The Artifact: The Tongue Stone

In ancient Rome, these were known as glosso petrie, meaning tongue stones. Our first written record of them comes from the first century Roman author Pliny the Elder, who mentions them in the mineralogy section of his surviving master work The Natural History. He doesn't say a lot, but what he does tell us is tantalizing. He writes that glossy petrie are stones that resemble the human tongue. He records a common folk belief that they are not created within

the earth like other stones. Instead, people say that they fall from the sky when the moon goes into eclipse. They're used for the purpose of selenimancy, which is a form of divination that draws hidden knowledge from the appearance of the phases of the moon. What roll the tongue stone plays in this magic art is unclear. But from here Plenty goes on to doubt the folk wisdom about these rocks, since it's also said that they have the power of quelling the winds of a storm, which in

his mind is clearly ridiculous. So what were these stones and where did the belief in their powers come from? Christopher J. Duffin of the Natural History Museum in London writes a chapter on the tongue stones for a book called Toxicology in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. According to Duffin, apart from a you reproductions of Plenty's comments, written references to gloss of Petrie mostly vanish in the

following centuries. However, the stones returned with a vengeance in late Middle Aged Europe as a regular entry in lapidaries or gimstone reference manuals of the time, where it seems they were believed to have power over the snakelike domains of magic, poison and venom. The fourteenth century lapidary of Jehan Mandeville claims that gloss of petrie are alexi far mix, meaning they work as antidotes to poison, in this case

changing color in the presence of a deadly draft. During this period in history, many rich and powerful Europeans seemed to be terrified of poisoning, especially due to the widespread knowledge and use of arsenic based compounds, which could be dissolved into a glass of wine or a ladle of gravy without a hint of smell or taste to give

them away. Remedies for this sphere included everything from goblets made of was believed to be unicorn horn, often in reality sourced from a narwhall or rhinoceros, to bees or stones, which are masses of undigested material from the guts of an animal. Gloss of petrie appear to be interpreted firmly within this tradition. The sixteenth century Sloan Lapidary, for instance, advises that the tongues of adders should be set in silver, both for kings and lords at their meat, so that

yet they may be kept safer from poison. So how will they keep the kings and lords safe? If your rival mixes arsenic into your quail pie. The Sloane texts suggests that rather than changing color, the stones will begin to sweat. Sometimes these stones were worn as pendants and jewelry. In other cases they were incorporated directly into the tableware. One example of the latter approach is the elaborate dinner table ornament known as that naturn Zungenbalm, meaning the adder's

tongue tree. This and other ornaments like it were commissioned from gold or silversmiths of the day, and they were a luxury available only to the upper echelons of society.

One explanation for this legendary alexipharmic power of Glossopetrie is pure sympathetic magic, since they either looked like snakes tongues or sometimes were in fact believed to be snakes tongues turned into stone, and since snakes were associated with the venom, the stones were believed to have power against chemical toxins according to the broad like cures like logic of pre

scientific medicine and magic. However, by the Renaissance some authors began to question the legendary and magical accounts of these stones. In a separate article entitled Cochleodonts and caimeroids, Arthur Smith Woodward and the hollow cephalians. Duffen traces the evolving scholarship on these objects during the late Middle Ages to the early Modern period, noting that Leonardo da Vinci argued in his no books that Glosso petrie were likely the remains

of ordinary, once living organisms, in other words, fossils. In the seventeenth century, the Danish scientist Nils Stenson, also known as Nicholas Steno, mounted a persuasive argument that these stones were not tongues at all, but teeth, the fossilized teeth of ancient sharks. This was based in part on his studies of the cranial musculature of a living great white

shark captured at Lavorno in sixteen sixty seven. Duffin notes that the Sicilian painter Augustino Scilla came to the same conclusion around the same time, and that the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner had suggested the possibility a hundred years earlier, though he had been unable to prove it. So think back to the naturn Zungenbaum. Now that we know what these stones were, Nobles and clergymen were decorating their fine dinner tables with what looked like leafless, withered elms dangling

with the fossilized teeth of extinct sea monsters. To read from duffin quote, the mounted shark's teeth were suspended from a central tree like structure, ready for picking and dipping into the wine before it was drunk. If the tooth did not undergo a color change on being extracted from the wine, the beverage was deemed safe to drink. One description of a tree like this mentions as many as eleven sharks teeth suspended from eight branches made of red coral.

Records indicate that a major consumer of these snake tong trees was the papacy, especially during the Avignon period of the fourteenth century. According to Duffen, there are at least four surviving examples of these trees. One he describes in some detail is truly difficult to imagine without seeing, so

it's worth looking up. Quote. A specimen in the green room of the stat Lika Kunst sam Lungen in Dresden consists of a silver base with Jesse, the father of David, lanked by a snake and reclining at the base of a tree. Six long pedicels then emerge through a canopy of serrated silver leaves, each terminating in a drooping flower, from which a tooth of issyrus or a mako shark is suspended in the crown of the tree. Mary with the baby Jesus in her lap, leans against a large

specimen of otodous megalodon. This was new to me, our Lady of the Megalodon. Another example cited by Duffin as a thirty two centimeter piece held by the Treasury of the German Order in Vienna, consisting of a coral tree on a silver gilt base with fourteen megalodon teeth dangling

like peaches from its red limbs. The Megalodon, whose name just happens to mean giant tooth, is an extinct species of enormous shark that lived from roughly twenty three million years ago until about two and a half million years ago. This amazing shark ark is one of the largest predators that ever lived, though its body size has to be estimated from incomplete data due to the poor fossilization potential of its cartilaginous skeleton. It may have grown up to

around twenty meters or over sixty feet in length. What we know for sure is how big its teeth got, with the largest examples measuring almost seven inches or eighteen centimeters, which is probably too big to fit into a wine glass. While Renaissance popes and nobles may not have known exactly what the serpent's tongues were, they knew what kind they wanted. While it seems any shark's teeth were at least sometimes believed to have alexipharmic effects, the most prized specimens were

Miocene fossils of Otodus megalodon from Malta. It appears Malta was a significant exporter of fossil shark teeth during this period. Malta is an island composed of sedimentary rock formed from ancient sea floors, which is a perfect place for serpent's

tongues to leak out of eroding cliffs and hillsides. Also tying into Malta are some legendary explanations for the origin of gloss of Petrie, which traced back to a story in the New Testament in the Book of Acts where St. Paul is bitten by a viper but miraculously left unharmed to read from Acts chapter twenty eight in the n R. S V. After we had reached safety, we then learned that the island was called Malta. The natives showed us unusual kindness, since it had begun to reign and was cold.

They kindled a fire and welcomed all of us around it. Paul had gathered a bundle of brushwood and was putting it on the fire when a viper, driven out by the heat, fastened itself on his hand. When the natives saw the creature hanging from his hand, they said to one another, this man must be a murderer. Though he has escaped from the sea, justice has not allowed him to live. He, however, shook off the creature into the fire and suffered no harm. They were expecting him to

swell up or drop debt. But after they had waited a long time and saw that nothing unusual had happened to him, they changed their minds and began to say

that he was a god. Over time, this story was embellished to include details not mentioned in the Bible, such as Paul turning the poison tongues of all of Malta's snakes into stone, or the idea that Paul's sermons were so righteous and commanding that they left physical impressions of his tongue in the rock strata of the island itself, which, of course, hundreds of years later would be dug up, collected, and sold as serpents tongues so they could be used

to detect poison in a drink, or for Mary and baby Jesus to recline against them in a centerpiece. That does it for this edition of The Artifact. Tune in each week for new episodes of The Artifact, hosted by Robert or myself. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson, and if you'd like to get into contact with us, you can always email us at cont act at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio.

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