William LeMessurier, Diane Hartley (building)

 
8:23
Citicorp Center | NYC skyscraper saved by a student’s question
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv2YQnT6pSoa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv2YQnT6pSo
Tyler Ley
Published on Jun 8, 2018
In June 1978, the skyscraper's structural engineer, William LeMessurier, discovered a potentially fatal flaw in the building's design [Citygroup Center in Manhattan, New York, formerly known as the Citycorp Center, and now known by its address, 601 Lexington Avenue, in 2009, owned by Boston Properties]: the skyscraper's bolted joints were too weak to withstand 70-mile-per-hour wind gusts.
   ____________________________________
2:45
The Citicorp Building
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwVNak-2-Xg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwVNak-2-Xg
WisconsinEngineerUWP
Published on May 18, 2012
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citigroup_Center

 ► https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professionalism/William_LeMessurier_and_the_CitiCorp_Building
 

 ►  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuned_mass_damper
 

 ►  http://www.theaiatrust.com/whitepapers/ethics/LeMessurier-Stands-Tall_A-Case-Study-in-Professional-Ethics.pdf
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Diane Lee Hartley
23:34
 ►  https://soundcloud.com/roman-mars/99-invisible-110-structural-integrity
   ____________________________________

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2014/04/17/the_citicorp_tower_design_flaw_that_could_have_wiped_out_the_skyscraper.html
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in the New Yorker story, the young man (college student working on her thesis project) is a young woman named, Diane Lee Hartley

 ►  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/05/29/the-fifty-nine-story-crisis
City Perils
May 29, 1995 Issue
THE FIFTY-NINE-STORY CRISIS
By Joseph Morgenstern
The New Yorker, May 29, 1995 P. 45

CITY PERILS about a structural defect uncovered in June, 1978 in Citibank's $175 million Citicorp Center tower which could have caused it to collapse in the event of a strong hurricane. Tells about designer William J. LeMessurier, who was structural consultant to the architect High Stubbins, Jr. They set their 59-story tower on four massive nine-story-high stilts and used an unusual, chevron-shaped system of wind braces. LeMessurier had established the strength of those braces in perpendicular winds. Now, in the spirit of intellectual play, in his Harvard class, he wanted to see if they were just as strong in winds hitting from 45 degrees. He discovered the design flaw and during wind tunnel tests in Ontario learned the weakest joint was at the building's 30th floor. Describes the building's active motion damping system, built into the top of the structure. By Aug. 7, 1978, steel plates to correct the defect had been designed. Welders worked seven days a week in August, after office hours, to add the plates to the wind braces. Welding was completed in October. The bank agreed to hold Stubbins' firm harmless and to accept the $2 million payment from LeMessurier and his joint-venture partners; no litigation ever ensued. Eight years ago, Citicorp turned the building into a condominium, retaining the land and the shops but selling all the office space, to Japanese buyers, at a handsome profit. 

Citicorp Center Tower: how failure was averted
08 December 2015
Sean Brady reflects on the Citicorp tower crisis when high rise engineer William LeMessurier owned up to a major design flaw and set about rectifying it
http://www.engineersjournal.ie/2015/12/08/citicorp-centre-tower-failure-averted/
Based on an article originally published in ‘The New Yorker’, Sean Brady reflects on the Citicorp tower crisis
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 ►  https://people.duke.edu/~hpgavin/cee421/citicorp1.htm
from welded joints to bolted joints

welded joints
  stronger
  expensive
  labor intensive

bolted joints
  weaker
  cheaper
  easier to install

But welded joints, which are labor-intensive and therefore expensive, can be needlessly strong; in most cases, bolted joints are more practical and equally safe. That was the position taken at the May meeting by a man from U.S. Steel, a potential bidder on the contract to erect the Pittsburgh towers. If welded joints were a condition, the project might be too expensive and his firm might not want to take it on.

"I spoke to Stanley Goldstein and said, 'Tell me about your success with those welded joints in Citicorp.' And Stanley said, 'Oh, didn't you know? They were changed--they were never welded at all, because Bethlehem Steel came to us and said they didn't think we needed to do it.'' Bethlehem, which built the Citicorp tower, had made the same objection--welds were stronger than necessary, bolts were the right way to do the job. On August 1, 1974, LeMessurier's New York office--actually a venture in conjunction with an old-line Manhattan firm called the Office of James Ruderman--had accepted Bethlehem's proposal.

The choice of bolted joints was technically sound and professionally correct.

Within this seemingly simple computation, however, lurks a powerful multiplier. At any given level of the building, the compression figure remains constant; the wind may blow harder, but the structure doesn't get any heavier. Thus, immense leverage can result from higher wind forces. In the Citicorp tower, the forty-per-cent increase in tension produced by a quartering wind became a hundred-and-sixty-per-cent increase on the building's bolts.

Precisely because of that leverage, a margin of safety is built into the standard formulas for calculating how strong a joint must be; these formulas are contained in an American Institute of Steel Construction specification that deals with joints in structural columns. What LeMessurier found in New York, however, was that the people on his team had disregarded the standard. They had chosen to define the diagonal wind braces not as columns but as trusses, which are exempt from the safety factor. As a result, the bolts holding the joints together were perilously few. "By then," LeMessurier says, "I was getting pretty shaky."

He later detailed these mistakes in a thirty-page document called "Project SERENE''; the acronym, both rueful and apt, stands for "Special Engineering Review of Events Nobody Envisioned."

http://www.openthefuture.com/wcarchive/2004/08/project_serene.html

https://people.duke.edu/~hpgavin/cee421/citicorp1.htm

BEFORE making a final judgment on how dangerous the bolted joints were, LeMessurier turned to a Canadian engineer named Alan Davenport, the director of the Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel Laboratory, at the University of Western Ontario, and a world authority on the behavior of buildings in high winds. During the Citicorp tower's design, Davenport had run extensive tests on scale models of the structure. Now LeMessurier asked him and his deputy to retrieve the relevant files and magnetic tapes. "If we were going to think about such things as the possibility of failure," LeMessurier says--the word "failure" being a euphemism for the Citicorp tower's falling down--"we would think about it in terms of the best knowledge that the state of the art can produce, which is what these guys could provide for me."

On July 26th, he flew to London, Ontario, and met with Davenport. Presenting his new calculations, LeMessurier asked the Canadians to evaluate them in the light of the original data. "And you have to tell me the truth," he added. "Don't go easy if it doesn't come out the right way." It didn't, and they didn't. The tale told by the wind-tunnel experts was more alarming than LeMessurier had expected. His assumption of a forty-per-cent increase in stress from diagonal winds was theoretically correct, but it could go higher in the real world, when storms lashed at the building and set it vibrating like a tuning fork. "Oh, my God," he thought, "now we've got that on top of an error from the bolts being under-designed." Refining their data further, the Canadians teased out wind-tunnel forces for each structural member in the building, with and without the tuned mass damper in operation; it remained for LeMessurier to interpret the numbers' meaning.

First, he went to Cambridge, where he talked to a trusted associate, and then he called his wife at their summer house in Maine. "Dorothy knew what I was up to," he says. "I told her, 'I think we've got a problem here, and I'm going to sit down and try to think about it.'" On July 28th, he drove to the northern shore of Sebago Lake, took an outboard motorboat a quarter of a mile across the water to his house on a twelve-acre private island, and worked through the wind-tunnel numbers, joint by joint and floor by floor.

The weakest joint, he discovered, was at the building's thirtieth floor; if that one gave way, catastrophic failure of the whole structure would follow. Next, he took New York City weather records provided by Alan Davenport and calculated the probability of a storm severe enough to tear that joint apart. His figures told him that such an event had a statistical probability of occurring as often as once every sixteen years--what meteorologists call a sixteen-year storm.

"That was very low, awesomely low," LeMessurier said, his voice hushed as if the horror of discovery were still fresh. "To put it another way, there was one chance in sixteen in any year, including that one." When the steadying influence of the tuned mass damper was factored in, the probability dwindled to one in fifty-five--a fifty-five-year storm. But the machine required electric current, which might fail as soon as a major storm hit.

As an experienced engineer, LeMessurier liked to think he could solve most structural problems, and the Citicorp tower was no exception. The bolted joints were readily accessible, thanks to Hugh Stubbins' insistence on putting the chevrons inside the building's skin rather than displaying them outside. With money and materials, the joints could be reinforced by welding heavy steel plates over them, like giant Band-Aids. But time was short; this was the end of July, and the height of the hurricane season was approaching. To avert disaster, LeMessurier would have to blow the whistle quickly on himself. That meant facing the pain of possible protracted litigation, probable bankruptcy, and professional disgrace. It also meant shock and dismay for Citicorp's officers and shareholders when they learned that the bank's proud new corporate symbol, built at a cost of a hundred and seventy-five million dollars, was threatened with collapse.

On the island, LeMessurier considered his options. Silence was one of them; only Davenport knew the full implications of what he had found, and he would not disclose them on his own. Suicide was another, if LeMessurier drove along the Maine Turnpike at a hundred miles an hour and steered into a bridge abutment, that would be that. But keeping silent required betting other people's lives against the odds, while suicide struck him as a coward's way out and--although he was passionate about nineteenth-century classical music--unconvincingly melodramatic. What seized him an instant later was entirely convincing, because it was so unexpected almost giddy sense of power. "I had information that nobody else in the world had," LeMessurier recalls. "I had power in my hands to effect extraordinary events that only I could initiate. I mean, sixteen years to failure--that was very simple, very clear-cut. I almost said, thank you, dear Lord, for making this problem so sharply defined that there's no choice to make.' '
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When We Don't Like the Solution, We Deny the Problem
 ►  https://science.slashdot.org/story/14/11/08/1416233/when-we-dont-like-the-solution-we-deny-the-problem

PUBLISHED November 6, 2014 IN Campus
Denying Problems When We Don’t Like the Solutions
By Duke Today Staff
https://today.duke.edu/2014/11/solutionaversion
A new study from Duke University finds that people will evaluate scientific evidence based on whether they view its policy implications as politically desirable. If they don't, then they tend to deny the problem even exists.  “Logically, the proposed solution to a problem, such as an increase in government regulation or an extension of the free market, should not influence one’s belief in the problem. However, we find it does,” said co-author Troy Campbell, a Ph.D. candidate at Duke's Fuqua School of Business. “The cure can be more immediately threatening than the problem.”
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http://www.openthefuture.com/wcarchive/2004/08/project_serene.html

 ►  https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/buildingbig/wonder/structure/citicorp.html

Northwest corner of Citicorp Building towering over St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, New York, New York

In 1978, the skyscraper's chief structural engineer, William LeMessurier, discovered a potentially fatal flaw in the building's design: the skyscraper's bolted joints were too weak to withstand 70-mile-per-hour wind gusts. With hurricane season fast approaching, LeMessurier took no chances. He convinced Citicorp officers to hire a crew of welders to repair the fragile building. For the next three months, a construction crew welded two-inch-thick steel plates over each of the skyscraper's 200 bolted joints, permanently correcting the problem.
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9:57
How Manhattan escaped tragedy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZhgTewKhTQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZhgTewKhTQ
flaxious
Published on Oct 21, 2010
   ____________________________________

https://faculty.arch.tamu.edu/media/cms_page_media/4433/Citicorp.pdf

Video unavailable
This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXpyukjQoGw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXpyukjQoGw
   ____________________________________

 16:41
MEGACITIES: Reality or Fiction? [Architecture in Sci-Fi]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5GL836kpls
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5GL836kpls
DamiLee
  Nov 11, 2022
Sign up to Milanote for free with no time-limit: https://milanote.com/damilee

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It was Greek (希臘語) to me (中文 - Chinese)

   ____________________________________

   This ‘’message‘’ was not meant for you.  

   ____________________________________

Tragedy of Julius Caesar (1599)
The Tragedy of Julius Caesar
Act I, Scene 2
A public place.              
---
[Flourish. Enter CAESAR; ANTONY, for the course; CALPURNIA, PORTIA, DECIUS BRUTUS, CICERO, BRUTUS, CASSIUS, and CASCA; a great crowd following, among them a Soothsayer]

     ••••   •••   ••••

    Cassius.  Did Cicero say any thing?
    Casca.  Ay, he spoke Greek.
    Cassius.  To what effect?
    Casca.  Nay, an I tell you that, Ill ne'er look you i' the
    face again: but those that understood him smiled at
    one another and shook their heads; but, for mine own
    part, it was Greek to me. I could tell you more
    news too: Marullus and Flavius, for pulling scarfs
    off Caesar's images, are put to silence. Fare you
    well. There was more foolery yet, if I could
    remember it.

    Cassius.  Will you sup with me to-night, Casca?
    Casca.  No, I am promised forth.
    Cassius.  Will you dine with me to-morrow?
    Casca.  Ay, if I be alive and your mind hold and your dinner 385
    worth the eating.
    Cassius.  Good: I will expect you.
    Casca.  Do so. Farewell, both.

Exit


source:
        https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=juliuscaesar&Act=1&Scene=2&Scope=scene
   ____________________________________

//    α β γ δ ε ζ η θ ι κ λ μ ν ξ ο π ρ σ (ς) τ υ φ χ ψ ω
//    Α Β Γ Δ Ε Ζ Η Θ Ι Κ Λ Μ Ν Ξ Ο Π Ρ Σ (ς) Τ Υ Φ Χ Ψ Ω 
//
//    Α α     alpha
//    Β β     beta
//    Γ γ     gamma
//    Δ δ     delta
//    Ε ε     epsilon
//    Ζ ζ     zeta
//    Η η     eta
//    Θ θ     theta
//    Ι ι     iota
//    Κ κ     kappa
//    Λ λ     lambda
//    Μ μ     mu
//    Ν ν     nu
//    Ξ ξ     xi
//    Ο ο     omicron
//    Π π     pi
//    Ρ ρ     rho
//    Σ σ (ς) sigma
//        The letter sigma ⟨Σ⟩ has two different lowercase forms, ⟨σ⟩ and ⟨ς⟩,
//        with ⟨ς⟩ being used in word-final position and ⟨σ⟩ elsewhere.
//       (In some 19th-century typesetting, ⟨ς⟩ was also used word-medially
//        at the end of a compound morpheme, e.g.
//                                "δυςκατανοήτων", marking the
//      morpheme boundary between "δυς-κατανοήτων" ("difficult to understand");
//                                "δυς-κατανοήτων" ("difficult to understand")
//        modern standard practice is to spell "δυσκατανοήτων" with a non-final
//        sigma.)[10]
//    Τ τ     tau
//    Υ υ     upsilon
//    Φ φ     phi 
//    Φ φ
//    Χ χ     chi
//    Ψ ψ     psi
//    Ω ω     omega
//
//    α β γ δ ε ζ η θ ι κ λ μ ν ξ ο π ρ σ (ς) τ υ φ χ ψ ω
//    Α Β Γ Δ Ε Ζ Η Θ Ι Κ Λ Μ Ν Ξ Ο Π Ρ Σ (ς) Τ Υ Φ Χ Ψ Ω 
   ____________________________________


“It’s Greek to me” or “it’s all Greek to me” is an English idiom meaning “I don’t understand it.” That could apply to videos or texts or lectures full of jargon, science, technology, complicated diagrams, dialect, or anything difficult to understand.

“It’s Greek to me” was an idiom, even by Shakespeare’s time, used by ordinary Elizabethans. In using it in a play Shakespeare was using an everyday expression that his audience would have related to.

The saying has a long history as an idiom, and has an interesting origin. The ancient Romans were bilingual. They spoke Latin as an everyday language but the “posh” people used Greek. And then, in the Middle Ages, the use of Greek began to decline and Latin remained as the language of both the educated and the ordinary people.

The scribes in the monasteries, working away, making copies of precious books in both ancient languages, began to hand the Greek books to Greek language experts as many young monks couldn’t understand Greek. They would make a note: “Graecum est; non legitur,” which means “This is Greek: it can’t be read.” It would then be copied by an expert.

“Greek” began to mean anything that can’t be understood. In that sense, it became an idiom, first in Latin, and then in English, as a direct translation from the Latin. It didn’t have to have something to do with the Greek language, but with anything someone didn’t understand.

                              “Graecum est; non legitur”  [Latin.]
         “This is Greek [therefore] it can not be read.”  [English.]
"Αυτό είναι ελληνικό [επομένως] δεν μπορεί να διαβαστεί." [Greek.]
                                                          [translate.google.com]

"Αυτό είναι ελληνικό [επομένως] δεν μπορεί να διαβαστεί." [Greek.]
                               [https://www.bing.com/translator/]                   “it was greek to me.” => ήταν ελληνικό για μένα.

source:
        https://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/quotes/famous/its-all-greek-to-me/
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graecum_est;_non_legitur
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_to_me
   ____________________________________

“This is Greek [therefore] it cannot be read.” => "Haec Graecae [ergo] autem non legitur".

"Haec Graecae [ergo] autem non legitur".  => "Αυτός ο Έλληνας δεν θα το κάνει
ανάγνωση"

“This is Greek [therefore] it cannot be read.”  => "Αυτό είναι ελληνικό [επομένως] δεν μπορεί να διαβαστεί."


"Αυτό είναι ελληνικό [επομένως] δεν μπορεί να διαβαστεί." => "Haec Graecae [igitur] non legitur".

"Αυτό είναι ελληνικό [επομένως] δεν μπορεί να διαβαστεί." => "This is Greek [therefore] cannot be read."


"Haec Graecae [igitur] non legitur". => "Αυτό το ελληνικό δεν μπορεί να διαβάσει."

"Αυτό το ελληνικό δεν μπορεί να διαβάσει." => "Haec Graecae autem non legitur".
"Αυτό το ελληνικό δεν μπορεί να διαβάσει." => "This Greek can not read."

"Haec Graecae autem non legitur" => "This will not read Greek"
"Haec Graecae autem non legitur" => "This - [is] Greek - [it] will not read"

"Haec Graecae autem non legitur" => "Αυτό δεν θα διαβάσει Ελληνικά"
"Αυτό δεν θα διαβάσει Ελληνικά"  => "This will not read Greek"

"Είναι ελληνικό. Διαβάζω " => "Est Graeca. Lego"
"Είναι ελληνικό. Διαβάζω " => "It's Greek. I read"


source:
        translate.google.com
   ____________________________________

“it was greek to me.” => ήταν ελληνικό για μένα.

“This is Greek [therefore] it cannot be read.” => Αυτό είναι ελληνικό [επομένως] δεν μπορεί να διαβαστεί.

source:
        https://www.bing.com/translator/
   ____________________________________

   Westworld (HBO)

   Tell us, have you ever question the nature of your reality?
   what do you think of this world?
   Did you find what you were looking for?
   They can not see that which will cause them pain.

   First tell us, have you ever question the nature of your reality? 
   Did you find what you were looking for?
   The thing that you are looking for, was not meant for you. 

   The message was not meant for you. 
   ____________________________________

   “It is difficult to get a man to understand
    something when his salary depends upon
    his not understanding it.”
               ── Upton Sinclair  *13

       *13  from the film, “An Inconvenient Truth”, featuring former Vice
            President Al Gore, Democratic Presidential Candidate

    No one is going to [knowingly] volunteer information that will destroy their economy or livelihood.


   Westworld (HBO)

   Tell us, have you ever question the nature of your reality?
   what do you think of this world?
   Did you find what you were looking for?
   They can not see that which will cause them pain.
   ____________________________________

     “how the stories we tell ourselves about the world
      invisibly shape our beliefs in profound and often
      stubborn ways ― even if they are completely wrong.”;
            ── Will Storr, The Unpersuadables (2014).

   “But you need to remember there's what people wanna hear, there's what people wanna believe, there's everything else, then there's the truth. The truth means responsibility. Exactly, which is why everyone dreads it.”;--The International (2009 film, political thriller dramma) directed by Tom Tykwer, written by Eric Warren Singer, produced by Charles Roven, Richard Suckle, Llyod Phillips, production designer Uli Hanisch. ([ if you like The International, then you might want to check out, The Infiltrator (2015), a film by Brad Furman, based on the book by Robert Mazur, screenplay by Ellen Brown Furman ])


  • http://hectorcorrea.com/blog/the-design-of-design/40
  • “If a design, particularly a team design, is to have conceptual integrity, one should name the scare resource explicitly, track it publicly, control it firmly.”
  • “The Design of Design – essays from a computer scientist”, Frederick Brook, chapter 10, on page 119
   ____________________________________
   ____________________________________

   Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet consectetur adipisci velit (translation: "Neither is there anyone who loves, pursues or desires pain itself because it is pain");--sections 1.10.32–3 of Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum (On the Ends of Goods and Evils, or alternatively [About] The Purposes of Good and Evil).[2], H. Rackham's 1914 translation; From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum

https://www.latin-online-translation.com/latin-english/translate
   ____________________________________

   "ιχθύς" (ichthýs)
    ιχθύς
   The symbol was adopted by early Christians as a secret symbol. It is now known colloquially as the "sign of the fish" or the "Jesus fish".[2]
conscious symbol of a witnessing Christian
   Greek     Latin    Spanish    English
   ΙΧΘΥΣ      Pisces    pescado   (fish)
    Ιησούς    Jesus     Jesús     (Jesus)
    Χριστός   Christus  Cristo    (Christ)
    Ο Θεός    Deus      dios      (God's)
    Υιός      Filius    hijo      (Son)
    Σωτήρας   Salvator  salvador  (Savior)

source:
        https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthys
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthys
        https://bing.com/translate/        
        https://www.latin-online-translation.com/latin-english/translate
 <-------------------------------------------------------------------------->

In Ancient Greek the word praxis (πρᾶξις) referred to activity engaged in by free people. The philosopher Aristotle held that there were three basic activities of humans: theoria (thinking), poiesis (making), and praxis (doing).  Corresponding to these activities were three types of knowledge: theoretical, the end goal being truth; poietical, the end goal being production; and practical, the end goal being action.[2]  Aristotle further divided the knowledge derived from praxis into ethics, economics, and politics. He also distinguished between eupraxia (εὐπραξία, "good praxis")[3] and dyspraxia (δυσπραξία, "bad praxis, misfortune").[4]

source:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxis_(process)
   ____________________________________
   ____________________________________

Western European reception of Greek ideas via Arabian tradition

Arabic logicians had inherited Greek ideas after they had invaded and conquered Egypt and the Levant. Their translations and commentaries on these ideas worked their way through the Arab West into Spain and Sicily, which became important centers for this transmission of ideas. [1]

Western Arabic translations of Greek works (found in Iberia and Sicily) originates in the Greek sources preserved by the Byzantines. These transmissions to the Arab West took place in two main stages.

source:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_of_the_Greek_Classics
   ____________________________________
   ____________________________________

The "Recovery of Aristotle" (or Rediscovery) refers to the copying or re-translating of most of Aristotle's books (of ancient Greece), from Greek or Arabic text into Latin, during the Middle Ages, of the Latin West.[1][2]  The Recovery of Aristotle spanned about 100 years, from the middle 12th century into the 13th century, and copied or translated over 42 books (see: Corpus Aristotelicum), including Arabic texts from Arabic authors, where the previous Latin versions had only two books in general circulation: Categories and On Interpretation (De Interpretatione).[1]  Translations had been due to several factors, including limited techniques for copying books, lack of access to the Greek texts, and few people who could read ancient Greek, while the Arabic versions were more accessible.  The recovery of Aristotle's texts is considered a major period in mediaeval philosophy, leading to Aristotelianism.[1][2][3]

source:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_of_Aristotle
 <-------------------------------------------------------------------------->
 
Writing

The act of writing is the graphic representation of language, it is not purely the visualisation of language, as that would then include sign language, and body language. It may have been noted that my use of the term “graphic” is rather clumsy, given the fact that it is derived from the Greek word for writing, grapho. But, much like the ancient word grapho, the modern English word ‘graphic’ refers to both image-making and writing (Elsner, 2004).

Just as authors of ekphrases were playing off of this dual meaning of grapho to mean both write and draw, the Archaic Greeks were similarly blurring the lines (or perhaps simply expressing that their own conceptual lines were blurred) through the deployment of writing on painted pottery. Many Geometric vases have writing in bands running horizontally, occupying the space that would otherwise be filled with a key pattern.


Reading

One of the most important aspects of reading in ancient Greece is that it was read aloud (Svenbro, 1993). This may seem a rather mundane and insignificant point to make, but it actually reveals a great deal about the Greek language. At the most basic level, this collection of Greek letters was the first ever alphabet. That is, it was the first writing system from which you could entirely reconstruct the spoken language for which it was designed (Powell, 1991). Furthermore, the fact that Archaic Greeks read aloud has great significance for Archaic Greek reading, as written words cannot exist simply in a verbal context. As Ong (1982) points out, when read aloud, writing is lifted from its page and included within a spatial context as well as affecting, or being affected by, the position of the reader’s body. Movement around a statue base, the turning of an inscribed object in the hands, or craning one’s neck to see a monumental inscription of a treasury’s contents all have an effect on the way the text is perceived. Similarly, by reading aloud, the reader has no option but to perform for the people around them, announcing the name of the deceased or donor, declaring the ownership of an object to a man or a god, and causing them to publicly assert these statements for themselves. It is also possible that the act of reading aloud would cause the reader to adopt the voice of the writing’s person, ventriloquizing the reader or perhaps allowing them to play the role of the deceased or some other absent person.

We can see then, that that with only just two simple facts: writing is ‘graphic’ and reading was done aloud, that the acts of reading and writing in Archaic Greece were far more complicated than we might first think, sparking a greater degree of self-consciousness in their enactors than those quotidian acts do for us today.


Nick Brown is a PhD candidate in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick. His research looks into the ways in which early Greek sculptures and their inscriptions interact with one another. In particular, he is investigating the significance of the body of the sculpture being the site of inscription. More broadly, his interests within Classics focus on the theme of art and text from Greek pottery to ekphrastic literature.

source:
        https://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/classicaltexting/entry/writing_and_reading/  <-------------------------------------------------------------------------->
codex (book)

source:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua  <-------------------------------------------------------------------------->