You are all saying the paper has been shown to be new and this person or that person wrote it but initially explanations of it seem to already give quite different answers.
The paper is cotton and explained as being from the correct time frame - it's not linen, it's older type cotton paper.
The ink is fromt he right time frame too. "it is therefore impossible to assign any later date".
If all this is untrue, there must have been an awful lot of lying and fabrication involved in making this and I just don't see it in any reports etc, like Knul, I'm not convinced on those yet.
I'll admit the time for Napoleon is co-incidence, but after you see cycles of things for long enough, prediction gets easy.
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Dr E. Verwijs having heard of this, requested permission to examine the manuscript, and immediately recognised it as very ancient Fries. He obtained at the same time permission to make a copy of it for the benefit of the Friesland Society, and was of opinion that it might be of great importance, provided it was not supposititious, and invented for some deceptive object, which he feared. The manuscript
p. vi
being placed in my hands, I also felt very doubtful, though
I could not understand what object any one could have in inventing a false composition only to keep it a secret. This doubt remained until I had examined carefully-executed facsimiles of two fragments, and afterwards of the whole manuscript—the first sight of which convinced me of the great age of the document.
Immediately occurred to me Cæsar's remark upon the writing of the Gauls and the Helvetians in his "Bello Gallico" (i. 29, and vi. 14), "Græcis utuntur literis," though it appears in v. 48 that they were not entirely Greek letters. Cæsar thus points out only a resemblance—and a very true one—as the writing, which does not altogether correspond with any known form of letters, resembles the most, on a cursory view, the Greek writing, such as is found on monuments and the oldest manuscripts, and belongs to the form which is called lapidary. Besides, I formed the opinion afterwards that the writer of the latter part of the book had been a contemporary of Cæsar.
The form and the origin of the writing is so minutely and fully described in the first part of the book, as it could not be in any other language. It is very complete, and consists of thirty-four letters, among which are three separate forms of a and u, and two of e, i, y, and o, besides four pairs of double consonants ng, th, hs, and gs. The ng, which as a nasal sound has no particular mark in any other Western language, is an indivisible conjunction; the th is soft, as in English, and is sometimes replaced by d; the gs is seldom met with—I believe only in the word segse, to say, in modern Fries sidse, pronounced sisze.
The paper, of large quarto size, is made of cotton, not very thick, without water-mark or maker's mark, made upon a frame or wire-web, with not very broad perpendicular lines.
An introductory letter gives the year 1256 as that
p. vii
in which this manuscript was written by Hiddo overa Linda on foreign paper. Consequently it must have come from Spain, where the Arabs brought into the market paper manufactured from cotton.
On this subject, W. Wattenbach writes in his "Das Schriftwesen im Mittelalter" (Leipzig, 1871), s. 93:—
"The manufacture of paper from cotton must have been in use among the Chinese from very remote times, and must have become known to the Arabs by the conquest of Samarcand about the year 704. In Damascus this manufacture was an important branch of industry, for which reason it was called Charta Damascena. By the Arabians this art was brought to the Greeks. It is asserted that Greek manuscripts of the tenth century written upon cotton paper exist, and that in the thirteenth century it was much more used than parchment. To distinguish it from Egyptian paper it was called Charta bombicina, gossypina, cuttunea, xylina. A distinction from linen paper was not yet necessary. In the manufacture of the cotton paper raw cotton was originally used. We first find paper from rags mentioned by Petrus Clusiacensis (1122-50).
"The Spaniards and the Italians learned the manufacture of this paper from the Arabians. The most celebrated factories were at Jativa, Valencia, Toledo, besides Fabriano in the March of Ancona." *
In Germany the use of this material did not become very extended, whether it came from Italy or Spain. Therefore the further this preparation spread from the East and the adjoining countries, the more necessity there was that linen should take the place of cotton. A document of Kaufbeuren on linen paper of the year 1318 is of very doubtful genuineness. Bodman considers the oldest pure
p. viii
linen paper to be of the year 1324, but up to 1350 much mixed paper was used. All carefully-written manuscripts of great antiquity show by the regularity of their lines that they must have been ruled, even though no traces of the ruled lines can be distinguished. To make the lines they used a thin piece of lead, a ruler, and a pair of compasses to mark the distances.
In old writings the ink is very black or brown; but while there has been more writing since the thirteenth century, the colour of the ink is often grey or yellowish, and sometimes quite pale,
showing that it contains iron. All this affords convincing proof that the manuscript before us belongs to the middle of the thirteenth century, written with clear black letters between fine lines carefully traced with lead. The colour of the ink shows decidedly that it does not contain iron. By these evidences the date given, 1256, is satisfactorily proved, and it is impossible to assign any later date. Therefore all suspicion of modern deception vanishes.
http://www.sacred-te...l/olb/olb02.htm
Otharus, on 03 November 2011 - 10:15 PM, said:
