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Day 6 of palindromic #TwitterHistorian @taoish Mark Saltveit's stint. Yesterday, the SATOR / ROTAS square. Today, "versus recurrentes" = Latin palindromic poetry, mostly 1 line. At #IMC2021, I argued that it was a continuous & self-referential genre from 2nd-15th c. CE.
1/12 -ms
1/12 -ms
I listed 42 but documenting is tricky. These were rarely in main texts. Most appeared in margins or on fly leaves, but repeated over the centuries. Theory: these were transmitted by teachers, esp. of scribes, and passed via wax tablets, memory & pen tests (federproben).
2/12 -ms
2/12 -ms
The classic (and first known) Latin verse #palindrome is a dactylic pentameter: "Roma tibi subito motibus ibit amor." Sidonius Apollinaris (ep. 9.14, ~480 CE) called it ancient. It's on a roof tile from Aquincum dated 107 CE next to a ROTAS square & at Ostia (200 CE). 3/12 -ms
Day 4 of #TweetHistorian Mark Saltveit @taoish's look at #palindromes. Thursday we viewed palindromic forms in non-European languages, a sadly neglected topic. "Today": the SATOR / ROTAS square, attested 4x in the first c. CE: 3x at Pompeii, 1x at Conimbriga in Portugal. 1/12 -ms
It's the Hollywood celebrity of #palindromes, thx to Chris Nolan's film TENET. It starts at an OPERA. ROTAS is the time reversal machine. TENET is the name of the conspiracy. Andrei SATOR is the villain. Thomas AREPO is an art forger we never see. 2/12 -ms beyondwordplay.com/palindromes-at…
This square is an image, a graphic composed of letters, arguably the world's first and most successful meme. Calling it a Latin sentence (SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS, or the reverse) is a hypothesis with v. little historical support. AREPO is not a Latin word or name. 3/12 -ms
Today my article ‘Al de swarten die hier ter stede comen’ - about an Afro-Atlantic community in seventeenth century Amsterdam - was published #openaccess in @_tseg. The article is in Dutch, so I’ll do a short introduction in #thread here. tseg.nl/articles/abstr… #twitterhistorian
From the moment the Dutch became active in the Atlantic world, people of African descent came to Amsterdam. Their presence is evident from baptismal and marriage registers and from seventeenth-century notarial deeds.
The earliest marriage of an African in Amsterdam that I have encountered was already at the end of the sixteenth century. On January 2, 1593 the 29-year-old Bastiaan Pietersz of ‘Maniconge in Afryken’ and Trijntje Pieters from Amsterdam registered their marriage.
