Month: May 2014

Washington Monument reopens after three years

Modern(ish)

The Washington Monument reopens to the public Monday after nearly three years of work repairing damage wrought when an earthquake struck the capital on August 23, 2011. Several historic structures were harmed by the quake, but after initial repairs the National Cathedral and the Smithsonian Castle could remain open. The Washington Monument was not so lucky.

It’s a hollow obelisk 555 feet high made out of three different kinds of marble and 36,000 stone blocks. When the earthquake struck, it whipsawed the obelisk, showering debris on the tourists climbing its vertiginous heights. Thankfully nobody was injured, but the monument was immediately closed for assessment. The National Park Service found one large crack four feet long and one inch wide, more than 150 other fractures and cracks, chipped and gashed stones, lost and loosened mortar, damage to the lightning protection system and elevator.

The estimated budget for repairs was $15 million. Congress voted to fund the work to the tune of $7.5 million but only on condition that the National Park Service secure matching funds. Private equity billionaire and dedicated history nerd David Rubenstein stepped up to the plate and donated the necessary $7.5 million and the repair project began in earnest in early 2012.

It required 2.7 miles of new sealant between stones, and 53 stainless steel “saddle anchors” to bolt in place slabs on the monument’s slanted pyramidion in case of another earthquake.

The slabs had been held in place mainly by gravity, and engineers worried that the slabs could fall off, James M. Perry, the chief of resource management for the mall and memorial parks, said Saturday. […]

In addition to the earthquake damage, the monument, which was begun in 1848 and finished in 1884, had seen more than a century of rain, snow, sleet and wind. Up close, it was a patchwork of repairs going back decades.

Cracks needed to be filled. Loose hunks of marble had to be dug out and replaced with scores of individual patches called “dutchmen.” Joints had to be smoothed and cleaned. Most of the damage was near the top.

Officials have said 150 dutchman patches were used, so many that work crews ran out of spare marble they had on hand for repairs. But a company was found that had salvaged old marble steps from homes in Baltimore. And that marble had come from the same quarry as some of the monument marble.

The repairs were complete on time and on budget. The Washington Monument will be officially reopened at 10 AM with a ceremony hosted by Al Roker and attended by Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, National Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis, National Mall & Memorial Parks Superintendent Bob Vogel and of course David Rubenstein. Entertainment will be provided by American Idol Season 12 winner Candice Glover, the Old Guard Fife & Drum Corps, the United States Navy Band, and the Boy and Girl Choristers of Washington National Cathedral Choir.

The event will be open to the public and tours of the monument will begin at 1:00 PM. Tickets are first come, first served, so if you want to be in the first wave of visitors to the repaired Washington Monument, you’ll want to line up early. The ticket office opens at 8:30 AM.

Hunley begins five year caustic bath

Modern(ish)

Last Thursday was the first day of approximately 1,825 days the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley will spend immersed in a caustic bath of sodium hydroxide and water. This a watershed step in the conservation of the 40-foot iron submarine, a long bath 14 years in the making. The caustic bath will first remove the concretion, the thick layer of hardened shell and sand that formed on the hull of the sub during the 136 years it spent on the floor of Charleston Harbor since it sank the night of February 17th, 1864. The concretion completely covers the outside of the sub, obscuring the damage that might answer the questions about how and why the Hunley sank after successfully torpedoing the Union warship USS Housatonic.

Michael Scafuri, Hunley archaeologist, said the concretion has been mapped, photographed and recorded with 3-D imaging to make sure they have every bit of information possible from the Hunley’s protective shell.

And now they are ready to see what lies beneath.

“Under that concretion is the possibility of new information about the attack,” Scafuri said.

With the shell and sand removed, Scafuri said scientists should learn more about the Hunley’s design and operations, and may be able to tell what caused the submarine to sink.

The solution of 99% water and 1% sodium hydroxide should begin to loosen the concretion within a few months, giving conservators their first look at the hull in the 14 years since the submarine was raised from the Atlantic seabed. Once the concretion is loosened, conservators will scrape it off the hull, a painstaking process that will take months.

After the scraping, the Hunley will settle in for the long soak. The sodium hydroxide has another important job to do: removing nearly a century and a half of sea salt from the iron hull. That’s the process that will take five years, with conservators regularly draining the 76,000 gallon tank of its 68,000 gallons of solution (large jugs of gravel and water in the tank displace 8,000 gallons) when it gets too salty.

There are risks inherent in this procedure. Sodium hydroxide is a dangerous chemical and this treatment has never been used on so large an artifact. The lab had to be retrofitted for the safety of the space and its occupants. It’s the only way to ensure the long-term stability of the submarine, however. It’s been in a tank of cold water since its retrieval, for 11 years in a custom truss that kept it at the same angle as its had been on the ocean floor, then upright for three years. The water, a mild electric current and the concretion have preserved the hull for these initial conservation stages, but eventually the iron will corrode if the salt isn’t removed.

Once the salt is completely extracted, the Hunley will be able to be displayed outside of a tank for the first time.

Mysterious notes in 1504 Odyssey deciphered

Modern(ish), Renaissance

On April 24th, the University of Chicago Library announced a contest to decipher mysterious margin annotations in a rare edition of Homer’s Odyssey printed in Venice by Aldus Manutius in 1504. This was only the second edition of the Odyssey in Greek ever printed (the first was published in Florence in 1488) and this particular example passed through many hands, several of which left marginalia in various languages on the pages.

The two-volume book is part of the Bibliotheca Homerica Langiana (BHL), a collection of rare early print editions of Homer’s works that was donated to the library in 2007 by Michael C. Lang. Lang had noticed that in the second volume of the 1504 edition there were handwritten annotations that had some French words mixed in with what looked like a shorthand. Researchers at the library weren’t able to crack the idiosyncratic script, so they opened it up to public at large with a $1,000 reward offered by Lang for the first person to identify and translate the code. People from all over the world responded to the challenge.

Less than two weeks later, we have a winner. The feat was accomplished Daniele Metilli, a computer engineer, archival science student and general lover of cyphers, with the help of French speaker and stenographer Giulia Accetta. He’s in Italy and couldn’t make a trip to Chicago to view the book in person, so the library sent him high resolution images of two pages from Book XI of the Odyssey that have the annotations in question.

Because the shorthand was mixed with French and because one of the notes contains a legible date of April 25, 1854, Metilli and Accetta started by investigating French shorthand systems that may have been in use in the mid-19th century. The earliest French shorthand methods were created in the 17th century, one by Jacques Cossard in 1651, the next by Charles Alois Ramsay in 1665. Neither of those systems matched the one in the Odyssey. They then turned to 19th century systems but none of those worked either.

It was an appendix in a 1792 book on stenography by Théodore-Pierre Bertin that pointed them in the right direction. The appendix included a table that compared a stenographic system invented by Samuel Taylor in 1786 to a “tachygraphy” (from the Greek word for “swift”) system for the French language invented by Jean Coulon de Thévenot in 1776. The notes in the Homer edition looked very similar to the tachygraphy in the table. Metilli and Accetta located a copy of Thévenot’s manual Tachygraphie des Français, an 1819 edition of Tachéographie ou Tachygraphie française by stenography professor N. Patey and two mid-19th century French translations of the Odyssey and got to work.

In Thévenot’s system, “every consonant and vowel has a starting shape, and they combine together to form new shapes representing syllables,” Metilli wrote. “The vertical alignment is especially important, as the position of a letter above or below the line, or even the length of a letter segment can change the value of the grapheme. This explains why most notes in the Odyssey shorthand are underlined—the line being key to the transcription.”

They were able to translate almost of all of page A and some of page B. The mysterious marginalia are French translations of Greek words and phrases, questions about the text, definition comparisons, corrected errors, the kind of notes someone who was studying Greek would take. Most people wouldn’t scribble their notes in the margin of a very rare, very expensive 1504 edition, however. Why not get a cheap mass market contemporary edition if you’re going to write all over it? Also, most people in 1854 weren’t using shorthand that was popular 50 years earlier. Cracking the code has yet to solve the mystery of who this eccentric annotator was.

In his report (pdf) on the deciphering of the marginalia, Metilli proposes three possible hypotheses: 1) the notes were written by a student, 2) by a teacher, 3) by a translator. If 1) were correct, you’d expect there to be more unnoticed errors in the notes. The other two possibilities would explain the competence of the translation, and 3) would be quite likely to be familiar with shorthand systems.

Metilli then had a bit of a coup de foudre:

The main edition of the Odyssey we used as reference was translated by Édouard Sommer and published by Hachette book by book starting in 1848. While transcribing the shorthand, we had noticed how the annotations sometimes seemed to use the exact same wording as the “argument analitique” found in that edition.

The Sommer translation is very accurate and close to the text, just like our annotations. The other translations of the time (Bareste, Leconte de Lisle) look nothing like it. So it finally came to me: which year did Hachette publish book XI of the Odyssey? Which year did the annotator write his notes? The same year: 1854. What if Mr. Sommer were our mysterious annotator?

Sounds downright plausible. It still doesn’t explain why in the world he used the Manutius edition, of course, but that’s some quality Nancy Drewing right there. One thousand dollars very well deserved.

I know from the wonderful responses to the World War I shorthand post that we have several shorthand pros in the house. Be sure to check out Metilli’s report because there are all kinds of details about the system and translated passages in there. You don’t have to read French to enjoy it.

Newly deciphered Maya stele identify Bat kingdom

Ancient

The ancient Maya city of Naachtun is in the jungle of northern Guatemala just over half a mile from the Mexican border. Founded around 400 B.C. in the Preclassic Period, it was one of very few important urban centers in the region to not only survive into the Classic Period, but thrive. At its peak between 500 and 800 A.D., the city had a population of 20,000 people, multiple pyramids, grand public buildings, more than 40 inscribed stele and a massive palace complex spread out over four hectares. The total size of the site is at least 200 hectares, 50 of which were occupied by monumental public structures.

Its location between the great Maya rival powers of Tikal to the south and Calakmul to the north in modern-day Mexico gave the city great strategic importance. Whether they were fighting each other or trading with allied city-states, Tikal and Calakmul had to go through Naachtun, and the city profited ably. According to hieroglyphic inscriptions discovered at this site and others, Naachtun changed sides repeatedly during the Classic Period, an unusually flexible posture in a region that was highly polarized between the two main superpowers. That, along with its uniquely formidable defenses — walls 13 feet high made out of large limestone blocks — allowed Naachtun to prosper during centuries of war.

Its fortunes fell along with those of Tikal and Calakmul. The great regional powers began a precipitous decline in the late 8th century and Naachtun, which had flourished through the upheaval of the transition between the Preclassic and the Classic, declined with them. The city was abandoned around 800 A.D.

It was rediscovered in 1922 by American archaeologist and pioneering Maya scholar Sylvanus Morley. Sponsored by the Carnegie Institution, Morley searched the Petén Basin north of Tikal for lost Maya cities. He enlisted the expertise of the chicleros, the men who collect sap from chicle trees, offering them a bounty for any ancient ruins they told him about. Chiclero Alfonso Ovando had stumbled on the Naachtun site in 1916. He told Morley about it and Morley explored the site, mapping many of its structures and discovering 19 stele.

It was Morley who named the site Naachtun, “far stone” in Mayan, because of how remote and inaccessible it was. That inaccessibility has made archaeological investigations of the site infrequent and of short duration. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the actual Mayan name of the city was identified on a stela as Masuul, and archaeologists are still working on deciphering the stele that Morley discovered nearly a century ago.

Two of those stele have recently borne fruit. Newly deciphered hieroglyphics have revealed the name of the kingdom of which Masuul was the capital: the Suutz, meaning Bat in Mayan, kingdom. The Bat kingdom has been references in inscriptions found on other sites, including Tikal and Calakmul, but until now, archaeologists weren’t sure if it was a more of a regional designation with shifting capitals than a kingdom with a specific urban capital and ruling dynasty. The new text confirms that Masuul was the capital of the Bat kingdom and it was ruled by the Bat dynasty from the second half of the 4th century. (I love how much this sounds like a particularly awesome episode of the 1960s Batman TV series.)

The hieroglyphic texts also place Masuul in the middle of the momentous events of January 16th, 378 A.D., when Tikal was defeated by forces from Teotihuacan. Teotihuacan, a powerful city-state 30 miles from modern-day Mexico City, is almost 800 miles northwest of Tikal, but that didn’t stop general Siyah K’ak’ (Fire Is Born) from killing Tikal’s king Chak Tok Ich’aak (Great Jaguar Paw), conquering the city and installing the six-year-old king Yax Nuun Ayin (First Crocodile), son of a figure known in descriptive non-native glyphs as Spearthrower Owl who was probably the ruler of Teotihuacan. First Crocodile married a daughter of the displaced Tikal ruling family and started a new dynasty. According to the newly deciphered stele, Masuul was an ally of Teotihuacan during this battle for Tikal.

There’s a photo gallery here with the stele, some maps and some breakouts of the glyphs. The labels are in Spanish but you can at least make out the bat features.

EDIT: I originally identified Teotihuacan as modern-day Mexico City, confusing it with Tenochtitlan. Many thanks to Lon for the correction.

Norton Simon Museum to return Bhima to Cambodia

Ancient, Looting, Museums

Almost exactly one year ago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art agreed to return a pair of 10th century statues known as the Kneeling Attendants that had been looted from the Cambodian archaeological site of Koh Ker in the early 1970s. Seven months later, Sotheby’s, after two years of fractious negotiations and under pressure from the US Attorney, agreed to return a much larger 10th century statue of the warrior Duryodhana that was also looted from Koh Ker in the early 70s. Now, five months after that, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena has agreed to return their own Koh Ker loot: a 500-pound sandstone statue of the hero Bhima, Duryodhana’s cousin and opponent in the Hindu epic Mahabharata.

The museum purchased Bhima in 1976 from New York art dealer William Wolff. It has been on display since then, labeled “Temple Wrestler.” Cambodia has had more than enough problems to deal with at home since the brutal civil war that claimed the statues of Koh Ker as victims, so it didn’t begin to pursue its stolen cultural patrimony until the past few years.

The museum has previously said that Cambodian representatives had seen the statue on display in California and had not raised any objections. In a statement on Tuesday the Norton Simon said it continues to have “a good-faith disagreement” with Cambodia over ownership of the Bhima, but after sending representatives to Phnom Penh in March to meet with government officials, it has “worked directly with Cambodia to come up with a mutually acceptable solution,” and agreed to give it back as a gift.

In 2007, the pedestals of the Kneeling Attendants and the feet of both Duryodhana and Bhima were discovered in the Prasat Chen temple of the Koh Ker complex by conservators from the German Apsara Conservation Project. Archaeologist Eric Bourdonneau of the Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient (the French School of Asian Studies) made a study of the pedestals and feet, virtually matching them up to photographs of the statues. They fit like a glove, and indeed you can clearly see the chisel marks looters left on the ankles, knees and feet of these otherwise perfectly preserved 1000-year-old statues.

All four of these statues — the attendants, Bhima and Duryodhana — were part of a group that stood inside the western gopura, one of two monumental towers at opposite entrances to the Prasat Chen temple. The tableau depicted a famous scene from the Mahabharata wherein Bhima duels with Duryodhana under the watchful gaze of seven kneeling and seated attendants. Koh Ker, the new capital of the Khmer Empire under King Jayavarman IV, was founded in 928 A.D., and a whole new style of sculpture was conceived there. The statues of Bhima and Duryodhana were revolutionary for their time, the first freestanding, dynamic figures in Khmer art which had previously been characterized by bas reliefs and static pieces.

Here’s a wonderful computer recreation by the Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient of the western gopura and its sculptures:

In an unusual, hell-freezes-over move, Christie’s has bought another one of the attendants from this statue group to return it to Cambodia. The auction house had sold it twice, once in 2000 and then again to an anonymous collector in 2009. Earlier this year, after an internal investigation of a five-year-old sale that apparently determined that the sculpture had been looted from Koh Ker decades earlier, Christie’s contacted the buyer and arranged to buy the statue back. Christie’s will now foot the bill to ship the piece to Cambodia.

That leaves two known statues Cambodian experts believe were looted from Koh Ker still in the United States, one at the Denver Art Museum and one at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Those museums are still in the denial phase right now, but last year so was the Met, the Norton Simon, Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Now Christie’s is doing its own investigations and buying looted artifacts back from the buyers (who would ever have seen that coming?), so the arc of this particular history appears to be bending rather strongly towards justice.

[Cambodia’s secretary of state] Mr. Chan Tani said that recovering all the statues from the Prasat Chen temple is a national priority. The goal is to reattach the statues to their pedestals, which were left behind by the looters, and place them all together in a special display area in the national museum.