WEBVTT

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On January 26, 2013,

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a band of al-Qaeda militants
entered the ancient city of Timbuktu

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on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert.

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There, they set fire to a medieval library
of 30,000 manuscripts

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written in Arabic
and several African languages

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and ranging in subject from astronomy
to geography, history to medicine,

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including one book which records

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perhaps the first treatment
for male erectile dysfunction.

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Unknown in the West,

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this was the collected wisdom
of an entire continent,

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the voice of Africa at a time when Africa
was thought not to have a voice at all.

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The mayor of Bamako,
who witnessed the event,

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called the burning of the manuscripts

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"a crime against world cultural heritage."

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And he was right --

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or he would have been, if it weren't
for the fact that he was also lying.

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In fact, just before,

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African scholars had collected
a random assortment of old books

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and left them out
for the terrorists to burn.

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Today, the collection
lies hidden in Bamako,

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the capital of Mali,

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moldering in the high humidity.

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What was rescued by ruse

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is now once again in jeopardy,

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this time by climate.

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But Africa, and the far-flung
corners of the world,

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are not the only places,
or even the main places

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in which manuscripts that could change
the history of world culture

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are in jeopardy.

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Several years ago, I conducted
a survey of European research libraries

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and discovered that,
at the barest minimum,

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there are 60,000 manuscripts

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pre-1500

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that are illegible
because of water damage,

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fading, mold and chemical reagents.

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The real number is likely double that,

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and that doesn't even count

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Renaissance manuscripts
and modern manuscripts

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and cultural heritage
objects such as maps.

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What if there were a technology

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that could recover
these lost and unknown works?

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Imagine worldwide
how a trove of hundreds of thousands

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of previously unknown texts

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could radically transform
our knowledge of the past.

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Imagine what unknown classics
we would discover

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which would rewrite the canons
of literature, history,

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philosophy, music --

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or, more provocatively, that could
rewrite our cultural identities,

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building new bridges
between people and culture.

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These are the questions
that transformed me

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from a medieval scholar,
a reader of texts,

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into a textual scientist.

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What an unsatisfying word "reader" is.

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For me, it conjures up
images of passivity,

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of someone sitting idly in an armchair

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waiting for knowledge to come to him

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in a neat little parcel.

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How much better to be
a participant in the past,

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an adventurer in an undiscovered country,

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searching for the hidden text.

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As an academic, I was a mere reader.

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I read and taught the same classics

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that people had been reading
and teaching for hundreds of years --

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Virgil, Ovid, Chaucer, Petrarch --

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and with every scholarly article
that I published

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I added to human knowledge
in ever-diminishing slivers of insight.

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What I wanted to be

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was an archaeologist of the past,

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a discoverer of literature,

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an Indiana Jones without the whip --

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or, actually, with the whip.

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(Laughter)

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And I wanted it not just for myself
but I wanted it for my students as well.

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And so six years ago,
I changed the direction of my career.

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At the time, I was working
on "The Chess of Love,"

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the last important long poem
of the European Middle Ages

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never to have been edited.

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And it wasn't edited because
it existed in only one manuscript

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which was so badly damaged
during the firebombing of Dresden

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in World War II

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that generations of scholars
had pronounced it lost.

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For five years, I had been working
with an ultraviolet lamp

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trying to recover traces of the writing

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and I'd gone about as far
as technology at the time

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could actually take me.

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And so I did what many people do.

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I went online,

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and there I learned about

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how multispectral imaging had been used
to recover two lost treatises

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of the famed Greek
mathematician Archimedes

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from a 13th-century palimpsest.

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A palimpsest is a manuscript
which has been erased and overwritten.

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And so, out of the blue,

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I decided to write
to the lead imaging scientist

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on the Archimedes palimpsest project,

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Professor Roger Easton,

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with a plan and a plea.

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And to my surprise,
he actually wrote back.

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With his help, I was able
to win a grant from the US government

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to build a transportable,
multispectral imaging lab,

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And with this lab, I transformed
what was a charred and faded mess

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into a new medieval classic.

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So how does multispectral
imaging actually work?

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Well, the idea
behind multispectral imaging

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is something that anyone who is familiar
with infrared night vision goggles

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will immediately appreciate:

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that what we can see
in the visible spectrum of light

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is only a tiny fraction
of what's actually there.

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The same is true with invisible writing.

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Our system uses 12 wavelengths of light

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between the ultraviolet and the infrared,

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and these are shown down
onto the manuscript from above

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from banks of LEDs,

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and another multispectral light source

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which comes up through
the individual leaves of the manuscript.

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Up to 35 images per sequence
per leaf are imaged this way

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using a high-powered digital camera
equipped with a lens

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which is made out of quartz.

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There are about five
of these in the world.

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And once we capture these images,

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we feed them through
statistical algorithms

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to further enhance and clarify them,

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using software which was originally
designed for satellite images

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and used by people
like geospatial scientists

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and the CIA.

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The results can be spectacular.

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You may already have heard
of what's been done

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for the Dead Sea Scrolls,

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which are slowly gelatinizing.

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Using infrared, we've been able
to read even the darkest corners

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of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

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You may not be aware, however,

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of other Biblical texts
that are in jeopardy.

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Here, for example,
is a leaf from a manuscript

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that we imaged,

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which is perhaps the most valuable
Christian Bible in the world.

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The Codex Vercellensis is the oldest
translation of the Gospels into Latin,

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and it dates from the first half
of the fourth century.

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This is the closest we can come

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to the Bible at the time
of the foundation of Christendom

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under Emperor Constantine,

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and at the time also
of the Council of Nicaea,

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when the basic creed of Christianity
was being agreed upon.

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This manuscript, unfortunately,
has been very badly damaged,

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and it's damaged because for centuries

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it had been used and handled

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in swearing in ceremonies in the church.

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In fact, that purple splotch
that you see in the upper left hand corner

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is Aspergillus, which is a fungus

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which originates in the unwashed hands

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of a person with tuberculosis.

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Our imaging has enabled me
to make the first transcription

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of this manuscript in 250 years.

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Having a lab that can travel
to collections where it's needed, however,

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is only part of the solution.

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The technology is expensive and very rare,

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and the imaging and image
processing skills are esoteric.

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That means that mounting recoveries

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is beyond the reach of most researchers
and all but the wealthiest institutions.

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That's why I founded the Lazarus Project,

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a not-for-profit initiative

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to bring multispectral imaging
to individual researchers

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and smaller institutions
at little or no cost whatsoever.

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Over the past five years,

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our team of imaging scientists,
scholars and students

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has travelled to seven different countries

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and have recovered some of the world's
most valuable damaged manuscripts,

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included the Vercelli Book,
which is the oldest book of English,

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the Black Book of Carmarthen,
the oldest book of Welsh,

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and some of the most valuable
earliest Gospels

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located in what is now
the former Soviet Georgia.

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So, spectral imaging
can recover lost texts.

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More subtly, though, it can recover
a second story behind every object,

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the story of how, when
and by whom a text was created,

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and, sometimes, what the author
was thinking at the time he wrote.

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Take, for example, a draft
of the Declaration of Independence

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written in Thomas Jefferson's own hand,

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which some colleagues of mine
imaged a few years ago

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at the Library of Congress.

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Curators had noticed
that one word throughout

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had been scratched out and overwritten.

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The word overwritten was "citizens."

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Perhaps you can guess
what the word underneath was.

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"Subjects."

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There, ladies and gentlemen,
is American democracy

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evolving under the hand
of Thomas Jefferson.

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Or consider the 1491 Martellus Map,

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which we imaged
at Yale's Beinecke Library.

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This was the map
that Columbus likely consulted

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before he traveled to the New World

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and which gave him his idea
of what Asia looked like

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and where Japan was located.

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The problem with this map
is that its inks and pigments

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had so degraded over time

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that this large, nearly seven-foot map,

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made the world look like a giant desert.

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Until now, we had very little idea,
detailed idea, that is,

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of what Columbus knew of the world

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and how world cultures were represented.

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The main legend of the map
was entirely illegible under normal light.

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Ultraviolet did very little for it.

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Multispectral gave us everything.

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In Asia, we learned of monsters
with ears so long

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that they could cover
the creature's entire body.

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In Africa, about a snake
who could cause the ground to smoke.

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Like starlight, which can convey images

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of the way the Universe
looked in the distant past,

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so multispectral light can take us back
to the first stuttering moments

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of an object's creation.

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Through this lens, we witness
the mistakes, the changes of mind,

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the naïvetés, the uncensored thoughts,

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the imperfections of the human imagination

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that allow these hallowed objects
and their authors

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to become more real,

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that make history closer to us.

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What about the future?

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There's so much of the past,

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and so few people
with the skills to rescue it

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before these objects disappear forever.

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That's why I have begun to teach
this new hybrid discipline

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that I call "textual science."

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Textual science is a marriage

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of the traditional skills
of a literary scholar --

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the ability to read old languages
and old handwriting,

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the knowledge of how texts are made

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in order to be able
to place and date them --

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with new techniques like imaging science,

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the chemistry of inks and pigments,

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computer-aided optical
character recognition.

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Last year, a student in my class,

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a freshman,

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with a background in Latin and Greek,

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was image-processing a palimpsest

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that we had photographed
at a famous library in Rome.

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As he worked, tiny Greek writing
began to appear from behind the text.

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Everyone gathered around,

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and he read a line from a lost work

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of the Greek comic dramatist Menander.

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This was the first time
in well over a thousand years

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that those words
had been pronounced aloud.

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In that moment, he became a scholar.

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Ladies and gentlemen,
that is the future of the past.

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Thank you very much.

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(Applause)