Unsolved historical mysteries that keep me up at night

Writing a recent post about secret medieval tunnels got me pondering all of the things that have been lost to the vast, gaping void of the past. Lady History is a cruel mistress, and here are three of the most intriguing questions she stubbornly refuses to answer.

1. The Codex Gigas

The Codex Gigas (Latin for “Giant Book”) is an early 13th century manuscript created in the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice in what is now the Czech Republic. Its contents include a Latin Bible, two texts on the history of the Jews, a copy of Isidore’s Etymologies, various medical works, and a chronicle of Bohemia. The Codex Gigas is said to be the largest medieval manuscript in existence, measuring some 36 inches long, 20 inches wide, and almost 9 inches thick, and weighing in at a staggering 165 pounds. Also, it is said to have been written by Satan himself.

Caretaker Gustavsson with the Codex Gigas at the National Library of Sweden in 1929

In addition to its massive size, the Codex has several remarkable features that have given rise to this legend. To begin with, a manuscript of this significance would have typically been the work of several scribes whose contributions would be distinguishable through differences in their handwriting. Not so for the Codex Gigas, whose 310 leaves (620 pages in the modern sense) show exactly one handwriting style. For a single person to complete a such a large book would have taken over 20 years of constant work, during which time the average person’s writing style would be expected to change or vary at least a little bit, but there is no sign of that here. From the first page to the last, the lettering is impressively consistent. Even more remarkably, the Codex contains no mistakes whatsoever, something almost unheard of for a book written entirely by human hands.

However, the Codex Gigas’ most famous feature is its large illustration of Satan.

This arresting full-body portrait occupies an entire page and is at the heart of the legend behind the book’s production, a legend that may be almost as old as the Codex itself. Per the National Library of Sweden’s website:

Already in the Middle Ages, a legend was told of a monk in Podlažice who was walled up while still alive for his sins. He tried to expiate his guilt by writing the world’s largest book in a single night. When he realised that the task was beyond his powers, he called on the Devil for help. The Evil One assisted him, had his portrait painted in the book, and demanded the monk’s soul in return. The day was saved for the monk, but he never had another moment’s peace. Eventually he turned to the Virgin Mary and prayed for salvation. The Virgin extended him a helping hand, but the penitent died the very moment he was supposed to have been freed from his contract with the Devil.

The theories

Most scholars have agreed that the best assumption is that the Codex Gigas really was written by one scribe working relentlessly for several decades. The myth of the book’s Satanic origins was perhaps inspired by an inscription in its calendar of deaths mentioning a man named Hermanus Inclusus, or “Herman the Recluse”. This could have referred to someone who lived as an anchorite, a special type of religious lifestyle that involved walling oneself permanently into a cell attached to a church or abbey as an act of devotion to God. The occasion of an anchorite’s walling-up was commonly celebrated with a funeral ritual symbolising their exit from the earthly realm and entry into a more spiritual mode of existence. The rest of the anchorite’s life would be spent in contemplation, prayer, and other forms of devotional activity. Writing out the largest book ever made would be a perfect activity for one who had made the decision to be walled away—and it was indeed the anchorite’s own decision to make, not a punishment for atrocious crimes.

Enclosing of an anchoress (source: Corpus Christie College, Cambridge, MS 79, fol. 96r)

This explanation plausibly accounts for the Codex, but the book’s singular nature still makes it one of the most intriguing objects from the Middle Ages. Although it is plausible for one person to have created the Codex Gigas, our so-called “Herman the Recluse” must have been a truly strange (and indeed reclusive) guy in order to devoted such painstaking attention to such a demanding task for 20 or more years. Who was he and why did he do such a thing? Was he a mystic? A madman? Repenting for something horrible? Or, as some have theorised, simply a historical example of someone on the autism spectrum? We’ll likely never know.

Read more about the Codex Gigas and browse a fully digitised version here.

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2. The Pictish Beast

The Picts were a mysterious group of people who emerged in northern Scotland some time during the early Middle Ages and were probably completely assimilated into the Gaelic culture of the south of Scotland by the 10th century AD. While their own artwork seems to depict people with books, we have no surviving written records from the Picts whatsoever. Almost everything about their culture is up for debate: where they came from, what sort of language they spoke, whether they really covered their bodies in tattoos like the Romans said they did. Researchers have been able to glean a few shreds of information about Pictish culture from the scant comments written by their contemporaries and from place names that are thought to be Pictish in origin. However, our richest source about their lives comes in the form of the hundreds of monumental stone carvings they left behind.

Stones from Aberlemno showing a common Pictish symbol—the two connected discs intersected by a Z with squiggly ends. The crescent-and-V shape at the top of the right stone is also a common symbol.

These carvings are themselves a source of great debate on account of the cryptic symbols that they feature—arrays of geometric shapes that can look random at first glance but recur over and over on different stones. The most easily identifiable elements are depictions of the fauna of northern Scotland: wolves, boar, fish, stags, and other animals that roamed the British Isles a thousand years ago. However, some 40% of Pictish animal carvings are representations of a completely unidentifiable creature known today simply as the “Pictish Beast”.

Most animals carved by the Picts adhere to a relatively naturalistic style, making them easy to recognise as real Scottish wildlife. The Pictish Beast, by contrast, seems like something from another world. The ends of its limbs are scroll-like, its snout is long and pointed, and its head is adorned with a thin, trailing tendril. To make things even more confusing, it appears in a wide variety of contexts, alongside humans, animals, fantastical creatures, and abstract symbols. Sometimes the Pictish Beast appears tiny, but other times it seems to dwarf the other inhabitants of the scene.

The theories

Many people gravitate toward the idea that the Pictish Beast represents a real life sea creature such as a seal, whale, or dolphin. Its blunt limbs could be flippers, perhaps, and its head adornment a spout of water from a blowhole? Nevertheless, this still doesn’t explain why the Picts would choose to abandon their usual naturalistic style for this animal in particular, especially because their drawings of fish are easily identifiable as such.

I personally favour the explanation that the Pictish Beast is a mythical creature whose meaning was lost alongside many of the other distinctive symbols used by Picts. This is probably the least controversial theory, since it makes the fewest assumptions about the Beast’s significance, but it leaves so many questions unanswered! Was there a legend behind the Beast’s origin? Did it have a name? Why was it forgotten? The Beast wasn’t the only mythical creature used in Pictish art, but unlike the twining fish-horses and dragon-snakes that appear in other cultures and eras, it seems to have been completely unique to the Picts. Most likely, it evolved in Scotland and was forgotten in Scotland, just like Pictish culture itself. The Beast isn’t just a mystery in its own right, I think—it’s an emblem of how little we know about this long-dead society.

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3. The Sator square

In 1936, archaeologists excavating the Roman city of Pompeii found something very strange buried under the ash. It was a graffito in the form of a 5 by 5 grid of letters scratched into a column some time before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 62 AD.

This wasn’t the first time such a square had been seen. In fact, the so-called “Sator square” (it is often written with the words reversed so that the first line is SATOR) has been found in countless contexts throughout history, including:

• On Coptic papyrus scrolls

• Carved into walls, doorways, and floors of churches, houses, and public spaces from the early Middle Ages onwards

• In a Carolingian Bible

• Recommended in medieval medical books as a charm or healing spell. Sometimes, the patient is told to chant the words, but a variation involves etching the square into butter or cheese on a piece of bread to be eaten as a cure for all sorts of maladies

• Carved into or written on discs used to extinguish fires in early modern Germany

• I spent several hours trying to verify claims that the square was carved into skulls that defendants would swear oaths on in Germany’s secret Vehmic courts during the late medieval and early modern period. I was able to find evidence that such skulls had been auctioned off but would hesitate to fully trust their authenticity

The facade of Siena cathedral (13th century)

An amphora fragment from the 2nd century AD found in Manchester, England.

A German fire disc.

However, no one knows what on earth the square means. It seems to be in Latin, but the second word, AREPO, is not known from any other context. It is a hapax legomenon. AREPO could be read as a proper name, in which case the square yields a rough translation as “The farmer Arepo works his wheels”, but this phrase doesn’t seem to hold any significance. Anways, early versions of the square usually have the words in reverse order, as do some later examples. Could this suggest that the square isn’t meant to be read as a meaningful sentence? Is it possible that the individual words are a pretext for a concealed message?

For years, the Sator square was assumed to have originated amongst early Christians as a secret symbol of their faith, since its letters can be rearranged into a cross comprised of the word “paternoster” intersecting itself. The leftover As and Os were taken as alphas and omegas, a pair of letters associated with Jesus and God the Father in the Book of Revelation. In this case, AREPO was merely a nonsense word that served no purpose beyond completing the square, and the other words in the grid were similarly arbitrary.

The 1936 discovery put this theory to rest. There were almost certainly no Christians living in Pompeii as early as 62 AD, and regardless all Christian writings were at that point in Greek. Since then, the Sator square’s origin has continued to be an open question. Particularly baffling is the fact that the square seems to have become associated with Christians from a very early date—if it was a pagan creation, how did this happen?

The theories

The ancient Romans loved puns and word games, and palindromes were a particular favourite. They combined this with their love of defacing public property, leaving many witty palindromic graffiti inscriptions on public walls and columns. That ROMA spelled backwards is AMOR (love) was ever entertaining to those patriots, who sometimes extended the palindrome to ROMA SUMMUS AMOR—Rome supreme love. There was even ROMA TIBI SUBITO MOTIBUS IBIT AMOR—Rome, to you love will come suddenly with passion.

Palindromic word squares like the Sator square are extremely hard to find—in fact, computer analysis by Charles Douglas Gunn in 1969 showed that no such square could be constructed with existing five-letter Latin words, but that the Sator/Rotas square was the one that most satisfactorily aligned with grammatically correct Roman text. He agreed that AREPO was probably just a way of completing the square. Perhaps the Sator square was simply one of many Roman word games and it had no real purpose beyond seeming clever. In this case, its use could have carried over into the Christian era simply because it was fun and iconic, like a millennia-old “cool S”. It doesn’t seem like such a logical leap to imagine that special words have special power, so the magical associations of the Sator square could simply be a product of its uniqueness.

A more recent theory that has found some support is that the square has Jewish origins, since it is known that large numbers of Latin-speaking Jews were living in Pompeii at the time of its destruction. This theory relies on some fairly esoteric and cryptic interpretation, so I recommend you check out Nicolas Vinel’s excellent paper on the subject.

Dozens of other explanations for the Sator square have been proposed, from ancient cult rituals to maps of the wind to Satanic numerology. Like most other historical mysteries, the chances are slim that we’ll ever find an answer so satisfying it puts the debate to rest. For the forseeable future, then, the Sator square will retain its air of mystique, even though it may have just been the result of some bored Romans having fun. However, I have yet to hear of anyone testing the square’s properties when scratched into the butter on their toast, which seems to me a gap in the literature. I think I know what I’ll have for breakfast tomorrow...