![]() The travel routes it contains may reflect long-forgotten geopolitical, cultural, and technological circumstances that reward the patient student. It becomes an evanescent namescape as varied and interesting as the solid landscape. A printed chart does not normally contain erasures, but it is made up of a map-maker’s shorthand-ostensibly meaningless verbal and non-verbal symbols that can be pried open by dedicated antiquarians, and flood the page with human impressions, imagery, and understanding. An out-of-date map, for instance, the older the better, may be likened to an ancient palimpsest. Peterson pointed out, “it became a fascinating task for scholars not only to translate the later records but also to reconstruct the original writings by deciphering the dim fragments of characters partly erased and partly covered by subsequent texts.”īy extension, the word palimpsest can refer to any document that contains more or less obscure clues to its own history. A recycled parchment or papyrus (pap-PEYE-rus) was called a palimpsest (PAL-imp-sest), a Latin word derived from two Greek sources, palin, “again,” and psen, “to scrape.” Because the writing fluid or “ink” varied in viscosity, and the texture beneath the writing surface could be more absorbent in one place than another, the erasures could not always be complete, for fear of scraping holes through the material, and more or less faint shadows of words, parts of words, and relatively long passages of text could remain dimly legible. The result was a multilayered record of some aspect of the past. Both parchment and papyrus were sturdy enough for the ink to be scraped off and the writing-sheets used for new documents, although often showing faint evidence of the erasures. ![]() An ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, important documents were written on specially prepared sheep or goat skins called parchments, or on a flat, flexible material manufactured from an aquatic flowering sedge called Cyperus papyrus. ![]()
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