Egyptian Monuments and Hieroglyphs

[click for much large versions - scaled down a little and touched up for background artifact]

It is no small coincidence that two of the pioneers of egyptian archaeology were inclined towards linguistics. Jean-François Champollion (previous post) was given the opportunity to decipher the Rosetta Stone because of his gift for languages, following which he developed an interest in the antiquities of Egypt. He spent a year there in 1828 with a Franco-Italian mission and his egyptian hieroglyphs interpretations were released after his death at a young age.

Prussian Karl Lepsius (1810-1884) on the other hand, studied European archaeology for a doctoral degree. He was then introduced to the Champollion translation work by a tutor and thereafter applied himself to further deciphering the egyptian language. He spent some years travelling around Europe, studying egyptian artifacts and educating himself in hieroglyphs. He visited Champollion's expedition partner, Ippolito Rosellini, in Italy and published his own improvements on the initial translation analysis. Later, he would develop an alphabetical system for transliterating african languages.

On the advice of Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian King sent Lepsius with an expedition in 1842 to study the egyptian/nubian/ethiopian monuments and to bring back any treasures discovered. The mission would last for 4 years and the party made detailed surveys of a vast number of ancient structures ranging from Alexandria in the north as far south as Khartoum in the Sudan.

Artists and mould makers accompanied the expedition and nearly 900 illustration plates were ultimately engraved for a massive 12 volume series recording their findings. Lepsius brought back 15,000 (!) individual pieces from the tour, including columns and walls dynamited by the ruler Muhammad Ali and given as a present during a ceremonial dinner. The texts themselves remain primary documents in egyptology and in cases where buildings and artifacts were destroyed (as was inevitably the case, back then), they remain as the only surviving record.

Lepsius would go on to become a Professor and oversee the egyptian artifacts housed at the Berlin Museum. He ventured back to Egypt later and uncovered the Decree of Canopus, an adjunctive trilingual tablet supporting the Rosetta Stone translation.

2 final points in the trivia stakes:

-- there is only one set of hieroglyphs at the Great Pyramid of Giza. It was carved at the entrance by Karl Lepsius in 1843 (not so trivial really).
-- Lepsius coined the expression 'The Book of the Dead' with his 1842 publication, 'Das Todtenbuch der Ägypten nach dem hieroglyphischen Papyrus'.

• The 12 volumes of 'Denkmäler aus Aegypten und Aethiopen' ('Monuments of Egypt and Ethiopia') bear an 1897 publication date but I presume they were published over many years before that. The full series of plates is most likely available at the Martin Luther University website but it is a timeconsuming task going through page by page - it's both a slow server and all the images are ~300kb in size. I saw perhaps 150 pages, if that. The above samples are a fair cross section, although I didn't include any of the many maps available.
• 'Karl (Carl) Richard Lepsius: A Founder of Modern Egyptology' by Jimmy Dunn.
• 'Das Archivmaterial der Lepsius-Expedition' is a german site and has some original manuscript pages and illustrations (but it is predominantly commentary).
• The face mask image above comes from the Met. Museum.
• The previous 'Monuments of Nubia and Egypt' post has some interesting/relevant links.

Trouvelot Astronomy

The planet Jupiter. Observed November 1, 1880, at 9h. 30m. P.M.

The planet Mars. Observed September 3, 1877, at 11h. 55m. P.M.

Total eclipse of the sun. Observed July 29, 1878, at Creston, Wyoming Territory.

Four views of Jupiter, 1872.

"[T]hese views were produced using the [Harvard] observatory's 15-inch refracting telescope made by Merz of Munich, Germany. They show the planet's characteristic cloud belts with festoon structures within that have been now been resolved in detail by robot spacecrafts such as Voyager. At this time, drawings made at the telescope using only the eyes showed more detail than could be produced using the insensitive photographic plates then available."

Mare Humorum. From a study made in 1875.

Group of sun spots and veiled spots. Observed on June 17th 1875 at 7 h. 30 m. A.M.

Aurora Borealis. As observed March 1, 1872, at 9h. 25m. P.M.

Frenchman Étienne Léopold Trouvelot (1827–1895) was primarily a portrait artist when he arrived in Massachusetts in 1852. During the following 30 years that he remained in America his amateur passion for science would ensure a legacy that straddles both fame and infamy.

Trouvelot had a particular love for silkworms and he had a 4 acre plot behind his house where he cultivated a native variety. To increase production he hoped to crossbreed the regular type with a species from Europe. He brought back Gypsy Moth eggs from a trip home and so introduced a virulent pest that ravages forests in America to this day. To his (slight) credit, he realized the enormity of the problem straight away when some of the introduced moths escaped. He made it publically known, but unfortunately local entomologists did nothing at the time to eradicate them.

Trouvelot turned his attention from moths to the stars and began illustrating celestial phenomena. His drawings were so good that the Director of Harvard College Observatory put Trouvelot on staff where he gained access to their powerful telescope.

He would go on to produce some 7000 astronomical drawings and publish 50 scientific papers. His works were displayed at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876 and Trouvelot began to assemble his best drawings for wider publication. In 1881 a series of 15 chromolithographs were released for $125 (!) to great acclaim. He spent the last 3 years of his life back in France pursuing his fascination for solar phenomena.

• The 15 lithographs from 'Astronomical Drawings' are online at NYPL.
• NYPL also have a great site - 'Art & Actuality: Heavens Above' - with a large section on Trouvelot, his drawings, contemporary astrophotography and modern astronomical images.
• The '4 Jupiters' image above (sans watermark) comes from Science and Society - they have a few additional illustrations by Trouvelot.

Remains of the Day

Manolo Prieto (1912-1991) was an advertising and book cover/poster
graphic artist from Spain. This and this are direct links to the galleries
from where the above works were taken - the framed site is a little
annoying. There are other images available from the parent site,
including some of Prieto's famed bullfighting paintings.

Tho' Johnson - 'The First Pugilist in the World' -
in Thomas Fewtrell's 'Science of Manual Defence'1790
at the Linacre School of Defence.
There are about 50 pages available but from
(dim) memory this is the only illustration.

'Report of the construction of Edystone Lighthouse' by civil engineer John Smeaton was published in 1813 and is online at Kyoto University Library.
It is a history of the 4 lighthouses built near Plymouth at the western end of
the English Channel in the 17th/18th centuries. There are about 20 excellent
images (well, if you're into lighthouse architectural drawings they are)
with high resolution details available.

This gorgeous chrysanthemum is from the 'Camerarius Florilegium',
produced in about 1589 by at most 2 artists for Joachim Camerarius.
The Harald Fischer Verlag site has about 20 images in large format.
Link direct to images (2 pages). Link to information in english.
Link to the site in german - there is a pdf file in here which
has a bit more background and a couple more small images.

Illustrations © Szymon Kruczek from Poland. He seems to like the moon, fish and...whimsy. Click around; although 'alignment' of the images became
a bit of an issue in firefox. I had to nab the source code and open the images
in an another tab to save them. But there is always the chance it was just me.
There is a link from his site to 'polskie strony artystyczne' -
I have only had a quick look at a few things, but I sense there
is some major Polish artistic timekill in amongst that lot.

I have no recollection where this Portuguese heraldic plate comes from.

'Deutschland, Mißgeburt mit Flügeln und schuppigem linken Bein,
die 1506 in Florenz geboren sein soll, nach 1506, Druck, Nürnberg,
Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Graphische Sammlung, HB 21779'

'Nürnberg 1501-1600 ' [I have a very vague recollection that I've either seen or
previously posted a colour version of this image(?)]

'Schmaritz, Jakob, Flugblatt ..Von dem grossen Wunder und Mirackel
eines Fisches..., 1624, Flugblatt, Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum.'
These last 3 images were found in the magic/religion theme in
'Bildindex der Kunst und Architektur des Bildarchivs Foto Marburg'.

The Anatomy of a Pygmie

"I take him to be wholly a Brute, tho' in the formation of the Body, and in the Sensitive or Brutal Soul, it may be, more resembling a Man, than any other Animal; so that in this Chain of the Creation, as an intermediate Link between an Ape and a Man, I would place our Pygmie."

“one would be apt to think, that since there is so great a disparity
between the Soul of a Man, and a Brute, the Organ likewise in
which ’tis placed should be very different too.”

[click for full size versions]

Edward Tyson (1650–1708) was an English physician and member of the Royal Society. Beyond his medical duties and publications (both of which were significant and extensive) he had a deep interest in comparative anatomy, an area of scientific investigation in which he is one of the leading early protagonists.

In 1680 he had already outlined this interest in 'Phocaena or the Anatomy of the Porpess' in which he not only systematically described cetacean structures but also wrote of "the importance of a comparative approach to anatomy and attempts to develop a plan for a natural history of animals." He performed dissections on many different species and published his findings in the 'Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society'.

In the late 1690s a chimpanzee had only been seen illustrated in Europe once previously and the larger apes such as the orangutan and gorilla were not discovered or described until the 18th and 19th centuries respectively. It was not surprising therefore that Tyson was given the opportunity to dissect a chimpanzee that had been brought over from Africa in 1698.

The chimpanzee was a juvenile (which led to some erroneous anatomical statements) and was injured on board its transport ship. The injury later became infected and caused the chimp's death. This injury is either directly or inadvertently represented in the engraving above (all the drawings were done by the anatomist William Cowper) in which the bipedal chimp is seen using a walking stick. Tyson described the animal as quadru-manous to distinguish it from the quadrupeds.

The reference to 'Orang-Outang' in the title is only in terms of it meaning "man of the woods" [homo silvestris]. So it was that 'The Anatomy of a Pygmie' marked the beginning of primatology, and there is some irony in Tyson having been a distant cousin of Charles Darwin. I haven't searched around but I would not be surprised to learn that the expression 'the missing link' derives from Tyson's meticulous documentation of the anatomical comparison between chimpanzees and man.

• The above images have been snagged from a first edition (1699) copy of 'Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris: or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man' on ebay. To the best of my searching capabilities there are no copies online and only a couple of the above fold-out engravings have been previously digitized (and these images above are better quality in my opinion than any others I encountered, including one image at the British Library). I think there were only 8 large illustrations in the first edition so this is nearly complete.
• In addition to the main text, Tyson also contributed 4 essays that were included as an appendix to the book. As the title page intimates, a large part of Tyson's intention when undertaking the project was to prove that mythical dwarf creatures which had been previously described as human were plausible animals, but were in fact apes. The first essay -- 'A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients' -- is really a kind of review of 'dwarfian' mythology or historical literature review and is available from Project Gutenburg, with a substantial 1894 introduction by Bertram Windle. It is rather fascinating to skim through.
• Kings College London: 'Anatomy of a Pygmy' exhibition page.
• 'Anatomy of a Pygmie' was re-released in 1966 and a 1967 review by KF Russell is available from pubmedcentral.
• 'Searching for Your Inner Chimp' by Carl Zimmer 2002.
• 'Selected Minor Works: Historical Reflections on Language and Bipedalism' by Justin Smith 2006.
• 'Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature' by Thomas Henry Huxley 1863 at Project Gutenburg.
• 'Four Hands Good, Two Hands Bad' 2006 by Tom Tyler (Senior Lecturer in Communication, Media and Culture at Oxford Brookes University UK).
• This page from Jonathan Marks at UNC Charlotte has a couple of images inspired by those from Tyson/Cowper.
• Previously: comparative mammalian anatomy and historical anatomies.

The Mirror of Human Salvation

The anonymous 'Speculum Humanæ Salvationis' was written at the beginning of the 14th century and several hundred versions were produced in all major european languages up to the end of the 15th century. The images above come from a 1430 german version.

"In its text and pictures the Speculum contains a vivid account of the religious and artistic forces at work in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the lessons in piety, the allegories, and all of the arts were devoted to instilling in the minds of the people the need for salvation and the dread of eternal damnation. The Speculum is entirely concerned with the Fall and Redemption and with their prefiguration in the Old Testament."

In addition to its widespread popularity over a few centuries, 'Speculum' is one of the most important works in the history of printing. It is the only book from the middle ages that exists in illuminated manuscript, blockbook and incunabula form.

Because it was so widely reproduced and derives from a single origin, 'Speculum' also constitutes a significant body of work in terms of book illustration. The copying, "which followed the precise numerical pattern of the original manuscript [..] and iconography [..] holds a unique place in the study of medieval miniatures in providing an enormous variety of styles and visual interpretations of the identical sequence of subjects."

• The 1430 version of 'Speculum Humanæ Salvationis' is online in its entirety at the Royal Library of Denmark. [the quality of the miniatures generally falls away after about page 40: they tend towards being either incomplete or haphazardly painted]
• The Royal Library of Denmark have a second version: the links on this page are to enlarged details from a later parchment manuscript.
• The Dutch National Library have a latin version from 1450 in thumbnail format via the Meermanno portal.
• The quotes above come from "A Medieval Mirror : Speculum Humanae Salvationis, 1324-1500" by Adrian Wilson & Joyce Lancaster Wilson. 1984. - this commendable book is available online. It provides background history with respect to the general printing and illustration techniques of the time and concentrates throughout on the iconography. There are many images (most in black and white) gleaned from all major versions of 'Speculum' in existence. Click on 'Photo Section' to see all the colour images.
• UPDATE (May 2011): a mid-14th century manuscript version has been posted by Badischen Landesbibliothek.