and h fourth fifty one. You'd have to go after the individuals who have made it there their mission to memorize fifty Shades

of Gray and carry it around. That's actually quite a few people, Okay, Okay, But then at that point we're looking at this dystopian future in which no one's ever heard of fifty Shades of Gray, but they somehow find an old iPod that has sorry no, an old kindle and they're able to somehow pull it up off of the hard drive on that kindle and they find this

lost text. Yeah. Or you know, another way to think about it too is you may have lost fifty shades of gray, but you have reviews that refer to it passages that have appeared from it, so you maybe have little bits and pieces of it, but the entire text itself is missing. That's sort of what's going on with some of these examples. They knew that these books had existed previously, but they didn't have copies of them, so it's sort of like only the Amazon reviews were left online,

but the book itself was not right. You know. I

actually worked on a book kind of like this. Uh. It was a previous life before I worked here at How Stuff Works, and I was doing graphic design on a book for Harvard University about the Iliad, and they had found this was not a palace, sessed by the way that it had not been written over, but it was a very ancient copy of the Iliad UH called the venus A And it was I believe in Venice, Italy that they found it, and in order to make it readable so that scholars could participate and kind of

look at it and compare and contrast it to other copies, they had to scan it with like a like a three D almost like a three D printer scanner. It scanned the topography of the pages. Because the book is so old and delicate, they couldn't move it. Okay, you can't just throw it on the xerox machine, and yeah, I mean, you like, moving a page in this book is like, you know, a big deal because you could

potentially destroy it. It's so brittle. Um. So, just working on that project and how delicately they treated the text before they copied it, it really gave me kind of an impression as I was reading about these examples here of what these sort of archivist archaeologists almost went through trying to dig up these old texts, which far more

difficult because they're literally buried under other layers of ink. Yeah, I mean, with this example you've mentioned, I mean, to touch the text is to risk destroying it absolutely, and then to reveal something just beneath the visible text is to destroy it a little bit. Yeah, exactly, they have to make a decision like what what is of more value destroying this ancient text, uh, so that we can have access to an even older one, or is it more valuable to hold onto this ancient text and maybe

not know what's underneath it? Now. One of the most notable early examples of palm test recovery comes to us from nineteenth century Italian priest and classical literature professor Angelo my uh. And he made his name rediscovering medieval palms tests. And he wasn't the first to find one, but he was the first to really dig for them in earnest So around eighteen nineteen, he's he's serving as a Vatican

librarian and he comes across a copy of Augustine's Psalms. Um, you know nothing, nothing particularly amazing about this book, but underneath it, when he starts uh probing a little, um, he discovers that there is a copy of Cicero's De Republica. So how did he like, how do how do how do you see this? But this is the hard part for me, Like, and I was looking for imagery of this too, I'm having a hard time imagining the scenario.

So he's looking at the parchment and he can see like maybe faint traces of ink leftover underneath the newer layer of ink. Yeah. Basically, I mean these texts are old, and so they're decaying a little bit. Often are they've been damaged here and there, and sometimes that damage reveals

the text underneath. Other times, especially with my like, he knows those texts are out there, he knows those palum tests are out there, so he's maybe actively scraping a little bit here and there, trying to just just test the waters and see if there's something interesting beneath the surface. And in this case he did. He found a lost text. Uh, Sister Rose d Republica, a controversial at the time dialogue on Roman politics. Uh. And this is a this is

fourth century Roman Empire stuff. So all right, maybe this is a good analogy for how this works, sort of something that we can all picture. It's sort of like if you take a notepad and somebody's written on the first layer of paper on the notepad and then they ripped that off, and then you take a pencil to the next layer underneath, and you shade it in so you can see the impression left behind by what was written on top of it. This is like a reverse version.

You're of course, referring to the famous Jackie Treehorn. Exactly what I was thinking of in my head was the big Lebowski palam sesst Yes, so that's similar here. Instead of finding, you know, a pornographic doodle, Yeah, he finds a pivotal text stuff from the details, the rise of Julius c. Easier, the eventual fall of the Roman Republic,

the emergence of the Roman Empire. Um. And this is a book that the scholars knew had once existed because it's referenced in other works, you know, as zim Burrow echo points out, books speak of books as if they spoke among themselves. Um. But anyway, it ends up getting lost centuries later, and we have only fragments, and even today only fragments of book four and five in the Republic are available to us. I get. I couldn't find any clear argument as to why this book was lost,

so maybe someone can fill us in on that. But um, as discussed earlier, we can chalk this up to to various reasons, to taste, to to the scarcity of materials, ETCETERA possible political controversy too, Yeah, yeah, especially earlier it was intentionally destroyed. Yeah, maybe so, yeah, especially given it's it's an initial controversial nature. I wonder what umberto Echo thinks about Amazon reviews. They're like importance in the philosophical

history of human nature. I don't know, Sam, have him on the show and asking that that would be fabulous. It's the kind of thing that he would, he would. I'm sure he actually has opinions. Yeah, I'm being facetious, of course, but I'm sure he actually has deep thoughts about because that's a glorious thing about eco. It's like he's interested in everything from medieval poverty heresies to hum superhero superheroes adults. I mean, yeah, how to travel with

the salmon, it's, etcetera. Okay, So the next really important example of a palum test is the modern restoration of Archimedes. And I mentioned this earlier, but it was lost text. Uh. You know, Archimedes is one of the most celebrated mathematicians of his time. But also you know, we all learn about him when we're in school, at least I guess we're supposed to. Uh. And you know, he invented everything from the screw to catapults and other weapons. I saw that you put a note here that he invented a

death ray. Yeah, it's it's been a while since I've done any material and that I think we referenced it in a podcast a while back. But their the their arguments that he may have devised a quote unquote death ray, may have just imagining this like this, like like arcane system of mirrors, like generating a laser beam off of the sun's heat or something like. Yeah, like I think it was essentially a means of blinding or more messing

with ships that were well. And then of course he also estimated the value of pie, which is fairly important. It's far more important than theoretical death rays. Well yeah, yeah, you could argue that. Um. So you know he's got let's let's list a couple of his books here, just you know, it's possible that people out there have read them and just don't particularly recognize our comedy's name. But he's got on the method of mechanical theorems on floating

bodies and the measurement of the circle. That's probably the pie one on the sphere, and the cylinder on spiral lines. They all there's a theme here on the on the equilibrium of planes. That's the other one so important guy. Right. However, there were only throughout the dark ages of medieval history three surviving works by our comedian. Uh. And one of these three d was lost when Constantinople was sacked in twelve oh four. And this particular palmp test was made

out of goat skin. So what ends up going on? This is the book that has the method of mechanical theorems, the first one I mentioned, So it's got. It describes how the law of levers works. It describes how to calculate a body's center of gravity. Uh. There's fourteen pages in it that are rare commentaries by him on the logic of categorization. Now, so this stuff, you know, maybe just kind of sounds like I'm breezing through a list of bullet points here, but this is important stuff in

the history of mathematics. Um. There's ten pages recording two unknown speeches by a guy named hyper perridities Hyperides, who is an order from fourth century BC. And two things that we're in this book that I thought that were particularly unusual. Apparently he had a unique way of describing infinity that mathematicians or his historians had not seen before in a text like this. So that was an important aspect of this. The other one was that there was a like a math puzzle that he made in there

that was called still Mansion. And I had not heard of this before, but like our comedies, was having some fun math games, you know. It was like his version of candy crush, and he had it in this in this palam test. Unfortunately, all that stuff got scraped off. What happened was Constantinople gets sacked. The book makes its way to Bethele him. Nobody knows how, but a Greek priest there scraped and washed the pages so they could apply liturgical text to it instead. Right, so it just

is gone for centuries. People don't even know that it exists. Yeah, because they they were just like, oh, here's this whole book, but I actually need the pages for these liturgical materials that I need on a daily base exactly. Yeah. Uh, And this is it's its story. The history of this

palmp cessed alone is fascinating. So in nineteen o six, this guy, Johan Ludwig Heiberg finds it okay, very similar to the previous example with Angela My he's looking through a bunch of palimps, not palmps as parchments in a monastery's looking at prayers and he realizes, oh this, I think this is, you know, like this important work by Archimedes.

So by hand he transcribes everything. He couldn't read some of it though, and he also don't ask me why completely ignored the diagrams, which seems important to me based on my history with math books, but you know, which is limited. But anyways, he leaves that out. He's he manages to photograph just a couple of pages. Then the book disappears again. Uh, it's right after World War One when it disappears, and they think that it was probably

stolen from this monastery. Now who knows. Maybe these people just thought it was more prayers, or maybe they realized the importance of it. I was believed to be owned by a French family for most of the twentieth century, and then in this thing just all of a sudden shows up at an auction in New York City and an anonymous collector I'm dying to know who this is,

buys it for two million dollars. So this reminds me of is we we did an episode on this TV show just a couple of weeks ago the Strain, and there's this whole thing going on in the Strain where they're trying to get this ancient text at a at an auction, you know, and I don't I don't remember how much it goes for. But this is what I'm thinking of while I'm reading about this. Is this Vampire TV show. Yeah, that's exactly what's going on in the

show as we're recording this. Yeah. Yeah, they're trying to buy the text and the pad guys, you're trying to buy the text. Everybody's also trying to just steal the text. That's what I imagine is going on here. There's all these factions at this New York auction and the anonymous collector manages to get it. Now, it's sounds like this anonymous collector is a pretty benevolent person because they lent it out to the Walters Museum for exhibition. The book

is in really bad shape. It's burnt, it's torn, there's holes in all the pages. It's got purple mold covering up certain sections of it. So they have to be incredibly careful with this thing, uh, and to make it even more valuable. One of the previous owners I don't know. I couldn't tell from the research whether this was the French family or somebody before it. They thought that it would make it more valuable if they covered it in gold leaf manuscripts, so they literally painted over this with

this this gold leaf styling. There's a there's a sense of a housing restoration and all of this too like imagining, Like someone's saying, all right, I want to restore this house. But look at somebody came in and they did this khaki restoration, and I really want to get back to the you know, the heart of the building. Let me add some crown molding here, Yeah, exactly. Uh. It was so damaged. It took them four years just to slowly

take the book apart and clean it. Like they didn't even get to the actual like archiving of this material. It was just four years simply to make sure they didn't destroy this thing and put it into sort of readable condition. You know. In a way, it's it's kind of lucky for this text that it was a vanished for that period of time because because while it was missing, Angelo my is essentially kind of destroying a lot of throwing acid on books, which you know from today's perspective.

We look back and we say, he's kind of rough with these materials, and in some cases he's destroying one ancient text to try and get it another. But those methods were I mean, it was kind of they were the best methods of the day. And we wouldn't have a more refined methods, uh in our modern time, and certainly more refined methods to show to throw at this

Archimedes palem sest if if he had not done the work. That, yeah, absolutely, I mean I think that there's probably a case to be made that, like, the technology that is available now allows us to retain a certain amount of the original documents. Aura righte? What what makes it it? However? I wonder if a hundred and fifty years from now there's gonna be even more technology and they're gonna look at us as being some kind of barbarians, so they're ripping this

thing apart, you know. Um. But so what's interesting is the way that they they've actually this team has used it and they called the book Archie for short for our Communities. Um. They imaged it with both ultra violet light and X rays from a particle accelerator, So you know, you just take one of those out and just pop it into the old university scanner. Uh. It's obviously a

very careful procedure. You know, every time they're they're scanning it, they have to monitor the temperature and the humidity in the room around the book while they're scanning it. And this is something I remember from when I worked on that venituse a project. I think they did a similar kind of thing. Always set the proton pact of the lowest possible yea, and they can't cross the streams of the particle accelerator in the X ray. The last thing the X rays this is this part was really cool.

I read this um one of the people who worked on the project. I read sort of a feature by her where she talked about what it was like like a day in the life of working on this book. She said that the X rays are able to read through that gold leaf painting, So that's why they used that. What they do is they strike the ink that's on the page and they caused the elements inside the ink to glow. And in this in some cases they they

set it so that it will make iron glow. In other cases they said it so it will make calcium glow, and I think that that's based on you know, how old the ink is, when you know, the composition of the ink that was probably used. Yeah, yeah, uh, and they're able to use you know, these high tech scanners that detect this particular kind of fluorescence and they convert that into data, which then is converted into particular kinds

of es on the computer. So this isn't just you know, you're not just opening up Photoshop and uh thrown it on the old bed scanner. Right. Um. You know, so far we've talked about a lot of palem says from the Christian world, so I think it's it's important to touch on some from from outside of Christian Europe. Yeah. It's important to note here too that like those previous examples,

they were within the dark ages. That's when they were sort of lost and written over because, like we mentioned earlier, religion had more importance to it than say science. However, there are other examples. I don't want our audience to think that this is solely like an effective Christianity, right yeah. And one of the one of the examples from the Islamic world, uh, comes to us from nineteen seventy two,

that's when it was discovered. Uh So it's in nineteen seventy two, and restoration is in process at the western wall of the Great Mosque in Sauna Yemen. Okay, So they're restoring h here and they discover a lost storeroom and it's filled with manuscript fragments of the Koran Um. And this highlights another, you know, key reason for the survival of many religious texts. And sometimes they're they're hidden

poem sets. The reluctance to destroy sacred books. So these are copies of the Koran that have worn out from use, or they've you know, or they've just degraded over time. But it's a it's a sacred text, so you can't just throw it out, you can't just burn it. So this is a place to put the damage in ruin Korans. And yeah, it's kind of a nubleat for Koran's. I think you're the only person who's ever tried to fit those two words into one sentence in the history of mankind.

Well maybe, But the crazy thing here where it gets interesting. It's not just that they found a whole bunch of old Korans, but they found a Koran written over the Koran, okay, okay, which might not seem like a big deal at first because you've written over one text with the same text. Sure,

but it's probably a different variation exactly. Um. The palm Tessed Koran was written just a few decades after the death of the prophet Mohammed in six thirty two, and so here you have what experts came to consider one of the oldest Korans in existence, and it's even a pre canonical version of the Koran. So I just remember reading a story like three days ago that seems sort of controversial about how they had found some copy of the Koran that dated to before Mohammed and therefore, like

it called everything about Islam into question. Did you see that? I did, and I was at the time. I was reading some of the sources coming out about it, and was said, this looks really fascinating. I kind of want to wait until more first stance of China, little Lucy Goosey to me, and so I didn't put a lot of stock into it. But now I'm kind of wondering if palam tests were part of that. It depending on

how real the whole thing is. Too. Yeah, I look forward to following following that is is more develops on it. But but yeah, it's it's interesting when you get into these ancient texts, you're also you're essentially getting into earlier drafts of faith and yeah, and that's certainly the case with the Sona Qoran. You're seeing sort of a uh,

you know, an earlier draft of the Koran. Yeah, it's sort of like you're watching as like religion adapts to society's norms over the period of time, but you're able to see it in this one document. Yeah. Well, another one that I found was the Sarva Mullah Grant this which is apparently attributed to be written by and this is going to be a real tough one for me to pronounce shre mad Facara sound about right. Sounds written

somewhere in between twelve thirty eight and thirteen seventeen UM. Now, the same team that I was talking about before that worked on that Archimedes palam sess they worked on this one. It's a seven hundred year old palm leaf manuscript. And essentially what this this you know, document contains is the essence of Hindu philosophy, so pretty important. Uh, it's thirty six works with commentaries that are written in Sanskrit on

top of sacred Hindu scriptures. So um, each one of these leaves is twenty six inches long and two inches wide, which seems like a very specific when you think about that, like like trying to get that framed, that's going to be a custom job. There are on a lot of like generic twenty six inch by two inch documents. Yeah, there's a documentary title of the Story of India that

is excellent. It's available i think, on various streaming sources, and and there's a portion of that where they're looking at old texts and they actually are handling some of these palm leaf new scripts and it's really fascinating. Yeah, it just sounds really neat just the construction of it.

It's also so these leaves are bound together with braided cord, and they what what's ended up happening because their leaves and not like goat skin like these other examples that we talked about, is they've turned brown overtime, and it makes it really difficult to read the Sanskrit writings there on it. So this team spent six days imaging the document.

They went to Udppe, India and they used an infrared filter to manipulate the contrast that's between the ink and the leaf, so they're able to sort of it's it. And again, like I keep using the photoshop example because this is what I know from my past history as a graphic designer. But it's sort of like playing with the curves and photoshop and like making it so the ink rises up to the top and as readable with the leaf falling into the background. It just sounds really neat.

One of the things. They decided that they needed to store this in a variety of different media so that this document wouldn't be lost again. So of course we've got you know, electronic copies, books, but you know how they decided to store this thing, so that really last how they made these things. They call them silicon wafer etchings, and they're apparently these they take aluminum um that ole and they etch the words into it, and they use

these because they're completely fireproof and waterproofs. So like building that they're in the library there and could burn down or there could be a flood, you can still recover these things. Eventually, this sounded fascinating, these stacks of these silicon wafers that that's what we need to put fifty shades of gray on. Wouldn't be surprised if they're already working on it. I think after they got done with the Sarvamula grant this, this team moved on to that

would make sense. The next one we're gonna look at is the Norvgarad codex Um, a hyper polem test, if you will. So back in two thousand, archaeologists were working in Norvgorad, Russia, and they discovered an eleventh century triptych of waxed limewood tablets. And so this is something that the owner of this would have used this over and over again, perhaps hundreds of times, writing and rewriting, and imagine you apply different layers of wax. I believe so.

And so this was written. The text here was written in Old Church Slavonic using the Cyrillic alphabet, and it was important because it's the only medieval object of its type in the entire Slavonic world. So the preserve text is U this is a seven Psalms and seventy six. But that's just that's just the wax, okay, the wood

underneath the wax. However, so you know the wax coding that you're writing, and then underneath the world um very much the Jackie treehorn area where the wood underneath that wax pers there's faint traces of of earlier lettering, psalms, and an assortment of religious works, and taken together, these are many times longer than the main text. They include various uh texts, including a previously unknown Slavonic text reflecting

a non canonical brand of Orthodoxy. So again we see lost faiths, lost versions of faith buried within these lost texts. You know. The whole thing that we're talking about here today really reminds me of of something that we're sort of lacking in today's society, which is this this physical contraption of the book, right like it used to be this this tone, you know, and it was made out of goat skin or wood covered in wax. But it

was a real piece of artistry. And with the mass production of books that we have now, Don't get me wrong, I love them. I read all the time, obviously, but like can imagine just owning one of those, just having that on your shelf. It's just there's something satisfying about that,

about the work that was put into it. Yeah, you know, it also makes me think a lot about tract changes and versions within say a WordPress document or Microsoft Word document, where essentially you have in some cases even a hyper palam sess, you know, especially because sometimes I'll write over I'll use an old document as a template for a new document, so I don't I'll say of myself, like five seconds of picking out the right font. Yeah, yeah, absolutely,

we do that here at work all the time. Like just this morning before we went in, I was working on a script with Lauren Vogelbaum, who's on Forward Thinking, uh, and we were bouncing. We're both in the document at the same time, and I said, oh, I just accidentally deleted one of the comments. We're gonna need to go

back to a revision from last night. But we could only do that, even though we can both work on the thing at the same time, we could only really talk about the fact that I deleted something that was irretrievable unless we went back to an earlier version of it because we were sitting there right next to each other. Yeah.

The collaborative nature of Google Docs. Who's continues to intrigue me is that working in these every week, because it's just a different it's a different experience writing and reading than I was used to just a few years. Absolutely, and I am under the impression that both the people at Google and probably Microsoft and other major corporations that make these word processing programs, they're thinking about how we

use it. I mean, uh, one of the things that's interesting about Google Docs is that'll it'll update continuously and you don't have to update it yourself. So all of a sudden, yesterday I was sitting there working on a document from one of our upcoming episodes, and I was like, oh, the formatting and this is completely changed, and and everything is different all of a sudden, you know. But it's because they're probably going through you know, user feedback and

getting a sense for how people use the software. Maybe that's kind of part of what's going on here too, is that over time, the people working on wooden wax or palm leaves or whatever sort of learned from their audience.

You know, these look cool, but they're not really practical. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing to think about a time in the future where instead of having like that original manuscript of this famous or important um novel, instead what what would be submitted you know, for for care in a library would be the original word document with full track

changes the original Google document with all the changes tracked. Yeah, I um, you know, I worked in libraries before I was here, in the special collections and archives area of the library that I worked in. This is something that they were just starting to deal with. Ye I left you like three or four years ago, maybe even a little further back than that. They're starting to figure out like, okay, we're starting to get archives from people that are digitized.

What's the best way to collect these things and exactly that, Like what do you do when you've got ten versions of the same word document? You know, save them all because that you're an archivist. You save everything that you can because who knows what variations between those word documents

could be important down the road. Yeah, Or you're like me, You realize you have like five to ten versions of a short story on your computer and you're not really sure off hand which one is the most which is the one that you want to actually send on Yeah, yeah, I've been there. So we've been talking about palms tests as historical documents and as a way of digging into are written past, but they also serve as an attempting

metaphor for the brain and even the soul. Yeah. Absolutely, there's something to be said about these in terms of the way that we layer information and how we think about information. And I think this is important something important to consider nowadays, because we're really in an era where it feels like information is that it's prime value. Right,

Like in our industry, it's referred to as content. Right, So all this content is important, But what is going on with that content and the value of it, Let's say, like the value of a BuzzFeed article that is a bunch of photos of dogs, cute looking dogs versus uh, this podcast. So you've got a kind of weigh the two together, right, or in in in what takes up

you know, hard drive space. Yeah, and then also even in the human human mind of course, you know, we all have that stuff that's in our heads, some sort of trivia that is, you know, objectively useless but subjectively important to ourselves. Unless you have, right, unless you have like a perfect what is the phrasing athetic memory, then you have to sort of over time make decisions on what tidbits of information you delete from your your own

personal hard drive. Yeah, Interestingly enough, one of the one of the first people to really think about this and write about it was Thomas de Quincy, who most of you probably familiar uh with him from his work Confessions of an English Opium Meter. I know that's the one

I have the most. I've not read that. It's It's cool, it's I did h I think I did a paper in college comparing that to Naked Lunch, because you know, and essentially both of those you have an author who is ingesting a lot of a lot of opium or heroin and then writing about fantastical things. So Thomas de Quincy is writing about I believe, like crocodiles and and uh. And there's some parallels, loose parallel else to be made

between the two works. But he also wrote the palem test of the human brain, published in the book A Suspiria de Profundus, and I was, I have not I have not read it in full previously, but I was. I was looking at it for this episode, and has a really trolling intro that is not going to drive with modern listeners. He says, you know, perhaps masculine reader, better than I can tell you, what is a palem test?

Possibly you have one in your own library. But yet, for the sake of others who may not know or may have forgotten, suffer me to explain it here, lest any female reader who honors these papers with their notice should tax me with well, yeah, that's a very particular way of of strutting. But i'll i'll read a selection here from this work that gets more to the heart of this than i'll I'll actually drop the accent for it. Okay, what else than a natural and mighty palam sest is

the human brain? Such a palam tesst is my brain, Such a palam tessed, oh reader, is yours? Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before, and yet in reality not one has been extinguished.

And if in the vellum palam sest lying amongst the other diplomata of human archives or libraries, there is anything fantastic or which moves to laughter, as oftentimes there is in the grotesque collisions of the those successive themes having no natural connection, which by pure accident have consecutively occupied the role. Yet in our own heaven created palam sest, the deep memorial palam sest of the brain. There are not and cannot be such incoherencies. This guy is that's

a mouthful. I'm impressed. So here's something that that Maybe this wasn't the point that Quincy was going for, but this is what just popped into my head while we're while you were reading that is that, uh, memory is like palam sests. And in the same way that we you know how some people like go under hypnosis to recover lost memories or or or remember things from their childhood.

And I know that there's some sort of disputes about whether or not that's real or not right, But that's sort of like the that's psychology's version of of scraping the wax off or scraping the goat skin layers off to try to find out what's underneath. It's interesting with the ways that we process information, whether it's in the material world or in our own minds or in culture,

they're all they all sort of work in these layered systems. Yeah. Indeed, Now, another writer who took the palm test as as a metaphor is Elizabeth the Barrett Browning, who wrote about it

in her eighteen sixty four poem Aurora Lee. And uh, you know this is actually more succinct and uh and I think ultimately a little uh, a little more resonant for the modern listener, modern reader, she says, Let who says the souls a clean white paper, rather say a palum test, a prophet's holograph defiled, erased and covered by a monks the apocalypse by a longus pouring on which obscene text we may discern perhaps some fair fine trace of what was written once, some upstroke of an alpha

and omega expressing the old scripture. So again, she's getting it the same thing that the clincy is getting at, really, and that's that that you know, our our memory, our our state of being is is essentially a a a hyper palum test. Yeah, and so like one of the things that this is making me think of, too, is that that they're referring to it fairly casually in these

writings from you know, eighteen sixties. So, I know, I know we talked about the etymology of the word palem, says, but I'm wondering how far back it goes into sort of vernacular, you know. Yeah, Well, I mean, as we discussed um Alginalami was not the first to to discover these, He just he was the first to really make it his business to find a bunch of them. Uh So the idea had been around for a while, like it was these books that degraded, uh you know, to the

point and where people were noticing these lost texts. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean to be honest, before we did this episode, I've never even heard of them before. Yeah, because each of us, you know, you can look at who you are now, you can look at who you worked ten years ago, and essentially that new version is

is written over the old. And sometimes you know, if you're feeling if your your current self is feeling a little bit tired, a little bit worn through, then maybe some hints so that older you end up coming to the surface. Yeah. I'm absolutely doing that right now. Um. I just dug up a bunch of old journals that I wrote from maybe fifteen years ago. Um, because I was like, well, I wonder what I was thinking about then that I might be able to apply to things

I'm working on now. Physical journals journal, Yeah, they're physical. So I've just been going through them with kind of a red pen and then, like in my current journal, there's a section that I'm transcribing some of these things into and go, oh, yeah, that was an interesting idea I thought of when I was nineteen. You know, at the time it seemed profound. Now I'm like, m okay, yeah, I'll consider that, but it might have some relevance to what I'm working on now. But yeah, that that old

version of me talking to President day me. So there you have it. Palm sessed, Palm sess is in a historical exploration, Palm sess is a modern metaphor. Palm sessed in the old world, Palm sess in the new Yeah. So, if you have any information about these that you want to share with us, I'd love to learn more about them. Uh, you know, outside of these few examples that we gave here, there wasn't a ton of research on these. I'm sure there's probably very niche areas of academia that you know.

For for licensing reasons, we don't have access to the research. But I'd love to learn more about this. So if you know something about these that we neglected to mention today, let us know. You can contact us on social media where we're available on Facebook, Twitter and Tumbler and all of those channels we are below the Mind that's right, and also head on over to stuff to Blow your

Mind dot com. That's the mother ship where you'll find all the podcast episodes, blogs, videos, and The landing page for this episode will include links out to related related materials on stuff to about your mind dot com, as well as some outside materials that we may have referenced here.

Uh oh, and when you do reach out to us, I'd also love to know about any fictional palum tests, because you know, we're you know, always reading, uh, you know, tales and novels in which there's some sort of sacred old text. We even mentioned the one in the currently on TV and The Strain, But I do not recall off hand encountering, say, an evil palam sest that's hidden with,

you know, beneath the text of another book. Yeah, I have to admit that that was one of the first things that I thought of, was like this, all right, I'm gonna store this away. This could be a potentially great plot device where, yeah, you discover some ancient hidden grimoire like we had talked about in that previously. Some guys like necronomicon. I don't need a necronomicon, and I gotta use these pages with something more practically exactly. They

cover it over with with three songs. Well yeah, if you want to reach out to us directly and let us know about any of those things that, you can also email us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com