A Brill Calendar: November 25

Leyden's First Words

Few things are so fragile, yet as lasting as the 'realities' associated with language: ideas and concepts, hopes and fears.

Of the galaxy of words created since the dawn of symbolic representation -covering at least a few hundred millennia - only tiny fractions remain. Without the primeval technology of writing emerging in China, Mesopotamia, Egypt, much less than a meagre ten millennia ago, knowledge of the past as an asset for the species and its survival would have been a dream.

Mankind as a whole is a hymn sung in praise of remembrance; linked to the effort of the mind to tame both things future and things past within a presence experienced as if history nor future could possibly exist: the presence of rapture. That very word suggests another one, ‘rupture’, a ‘break’ in less Latinized parlance. Ancient civilizations – regardless how ancient they may be – can only be present in the awareness of mankind just beyond the threshold of the second millennium reckoned from the birth of Christ.

If we drastically limit musings akin to the above to the city of Leyden, scholarship traces the first remaining vestiges of the ‘activity’ of writing in the city back to November 25, 1260 AD; less than a millennium ago. Because of the main reason for writing as such and ‘ab ovo’, the document involves a business transaction. In early days writing and script are little more than minions of an urge to own property personally. In this particular document eight aldermen of Leyden declare that the Abbot of Egmond, an almost omnipotent regular agent in 13th century real-estate in the County of Holland, lent a piece of land in Boshuizen village to the daughter of one Arnout van Boshuizen.

Chances that a still earlier document could surface in the future keep archival scholarship alive and kicking.