|
Two skeletons, side by side, fingers laced together.
|
|
Modena, northern Italy, 2009. Eleven other bodies came out of the same ground, several of them carrying the kind of damage a battle leaves. The pair in the middle were holding hands.
|
|
For the next ten years, everybody who wrote about them called them lovers.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Trained Archaeologists Read a Whole Romance Into Two Hands, and Held It for a Decade.
|
|
The bones were in poor condition. Teams tried genetic analysis more than once and could not pull a usable result, so the sex of either individual stayed open. Into that opening went the obvious reading: a man and a woman, arranged by somebody who knew what they had been to each other.
|
|
That reading was never a finding. It was a gap with a story sitting in it.
|
|
Then a group at the University of Bologna worked out how to read sex from a protein in tooth enamel, which outlasts DNA by a wide margin. They ran the teeth of both. Seven years ago today, on the eleventh of September 2019, the result went into Scientific Reports.
|
|
Both of them were men.
|
|
The paper is careful in a way the ten years of headlines were not. Here is what the authors put on the record:
|
| • |
The position was deliberate. Somebody chose to put those hands together. |
| • |
Others in the same ground died of injuries consistent with a battle. |
| • |
They may have been soldiers who went down in the same fight. |
| • |
They may have been brothers or cousins, close as they were in age. |
| • |
Love between them cannot be excluded, and in that century nobody would have arranged a burial to advertise it. |
| • |
What the gesture meant is not recoverable from the gesture. |
|
|
|
Look at the shape of those ten years. The hands were always evidence of something. They were never evidence of what.
|
|
Nobody there made a mistake of feeling; the mistake was treating a gesture as a category.
|
|
A hand can mean a marriage. A hand can mean a brother. A hand can mean two men who died in the same hour and a third who could not stand to lay them down apart.
|
|
The gesture is on the record; the meaning never was.
|
|
This is the part worth carrying home from a cemetery in Italy. Trained people with a budget and ten years could not get a relationship out of one held hand, and they had the bodies laid out in front of them.
|
|
You are working with thinner evidence than they had, and with one thing they will never have, which is a person who can still be asked.
|
|
|
|
Also True
|
|
From the Ancients
|
|
The Greeks did not run all of it through one word. Eros was the wanting, storge was the bond that thickens inside a household over years, and philia covered the loyalty between people who had stood next to each other through something hard. A Greek looking into that grave would have had a name ready for what he saw and would not have needed it to be a romance.
|
|
The Mirror
ℒ
What have you concluded about someone on the strength of one gesture, and what would it cost you to ask them out loud instead?
|
|
| |
Today’s Devotion: Take the one moment you keep replaying and write it down tonight the way the paper would: what happened, the date, nothing added. Read the line back once and leave it.
|
|
|
|
|
Keep your power in your own hands.
|
|
Sofia
|
