Sir John Gurdon, the 2012 Nobel prizewinning scientist who, until recently, was known only within the scientific community for successfully cloning frog tadpoles in 1962, was asked this week in a BBC interview why he thought that the world, several decades later, had taken so readily to Dolly the Sheep, yet had snubbed his amphibians at the time. He put it down to a heightened interest in the subject, thanks largely to progress on other fronts as well as to the size and significance of the aforementioned ovine. This, of course, is the answer of a scientist. A publicist would give an entirely different one: “The frog wasn’t called Dolly, that’s why!”

What’s in a name? The simple act of coming into being is usually associated with naming. Many ancient cultures have naming myths, in which all things are literally “called” into existence. Until you have a name – and a certificate of birth bearing it – your life hangs in the balance of legal jeopardy, which is a very close cousin to physical danger. But the corollary is also true: once something HAS a name, it is generally thought to exist, even in the teeth of the evidence. Such has been the case of “Aether” as a heavenly substance, as well as “Purgatory” and “Limbo”, once considered poorly-furnished waiting rooms prior to final judgment and hellfire or the non-judgmental paradise of the un-baptized child. “Atlantis” and “Utopia” are also doing very well, even as “Timbuktu”, a place we once thought mythological, is currently having its tenuous grip on reality crushed by Islamists. Meanwhile “St George” has had not only his sainthood revoked, but his very existence annulled by no less a person than the Pope and yet he still seems to be doing all right, if only in effigy and heraldry.

On a similar tack, German historians, and they are surely the most thorough, are busy questioning whether Europe’s founding father, the Emperor Charlemagne, really existed or whether he was not merely a historical figment created by Emperor Otto III to serve as a heroic ancestor after he and Pope Sylvester had quite arbitrarily placed the year 1000 at the beginning of Otto’s reign. This may seem preposterous. What! Invent the middle ages? Yet such a creative conspiracy to justify the seizing of power through spurious heritage would have been quite familiar to the Caesars and the pharaohs, who regularly went in for purging history of anathema. And we can be sure that Hitler, had he won the War, would not only have sought to project his Third Reich a thousand years into the future but would have sooner or later justified that hegemony with a heroic millennial heritage of previous empires, more or less manufactured by historians, whether willing or unwilling. And who could have prevented him?

For their part, the Chinese have never been averse to creating history, having traditionally regarded it as one of the prerogatives of the winning team, and the Russians have had their history – at least as it is taught in schools – rewritten several times: by Peter the Great, by Stalin, by Brezhnev and now by Vladimir Putin. To give a cogent example from the recent past, the entire Pahlavi “dynasty” of Iran was created in historical retrospect to justify Reza Shah’s seizure of power in a military coup. Thus there is nothing especially spectacular – although it is rather daring – about writing three centuries into existence.

Were it not for the fact that this has happened, as it were, on our watch, here in Europe in a period we consider quite well known, we could shrug it off. After all, would it really make much of a difference to any of us living today to know that the date is actually January 5th 1717 rather than January the 16th 2013? We’d still have had Steve Jobs and Jimi Hendrix, Shakespeare (though perhaps not his plays), Brunel, Sibelius, Turner and Picasso. We’d still have our technology, just a bit earlier than expected that’s all. And it would make us look a whole lot smarter to have done in only 700 years what we previously needed a thousand to do!

Of course, correcting the error now would not change the present. But had the iconoclasm never been committed, our present would be vastly changed. The baton would have passed more naturally from the Romans to the Franks. The Holy Roman Empire and its development into the rule of the Hapsburgs would have been very different. There might never have been a Hundred Years War, nor a Turkish army at the gates of Vienna. And an altered development of doctrine by the Papacy might have circumvented the need for the Reformation. Thus, no Catholic wars, no Franco-Prussian War, no First and hence no Second World War. Oh, and since there would not have been an East-West division of Christendom, the Russians – whose attention would not have been distracted by uncomfortable events in Western Europe – might have discovered America a century before Columbus … in 1096.


Continued on 22 January >


© Edwin Drood, January 2013



Illustration after a purported portrait of Christopher Columbus (around 1446-1506),
painted in 1519 by Sebastiano del Piombo (1485/6–1547).
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.