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Fake or Find (APPLIED EPISTEMOLOGY)
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Mick Harper
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William Stukeley, Newton’s personal physician in his later life.

That I did not know.
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Mick Harper
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Here's an interesting Newtonian relative

Francis Tresham was one of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators yet died of natural causes in the Tower of London in 1605. (p22)

Interesting not so much for being one of an interlinked clan of (as we might say, pushing it a bit) Megalithic English gentry but for two other reasons:
1. It was probably his letter to two other members of the clan warning them to stay away from Parliament that led to the discovery of the Plot
2.. which was in November 1605 so dying from natural causes by December is some going. I don't believe a word of it unless, like Americans, you believe enhanced interrogation is not injurious to one's health.
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Mick Harper
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A hilarious piece of academic sniffiness

For 250 years Newton's manuscripts lay in a large trunk ... untouched until 1872 when they were donated to Cambridge University. After the University Library accessioned those items of scientific interest, they returned all personal items, including the alchemical manuscripts, to the family. p28

The point of course is that by 1872 there were no items of scientific interest, only ones of historic interest. Of these the alchemical papers were of the greater interest since Newton's scientific work was so well documented. Actually, this is not sniffiness but 'careful ignoral' -- Newton the Weirdo has been a severe embarrassment from his day to this and must not be given the oxygen of Oxbridge orthodoxy. And talking of bolted gift horses, if they'd kept the 'personal papers' the Library could have paid for a whole new wing.
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Mick Harper
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One possibility the author does not canvass (possibly because it's out to lunch) is that Katherine Barton is not the belle of the eighteenth century ball but Newton's daughter. She was officially born in 1679, the year after her official immediate sibling which is short even by seventeenth century standards. 1679 was also the year when Newton went off to a solitary life at Woolsthorpe. If he stashed her with his cousins, some things make more sense. Sykes is not curious about a couple of oddities that, to my much more neurotic sensibilities, rather leapt off the page.

Originally these baronets were Cradoc(k)s/Caradocs of Welsh descent but became mistranlated as Newton. p 32

Really? How’s that done then? I can find nothing Craddish in the Welsh/English dictionary about newts, new towns, new tuns. A Craddock was Lord of Newton but even Leland thinks this is an error. I don’t say any of this is significant it is just you only develop a neurotic sensibility by wondering why people keep on carefully ignoring certain ‘mistakes’. It’s always the cover up, never the crime.

By the very by, this Newton that Craddock was lord of is at Haverfordwest, not very Welsh but extremely Megalithic. The other reported but not commented on weird fact is this

By the time of the first baronet, Sir John (c 1611-1661), they realised that the line was going to die out and this Newton invited a namesake from Gonerby in Lincolnshire to inherit the title. pp 32-3

(a) I am sure there were nearer Newtons to be found than going to the other side of the country
(b) I am (pretty) sure you are not allowed to deal out titles as if playing the short form of Monopoly
(c) this line promptly died out too
(d) a whole bunch of stuff had quietly got shifted over from Cradockian West Wales to Isaac Newtonian Eastern England.
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Mick Harper
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Foard notes the Colliers Closes near Corby were quarries where charcoal burning once took place. The practice, once widespread, was virtually forgotten by 1713. p73

1. Colliers are miners, nothing to do with charcoal burning.
2. Closes are enclosed pastures more often than woodland.
3. Quarries are hardly suitable for charcoal burning which takes place in woodland clearings.
4. Hardly 'forgotten'. Charcoal burning reached its peak in 1713! The end of a great naval war (charcoal = iron smelting = cannon) but before coal smelting.
5. Corby is at the centre of Britain's largest iron ore field.

Either Foard (the authority on all this) or Sykes needs to look to their laurels.
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Mick Harper
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So, is the title deed itself Fake or Find? The two operative facts are
1. Isaac Newton and Oliver Cromwell are the only individuals of the period both likely to turn up on title deeds and to be worth forging.
2. Isaac Newton seems strangely extraneous to the proceedings being recorded. He pops up at the start and at the end of a very long document and for not altogether convincing reasons on either occasion.

If this was being sold for twenty grand in a west end showroom I’d say Fake. Since it is sitting unvalued in a Bristol Library, I’d say Find. Exactly why it is sitting unvalued in a Bristol Library is a mystery Sykes indefatigably and entertainingly never quite solves.

ends
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Hatty
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Wiki has an article on Newton baronets which says there was no family relationship, apart from the name, between the Gloucestershire and Lincolnshire Newtons

The first Sir John Newton belonged to an ancient Gloucestershire family, originally surnamed Caradoc. He received his baronetcy as reward for providing King Charles II with troops to defend the plantation of Ulster. The royal patent of 1660 that created the baronetcy stipulated that upon the death of the first baronet, who was childless, the honour would "revert" to his "kinsman" John Newton, resident of Culverthorpe, in Lincolnshire. In reality, there was no family connection between the Gloucestershire and the Lincolnshire Newtons, and the arrangement seems to have been the result of the John Newton of Culverthorpe paying a large sum of money to his namesake in Gloucestershire

The article then cites genealogists who completely disagree

Shortly after he was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705, the scientist Isaac Newton submitted to the College of Arms a genealogy claiming a common male-line ancestry with Sir John Newton, 3rd Baronet. Modern genealogical scholarship confirms that they were third cousins


Online history of parliament openly states that the baronetcy was bought

Newton stood for Grantham, six miles from Culverthorpe, at the general election of 1660, although ineligible under the last ordinance of the Long Parliament. ... He was proposed for the order of the Royal Oak with an estate of £3,000 p.a., but his family was too obscure to qualify him for the grant of a baronetcy. Accordingly he procured the honour for a childless Gloucestershire gentleman of the same name, with a special remainder to himself, which fell in, together with the estate, some 18 months later

http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1660-1690/member/newton-john-1626-99

The order of the Royal Oak never got anywhere so was the title useless? On this point Wiki has found an interesting connection between Newton and Cromwell

The award was abandoned before being formally established, out of concerns that it might perpetuate dissension and keep alive the differences between Parliament and the King, which were better left forgotten:

"...it being wisely judged," says Noble, in his 'Memoirs of the Cromwell family', "that the order was calculated only to keep awake animosities, which it was the part of wisdom to lull to sleep." Henry Cromwell, a zealous royalist and first cousin once removed to Oliver Cromwell, was one of the men proposed to be one of these knights. He had by then changed his name to Williams


Buying the baronetcy might have been necessary to prove his loyalty at the Restoration (John Newton's mother had been taken prisoner by royalist soldiers in 1649). Changing names, changing times.
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Mick Harper
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All very valuable (and all very possible) but do I get the whiff of facts being adjusted 'after the fact'? This actually applies to the land transfer document itself that Sykes discovered in Bristol Library. At no point did I get the impression that this was some dude flogging off thirty acres of tuppeny-ha'penny English countryside to another dude. Half a page and the pub landlord witnessing it would have been more appropriate.
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Mick Harper
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Sorry, checking the book for the actual acreage I see it is more complicated than that. Still...
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Hatty
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'Sea people' have been in the news in connection with an inscribed stone slab. It has however been translated for non-Luwian speakers, to be published in a book coming out in time for Christmas

Ancient symbols on a 3,200-year-old stone slab have been deciphered by researchers who say they could solve "one of the greatest puzzles of Mediterranean archaeology".

The 29-metre limestone frieze, found in 1878, in what is now modern Turkey, bears the longest known hieroglyphic inscription from the Bronze Age. Only a handful of scholars worldwide, can read its ancient Luwian language.

The first translation has offered an explanation for the collapse of the Bronze Age's powerful and advanced civilizations.

'Luwians', whose origins can only be guessed at by scholars, lived in Anatolia mostly, also north-western Levant, during the Bronze and Iron ages. Then, it is said, their states were destroyed by, or incorporated into, 'the Neo-Assyrian Empire' because they completely vanished.

If these mysterious hieroglyphs are right, the Luwians and fellow-Anatolians were first-rate seafarers and presumably not bad on land either

The text suggests the kingdom and other Anatolian states invaded ancient Egypt and other regions of the east Mediterranean before and during the fall of the Bronze Age.


There is a bit of a problem though because it doesn't seem to be the original after all

The 35cm-tall, 10-metre-long limestone slab was found 1878 in the village of Beyköy, 34 kilometres north of Afyonkarahisar in modern Turkey. French archaeologist George Perrot copied the inscription before the stone was used by villagers as building material for the foundation of a mosque.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/archaeologists-decipher-ancient-stone-turkey-invasion-mysterious-sea-people-luwain-hieroglyphic-a7992141.html

This copy was apparently kept under wraps by none other than James Mellaart

The copy was rediscovered in the estate of English prehistorian James Mellaart after his death in 2012 and was handed over by his son to Dr Eberhard Zangger, president of the Luwian Studies foundation, to study.

Mellaart was famous for discovering Catalhoyuk but perhaps not always entirely trustworthy; as Wiki puts it

James Mellaart FBA was a British archaeologist and author who is noted for his discovery of the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük in Turkey. He was expelled from Turkey when he was suspected of involvement with the antiquities black market.


The Independent article says only 20 people in the world 'know' Luwian. Imagine the excitement at being handed "the longest known hieroglyphic inscription" in the world. Would they declare it fake or find do you think?
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Mick Harper
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Yes, that famous AE dictum "If it's a world record, don't get too excited, another one will be along right behind." We weren't particularly looking for them when we did Forgeries but compiling the Index afterwards we couldn't help noticing we had amassed quite a few, so we indexed them!


artefact, oldest in Britain 4, 23, 40
book, earliest 70
book, written English, earliest 4, 23
books, mass market, first 154
books, printed, earliest 150-1
cathedral city earliest 129
Christian site, Britain, earliest 107
dated land charter, earliest 24
demotic writing, ever 26, 37, 101
event, most significant 83, 84
exponential development, first 151-2, 155
famous person, second most 106
gospel book, earliest 83
gospel book, earliest, England 21
gospel book, earliest, Europe 70
gospel book, earliest with known origin 100
Gospels in English, first 85
icon, 'greatest' 51, 55, 62
identified Irish writer 67-8
identified scribe, earliest 99
intellectual authority, highest 82
landmass, largest 82
language, literary, first 26, 131
language, literary, since Latin 26
language, literary, done twice 26
language , most important 4, 23,30, 35
Last Supper depiction, first 64
law code, Germanic, earliest 36
leadpoint, earliest 85
leather goods, capital of 117
light-box, earliest 85
manuscript, most remarkable 4
mass demotic, first 150-1
name, English, earliest recorded 24
oldest state, world's 30
opera , world leader 149
philosopher, pre-eminent Christian 40
relic, 'greatest' 54-5, 62-3
state trial, England, earliest, 75-6
station name, longest 100
Virgin and Child, earliest 64
written arts, world leader 149
written English, earliest 26
written Irish, earliest 67
written Welsh, earliest 101

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Wile E. Coyote


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You two are such spoilsports.......

Zangger argues the Luwian's played a critical role in what he dubs "World War Zero", a large-scale conflict that culminated in the Battle of Troy and destroyed several powerful civilizations (including the Egyptians and Mycenaeans) within a very short time-span. It was this, he says, that brought an end to the later Bronze Age (c. 1177 BCE) and sparked a new dark age.


That's more like it..... it's only the prelude to world war zero......and darkness. (until someone sheds some light)
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Hatty
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"World War Zero", a large-scale conflict that culminated in the Battle of Troy and destroyed several powerful civilizations (including the Egyptians and Mycenaeans) within a very short time-span. It was this, he says, that brought an end to the later Bronze Age (c. 1177 BCE) and sparked a new dark age.

This is helpful, it's presumably why the inscriptions have been dated c1190 BC since no other tools are available.
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Wile E. Coyote


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http://ancients-bg.com/world-war-zero/

Hmmm.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Not sure about this.

To Wiley on a first look, Luwian is a script (scripts) which linguists (not sure they are the best people for the job) have decided shows that there was a shared Luwian culture. However field excavators happily ignorant of all of the above have never recorded Luwian finds..."by jingo Thomas.. it's a Luwian ceramic" etc.....simply because Luwian culture is not currently recognised by people cataloging finds in Asia Minor.

So in a sense there are multiple previous finds out there, currently classified as, say, Hittite (?), now waiting to be reclassified to Luwian. If this Luwian thing takes off.

The Luwians (they are getting portrayed as magicians and seafarers) appear to serve a similar function to vikings in European dark age history in the minds of those advocating their existence.

To be honest I am not sure whether I have grasped the basics.
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