Month: May 2007

Reading pre-WW1 handwriting

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

Don’t you hate it when the postman brings a whole pile of things that you’ve been waiting to work on, all on the same day?  Well that happened to me this morning, just as I was about to go off and get an Armenian grammar.

The first item is a printout of a microfilm of a Syriac text of Marutha of Maiperkat, On the Council of Nicaea, which I mentioned a while back.  Marutha lived in the 5th century and persuaded the Persian king to allow the Christians of that kingdom to hold a General Council, at which they ratified the Nicene Creed.  This particular copy consists of a modern 14-page handwritten booklet, presented to the American Oriental Society by a certain A.H.Wright.  Half of it is Syriac text, in Nestorian characters; the rest a handwritten English translation.  No published translation is known.

“Aha!” I hear you cry, “He’s going to transcribe the English and upload it.”  Indeed I am.  But I’m having trouble with about a dozen words.  Would anyone like to see if they can do better?  If you look in http://www.tertullian.org/00temp, you will see a file transcription.txt, and also a monster 128Mb marutha_eng.pdf.  It’s so large because I scanned the English at 600 dpi greyscale.

Contributions gratefully accepted!

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GCS Eusebius at Google Books

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

I have this evening discovered two volumes of the Berlin Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller series containing critical texts of works by Eusebius at Google books.  A search for “eusebius werke” brought up vol. 2.2 (HE VI-X, Martyrs of Palestine, Rufinus HE X-XI); vol 3 (Onomasticon).  I’m not sure what the proper URL’s are, since I’m using a backdoor to access them: anyone?

Postscript: See the comments for links.  But I have now tried entering “griechischen christlichen schriftsteller” (without the quotes in Google books).  This gets me one link, here, which seems to display no content, and links to three “Other editions” in ‘snippet view’.  Can anyone in the US see any of the content for any of these four?

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1/72 Ancient wargaming figures

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

As a lad, I used to wargame ancients using the Wargames Research Group rules; indeed a metal 1/72 scale Seleucid army still resides in the loft of my house somewhere.  This week I came across an old-fashioned hobby shop, which is a rare thing indeed these days.  On the shelves were wargaming figures, in plastic, 1/72 scale for a vast range of ancient armies.  These were all by Hat Industrie, whose list is here with photographs.  Persians, Carthaginians, Late Romans, all in sets of 20-50 figures — I would have killed for these as a boy! 

Postscript, 21st May: I went back today and found the shop gone, as if it had never been.

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Obtaining a copy of the Armenian text of Eusebius’ Chronicle

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

Aucher’s 1818 editio princeps is in two volumes, corresponding to the two books of the Chronicle. Cambridge University Library have got back to me with some prices. For a photocopy of the 400 pages of vol. 1 they want ca. $160; for both vols ca. $300. “Bi-tonal scans as PDF files” are $420 and $790 (!).

Nor are CUL just being greedy compared to other libraries, and indeed they are one of the more reasonable ones. Most UK libraries see such requests only as opportunities for profit for what the market will bear; although, of course, those who run those libraries tend to make special arrangements for themselves, at a very special price, as I found out happens at the British Library.

Again, we owe such gratitude to Google Books for freeing us all from this dungeon of high charges and inaccessibility.

So it’s decision time. Clearly I won’t buy PDF’s from them — I can make them myself for nothing from the photocopies. Nor can I afford both volumes. But I might buy a copy of vol.1. It really would be nice to have access to this, when arguments about names arise. I shall look at Thomson’s grammar of Classical Armenian this weekend and decide then.

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More thoughts on the Armenian of Eusebius

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

There is supposed to be a new edition of the Armenian text of Eusebius’ Chronicle, to appear in the Berlin GCS series. Richard Burgess communicated this information to the LT-ANTIQ list a year or two back. If so, this would alter matters again, as a printed Classical Armenian (=’Grabar’) text could be scanned. I am told that the support for Grabar in Abbyy Finereader 8.0 Pro (which I have) is very good, thereby avoiding the need to get Aucher retyped. Perhaps the right choice is to defer dealing with the Armenian, and to proceed with the Latin and German.

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Working with the Armenian text of Eusebius – or not

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

I am beginning to wonder whether I have been too ambitious in attempting to work with the Armenian text of Eusebius Chronicle. It seems remarkably difficult just to obtain the raw materials. The English Grammar by R.M.Thomson is out of print and unobtainable second hand for less than $100; my attempts to borrow it from the library have gone nowhere.

There is no critical text. My attempts to obtain a photocopy of Aucher’s 1818 text, requested in March, have vanished into a black hole. This will involve $200 when or if it is possible and yet more delay.

Then it will be necessary to get it typed up. My only quote for this at 7 euros per page for 400 pages amounts to $4,000 – an impossible sum. An attempt to locate people in Armenia who would do it got no reply.

Then it would be necessary to get the text morphologised, because none of us known Armenian. This at least seems possible, as J.J.Weitenberg will help me.

Then it will be necessary to split up the text into sections, to align with the Latin and German. This will be very lengthy, given that I don’t know Armenian.

And after all that, will anyone use it? Or will they just use the Latin and German?

I must admit that I am being tempted to just abandon the Armenian angle. I’m about half-way through lining up the columns of Latin and German.

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Anagnostis – OCR for ancient Greek

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

I had an email from Dominique Gonnet at the Sources Chretiennes, asking if I had a copy of the OCR program Anagnostis.  I’d never heard of it, but this turns out to be an OCR utility for Greek which can handle Ancient Greek! 

Of course I want one!  But I was quickly put off, by the unbelievable price-tag of 585 euros for the ‘pro’ version — almost £400 or $800.  A ‘standard’ version exists for 78 euros, but this doesn’t do ancient Greek, so is useless to us all.  I don’t really think that I can justify spending such a very large sum.  I wonder if anyone else has seen or used this product?  If so, how well did it work?  A trial download is available: but I have not tried this, and I have seen a post suggesting that it doesn’t let you try the OCR!

I’ve also written to the company suggesting that they do an ‘ancient Greek’-only version for our market, for 78 euros. You might like to do the same, if you think that you’d buy such a product.

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Herodian now online in English

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

The 3rd century historian Herodian of Antioch wrote a history in eight books of the emperors from the death of Marcus Aurelius to the accession of Gordian III. The 1961 English translation is now online here. This is out of copyright in the USA, so copy freely if you are based there.

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More Old Nubian

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

I have found and ordered a copy of F. L. Griffith The Nubian Texts of the Christian Period (1913), which apparently has some 130 pages and contains all texts known at that time. It includes the Miracle of Saint Menas, one of the longest available texts in this language. This text was contained in a manuscript which was purchased by the British Museum in 1908. According to the description by E. A. Wallis Budge, it measures about 15.5 by 110 cm and consists of 8 leaves of parchment in three quires, and is bound in covers of brown leather. This book is out of copyright in the US, so I will see what can be scanned from it.

Postscript. According to Copac, F. L. (Francis Llewellyn) Griffith lived from 1862-1934. The latter is more than 70 years ago, so puts all his books out of copyright in Britain and the EU, as well as in the US.

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