Translatician knowledges: the legend of the two prediluvian columns

Abstract

This paper analyses texts from antiquity, the middle ages and the early modern age to explain how the truths which were revealed by God to Adam and then passed on to his successors were put into written form on two columns that would be saved from the announced, universal flood or catastrophe. It also describes the development of the idea of these columns, clarifying the origin of this theory, how it was transmitted and reelaborated from antiquity to the early modern age. The paper addesses the origination of a variety of concepts concerning the transmission of knowledge (translatio scientiae), the nautre of political legitimacy (translatio imperii), and how these have been diversely interpreted and used in different cultures, societies, and groups.