Researchers are cataloging and translating the 10,000 Arabic inscriptions coating the walls and ceilings of Spain’s Alhambra palace.

Many inscriptions consist of aphorisms, terse sayings embodying a general truth, such as “Be sparse in words and you will go in peace” and “Rejoice in good fortune, because Allah helps you.”

What the researchers have found so far is that, contrary to popular belief, verses from the Koran and poetry represent only a tiny minority of the messages in classical Arabic that cover the Alhambra, Europe’s finest example of Muslim architecture.

“They do not make up not even 10 percent of what has been studied so far,” explained Mr Castilla. Instead the elegant Arabic script contains a large amount of sloganeering, predominantly praise for the Nasrid dynasty who ruled Granada for two and half centuries.

The Nasrid motto - “There is no victor but Allah” - is the most common inscription found so far.

The next most common messages are isolated words like “happiness” and “blessing” that are thought to be expressions of divine wishes for the Muslim rulers of Granada.

Until now there have only been partial studies of what the inscriptions meant, including one ordered by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella who sought to purge Spain of Muslims after the reconquest of Granada in 1492.

“It seems incredible that there is no exhaustive catalogue (of the inscriptions) in the 21st century,” said Mr Castilla.

Many of the inscriptions are wrapped around arches and pillars, making them hard to read with the naked eye from ground level.

Further complicating the task is the fact that artisans who did the engraving used an elaborately cursive script, which can be difficult to read. Calligraphy was a major art form in a culture that banned human images.

The researchers hope to have 65 percent of the inscriptions catalogued and translated into Spanish by the end of the year and the entire project finished in 2011.

The inscriptions will be later translated into English and French.

A DVD and book have been published containing the findings in the Alhambra’s 14th-century Comares Palace.

{via the Daily Grail}

{images by cconaty}

The days when the dandelion could be called the pissabed, a heron could be called a shitecrow and the windhover could be called the windfucker have passed away with the exuberant phallic advertisement of the codpiece.

–historian Geoffrey Hughes in Swearing

Quoted by Steven Pinker here.

“Missed Connections” personal ads were around before Craigslist made them so popular, but they go back even further than you might think. From the General Advertiser of London, March 30, 1748:

Whereas, on Saturday last, a lady, genteely dressed, was seen to lead a string of beautiful stone horses through Edmonton, Tottenham, and Newington - this is to acquaint her, that if she is disengaged and inclinable to marry, a gentleman who was on that occasion is desirous of making honorable proposals to her; in which state if he be not so happy as to please, he will readily purchase the whole string for her satisfaction.

Reprinted in Lapham’s Quarterly, winter 2009 (the “Eros” issue).

So, what works were on the Catholic Church’s infamous Index Librorum Prohibitorum? Wikipedia has the answers.

The final version (1948) contained around 4,000 works, most of which are extremely obscure. Among the the well-known writers with at least some forbidden works: Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau, Casanova, Sade, Flaubert, Hugo, Zola,Rabelais, Sartre, Beauvoir, Copernicus, Defoe, Milton, Graham Greene, and Swift. (Obviously, the odds were stacked against the French.)

More surprising are those whoese works who never appeared on the lists: Marx, Darwin, Hitler, Aristophanes, James Joyce, DH Lawrence.

A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern-day Iraq by Fernando Baez (Atlas & Co., 2008)

From the publisher:

See also: Books on Fire: The Destruction of Libraries throughout History by Lucien X. Polastron| Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections Since Antiquity, edited by James Raven [review]

After WWII, the US Army took (i.e. looted) 9,250 Nazi-era artworks by Germans, bringing them to America. Most have been returned, but 450 objects remain in the Army’s possession. All of this art, in the US and Germany, is kept away from the public and very little of it has been seen.

Professor Gregory Maertz of St. John’s University has spent years tracking it down, and he has photographed every one of the 9,250 works and has amassed 50,000 related documents. He’s working on not one, not two, but five books about these controversial, unviewable works that form a lost chapter in art history:

His research on the real canon of Nazi art is appearing as a trilogy—The Invisible Museum: Unearthing the Lost Modernist Art of the Third Reich (forthcoming, Yale UP), House of Art: A Cultural History of Nazi Germany, and The Last Taboo: The Rehabilitation of Nazi Artists in Postwar Germany—and in two free-standing volumes, Modernism and Nazi Painting and Nazi Art: Images, Texts, and Documents.

You can listen to his lecture, “Nazi Art in Museums? Canonization and Controversy,” and read his article “The Invisible Museum: Unearthing the Lost Modernist Art of the Third Reich“:

The importance of these materials lies in their ability to shatter two of the most enduring myths associated with Nazi Germany and its post-war occupation. The first myth to crumble on contact with the evidence is that official American policy with respect to German cultural properties did not include art looting. The second and most stubborn Nazi-era myth dispelled by my discovery of the “German War Art Collection” is that of the complete ideological incompatibility of the National Socialist aesthetic with Modernist painting.

According to the master narrative of 20th-century German art history, the opening of the Entartete Kunstausstellung [Degenerate Art Exhibition] in July 1937 in Munich’s Haus der Deutschen Kunst [House of German Art] rang the death knell of the avant garde in Nazi Germany and the practice of “real art,” that is, Modernism, resumed only after the fall of the NS regime. The pages that follow will provide evidence for the startling fact that certain types of Modernist art not only survived in Germany after 1937, but that “Nazi Modernism” was produced under the official patronage of Adolf Hitler and the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht [the German Armed Forces High Command]. That the production of Modernist art could have been sponsored by the very institution responsible for the bloody conquest and brutal occupation of Europe is not inconsistent with the crucial role played by violent imagery and militaristic rhetoric in other strands of Modernism, such as Italian Futurism and British Vorticism. But until now evidence has been lacking or insufficient to support such an apparently counterintuitive concept as “Nazi Modernist” art.

{The image is Dunkirk by Otto Engelhardt-Kyffhauser, from Nazi War Art: 1940-1944. It is not necessarily one of the looted works covered by Maertz.}

{Thanks to Susan Maret, Ph.D.}

From the Washington Post:

Yes, she liked to read the Bible, but she devoured gothic romance novels, too.

The fact that so little is known about Martha and that she has been cast throughout American history as First Frump is, in part, her fault. In the days after George Washington died, she, as was the custom of well-known people of her time, burned all their correspondence. So we know George wrote two youthful love letters bursting with yearning and passion to Sally Fairfax, even though she was the wife of his good friend. We have a really bad poem he wrote as a teen to a young Virginia beauty (”Rays, you have, more transparent than the sun . . . “). We have no idea what he wrote to Martha.

Ron Rosenbaum (The Secret Parts of Fortune, Explaining Hitler, The Shakespeare Wars) is working on a book about “the new face of nuclear warfare,” which is cause for excitement.  In his Slate column, he writes about the deeply hidden nuclear “Letter of Last Resort”:

At this very moment, miles beneath the surface of the ocean, there is a British nuclear submarine carrying powerful ICBMs (nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles). In the control room of the sub, the Daily Mail reports, “there is a safe attached to a control room floor. Inside that, there is an inner safe. And inside that sits a letter. It is addressed to the submarine commander and it is from the Prime Minister. In that letter, Gordon Brown conveys the most awesome decision of his political career … and none of us is ever likely to know what he decided.”

The decision? Whether or not to fire the sub’s missiles, capable of causing genocidal devastation in retaliation for an attack that would—should the safe and the letter need to be opened—have already visited nuclear destruction on Great Britain. The letter containing the prime minister’s posthumous decision (assuming he would have been vaporized by the initial attack on the homeland) is known as the Last Resort Letter.

The old-fashioned, pen-and-ink-on-paper quality of it all (quill pen, perhaps?) somehow makes the system seem like it emanated from a 19^th-century madhouse out of Wilkie Collins. Which makes it even more profoundly shocking that the system is still in place.

Rosenbaum also gives us a glimpse of his research for the book:

In 1997, the U.S. Navy discovered that there was a “backdoor” electronic entrance to the nuclear missile submarine launch control system, according to Bruce Blair, head of the World Security Institute, a Washington think tank. Blair told me the “backdoor” entrance would have allowed a diabolically ingenious hacker to insert a launch order into the system.

When he worked in Colorado College’s library, Zac Frank found Elizabeth Cheney’s 1988 senior thesis in the trash bin. For her bachelor’s in poli-sci, Dick Cheney’s elder daughter had written “The Evolution of Presidential War Powers.” Frank gives us the scoop:

The 125-page treatise argued that, constitutionally and historically, presidents have virtually unchecked powers in war. Thirteen years before her father became vice president, she had symbolically authored the first legal memorandum of the Bush administration, laying out the same arguments that would eventually justify Guantanamo and extraordinary rendition, wiretapping of American citizens, and, broadly, the unitary theory of the executive that shaped the Bush presidency.

…

Time and again, Cheney contends that in times of war, presidents since Washington have justifiably redefined their authority to preserve the country, and she is scornful of any who challenge that authority. As Congress challenged presidential authority toward the end of Vietnam, she casts them as scapegoating the executive. “As public support dwindled so did congressional willingness to accept responsibility,” she writes, “Congress set about to blame the only two men who couldn’t escape responsibility.” For someone who has vested so much faith in executive wisdom, she is surprisingly unwilling to hold it accountable.

The City Room blog at the NY Times discusses what looks like a winking emoticon in an 1862 NYT transcript of a speech by Lincoln:

The post goes on at some length. Experts are called in to dissect the space/semicolon/parenthesis - is it a typo, an actual emoticon, or archaic punctuation with a space added to make the line right-justified? There are some interesting reader comments, with the best being:

Ah, if only the Times would go to this length and depth of inquiry when investigating WMD claims.

The Papers of Benjamin Franklin website contains digitized, searchable versions of all of Franklin’s 30,000 extant papers - books, pamphlets, scientific papers, Poor Richard’s Almanacks, correspondence, etc.  This collection will occupy 47 printed volumes when Yale’s book series is completed. (Via Boing Boing, where the website was briefly mentioned in this post by guest-blogger Steven Johnson, author of The Invention of Air.)

The New Yorker has a long look at a new book about the Ludlow massacre, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War.

In the spring of 1914, members of the Colorado National Guard machine-gunned and set fire to tents in Ludlow, Colorado, where striking miners were living with their families. Five miners, two miners’ wives, and twelve children died, most of them by suffocation while hiding in a cellar under a burning tent. The miners fought back, and, all told, more than seventy-five people were killed in the course of the dispute, roughly as many on the mine owners’ side as on the strikers’. In his new book, “Killing for Coal” (Harvard; $29.95), Thomas G. Andrews calls it the deadliest labor struggle in American history.

Thomas Fleming, author of The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I and 40+ other books, has a review of The Question of MacArthur’s Reputation.

In an astonishing analysis of these three violent, chaotic October days, Robert H. Ferrell, professor of history emeritus at Indiana University, concludes that Brigadier General MacArthur’s heroism is fiction. In the savage fighting that eventually carried the Cote de Chatillon,  MacArthur never left his command post, three miles behind the front lines. Two other officers,  largely unrecognized to this day, achieved the victory by ignoring General MacArthur’s murderous demand for a frontal assault and finding a way to attack the hill on a relatively unfortfied flank. General MacArthur did not deserve to be nominated for anything, much less the Congressional Medal of Honor. It is probably significant that the nomination was rejected. MacArthur filed a protest, and the decoration was reduced to the Distinguished Service Cross, the next highest level of honors for bravery.

The story gets worse.