Provenance

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.”