\m [music playing--no dialogue] \m \m

>> Dr. Wafeek Wahby:
Before I start with welcoming you to the official traditional welcome, I want to ask you a question, ready, have you ever heard about the mine of radioactive gold?

A mine of radioactive gold, if you haven't we are sitting in a room in a such a mine of radioactive gold right here, right now and that's Booth Library.

Booth Library is the mine of gold.

And not only gold, just aesthetic gold, but radioactive.

When you walk through the aisles looking through books or videos or whatever material you are looking for, it's radiating things that can change your life when you read it, just changes your mind.

So it has radioactivity, and it is very precious.

I grew up from early childhood loving books.

I used to see my dad was a pastor, reading, preparing his study, so I grew up loving books.

I like their smell, I like to hold them and change pages and put my finger here in the word.

So they mean a lot to me, so being in a library to me is a mine of gold, and it's not just aesthetic gold.

It is radioactive.

And I leave a better person when I come to the library, so thanks to all the lirarians in this room and guess what?

It started a long time ago, make no mistake.

Without much ado, Dean Lanham.

>> Dean Allen Lanham:
Well thank you, some of you are camping out here and that is wonderful.

What we all would like to do.

So today, I thought I would share with you some of the things that interest me about ancient Egypt and how it connects to not only my life, but your life and the life of libraries and other things.

What I won't be doing is talking about the grand library of Alexandria.

There are other people who already talked about that, and there is more to come in this series.

But nonetheless, I will look at some of the remnants of the ideas of the period, but actually my title comes from a conversation with Wafeek Wahby.

And I don't know if he remembers the conversation at all, but he was describing to me about the ancient scribes and how they're sitting at the rock tablet, the stone tablet, you know chiseling these letters away and getting everything just right.

And you know it struck me that with just a turn of the chisel, they would change history as we know it in a variety of ways.

And so my caution in that is make no mistake when you are documenting because it does come back to you, and scholars base their lives and write their books and treatises on evidence they find.

And we don't know if perhaps the scribe was incorrect that day or feeling bad or got his arm bumped and did something wrong, and so I'm thinking documenting life you know since these Egyptians all had the same effect.

Today look at the editors, the proofreaders, the scholarship that goes into producing any document, and I refer back to the one that is of course related to this symposium, and I know what it takes to put together something like that and try not to make a mistake.

And several eyes may give you a different effect in the final product, so as I was looking through what we might talk about today related to libraries and information and related somehow to music that is my background as well.

I wasn't in Ancient Egypt, although I may look like I might have been there.

I wasn't there, so all of this is in turn borrowed from others who have shared with us along the way.

And there have been as you can imagine many.

It goes back to knowledge is power, and so you look back into Ancient Egypt, you have those people who were extremely wealthy and others who might've had some kind of profession and then others who were trying to make it to the end of the day by finding food or fire or something else that they might get through that part of their life with.

How many of these people had knowledge of their own life, their own surroundings, yes maybe they have a few blocks around them, but others then could actually write or read or transcribe and actually know about more, so much more.

And as we look through various societies, we know that very often people hide knowledge from others, we find it here in the library.

There are several librarians here [unclear dialogue] what happens in any library?

Someone gets in, especially in the older period a couple of generations back, the professor would give the assignment at 9 'o' clock, class would be over at 10.

The student would run over here and hide the information for the next three weeks because they then would have the power in the classroom.

Today with the Internet, it's harder to do that, you know, but a casual book among a million others among the shelves, you know where it's hidden.

And so knowledge is power and remains power.

Look at this from one of the tombs, can you read it in the back?

It's a little far back, listen all of you!

The priests of Hathor will [unclear dialogue] any of you who enter this tomb or does harm to it.

The gods will comfort him because I am honored by his lord.

The gods will not allow anything to happen to me.

Anyone who does anything bad to my tomb, then the crocodile, hippopotamus, and lion willl eat him.

Okay, so it's spreading the knowledge that if you do anything to me even after death, I oh holy one, you will discover the wrath of, and this is the first time I knew that the hippopotamus could throw wrath towards individuals, but I suppose you can.

So here as you read down the various figures, etcetera, there's a message that someone has left behind to steer people away.

Of course, we've already in this conference looked at Indiana Jones and all his powers and bravery.

I'm not sure we would all be as brave, especially when we're talking about snakes and frogs, which we will see later in this presentation.

But much of what we know about one civilization or one lifetime can tend to be hidden.

And so we see here, the scientists who with this small implement is blowing sand away from something very important.

Like you would drive through the fog, and you knew that there was a cliff beside the road.

You would go very carefully.

And of course the scientist is doing the same thing, carefully, carefully, we're going to find what is under here.

And you can see the magnificent drawings that are under here, covered by what?

Any and everything that someone has thrown there or the wind has blown there or the river has brought up in the three month flood that always happened for so long.

So we owe much of what we know about the Ancient Egyptians to not only the people who did it to begin with, but to those who have resurrected it for us.

And this continues, and those of you who were in Dr. Hoffmeier's presentation on Thursday or Friday realized that that type of work can be very exciting, but very, what, it could be very tedious, it could be very hot, it could be very uncomfortable.

And yet, eureka!

You come upon something that no one has come upon for thousands of years perhaps.

For example, we throw the Rosetta Stone around all the time, but has anyone actually seen it in the British museum?

A few of us, you can walk right by it and think it's a doorstop, almost.

And where they have it, or when I was in the British museum, it looked like it was holding the door open.

And then I'm like, oh my gosh, look what this is, and maybe they thought that they were putting it in a place of prominence, and it didn't seem to me yet from this and you can see the heading here from the caption.

And from this, we are able to decipher so much about Ancient Egypt and bring information forward for next many generations to come and so had we not found this, and whoever found it, and I'm sorry I'm not an Egyptologist and this is not actually my specialty here.

But I can say whoever did find it, it was important that they knew what it was or could recognize that there are three different languages going on here and they are actually the translations or the key to the castle, to the understanding of past knowledge.

I love this photo from 1954, this is not very old.

I too was here, and several of you were about to be born.

And here in one of the excavations sites, they are trying to look back and look to what trouble they are having to do to look back into ancient society.

You must build, you must uncover, you must carefully brush off, I'm not totally sure exactly what they're doing here.

It's certainly an official look at probably something new or recent dig here, but my point is it takes a lot more effort to uncover it, than perhaps it would've taken to keep it uncovered and bringing it into our society.

Well just in the last session, Dr. Wahby said, "Well, we'll have this as long as the Internet survives."

We're like well how long will that be, and we don't know.

No one knows, we hope that it keeps going, but what we depend upon other specialists to do is to bring that information forward through another form of translation or another key or another Rosetta Stone.

Unfortunately, there's a company now that's Rosetta Stone that sells language tapes, you know, language materials for you to learn how to travel the world.

But I'm fascinated by things that are uncovered, just as you are.

All of the [unclear dialogue] becomes personal doesn't it?

They look like this, somebody didn't make this up because if they did, they wouldn't look as close to what we still look like, I don't think.

They might have had different appendages or a different look.

But this is very normal looking to us, and yet when you look at some of the other drawings, it's not quite as normal, it doesn't always look as normal.

Here, this is one of the images on your program, so the caption there for you to look at, but I'm fascinated here, the symmetry, the grandness of this, what it would take to build a structure so large.

And this symposium has helped you learn how these were built, and I don't have to go over that again.

But I'm struck by what is written on each of these and why.

And we've learned that much of what is described there turns out to be descriptive of what the Pharoah was thinking or wanted to be remembered for, or perhaps thinking his parents or his wife or saying that remember we'll be, we'll go down in history for staving off the warriors from whatever tribe or something like that.

Maybe it's historical things like that, of course we don't really know.

This might say [unclear dialogue] too or if there was a school trip anywhere nearby, you know what it's going to say on there.

So hopefully the teacher keeps the class moving so they don't upset history once again as we go through.

We think of very large monuments when we think of Ancient Egypt, you know, as we have the Sphinx here and of course only one of the hundreds of pyramids that are there.

And yet quite frankly, Dr. Stimac told us just an hour ago about how this was a not brought here, this was already here and they merely added something that would make it look normal and natural and be there and decorate or to be symbolic of whatever.

And so this whole thing of geologic formation already occurring there and someone saying oh you know I think that could be [no audio].

Setting up to do it is really, it shows creativity and artistic ingenuity.

Of course I'm afraid most of our history is going down like this [unclear dialogue] perhaps you can tell, maybe not.

What is going on here?

I'm not sure.

I think maybe the later civilizations took away parts of the body they didn't want there.

Maybe like they did later in the Roman and Greek sculptures where certain body parts were eliminated.

We don't know that that didn't happen.

But also there's a variety of things going on there.

The person depicted there seems to be painting her lips and is that a mirror that she is holding.

We don't know.

I don't know, maybe others do.

Here my favorite scribes, these are the people that when I think of if I were an ancient Egyptian what would I want to be, and I think I would like to be the scribe.

Just sitting there writing all this stuff down, knowing how to read, knowing how to write, knowing how to take instructions from others and really having the final say so right.

Because probably very often the ones that you were doing it for didn't know what you did after you wrote it down.

And so here we have them and they're careful, very careful.

It's prepared just like you know two number two pencils of behind the ear.

Ready for any situation and to continue their work.

Scribes were so important that we had an inspector of scribes.

Someone who would say that you truly know what you're doing or were going to inspect you to make sure that you're worthy of the title.

And I love this in the tradition, here's [unclear dialogue] down here.

You might overlook that if you're just walking by, you're just struck by the man's face or the tablet and all of a sudden the whole family is all around its feet.

This happens in several of the areas or artworks found.

Here's one other this is the scribe that is found in Memphis right outside of Cairo, another ancient capital there, which I find interesting.

You look at the Illinois area, and you find Cairo down at the bottom of Illinois and just down the river a little bit, Memphis of course, and so we are bringing other parts of the world very locally to what we're doing here.

This guy almost looks like a buddha, I think he is eating too well to be a scribe.

So what do we need to do, we need to overturn the few people who knew how to do these things, it was generalized, we would all become fluent in writing, learning, reading, expressing ourselves, doing all these types of things.

And yet when we do, we have to find a way in which to capture those thoughts, capture the history of all this.

I had to stick that in too down here.

I don't think that happened because the inspector of scribes would have had you decapitated probably.

Okay and so it's written that we need to document life as we go on, and I'm not going into the areas but you can think why we need this.

The whole thing, we need to document who owns the property, the marriage, and all these types of things, they're obsessed with driver's licenses, and death certificates.

We're all trying to find out what happens, you know, and it's necessary to know those things for a variety of reasons, but if we didn't capture those and there are societies that don't really capture those, they say they do, but you know even in my mom's case, um, when she went to get her birth certificate she found out she had a different name.

Because it was recorded maybe a year or two after the birth of the child in the particular place that she was living.

And so that leaves a bit of space for us to forget what the child's name was, and she is not the only instance, I know others, who had to find out what their real name was.

It could be by the time the county agent came around to record the birth that they had changed their mind what the name might be, which happens a lot too.

But as we look back to ancient Greek society, these things to us look like decoration, but it's always telling a story of something and very authentic.

It's a different story as we learned from Dr. Hoffmeier.

It could be a different story because when one Pharaoh, one king died, we just started into a different direction.

He died on a Sunday, well on Monday, we're marching this way, and whatever the story entails and products that had been deemed necessary the whole story might change.

Hair ornamentation really hasn't changed very much has it?

Links us right back to there, but I don't see any of you ladies with some kind of gazelle in your hair, but it could happen.

Ancient Egyptian culture and interest is continually renewed, in our society, and I don't know if all others, but in our society, King Tut just opened up a whole new world of old Egypt to us.

Wasn't it true?

And it seemed to come in waves because first of all there was the discovery, and then there was the books that came with it and the films, and we were all just King Tutting everything.

Then came all the traveling exhibits to all the major museums in the United States, and then it made its return three or four years ago to Chicago, so we all have been rather intrigued by the Ancient Egyptians, of course, by what they had to offer and who knows what is still below the earth for us to record.

They didn't he was there until they found him, right?

Let's skip this little librarian thing, although I did bring a book that for those of you the graphic novels at ilibrarian have in here stories [unclear dialogue] using depictions of Ancient Greek, or Ancient Egyptian characters.

You know it doesn't stop, does it?

Look at what we have here in terms of the various [unclear dialogue], can someone tell me what they think is here?

What is she concerned with or thinking about or famous for?

Do any of those look familiar, and you see lots of birds, ducks, doves, river, you see a river here that leads to water.

You don't know exactly, but here is one with the male, and what do we find that he's concerned with or famous for, or thinking about, or wants to be remembered for.

More weapons, or things that look like weapons, the animals have, there are still birds and doves and all these things but what else is there.

What was one of the plagues that was discussed this morning?

The frogs, locusts, here's another one.

Here we have a detail of the previous [unclear dialogue] and here and notice on the bird on the right sharp talons and the teeth or some fighting aparatus from the mouth, I'm not sure exactly what it is.

Ferocious cats, frogs that changed society at one time or another, that we learned this morning in the religion area.

On the other hand, here's something that probably is very symbolic, but I saw it as something rather frivolous of showing a dancer maybe and it could be a very sacred dance.  

I don't think so, it looks like a girl having fun.

But someone took the time to pose or someone took the time to put it down.

I just put Nefertiti's face in here because we haven't talked about her for the past four days, and if you turn the clock back before King Tut that's about the only one that anybody knew.

So that's what I put there.

This is showing up on one of the [unclear dialogue] to Queen Nefertiti, and it goes back to the cattle and the importance of the cattle and the horns, once again, these are the seven cattle with all kinds of different things depicted here of course.

And you know we can spend the next six months reading and deciphering these, but notice the colors.

Here lack of color and yet nonetheless very impressive.

Now if you would describe doing this, do you think you would err on the side of making this person look more virile, more stronger, wiser, more important?

I think you would.

Notice the fine detail with the drawings at the top.

And yet how soft is this from the alabaster mines that were described in Dr. Stimac's talk earlier today, very gentle.

Also the presence of women throughout society, as which we will have some discussions later on in this series about women and their role in the society.

But if we look down through here, and I just threw a few of these and there could be five hundred of them just to get you started.

We've come a long way here from carving into stone or to putting wet clay around objects and then drawing into the clay and then firing the clay again to all the way down to these microphones and electronic files that we hope will stay alive over time.

And yet we're already in the second or third generation of electronic files and many of them are unreadable at this time.

Oh we must take care as we proceed that we can continue to keep up with history and our place in society.

We've gone from copying everything by hand, one thing I will throw out about the Library of Alexandria, remember any ship that stopped in the Alexandria harbor was raided for books.

They would go on to board, they would send soldiers on to every ship that came from any other society in the world that might be training there.

And they would rob and borrow the originals, take them to the library, copy them, and then do what?

Give the copy back to the ship, okay?

And that's how you get a very rich library.

\I >> audience member:
[unclear dialogue]

\P >> Dr. Lanham:
No, you heard right.

They would give the copy back to whoever brought it.

That reminds me of a similar instance, except even harsher in our own lifetime.

\I >> audience member:
[unclear dialogue]

\P >> Dr. Lanham:
Well yes that goes, that continues, but I am thinking of a library in particular, the National Library of Cuba where yes you can leave our country, but you must leave everything here and we will put everything into our library thank you very much, watch out for the waves.

And that's how they built their library.

The National Library of Cuba, I think, I forget how many volumes it holds, they built it within 3 or 4 years of the revolution, and it was supposed to last 40 years, 20, 30, 40, 50 years, but because so many people left the island because they wanted to get away from the revolution regime to come.

The library filled up to capacity and overflowing within 3 or 4 years from riches from somebody else.

So we're not all without guilt and over the years as we try to pull in information together and you can bring that home right today where people are stealing things off of the Internet right as we sit here.

People wherever they can find information, and we go back to information is power and that is what we will go back on.

So as you can see there, we used to copy by hand and then we finally got to type, and this is thousands of years later and now hundreds of years later we're doing electronic files reading them and etcetera.

The whole thing of compiling information into something that was handy, of course, has gotten much easier.

But if we look here this is from around 692, and the Pope Gregory's were quite interested in a lot of things, and this was Codex that a copy went to Pope Gregory II, but look at the true bookcase where it was going to be actually shut and locked as soon as this person was finished with what he was doing there.

It could be a scribe here I'm not exactly sure, but the idea of keeping that information from others, but also keeping it safe is very important through today.

As you walk out of the library, you'll be zapped by an electronic object seeing if you're taking anything from this library, so some things never change as we go along.

But these, the next 3 or 4 slides just bring up from different illuminated manuscripts and paintings and whatever, the importance that we give to the scribes and then the scholars  and the people who may be able to read.

Today we think everybody should be able to read and write.

But that's very late to the party, we went centuries where it really didn't matter if you could barter your way through the market, be fed, and get home, and do all that and do it again tomorrow, that was enough maybe.

But as we go through here, you can see once again now we've tied volumes together, they're probably so heavy you couldn't drag them home if you wanted to and there's someone there to make sure they stay.

This is a few centuries after Ancient Egypt.

Here we have people writing and reading and talking about information that they are finding in written materials.

I love we have someone here with a scroll, a couple of scrolls, he's writing on the scroll.

This one seems to be, someone's holding the great books up here, up there, someone may be studying for the next lecture.

I think I may recall reading about this particular theme, and it's early university life, and here we have a chair.

So the symbolic as the chair.

Today it's a little thing on 4 wheels that looks like everybody elses, but in those days that person was elevated and could yell across the room and spread the information that they were interested in spreading to overtake perhaps much of the conversation that is going on in the room.

Finally a library here, it looks Dutch to me, I don't know and forgive me for not giving you exact specifics, you would forget them if I told you.

I would unless it was written down, but if you want to know specifically where each one of these came from I can provide that for you.

What I'm interested in here is the classification scheme here, Mathematics, Philosophy, Literature, Theology, Medicine, HIstory.

There's more Theology than History.

There's very little, some disciplines are very small in this particular library and stayed that way for some time.

But notice what happens here, if I'm not mistaken these are chains so if you wanted to look at one of those books, you would request from the library to look at it.

They would chain it to the desk here and you could stand up and read it for as long as you wish.

Now if that is not what is happening there then we could find other photos and illustrations that that is what was happening there.

You remember the name of the Rose the movie from the 1970s or 1980s where the library was final torched, but all the books were chained to the desk so they couldn't get them out to save them.

So anyway, I'm fascinated with the idea that we're trying to classify the information and yet let a few people know about it.

Also, as you look at some more areas of the Rennaissance and later periods, we always have these portraits of important groups of people or individuals, there's always a book.

You know that's the knowledge or this is the ledger of things that people owe me or this is how I've recorded what is important to me.

And so, you know, here we've just tossed them, but we have several books here that we've just thrown them on the table.

And a few of these were also very wise here with a map of a couple big blobs because they probably had no idea what was on other places.

But nonetheless, if you were a fine, rich, and upstanding person you were supposed to surround yourself with information.

This is a recent drawing of an old library but with ghosts of the past or authors or ideas floating into the air.

It gets a little nebulus, I love this when there is the Director I think of one of the earlier Egyptian museums.

What's important to this man?

Obviously the thoughts of others, unless he's the author of those.

I don't think it's the Sears Catalogue that is surrounding him there.

I imagine that it's work that other scholars have prepared on the collections of the museum, the holdings in the library and very important things.

But he is pretty much glazed over with so much information, it reminds of today with information overload.

He needs a good cataloguer on his staff.

Once again another dandy with his book in his hand, and today, and I've jumped centuries here, and forgive me here, I'm just trying to drag you through history here.

So we have typewriting on the roof, I think, in Los Angeles.

And we have, of course up there, all kinds of miraculous things that we are studying and reproducing and digesting information with the computer and probably that [unclear dialogue] probably displays electronically.

As we go through lifetime, there have been persons who write more in their lifetime than we can read in hours.

And I think, I'm a musician, and I think back to the works of Mozart and Bach.

You know Mozart died when he was 36.

It would take two of us to drag his works in here on carts.

And hundreds of hours to perform and to read those manuscripts.

And the same thing with Bach, you know, and make no mistake, the little joke, the very old joke about Bach was of course that Bach had 23 children and practiced on a spinster in the attic.

There's a little mistake there that has changed history if you believe that.

Instead of the spinnet piano, he's found something else going on up there, but we look at the life of Anne Frank.

I just grabbed a little handful of these things, and yet because of her writings because of her desire to capture, to imagine, to what, to write, think, read, express, we have people who can't get enough of her recounts of the times.

And we have used her works, some of which are here, to describe and to illustrate the lives of thousands of people in the same period.

And we've gone forward in the "Treasures from the Attic" are the items that were in her aunt's home after the diaries became famous.

Later on, we found 600 photographs and old letters and things from the Frank family that once again opened up the world even more.

Had she, had Anne not written, and had those things not been found and dusted off, we might have lost all of that and not paid attention to the 600 things that were in the attic of the aunt because that would have been dumped in a fire or sold at an auction.

Think about it.

Because they would be totally unimportant, and yet it has described for us a great epic in the history of the world just by a child basically writing some things every day.

And we don't have time to look at some of those, I'll leave those marked.

There are some illustrations and captions you can look for.

But you know the same thing through Shakespeare, you know, I asked Karen, she said she would not bring all the Shakespear works up here in the room.

I was trying to get her to do it, but the, it's impossible to tote the works of these people around because they are so voluminous.

And yet, it was natural to them, and what, these composers, we are still finding manuscripts written by Mozart.

Why?

Because the day he wrote it, somebody came to visit and he was like, "Here you can have it". 

They didn't really know what they had perhaps or they cherished it enough to hide it away, and then 200 hundred years later someone has found it.

Once again in the attic or the garage, you know the worst place you could put print materials was in the attic of a home or in the garage.

And for the most part, that is where we find all of these things.

Sometimes they end up in museums by mistake and fifty years later, someone from the museum archives will turn the page and there's another piece that the world has never been aware of.

Once again someone took the time to write it down, someone took the time to save it and then someone lost it and then someone found it.

It keeps going no matter how many centuries have gone by.

So it's back to I didn't mention the diaries and letters.

So here's the scoop on everything if you want to find out.

So that's a little snapshot of today.

If we go back, there were some other things that weren't related to the Kings and Pharoahs and Queens of the Nile.

Some people were looking for the next fish and someone, we don't know who, put it down, it looks quite interesting.

I would not want to eat this thing from the Nile, maybe it ws safer then, but look how many other creatures are in the paper here.

And it could be that they had an extra hour before they got off work the next day and drew some more fish or whatever, but I don't think so.

I think times were abundant during certain periods of the year, and these artists have helped us to do it.

Here we have Ramses.

Oh its the Sun, the Sun is on one side, look at this, how ornate do you need a box to put your sandals?

Today we come from the beach and kick those off at the door and hope that the sand stays in the garage.

But these, of course, were royal shoes and royal shoes command attention of all kinds of things.

So before you put them on, you realize how great an individual you are.

This is a battle we were famous for.

It could have been what is known here as the county fair, right?

I don't know.

Could be.

Other things, here's an ornamental tub with a pleasure boat on the top.

Many civilizations have these pleasure boats, that it took so much human power to drag that boat out to the water, so that 2 or 3 royal people could sit for a couple of hours and have cucumber sandwiches, I guess, if they had those.

My point here is someone has taken the time to document and here in tapestry form the same thing. 

Tell a story.

In libraries, we have preserve, preserve, preserve, museums, the historical society, the hoarders, and packrats.

We've got a very bad reputation recently in the television for going overboard, but nonetheless without hoarders and packrats, we would have lost things of importance over time.

And yet on the other hand, there are other people in the world who go destroy, destroy, destroy, don't let them know about this, destroy this letter after you read it my darling.

You've read about those.

Book burnings, you don't have to go too far to find people burning books.

There are family friendly groups burning books today somewhere in America, waving the flag above it.

In certain civil unrest, we have torn down the statues that described our societies over and over for hundreds of years.

And then boom on a Saturday, there's a revolution, and what comes down first?

It's always, always that document shredding.

It is rampant at Eastern and at every other institution  because what I said yesterday, I don't want people to know or may not still be true.

Or maybe we don't need this, or I can't tell them that, so it's going back to knowledge is power.

If I leave this on my desk, someone will find out.

And you know think about all the wonderful information that is now captured on people's cell phones and other handheld electronic devices.

And when they die or lost or get dumped into the water, which they seem to do.

Every time there is a new model available, there is a wealth of information being destroyed about  our society.

It behooves us today to try to capture for the rest.

In terms of documenting things, I just put a few things down here.

We've looked at hieroglyphics from Ancient Egypt.

You saw some Latin writings in some of the areas, but every profession turns out to have his own language and found ways in which to describe that in detail.

So a funny book came across my desk the other day.

It was "Guide to a Hodown" or something like that, and it was dancing instructions for square dancers in the 1950s.

Not a very widely held document, but in the town of Charleston, there are actually 2 of these.

I thought it was unusual, and maybe someone came around and had a dance here in the 1950s and sold books after it was over.

You know that's like getting the word out, we tried to do that.

And so everyone, the dancers, they all want to know how the famous, how did they do it.

And so they have documented that in a way.

The artists only have how many formats and how many media do we have for artists to be expressive.

Think of the chemists.

My chemistry teacher used to say, I can see in the chart on the back of the wall that such and whatever has blah, blah, blah, and there was no chart on the back of the wall.

Every student kept turning around looking for the famous chart was in his head.

The cartographers, we've represented those beautifully in this series.

Educators in their curriculum guides and other kinds of things.

Musicians, think of the notes, some people can read it, some people can't.

It indecipherable, it's always in the wrong language, and forbid you buy a German opera in a French translation, you know, these kinds of things happen.

But the amazing thing is these people have found ways to document their life and what is interesting and what is important to them, and our culture is richer because of it.

I just had to stick this in because I love this picture.

It's in your program also, so you have one for your house too.

But we always think about the dry arid areas, and yet they probably spruced the river up, is it ever this blue?

>> male speaker:
Sometimes.

>> Dean Lanham:
Sometimes, okay, I'm glad it is, maybe the sky has given it this lovely color, but what I am thinking of, just stare at the top and then imagine that someone has divined that we need this on the other side to document our life, to show that we are artistic, to show that we are capable of understanding physics and engineering and other sciences that we know the difference in this cap of the column and that one.

It's the makeup of civilization, and the desire to be remembered later.

Some of it's to impress your neighbors today, let's face it, but in the long run, it comes out to be symbolic of a learned people.

So I say make no mistake, be careful, the world is full of bloopers, you don't have to look far on our American television to find those.

But it's impossible to record everything, but something needs to live on, so that our archaeologists don't have to take the little bulb and go dusting the sand away from the documents that were important for our civilization and our time on this earth.

So I'm saying make your mark, join the historical society, be a patron of the museum and library.

Make sure that these items that we want remembered the hodown that took place in 1957 in Greenup has been well documented, and it resides at Eastern Illinois University's library.

Those are very important.

Before I go to that, I'll stop for questions.

Questions, or comments, or you can draw me a little picture of  [unclear dialogue] or whatever.

\I >> Dr. Wahby:
I have a quick question, do we know where the writing on stone started first?

\P >> Dean Lanham:
I'm, from my readings, and I could be wrong, this is not necessarily my area.

I will refer you to a wonderful book written on the subject by Daniel Boorstin, Library of Congress, which he goes in careful detail where all of the items came from what their past was or whatever.

I would guess that the stone was before the papyrus, and then the papyrus was before the parchment, etcetera, but I will leave that for you to explore.

>>Dr. Wahby:
Do we have any information about the Sumerian language and the hieroglyphic which fed into the other how and so forth?

>> Dean Lanham:
I don't know.

I'll have to research that to find out.

>> Dr. Wahby:
But it seems that there is urge in the human nature to document, and I think if I have a thermometer of measuring this urge, it was as strong as [unclear dialogue].

>> Dean Lanham:
I think so too.

It was strong for different strata in this civilization.

People were always scribbling something, children playing hopscotch.

One will draw the little chart, and somebody else will decorate it with curly cues, paint it pink, and do all these kinds of things.

There is a desire within some people perhaps more to ornament more than others, but the idea of getting it on paper, on some surface is very strong.

Cut in stone is too much work, I can tell you that, right?

>> Dr. Wahby:
Any other questions?

Yes?

>> female speaker:
Yes, how big is a Rosetta Stone?

>> Dean Lanham:
The Rosetta Stone is about this big, as far as I can remember it, a large piece.

And like I said when you're going from one hallway to another and you cross a glass door, you could trip over it.

it's right there, almost behind the door, so don't miss it.

Maybe they moved it to a more permanent space at this time or maybe they thought that was the most prominent because you would trip over it, but that's there.

Some other materials that I did bring along of like documents, actually there are documents, this one happens to come from the National Archives, and it's talking about the post Civil War federal agencies documenting the lives of slaves, and when you're doing that research handy guide in this little book, and I'll leave it sitting out, the papyrus rolls and the way they kept them on the shelf.

And I note that very often, the scribe failed to put the authors name, but they would put the scribe's name on the finished document.

So when you're looking back sometimes you're not going to get all the information you might think just like when you're reading a freshman's term paper.

I laid this volume out on the Mormon desire to document genealogy and family history, and their efforts in since this century to well since the 1800s to get involved in documenting all sorts of information on individuals and their family status.

Of course it started to be all related to their church, but they moved way past that.

I think I'll stop there and end with a cute little thing.

When people saw that I was going to do this talk, they said, "Well, I only have one question and surely you'll talk about this".

And it was, does anybody know what it is?

What's your biggest question about the whole thing?

It's like, did the Egyptians really walk like that?

It goes back to the song from the 1980s, "Walk Like an Egyptian", you know, Randy, can I use you as an example?

What do you think or how have you seen Egyptians walk, just take a stance, you don't have to walk, just what stance would you take with the body?

[laughter]

Show us yours, there's one!

What's another one?

Okay, Larry, come here, there's another one, what about this one?

You've seen that, right?

I found a picture, I finally found a picture, would you strike that pose please.

This was in the [unclear dialogue] was drawn the Egyptian holding their arms like that, walking like the crazy American Egyptian, but the only thing I found documented was that they were holding platters of food and perfumes and other things, delivering them to someone, so I thank you.

[laughter]

So I looked on the Internet and came up with a little blurb that just takes a couple of minutes, if you have time, okay.

Are we not going to be able to hear this, if so we are going to cut that off immediately.

[beeping noise]

Well I'm sorry the volume is not going to work for us, but I finally did find what they thought, how they thought Egyptians walked.

So I thought I'll bring this in case someone asks a question, and we'll have them walk through, if it's not going to come through for us.

You can find it for yourself by doing a Google search, walk like an Egyptian, choose the Bangles, the girl group Bangles that are on there, it's about 3 minutes and you will laugh.

\I >> Dr. Wahby:
Any other questions?

[audience applause]

[no dialogue]