♪ [music playing--no dialogue] ♪ ♪ >> dr. wafeek wahby:before i start with welcoming you to the officialtraditional welcome, i want to ask you a question, ready,have you ever heard about the mine of radioactive gold? a mine of radioactive gold. if you haven't we aresitting in a room in a such a mine ofradioactive gold right here, right now andthat's booth library.
booth library isthe mine of gold. and not only gold, justaesthetic gold, but radioactive. when you walk through the aisleslooking through books or videos or whatever material you arelooking for, it's radiating things that can changeyour life when you read it, just changes your mind. so it has radioactivity,and it is very precious. i grew up from earlychildhood loving books. i used to see my dad was apastor, reading, preparing his
study, so i grewup loving books. i like their smell, i like tohold them and change pages and put my finger here in the word. so they mean a lot to me, sobeing in a library to me is a mine of gold, and it'snot just aesthetic gold. it is radioactive. and i leave a better person wheni come to the library, so thanks to all the lirarians in thisroom and guess what? it started a long timeago, make no mistake.
without much ado, dean lanham. [audience applause] >> dean allen lanham:well thank you, some of you are camping out hereand that is wonderful. what we all would like to do. so today, i thought i wouldshare with you some of the things that interest me aboutancient egypt and how it connects to not only my life,but your life and the life of libraries and other things.
what i won't be doingis talking about the grand library of alexandria. there are other peoplewho already talked about that, and there is moreto come in this series. but nonetheless, i will look atsome of the remnants of the ideas of the period, butactually my title comes from a conversation withwafeek wahby. and i don't know if he remembersthe conversation at all, but he was describing to me about theancient scribes and how they're
sitting at the rock tablet, thestone tablet, you know chiseling these letters away and gettingeverything just right. and you know it struck me thatwith just a turn of the chisel, they would change history as weknow it in a variety of ways. and so my caution in that ismake no mistake when you are documenting because itdoes come back to you, and scholars base their livesand write their books and treatises onevidence they find. and we don't know if perhaps thescribe was incorrect that day or
feeling bad or got his armbumped and did something wrong, and so i'm thinking documentinglife you know since these egyptians allhad the same effect. today look at the editors, theproofreaders, the scholarship that goes into producing anydocument, and i refer back to the one that is of courserelated to this symposium, and i know what it takes to puttogether something like that and try not to make a mistake. and several eyes may give you adifferent effect in the final
product, so as i was lookingthrough what we might talk about today related to libraries andinformation and related somehow to music that is mybackground as well. i wasn't in ancient egypt,although i may look like i might have been there. i wasn't there, so all of thisis in turn borrowed from others who have shared withus along the way. and there have been asyou can imagine many. it goes back to knowledge ispower, and so you look back into
ancient egypt, you have thosepeople who were extremely wealthy and others who might'vehad some kind of profession and then others who were tryingto make it to the end of the day by finding food orfire or something else that they might get through thatpart of their life with. how many of these people hadknowledge of their own life, their own surroundings, yesmaybe they have a few blocks around them, but others thencould actually write or read or transcribe and actually knowabout more, so much more.
and as we look through varioussocieties, we know that very often people hideknowledge from others. we find it here in the library. there are several librarianshere [unclear dialogue]. what happens in any library? someone gets in, especially inthe older period a couple of generations back, the professorwould give the assignment at 9 'o' clock, classwould be over at 10. the student would run over hereand hide the information for the
next three weeks becausethey then would have the power in the classroom. today with the internet,it's harder to do that, you know, but a casual bookamong a million others among the shelves, youknow where it's hidden. and so knowledge is powerand remains power. look at this fromone of the tombs, can you read it in the back? it's a little far back,"listen all of you!
"the priests of hathorwill [unclear dialogue] "any of you who enter thistomb or does harm to it. "the gods willcomfort him because "i am honored by his lord. "the gods will not allowanything to happen to me. "anyone who does anything bad tomy tomb, then the crocodile, "hippopotamus, andlion willl eat him." okay, so it's spreading theknowledge that if you do anything to me even after death,i oh holy one, you will discover
the wrath of, and this is thefirst time i knew that the hippopotamus could throwwrath towards individuals, but i suppose you can. so here as you read down thevarious figures, etcetera, there's a message thatsomeone has left behind to steer people away. of course, we've alreadyin this conference looked at indiana jones and allhis powers and bravery. i'm not sure we would all be asbrave, especially when we're
talking about snakes andfrogs, which we will see later in this presentation. but much of what we know aboutone civilization or one lifetime can tend to be hidden. and so we see here, thescientists who with this small implement is blowing sand awayfrom something very important. like you would drivethrough the fog, and you knew that there wasa cliff beside the road. you would go very carefully.
and of course the scientist isdoing the same thing, carefully, carefully, we're going tofind what is under here. and you can see the magnificentdrawings that are under here, covered by what? any and everything that someonehas thrown there or the wind has blown there or the river hasbrought up in the three month flood that alwayshappened for so long. so we owe much of what we knowabout the ancient egyptians to not only the people who did itto begin with, but to those who
have resurrected it for us. and this continues, and those ofyou who were in dr. hoffmeier's presentation on thursday orfriday realized that that type of work can be veryexciting, but very, what, it could be very tedious,it could be very hot, it could be veryuncomfortable. and yet, eureka! you come upon something that noone has come upon for thousands of years perhaps.
for example, we throw therosetta stone around all the time, but has anyone actuallyseen it in the british museum? a few of us, you canwalk right by it and think it's adoorstop, almost. and where they have it, or wheni was in the british museum, it looked like it washolding the door open. and then i'm like, oh mygosh, look what this is, and maybe they thought thatthey were putting it in a place of prominence, and itdidn't seem to me yet from this
and you can see the headinghere from the caption. and from this, we are ableto decipher so much about ancient egypt and bringinformation forward for next many generations to come andso had we not found this, and whoever found it, and i'msorry i'm not an egyptologist and this is not actuallymy specialty here. but i can say whoever did findit, it was important that they knew what it was or couldrecognize that there are three different languages going onhere and they are actually
the translations or thekey to the castle, to the understandingof past knowledge. i love this photo from 1954,this is not very old. i too was here, and several ofyou were about to be born. and here in one of theexcavations sites, they are trying to look back and look towhat trouble they are having to do to look backinto ancient society. you must build, you mustuncover, you must carefully brush off, i'm not totally sureexactly what they're doing here.
it's certainly an official lookat probably something new or recent dig here, but my pointis it takes a lot more effort to uncover it, thanperhaps it would've taken to keep it uncovered andbringing it into our society. well just in the lastsession, dr. wahby said, "well, we'll have this as longas the internet survives." we're like well how long willthat be, and we don't know. no one knows, we hopethat it keeps going, but what we depend upon otherspecialists to do is to bring
that information forward throughanother form of translation or another key oranother rosetta stone. unfortunately, there's a companynow that's rosetta stone that sells language tapes, you know,language materials for you to learn how totravel the world. but i'm fascinatedby things that are uncovered, just as you are. all of the sudden thisbecomes personal doesn't it? they look like this, somebodydidn't make this up because if
they did, they wouldn't look asclose to what we still look like, i don't think. they might have had differentappendages or a different look. but this is very normal lookingto us, and yet when you look at some of the other drawings,it's not quite as normal, it doesn't alwayslook as normal. here, this is one of the imageson your program, so the caption there for you to look at,but i'm fascinated here, the symmetry, the grandnessof this, what it would take to
build a structure so large. and this symposium has helpedyou learn how these were built, and so we don't haveto go over that again. but i'm struck bywhat is written on each of these and why. and we've learned that much ofwhat is described there turns out to be descriptive of whatthe pharoah was thinking or wanted to be remembered for, orperhaps thinking his parents or his wife or sayingthat remember we'll be,
we'll go down in history forstaving off the warriors from whatever tribe orsomething like that. maybe it's historicalthings like that, of course we don't really know. this might say[unclear dialogue] too or if there was a schooltrip anywhere nearby, you know what it'sgoing to say on there. so hopefully the teacherkeeps the class moving so they don't upset historyonce again as we go through.
we think of very large monumentswhen we think of ancient egypt, you know, as we have thesphinx here and of course only one of the hundreds ofpyramids that are there. and yet quite frankly, dr.stimac told us just an hour ago about how this was a not broughthere, this was already here and they merely added somethingthat would make it look normal and natural and bethere and decorate or to be symbolic of whatever. and so this whole thing ofgeologic formation already
occurring there and someonesaying oh you know i think that could be [unclear dialogue]. setting up to do itis really, it shows creativity andartistic ingenuity. of course i'm afraid most of ourhistory is going down like this [unclear dialogue] perhapsyou can tell, maybe not. what is going on here? i'm not sure. i think maybe the latercivilizations took away parts
of the body theydidn't want there. maybe like they did later inthe roman and greek sculptures where certain bodyparts were eliminated. we don't know thatthat didn't happen. but also there's a variety ofthings going on there. the person depicted thereseems to be painting her lips and is that a mirrorthat she is holding. we don't know. i don't know, maybe others do.
here my favorite scribes, theseare the people that when i think of if i were an ancient egyptianwhat would i want to be, and i think i wouldlike to be the scribe. just sitting there writing allthis stuff down, knowing how to read, knowing how to write,knowing how to take instructions from others and really havingthe final say so right. because probably very often theones that you were doing it for didn't know what you didafter you wrote it down. and so here we have them andthey're careful, very careful.
it's prepared just likeyou know two number two pencils of behind the ear. ready for any situation andto continue their work. scribes were so important thatwe had an inspector of scribes. someone who would say that youtruly know what you're doing or were going to inspectyou to make sure that you're worthyof the title. and i love this in thetradition, here's [unclear dialogue] down here.
you might overlook that ifyou're just walking by, you're just struck by the man'sface or the tablet and all of a sudden the wholefamily is all around its feet. this happens in several of theareas or artworks found. here's one other this is thescribe that is found in memphis right outside of cairo, anotherancient capital there, which i find interesting. you look at the illinois area,and you find cairo down at the bottom of illinois and justdown the river a little bit,
memphis of course, and sowe are bringing other parts of the world very locallyto what we're doing here. this guy almost looks like abuddha, i think he is eating too well to be a scribe. so what do we need to do, weneed to over time the few people who knew how to do thesethings, it was generalized, we would all become fluent inwriting, learning, reading, expressing ourselves, doingall these types of things. and yet when we do, we have tofind a way in which to capture
those thoughts, capturethe history of all this. i had to stick that intoo down here. i don't think that happenedbecause the inspector of scribes would have had youdecapitated probably. okay and so it's written thatwe need to document life as we go on, and i'm notgoing into the areas but you can thinkwhy we need this. the whole thing, we need todocument who owns the property, the marriage, and allthese types of things,
they're obsessed withdriver's licenses, and death certificates. we're all trying to find outwhat happens, you know, and it's necessary to know those thingsfor a variety of reasons, but if we didn't capture those andthere are societies that don't really capture those, theysay they do, but you know even in my mom's case,um, when she went to get her birth certificate she foundout she had a different name. because it was recorded maybea year or two after the birth of
the child in the particularplace that she was living. and so that leaves a bit ofspace for us to forget what the child's name was, andshe is not the only instance, i know others, who had to findout what their real name was. it could be by the time thecounty agent came around to record the birth that they hadchanged their mind what the name might be, whichhappens a lot too. but as we look back toancient greek society, these things to us look likedecoration, but it's always
telling a story of somethingand very authentic. it's a different story as welearned from dr. hoffmeier. it could be a different storybecause when one pharaoh, one king died, we just startedinto a different direction. he died on a sunday, well onmonday, we're marching this way, and whatever the storyentails and products that had been deemed necessarythe whole story might change. hair ornamentation really hasn'tchanged very much has it? links us right back to there,but i don't see any of you
ladies with some kindof gazelle in your hair, but it could happen. ancient egyptian culture andinterest is continually renewed, in our society, and idon't know if all others, but in our society, king tutjust opened up a whole new world of old egypt to us. wasn't it true? and it seemed to come in wavesbecause first of all there was the discovery, and then therewas the books that came with it
and the films, and we were alljust king tutting everything. then came all the travelingexhibits to all the major museums in the united states,and then it made its return three or four years ago tochicago, so we all have been rather intrigued by theancient egyptians, of course, by what they had to offerand who knows what is still below the earthfor us to record. they didn't he was there untilthey found him, right? let's skip this little librarianthing, although i did bring a
book that for those of you thegraphic novels of illibrarian have in here stories[unclear dialogue] using depictions of ancient greek, orancient egyptian characters. you know it doesn'tstop, does it? look at what we have herein terms of the various [unclear dialogue], can someone tell mewhat they think is here? what is she concerned with orthinking about or famous for? do any of those look familiar,and you see lots of birds,
ducks, doves, river, you see ariver here that leads to water. you don't know exactly, but hereis one with the male, and what do we find that he's concernedwith or famous for, or thinking about, or wantsto be remembered for. more weapons, or things thatlook like weapons, the animals have, there are still birds anddoves and all these things but what else is there. what was one of the plagues thatwas discussed this morning? the frogs, locusts,here's another one.
here we have a detail of theprevious [unclear dialogue] and here and notice on the birdon the right sharp talons and the teeth or some fightingaparatus from the mouth, i'm not sure exactlywhat it is. ferocious cats, frogs thatchanged society at one time or another, that we learned thismorning in the religion area. on the other hand, here'ssomething that probably is very symbolic, but i saw it assomething rather frivolous of showing a dancer maybe and itcould be a very sacred dance.
i don't think so, it lookslike a girl having fun. but someone took the time topose or someone took the time to put it down. i just put nefertiti's face inhere because we haven't talked about her for the past fourdays, and if you turn the clock back before king tutthat's about the only one that anybody knew. so that's what i put there. this is showing up on oneof the [unclear dialogue]
to queen nefertiti, and itgoes back to the cattle and the importance of the cattleand the horns, once again, these are the seven cattle withall kinds of other things depicted here of course. and you know we can spendthe next six months reading and deciphering these,but notice the colors. here lack of color and yetnonetheless very impressive. now if you would were the scribedoing this, do you think you would err on the side ofmaking this person look
more virile, more stronger,wiser, more important? i think you would. notice the fine detail withthe drawings at the top. and yet how soft is this fromthe alabaster mines that were described in dr. stimac's talkearlier today, very gentle. also the presence of womenthroughout society, as which we will have some discussions lateron in this series about women and their role in the society. but if we look down throughhere, and i just threw
a few of these, there couldbe five hundred of them but just to get you started. we've come a long way here fromcarving into stone or to putting wet clay around objects andthen drawing into the clay and then firing the clayagain to all the way down to these microphones andelectronic files that we hope willstay alive over time. and yet we're already in thesecond or third generation of electronic filesand many of them
are unreadable at this time. so we must take care as weproceed that we can continue to keep up with historyand our place in society. we've gone from copyingeverything by hand, one thing i will throw outabout the library of alexandria, remember any ship that stoppedin the alexandria harbor was raided for books. they would go on to board, theywould send soldiers on to every ship that came from any othersociety in the world that
might be training there. and they would rob andborrow the originals, take them to the library,copy them, and then do what? give the copy backto the ship, okay? and that's how you geta very rich library. >> audience member: [unclear dialogue] >> dr. lanham: no, you heard right. they would give the copyback to whoever brought it. that reminds me of a similarinstance, except even harsher
in our own lifetime. >> dr. lanham: well yes that goes, that continues, but i amthinking of a library in particular, the nationallibrary of cuba where yes you can leave our country, but youmust leave everything here and we will put everything into ourlibrary thank you very much, watch out for the waves. and that's how theybuilt their library. the national library of cuba, ithink, i forget how many volumes
it holds, they built it within 3or 4 years of the revolution, and it was supposed to last 40years, 20, 30, 40, 50 years, but because so many peopleleft the island because they wanted to get away from therevolution regime to come. the library filled up tocapacity and overflowing within 3 or 4 years fromriches from somebody else. so we're not all without guiltand over the years as we try to pull in information together andyou can bring that home right today where people are stealingthings off of the internet
right as we sit here. people wherever they can findinformation, and we go back to information is power and thatis what we will go back on. so as you can see there, we usedto copy by hand and then we finally got to movable type, andthis is thousands of years later and now hundreds ofyears later we're doing electronic files readingthem and etcetera. the whole thing of compilinginformation into something that was handy, of course,has gotten much easier.
but if we look here thisis from around 692, and the pope gregory'swere quite interested in a lot of things, and thiswas codex that a copy went to pope gregory ii, butlook at the true bookcase where it was going to beactually shut and locked as soon as this person was finishedwith what he was doing there. it could be a scribe herei'm not exactly sure, but the idea of keeping thatinformation from others, but also keeping it safe isvery important through today.
as you walk out of the library,you'll be zapped by an electronic object seeing ifyou're taking anything from this library, so some things neverchange as we go along. but these, the next 3 or4 slides just bring up from different illuminatedmanuscripts and paintings and whatever, the importancethat we give to the scribes and then the scholars and thepeople who may be able to read. today we think everybody shouldbe able to read and write. but that's very late to theparty, we went centuries where
it really didn't matter if youcould barter your way through the market, be fed, andget home, and do all that and do it again tomorrow,that was enough maybe. but as we go through here, youcan see once again now we've tied volumes together,they're probably so heavy you couldn't drag themhome if you wanted to and there's someone thereto make sure they stay. this is a few centuriesafter ancient egypt. here we have people writingand reading and talking about
information that they arefinding in written materials. i love we have someone here witha scroll, a couple of scrolls, he's writing on the scroll. this one seems to be, someone'sholding the great books up here, up there, someone may bestudying for the next lecture. i think i may recall readingabout this particular theme, and it's early university life,and here we have a chair. so the symbolic as the chair. today it's a little thing on 4wheels that looks like everybody
elses, but in those days thatperson was elevated and could yell across the room and spreadthe information that they were interested in spreadingto overtake perhaps much of the conversationthat is going on in the room. finally a library here,it looks dutch to me, i don't know and forgive me fornot giving you exact specifics, you would forgetthem if i told you. i would unless it was writtendown, but if you want to know specifically where eachone of these came from
i can provide that for you. what i'm interested in here isthe classification scheme here, mathematics, philosophy,literature, theology, medicine, history. there's moretheology than history. there's very little, somedisciplines are very small in this particular library andstayed that way for a long time. but notice what happens here, ifi'm not mistaken these are chains so if you wanted tolook at one of those books,
you would request fromthe library to look at it. they would chain it to the deskhere and you could stand up and read it for aslong as you wish. now if that is not what ishappening there then we could find other photos andillustrations that that is what was happening there. you remember the name of therose the movie from the 1970s or 1980s where thelibrary was finally torched, but all the books werechained to the desk so
they couldn't get themout to save them. so anyway, i'm fascinated withthe idea that we're trying to classify the information and yetlet a few people know about it. also, as you look at some moreareas of the rennaissance and later periods, we alwayshave these portraits of important groups ofpeople or individuals, there's always a book. you know that's the knowledgeor this is the ledger of things that people owe me
or this is how i've recordedwhat is important to me. and so, you know, here we'vejust tossed them, but we have several books here that we'vejust thrown them on the table. and a few of these were alsovery wise here with a map of a couple big blobsbecause they probably had no idea what wason other places. but nonetheless, if youwere a fine, rich, and upstanding person youwere supposed to surround yourself with information.
this is a recent drawing of anold library but with ghosts of the past or authors orideas floating into the air. it gets a little nebulus, i lovethis when there is the director i think of one of the earlieregyptian museums. what's important to this man? obviously thethoughts of others, unless he's theauthor of those. i don't think it'sthe sears catalogue that is surrounding him there.
i imagine that it's work thatother scholars have prepared on the collections of the museum,the holdings in the library and very important things. but he is pretty much glazedover with so much information, it reminds me of today withinformation overload. he needs a goodcataloguer on his staff. once again another dandy witha book in his hand, and today, and i've jumped centurieshere, and forgive me here, i'm just trying to dragyou through history here.
so we have typewriting on theroof, i think, in los angeles. and we have, of course up there,all kinds of miraculous things that we are studying andreproducing and digesting information with thecomputer and probably that [unclear dialogue] probablydisplays electronically. as we go through lifetime, therehave been persons who write more in their lifetime thanwe can read in hours. and i think, i'm a musician,and i think back to the works of mozart and bach.
you know mozart diedwhen he was 36. it would take two of us to draghis works in here on carts. and hundreds of hours to performand to read those manuscripts. and the same thing with bach,you know, and make no mistake, the little joke, the veryold joke about bach was of course that bach had 23children and practiced on a spinster in the attic. there's a little mistakethere that has changed history if you believe that.
instead of the spinnet piano,he's found something else going on up there, but we lookat the life of anne frank. i just grabbed a littlehandful of these things, and yet because of her writingsbecause of her desire to capture, to imagine, to what,to write, think, read, express, we have people whocan't get enough of her recounts of the times. and we have used her works, someof which are here, to describe and to illustrate thelives of thousands
of people in the same period. and we've gone forward in the"treasures from the attic" are the items that were in heraunt's home after the diaries became famous. later on, we found 600photographs and old letters and things from the frank familythat once again opened up the world even more. had she, had anne not written,and had those things not been found and dusted off, we mighthave lost all of that and not
paid attention to the 600 thingsthat were in the attic of the aunt because that would havebeen dumped in a fire or sold at an auction. think about it. because they would be totallyunimportant, and yet it has described for us a great epic inthe history of the world just by a child basically writing somethings every day. and we don't havetime to look at some of those, i'll leavethose marked.
there are some illustrations andcaptions you can look for. but you know the same thingthrough shakespeare, you know, i asked karen, she said she wouldnot bring all the shakespeare works up here in the room. i was trying to get her to doit, but the, it's impossible to tote the works of thesepeople around because they are so voluminous. and yet, it was natural to them,and what, these composers, we are still findingmanuscripts written by mozart.
why? because the day he wroteit, somebody came to visit and he was like, "hereyou can have it". so they took it. they didn't really know whatthey had perhaps or they cherished it enoughto hide it away, and then 200 hundred yearslater someone has found it. once again in the attic or thegarage, you know the worst place you could put print materialswas in the attic of a home
or in the garage. and for the most part,that is where we find all of these things. sometimes they end up in museumsby mistake and 50 years later, someone from the museumarchives will turn the page and there's anotherpiece that the world has never been aware of. once again someone tookthe time to write it down, someone took thetime to save it
and then someone lost itand then someone found it. it keeps going no matter howmany centuries have gone by. so it's back to i didn't mentionthe diaries and letters. so here's the scoopon everything if you want to find out. so that's a littlesnapshot of today. if we go back, there were someother things that weren't related to the kings andpharoahs and queens of the nile. some people were looking forthe next fish and someone,
we don't know who, put it down,it looks quite interesting. i would not want to eatthis thing from the nile, maybe it ws safer then, but lookhow many other creatures are in the paper here. and it could be that they hadan extra hour before they got off work the next dayand drew some more fish or whatever, buti don't think so. i think times were abundantduring certain periods of the year, and these artistshave helped us to do it.
here we have ramses. oh its the sun, thesun is on one side. look at this, how ornate do you need abox to put your sandals? today we come from the beachand kick those off at the door and hope that the sandstays in the garage. but these, of course, wereroyal shoes and royal shoes command attention ofall kinds of things. so before you putthem on, you realize
how great anindividual you are. this is a battlewe were famous for. it could have been what is knownhere as the county fair, right? i don't know, could be. other things, here's anornamental tub with a pleasure boat on the top. many civilizations havethese pleasure boats. that it took so much humanpower to drag that boat out to the water, so that 2or 3 royal people could sit
for a couple of hours and havecucumber sandwiches, i guess, if they had those. my point here is someone hastaken the time to document and here in tapestryform the same thing. tell a story. in libraries, we have preserve,preserve, preserve, museums, the historical society, thehoarders, and packrats. we've got a very bad reputationrecently in the television for going overboard, but nonethelesswithout hoarders and packrats,
we would have lost thingsof importance over time. and yet on the other hand, thereare other people in the world who go destroy, destroy,destroy, don't let them know about this, destroy this letterafter you read it my darling. you've read about those. book burnings, you don'thave to go too far to find people burning books. there are family friendly groupsburning books today somewhere in america, wavingthe flag above it.
in certain civil unrest, we havetorn down the statues that described our societies over andover for hundreds of years. and then boom on a saturday,there's a revolution, and what comes down first? it's always, always thatdocument shredding. it is rampant at eastern andat every other institution. there's not an officewithout a shredder. because what i said yesterday,i don't want people to know or may not still be true.
or maybe we don't need this,or i can't tell them that, so it's going back toknowledge is power. if i leave this on my desk,someone will find out. and you know think about allthe wonderful information that is now captured onpeople's cell phones and other electronichandheld devices. and when they die or lost orget dumped into the water, which they seem to do. every time there is anew model available,
there is a wealth ofinformation being destroyed about our society. it behooves us today to tryto capture for the rest. in terms of documenting things, i just put a fewthings down here. we've looked at hieroglyphicsfrom ancient egypt. you saw some latin writingsin some of the areas, but every profession turnsout to have his own language and found ways in which todescribe that in detail.
so a funny book came acrossmy desk the other day. it was "guide to a hodown"or something like that, and it was dancing instructions forsquare dancers in the 1950s. not a very widely held document,but in the town of charleston, there are actually 2 of these. i thought it was unusual, andmaybe someone came around and had a dancehere in the 1950s and sold booksafter it was over. you know that's like getting theword out, we tried to do that.
and so everyone, the dancers,they all want to know how did the famous do it? and so they havedocumented that in a way. the artists certainly havehow many formats and how many media do we havefor artists to be expressive. think of the chemists. my chemistry teacher used tosay, i can see in the chart on the back of the wallthat such and whatever has blah, blah, blah, andthere was no chart
on the back of the wall. every student kept turningaround looking for the famous chartwas in his head. the cartographers,we've represented those beautifullyin this series. educators in theircurriculum guides and other kinds of things. musicians, think of the notes, some people can readit, some people can't.
to some it's indecipherable,it's always in the wrong language, and forbid youbuy a german opera in a french translation, you know,these kinds of things happen. but the amazing thing is thesepeople have found ways to document their life and what isinteresting and what is important to them, and ourculture is richer because of it. i just had to stick this inbecause i love this picture. it's in your program also, soyou have one for your house too. but we always thinkabout the dry arid areas,
and yet they probablyspruced the river up, is it ever this blue? >> male speaker: sometimes. >> dean lanham:sometimes, okay, i'm glad it is, maybe the skyhas given it this lovely color, but what i am thinkingof, just stare at the top and then imagine thatsomeone has divined that we need this on the otherside to document our life, to show that we are artistic,to show that we are capable
of understanding physics andengineering and other sciences that we know the differencein this cap of the column and that one. it's the makeup of civilization, and the desire to beremembered later. some of it's to impress yourneighbors today, let's face it, but in the long run,it comes out to be symbolic of a learned people. so i say make nomistake, be careful,
the world is full ofbloopers--you don't have to look far on our americantelevision to find those. but it's impossible to recordeverything, but something needs to live on, so that ourarchaeologists don't have to take the little bulb and godusting the sand away from the documents that were importantfor our civilization and our time on this earth. so i'm saying make your mark,join the historical society, be a patron of themuseum and library.
make sure that these itemsthat we want remembered the hodown that tookplace in 1957 in greenup has been well documented,and it resides at eastern illinoisuniversity's library. those are very important. before i go to that, i'llstop for questions. or comments, or youcan draw me a little picture of [unclear dialogue]or whatever. >> dr. wahby: i have a quick question.
do we know if papyrusstarted first or writing on stonestarted first? >> dean lanham: i'm, from my readings, and i could be wrong, thisis not necessarily my area. i will refer you to a wonderfulbook written on the subject by daniel boorstin, the librarianof congress, which he goes in careful detail where allof the items came from what their pastwas or whatever. i would guess that the stonewas before the papyrus,
and then the papyrus was beforethe parchment, etcetera, but i will leave thatfor you to explore. >>dr. wahby: do we have any information about thesumerian language and the hieroglyphic which fed intothe other how and so forth? >> dean lanham: i don't know. i'll have to researchthat to find out. >> dr. wahby: but it seems that there is urge in the humannature to document,
and i think if i havea thermometer of measuring this urge, it wasas strong in us as in them. >> dean lanham: i think so too. it was strong for differentstrata in this civilization. people were alwaysscribbling something, children playing hopscotch. one will draw the littlechart, and somebody else will decorate it with curlycues, paint it pink, and do all thesekinds of things.
there is a desire within somepeople perhaps more to ornament more than others, but theidea of getting it on paper, on some surface is very strong. cut in stone is too much work, ican tell you that, right? >> dr. wahby: any other questions? yes? >> female speaker:yes, how big is the rosetta stone? >> dean lanham: the rosetta stone is about
this big, as far asi can remember, it is not a large piece. and like i said when you'regoing from one hallway to another and you cross a glassdoor, you could trip over it. it's right there, almost behindthe door, so don't miss it. maybe they moved it to a moreprominent space at this time or maybe they thought that wasthe most prominent because you would trip overit, but that's there. some other materials that i didbring along of like documents,
actually there are documents,this one happens to come from the national archives,and it's talking about the records of thepost-civil war. federal agencies documenting thelives of slaves, and when you're doing that research handyguide in this little book, and i'll leave it sitting out,it shows you the papyrus rolls and the way they keptthem on the shelf. and i note that very often, thescribe failed to put the authors name, but they would putthe scribe's name on
the finished document. so when you're looking backsometimes you're not going to get all the informationyou might think just like when you're readinga freshman's term paper. i laid this volume out on themormon desire to document genealogy and family history,and their efforts in since this century to well since the1800s to get involved in documenting all sorts ofinformation on individuals and their family status.
of course it started to beall related to their church, but they moved way past that. i think i'll stop there and endwith a cute little thing. when people saw that i was goingto do this talk, they said, "well, i only haveone question and surely you'll talk about this". and it was, doesanybody know what it is? what's your biggest questionabout the whole thing? it's like, did the egyptiansreally walk like that?
it goes back to thesong from the 1980s, "walk like anegyptian", you know. randy, can i useyou as an example? how do you think or how haveyou seen egyptians walk? just take a stance, youdon't have to walk, just what stance wouldyou take with the body? [laughter] show us yours,there's one! what's another one?
okay, larry, come here,there's another one, what about this one? you've seen that, right? i found a picture, i finallyfound a picture, would you strike that pose please. this was in the[unclear dialogue] was drawn the egyptianholding their arms like that, walking like thecrazy american egyptian, but the only thing i founddocumented was that they
were holding platters of foodand perfumes and other things, delivering them tosomeone, so i thank you. so i looked on theinternet and came up with a little blurb that justtakes a couple of minutes, if you have time, okay. are we not going to beable to hear this? if so we are going to cutthat off immediately. well i'm sorry the volume isnot going to work for us, but i finally did findwhat they thought,
how they thoughtegyptians walked. so i thought i'll bring this incase someone asks a question, and we'll have themwalk through, if it's not going tocome through for us. you can find it for yourself bydoing a google search, walk like an egyptian, choose the bangles,the girl group bangles that are on there, it's about3 minutes and you will laugh. [no dialogue]
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