On The Nile

“After getting astride of the saddle, comes motion No. 1, which is caused by the animal raising his hind quarters from the ground; this throws you forward, and you lose both your hat and your balance : then comes motion No. 2, which corresponds to motion No. 1, but with the front quarters; this motion throws the traveller as far backward as he was thrown forward before.

These two motions leave the animal and the traveller neither fairly up nor altogether down ; and it requires another motion, No. 3, to bring fore and hind quarters, together with the hump and other adjacent portions, to a “perpendicular;” which act, when accomplished, leaves the rider on the animal’s hump, provided he has clung to the saddle with sufficient tenacity. After the first mount the whole matter is simplified.“

"In the early nineteenth century a trip to Egypt and up the Nile aboard a native dhahabîyeh (large sailing craft) was reserved for only the most adventurous traveler, or howadji, a Turkish word originally meaning 'merchant' or 'shopkeeper'. Howadji soon became a term applied by local inhabitants to all foreign travelers." [Source: Smithsonian exhibit: Nile Notes of a Howadji]

"Augustus Hoppin [W] left his law profession in 1848 to study art and pursue a career as an illustrator. He became quite successful and widely known for his illustrations for novels. In 1873, he embarked on a extensive tour of Egypt and soon followed his adventure with a fully illustrated book, On the Nile. The accompanying narrative disturbingly captures the narrow, patronizing, and prejudiced views of Anglo travelers during the Victorian period, especially toward those from Middle Eastern culture and religion. Scattered about are illustrations describing more lighthearted amusing moments during the trip[..]. [source/via]

'On The Nile' by Augustus Hoppin (1874) is available from Widener Library at Harvard University.

The scratchy, engraved vignettes contain a lot of interesting/humorous detail.

Liber Floridus

These images come from the fabled manuscript, 'Liber Floridus' (Book of Flowers), a Medieval encyclopædia produced some 900 years ago by Lambert, Canon of St Omer, in the NE France/Flanders/Belgium region.

"For Lambert the encyclopedia is a heavenly meadow where the “flowers of literature” flourish together to attract faithful readers by their sweetness."

{Some of these page and detail images were spliced together from screenshots, but I didn't go to the trouble, in most instances, of generating very large images; click through to adequately enlarged versions. Mouseover above for approximated image titles}


The 'Liber Floridus' is essentially a compilation of extracts from nearly two hundred late Classical and early Medieval works by authors such as Isidore of Seville, Orosius, Julius Honorius, Pomponius Mela, Solinus, Venerable Bede, Rabanus Maurus, Pseudo-Callisthenes and Martianus Capella. There are, unsurprisingly, biblical dimensions to the manuscript, including a description of the Apocalypse, and the final illustration above depicts Noah's Ark, for instance.

Lambert's manuscript was completed in his own hand by ~1120 and is regarded as the first encyclopædia of the High Middle Ages. It chronicles the history of the world and describes the cosmos and man's place in the greater whole. Lambert's personal contribution to the work was confined to the fields of cosmography, geography and cartography.

The copious illustrations and idiosyncratic maps ensured that the manuscript came to be regarded as a classic, and up to eight extant copies of 'Liber Floridus' may have survived. [Three contemporary manuscripts exist: Ghent {MS 92} is the original {some of the ending is missing}; and mid-12th c. copies are located at Paris and Wolfenbüttel - these later copies weren't produced by Lambert's hand and contain full mappa mundi-type world maps]

"A medieval encyclopedia has little in common with the modern form of encyclopedia that we know. [..]

Instead of an alphabetical order and rational classification, a medieval encyclopedia has an organic structure. Knowledge is embedded in the images showing the world – a so-called ‘world view’. [..]

Many of these encyclopedias were intended to be used as didactic tools in convent and cathedral schools and, later, in universities. The Liber Floridus was probably used for teaching at the chapter school. The few entries in the Liber Floridus which Lambert did not write himself are assumed to have been done by his pupils."

After some modest reading around on the web, I have come to the conclusion that delving into the cartography - the most interesting aspect of the MS, in my view - is beyond the scope of this post. The various commentaries are more ambiguous than enlightening, because it's hard to properly identify the maps and editions under discussion. Nevertheless, I very much recommend examining the maps (and the rest of the MS) in the rather tolerable high resolution zoom frame at the source site. This manuscript - of about 300 folio leaves - is a real treat to look at closely.

• 'Liber Floridus' {MS 92} by Lambert, Canon of St Omer, is owned by Ghent University Library and hosted on a trilingual site (choose 'Online' to get to the actual manuscript).
• Overview of the maps at the Henry Davis site.
• Wikipedia article on 'Liber Floridus'.
• Wikimedia images (from other MSS)
  
• Amazon references to 'Liber Floridus'.
• Previously: Medieval :: cartography.
  

Japanese Family Crests

Kamon are Japanese emblems or crests, corresponding to the European heraldy tradition, that are used to specifically represent and identify a family.

They are a subset of the larger body of motifs (called mon) that are symbols of temples, clans, guilds and similar groups of people. Mon first appeared by the 12th century as patterns on flags and uniforms in battles, but their wider use followed the vagaries of class and social custom.

The quartets of kamon below were selected and spliced together from the symbol categories: animal, plant, flower, furnishing, martialism, natural and pattern crests. {I think there is some crossover}




[animal crest] chicken, phoenix, crane, phoenix




[animal crest] butterfly, tortoise, bamboo grass, rabbit




[plant crest] hollyhock, bracken, cryptomeria, Oxalis corymbosa




[plant crest] grape, rice, date palm, ginkgo




[flower crest] wisteria, wisteria, tree peony, anchor




[flower crest] Morning glory, goldthread, wisteria, chrysanthemum




[furnishing crest] key, gin trap, broom, alarm plate




[furnishing crest] wooden hammer, bag, temari ball, amulet




[martialism crest] arrow, anchor, fan, gem




[martialism crest] arrow, samurai warrior helmet, anchor, arrow




[natural crest] cloud & moon, arrows of lightning, sun, wave




[natural crest] water & moon, arrows of lightning, gem, wave




[pattern crest] comma-shaped, swastika, gem, fusil




[pattern crest] tortoise-shell, Japanese quince, crossed stick, meyui pattern

• The (bilingual) Crest Japan site has more than 280 kamon available copyright free for download as .eps files. They convert to jpegs in photoshop (as has been done above) or can be used as scalable vector illustrations in Adobe Illustrator. [beware the flash show's embedded audio!] I think, from a very brief look, that there might be slightly bigger thumbnail images and maybe even more range of styles available from/via the Japanese homesite.
• The wikipedia article on kamon is fairly comprehensive : note all the links to further material.
• Pingmag 2007.
• Inspired by, and ever so slightly ransacked from, Will's Crest Syndrome post on 50 Watts from Jan, 2009.

A Sometimes Unnatural History

The images below (background cleaned) are taken from the multi-volume natural history work, 'Getreue Abbildungen Naturhistorischer Gegenstände' (1795-1807), by Johann Matthäus Bechstein.

Gibbon

Common (!?) Marmoset (Simia jacchus Linnaeus)

Three-Toed Sloth (nb.)

Lion

Hippopotamus

Elephant

Rhinoceros

Vulture

Dodo (extinct by 1681*)

Barbary Falcon

Blue Whale

Sperm Whale

Antelope

Tapir

Squirrel

Polar Bear

I originally found this fabulous polar bear image from the Bechstein volumes a couple of years ago and chose at the time not to pursue the series. I felt that, although there was a BibliOdysseyesque diversity of material (in terms of artistic merit and style, absurdity, and range of species types), the illustrations had been largely stolen or adapted from earlier works (Buffon & Von Schreber come immediately to mind).

With the passage of time and the random rediscovery of the series website, I've had something of a change of heart. Repeated appearance of some of the illustrations (both in contemporary publishing terms and on this blog) underlines the importance and relative ubiquity of the contrived sketch settings, human-like emotions and absurdly humorous representations of some of the less familiar species in Early Modern natural history literature.

In fact, after skipping through the multiple volumes of similar material that constitute Bechstein's zoological encyclopaedia, the appearance of the anatomically correct and detailed renders among the more bizarre illustrations can feel the more incongruous finds. It's a snapshot reminder of progress in popular scientific reporting and accuracy.

Basilisk (mythological)

Wood Boring Beetle

Johann Matthäus Bechstein (1757-1822) was a German ornithologist and forestry expert and a pioneer in animal and environmental conservation.

After studying and teaching theology, Bechstein's casual interest in natural history was formalised professionally with the founding in the 1790s of a forestry school and a forestry society in the German state of Thuringia.

Bechstein was a prolific author - if only a modest figure in the history of science - and is probably best remembered in the English-speaking world for his series on singing birds. He also provided the first description of several bird species, wrote a monograph on caged bird diseases and advocated for preservation of animals considered to be pests in his day (bats, for instance).

• The 8-volume series by Johann Bechstein, 'Getreue Abbildungen Naturhistorischer Gegenstände' (Realistic Pictures from Natural History), was issued between 1795 and 1807. Seven of those volumes are available from the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. (click through on a volume - band - then on anything below 'Inhalt', and then on 'Vorschau' for thumbnail pages. Easypeasy.)
• Bechstein books: Amazon | German National Library | Biodiversity Heritage Library | Googlebooks.
• Wikipedia bio.
• Previously: science | fauna.
• BibliOdyssey on Twitter.