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Red and Green Flags (British History)
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Mick Harper
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Here's a kind of red/green flag situation that came up recently on medium.com about a British medieval historian new to me (for shame) but sounds worth an airing

John Welford wrote:
John Hardyng: King Henry V’s Spy https://medium.com/@johnwelford15/john-hardyng-king-henry-vs-spy-1a255bacab21
John Hardyng was born in 1378 and educated in the Northumberland household of Sir Henry Percy, who was nicknamed “Hotspur”. This gave him plenty of experience of warfare, given the closeness of the Scottish border and the frequent raids that took place across it.

Good training for a spy though not perhaps for a historian. But, come on, this is the fourteenth century.

Henry planned to turn his attention to Scotland once he had finished with France, and in 1418 John Hardyng was given a special mission, namely to travel round Scotland and gather information that would be useful in a future invasion. He was also tasked with finding proof that Scotland’s claim to independence was without foundation.

Welcome, Mr Englishman, is there anything else you wish to see?

Hardyng’s mission lasted for three and a half years. During that time he surveyed the routes into Scotland, the places on the coast that could be used by an invasion fleet, the strengths and weaknesses of various castles, and the agricultural resources that could be exploited by an invading army.

Blimey, it's almost like having your own spy satellite.

He also acquired documents that supported England’s claims over Scotland.

These will be the usual case of documents lasting long enough to be copied but not long enough for us to look at.

In 1421 John Hardyng was forced to flee from Scotland, having made too many enemies, but the information he was able to present to King Henry would have been invaluable had an invasion ever taken place. However, Henry’s early death put paid to any such ambition, and the new king, Henry VI, was never in any position to make use of John Hardyng’s work.

So it'll have to be a new line of work

Hardyng was now in the unfortunate position of having done exactly what had been asked of him but without any reward for his efforts. He became a pensioner at an Augustinian Priory and continued to press King Henry VI to honour the promise made by his father. This eventually led, in 1440, to Hardyng being granted an annuity worth ten pounds a year.

To do what exactly? Well, probably this

Hardyng spent the next twenty years writing a history of Britain that made good use of his earlier career as a spy, as well as continuing to claim that England had every right to conquer Scotland.

Sounds plausible enough to be in every text book. But who's this tiresome fellow putting his nose in...
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Mick Harper
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Mick Harper wrote:
"Hardyng spent the next twenty years writing a history of Britain that made good use of his earlier career as a spy"
I make no such claims about Hardyng, but medieval historians and geographers were fond of telling their readers they were speaking from their own direct knowledge when in reality, like modern historians and geographers, they hadn't actually been further than their local archive.

John has been learning at the master's table and is no longer quite so abject a servant at the Big Table

John Welford wrote:
I suppose the answer to that is that some were more reliable than others, and that is certainly the case today. As an example of that, I was revising my recent piece on King Edward III and thought I'd give ChatGPT a go to see if there was anything I could add - there wasn't. However, I was told the remarkable fact that Edward's 13 children included two who would later become kings, namely Edward the Black Prince and Richard II !

In other words, he can pick up simple errors of fact.

The problem with that resource is that it does what all bad historians do, namely rely solely on other bad historians and copy their mistakes without checking them. The old mantra still applies - rubbish in, rubbish out!

John, a librarian, thinks he can distinguish a good historian from a bad historian. Which he can when he is comparing what he learned at school and afterwards, i.e. from academic historians, and what he is reading now on the internet. What he can't do is distinguish good academic historians from bad academic historians. Nobody can because there cannot be good and bad academic historians, in a technical sense. They are all citing one another, they are all trained to do it competently, and if they couldn't -- or if they didn't -- they wouldn't be academic historians. The people at ChatGPT wouldn't last five minutes.

Only we seem able to tell good from bad. Academic historians excoriate us thoroughly for doing so with the bad (should they notice us at all) and from their perspective quite rightly because, having cited one another in an endless and unbroken chain all their lives, they will all get tarred by the same brush. "Rubbish, we don't agree with one another," they might protest but peer review says, "All right, you can disagree, but only in minor matters of interpretation. You'd better behave on the important stuff or you'll find yourself on ChatGP."
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Hatty
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Wiki describes John Hardyng as an antiquarian who apparently wrote the same chronicle twice. I say 'apparently' because there's only one surviving copy of the first chronicle, currently in the British Library (Lansdowne manuscript 204), and no-one knows where it was written ('Lincolnshire or the East Midlands' according to the BL, solely on 'stylistic' grounds)

In 1424 Hardyng was at Rome, where at the instance of Cardinal Beaufort he consulted the chronicle of Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus. Upon the death of Umfraville in 1436, Hardyng retired to the Augustinian Priory at Kyme, where he wrote the two versions of his chronicle and where he probably lived till his death about 1465.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hardyng

This Trogus sounds bogus. Sure enough, there's no info on him except he lived in the time of Augustus and is described as a polymath. And no mistake! Pompeius Trogus is credited with having written, inter alia, a 44-volume work although his sources (assumed to be Greek) are unknown and, worse still, the volumes are 'now lost'

His principal work was his 44-volume Philippic Histories and the Origin of the Whole World and the Places of the Earth (Historiae Philippicae et Totius Mundi Origines et Terrae Situs), now lost, which, according to its surviving epitome, had as its principal theme the Macedonian Empire founded by Philip II but functioned as a general history of all of the parts of the world which fell under the control of Alexander the Great and his successors, with extensive ethnographical and geographical digressions. Trogus began with Ninus, legendary founder of Nineveh, and ended at about the same point as Livy (AD 9).

On the grounds that such a work was beyond the ability of a Gallo-Roman, it has generally been assumed that Pompeius Trogus did not gather his material directly from these Greek sources but from an existing compilation or translation by a Greek such as the Universal History compiled by Timagenes of Alexandria

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnaeus_Pompeius_Trogus

It's not clear (to me) whether Hardyng's name was actually on the manuscript. The BL seems to imply it was Sir Robert Cotton who named Hardyng as the author of the chronicle or maybe it was Richard James (1592-1638), the first librarian of the Cotton Library

Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, (b. 1571, d. 1631), 1st Baronet, antiquary and politician: his inscription, 'A Chronicel of Britane gathered out of divers auters the auter unknown', along with a summary of the contents in Latin, naming Hardyng as the author of the text, written by his librarian Richard James

https://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Lansdowne_MS_204

Would England have been particularly interested in relations with Scotland in the Tudor and/or Stuart era?
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Mick Harper
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Magnificent! I'll just pop in a few asides.

In 1424 Hardyng was at Rome, where at the instance of Cardinal Beaufort

The Beauforts are big wheels on the Lancastrian side of the War of the Roses so this is a faint early indication of it being a Tudor production. I'm assuming the cardinal is a real historical figure.

he consulted the chronicle of Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus.

As we often point out, Renaissance writers were great ones for putting great names on their Classical productions. Your Trogus the Bogus (good one!) will have to get the treatment (though I am not volunteering myself for the task).

Upon the death of Umfraville in 1436

This is irrelevant but I bet this is where Anthony Powell got the name Dicky Umfraville for his Dance to the Music of Time.

Hardyng retired to the Augustinian Priory at Kyme, where he wrote the two versions of his chronicle and where he probably lived till his death about 1465.

This is neat. If you are inventing Hardyng (the historian, he might be a real historical figure) you have to account for him spending twenty years somewhere plausible but whose records have been scattered to the winds.

Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, (b. 1571, d. 1631), 1st Baronet, antiquary and politician: his inscription, 'A Chronicel of Britane gathered out of divers auters the auter unknown', along with a summary of the contents in Latin, naming Hardyng as the author of the text, written by his librarian Richard James

Ah! We have arrived at the Lair of the Great Worm of Fakery. It's a bit of giveaway to say Richard James 'wrote the text' when (of course) they mean he copied the text. Slack work from someone.
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Mick Harper
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Mick Harper wrote:
John, we have taken up the story here:
http://www.applied-epistemology.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?p=57856#57856

John Welford wrote:
Very interesting!

As you have discovered long since, my pieces on Medium make no claim to be based on first-hand historical sources, which probably places me in the "bad historian" camp. My interest is in discovering interesting stories and passing them on - maybe the result of studying English at university and not history! However, I did quite often pop into open lectures given by the history staff! However, if my pieces inspire others to dig a little deeper, I am very happy about that, even if I get pulled to bits in the process!

Mick Harper wrote:
You are in the 'I believe historians' camp. People that are happy to be pulled to bits are very rare and should be cherished.
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Hatty
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On the recommendation of a Norwegian pal I've started reading The Debatable Land by Graham Robb (one of his books, The Ancient Paths, was discussed somewhere or other) so of course I immediately went to the Index to check if John Hardyng is in it. He isn't. The omission is telling as Robb, currently resident on the Scottish border in Cumbria, is assiduous in tracking down everything there is to know (not very much it appears) about the history of the border country between Scotland and England.

It's true (or possibly not) there is only one manuscript of the first version of Hardyng's Chronicle (British Library MS 204) which would make it difficult to consult for someone stuck in the sticks but the British Library states there are "at least 16 copies" of a later version, purportedly also penned by Hardyng. However, according to Dr Alfred Hiatt, Professor of Medieval Studies at Queen Mary's, London, the Chronicle is a forgery so Robb was doubtless wise to steer clear

In The Making of Medieval Forgeries, Alfred Hiatt focuses on forgery in fifteenth-century England and provides a survey of the practice from the Norman Conquest through to the early sixteenth century, considering the function and context in which the forgeries took place. Hiatt discusses the impact of the advent of humanism on the acceptance of forgeries and stresses the importance of documents to medieval culture, offering a discussion of the relation of the various versions of the chronicle of John Hardyng to the documents he forged, as well as documents pertaining to the charters of Crowland Abbey and various bulls and charters connected with the University of Cambridge.

A considerable portion of the book concerns the Donation of Constantine, which involves many continental writers, German, French, and Italian. The Making of Medieval Forgeries further discusses the 'multiplicity of audiences' for forgeries: those that produce, those that approve, and those that are hostile.
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Mick Harper
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What do you see that is significant here ?

...she discovered the Philosophical Research Society complex in the Los Feliz neighborhood. Founded in 1934 by a Canadian mystic called Manley P Hall, it boasts one of the world's biggest collections of esoteric literature. "To just stumble across a library that's packed with every single book you could possibly dream of -- and there are some locked away that are from the 1600's -- is really incredible. It felt like a secret not many people knew about." Guardian
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Wile E. Coyote


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Hatty wrote:
On the recommendation of a Norwegian pal I've started reading The Debatable Land by Graham Robb (one of his books, The Ancient Paths, was discussed somewhere or other) so of course I immediately went to the Index to check if John Hardyng is in it. He isn't. The omission is telling as Robb, currently resident on the Scottish border in Cumbria, is assiduous in tracking down everything there is to know (not very much it appears) about the history of the border country between Scotland and England.

It's true (or possibly not) there is only one manuscript of the first version of Hardyng's Chronicle (British Library MS 204) which would make it difficult to consult for someone stuck in the sticks but the British Library states there are "at least 16 copies" of a later version, purportedly also penned by Hardyng. However, according to Dr Alfred Hiatt, Professor of Medieval Studies at Queen Mary's, London, the Chronicle is a forgery so Robb was doubtless wise to steer clear

In The Making of Medieval Forgeries, Alfred Hiatt focuses on forgery in fifteenth-century England and provides a survey of the practice from the Norman Conquest through to the early sixteenth century, considering the function and context in which the forgeries took place. Hiatt discusses the impact of the advent of humanism on the acceptance of forgeries and stresses the importance of documents to medieval culture, offering a discussion of the relation of the various versions of the chronicle of John Hardyng to the documents he forged, as well as documents pertaining to the charters of Crowland Abbey and various bulls and charters connected with the University of Cambridge.

A considerable portion of the book concerns the Donation of Constantine, which involves many continental writers, German, French, and Italian. The Making of Medieval Forgeries further discusses the 'multiplicity of audiences' for forgeries: those that produce, those that approve, and those that are hostile.


I have come to believe that Hardyng was genuine after all. After many years spying in Scotland (unpaid), I believe he produced a comprehensive invasion plan, it was not his fault that he could not secure a buyer and was forced to bring out the second, third and fourth editions in rhyming couplets with a fairytale map to boost sales.

If only Hats you could dig up the original Hardyng, we could be onto something.

It's either that or a new edition of the Megalithic Empire in rhyming couplets.
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Mick Harper
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I notice I did not get round to answering my own question about the significance of the Philosophical Research Library's collection (and nor did anyone else) so here goes

packed with every single book you could possibly dream of -- and there are some locked away that are from the 1600's -- is really incredible.

What is 'incredible' is that there are no pre-1600 books. And no pre-printing era manuscripts either by the sound of it. The whole cult of esotericism relies on it being real but lost in the mists of time. If 'one of the world's biggest collections of esoteric literature' doesn't possess them, it's a pretty good bet nobody else does either. In other words 'esotericism' is an entirely modern phenomenon.

PS I just came across a Guardian article that says Ronald Reagan was a big fan of Manley P Hall. Good news or bad news?
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Mick Harper
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Ancient Majesty: The Oldest Crown Ever Found
JOANNA GILLAN 25 JUNE, 2023 - 18:59
https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-other-artifacts/oldest-crown-001436


I have no knowledge or, as yet, any thoughts about this but since I have been asked for my opinion I thought it would be a good test of the red/green system. Here are one of each. Red: it's a world record. Green: it's part of a hoard

The oldest known crown in the world, which was famously discovered in 1961 as part of the Nahal Mishmar Hoard, along with numerous other treasured artifacts

Then a red flag: a period of obscurity before a fanfare

publicly revealed in 2020 in New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World as part of the 'Masters of Fire: Copper Age Art from Israel' exhibit

Probably nothing but we'll see...
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Hatty
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This is the background, according to TIME Magazine's report of the discovery in 1961

In Jerusalem last week, Israeli Premier David Ben-Gurion, temporarily ignoring the Eichmann trial, ordered out his scientific troops for a major assault on Biblical history. Find Israel's first army for me, he told an assembly of his country's leading archaeologists. Dig up the remains of Abraham's band of 318 men who pulled off a nighttime pincer attack at Dan and freed Abraham's nephew Lot from Chedorlaomer, King of the Elamites (Genesis 14:15).

The Bar Kochba explorers—160 soldiers, students and kibbutz volunteers—had been led to the desert badlands just west of the Dead Sea by Archaeologist and former General Yigael Yadin. They found a treasure their first day at the diggings. In the same bat-infested, three-chambered Cave of Letters where he had discovered the rebel chieftain's papyri orders just a year ago. Archaeologist Yadin found some 60 more documents in a goatskin and a leather bag.

Written in elegant Mishnaic Hebrew, the letters had an oddly contemporary ring. As in present-day Israel, all land belonged to the state, and one set of scrolls disclosed an intricate real estate deal in which a government administrator leased several plots to a four-man syndicate which, in turn, subleased the plots among themselves—probably to dodge taxes.

Eight days on and eight miles away, the hoard was found beneath a reed mat dated to around 3300 B.C. or earlier

Eight miles from Dr. Yadin's Cave of Letters in the Wilderness of Judah, the second archaeological team, headed by grey-haired Polish Emigré Pessah Bar-Adon, 53, dug through six feet of debris in another cave. On the eighth day, behind a smooth stone that blocked a wall niche, it discovered a collection of artifacts that Bar-Adon quietly described as "probably archaeologically sensational": 432 copper, bronze, ivory and stone decorated objects that seem to be mace heads, scepters, crowns, powder horns, tools and weapons.

Copper objects can't be dated so the reed mat wrapped around them is presumably the only dating mechanism to hand. The archaeological report remarks that the objects seemed to have been assembled in a hurry leading to speculations about temples and whatnot. The hotchpotch nature of the collection and the deadline are not reassuring, thinking of the shenaningans around Tut's tomb.
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Mick Harper
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Blimey. Our rule about hoards will have to be amended to "apart from Israeli hoards'. I can't believe that this amount of gear, in this short period of time, really could have been assembled. But you have encouraged me to press on.

The ancient crown dates back to the Copper Age between 4000–3500 BC, and is just one out of more than 400 artifacts that were recovered in a cave in the Judean Desert near the Dead Sea more than half a century ago.

I don't recall ever having seen a crown from the Bronze Age, never mind the Copper Age. Not that you get much from the Copper Age on account of copper on its own not being much use for making anything.

The crown is shaped like a thick ring and features vultures and doors protruding from the top. It is believed that it played a part in burial ceremonies for people of importance at the time.

So not for being a king or anything like that. It's awfully like a modern kingly crown. Couldn't be a modern Israeli fake, they've got presidents and prime ministers, haven't they? And Ben-Gurion of course.

New York University wrote:
“An object of enormous power and prestige, the blackened, raggedly cast copper crown from the Nahal Mishmar Hoard greets the visitor to Masters of Fire. The enigmatic protuberances along its rim of vultures and building façades with squarish apertures, and its cylindrical shape, suggest links to the burial practices of the time.”

Be careful. If it's made of copper all those vultures will bend and snap as soon as you try to adjust the crown on your head. Still, it's lasted for six thousand years so obviously they were careful.

The symbolism of a crown in the past often represented power, authority, and leadership. They could have been associated with individuals of high status, such as rulers, chiefs, or religious figures.

Fascinating. I didn't know that...
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Mick Harper
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Wearing a crown could have served as a visible symbol of their position and influence within the hierarchical structure of society. Or could have played a role in specific rituals, ceremonies, or important life events. This object was likely associated with religious or ceremonial practices, potentially related to burial rituals or the worship of deities.

Yes, you were saying.

The forms and themes of the artifacts in the hoard strongly suggest their cultic nature. Some decorations indicate a fertility cult, while showcasing the artistic abilities of the Chalcolithic population in the region. These objects were likely used in rituals, including prayers for hunting, grazing, agriculture, and protection.

Aye, likely.

The abundance and variety of the finds indicate an organized socio-political and religious hierarchy, with evidence of widespread participation in religious rituals and festivals. The significant weight and value of the copper objects highlight the preciousness of copper during that time period.

Oh, I don't know about that. It's called the Copper Age after all.

The Nahal Mishmar Hoard was found by archaeologist Pessah Bar-Adon hidden in a natural crevice and wrapped in a straw mat in a cave on the northern side of Nahal Mishmar, which became known as the ‘Cave of Treasures’. The 442 prized artifacts made from copper, bronze, ivory, and stone, include 240 mace heads, 100 scepters, 5 crowns, powder horns, tools and weapons.

I'm okay with metal lasting in cave in the desert but that straw mat... seems very unlikely to have lasted six thousand years. But I was wrong.

Carbon-14 dating of the reed mat in which the objects were wrapped suggests that it dates to at least 3500 BC.

Quite a large mat by the sound of it.

It was in this period that the use of copper became widespread throughout the Levant, attesting to considerable technological developments that parallel major social advances in the region.

This is not entirely orthodox. I had always been under the impression that copper things are incredibly rare (on account of the pliability of pure copper) and restricted to little god-figures and stuff like that. But I must investigate the possibility of getting Hatty to investigate.

Some of these objects are like nothing ever seen anywhere else.

You can say that again.

The round knobs are usually said to be mace heads, but there is no evidence that any of them were ever used in combat.

Copper weapons might as well be made out of plasticine.

The remaining objects are even more unusual and unique in style, such as the bronze scepter depicted below



Lovely piece of schmutter. We're in the Bronze Age now. In case you weren't paying attention.

Daniel Master, Professor of Archaeology at Wheaton College and a member of the curatorial team, said: “The fascinating thing about this period is that a burst of innovation defined the technologies of the ancient world for thousands of years.”

Or the burst of innovation coming out of Israel a bit later.

Jennifer Chi, ISAW Exhibitions Director and Chief Curator, added: “To the modern eye, it's stunning to see how these groups of people, already mastering so many new social systems and technologies, still had the ability to create objects of enduring artistic interest.”

Yes, Jen, stunning.
The purpose and origin of the hoard remains a mystery.

No, I think we've cleared that one up.
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Hatty
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Some thirty years later a more detailed analysis of the metallurgy showed the same metallurgy present as at other sites but also the presence of some unusual alloys including arsenic and nickel.

A pioneering metallurgical investigation of the hoard was conducted by C.A. Key of the Geochemistry Division, Geological Survey of Israel. His work was the first systematic analysis of trace elements for metalwork finds from the ancient southern Near East. Key’s work emerged in what was almost a vacuum of knowledge and its impact was therefore correspondingly large. Even now, more than a quarter of a century later, his work is still playing a major role in our understanding of the early history of metallurgy.

https://www.academia.edu/21720942/The_Metallurgy_of_the_Nahal_Mishmar_Hoard_Reconsidered

The tools seem genuine, or at least fairly standard as per the reference to 'other sites' They were made of unalloyed copper, presumed to be from a regional source, and thought to be either older than the ornaments and weapons or made by different forgers. I mean, metalworkers. The discovery of arsenic ore (sulf-arsenates) in the copper ornaments shows the ore would have been mined in Armenia and/or Azerbaijan or eastern Anatolia, but the exact origin of these metals isn't yet known. It makes me wonder why the various alloys could only have come from such distant areas, as we have seen in other threads, sophisticated, complex technologies and inventions have a tendency to derive from far away and long ago.

Copper weapons might as well be made out of plasticine.

The metal of the 'prestige', apparently foreign, objects with their high arsenic content is harder than the copper of the tools.
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Mick Harper
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My own suspicions remain unalloyed by "of the Geochemistry Division, Geological Survey of Israel" and "a vacuum of of knowledge ". But the real giveaway is the careful academese of

Even now, more than a quarter of a century later, his work is still playing a major role in our understanding of the early history of metallurgy.

In other words nobody has ever seen the like before or since.
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