On January 26th, 2013,
a band of al-Qaeda militants entered the ancient city of Timbuktu
on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert.
There they set fire to a medieval library of 30,000 manuscripts
written in Arabic and several African languages,
and ranging in subject from astronomy to geography,
history to medicine,
including one book which records
perhaps the first treatment for male erectile dysfunction.
(Laughter)
Unknown in the West,
this was the collected wisdom of an entire continent,
the voice of Africa at a time when Africa was thought not to have a voice at all.
The Mayor of Bamako, who witnessed the event,
called the burning of the manuscripts a crime against world cultural heritage.
And he was right, or he would have been,
if it weren't for the fact that he was also lying.
In fact, just before,
African scholars had collected a random assortment of old books
and left them out for the terrorists to burn.
Today, the collection lies hidden in Bamako, the capital of Mali,
moldering in the high humidity.
What was rescued by ruse is now was once again in jeopardy,
this time by climate.
But Africa and the far-flung corners of the world are not the only places,
or even the main places,
in which manuscripts that could change the history of world culture
are in jeopardy.
Several years ago,
I conducted a survey of European research libraries,
and discovered that, at the barest minimum,
there are 30,000, actually 60,000 manuscripts pre-1500
that are illegible
because of water damage, fading, mold, and chemical reagents.
The real number is likely double that.
That doesn't even count renaissance manuscripts,
and modern manuscripts,
and cultural heritage objects, such as maps.
What if there were a technology
that could recover these lost and unknown works?
Imagine worldwide how a trove
of hundreds of thousands of previously unknown texts
could radically transform our knowledge of the past.
Imagine what unknown classics we would discover
which would rewrite the canons of literature, history, philosophy, music.
Or more provocatively, that could rewrite our cultural identities,
building new bridges between people and culture.
These are the questions that transformed me
from a medieval scholar, a reader of texts,
into a textual scientist.
What an unsatisfying word reader is?
For me, it conjures up images of passivity,
of someone sitting idly in an armchair,
waiting for knowledge to come to him in a neat little parcel.
How much better is to be a participant in the past,
an adventurer in an undiscovered country, searching for the hidden text?
As an academic, I was a mere reader.
I read and taught the same classics
that people had been reading and teaching for hundreds of years:
Virgil, Ovid, Chaucer, Petrarch.
With every scholarly article that I published,
I added to human knowledge an ever-diminishing slivers of insight.
What I wanted to be was an archaeologist of the past,
a discoverer of literature,
an Indiana Jones without the whip … or, actually, with the whip.
(Laughter)
And I wanted it not just for myself, but I wanted it for my students as well.
So six years ago, I changed the direction of my career.
At the time, I was working on "The Chess of Love",
the last important long poem of the European Middle Ages,
never to have been edited.
It wasn't edited because it existed in only one manuscript,
which was so badly damaged
during the firebombing of Dresden in World War II
that generations of scholars had pronounced it lost.
For five years, I had been working with an ultraviolet lamp,
trying to recover traces of that writing,
and I'd gone about as far as the technology of that time
could actually take me.
So I did what many people do;
I went online, and there I learned
about how multi-spectral imaging had been used to recover 2 lost treatises
of the famed Greek mathematician Archimedes from a 13th-century palimpsest.
A palimpsest is a manuscript which has been erased and overwritten.
So, out of the blue, I decided to write
to the lead imaging scientist on the Archimedes Palimpsest Project,
Professor Roger Easton, with a plan and a plea.
To my surprise, he actually wrote back.
With his help, I was able to win a grant from the US government
to build a transportable multispectral imaging lab
- yes, this is a dirty little secret where all your tax money is going -
and with this lab, I transformed what was a charred and faded mess
into a new medieval classic.
So, how does multispectral imaging actually work?
The idea behind multispectral imaging
is that something that anyone
who is familiar with an infrared night-vision goggles
will immediately appreciate,
that what we can see invisible light, invisible spectrum of light,
is only tiny fraction of what's actually there.
The same is true with invisible writing.
Our system uses 12 wavelengths of light between the ultraviolet and the infrared.
These are shown down onto the manuscript from above, from banks of LEDs,
and another multispectral light source
which comes up through the individual leaves of the manuscript.
Up to 35 images per sequence per leaf are imaged this way,
using a high-power digital camera
equipped with a lens which is made out of quartz.
There are about 5 of these in the world.
Once we captured these images,
we feed them through statistical algorithms
to further enhance and clarify them,
using software which is originally designed for satellite images,
and used by people like geospatial scientists and the CIA.
The results can be spectacular.
Some of you may already have heard
of what's been done for the Dead Sea Scrolls,
which are slowly gelatinizing.
Using infrared, we've been able to read
even the darkest corners of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
You may not be aware, however,
of other Biblical texts that are in jeopardy.
Here, for example, is a leaf from a manuscript that we imaged,
which is perhaps the most valuable Christian Bible in the world.
The Codex Vercellensis is the oldest translation of the Gospels into Latin,
and it dates from the first half of 4th century.
As you can see, this is the closest we can come to the Bible
at the time of the foundation of Christendom under Emperor Constantine,
and at the time of also the Council of Nicaea,
when the basic creed of Christianity was being agreed upon.
This manuscript, unfortunately, has been very badly damaged.
It's damaged because for centuries it has been used and handled
in swearing-in ceremonies in the church.
In fact, that purple splotch that you see in the upper right-hand corner
- upper left-hand corner. Right-hand corner? Yes. -
... is Aspergillus,
which is a fungus which originates originally in the unwashed hands
of a person with tuberculosis.
Our imaging has enabled me
to make the first transcription of this manuscript in 250 years.
Having a lab that can travel to collections
- so where it's needed, however -
is only part of the solution.
The technology is expensive and very rare,
and the imaging and image processing skills are esoteric.
That means that mounting recoveries is beyond the reach
of most researchers and all but the wealthiest institutions.
That's why I founded the Lazarus Project, an initiative, a non-for-profit initiative
to bring multispectral imaging
to individual researchers and smaller institutions
at little or no cost whatsoever.
Over the past five years,
our team of imaging scientists, scholars, and students
has traveled to seven different countries
and have recovered
some of the world's most valuable damaged manuscripts,
including the Vercelli Book, which is the oldest book of English,
the Black Book of Carmarthen, the oldest book of Welsh,
and some of the most valuable earliest Gospels,
located in now what's the former Soviet Georgia.
So spectral imaging can recover lost texts.
More subtly, though, it can recover a second story behind every object,
the story of how, when, and by whom a text was created,
and sometimes, what the author was thinking at the time he wrote.
Take, for example, a draft of the Declaration of Independence,
written in Thomas Jefferson's own hand,
which some colleagues of mine imaged a few years ago
at the Library of Congress.
Curators had noticed
that one word throughout had been scratched out and overwritten.
The word overwritten was "citizens".
Perhaps you can guess what the word underneath was.
"Subjects".
There, ladies and gentlemen, is American democracy
evolving under the hand of Thomas Jefferson.
Or consider the 1491 Martellus Map,
which we imaged at Yale's Beinecke Library.
This was the map that Columbus likely consulted
before he traveled to the New World,
and which gave him his idea of what Asia looked like
and where Japan was located.
The problem with this map
is that its inks and pigments had so degraded over time
that this large, nearly 7-foot map made the world look like a giant desert.
Until now, we had very little idea, detailed idea, that is,
of what Columbus knew of the world and how world cultures were represented.
The main legend of the map was entirely illegible under normal light.
Ultraviolet did very little for it.
Multispectral gave us everything.
In Asia, we learned of monsters
with ears so long that they could cover the creature's entire body.
In Africa, about the snake who could cause the ground to smoke.
Like starlight which can give today
images of the way the universe looked in the distant past,
so multispectral light can take us back
to the first stuttering moments of an object's creation.
Through this lens, we witnessed the mistakes, the changes of mind,
the naivetes, young censored thoughts,
the imperfections of the human imagination
that allowed these (…) objects and their authors
to become more real, that make history closer to us.
So what about the future?
There's so much of the past
and so few people with the skills to rescue it
before these objects disappear forever.
That's why I've begun to teach this new hybrid discipline
that I call textual science,
a mixture between kind of Indiana Jones meets CSI.
Textual science is a marriage
of the traditional skills of the literary scholar,
the ability to read old languages and old handwriting,
the knowledge how texts are made
in order to be able to place and date them
with new techniques like imaging science, the chemistry of inks and pigments,
computer-aided optical character recognition.
Last year, a student in my class,
a freshman with the background in Latin and Greek
was image-processing a palimpsest
that we had photographed at the famous library in Rome.
As he worked, tiny Greek writing began to appear from behind the text.
Everyone gathered around,
and he read a line from a lost work of the Greek comic dramatist Menander.
This was the first time in well over a thousand years
that those words had been pronounced aloud.
In that moment, he became a scholar.
Ladies and gentlemen, that is the future of the past.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)