The History Blog

After years of planning, pilot programs and painstaking effort by scholars, conservators and NASA scientists, the first five Dead Sea Scrolls have gone online. Four of them are part of the original seven scrolls discovered by a Bedouin shepherd in a cave at Qumran, just above the Dead Sea, in 1947. One of them, the Temple Scroll, was discovered in a cave less than a mile away in 1956.

The Great Isaiah Scroll, the Temple Scroll, the War Scroll, the Community Rule Scroll and the Commentary on the Habakkuk Scroll, five of the most complete and important scrolls discovered in caves on the banks of the Dead Sea, are kept in a highly secured vault by the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. The isolation is necessary to protect the 2,000-year-old documents from any further deterioration, but it also means anyone who would like to peruse these invaluable Biblical manuscripts would have to jump through nearly impossible hoops.

Not any more. Photographer Ardon Bar-Hama has taken high resolution pictures up to 1,200 megapixels and Google technology has created a database that allows anyone with an Internet connection to get so close to the scrolls that you can see the most minute details of ink and parchment. Each scroll is introduced with more about its contents and history, both written and in short explanatory videos. The Dead Sea Scrolls Online site lets users click on the Hebrew text to get an English translation, and you can join the site via Google Connect to suggest translations in other languages or just to leave comments. The scrolls are all searchable, not just locally on the site but also via Google web search.

Google’s involvement with the Dead Sea Scrolls doesn’t end there. They are also collaborating with the Israel Antiquities Authority on a separate digitization project that will put the IAA’s collection of approximately 30,000 Dead Sea Scrolls fragments totaling 900 manuscripts on the Internet. This project will go several steps beyond high resolution photography.

The MegaVision system will enable the digital imaging of every Scroll fragment in various wavelengths in the highest resolution possible and allow long term monitoring for preservation purposes in a non-invasive and precise manner. The images will be equal in quality to the actual physical viewing of the Scrolls, thus eliminating the need for re-exposure of the Scrolls and allowing their preservation for future generations. The technology will also help rediscover writing and letters that have “vanished” over the years; with the help of infra-red light and wavelengths beyond, these writings will be brought “back to life”, facilitating new possibilities in Dead Sea Scrolls research.

This project is scheduled to be complete by 2016. By then, the Israel Museum’s digitization should also be complete, so if all goes well, the entirety of the Dead Sea Scrolls will be online and available to us all within five years.

Leonardo da Vinci’s lost mural, The Battle of Anghiari, will be the subject of a heist caper movie written and directed by David Twohy, writer and director of the science fiction classics starring Vin Diesel Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick. It will be called, deplorably enough, The Leonardo Job which is so absurdly derivative I hope very much it will be changed at some point in the production process.

Even if it stays the same, I fear the name may be the best part.

An action thriller about the heist of the “lost” Leonardo da Vinci painting The Battle of Anghiari; the story involves two rival master thieves hired to go to Florence to track down the “mythical” painting. These experts use high tech and old tricks to prove the painting exists and pinpoint its location – hidden behind another masterpiece. They are forced to combine skills when their schemes to steal the painting get more complicated and dangerous after they discover they are not the only ones pursuing the hidden treasure.

I’m curious to see exactly how they plan to steal a mural. Murals are on walls, you see, from the Latin murus meaning wall. This particular wall is rather large, too. It will require some seriously impressive high tech gadgetry to excise it without anyone noticing.

They haven’t released a production schedule yet, so we don’t know when the movie will be released. Twohy has been working with Vin Diesel on the long-awaited third Riddick movie so Leonardo might have to get in line.

Cynicism aside, I hope somehow this seeming train wreck will turn out to be a rollicking good time that doesn’t annoy me at all. Pitch Black is a brilliant movie, and I love The Chronicles of Riddick with all its flaws. It never fails to draw me in when it’s on cable.

In 1504, the Gonfalionere of Justice, leader of the Florentine Republic, Piero Soderini commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to decorate a wall in the newly built Hall of Five Hundred, the room where Florence’s Great Council met in the Palazzo Vecchio.

According to Giorgio Vasari’s biography of Leonardo in the Lives of the Artists, the people of Florence clamored for a memento of the great artist’s presence among them. They decided on a large-scale mural depicting the 1440 Battle of Anghiari in which greatly outnumbered Florentine armies held a bridge against the Duke of Milan’s mercenaries, thereby keeping central Italy’s free from Milanese control.

Vasari glowingly describes Leonardo’s design:

Whereupon Leonardo, determining to execute this work, began a cartoon in the Sala del Papa, an apartment in S. Maria Novella, representing the story of Niccolò Piccinino, Captain of Duke Filippo of Milan; wherein he designed a group of horsemen who were fighting for a standard, a work that was held to be very excellent and of great mastery, by reason of the marvellous ideas that he had in composing that battle; seeing that in it rage, fury, and revenge are perceived as much in the men as in the horses, among which two with the forelegs interlocked are fighting no less fiercely with their teeth than those who are riding them do in fighting for that standard, which has been grasped by a soldier, who seeks by the strength of his shoulders, as he spurs his horse to flight, having turned his body backwards and seized the staff of the standard, to wrest it by force from the hands of four others, of whom two are defending it, each with one hand, and, raising their swords in the other, are trying to sever the staff; while an old soldier in a red cap, crying out, grips the staff with one hand, and, raising a scimitar with the other, furiously aims a blow in order to cut off both the hands of those who, gnashing their teeth in the struggle, are striving in attitudes of the utmost fierceness to defend their banner; besides which, on the ground, between the legs of the horses, there are two figures in foreshortening that are fighting together, and the one on the ground has over him a soldier who has raised his arm as high as possible, that thus with greater force he may plunge a dagger into his throat, in order to end his life; while the other, struggling with his legs and arms, is doing what he can to escape death.

It is not possible to describe the invention that Leonardo showed in the garments of the soldiers, all varied by him in different ways, and likewise in the helmet crests and other ornaments; not to mention the incredible mastery that he displayed in the forms and lineaments of the horses, which Leonardo, with their fiery spirit, muscles, and shapely beauty, drew better than any other master.

In classic Leonardo style, he invented an accordion-folding scaffold to reach the top of his immense canvas. Also in a classic but less fortunate Leonardo style, he invented a new undercoat to apply to the wall under his oil painting. He didn’t want to use fresco because it had failed rather spectacularly in The Last Supper, so he scared up some weird mixture that in tests worked quite well. On the huge scale of the wall, though, where it was virtually impossibly to keep the environment evenly warm, the primer didn’t dry quickly enough and before his very eyes the paint started dripping. Leonardo brought in braziers to heat the wall and try to preserve what he could, but only the bottom of the painting managed to dry on time. The paints on the top were hopelessly intermingled. Bummed, Leonardo abandoned the project.

Even incomplete, the mural was widely revered. Many copies were made of it over the years, most notably by Peter Paul Rubens in 1603, based on a 1553 engraving by Lorenzo Zacchia. By the time Rubens made his version, Leonardo’s original was long gone. The Hall of the Five Hundred was enlarged between 1555 and 1572, and in the process The Battle of Anghieri and the incomplete work by Michelangelo that was across from it were both lost.

It was none other than Giorgio Vasari who was in charge of the restructuring of the hall. He and his associates painted vast battle murals on the walls, including over the wall that had once held Leonardo’s lost masterpiece. On one of those murals, way up high, Vasari left a curious note. There’s no lettering anywhere else on this intricate scene of army against army, but in one green standard Vasari painted two words: “Cerca Trova,” seek and find.

Florentine art historian and University of California, San Diego, professor Maurizio Seracini found Vasari’s note in the 1970s. Ever since then, he’s tried to find out more about the wall and might be behind it. Ultrasounds taken in 1976 detected no painting behind the current one. In 2000, Seracini used radar scanning to discover that Vasari had painted his work on a new brick wall, not directly on Leonardo’s surface. Could Vasari, who we know held Anghiari in the highest of esteem, had built a brick surface to keep Leonardo’s work, whatever was left of it, intact? Is that what seekers would find if they looked?

The problem is how do we find out what, if anything, is behind the bricks without dismantling the 16th century works. Enter freelance photographer Dave Yoder. In 2007, Yoder was assigned by National Geographic to do a story about Seracini’s decades-long investigation, and in 2010, National Geographic inked a deal with Florence to pay the city $250,000 for exclusive rights to publish the results of Mr. Seracini’s research.

It was Yoder who found a possible solution to the conundrum. Googling, he found nuclear physicist Robert Smither who was creating a gamma ray camera that would be able to take high-resolution pictures of cancer inside of a patient without invasive exploration.

Mr. Smither figured that his camera, which essentially uses copper crystals in place of lens glass to focus the gamma rays that bounce back when an object is sprayed with neutrons, could provide a definitive answer. It could not only determine whether the Leonardo painting was there by identifying the chemicals in the paint but could also capture an image of the hidden work — without damaging the Vasari fresco on top.

Thus ensued an unlikely and somewhat surreal turn of events in which Mr. Yoder, between glossy-magazine assignments, found himself borrowing time at a facility of Italy’s energy research agency in Frascati, outside Rome. The testing, in June 2010, went well. The team took pigments similar to those used by Leonardo and original bricks from Leonardo’s era that Mr. Seracini found at the Palazzo Vecchio and sprayed them with neutrons. The gamma rays that bounced back were strong enough for Mr. Smither to collect and read.

That convinced Mr. Smither that if they exposed the wall in the Hall of Five Hundred to neutrons, they could tell from the gamma rays that bounced back whether Leonardo’s painting was still there. And, at that point, they could build a special camera that would create an image from those particular gamma rays.

It’s the best of both worlds: we get to see what’s left of Leonardo’s painting without damaging the wall on top of it. The only problem is money. In order to develop and test the gamma camera, the researchers need $265,000. Since everyone is broke, they’ve taken it to Kickstarter where people can donate a dollar or a hundred thousand of them to see this plan come to fruition.

I think Leonardo, compulsive inventor that he was, would be absolutely thrilled to have a new gamma ray camera built so that we can see his art.

As you’ve doubtless noticed by now, I love digitization projects that allow, nay, desperately need random nerds such as ourselves to root around in historical archives. This one is easily my favorite because it gives you the chance to read entire issues of the weekly magazine Charles Dickens owned and edited for 20 years.

The magazine saw the debut in serial form of some of Dickens’ most famous works like Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The journals contain articles about society and politics, exposés of appalling conditions in factories and prisons, dispatches from the front of mid-19th century conflicts, and the literary stylings of luminaries like Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Elizabeth Gaskell. Every Christmas Dickens would collaborate with some of them to create seasonal plays and stories.

The journal began in 1850 as Household Words. Dickens owned half of it and his agents Forster and Wills owned another quarter. The remaining shares belonged to his publishers, Bradbury and Evans. That 25% was enough to guarantee them interference, so when they and Dickens had a falling out in 1859 the author decided to start a new magazine over which he would have complete creative control.

He took Bradbury and Evans to court (Chancery Court, no less, the systemic maelström at the center of Bleak House) to win back the rights to the trade name “Household Words” but wasted no time getting the new venture off the ground. All the Year Round debuted on April 30, 1859. One month later Dickens won his case and folded Household Words into All the Year Round. He continued to edit the magazine until his death in 1870.

There are 1,101 editions of Dickens’ weeklies, that’s 33,000 pages. Starting in 2006, a valiant team of three people at the University of Buckingham has been working on scanning and digitizing them all so that they can be readable and searchable on the Internet. It’s an immense project, however, because even a high-resolution document scan is still replete with OCR errors and extraneous data, and it takes one person a lot of time to copy-edit a billion words. They’ve only managed to go through about 15% of the archive thus far.

Enter the Online Text Correction (OTC) Project.

All though the image files were created using a state-of-the-art scanning device, the quality of the original journal pages varied and some contained paper folds, smudge marks, transparency, etc. and as a result the text files contain a number of errors that vary from file to file. This is the main dilemma that we are trying to correct. A secondary problem, relatively trivial, is that the text file contains unwanted information and styling, which can also be corrected at the same time as the actual mistakes.

We have decided to make a magazine, typically 24 pages long, the smallest unit of contribution and as a result we will have 1,101 units of work at the end of the day. So if we find around 1,000 volunteers to take on 1 or 2 magazines each, we will reach the target between us. We reckon that with a typical magazine, it will take about 10 minutes to review and correct each page = 240 minutes or 4 hours’ work).

I love this approach. It means that you get to read an entire issue cover to cover, fixing OCR and formatting errors. You get all the pleasure of curling up with a stack of old Dickens magazines while at the same time helping ensure they will be available at the click of a mouse in perpetuity. The goal is to get the entire archive online in time to launch the new Dickens Journals Online website by February 7, 2012, the bicentennial of the birth of Dickens.

To help them accomplish this laudable goal while getting the chance to immerse yourself in Victorian society, register on the OTC Project website. Once you’re logged in, you select an uncorrected issue from the Magazine Index and dig in. Scroll down on this page for details on how they want the text formatted and corrected.

I spent all day pursuing a fascinating new obsession and had a nice loooong blog entry to show for it when I got kicked out of WordPress and lost all my work. I’m too traumatized to face starting over again right now, so y’all will have to excuse me for not posting today.

I leave you instead to the dark consolation of Volume 6 of Drunk History, starring a six-pack, a bottle of Absinthe, John C. Reilly and Crispin Glover.

Nonexistent? Okay then, how are you at playing Concentration when you can see all the cards? Pretty damn good, I bet. Well now you can put that talent to excellent history nerd use by helping identify and transcribe the Oxyrynchus Papyri, a large collection of ancient writings dating from the 1st to the 6th century A.D.

Archaeologists Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt discovered thousands of papyri in a garbage dump outside Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, in the winter of 1896. The papyri had been preserved by the dry sand and were primarily written in Greek, although there were also Latin and later Arabic documents in the mix. The discovery generated immense excitement, with visions of the lost works of antiquity dancing in people’s heads.

Indeed several important ancient literary treasures were discovered among the papyri: large sections of lost Euripides plays plus a biography of him by Satyrus the Peripatetic, an essay by philosopher Empedocles on the anatomy of the eye, the oldest and most complete diagrams from Euclid’s Elements, some never-before-seen letters by Epicurus, seven of the 107 lost books of Livy, and many fragments of the elusive Menander whose comedies were immensely popular in antiquity but barely survived at all.

Scholars also identified a number of theological writings, including gospels canonical and non, and portions of books from the Septuagint, both Hebrew canonical and Apocryhpa, plus all kinds of fragments of quotidian life in Greco-Roman Egypt like receipts, loan notes, work contracts, government edicts.

Still, it’s been over a hundred years since the papyri were discovered and only 15% of them have been identified. For most of that time the process has been scholar-intensive, with each character on each fragment having to be documented by a classicist. The dawn of the computer era allowed for some easier identifications based on comparisons of string of papyrus text with known ancient works, but there is so much volume of data to go through, so many variations in scribe handwriting and so much non-literary material that clunky queries just won’t cut the mustard.

So Oxford University, which owns the bulk of the papyri, and the Egypt Exploration Society enlisted the help of University of Minnesota astrophysicists and papyrologists to devise a crowdsourced solution.

This is where Zooniverse, a collaboration of astrophysicists and public volunteers comes in. The general public will be able to help “read” the texts by locating the placement of ancient Greek letters, and matching the shapes of letters in order to help create strings of letters, which will allow the algorithms to learn to translate and recognize the various characters. Using an interface first developed for the Zooniverse collaboration to allow the general public to identify the shapes of galaxies, volunteers will be able to click on places where they think a letter might be. This data should train the algorithms to improve their ability to translate the texts.

Check it out on the Ancient Lives website. I just did three fragments and it’s easy. Even fun. (I spent many hours of a wayward youth playing Concentration.)

You see a large picture of the fragment and a keyboard of Greek characters beneath. Hover over one of the characters to see an example of it as written in a scribe’s hand over on the right above the accents and symbols. Click on one of the characters on the picture of the papyrus, then click on the corresponding character on the keyboard. Keep doing that until your friends call the cops because they haven’t seen you for days, then click save.

The Open University is a UK school of higher learning that has no formal entry requirements for admission. The idea is to make learning available to everyone of any age and walk of life, no matter where they live. You don’t have to wait to graduate high school to enroll at OU, and there is no age limit. There are no dorms, no residential component at all, but at more than 250,000 students the OU is the largest university in the UK. Since it was founded in 1969, over 1.6 million people have taken at least one Open University course.

In keeping with their mission of widening access to university-level study, the OU has a put a wealth of materials online. They have a database of research papers that is freely accessible to the public — Open Research Online — and OpenLearn makes available online, free of charge, learning materials used in coursework at The Open University. It’s not accredited so you won’t be able to parlay any of the work you do into an OU degree, but it’s an excellent resource for anyone looking to educate themselves on a subject of interest. There are over 500 free courses, from short introductory overviews to 50-hour advanced study programs, across 12 subject areas you can pursue on OpenLearn.

OL also has a YouTube channel, which brings us to reason for this here entry. Without further ado, please enjoy the History of English in (just over) Ten Minutes.

The Upham tintype of Henry McCarty, aka William Bonney aka Billy the Kid, the sole authenticated picture of the famous outlaw, sold at Brian Lebel’s Old West Show & Auction in Denver on Saturday for $2.3 million. The pre-sale estimate was $300,000 – $400,000, but Florida billionaire, alternative energy investor and America’s Cup winner William Koch finally took it home for eight times that amount.

According to one of Billy’s old girlfriends, the tintype was taken by a traveling photographer on the street outside Beaver Smith’s saloon in Fort Sumner, New Mexico in 1879 or 1880. One of the things that makes it such an iconic image of Billy and the old West is that it’s not a posed and polished studio portrait, but rather captures the Kid wearing his crumpled hat, thick sweater, thoroughly lived-in boots and baggy pants, with his 1873 Winchester carbine rifle in his left hand and his Colt .45 single action revolver in a holster on his right hip. (This picture is the reason Billy the Kid was widely thought to have been left-handed during much of the 20th century, when in fact tintypes are mirror images so really he was holding the Winchester in his right hand.)

The camera used to take the photo was multilense, so four identical pictures were made at the same time. This is the only one known to have survived. Billy gave it to his cattle rustling colleague Dan Dedrick, who claimed he was present when the photo was taken, and who in turn gave it to his nephew Frank L. Upham in the 1930s.

The image was already famous by then. It was first printed in the Boston Illustrated Police News, January 8, 1881, when the Kid was still alive and in the Santa Fe jail that he would break out of, killing two deputies. The year after that Pat Garrett, the sheriff who had shot the Kid dead three months after that jailbreak, published the picture in his biography The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid.

As famous as it was, within a few decades the original tintype appeared to be lost. It wasn’t until 1986 that the Upham family announced that they had lovingly kept their tintype of Billy the Kid and that they were donating it to the Lincoln County Heritage Trust in New Mexico. That is the only time the tintype was ever on public display.

There was a stipulation, however, that if the Trust ever dissolved, then ownership of the picture would revert to the Upham family. The Trust ceased to exist in 1998 and the tintype went back to the Uphams. They put it up for auction Saturday along with an 1880 tintype of Dan Dedrick, six other pictures of Dedrick and his family, plus letters and documentation, all included in the lot.

Koch intends to loan the iconic picture to several small museums before taking it home to “just enjoy.”

LIFE.com has collated yet another excellent gallery dedicated to the celebration of the summer solstice in the UK. Druids: Mystery, Faith, Myth stars some nattily attired modern druids celebrating the solstice at Stonehenge, including one gentleman with a monocle whom I absolutely adore. If anyone can tell me who he is, I’d love to know. He must be a prominent figure in the Neo-Druid movement of the 1950s, because the LIFE gallery has another shot of him shaking hands with a second Druid on the Isle of Mull in Scotland in September of 1954 during what was considered the first gathering of Druids in Scotland since antiquity.

We know very little about actual ancient Druids. They didn’t leave written texts behind, so all we have to go on in terms of contemporary sources are Roman and they are uniformly disparaging. Julius Caesar describes the Druids in his Gallic Wars thus:

The nation of all the Gauls is extremely devoted to superstitious rites; and on that account they who are troubled with unusually severe diseases, and they who are engaged in battles and dangers, either sacrifice men as victims, or vow that they will sacrifice them, and employ the Druids as the performers of those sacrifices; because they think that unless the life of a man be offered for the life of a man, the mind of the immortal gods can not be rendered propitious, and they have sacrifices of that kind ordained for national purposes. Others have figures of vast size, the limbs of which formed of osiers they fill with living men, which being set on fire, the men perish enveloped in the flames. They consider that the oblation of such as have been taken in theft, or in robbery, or any other offense, is more acceptable to the immortal gods; but when a supply of that class is wanting, they have recourse to the oblation of even the innocent.

The Roman sources all indicate that the Druids performed human sacrifices. Again, we have little to no evidence of this, and even if it were true that the invading Romans saw Druidic ritual human sacrifice, they could have been performed in response to the destructive trauma of invasion rather than as a regular part of Druidic practice. Certainly the Druids today reject this characterization as an aspersion cast by ancient enemies.

Modern Druid rituals and beliefs spring from a more recent tradition, the late 18th, early 19th century Romantic fascination with ancient Britain and its mystery religions. It is that tradition we see then-Princess Elizabeth celebrating in the LIFE picture from August 6, 1946 where she is being led into the Sacred Circle of Bards at the national Eisteddfod at Mountain Ash, Glamorgan, Wales. We owe the fantastic spectacle of the future Queen of England and Defender of the Faith donning the green robes of the novitiate and being invested a bard in a Druidic ceremony to one man: Edward Williams, a.k.a. Iolo Morganwg, stonemason, poet, Welsh nationalist, manuscript collector and most able forger.

Born in 1747 in Llancarfan in Glamorgan, southern Wales, Williams was a political radical, religious dissenter and pacifist Jacobin who believed Wales should have its own national institutions celebrating its unique culture and heritage. As a young man working as a stonemason in London, he had seen Welsh culture widely disparaged. He believed the Welsh poets were the direct descendants of the Celtic druids, and he set about writing so glorious a history it would put the English to shame, even if he had to forge it, by gum.

In support of that vision, in 1789 he published a collection of poems by 14th-century Welsh bard Dafydd ap Gwilym. Included were many newly-discovered poems Morganwg had “found,” i.e., written himself. The book was popular and inspired him to return to London to take the next step in promoting Welsh culture.

On the 21st of June, Summer Solstice, 1792, Iolo Morganwg held a ceremony on Primrose Hill in London founding the Gorsedd of Bards (in Welsh the Gorsedd Beirdd Ynys Prydain), a community of Welsh bards dedicated to preserving Welsh language, poetry and music. He developed the ritual for the ceremony from druidic rites described in ancient manuscripts from his collection that were later found to have been the product of his own very fertile, laudanum-addicted imagination.

It wasn’t just the English disdain that he was combating with his founding of the Gorsedd. There was intra-Welsh snobbery too, courtesy of northern Wales (Gwynedd), which saw itself as the purest expression of the Welsh poetic tradition. Morganwg’s manuscripts were evidence that only in southern Wales, in his own region of Glamorgan, was druidic lore preserved intact from ancient times, through centuries of oppression from Rome, the Christian Church and England.

He kind of pulled it off, too, especially by linking the Gorsedd with what would become the national festival of Wales, the Eisteddfod. The Eisteddfod is a folk festival celebrating Welsh language, music, poetry and literature that traces its lineage back to a grand gathering of musicians and poets held by Lord Rhys of Cardigan in 1176. From that early progenitor, a vast number of provincial gatherings proliferated over the centuries, sponsored by local lords all over Wales.

In 1819 the eisteddfod festivals and the Gorsedd of Bards came together, thanks again to Iolo Morgannwg, now 72 years old and still with a keen eye towards promoting Welsh civilization. He traveled to the eisteddfod being held at the Ivy Bush Inn in Carmarthen and drew a Gorsedd circle — meant to be a sacred circle of standing stones a la Stonehenge — on the lawn using a handful of pebbles. In the circle, he invested the notables present as bards and druids, including the local bishop and festival patron, Bishop Thomas Burgess of St. David’s.

From then on, the Gorsedd and the eisteddfod continued to develop their relationship, and when the National Eisteddfod was established in 1861, the Gorsedd’s Druidic rituals, now considerably more elaborate than they had been at that first Primrose Hill ceremony of 1792, played a central role, providing high drama and pageantry in the medal ceremonies and in the investiture of important political, religious and cultural figures into the Gorsedd in recognition of their contributions to the nation, language and culture of Wales.

It’s a remarkable feat of cultural transformation Iolo Morganwg accomplished, going from naked English contempt for the Welsh to the future Queen herself donning green robes and joining the Gorsedd Circle in a celebration of Welsh language, culture and civilization. You can see a little more of the Gorsedd’s ceremonial flair in this Pathé footage of Princess Elizabeth’s investiture, complete with sung hymns and Archdruid Crwys Williams drinking from the huge and curvy Horn of Plenty.

For more on Welsh history in general and on the Eisteddfod and Gorsedd in particular, do yourself a favor and browse the excellent website of the National Museum of Wales.

University of Alabama at Birmingham Egyptologist Sarah Parcak, Ph.D has discovered 17 still-buried pyramids using infra-red satellite imagery. Funded by a BBC grant, Parcak’s team spent over a year capturing images of Egyptian sites from both NASA and commercial satellites. The images revealed more than 1,000 tombs and 3,100 ancient settlements as well as the undiscovered pyramids. French archaeologists on the ground were then able to confirm two of the pyramids in Saqqara, the burial ground for the ancient capital of Memphis and the site where the oldest pyramids (from 2,600 B.C.) were found, and a home in Tanis which exactly matched the structures revealed by the satellite imagery.

Considering that there are only 140 confirmed pyramids in Egypt, finding 17 more is of major significance, and this is only the first pass covering areas that are just under the surface. Parcak and Zahi Hawass have plans to collaborate to train young Egyptians to capture images of ancient sites using satellite technology creating a whole new field of Egyptological study and revealing new sites that have been well buried by millennia of Nile silt deposits and shifting sands.

The infra-red imaging technology is so accurate it can capture objects less than 40 inches in diameter from satellites 430 miles (700 km) above the earth. It identifies differences in density, thus distinguishing dense mud brick walls, for instance, and the soil around them. That’s how the imagery can reveal not just large structures but also the road map of entire cities. Having such a map will be of immense help to archaeologists in planning where to excavate, and the satellites will train an unblinking eye on sites that are particularly vulnerable to looting because they are famous and/or because they are unexcavated and unguarded.

The Egyptian authorities plan to use the technology to help – among other things – protect the country’s antiquities in the future.

During the recent revolution, looters accessed some well-known archaeological sites.

“We can tell from the imagery a tomb was looted from a particular period of time and we can alert Interpol to watch out for antiquities from that time that may be offered for sale.”

Parcak’s work will be covered in detail in the BBC documentary Egypt’s Lost Cities airing Monday, May 30th. This show won’t air in the US, but the Discovery Channel is putting together a documentary of its own on Parcak’s findings which is tentatively planned to air some time this summer.

To tide you over until then, find out more about Tanis in a Secrets of the Dead episode on PBS called “The Silver Pharaoh.” I just saw it last week. It describes the discovery of the tomb of Pharaoh Psusennes I in Tanis by French archaeologist Pierre Montet. This was in 1939 so the spectacular find, including the only silver sarcophagus ever found in Egypt, got very little attention on account of the Nazis (I hate those guys).

Speaking of which, given the Tanis location and the French archaeologist, I couldn’t help but wonder if George Lucas might have been inspired by Montet’s discoveries. The documentary even gives a shout out to the Ark of the Covenant with a Biblical reference that could be interpreted as an Intermediate Period pharaoh sacking the Temple of Solomon and taking the Ark back to Egypt (at the 7:17 point in the video).