Lito Apostolakou's Blog

Posted by Lito Apostolakou

The Arabian Nights, the famous One Thousand and One tales that Shaharazad, or Sheherazade, told the King to save her life, tells also the history of a quest: the quest to find the original manuscript, or failing that the manuscript closest to the original. It has been a long quest - for the Arabian Nights manuscript dating back to the 13th century has been lost for ever.

The quest for the original - the original manuscript - the untainted story - informs the practices of both historian and philologist. Since the "original" Arabian Nights has been written, many copies have been made, many stories inserted and lots of paraphrasing, omitting and abridging done by editors and translators alike. In his introduction to the definite edition of the Nights by Mahdi, Haddawy praises the scholar who "restored" the tainted Arabian Nights to their original glory.

Indeed many alterations had taken place since the original manuscript was created. The story of Aladdin is a case in point. A folk tale inserted by French scholar Antoine Galland in his 18th-century translation, Aladdin does not appear in any known Arabic manuscript, let alone in the Arabian Nights original. Yet what is history but a palimpsest of stories and versions, of many truths and faces, of forgeries that become part of truths and integral to the interpretation of the past?

Revealed as a forgery and not part of the original Arabian NIghts, Aladdin is still the most popular of the tales. It has even been paired with the Thief of Baghdad to create the Disney movie. A lesson about the nature of truth for philologists and historians alike.

On this issues see

• The History of the Arabian Nights: Manuscripts and Print Editions of Shahrazad 1001 Tales
• Story of Aladdin: Arabian Nights, the Storytellers and Forgery
• Aladdin and the Thief of Baghdad: Folk Tale, Silent Movie and Disney Film

Posted by Lito Apostolakou

The imposing marble gate of the Roman Agora of Athens opens to a layered landscape. There were Romans here mixing with Greeks in the large rectangular building of which only columns and fragments remain. In the 1st century BC there were offices, storerooms, shops, an agoranomeion, a fountain, public latrines, a sundial and water clock; then workshops, churches; then mosques; a wheat and flour market; an islamic school; a prison.

Of them the sundial-and-water clock, the Tower of the Winds, stands almost intact with the eight winged wind gods peering from its eight sides. It was used later by the Ottomans as tekke (dance hall) by Derivishes.

Across it the beautifully restored but sadly disused Fethiye Mosque, built in the middle of the 17th century. In the post-Ottoman era it was used as a prison, army barracks, school, flour storeroom and army bakery. Between the clock and the mosque, the Roman latrines, one of Rome's contribution to civilized urban life.

And on the left of the Tower of the Winds a mysterious, almost haunted structure: another door more humble perhaps compared to the Gate of the Roman Agora but no less imposing. The door and the bit of wall remaining is what's left of the 18th-century Islamic school (Mendrese). During King Otto's time it was used by the Bavarians as a prison.

The Roman Agora and surrounding area is scattered with Greek, Roman, Ottoman, Muslim and Christian remains and is a graphic example of the layered nature of the past.

• On the Tower of the Winds see Ancient Clock of the Roman Agora, Athens: Boreas and Zephyros in the Tower of the Winds.
• On the Roman latrines, see Roman Sewers in the Athens Agora: Latrines of the Ancient Romans

Posted by Lito Apostolakou

The Victorian artist's botanical drawing practices and guidelines are peculiarly evocative of the those of the historian. Writes Endersby in his Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (UOC 2008) :

Given sufficient skill and practice, even a completely flattened and dried specimen, once it had been restored using water, could be cut apart to reveal the structure, providing valuable clues as to its original appearance and classification.

Walter Hood Fitch, the 19thC renown botanical artist, often drew plants he had never seen working from field sketches or dried specimens. A master of dissection with a deep knowledge of plant anatomy and structure, Fitch selected those plant organs for illustration that "appeared to him the most characteristic of the species or genus".

Isn't the past a dried specimen, which once possessed a material existence but is now flattened and dead and exposed to the historian's observant eye? The past is "restored", cut apart by the skilled master of history to reveal its structure and to yield the valuable clues as to its original appearance. The past is "illustrated", reconstructed in writing but what part of it is recorded? Only those parts that appear to the master of history as the "most characteristic". Like the botanical artist, the historian records what he or she already knows.

For the Victorian student of botanical art, "drawing was only a learning process for those who already knew what to look for". The historians' quest for "truth" is similar to the botanical artist's quest for the perfect drawing: both are looking to describe a "truth" that is consistent with a pre-learned, or given, world-view.

Related articles

• Walter Fitch, Drawing Master of Botanical Art: Flower Paintings or How to Draw Plants
• Online Resources for Botanical Art: Botany Illustrations and Antique Flower Prints
• The Botanical Treks of Joseph Dalton Hooker in the Himalayas
• Historical Drawings of Rhododendrons: Botanical Paintings of Himalayan Plants

Posted by Lito Apostolakou

It features in cave paintings, it is evident in prehistoric skulls, Hippocrates explains it, Galen elaborates on it and it was practiced from the Andes to Norway and beyond, from prehistory and until today: trepanation or trepanning is a procedure whereby a hole is drilled into the human skull to treat intracranal diseases.

The methods have of course changed since ancient times but the illustrations that survive of the procedure of trepanation from the Renaissance period onwards are valuable resources for the history of medicine. These were times before modern anaesthesia was invented and patients had to make do with traditional anaesthetics such as alcohol and opium.

The same was true for limb amputations. Surgeons had to be quick, patients had to be restrained and the risk of infection was high. It is noteworthy however that over half of the patients survived trepanation and the infection risk was low.

The illustrations and prints which are part of the Wellcome Images collection, held in Wellcome Library in London feature different surgical instruments used for amputations as well as representations of amputations. Some of them are not for the fainthearted.

On historical medical images resources see

• Online Historical Medical Images at Duke University Medical Center Library

• Historical Medical Images of Surgery at the Wellcome Library, London
• Vesalius and the Anatomical Illustration: Anatomy Images and Historical Illustrations, Wellcome Library

The Wellcome Collection is on 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE

Posted by Lito Apostolakou

The postmodernist worldview has demolished the sacred status of historical documents, records and manuscripts. Historical records are simply narratives. We know the past by reading interpreted "reports" about it. What we accept as "real" and "true", writes Linda Hutcheon, is that which "wears the mask of meaning, the completeness and fullness of which we can only imagine, never experience".

Whose history survives? We only know the past through texts, traces, relics. "History is natural selection", writes Salman Rushdie in Shame. Documents are not neutral evidence, writes Dominick LaCapra. We cannot use them to reconstruct the past which has supposedly some independent existence outside the archives. Archives, documents, records process information and "the very way they do so is itself a historical fact that limits the documentary conception of historical knowledge".

Documents are signs of events. Historians read these signs and construct them into facts. They select documents, which are themselves constructs (of institutions or individuals), to serve a certain point of view. Postmodernist historians do not aspire to tell the truth but to question whose truth gets told. In 1910 Carl Becker wrote: "the facts of history do not exist for any historian until he creates them".

Sources

Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, Routledge 1988.

Timothy Findley, Famous Last Words, Toronto & Vancouver 1977