Written off

The decision by a London university to axe the UK's only chair in palaeography has been met by outrage from the world's most eminent classicists. John Crace on why the study of ancient writings matters – and why history will be lost without it

Dry, dusty and shortly to be dead. Palaeographers are used to making sense of fragments of ancient manuscripts, but King's College London couldn't have been plainer when it announced recently that it was to close the UK's only chair of palaeography. From ­September, the current holder of the chair, Professor David Ganz, will be out of a job, and the subject will no longer exist as a separate academic discipline in British universities. Its survival will now depend entirely on the whim of classicists and medievalists studying in other fields.

The decision took everyone by ­surprise. "It was only recently that Rick Trainor [the principal of King's] was calling the humanities department [to which palaeography is attached] the jewel in the university's crown," says Dr Mary Beard, professor of ­classics at Cambridge University. "There had been a complete overhaul of ­minority disciplines in the mid-1990s, so there was consensus that everything had been pared down to the bare minimum."

How things change. With Lord Mandelson – in his incarnation as secretary of state for business, industry and skills – now imposing a minimum 10% cut in spending throughout higher education, universities are looking to slash and burn departments. And esoteric subjects such as palaeography are easy targets; they attract comparatively few students and, most importantly, comparatively little in the way of research grants – the only way the past few governments have measured a subject's worth.

But if Trainor was hoping palaeography would do the decent thing, he badly misjudged the situation. Professor Ganz – the fourth person to have held the chair since it was endowed in 1949 – didn't roll over and die quietly. "On the assumption that this means the end of the chair of palaeography, I am having to fight for my subject," he says, "and I have been deeply moved by the level of support from friends, many of whom I have never met."

That's pretty much all Ganz is saying for now – but, having initially raised a very restrained, academic form of hell, others are now doing the talking for him. A Facebook page to save the chair has more than 4,000 members, and many of the world's most distinguished classicists have petitioned King's to ­reconsider its position. Even his ­students are stepping in to defend him. "Without a palaeography professor such as David Ganz, not only will King's be sorely deprived of a basis on which to teach almost every other university discipline," says Alexandra Maccarini, "but the study of humanities everywhere will suffer from the absence of a devoted specialist in the subject."

In its strictest sense, palaeography is the study of ancient manuscripts whereby scholars can read texts – often partial, as many exist only in fragments – and localise and date handwriting accurately. This may sound arcane, and to some extent it is. But it is also the building block of all classical and ­medieval scholarship. According to Ganz: "Anyone who goes into a ­university library will within a week find an ancient manuscript that no one has yet properly understood."

"It is academic forensic science," agrees Dr Irving Finkel, assistant keeper in the department of the ­Middle East at the British Museum. "Many of the printed texts we use today – be they the Bible, Livy's poems or Shakespeare's plays – do not come from a single text. They are a collation of various manuscripts that may have been altered by scribes over time. A palaeographer can help determine which is likely to be the most authentic.

"It's about understanding the codes, the signs and the ligatures [common abbreviations] that were in use at different periods of a language's evolution, so you can interpret words that may have been rubbed away and see what may have been added at a later date."

Academics, of course, enjoy a good squabble, so it's hard to get universal agreement on what does and doesn't fall within palaeography's reach. For some it includes major finds such as the Rosetta Stone, from which ­hieroglyphics were first decoded, and Linear B, the ancient Minoan script translated by Michael Ventris. ­Others insist that, as they were carved in stone, they fall within epigraphy. Some restrict ­palaeography to merely classical texts; others include medieval and Renaissance texts.

Either way, the point is much the same. It's not just that we wouldn't have a clue what the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Cyrus Cylinder (over which the British Museum and the Iranian government are currently locking horns) actually mean without palaeography; we wouldn't know how to evaluate their historical importance. Multiply this by every fragment and every hand-written folio, and the history of the world begins to be up for grabs.

"Palaeography is not simply an arcane auxiliary science," says Professor Jeffrey Hamburger, chair of medieval studies at Harvard University. "It is as basic to the training and practice of ­historians as mastery of Dos or Unix might be to a computer scientist.

Not that palaeography has the answer to everything. No one has still made head or tail of Linear A (dating back to around 1900BC), and the Indus ­Valley script of the third millennium BC is still a mystery. But just days before King's made the announcement, its sister London institution, University College, was boasting how two of Ganz's former students, Dr Simon ­Corcoran and Dr Benet Salway, had pieced together 17 fragments of parchment that form an important ­Roman law code – believed to be the only original evidence yet discovered of the Gregorian Codex (a collection of constitutions upon which a substantial part of most modern European civil law ­systems are built) that had been thought lost for ever.

Giving up on palaeography is like giving up on art, history and culture. It's like deciding we know all we want to know about the past, so we're not going to bother to find out any more: "It's not as if we can come back to it in 15 years' time if we then decide there's enough money," says Beard. "Palaeography can't be taught in an online tutorial; it's a skill handed down from one academic to another. If King's does go through with its decision, it's the end of the subject in this country."

Reading the past: What palaeographers have done for us

Dead Sea Scrolls

A collection of about 900 documents on parchment and papyrus, ­written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, ­dating from about 150BC to AD70. Discovered between 1947 and 1956 in 11 caves on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. The earliest surviving ­examples of Biblical texts.

Indus Valley Script

More than 600 symbols have been found – primarily on seals – belonging to the Indus Valley civilisation of 3,000BC. Most inscriptions are only four or five symbols in length. The longest is 26 symbols. Scholars have yet to decode them, though it hasn't stopped them arguing whether it does actually constitute a genuine language.

Rosetta Stone

Technically one for epigraphers, but many palaeographers claim it for themselves. The stone, discovered by the French in 1799, contained three parallel texts – hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek – and was the key that ­enabled scholars to decode ­hieroglyphics for the first time.

Beowulf

The most important work in Anglo-Saxon literature, the Old-English epic poem of 3,182 lines is known from a single manuscript that is estimated to date from AD1000. The manuscript has crumbled over time and scholars are still working on its preservation and revealing lost letters of the poem.

Oxyrhynchus Papyri

A collection of documents from the Ptolemaic and Roman eras excavated from the old rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus, an ancient Egyptian site thought so unimportant it was left almost untouched for centuries. Extracts from the plays of Menander and the Gospel of St Thomas are among the most important finds.

Mystery as Burj Khalifa shuts

Electrical problems blamed for closure of viewing platform but unknown if rest of tower is affected

The world's tallest skyscraper has unexpectedly closed to the public a month after its lavish opening, disappointing tourists headed for the observation deck and casting doubt over plans to welcome its first permanent occupants in the coming weeks.

Electrical problems are partly to blame for the closure of the Burj Khalifa's viewing platform, the only part of the half-mile high tower that has so far opened. But a lack of information from the spire's owner left it unclear whether the rest of the largely empty building – including dozens of elevators meant to whisk visitors to the tower's more than 160 floors – was affected by the shutdown.

The indefinite closure, which was imposed on Sunday, comes as Dubai struggles to revive its international image as a cutting-edge Arab metropolis, amid nagging questions about its financial health.

The Persian Gulf city-state had hoped the 828m (2,717ft) Burj Khalifa would be a major tourist draw. Dubai has promoted itself by visitors with over-the-top attractions such as the Burj, which juts like a silvery needle out of the desert and can be seen from miles around.

In recent weeks, thousands of tourists have lined up for the chance to buy tickets for viewing times often days in advance that cost more than $27 apiece. Now many of those would-be visitors, such as Wayne Boyes, a tourist from near Manchester, England, must get back in line for refunds.

"It's just very disappointing," said Boyes, 40, who showed up at the Burj's entrance today with a ticket for an afternoon time slot, only to be told the viewing platform was closed. "The tower was one of my main reasons for coming here," he said.

The precise cause of the £960m ($1.5bn) Dubai skyscraper's temporary shutdown remained unclear. In a brief statement responding to questions, the building's owner, Emaar Properties, blamed the closure on "unexpected high traffic", but then suggested that electrical problems were also at fault.

"Technical issues with the power supply are being worked on by the main and subcontractors and the public will be informed upon completion," the company said, adding it is "committed to the highest quality standards at Burj Khalifa".

Despite repeated requests, a spokeswoman for Emaar was unable to provide further details or rule out the possibility of foul play. Greg Sang, Emaar's director of projects and the man charged with coordinating the tower's construction, could not be reached. Construction workers at the base of the tower said they were unaware of any problems.

Power was reaching some parts of the building. Strobe lights warning aircraft flashed and a handful of floors were illuminated after nightfall.

Emaar did not say when the observation deck would reopen. Tourists affected by the closure are being offered the chance to rebook or receive refunds.

Questions were raised about the building's readiness in the months leading up to the January opening.

The opening date had originally been expected in September, but was then pushed back until sometime before the end of 2009. The eventual opening date just after New Year's was meant to coincide with the anniversary of the Dubai ruler's ascent to power.

There were signs even that target was ambitious. The final metal and glass panels cladding the building's exterior were installed only in late September. Early visitors to the observation deck had to peer through floor-to-ceiling windows caked with dust – a sign that cleaning crews had not yet had a chance to scrub them.

Work is still ongoing on many of the building's other floors, including those that will house the first hotel designed by Giorgio Armani, due to open in March. The building's base remains largely a construction zone, with entrance restricted to the viewing platform lobby in an adjacent shopping mall.

The first of some 12,000 residential tenants and office workers are supposed to move in to the building this month.

Betty Tadman obituary

My friend Betty Tadman, who has died aged 88, was a gifted artist and inspirational teacher. Her career was largely spent in two posts: first as a class teacher at Queen's House school in Hampstead, north London, where many of her pupils were the daughters of Holocaust survivors, and then at Kingsway College, where she set up and ran the textile department in the 1970s and 80s. Her students there included the Sex Pistols' Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious, with whom she got on well – her anarchic streak was every bit as strong as theirs.

She possessed a true talent for drawing out strengths that her pupils did not know they possessed. Beautiful and charismatic, she had a gentle way of helping them to conquer their self-doubt, having overcome the uncertainties of her own childhood.

She was born in Sale, Cheshire, the illegitimate child of the woman she grew up believing was her sister. To avoid social stigma, Betty's grandmother raised her as her own daughter, and as a fun-loving eccentric who prized the latest Hollywood movies above time "wasted" on homework, she passed on to Betty a lifelong appetite for entertainment. But Betty often said it was Dickens, whose novels she discovered at a very early age, who really brought her up.

Betty was 16 and had just won a scholarship to Manchester School of Art, when, in the course of a family row, she discovered the truth about her real mother. She learned nothing about her father, but secretly believed that when she came of age, as in a Dickens story, he would seek her out. It didn't happen. But it was never in Betty's nature to dwell on disappointment.

As a born comedian and raconteur, Betty naturally gravitated to the theatre, at first working backstage, dressing a young Julie Andrews, doing ­Vivien Leigh's hair, and generally assisting the actor-manager Sir Donald Wolfit. Later, with her husband, the music critic Michael Church, Betty co-wrote her own plays.

But painting remained her first love and she never stopped producing ­pictures. Her style was eclectic and she could achieve – seemingly without effort – any virtuoso effect she wanted. She was much inspired by Greek mythology and the Mediterranean. She despised the values permeating the London fine art scene, and never courted fame. Appreciation by connoisseurs and friends was quite enough.

Michael survives her.

Standing out from the crowd

Goodwin's quietly powerful portraits of London Underground staff capture the mystery and melancholy of life in the capital

Ordinary faces look back at you from posters at London Underground stations, drawn in intense black lines, almost like forests of wiring. There is a hum of represssed energy, as if you were approaching power lines on a wasteland. There is also a solitude, a silence in the portraits that reach out, with their eyes, to you the stranger ... and then you've moved on, carried by the crowd, the connection is lost.

Dryden Goodwin's portraits of London Transport staff are the latest – and some might say the most conventional – in the series of artworks commissioned by Art on the Underground. Goodwin made drawings of 60 underground workers. They're engaged, emotional, hardworking sketches. For those who need a bit of video to make them feel they are seeing some proper modern art, he has also made films of the drawing sessions. For me, though, what's interesting is the vision of London this artist is pursuing; these drawings continue the themes of solitude in the crowd that made his 2008 show at the Photographers' Gallery so quietly powerful.

It is an old-fashioned London he is drawing, more reminiscent of the 1950s city of a Frank Auerbach than the happening metropolis of now. Both Londons are mythic, of course. There is no one, fixed truth of London; this city is both a heaven and a hell, depending on your point view. But in contemporary culture, the point of view is almost always remorselessly upbeat and promotional. Goodwin's London is a more melancholy, mysterious place whose streets, in these winter days, we actually seem to walk. They're gripping, thought-provoking and evocative of life in the big city.

Concrete poetry

With its stark yet oddly romantic images of American factories, intersections and trailer parks, William Jenkins's 1975 exhibition rewrote the rules of landscape photography. Does it have the same impact today?

It is 35 years since the term "new topographics" was coined by William Jenkins, curator of a group show of American landscape photography held at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. The show consisted of 168 rigorously formal, black-and-white prints of streets, warehouses, city centres, industrial sites and suburban houses. Taken collectively, they seemed to posit an aesthetic of the banal.

"What I remember most clearly was that nobody liked it," Frank Gohlke, one of the participating photographers told the LA Times when the exhibition was restaged last year at the LA County Museum of Art. "I think it wouldn't be too strong to say that it was a vigorously hated show."

The exhibition's clunky subtitle was "Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape", which gave some clue as to the deeper unifying theme. What Jenkins had identified in the work of US photographers such as Gohlke, Robert Adams, Stephen Shore, Lewis Baltz and Nicholas Nixon was an interest in the created landscapes of 70s urban America. Their stark, beautifully printed images of this mundane but oddly fascinating topography was both a reflection of the increasingly suburbanised world around them, and a reaction to the tyranny of idealised landscape photography that elevated the natural and the elemental. In one way, they were photographing against the tradition of nature photography that the likes of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston had created.

Adams, who is now perhaps the most well-known chronicler of America's disappearing wildernesses, pointed his camera at eerily empty streets, pristine trailer parks, rows of standardised tract houses, the steady creep of suburban development in all its regulated uniformity. Baltz made stark photographs of the walls of office buildings and warehouses on industrial sites in Orange County. Nixon concentrated on innercity development: skyscrapers that dwarfed period buildings, freeways, gridded streets and the palpable unreality of certain American cities in which pedestrians seem like interlopers.

Jenkins also included American work by Bernd and Hilla Becher in the show. The Bechers' stark images of Pennsylvania salt mines and giant coal breakers were as coolly architectural as their images of German cooling towers and industrial plants. The suggestion was that there was something determinedly European about this new American gaze.

Only one photographer, Shore, shot in colour. It seemed to heighten the sense of detachment in his photographs of anonymous intersections and streets. Shore was influenced by Ed Ruscha, the conceptualist of Californian cool, who, in the 60s, had made a series of artist's books with self-explanatory titles such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Some Los Angeles Apartments, Every Building on the Sunset Strip. The show also nodded obliquely at the later work of Walker Evans, who had photographed the vernacular iconography of America in road signs, billboards, motels and shop fronts.

Evans's images now carry the romantic undertow of an almost vanished America. The work of the photographers in the New Topographics exhibition, now collected in an austerely beautiful book of the same name by Steidl, still looks, for the most part, contemporary – and still seems troubling in its matter-of-factness, its almost dull reflection of the uniform and banal. A friend of mine who works in publishing dismissed the book outright, saying: "If I were to commission a bunch of authors to write essays on boredom, I would not expect the result to be a bunch of boring essays. Nor would I give it a pretentious postmodern title." Outside the rarefied world of art photography, many would, I suspect, agree.

The influence of the New Topographics movement, however, has been pervasive. You can detect it in the work of Andreas Gursky, Paul Graham and Candida Höfer. Indeed, Donovan Wylie's clinical approach to photographing the empty Maze prison in Northern Ireland, currently shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse prize, could easily have been a contemporary addendum to the Steidl book.

The New Topograhics exhibition in 1975 was not just the moment when the apparently banal became accepted as a legitimate photographic subject, but when a certain strand of theoretically driven photography began to permeate the wider contemporary art world. Looking back, one can see how these images of the "man-altered landscape" carried a political message and reflected, unconsciously or otherwise, the growing unease about how the natural landscape was being eroded by industrial development and the spread of cities.

Back then, Jenkins seemed to have anticipated what the public reaction to the show would be. University students were on hand at George Eastman House to interview visitors for their reactions, most of which were negative or dismissive. One man was surprised to find his own truck in one of Adams's photographs, and had this to say: "At first they're really stark nothing, but then you really look at them and it's just the way things are. This is interesting, it really is."

Now see this

Shot in black-and-white on an old 35mm camera, Giacomo Brunelli's photographs of animals – domestic and wild, dead and alive – are by turns dramatic and ghostly. He prowls the fields and streets near his London home for his prey and the results are often surprising; occasionally shocking. The Animals is on show at the Photofusion Gallery in London until 26 March 2010.