History

The Seal and the Net

George Dillard writes history essays I read even when they’re far from anything I know, and a while back we traded comments under one of them, so I was primed to click when his piece on document verification came through my feed. In How Do You Know That Document Is Real? he walks five thousand years of the problem: Mesopotamian cylinder seals rolled into wet clay, wax pressed onto parchment tongues, medieval documents cut in half with wavy edges, the flowering of the signature, the calligraphic tughras of the Ottoman sultans. Then he stops at a door and, being a historian rather than a technologist, declines to walk through it. He ends on a question: “Can we build the digital equivalent of the cylinder seal? A lot is riding on the answer to that question.”

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Nobody Told the Scribes

In 1492 a German abbot named Johannes Trithemius wrote a passionate defense of the monastic scribes, the monks who copied books out by hand, one letter at a time, the way it had been done for a thousand years. He was alarmed by the printing press. He argued that the copying was holy work, that a hand-inked page held a devotion no machine could stamp into paper, that something sacred would die if we let the contraption take over. It’s a genuinely moving little book with quotes like, “He who gives up copying because of the invention of printing is no genuine friend of holy Scripture.” He titled it In Praise of Scribes.

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