M.J. Rose

As our waters recede due to drought, strange and beautiful things emerge – as if from a time machine.

Colonial church emerges from receding reservoir in Mexico
SF Gate/Associated Press

“MEXICO CITY — Leonel Mendoza fishes every day in a reservoir surrounded by forest and mountains in the southern Mexico state of Chiapas. But in recent days, he also has been ferrying curious passengers out to see the remains of a colonial-era church that has emerged from the receding waters.

A drought this year has hit the watershed of the Grijalva river, dropping the water level in the Nezahualcoyotl reservoir by 82 feet.

It is the second time a drop in the reservoir has revealed the church since it was flooded when the dam was completed in 1966. In 2002, the water was so low visitors could walk inside the church.

“The people celebrated. They came to eat, to hang out, to do business. I sold them fried fish. They did processions around the church,” Mendoza said.

The church in the Quechula locality was built by a group of monks headed by Friar Bartolome de la Casas, who arrived in the region inhabited by the Zoque people in the mid-16th century…”

For the rest, and a video too, click here.

More very, very old book news:

Two pages from Samuel Ward’s translation for part of the King James Bible. An American professor who came upon the manuscript last fall at Cambridge says it is the earliest known draft for the King James translation, which appeared in 1611. Credit Master and Fellows of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge; Maria Anna Rogers (Photo)

Earliest Known Draft of King James Bible Is Found, Scholar Says
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

“The King James Bible is the most widely read work in English literature, a masterpiece of translation whose stately cadences and transcendent phrases have long been seen, even by secular readers, as having emerged from a kind of collective divine inspiration.

But now, in an unassuming notebook held in an archive at the University of Cambridge, an American scholar has found what he says is an important new clue to the earthly processes behind that masterpiece: the earliest known draft, and the only one definitively written in the hand of one of the roughly four dozen translators who worked on it.

The notebook, which dates from 1604 to 1608, was discovered by Jeffrey Alan Miller, an assistant professor of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey, who announced his research on Wednesday in an article in The Times Literary Supplement…”

For the rest, click here.

We’re always excited when science investigates the stuff of legends.  Sometimes the feeling we are left with after these investigations is that some mysteries are just not possible to unlock, and some of the greatest mysteries of all are found in the pages of our most ancient texts…

On NOVA: Secrets of Noah’s Ark

Aired: 10/07/2015

A team attempts to build the flood boat using inscriptions from an ancient clay tablet.

For the complete episode, click here to go to PBS.