Aside From Coins, Do You Have Any Other Hobbies?

You are a lucky man to have met a legend. I love the creativity of the Asterix comics. Last time I was in Europe, years ago, I purchased every English translated Asterix I could find at the airport's news stand and bookstore.

 

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I saw Goscinny and Uderzo too, in 1966 or 67, and had a dedicace (but a mere dedicace) on my copy of Asterix and the Normans. When in UK I bought myself a paperback English translation of Asterix in Britain. I wanted to know how they could have translated the Britons' idioms, because in the French original version the Britons speak a kind of bizarre French made of English syntax and English typical expressions literally translated. This English translation is a trick of force.

 

I studied Latin for five years, Russian for one, and can say please, thank you, and good morning in a number of other languages, but I have no fluency in any language other than English, and even my fluency in English is suspect. It had to be a lot of fun for you understanding the nuances of Asterix's "bizarre French" and the literal translations of English expressions.

 

I collect books. Reading more then watching. Guessing the grade(GTG). I like all 3 pictures. 3 being the best. Picture 3 gets a 70. Picture 2 a 69. Picture 1 gets a 68++. We all love the cosmos

 

My friend, you are much older than that!

 

Lately, I have been spending my time (literally 30-minutes per day) scanning manuscripts for preservation. Its somewhat relaxing after my busy schedule...

 

I'm really curious to hear more about these manuscripts - how old they are, where they're from, if they've been translated, and anything else you know about them.

 

A bit of history is in order. Palm leaves were used as the primary source of writing materials in South and Southeast Asia for hundreds of years. In India, it was the primary writing material for thousands of years. Each palm leaf could last about 500-600 years before its contents were copied over.

The leaves from various types of palm trees were harvested, cooked, and then dried out. Once that was done, it was cut to size. Each leaf was etched with an iron stylus leaving groves:

The etchings produce the following on the dried leaf:



Once the palm leaf has been etched, lamp black (a mixture of soot and oil) is applied onto the leaf and then wiped away leaving the lamp black embedded into the groves of the etching. This produces the crisp writing on the leaf. Note that the author, in this case, decided to only reveal the top portion of the leaf as opposed to the whole leaf:



Below is a scribe using the stylus to etch onto the leaves:



Holes were added so that the leaves could be bundled together to form a complete manuscript and finally, wooden boards were added to protect the leaves from damage:



All the images above are from my collection . What I am doing is unraveling the bundle and scanning each leaf. It will be re-assembled once I am done and then sent to the university to be deciphered. I can't read most of these as either the language/script is foreign to me or the script is written differently than what is currently used. Topics range from science, medicine, religious stories, all the way up to novels and plays...

 

Thank you very much for that explanation! I've never heard any of it, but my historical focus/interest has always been primarily ancient Rome. Still, yours is a fascinating story, and you've got quite the cool collection of manuscripts. The future translations must have you on the edge of your seat...I'd go crazy waiting to hear what the manuscripts say.

 

Yeah, its crazy and there is so many manuscripts that I need to digitize, including paper and papyrus.I have been quite anxious to get these analyzed. The cuneiform tablets in my collection have mostly been analyzed. Still have about 3 or 4 that needs analysis.

In ancient Rome, they used wax tablets. Alas I do not have a wax tablet in my collection (been looking for one for a while), but I do have the iron stylus that was used. The sharp end was used to inscribe whereas the flat end was the eraser to remove the wax:



The tablet looks like the following:




You can see an example of the above stylus and tablet in this Roman mosaic of a poet:

 

I have a bronze stylus from (I think) the second century AD, and I used to display it with a 5x7 copy of that same portrait from Pompeii.

 

That a nice one! I have been trying to pick up something similar, too, but its not high on my priority. I do have a somewhat similar one that is made of silver, but I still like the simple, iron one. They are all from the 1st to 3rd AD, like yours...

 

I don't know if you've ever seen this stylus, but it shows ancient Romans had a great sense of humor:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smar...uvenir-stylus-inscribed-corny-joke-180972792/

 

Before I printed that Pompeii portrait to display next to my stylus, this is what I did to it to clean it up a little and fix the proportions to look more realistic - I just straightened her nose and got her eyes on the same level, and then tried to clean up the cracks and chips on her face a bit:

 

Yeah, I read that! Wish I had one of those. I visited the London museum before the COVID mess and was amazed by the tablets and stylus that they had. Of course, its not the British Museum ...

Hmmm, I do like the mount. Might do something similar

 

Numisnewbiest and Quant.Geek,

This conversation is one of the most fascinating ones I have read on CT. Thank you for the education.

 

I was going to ask about the dimensions of a stylus -- somehow, in the isolated photos, they looked impractically large to me. This mosaic puts them perfectly into scale.

 

The stylus I posted is 5-1/2 inches long, but I've seen many that are smaller than that, too. The one in the Pompeii portrait looks longer than any I've seen.

 

Well, I guess historical medals aren't coins. For those who never visit the World Coins forum, see my several posts in a thread over there about what remains of my medals collection: https://www.cointalk.com/threads/british-official-coronation-jubilee-medals-etc.393035/.