Name: 【TED】Gregory Heyworth: How I'm discovering the secrets of ancient texts (How I'm discovering the secrets of ancient texts | Gregory Heyworth)
Uploaded: 2017-06-27T05:42:23.000Z
Duration: 12 min 8 s
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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,

perhaps the first treatment for male erectile dysfunction.

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,

"a crime against world cultural heritage."

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

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,

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

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

and discovered that, at the barest minimum,

that are illegible because of water damage,

Renaissance manuscripts and modern manuscripts

and cultural heritage objects such as maps.

that could recover these lost and unknown works?

Imagine worldwide how a trove of hundreds of thousands

could radically transform our knowledge of the past.

Imagine what unknown classics we would discover

which would rewrite the canons of literature, history,

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,

For me, it conjures up images of passivity,

How much better to be a participant in the past,

an adventurer in an undiscovered country,

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

and with every scholarly article that I published

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

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

And 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

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

which was so badly damaged during the firebombing of Dresden

that generations of scholars had pronounced it lost.

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

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

how multispectral imaging had been used to recover two lost treatises

of the famed Greek mathematician Archimedes

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

I decided to write to the lead imaging scientist

And 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,

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【TED】Gregory Heyworth: How I'm discovering the secrets of ancient texts (How I'm discovering the secrets of ancient texts | Gregory Heyworth)

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