The Great Stemma



The Great Stemma: a Late Antique diagram of Christ's descent from Adam

Jean-Baptiste Piggin, Hamburg

Introduction to Data Visualization

To anyone interested in visualizations of abstract information, a diagram in Florence at the Laurentian Library must surely be the richest and most spectacular artefact of the entire first millennium. Marking a milestone in the history of writing systems, it maps biblical history onto a great chart. Its rediscovery offers evidence of a previously unsuspected graphic-arts technique in patristic narrative writing.

The Latin document we are concerned with spans eight folios of an 11th-century codex, Plutei 20.54 (ff 38r-45v). At first sight it presents a genealogy, starting from Adam and ending with Jesus Christ, in a form that seems to resemble a modern family tree.[i]

The extended diagram, which until recently had been thought to date from no earlier than the 8th century, and perhaps to have been first drafted as late as the 10th century, contains about 540 biblical and historical names, mostly encased in roundels that are connected to their neighbours by lines. The persons named include:

• patriarchs in Genesis,

• kings of Judah and Israel,

• minor prophets,

• Roman emperors.

This genre, a large-scale data visualization, is extremely rare and perhaps unique in any literature of the first millennium, yet it would evince little surprise among modern readers precisely because information graphics are nowadays such a common feature in newspapers and textbooks.

Figure 1: snippets and lines

Data visualization is a feature of advanced writing systems. Snippets of text are made into closed entities, which can then be grouped on the page into sets or strung together with connecting lines. Different kinds of connectors represent relationships among the entities such as sequence or hierarchy. The chick-bird-egg example in Fig. 1 is a simple but powerful way of describing the idea of a cycle.

Visualization is a practice that we acquire as we learn literacy, but are only dimly conscious of possessing. Once the notational conventions are understood, the boxes and lines can be elided: white space can be used to create virtual containers, and position alone can convey the relationships between the nodes.

Such drawings are often described as "back of a napkin" or "back of an envelope" in style, suggesting informality, but are also a foundation of PowerPoint presentations and are of interest in the field of information science, where the term mind mapping is sometimes applied to the visual conventions that the drawings are based on.

The road map, on which highways connect towns, is the implicit model, and perhaps was even the early inspiration for such drawings. Indeed, in information architecture, the connections between such data are called paths.

The most frequently used pattern in the paths between such texts is that of hierarchy, because visualization is more effective at communicating the intricacies of hierarchy than linear speech is. The principle of hierarchy brings visual order to things as various as corporate organization charts, cladograms in biology, flow diagrams for military planning and family trees. Formally, genealogies are no different from other hierarchies.

Any evidence that the pre-medieval world was familiar with such visualization techniques would not only shake a still widespread perception that Graeco-Roman intellectual life was discourse-centric, but also tend to contradict the view that Antique technical draftsmanship and mapping skills were poor and impracticable.

Figure 2: document overview

The Florence Diagram

The Florence diagram makes sophisticated use of this mind mapping technique. This article will investigate the diagram's:

• text,

• visual logic,

• date of origin, and

• role in Christian controversy.

My re-assembly of the sections in the codex into a continuous chart appears to be the first presentation of the diagram as a more or less single unit for 1,000 years. I have also made some organizational alterations vis-a-vis the codex, based on evidence about how the document is most likely to have been spatially arranged in its archetypal form.

Fig. 2 shows a reconstruction of the diagram, here arranged in two parts for a modicum of legibility. A register has been added to mark the stages of bible history that are represented, from the Creation to the Incarnation. The entire diagram was perhaps two metres wide when originally drawn.

Figure 3: Family of Esau detail

Fig. 3 shows a detail from the manuscript: the family of Esau. A literal reading of Gen. 26, 28 and 36 indicates that Esau had five wives and five sons. The connections that radiate away from Esau here are of three sorts. One marks his descent from Isaac. One is a trunk connector to Esau's wives, indicating that all five share a common relationship with him. Five are ramifications, from the Latin term, ramus, for branch, to his offspring. Together, the scheme constitutes a stemma, roughly equivalent to what by the Renaissance period had come to be called a family tree.[ii]

Persius and Isidore indicate to us that the terms ramus and stemma were an established pair in Latin usage:

Persius: An deceat pulmonem rumpere uentis stemmate quod Tusco ramum millesime ducis censoremue tuum uel quod trabeate salutas? (Saturae 3.28)

Isidore: Stemmata dicuntur ramusculi, quos advocati faciunt in genere, cum gradus cognationum partiuntur ... (Orig. IX.vi.28)

A readable arrangement of the diagram, in a single strip where zooming in reveals the fine detail, can be found on the stemmahist website. The text and roundels were retraced using vector-drawing software, which offers the added benefit of separating the content into searchable layers, which can made visible or invisible at will so as to facilitate study and discussion. Fig. 4 shows a schematic redrawing of the family of Esau.[iii]

Because the Florence diagram is an assembly of many such stemmata into a kind of super-stemma, I call it the Great Stemma for short.

Figure 4: Esau family redrawn

No author's name can be discovered for the Great Stemma. Moreover, it carries no title. A heading, Genealogia ab Adam usque ad Christum per ordines linearum, appears on at least two medieval Spanish copies, but this appears to be merely a librarians' descriptive label. The Great Stemma bears no date of authorship, although the Florence copy does have a dated text attached to its final folio. This is the Ordo Annorum Mundi, a document to be discussed in more detail below, in a recension of 672 A.D. That date can be adopted as a terminus ante quem before we seek evidence of an earlier date.[iv]

It is astonishing that the Great Stemma has received such limited scholarly attention. Two Vetus Latina scholars, Bonifatius Fischer and Teófilo Ayuso Marazuela, quoted extensively from the document in the course of their research on the early western bible.[v]

Several art historians, including Wilhelm Neuss, John Williams and Yolanta Zaluska, have studied how medieval Spain decorated it.[vi]

Most recently, the cultural historian Christiane Klapisch-Zuber took a closer look at a late copy, from Gascony, but rapidly dismissed it as an affront to the principles of ‘graphic semiology’, and argued that no coherent biblical genealogical diagram existed before a medieval work, the Compendium, devised by Peter of Poitiers.[vii]

Specialists from other fields have yet to begin picking over the rich fruit that the Great Stemma contains. Until I published an online collation in 2010, there had not, to my knowledge, been any complete edition of the Great Stemma text, let alone a graphic rendering.

Zaluska laid the foundations for this work more than 25 years ago by defining recensions and giving them five principal sigla: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Sigma. She based her analysis on copies that are found in a cluster of Spanish bibles and as frontispieces to the Apocalypse commentary by the Spanish monk Beatus of Liébana.

Unfortunately she initially left out of account the Florence manuscript, which contains the earliest text, without illumination and largely free of medieval contaminations.

Zaluska did notice her omission, and very late in the day drew her readers' attention to the Florence manuscript, but she has not published on the topic since.[viii]

I have denoted the Florence diagram with a new siglum, Epsilon, and it has become the basis for my electronic edition of the Great Stemma and my effort to reconstitute the lost archetype of the work.

The 18 manuscripts are listed below with their common long names, Zaluska’s adaptations of the Neuss sigla, archival locations and finally the recension to which they belong. They are tabulated by their codex type (the Commentary of Beatus, a bible or a history) and date, with the Morgan codex, penned in about 940, believed to be the oldest extant manuscript.

Table: The Manuscripts

| |Beatus | | | | |

|1 |Morgan |M |New York, Pierpont Morgan Library |M. 644, 4v-9v |β |

|2 |Tábara |T |Madrid, Archivo Histórico Nacional |cód. 1097B, 0-1v |α |

|3 |Gerona |G |Girona, Museu de Catedral |Num. Inv. 7(11), |α |

| | | | |8v-15r | |

|4 |Urgell |U |Seu de Urgel, Museu Diocesán, Archivo de la Catedral |Inv. 501, I-V |γ |

|5 |Facundus |J |Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España |MS Vitrina 14-2, |β |

| | | | |10v-17r | |

|6 |Saint-Sever |S |Paris, Bibliothèque National |ms. lat. 8878 |σ |

|7 |Turin |Tu |Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria di Torino |lat. 93 / Sgn. |α |

| | | | |I.II.1, 8v-15r | |

|8 |Rylands |R |Manchester, John Rylands University Library |ms. lat. 8, 6v-13r |α |

|9 |Cardeña |Pc |Madrid, Museo Arqueológico Nacional, and New York, |ms. 2, 3r-6v, and |α |

| | | |Metropolitan Museum |1991.232.6, 2-3r | |

|10 |Las Huelgas |H |New York, Pierpont Morgan Library |M. 429, 6v-12r |α |

| |Bible or Beatus? | | | | |

|11 |Fragment Vitr. 14-2 |Fi |Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España |MS Vitrina 14-2, |β |

| | | | |2r-5v | |

| |Bibles | | | | |

|12 |León Bible |Le |León, Colegiata de San Isidoro |cód. 2 |β |

|13 |San Juan de la Peña Bible |Ma |Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España |lat. 2 (A. 2) |γ |

|14 |Second León Bible | |León, Colegiata de San Isidoro |cód. I. 3. |β |

|15 |Calahorra Bible |Ca |Calahorra, Cathedral Treasury |ms. 2 |δ |

|16 |San Millán de la Cogolla Bible |Ac |Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia |cód. 2-3 |δ |

| |Histories | | | | |

|17 |Roda Codex |Ro |Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia |cód. 78 |α |

|18 |unnamed | |Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana |Plut. 20.54 |ε |

Writing the first detailed study of the work, Zaluska built on Fischer's survey of the Vetus Latina word-forms for his Genesis to demonstrate that the text of the biblical names had submitted to no influence from the new transliterations of the Hebrew names undertaken by Jerome of Stridon for his Vulgate translation at the end of the 4th century. Among the examples she isolates is Chor (Gen. 36:22), a personal name in the Septuagint and Vetus Latina, which Jerome had corrected to Hori. Zaluska also detected the Vetus Latina name of a Horrite chief – Ucan – which Jerome had suppressed, as well as another name, Chat, which had arisen through scribal error. Both names continued to be reproduced in the Great Stemma into the high medieval period although they were no longer current in the Genesis narrative.

The original core text seems to have been written without any awareness of the writings of Jerome, or of his contemporary Augustine of Hippo, although all the recensions other than Epsilon have been augmented with many annotations from both of those writers, as well as from Isidore of Seville.

Perhaps it was these augmentations which caused Fischer to labour under the misconception that a late 8th-century Iberian author had drafted the diagram while consulting an already ancient Vetus Latina bible, thus creating an impression that this was a clumsy and failed Dark Ages attempt to invent the family tree.

My hypothesis is that the recensions are in fact the damaged remnants of one of the boldest achievements of Antique book design, dating from that period centuries earlier when the roll had yet to give way to the codex.

There can be little doubt that the diagram was originally conceived as a single piece, since a major copying error plainly occurred while the document was still in one piece: thirteen forefathers in the Matthew genealogy, from Uzziah (here Oziam) to Azor, have been attached to the wrong wives. It seems that instead of copying each parental couple in sequence, an early scribe copied the sequence of husbands en bloc, then the sequence of wives, only to mismatch them. One major block of roundels was thus accidentally transposed by four positions to the right, disrupting other data throughout the area. This error crosses the page boundaries of the Epsilon and other recensions and infects all the known manuscripts.

The visual logic of the diagram, with lines that run the full sweep from beginning to end, indicates that its reader needed to see it as a whole, unrolled on a table or hung on a wall, to grasp its layering of various data types into a harmonious whole.

Figure 5: Timeline

The timeline

The first of those layers of content is a chronicle of world history. This comprises the names of many biblical rulers, which are also enclosed in roundels like the genealogies. These do not ramify, but are instead strung out like beads on a string. This sequence represents historical time, a long scale that probably began with the Flood (though there are now gaps and the start is no longer extant) and ended with the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius, which is the secular time marker corresponding to the Incarnation. A possible arrangement of the material is shown in Fig. 5 in a schematic sketch that somewhat compresses the diagram’s horizontal sweep. The timeline clearly provides a backbone to the document and aims to persuade the reader that the genealogies to be arranged around it are not myth, but embedded in world history.

For three principal sections, from Kohath to Joshua, from the Samarian king Jeroboam to his distant successor Zechariah, and from Cyrus of Persia to Tiberius, the sequence proceeds, roundel by roundel, from left to right. This must have been the rule for the whole. One sequence, from King Cushan-rishathaim to Jephthah, judge of Israel, has been arranged in the main extant manuscripts as a string of roundels running down the page and then turning away to the left, doubtless to accommodate the exigencies of transferring the material from an expansive roll to the more limited room on a codex page.

There is no direct evidence that the roundels making up the Great Stemma timeline were arranged to any fine scale of years, and indeed this would have been difficult to achieve where every roundel remained the same size, regardless of the length of reigns that varied between half a year and more than 40 years in length. However a coarser gradation in the order of quarter-centuries would have been entirely feasible, and I have experimentally applied this in the reconstruction without wishing to insist that it was in fact the Great Stemma author's intention to do so.

In general, the chronological data does not surpass the available space when it is arranged in a band, roughly matching the genealogical data point for point. The data only had to be compacted in one stretch, the succession of Samarian kings. My reconstruction employs a zigzagging line (visible in Fig. 2 above the word ‘Israel’) as a provisional solution to accommodate this group. In every other section, the timeline fitted comfortably into the available space as a straight line.

The main consequence of drawing this timeline to scale was to make the area at the right of the diagram less dense, leaving a large amount of vacant space. It is conceivable that in the archetype, this space may have been occupied by a survey of the main 52 persons making up the Davidian royal court. I return to this issue below, although the evidence for such an inclusion is not conclusive.

Figure 6: The Fila

The Fila

Layered onto the timeline comes the document's dynamic factor, its four "ancestral streams". Fig. 6 shows these in the schematic view. The streams are the four arrows which sweep around the outer edge of the document, framing it, with Adam, David and Christ as nodal points.

In their purpose, these streams are analogous to the fila that measure the onward march of dynasties in the Chronological Canons of Eusebius of Caesarea. The regnal years of the various kingdoms there form filum sequences which run in parallel down each page of the Canons, providing a comparison between the different national time-reckoning systems.

But unlike the Eusebian fila, which are columns of year-numbers rigidly arranged on a vertical axis and in perfect alignment, the Great Stemma's fila sweep and turn to represent four main lines of descent in the bible story. Each of these lines has a significance of its own in salvation theology.

The A filum is the main line comprising God's chosen in the Hebrew scriptures, the succession of patriarchs from Adam's son Seth down to David.

The B filum comprises the antediluvian, accursed children of Cain. This graphic divergence of the A and B fila alludes to an early Christian topos, the contrary paths adopted by the children of Seth and of Cain, which Augustine was to elaborate in the 15th book of his City of God.

The C filum is principally made up of the house of Judah, the ‘royal’ descent from King Solomon down to Christ in the Gospel of Matthew.

The D filum comprises the succession of obscure post-Davidic names brought to us by the genealogy in the Gospel of Luke, commencing with Nathan, who is described as a son of King David.

The fine detail

The third layer of information comprises the family groups. There are about 15 stemmata of this type. Most are free-standing and not connected to one another or to the fila. Their members are typically arranged in radial fashion. That for Adam, with only three sons, radiating rightwards, on a right-down diagonal and downwards, is the simplest. The Esau group, which we saw earlier, is one of the tidiest in arrangement. Other groups appear to have become disordered during scribal transmission.

In addition we find two large blocks of additional information: a survey of the minor prophets, which seems to have originated as a set of notes to accompany the timeline, and an account of the kingdom of Rome before the consular period.

The essential features of the document's visual logic are therefore:

• its timeline,

• the four fila,

• its collection of stemmata.

This decompilation into content layers is essential to an understanding of the innovations in a document that is neither a text nor a work of art, but rather the oldest of a hybrid genre that we now call information graphics, or infographics for short.

The Liber Genealogus

The key evidence in establishing a date for the Great Stemma is external to the document. This comes from close study of a related Late Antique work, the Liber Genealogus of 427.[ix] This is a theological prose work by an anonymous Donatist author which recites Christ's genealogy, giving etymologies of the ancestral names.[x]

Its four principal recensions are denominated G (dated 427 A.D.), F (438), L (455/463) and T (undated). The four sigla were set by Theodor Mommsen and refer to the locations of the type manuscripts: St Gall, Florence, Lucca and Turin. A suggestion has been made by Paul Monceaux that T, which has been truncated, may be the ancestor of the other three, separated from them by a lost intermediate recension, but no fundamental evidence can be adduced against the simplest solution: that the earliest recension bearing an actual date, G, is indeed the parent of all the other three.[xi]

There is a consensus that the Liber has some kind of textual relationship with the Great Stemma, but previous scholars assumed that the diagram was derived from and inspired by the text.[xii]

The solution to this vexing puzzle was found by analysing the order in which the biblical persons are listed in the Liber Genealogus. Three possible sequences would have been practicable and need to be distinguished:

1. Strict historical order, with the oldest first;

2. The scriptural order of the narrative found in Genesis, Kings, Chronicles and other books, which is not strictly chronological, sometimes naming a son before the first mention of his uncle;

3. The order while traversing or reading the Great Stemma, top to bottom and left to right across the page, as well as within the individual stemmata.

My analysis established that the data order of the Liber is not a fully chronological sequence and in many cases deviates from the scriptural order as well. The deviations can only be explained by assuming that the Liber author used the Great Stemma as his primary source, drawing his information from it, or from a diagram very similar to it. The data order he uses is not derived from a story-telling plan: it solely reflects the graphic design.

Figure 7: LG order

The most striking of these deviations from the story order involves the four fila. This is illustrated in Fig. 7, where numbers, denoting the main sections of the Liber Genealogus from one to seven, are overlaid on the positions of the matching data in the Great Stemma.

It is plain that the Liber first describes three fila, including Filum C, the post-Davidic genealogy according to the Gospel of Matthew. After dealing with the material numbered 1-4 in the figure, it then it breaks off from genealogy and describes the main part of the historical timeline (numbered 5-6), before resuming the fila with the fourth, based on the Gospel of Luke (numbered 7).

This structure is not what one would expect from a historian or a writer of a biblical handbook. I would argue that the Liber author read his data not from the books of Genesis and Kings or even from a tabulation, but directly from the Great Stemma, working from left to right and from top to bottom and adding his etymologies and commentary as he went. His language even alludes to this spatial navigation: Filum A is interrupted with the words, Transeamus ad originem Cain et tunc ad generationem Noe revertimur, as the author stops at Noah to insert his account of Filum B (2 in Fig. 7), then reverts to listing Noah’s offspring (3 in Fig. 7).

In similar fashion, the Liber follows the graphic pattern in exploring certain major stemmata to their ends before returning to the relevant filum. The descendants of the three sons of Noah, including Shelah and his son Eber (LG paragraphs 94-6), are initially described in comprehensive detail in a stemma before the text reverts, with the words, Redeamus ad Salam nepotem Sem fili Noe, to the continuation of Filum A, repeating there the names Shelah and Eber (paragraphs 204-5). Likewise, the text first treats Judah, Perez and Hezron within their tribal setting (paragraphs 331-2), only to recapitulate the same names later as it works its way along Filum A (paragraphs 360-1).

At the micro level, within the stemmata, we also occasionally find a graphic-driven traversal order in the first, G recension of the Liber. Stemmata can be traversed, that is to say read or processed as data, by two methods: breadth-first or depth-first order. These are terms used in mathematics and computer programming to describe sequences for reading the nodes of a tree diagram regularly. Breadth-first means to begin at the root and recite each generation in its entirety before continuing to the next generation: one names an ancestor, then his sons, then the grandchildren. This is the predominant pattern of genealogies in Genesis. In a depth-first traverse, one begins with the ancestor, proceeds to his eldest son, then describes that son's sons before returning to the second-eldest son and exploring his line fully. Sometimes this will be the shortest reading path, and a cautious reader will employ this traversing sequence to avoid making large jumps over the page with the attendant risk of accidentally overlooking some of the material.

We find the distinctive approach of depth-first traverse at several places in the G recension of the Liber, for example in its treatment of the offspring of Keturah, a slave-spouse of Abraham. The text of Gen. 25:1-4 is a breadth-first traverse, listing all six sons of Keturah without any asides. However the first, G recension of the Liber alters the sequence to depth-first, interrupting the list of Keturah's sons at Jokshan to tell us the names of Jokshan's own sons before jumping a generation backwards again, as a reader might naturally do when reading the data from a graphic stemma.

It is particularly curious that two later recensions, F and T, have restored the Genesis traversal order, presumably as a result of editorial correction sessions where scripture rather than the Great Stemma was used as the authoritative source.

This finding has several implications. Firstly, if the Great Stemma diagram served as the model around which the prose of the G recension of the Liber Genealogus was structured, we must assume a terminus ante quem of 427 for the Great Stemma itself. The supposition that the diagram was first drawn in Dark Ages Iberia is 300 to 400 years shy of the mark.

Secondly, the finding suggests that, at least in the beginning, the Liber is unlikely to have been a Donatist bishop's hand reference for bible study as some scholars have suggested.[xiii]

It is much more likely to have been an instance of that Antique literary genre known as ekphrasis, a learned commentary on a work of art. In the Liber, the author shows off his education by providing meanings for many of the Hebrew names and interspersing these philological notes with his political and religious observations, exploring the parallels between the history of Israel and what he saw as unjust persecution of his Donatist brethren. The Liber would have been preserved because its author was respected and his commentary on the Great Stemma would have been seen as a personal response worthy of imitation. Appreciated as a pair, the Great Stemma and the Liber Genealogus demonstrate a rare sophistication in translating scriptural concepts into visualized form and back again to verbal discourse.

Thirdly, Monceaux's hypothesis that the T recension of the Liber, sometimes known as the Origo Humani Generis, is older than the other versions becomes unsustainable.

Fourthly, we obtain in the G recension of the Liber a relatively accurate description of what the lost, early, archetypal version of the Stemma would have looked like in 427. Where the Liber is slightly more comprehensive, presenting the names of nine additional grandsons of the Twelve Patriarchs (five of Reuben, two of Levi, two of Joseph), it is likely that these were originally included in the Great Stemma. The Liber also lists twenty-four priests, twenty-four champions, and four bards of David's court: it is open to debate whether these too were included in the Great Stemma.[xiv] Conversely, Great Stemma material that is absent from the G recension, such as the lists of Minor Prophets and kings of Rome, is likelier to have been added to the Great Stemma after 427 in a process of accretion.

Eusebius's Chronicle

The Florence diagram contains one tantalizing pointer to a possible influence on the diagram's evolution and to the company which it kept. On the final page, we find the Ordo Annorum Mundi, as mentioned above. This is a short, anonymous text that is a précis of Eusebius's chronological scheme. It is a kind of cribbing note, short enough to have been learned by heart. In translation it reads:

| |From Adam to the Flood |2242 |

| |From the Flood to Abraham |942 |

| |From Abraham to Moses |505 |

| |From the Exodus to the entry into the promised land |40 |

| |From the entry to King Saul |355 |

| |Saul reigned for |40 |

| |From David to the begin of construction of the Temple |43 |

| |From the construction of the Temple to the Exile |443 |

| |Years of Babylonian Exile |70 |

| |Reconstruction of the Temple by Zerubabbel |4 |

| |From the reconstruction to the Incarnation |515 |

| |Total |5199 |

The Ordo's concluding line, echoing the Chronological Canons' calculated period from Adam to the Incarnation as 5,199 years, appears on at least three further copies of the Great Stemma (Roda, Facundus and León). Four Spanish bibles contain the full Ordo and the Great Stemma in close proximity (León, Second León, Calahorra and San Millán.) The nature of the affiliation between the Ordo and the Great Stemma is not yet clear, but the manuscript tradition does convey an understanding that they somehow complement one another.

During its evolution, the Great Stemma appears to have also gathered in material from the Chronological Canons. Those innovations are not witnessed by the G recension of the Liber Genealogus. Unless they were consciously omitted, they are likelier to be post-427 modifications.

A cornerstone of Eusebius's calculations was his finding that King Ahaz had ruled Judah at the time that Rome was founded. Our manuscripts of the Great Stemma reproduce this with the following gloss to the year 1 A.U.C., the foundation of Rome: Fiunt autem a conditione urbis Rome (id est XI Kal. Maias) conditore Romo et Romulo, Martis et Ielie filio: regnante tunc in Iudea Achaz annos quarto regni eius. This date is only one year off the date Eusebius uses: the third year of Ahaz's reign (Helm 88g). The slight difference is not significant, given that Eusebius only sought accuracy on a scale of olympiads, or four-year periods, and moreover relied entirely on side-by-side page layout, with its inherent proneness to slight error, to demonstrate the synchronisms he had discovered.[xv]

Other chronographers arrived at markedly different synchronistic findings, and are clearly not the sources for this statement: Julius Africanus would have placed Ahaz 19 years earlier, while the calculations of Hippolytus of Rome would have placed Ahaz about 60 years before 1 A.U.C.

If the Great Stemma was not originally composed with the Canons as one of its sources, one can nevertheless be sure the Canons were used by editors from a very early date as an authority for corrections.

Techniques

A striking commonality between the Great Stemma and the Canons is the use of a spatial matrix. The Canons, which list years consecutively down the page, are our oldest witness for an arrangement along two axes of a very large quantity of data, a principle that underlies modern spreadsheets. The Canons’ columns, or Y axis, represent time, while the different civilizations surveyed by Eusebius are arranged across the page. The book's primary information is denoted not by the text itself, but by the row and column positions of the data. The Great Stemma employs the same axial principles, but with a graphic orientation that has been rotated 90 degrees to the left, so that the fila run across the page, instead of down it as in the Canons.[xvi]

The probable copying technique used by scribes, drawing the roundels in bulk, then filling in the text and adding the connecting lines, is likely to have quickly spoiled the original alignment between the timeline and the fila. But as noted above, when the Stemma is redrawn using 21st-century technology, the alignment is easily restorable and is consonant with the volume of material that must be accommodated.

Megan Williams and Anthony Grafton have eloquently demonstrated how Origen’s Hexapla and Eusebius’s Canons represent a leap forward in text technology and mark a a key starting point in codex design. The Great Stemma, it can be argued, is something more awesome still: an acme of roll design, in which axial orientation is used to accommodate and organize a great amount of information on a single sheet. At a micro level the content is useful, but its true import is only evident at the macro level when the reader stops looking at individual words and instead perceives the assembly as a whole. The Great Stemma’s modern counterparts are the poster, the PowerPoint slide and the scrollable, zoomable electronic display. It cannot be accommodated in the pages of a book without losing its essence.

Whether the Great Stemma is unique or part of an established Antique genre is difficult to say. We have remarkably little knowledge of techniques for visualizing hierarchies in high Antiquity. We certainly know of Roman interest in genealogy and the importance of agnate descent in Roman law. The advanced graphic techniques used in the Great Stemma may be based on a Roman practice of representing patrician genealogies, but unfortunately, beyond Isidore's definition above, which tells us that doing branch-style drawings was part of a lawyer's job description, we have no evidence of how real-life family genealogies were actually visualized by Antique writer-artists. As noted already, the conceit of representing a family as an arbor or tree, with the founding ancestor on the soil and the youngest children as fresh leaves, did not begin to evolve until well into the western medieval period.

It is not until Cassiodorus, writing in the 6th century about the role of data visualization in education, that we even hear a clue as to how Late Antique readers might have interpreted and used such stemmatic diagrams. The 37 stemmata which Cassiodorus drew in the two volumes of his Institutions organize basic religious and academic knowledge for his students, and it is plain that they are neither mnemonic prompts nor an information-storage system, but rather an expository method.[xvii]

In the preface to the Institutions, he tells us that teaching should be conducted as a dual process: first use a drawing to focus the ‘visual’ mind of the audience on the context, then follow through with words once the listener can see what you are talking about:

Duplex quodammodo discendi genus est, quando et linealis descriptio imbuit diligenter aspectum, et post aurium praeparatus intrat auditus.

— Institutiones 2, Praefatio, 13.

Interpretation

The theological agenda of the Great Stemma may not be evident at first sight.

Out of 540 roundels, there are some points of exegetical interest, such as the omissions of the Second Kenan (Luke 3:36) and Nathan and Heli (Luke 3:24), but only one node is truly controversial. It attempts to solve a Gospel puzzle.

Matthew's genealogy of Jesus traces a line from King Solomon, the son of David, down to Joseph. Luke's genealogy traces a line from Nathan, another son of David, down to Joseph. In the normal way of things, it would be impossible for Joseph to have two different paternal ancestries. A dispassionate observer would say that one of them must be wrong. A pagan critic would have held the muddle up to scorn. Christians felt some kind of convincing answer was needed to this.

The Great Stemma solves the contradiction by letting Matthew's account be the paternal ancestry that ends with Joseph, while treating Luke's as a genealogy of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Since Luke’s list ends with Joseph too, an early Christian faction had come up with an ingenious exegesis: Luke's ‘Joseph’, it was argued, was the Virgin's grandfather, not her spouse. The gap between this Joseph and Mary was closed by a man named in apocryphal tradition as Joachim. Filum D of the Great Stemma accordingly traces Christ's descent, according to Luke, down to ‘Joseph’. Up to that point it remains canonical. It then inserts Joachim in the chain, as the missing link, and concludes with the Virgin.

The Joachim story has a Greek source: the sentimental but uncanonical Protevangelium of James, which can be dated to about 200. By the fourth century it had evidently been translated into Latin and had gained wide currency in the Latin west. We know from a verse adaptation in a papyrus, now in Barcelona, that the Protevangelium must have been available in Latin translation in this period. A Manichean version of the Joachim legend was known to Augustine, since he discusses it non-commitally in his dispute with Faustus.[xviii]

The Joachimites were at odds with the received wisdom, accepted by the later Augustine and others, as originally set down by Julius Africanus in his Letter to Aristides.[xix] This mainstream held that both Matthew's and Luke's genealogies can terminate at the Virgin's spouse because Joseph’s legal ancestry would not have been the same as his biological heritage. Unfortunately we possess no rigorously argued early account of the Joachimite theory, and the geometrical splendour of the Great Stemma may perhaps have to serve in that role, demonstrating that a well-drawn diagram can indeed hold its own in intellectual debate.

When it was adopted as a tool by controversialists in early Christianity, an advanced graphic like this is likely to have been at least partly intelligible to the less literate, or even useful to proselytize those with a poor command of Latin. Used with a live audience, the fila, the timeline and the rami would also have powerfully assisted the rhetoric of the preacher. In an age when the technical issues of trinitarian theology dominated Christian debate and neo-Platonic syntheses of faith were advancing, some Christians may have resisted, holding fast to their religion’s dramaturgy and its compelling narrative of errancy, redemption and death overcome. Narratives ‘sell’ better than technical analysis. Data visualization is essentially a translation of closed-discourse ideas into more accessible terms, closely akin to narrative, which can reach a popular, non-technical audience. In this sense, the Great Stemma is a forerunner to the visual aids used in modern media.

Conclusion

The Great Stemma is an early Christian infographic that has perhaps not been ‘lost’, but has certainly been hidden in plain sight and overlooked by scholars. The 2010 web digitization by the Laurentian Library of the Epsilon recension is likely to facilitate wider future attention to it. My analysis has been able to:

1. establish that the diagram was originally drawn in one piece;

2. show that its incoherence arises from scribal errors and reconstruct its likely original organization;

3. reveal its visual logic;

4. move back its date of authorship by nearly 400 years.[xx]

The history of writing systems is one of education. To develop an alphabet and a system of punctuation into a self-reproducing system, a community of people using common writing conventions has to be established by continual schooling. Data visualization rests on that fundament and propagates though a supplementary set of conventions that give meaning to containers such as roundels, to paths connecting these little towns of text and to the overall arrangement of the visualization on the page. Wherever we see such conventions in use, we have to assume that they have spread, whether by formal education or self-teaching, through a sufficiently large community of readers to become intelligible at first sight. Such a community then sustains itself by constant practice or the conventions collapse.

The Great Stemma is a milestone in this history, as the earliest documented use of a timeline and of stemmata, yet it is strangely alone in the documentary record. Only the Institutions of Cassiodorus can be cited alongside it as exploiting the mind-mapping principle with similar virtuosity in Late Antiquity. Substantial numbers of timelines do not appear until the 15th century.[xxi]

But if it is plain that both of these visualization devices were intelligible to 5th-century readers, we must assume that there were many more similar documents in existence at and before this time, helping to propagate and reinforce this visual language through repeated and varied use.

Wherever concepts are made tangible in mental pictures, we can also expect that this pictorial sensibility will leave its traces in spoken language and encourage later generations to experiment with new ways of drawing those mental pictures. Root-and-branch words such as stirps and ramus for describing hierarchical or genealogical relationships are likely to have their origin in visualization, and offer us fertile ground to speculate on the relationship between discourse and data visualization in Graeco-Roman intellectual life.

Contact

Jean-Baptiste Piggin

Kiwittsmoor 64

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Tel: +49 172 670 5890

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[i] Frede's Verzeichnis der Sigel: Kirchenschriftsteller, republished as Roger Gryson, Répertoire général des auteurs ecclésiastiques latins de l'antiquité et du haut moyen âge, (Freiburg, 2007), gives it the siglum PROL gen. The document is not listed in the Clavis Patrum Latinorum.

[ii] This evolution is outlined in: Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, L'ombre des ancêtres, (Paris, 2000).

[iii] The stemma history section of the macro-typography website includes technical drawings of the Great Stemma, a collation of the text from the main witnesses, detailed technical discussion of the content, a new edition of the Liber Genealogus and an extensive bibliography.

[iv] The Ordo Annorum Mundi has sometimes been falsely attributed to Julian of Toledo. Its publication is to be undertaken shortly by José Carlos Martín Iglesias, Salamanca.

[v] B. Fischer (ed.), ‘Nachträge’, in Genesis, Vetus Latina: die Reste der altlateinischen Bibel 2, (Freiburg-im-Breisgau, 1954). B. Fischer, ‘Algunas observaciones sobre et «Codex Gothicus» de la Real Colegiata de San Isidoro en León’, Archivos leoneses 15 (1961), 5-47.  Teófilo Ayuso Marazuela, ‘Los elementos extrabíblicos de la Vulgata’, Estudios Bíblicos 2 (1943), 133-87.

[vi] Wilhelm Neuss, Die Apokalypse des Hl. Johannes in der altspanischen und altchristlichen Bibel-Illustration: das Problem der Beatus-Handschriften, (Münster [Germany], 1931).  John Williams, ‘A Castilian Tradition of Bible Illustration: the Romanesque Bible from San Millán’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1965), 66-85. J. Williams, ‘A Model for the Leon Bibles’, Madrider Mitteilungen 8 (1967), 281-286.  Yolanta Zaluska, ‘Les feuillets liminaires’, in El Beato de Saint-Sever, ms. lat. 8878 de la Bibliothèque nationale de Paris, Xavier Barral i Altet (ed.), (Madrid, 1984).

[vii] C. Klapisch-Zuber, Ombre, 77.

[viii] Y. Zaluska, ‘Entre texte et image: les stemmata bibliques au Sud et au Nord des Pyrénées’, Bulletin de la Societé nationale des antiquaires de France (1986), 142-152. Y. Zaluska, ‘Le Beatus de Saint-Sever à travers sa composition matérielle et ses généalogies bibliques’, in Jean Cabanot (ed.), Saint-Sever, millénaire de l'abbaye: colloque international, 25, 26 et 27 mai 1985, (Mont-de-Marsan [France], 1986), 279-292.

[ix] Theodor Mommsen (ed.), ‘Liber Genealogus: Additamentum II [to the] Chronographus anni CCCLIIII’, in Chronicorum minororum saec. IV. V. VI. VII. Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH), Auctores Antiquissimi (AA) 9, (Berlin, 1892). Its siglum is ‘AN gen’ in the Frede/Gryson Répertoire général and it has the number 2254 in the Clavis Patrum Latinorum.

[x] Hervé Inglebert, Les romains chrétiens face à l'histoire de Rome, (Paris, 1996) provides the most recent thorough discussion of it, with further analysis in Inglebert’s Interpretatio christiana: les mutations des savoirs (cosmographie, géographie, éthnographie, histoire) dans l'Antiquite chretienne (30-630 apres J.C.), (Paris, 2001).

[xi] Paul Monceaux, Littérature donatiste au temps de Saint Augustin, Histoire littéraire de l'Afrique chrétienne depuis les origines jusqu'à l'invasion arabe 6, (Paris, 1922).

[xii] Y. Zaluska, Feuillets, summarizes the debate, while leaving the position open.

[xiii] FGdeu‡ˆ‹œ? ­®»ÊÞåëðø | Q [ ˆ Ì Ø ù þ (*2;QWg~‡Richard Rouse and Charles McNelis, ‘North African literary activity: A Cyprian fragment, the stichometric lists and a Donatist compendium’, Revue d'histoire des textes 30 (2000), 189-238.

[xiv] Y. Zaluska, Feuillets, 250 raises this possibility: 27 priests of David have been re-introduced into the Sigma recension.

[xv] The reference to the Chronological Canons employs the page and section number of the critical edition, Eusebius Werke VII. Die Chronik des Hieronymus, ed. Rudolf Helm, GCS 7 (Berlin, 1956).

[xvi] Anthony Grafton and Megan Hale Williams, Christianity and the transformation of the book: Origen, Eusebius, and the library of Caesarea, (Harvard, 2006).

[xvii] Michael Gorman, ‘The diagrams in the oldest manuscript of Cassiodor's Institutiones’, Revue bénédictine 110 (2000), 27-41. Anna Catharina Esmeijer, Divina Quaternitas: a preliminary study in the method and application of visual exegesis, (Assen, 1978).

[xviii] Ramón Roca-Puig, Himne a la Verge Maria: ‘Psalmus Responsorius’; Papir del segle IV, (Barcelona, 1965). Emile Amann, Le Protévangile de Jacques et ses remaniements latins, (Paris, 1910).

[xix] Guignard, Christophe (ed.), La Lettre de Julius Africanus à Aristide sur la généalogie du Christ, (Berlin, 2011)

[xx] The Laurentian’s web version of the sole Epsilon manuscript can be found at: . The Roda manuscript, the best of the Alpha recension, is online at:

[xxi] Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time, (New York, 2010).

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