800 year old Magna Carta manuscript reveals its secrets | Hacker News Reader

800 year old Magna Carta manuscript reveals its secrets

britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk

68 pointsThevet19 comments

Alas, this article does not reveal its secrets.

Does anybody know if the 'new' text is expected to differ from what is in the other 3 extant copies?

My bet is a "no" otherwise I think historians would be going bonkers over it and it would probably make CNN front page style material.

* - what I mean is that they probably won't find an unseen paragraph of text outlining entirely new provisions not previously known. Typographical differences and variations of spelling I'm sure may be found.

"In February 2015, the four manuscripts will be brought together for the first time in history for a special 3-day event, which will allow further academic study of them side by side..."

Maybe I'm being paranoid but it seems risky to bring the remaining four manuscripts together in one place.

I had the same thought. Occupational hazard (security consultant).

If security is properly managed, risk should be acceptable, in the sense that only the most unlikely umanageable disasters would remain, and the impacts of the worst of these would be such that few if any of us would miss the Magna Cartas for a long, long time.

If security is properly managed. I sure hope they've done thorough TRAs (threat-risk assessments) with independent review.

It's not like bad things never happen, either.

In my home town this happened: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/history-in-ruins...

Did they determine whether or not construction of a subway line beneath the same street where the archive is located was the cause?

They determined that the construction tunnel was miraculously missing (as in, according to the paper trail, they were supposed to be there but weren't) a vast number of the pumps that were meant to keep the gravel from being washed away by the ground water (leading to the gravel being washed away, hollowing out the ground and, well, gravity took its course).

Thanks to bureaucracy and politics, it's still not clear who is officially to blame, although it's mind-numbingly obvious that it's a mix of really stupid decisions in the planning stages ("let's run the subway line right underneath an extremely important building through an area that almost entirely consists of gravel and water") and corruption at some level of the building companies (which seems to be SOP for public building projects in Germany).

Let's just say that most parties involved are pretty happy the investigation hasn't really been going anywhere over the past five years, which is entirely coincidentally enough time to allow all politicians that might be blamed to transition to greener pastures (communal elections in the Land are held every five years).

Is your concern that if the four Magna Carta copies are destroyed, power reverts to the British King?

>> subsequently staff at the British Museum Library used 19th century techniques to try to flatten and mount it, which has contributed to its current condition today rendering the text very difficult to see.

The article says today's specialists have the answer, when previously they were amateur: preservation specialists are having to glean as much as they can, since previous staff didn't really know how to preserve something this important, patronizingly calling them 19th century techniques. I imagine in another few hundred years the specialists of the time will call today's techniques damaging.

It's a common habit to forget learning is continual and we should never stop questioning and challenging the so-called experts. They should stop digging up Dinosaur bones and think twice (or more) before excavating historical sites.

> patronizingly calling them 19th century > techniques. I imagine in another few hundred > years the specialists of the time will call > today's techniques damaging.

How is it patronizing to mention that techniques from more than a 100 years ago are less effective than what we could do with today's knowledge/techniques? I would hope that specialists in a few hundred years time would be able to spot certain damaging practices that we're not aware of today.

Was there some derogatory comment that I missed about how amateurish experts of the past were?

> I imagine in another few hundred years the specialists of the time will call today's techniques damaging.

They have actually stopped or delayed certain archaeological excavations because of exactly this issue. The Terracotta Warriors are the first example that comes to mind. The pieces are all elaborately painted, but current preservation techniques have proved ineffective in protecting the paint after they are first unearthed. They are intentionally leaving some areas unexcavated in the hopes that future preservation techniques will be more advanced and hopefully be more successful.

But historical sites are disappearing at the rate cities develop. There is no waiting.

Previous preservationists were often actually amateurs i.e. civilians with no professional training. Today's experts are certainly far more capable than previous amateurs.

Surely another century of science will be able to do a better job. But that's moot. The documents have to be treated as we best know how today.

I think about this a lot. In the very near future, we'll have wanted all video to also include a pan or something of the surroundings so that a 3D model could be created. Who knows in the future a technical for spectral analysis could describe materials better and we'll have wished all video included at least one sunlight shot for reference... anyway... I think about this issue a lot, even if my thinking is ill-informed BS, it is all still a curious idea, so thanks for posting this.

I had a similar thought in a recent discussion about Stonehenge [1]. We have to draw the line somewhere, although I guess even today's "non-destructive" could appear to be desecration to future experts.

Bonus points because I visited Stonehenge and and Salisbury Cathedral Magna Carta on the same day.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8210452

So...what does it say? Where is a high-res image of the revealed text?

I don't think anyone cares since it is just one of several copies and everyone knows what it says, except for maybe a transcription error or two by the scribe.

Indeed this sort of historical preservation seems to me rather like my own inability to throw things out. The manuscript got burnt, we know what it said, why go to all this trouble to re-reveal the wording?

I can see useful practice has been had, beyond that it seems like a waste of time and resources?

I was hoping for something along the lines of, "King John actually a captain of an outer-space starship known as Enterprise."

Beethoven was an alien spy: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BeethovenWasAnAli...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com