Inventing History : forgery: a great British tradition (British History)

[nemesis8]

[Chad]

Yeh... I'd have gone for Mel Gibson personally...

[Mick Harper]

Any AE-ists watching the ineffable Michael Wood and his Anglo-Saxons last night
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03816y5/King_Alfred_a
nd_the_Anglo_Saxons_Alfred_of_Wessex/
[Episode Two, The Lady of the Mercians]

will have been arrested by his enthusiasm for Alfred's will. "Surprisingly modern," he gushed. I should cocoa, Michael.

"And ooh look, it mentions so many places that were important in Alfred's reign. And therefore so important for him to make sure that they ended up in the proper hands." No, Michael. Since very few places with Anglo-Saxon spellings are known from the period, the later forger was obliged to use just those, ie the famous ones, to use in his will.

Unless of course you think someone writing a will says to himself, "Out of the infinite number of places in my kingdom that I might consider leaving to specific people, I think I'll just mention those that will be known five hundred years hence."

[N R Scott]

[Hatty]

I found the programme impossible to watch but came to temporarily when the will was mentioned because of the names Godalming, Guildford and Steyning, all towns on important routes e.g. the Pilgrims' Way that connect prehistoric places of interest e.g. Cissbury Rings. All predate the Anglo-Saxons needless to say.

Interesting about Oswald because Oswestry as a market town on the English-Welsh border is also at the crossing point of prehistoric north-south and east-west routes. Old Oswestry is one of those impressive features described as Iron Age hillforts, though it appears not to be a fort being "unusually low", twinned with an artificial mound or barrow known as Whittington Castle on the opposite side of the route (now the A5).

[Mick Harper]

Here's some high comedy from our old fave, the Beowulf forgery

[Ishmael]

I take your point as thus; one dude said that Beowulf, as it exists, was an edited version of an original story---without any real evidence for his position---yet every scholar since has accepted and echoed this claim as though it were gospel.

Am I correct?

[Mick Harper]

Well, I didn't get as far as working out what it all meant. I was trying to convey how an AE-ist should use his antennae when perusing fairly random sources. Still, now you have raised the point I will try to work out in detail what it actually all means.

[Ishmael]

[Tilo Rebar]

[Ishmael]

[Boreades]

My favourite hoax is the Holy Foreskins.

Thank goodness we don't have that to worry about. Well, apart from our Royal Family of course, whose male offspring until recently still got a visit from the Chief Foreskin Snipper of Great Britain.

[Mick Harper]

We haven't discussed Lascaux for some time so I post this reprint from The Megalithic Portal without comment.

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Authorities in the southwestern French town of Montignac are investigating the extraordinary possibility that, just 4km from the famous Lascaux caves, there may exist another set of prehistoric paintings hidden away in a separate underground cavern.

One of the cave paintings at Lascaux in south-western France. Could a 50-year-old family secret help unveil a new prehistoric art gallery at nearby Montignac? [Credit: ProfSaxx/Wikimedia]

A group of teenagers in the south west of France in 1940 stumble across what turns out to be a complex network of Paleolithic caves with a series of astonishing 17,000-year-old frescoes, which becomes known as the 'Sistine Chapel of the Prehistoric era.' You might assume this type of thing only happens once in the same region, but authorities in the town of Montignac, Dordogne are probing the possibility of the existence of a second Lascaux cave.

The rumours of a second cave covered in pre-historic artwork have been circulating for years, but it appears local authorities are now ready to take them seriously after one local family shared an extraordinary secret they had kept to themselves for half a century.

According to French media reports this week, preliminary investigations by the town's mayor, as well as authorities in the Dordogne region, have proved promising enough to warrant a more detailed probe into a patch of land 4 km from the site of the Lascaux caves.

'There's no certainty, and we are still quite far from having the necessary evidence to confirm the existence of another decorated cave,' Montignac mayor Laurent Mathieu told French daily Le Figaro this week. Despite that caution, however, Mathieu did confirm that the culture department of the Dordogne regional administration would soon be mapping out a 10-hectare area for 'further research.'

This region will also be placed under surveillance, to prevent amateur archaeologists from conducting their own, unsupervised investigations.

The possibility of a second momentous discovery near the south-western town came about in August, when a local woman in her 70s approached Mathieu with an extraordinary claim. She told him her husband -- who died in August -- had come across a cave with prehistoric frescoes back in 1962, but covered the entrance back up, for fear of bringing hassle on himself, according to France Info radio.

The secret had stayed in the family for 51 years, until she finally shared it with the mayor. The original cave art at Lascaux was found in 1940, and attracted hordes of visitors until it was closed to the public in 1983. A partial set of detailed imitations located next to the original cave have since brought roughly 10 million visitors to the region, a result that politicians and residents in Montignac will be hoping they can replicate with a brand new set of prehistoric paintings.

A member of staff at the local tourist office told The Local on Thursday that the possibility of a second Lascaux cave was the topic of conversation on everyone's lips.

"The rumours have been around for a while, but everyone is talking about it now. For the moment we just don't know. "The mayor believes the story but there are other archaeologists who doubt it. If a second cave was found it would be excellent for the region," she added.

[Grant]

It's funny how local people are always aware of these caves for at least a few years prior to the "discovery." But no-one says anything until a local amateur prehistorian stumbles upon them.

[Hatty]

The Voynich manuscript, never decoded, seems to have been manufactured in the USA. Experts appear to be unconvinced. Others may reach their own conclusions

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A mysterious manuscript that appears to be written in gibberish may actually be in an extinct dialect of the Mexican language Nahuatl. Illustrations of plants in the manuscript have been linked to plants native to Central America for the first time, suggesting a new origin for the text. But some still say it could be a hoax.

The Voynich manuscript has puzzled researchers since book dealer Wilfrid Voynich found it in an Italian monastery in 1912. Among hundreds of pages of so-far undecipherable text, it includes illustrations of naked nymphs, astrological diagrams and drawings of plants that no one has been able to identify.

An academic war has raged for years between those who think the manuscript contains a real language that could eventually be decoded, and those who think it was a clever forgery designed to dupe book collectors. "It's a battle with two sides," says Alain Touwaide, a historian of botany at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC.

Mexican look

Previously, many researchers assumed that the manuscript must have originated in Europe, where it was found. But botanist Arthur Tucker of Delaware State University in Dover noticed similarities between certain plants in the manuscript and illustrations of plants in 16th century records from Mexico.

Tucker began collecting copies of Mexican botanical books out of curiosity about the history of herbs there. "Quite by accident, I ran across the Voynich and it was a Homer Simpson moment of D'oh! Of course this matches my other codices and the artwork of 16th century Mexico."

The most striking example was an illustration of a soap plant (xiuhamolli) in a Mexican book dated 1552. Tucker and Rexford Talbert, a retired information technology researcher at the US Department of Defense and NASA, connected a total of 37 of the 303 plants, six animals and one mineral illustrated in the Voynich manuscript to 16th century species in the region that lies between Texas, California and Nicaragua. They think many of the plants could have come from what is now central Mexico.

On the basis of these similarities, the pair suggests that the manuscript came from the New World, and that it might be written in an extinct form of the Mexican language Nahuatl. Deciphering the names of these plants could therefore help crack the Voynich code.

Plant forgery

Gordon Rugg of Keele University in the UK remains sceptical. He thinks a careful forger could have made up plausible-looking plants.

"It's pretty good odds that you'll find plants in the world that happen to look like the Voynich manuscript just by chance," he says. "If I sat down with a random plant generator software and got it to generate 50 completely fictitious plants, I'm pretty sure I could find 20 real plants that happen to look like 20 of the made up plants."

Touwaide says the findings are intriguing, but agrees that they form just one of many hypotheses. "I believe that it doesn't prove anything. If it's a forgery, someone could very well have had the idea of creating the forgery on the basis of New World flora. At the most, it shows a possible source of the forgery."

Tucker admits that there is work to be done before they can throw out the hoax hypothesis entirely. But one of the Voynich plants makes him wonder: it looks strikingly similar to Viola bicolor, the American field pansy, which only grows in North America. The distinction between this plant and its European relative, Viola tricolor, was not known until after the Voynich was discovered. Ruling out time travel, says Tucker, how would this have been possible? "If this is a hoax, they did a dang good job and had help from a competent botanist who had knowledge only available after 1912 in some crucial cases."

Journal reference: HerbalGram