IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 235

The Book of Kells is a copy of the four Gospels in Latin, written and decorated by hand on pages of prepared animal skin. It has been held at Trinity College Dublin since the seventeenth century and is displayed in the college library, where a glass case holds one volume open. The manuscript is usually dated to about the year 800, though a date some decades earlier or later is possible, and it is regarded as the finest surviving example of the art of the early Irish church.

According to a tradition that persisted for centuries, the book was the work of Columba, the Irish monk who founded a monastery on the island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland, in the sixth century. Modern scholarship has abandoned that attribution, since Columba died in 597, more than a century before the manuscript was made. The association is not entirely mistaken, however. Iona remained the centre of a powerful monastic family, and the book is widely thought to have been produced there, or by scribes trained there, in the decades around 800. Irish and Scottish monasteries of the period treated such books as treasures.

The monastery was exposed to attack from the sea, and in 806 a raid on Iona killed a large number of its monks. Such disasters encouraged the community to look for a safer home, and in the early ninth century the monks established themselves at Kells, in County Meath in Ireland, from which the manuscript takes its name. Whether the book was carried to Kells or made there after the move has never been settled, and a few scholars have argued for an origin in northern Britain instead. The question matters because it decides which artistic traditions the decoration should be compared with.

Each of the 340 surviving leaves is a sheet of vellum, made from the skin of a calf. The pages are large, roughly 33 by 25 centimetres, and the text is written in long lines of rounded letters known as insular script. Producing so much vellum was expensive, and estimates of the number of animals needed, which are necessarily rough, run to well over a hundred. The skins were smoothed with abrasives so that ink would lie on the surface without spreading.

About thirty of the pages are given over entirely to decoration. Some contain the symbols of the evangelists or full-page portraits; others are carpet pages, filled with interlace so dense and exact that a single panel can occupy a magnifying glass for an hour. The interlace is drawn without visible guide lines, and errors in the pattern are rare. The most celebrated page introduces Matthew's account of the birth of Christ, where the Greek letters chi and rho, the beginning of the word Christ, expand into a mass of spirals, animals and human figures. No gold or silver appears anywhere in the decoration; its brilliance comes from pigments alone.

The Gospels are preceded, as was customary, by canon tables: lists of parallel passages set out in columns beneath arched frames, so that a reader can see at a glance where the four accounts agree. These pages are decorated too, though less densely than the carpet pages. Parts of the manuscript were never finished. On some pages the outlines are drawn but never filled with colour, and elsewhere blank spaces remain where a picture was planned. Such pages are valued by scholars precisely because they expose a method of work that the completed pages conceal.

Analysis of the handwriting has distinguished four scribes working on the text and three artists responsible for the decoration, though the same person may have done both jobs. The scribes wrote with quills cut from feathers. Their ink was made from oak galls and iron salts. Before writing, they pressed guide lines into the vellum with a sharp point, and traces of these lines can still be seen. Pigments were then applied over faint outlines, layer by layer; the purples, yellows and reds are earths and organic dyes, while the blue has been examined in laboratories because its source is not obvious.

The monastery at Kells was itself attacked more than once, and it is probably no accident that the first certain record of the book concerns a theft. The Annals of Ulster report that in 1007 the great Gospel book of Columba was stolen at night from the church at Kells and stripped of its precious cover. It was hidden under turf, and was recovered after two months and twenty days, minus the cover. The annal does not describe the manuscript, and its identification with the Book of Kells, though widely accepted, remains an inference.

The book stayed at Kells through the middle ages, used for the taking of oaths rather than for reading, and survived a long period in which the monastery declined. In the unsettled middle of the seventeenth century it was sent to Dublin for safekeeping, and by 1661 it had reached Trinity College, presented by Henry Jones, then bishop of Meath. Apart from a period in the 1950s, when it was sent away to be rebound, it has remained in the college's hands ever since.

In 1953 the volume was taken apart and rebound in four volumes by the binder Roger Powell, a treatment that relieved the strain on the pages and allowed each part to be opened more safely. Two volumes can be displayed at once, one open at a fully decorated page, and the pages are turned at regular intervals to limit exposure to light. A complete set of digital images is now available online, which has reduced the need for scholars to handle the original.

Amber is not a stone but the hardened resin of trees that grew in northern Europe tens of millions of years ago. Buried and chemically altered over that time, the resin survives as a material that can be carved and polished. Its colour ranges from pale yellow to deep reddish brown, and pieces large enough to carve are rare. Most of the amber that reached the ancient Mediterranean came from the shores of the Baltic Sea, where storms still tear it from the sea bed and leave it lying on the sand.

The movement of this material across Europe is far older than the Roman world. Amber beads have been found in the shaft graves of Mycenae in Greece, in burials of the sixteenth century BC, and analysis indicates that the resin came from the Baltic rather than from any local source. Amber therefore travelled well over two thousand kilometres through prehistoric Europe, passing from hand to hand long before any state could organise a trading expedition.

Historians call the routes by which it travelled the Amber Road, but the phrase is a modern invention and slightly misleading. There was never a single paved highway running from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, and no ancient author describes an itinerary. What existed was a bundle of routes, changing with politics, weather and the silting of rivers, along which amber and other goods moved south while metals, glass and coins moved north. The name was given by modern scholars to a set of connections that no single authority ever administered.

The best-known branch began on the Samland peninsula, near the site of the modern city of Kaliningrad, where amber was most abundant, and ran south along the Vistula. It crossed the Moravian Gap, a natural pass between mountains that has carried traffic since prehistory, and reached the Danube near the Roman fortress of Carnuntum, east of modern Vienna. From there it continued over the Alps and down to Aquileia at the head of the Adriatic. Other branches went east towards the Black Sea, and some amber probably travelled by river and coastal boat for part of the way.

Aquileia, founded as a Roman colony in 181 BC, became the principal market. Excavations have uncovered workshops where amber was cut and polished into rings, beads and small figures, and unfinished pieces show that raw material was imported and finished locally. From Aquileia the objects could be carried by road to Rome or shipped across the Adriatic to Greece. The wealth of the city, and the density of amber finds in its ruins, have made it the central piece of evidence for the trade.

The Roman writer Pliny the Elder, whose Natural History was compiled in the first century AD, is the fullest literary source. He describes how amber was gathered on the northern coast and sold to Roman traders, and he reports an expedition sent during Nero's reign, when a Roman knight travelled to the amber markets and came back with so much of the material that the netting protecting spectators in the arena was knotted with it. He also notes that a small carved figure of amber could cost more in Rome than a living person. The story is a single anecdote in a work that mixes observation with hearsay, but it shows that Romans could reach the Baltic themselves.

What the northern communities received in exchange is known mainly from what archaeologists find in their graves and settlements: bronze vessels, glass beads and Roman coins, the last often pierced so that they could be worn as pendants. Hoards of Roman money far beyond the imperial frontier show that it was valued, though whether it circulated as currency or simply as a source of silver and prestige is disputed.

Chemists have known since the nineteenth century that Baltic amber, called succinite, contains a characteristic proportion of succinic acid, typically several per cent by weight, which other fossil resins lack. More recently, infrared spectroscopy, which measures the way a sample absorbs light at different wavelengths, has given each resin a distinctive pattern and made it possible to distinguish Baltic amber from Sicilian, Burmese or Dominican material. An object's find spot no longer has to be taken as evidence of where its material came from.

The limits of the evidence are worth stating plainly. A map of amber finds shows where objects ended up, not how they got there, and a line drawn between two find spots may describe a route that was never used. Many pieces probably passed through several pairs of hands, each exchange adding to the price, so that a bead buried in a Greek grave may have been carried most of the way by people who had never heard of the Baltic. Some scholars therefore prefer to speak of a network of routes rather than a single road.

None of this diminishes what the routes represent. Amber was gathered at the edge of the known world and delivered, thousands of kilometres away, to customers who valued it for its colour, its warmth to the touch and its supposed medicinal powers. The trade linked communities that left no writing and whose names are unknown.

Every year, millions of people visit places where large numbers of human beings were killed. They file past the gate at Auschwitz-Birkenau, walk through the cells of the former prison at Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh, and take the ferry to Robben Island. Some come as pilgrims, some as schoolchildren on a timetable, some because the site happens to lie on the way to somewhere else. The growth of this kind of travel has produced a substantial academic literature, a pair of labels (dark tourism and thanatourism) and an argument that is often conducted with more feeling than evidence.

Critics of the practice make several complaints, which are worth separating. The first is that pleasure and horror do not mix: visitors consume suffering as a spectacle, moving from a gas chamber to a café and a gift shop without a break in mood. The second is that crowds make reflection impossible, so that the place becomes a background for photographs of oneself. The third, and the most serious, is that turning a killing ground into an attraction flattens it, replacing understanding with a vague and comfortable sadness that costs the visitor nothing and changes nothing.

Against this, defenders point to what happens when such places are neglected. Sites of atrocity are awkward inheritances, and the simplest way to deal with an awkward inheritance is to let it decay. Where survivors and their descendants have fought to preserve a site, they have usually done so in the belief that visitors are essential to its survival: that a building empty of people soon becomes a ruin which can be denied, rebuilt or built over. A camp that receives a million visitors a year is difficult to erase from public memory.

The educational argument is stronger than it is usually made to sound. Reading about a place is not the same as standing in it, and the difference is not merely sentimental. Visitors encounter scale and proximity: the size of the ground, the distance between the railway platform and the gas chambers, the ordinary streets that surround the perimeter. These are facts that prose struggles to convey, and the knowledge they produce resists the familiar claim that the accounts were exaggerated or invented, a claim that has not gone away.

There is also the matter of witness. At several sites, survivors chose to return and to speak, and their decision changed the character of the place. In Phnom Penh a handful of prisoners survived the prison that is now a museum, and their presence turned a building the regime had abandoned into a place of testimony. To dismiss the visits of outsiders as voyeurism is to ignore the fact that many sites exist as museums because survivors wanted an audience, and did not trust the future to remember without one.

Money complicates the picture. Entrance fees and the spending of visitors pay the staff who maintain the buildings and the archives, and in poor regions they support the surrounding economy as well. But a market in suffering creates its own pressures. Where visitor numbers become the measure of success, exhibitions drift towards the dramatic and the photogenic, and the mundane detail that explains how a thing happened is quietly dropped. It is one thing to charge for admission in order to repair a roof, and another to sell key rings stamped with the name of a death camp.

The distinction that matters, then, is not between visiting and not visiting, but between sites that explain and sites that merely display. A well-curated site does more than preserve: it places the killing in a sequence of decisions, names the bureaucracy that made it possible, and shows the ordinary people who carried it out. It also tells the visitor what to do with the experience, where to stand and when to be silent, and it accepts that some visitors will behave badly, providing for them rather than pretending otherwise.

This is why I find the argument over the selfie at the memorial less interesting than it appears. A photograph taken in front of a killing wall is objectionable not because photography is forbidden but because the pose puts the visitor at the centre of a story that is not about them. The fault lies less in the camera than in the framing, and the remedy is interpretation: an exhibition that makes clear what happened there tends to make such poses look foolish without any need for a rule prohibiting them.

My conclusion, therefore, is that the case for visiting is strong but conditional. Sites of atrocity should be open, financed and explained, and school visits, properly prepared, are among the most valuable journeys a young person can make. But the value lies in the explanation rather than in the journey. A visit that leaves the traveller with a photograph and a feeling of generalised pity has achieved nothing; one that leaves them with a date, a name and an understanding of how the thing was organised has achieved a great deal.