This brief outline reflects my early thoughts on a narrative I hope to write. I welcome relevant comments.
From Global Fascination to Niche Obsession
I. A Shadow Larger Than Its Substance
- Opening Impression: Claims abound that the Shroud of Turin is experiencing a renaissance.
- Viral TikToks, YouTube documentaries, podcasts
- Glowing mentions in niche faith blogs and apologetics channels
- Upcoming 2025 St. Louis Conference enthusiasm
- Thesis: This “resurgence” is largely illusory — a closed echo chamber amplifying itself.
- Reality Check:
- Over 2 billion Christians, yet most are unaware, uninterested, or ambivalent.
- No reliable polling (little perceived interest which is puzzling) to demonstrate meaningful shifts in belief or awareness.
- Key Framing Question: Is the Shroud’s cultural footprint growing — or just glowing faintly in its own mirror?
II. The Church’s Careful Dance
- The Vatican’s stance: Respect without endorsement.
- John Paul II: a “mirror of the Gospel,” not a relic.
- Pope Francis: an “icon,” not evidence.
- No Doctrine, No Dogma
- Catholicism does not require or encourage belief in the Shroud.
- Absent from catechisms, councils, and canonical teaching.
- Protestant, Orthodox, and Anglican disengagement:
- Ignored in creeds, sermons, and seminary syllabi.
- Ask yourself: When was it last mentioned in church?
- Conclusion: Even the institutional body that houses it treats it as symbolic curiosity, not sacred certainty.
III. The Scientific Hammer: 1988 and After
- The Carbon-14 Date: 1260–1390 AD
- Three labs, British Museum oversight, published in Nature.
- Consensus: a medieval origin.
- Mainstream Repercussions:
- Standard references (e.g., Encyclopædia Britannica) accept the dating.
- Media coverage moved on.
- Apologetic Resistance:
- Alternative theories (e.g., contamination, invisible repairs) reflect confirmation bias, not new data.
- Workarounds are often more about protecting beliefs than revising conclusions.
- Takeaway: The burden of proof has shifted — and remains unmet.
IV. Marginalized in the Halls of Scholarship
- Silence from leading thinkers:
- No engagement from voices like N.T. Wright, Hans Küng, or Alister McGrath.
- Gary Habermas seems to be the “single” cautious exception.
- Ross Douthat’s 2025 book Believe omits the Shroud entirely.
- No presence in biblical studies or theology curricula.
- A tiny, aging circle:
- A few hundred(?)z devoted enthusiasts dominate the discussion.
- Mostly absent from broader academic or theological journals.
- Credibility Gap:
- Outlandish theories (e.g., resurrection energy/radiation bursts) undermine wider interest.
- Amateurish websites (e.g., Sign From God Foundation) peddle unfounded facts.
- Conclusion: The Shroud isn’t controversial in the academy — it’s mostly ignored.
V. Shroud Science: A Field in Decline
- Aging pioneers: Most major researchers from the 1970s–80s are gone or inactive.
- No generational handoff:
- No emerging field of Shroud Studies by qualified scientists.
- Little institutional funding or scientific engagement.
- Technological stagnation:
- Few new studies using modern tools like hyperspectral imaging, isotopic analysis.
- The Same Old Cycle:
- Repetitive arguments, recycled papers, same conference attendees.
- Poofs (coins over eyes, flower images, pollen, VP-8 significance).
- Living in the Past (VP-8, 24 peer-reviewed journals, STURP)
- Shift from inquiry to advocacy: A posture of defending conclusions, not testing them.
VI. The Enthusiast’s Paradox: High Passion, Low Impact
- Core belief: “If people just knew the evidence, they’d believe.”
- The actual outcome:
- Most Christians don’t know — and when they do, often don’t care.
- Parallels with fringe movements:
- Like UFO disclosure or crypto-evangelism — lots of content, little conversion.
- Christian reaction: Not rejection, but benign indifference.
- Most believers see no need for relic-based validation of faith.
- Key insight: A relic-based apologetic misreads the nature of modern religious conviction.
VII. Scholarly Comparison: What True Relevance Looks Like
- Universally studied artifacts:
- Rosetta Stone, Dead Sea Scrolls, Antikythera Mechanism.
- Integrated into education, research, and public discourse.
- What they have that the Shroud lacks:
- Broad interdisciplinary interest.
- Institutional investment.
- Relevance to historical understanding.
- The Shroud’s category: Closer to fringe relics (e.g., True Cross, Holy Grail, Ark conspiracies) than to serious artifacts of inquiry.
VIII. The Closing Mystery: Revered but Redundant
- Persistent fascination: Some will always be captivated.
- But for the wider world:
- The Shroud remains an enigmatic artifact, not a transformative discovery.
- The Church treats it as optional curiosity, not essential faith.
- Final reflection:
- Faith neither rises nor falls with a cloth.
- The real resurrection — if believed — needs no photograph.
Re c14 testing you said it before somewhere and it is worth repeating and should be part of your outline. The silence from the actual radiocarbon science community on the alleged flaws in the c14 dating of the shroud is significant Since the 3 lab results were published in Nature NOT a single recognized expert in ams whether academic commercial or institutional has publicly endorsed any of the excuses put forth by the highly insular shroud crowd. This silence is a big deal. To say it is hotly debated as some do is to insult my intelligence. Short of something new but not that nonsense radiation I can NOT doubt the accuracy of the c14.
It’ is naive to think that the labs who performed the C-14 testing would admit to having made any mistakes. They got enormous publicity from having done the test, and C-14 dating is now a multi-billion dollar industry. Given the wide range of dates in the small c. 1 x 7 cm. sample, if it had been a run-of-the-mill sample they might have said there’s something not right with the sample, but with the glaring publicity there’s no way they would do that. Bottom line: only 1 controversial sample was taken for the dating, and because of that, there is no way of absolutely knowing if the sample was representative of the main cloth (and it was the Church’s fault, not the C-14 labs, for deciding to take only one sample). For making a conclusion based on one controversial sample points to the adage, “garbage in, garbage out.”
A few brief comments:
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And there are a lot of anti-Shroud comments and articles that always try to counter what’s on the pro-side. If an authentic Shroud is a silly idea, why all the protest? Why not just ignore it?
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Most Christians are unaware, uninterested or ambivalent about biblical exegesis and many other Church-related matters, but that doesn’t mean they’re not important. In the public expositions of 1978, 1998, 2000, 2010 and 2015, all of which besides 1978 was AFTER the C-14 dating, they drew at least 10 million people, which is not an insignificant figure.
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I’ve seen in the past few years a few university courses being offered. If the image-formation process is not solved, I suspect the numbers will continue to increase.
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The Vatican never “endorses” per se any relic. They will allow veneration if there’s no proof that the relic is provably false. That indicates that they don’t accept that the C-14 dating proved the Shroud to be a fake. Over 30 Popes have expressed their personal opinions of the Shroud’s authenticity. See my 43 page article, “What is the Catholic Church’s Official Position on the Shroud of Turin? Pronouncements from The Vatican and Turin” at: https://www.academia.edu/45292513/What_is_the_Catholic_Churchs_Official_Position_onhe_Shroud_of_Turin_Pronouncements_from_The_Vatican_and_Turin
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Absolutely wrong on the 2nd half. He told Orazio Petrosillo of Il Messagero, “It certainly is a relic.”
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I’ve been seeing quite a few videos recently of Protestant and even Orthodox services giving presentations on the Shroud.
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It treats it as an object that possibly be the real thing. We’ll never 100% proof that it is, but that shouldn’t keep us from paying attention to it.
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Three labs using the same sample; the British Museum head taking over at Oxford after Teddy Hall resigned; Nature having a militant anti-Christian editor at the time of the report. Please read my 800 page book on the egos, agendas and backstabbings occurred before during and after the C-14 dating.
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Consensus by whom? The labs? Do you think they were going to admit to errors? By people who were happy to get a medieval date but didn’t want to be bothered into looking into the fiasco that was the dating exercise? By people who have done little to no research on the Shroud? Certainly not by numerous people who have spent 4 and 5 decades studying all aspects of the Shroud.
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Standard references have very little knowledge of the intricacies of the Shroud.
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There are still plenty of articles about the Shroud and most will mention the assertion by many that the C-14 is believed by some to be inaccurate because the sample tested was a repair section.
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Any theory starts at a particular point in time. The theory that Rogers came up was based on empirical evidence and was new data at the time. Remember that Rogers had accepted the C-14 date before he did his experiments, which were supported by other multiple scientists.
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There is still enough of a bias about the Shroud that many thinkers are afraid to speak out of a concern for their reputations.
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Maybe it’s because those researchers have spent multiple decades studying the Shroud, which warrants them dominating the discussion. Why should people’s opinion who have done little or no real study on the Shroud be given the same weight?
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I disagree. I follow all the articles that come out and they have been in a fairly wide range of academic or theological journals.
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It’s not impossible that resurrection energy/radiation bursts) could have caused the images. Something had to cause the images, and we don’t have a natural explanation that works. I don’t think such theories keep people from being interested in the Shroud.
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There are a number of new scientists who have become interested in the Shroud. Some of them will be speaking at the 2025 St. Louis conference.
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People like Giulio Fanti, Dr. Paolo DiLazzaro, and Dr. Liberato De Caro have been using modern technology on the Shroud.
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Sure, some similar papers are presented at conferences but there hasn’t even been a major conference in North America since 2019. You can’t possibly know who attended the 2019 conference (non-speaking attendees) and who will be attending the 2025 conference.
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Why shouldn’t we still depend on the STURP work? Their work is the basis of most of the knowledge we have today. Are you perhaps suggesting we get rid of it because they didn’t discount the Shroud?
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So because some Christians are indifferent, we should stop investigating what could be the actual burial cloth of Jesus?
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Look at the difference between the reactions of the apostles John and Thomas. John just saw the linen cloths and believed, without having seen the risen Lord. Thomas declared he wouldn’t believed unless he had physically touched him. God reaches people in different ways. Why couldn’t God have left the Shroud for people who it need it more than others?
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Jesus performed miracles to help people believe. The Shroud may be a miracle for modern people.
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I wrote an article (in my academia page) showing that there have been at least 102 disciplines and subdisciplines used on the Shroud. How many objects out there being studied are going to match that?
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Nothing on the Shroud has been found that blatantly contradicts what we know about such things as Roman crucifixion or Jewish burial customs. If the Shroud were a forgery, we probably would have found some contradictions by now.
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Seriously? If it’s so fringe why is it one of the most (if not the most) studied artifacts in human history and why has it not been solved yet?
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Nobody ever said the Church required belief in the Shroud as essential faith.
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True enough–but don’t forget the apostle John “saw and believed.”
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From your perspective–but what if God wanted to leave it for the doubting Thomases of the 20th and 21st centuries? Then all the blog postings in the world won’t keep people from investigating it.
It doesn’t matter to me the age of the shroud. What does matter is the formation of the image with the peculiar positive/negative quality. Nothing so far has explained the image formation. I can only roll my eyes when I read wild eyed theories of medieval painting or scorching a cloth wrapped around hot metal. Why are we so caught up in it being Jesus’ shroud? Why are we not boggled by the fact of the existence of a truly unique image? That’s the mystery that is being lost under the distractions of religious layers and beliefs.
Dan.
If I am allowed to express my sincere and honest opinion.
The older layout and the title of your blog “Shroud Story” were MUCH better! And so the intro on the right side (where you now write: “I changed my mind…” and so on -and BTW, you don’t even mention your name, so newcomers do not know you are).
I think you get too pessimistic, you see everything in dark shades.
Perhaps you read too much skeptical sites without proper criticism of their propositions. Be skeptical about skeptical claims!
You claimed, you made “rigorous reexamination of the facts”. With all respect I am not convinced it was sufficiently rigorous.
This (the “reexamination” and fact-checking) is often hard, difficult and tiresome. Really. The reexamination requires knowledge, open-mindedness, imagination, self-discipline, and will to learn new things and ability to check alternatives. People often instead rely on experts, and the experts there many with various views. Not only skeptical with the goal to debunk the Shroud (exactly opposite to those who want to authenticate it at all cost, and most of the pro-authenticity do not perform that).
10 years ago your blog was exciting, intriguing and your comments, even when they challenged the common view, were stimulating. Now they are mostly irritating and boring. And I don’t think that by switching to the skeptical site you will get again so much attention as before, if this is the goal.
You wrote 4 posts titled “Not good” and put them on the top. I have proposition for you. Now, for the balance write four posts titled “Not bad”. You will see that the situation with the Shroud research and publicity is really not that bad, as you perceive it. There is no point changing previous enthusiasm for the depression and rejection. You found 100 $. Now you lost 30 $ Next day maybe you will find 20 $, next day you will lose 10 $, next you will find 50 $… and so on. But still the account is >0 $. The Shroud Story is similar.
Later on I will address some of the points from the outline you wrote.
Dan.
If I am allowed to express my sincere and honest opinion.
The older layout and the title of your blog “Shroud Story” were MUCH better! And so the intro on the right side (where you now write: “I changed my mind…” and so on -and BTW, you don’t even mention your name, so newcomers do not know you are).
I think you get too pessimistic, you see everything in dark shades.
Perhaps you read too much skeptical sites without proper criticism of their propositions. Be skeptical about skeptical claims!
You claimed, you made “rigorous reexamination of the facts”. With all respect I am not convinced it was sufficiently rigorous.
This (the “reexamination” and fact-checking) is often hard, difficult and tiresome. Really. The reexamination requires knowledge, open-mindedness, imagination, self-discipline, and will to learn new things and ability to check alternatives. People often instead rely on experts, and the experts there many with various views. Not only skeptical with the goal to debunk the Shroud (exactly opposite to those who want to authenticate it at all cost, and most of the pro-authenticity do not perform that).
10 years ago your blog was exciting, intriguing and your comments, even when they challenged the common view, were stimulating. Now they are mostly irritating and boring. And I don’t think that by switching to the skeptical site you will get again so much attention as before, if this is the goal.
You wrote 4 posts titled “Not good” and put them on the top. I have proposition for you. Now, for the balance write four posts titled “Not bad”. You will see that the situation with the Shroud research and publicity is really not that bad, as you perceive it. There is no point changing previous enthusiasm for the depression and rejection. You found 100 $. Now you lost 30 $ Next day maybe you will find 20 $, next day you will lose 10 $, next you will find 50 $… and so on. But still the account is >0 $. The Shroud Story is similar.
Later on I will address some of the points from the outline you wrote.
I’m still working on it, so your opinion is much appreciated. I’m almost surely going to bring the text (and my name) back up near the top. But now, it is Memorial Day in the U.S. and I am off to a BBQ. I’ll work on it a bit tomorrow. Thanks.
You make some good points and some not that good.
It is true that in academic circles the Shroud is mostly ignored. But that isn’t a recent development, it has always been that way, and I don’t see signs that the situation is worsening. If your point is to show that recognition of the Shroud isn’t growing, most of the things that you are listing don’t really make that point.
There is indeed some stagnation in Shroud science, but the main cause for that is that the Vatican hasn’t been allowing new research, rather than lack of interest. And while I can’t quote numbers, I have the impression that the number of published papers on the Shroud has been constantly increasing in the last years.
Your list of “universally studied artifacts” is rather curious. The Rosetta Stone had enormous importance — 200 years ago. If you talk about “living in the past” then that’s a great example, it’s about four times as old as the VP-8. The Dead Sea Scrolls have been indeed an important source of historical information to specialists, but they are most known to the public because of wild speculations and conspiracy theories like Dan Brown’s. The Antikythera Mechanism, do you really think that it is more known and studied than the Shroud? And your claim that the Shroud lacks “relevance to historical understanding” is, well, bizarre — unless you claim that Jesus Christ was a minor figure with little impact on history.
As for your final reflection, it is true that faith does not *depend* on the Shroud, but that doesn’t mean that it is *irrelevant*. If we can have a “photograph of the resurrection” how would that be a bad thing? I hope you don’t fall into the elitist attitude that, since you don’t *need* proof for your faith, then you don’t *want* proof because that would somehow make your faith “less worthy”, or to use your words, because it would detract from a “modern religious conviction”, whatever that means.
Pick me! Pick me! I can quote numbers!
Hits on Google Scholar, for “Turin Shroud” or “Shroud of Turin”:
1960s: 25
1970s: 159
1980s: 877
1990s: 1256
2000s: 2094
2010s: 3431
2020s: 1771 so far.
For “Rosetta Stone” and “Egypt”:
1960s: 117
1970s: 181
1980s: 301
1990s: 727
2000s: 2180
2010s: 3840
2020s: 2240 so far.
For “Dead Sea Scrolls”:
1960s: 2470
1970s: 2130
1980s: 2690
1990s: 8120
2000s: 15,500
2010s: 14,700
2020s: 10,900 so far.
For “Antikythera Mechanism”
1960s: 8
1970s: 57
1980s: 56
1990s: 63
2000s: 437
2010s: 1710
2020s: 1310 so far.
For “Ötzi” and “Iceman”:
1960s: 2 (Eh? He wasn’t discovered till 1991!)
1970s: 2 (Google quantum uncertainty at work)
1980s: 0
1990s: 31
2000s: 331
2010s: 1510
2020s: 1090 so far.
For “Homo floresiensis” (discovered 2003)
1960s: 2
1970s: 4
1980s: 4
1990s: 17
2000s: 1080
2010s: 2900
2020s: 1760 so far.
For “Vinland map”
1960s: 235
1970s: 282
1980s: 126
1990s: 187
2000s: 424
2010s: 418
2020s: 225 so far.
I must get out more…
Hi, Hugh,
Hits on “Google Scholar” necessarily eliminates hits just on “Google.” Most people don’t search on Google Scholar. Actually, I almost never use that–I just do my searches on Google, and the amount that I, alone, have been studying the Shroud for the past 4 years would amount to far more “hits” on Google Scholar for the Shroud of Turin (or a version of that name) than merely 1,771. Because your numbers are artificially “cooked,” at best, they’re “half-baked!” Once again, the problem with using the fake brain of A.I. along with a narrow search term that doesn’t really reflect reality. Plus, studying and analyzing the Shroud of Turin involves countless hours in thinking and reading papers that are often not necessarily searched with a title that involves “Shroud of Turin” or some such name. For example, there are countless medical, forensic and scientific issues that I have studied where to tie in their pertinence to the Shroud requires understanding the scientific/medical/forensic issues FIRST. But, this is all part of Shroud scholarship and goes into the analysis of the Shroud of Turin. So, there’s that . . .
Best regards,
Teddi
Hi Teddi,
Perhaps I should have explained a bit more. Gerardo said he had “the impression that the number of published papers on the Shroud has been constantly increasing in the last years,” and I showed that he was correct. I don’t know exactly how Google decides what counts as a “scholarly” paper rather than just anybody’s mention, or how it counts them, but it certainly narrows the field. However, being a good scientist, we really need controls, to try to find out if the apparent increase is an artifact. After all, there were no Google mentions before Google was invented, even though there were plenty of publications. And, as everybody in the world gets used to using internet technology, it seems that, as you can see, just about everything continues to have more and more papers published about it.
As to the 1771 articles/papers/books. These are documents rather than blogs/ videos/ newspapers/ tourist sites etc. which have “Turin Shroud” or “Shroud of Turin” in them, and have been published after 2020, although even Google admits that the number is approximate. However many times you’ve hunted for the Shroud on the internet recently, are you sure you have consulted more than, say, 1750 articles published in the last five years? Have you also consulted the 3400 articles published in the ten years before 2020? I look forward to reading the bibliography in your upcoming book….
How do you get hits for “Homo floresiensis” 40 years before its discovery?
Clearly, this shows that counting Google hits is, at best, a very rough measure.
And why did you search for “Rosetta Stone and Egypt” rather than Rosetta Stone alone? I said there isn’t recent research on the Rosetta Stone. Of course there is a lot on Egypt.
Hi, Hugh,
When Gerardo was mentioning the Rosetta Stone, Dead Sea Scrolls, Antikythera Mechanism, etc. he wasn’t referring to papers published but the STUDY of these artifacts. Gerardo, also, however, mentioned (as a separate point) that he had the impression that the number of published papers on the Shroud has been constantly increasing in the last years. Just think about it this way–in the pre-internet past, the number of scientific journals (hard copies) was much exponentially smaller. With the advent of the internet and online journals, this has expanded opportunities for people to write about scientific (as well as other) topics. So, I think that common sense alone can tell us that the number of papers concerning the Shroud has increased.
And, yes, I’m quite confident that in less than five years I have read more than 1,750 papers on various topics that are related to my investigating a multitude of topics concerning the Shroud of Turin. And, just because I read something does not mean that I am going to use it. If that were the case, I’d be using a lot of wrong information (and this deals with many things that I have investigated that concern medical and scientific topics that are not even mentioning the Shroud but which I need to know about when studying the Shroud. There is a lot of commonly repeated old information that is no longer quite right in many other areas besides Shroud scholarship. A fine example is the one that I point out in my paper regarding how long rigor mortis can last.
All the best,
Teddi
Hi Gerardo,
Getting the best out of any search engine is always a matter of subtlety and nuance, which is why I quoted numerous examples over 75 years or so, and, so that people could see I wasn’t being selective, why I quoted some figures that are patently absurd. You’re right that counting Google hits is a fairly rough guide, but even a rough guide is better than no guide at all, and I think my research shows that you were correct in your impression that the number of published papers on the Shroud has been constantly increasing in the last years.
There are various reasons why a discovery in 2000 appears to be quoted in a paper of 1950. Sometimes a modern paper about the discovery quotes a previous paper of relevance – maybe about the geography of the area, say – and Google gets confused about which is the correct date to list it under, and sometimes an old paper simply gets updated with new discoveries, but Google retains the original publication date.
Choosing search criteria is also nuanced. Articles about the Shroud must include the words “Shroud” and “Turin,” but there are lots of articles about the Egyptian mummy museum in Turin which also include those words. Choosing “Turin Shroud” excludes all the papers which call it the “Shroud of Turin,” and vice versa. I searched for all the papers under both headings and added them up, but as I did so I noticed that there were some which referred to the Shroud by both phrases, so they were counted twice.
When I searched for “Rosetta Stone,” I noticed that there were numerous examples of the term being used entirely metaphorically, with nothing to do with the actual stone at all, so I added “Egypt” so that the article had to include both terms. No doubt a few metaphorical examples which just happened to be set in Egypt crept through. I did not include articles which included Egypt but did not mention the Rosetta Stone.
That’s also the reason why I looked for articles including both “Ötzi” and “iceman,” although no doubt some scholarly articles don’t call him by name, and a great many, being in German, don’t call him “iceman” so I will have missed them. Still…
There’s a lot more to say about searching Google, but I’m sure you get the point.
Best wishes,
Hugh
Yes, I believe I get the point.
Besides, in Italy Ötzi the Iceman is more often called “the man of Similaun” or “the mummy of Similaun” from the place where he was found. And there are other people called “Iceman”, for example the former Formula 1 world champion Kimi Räikkönen… So yes, there are so many “subtleties and nuances” to consider when using Google search, that one has to wonder how much one is “improving” vs. “manipulating” the result.
And don’t even get me started about getting reliable information from ChatGPT — just forgive me if I simply refuse to consider any arguments made from it.