Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
I’m sitting here this morning in an empty office because all the permanent staff have been taken up to the fourth floor — the management floor — for a ‘briefing’. It seems that the company has been taken over. Everyone is terrified for their jobs, and rightly so.
I understand that the management have decided to give them all a glass of champagne; to “celebrate” the takeover, you understand. Funny how people don’t imagine how others might be feeling.
In the preface to volume 2 of the catalogue of the Mingana manuscripts in Birmingham, Alphonse Mingana states (p. v) that the main collections of Arabic Christian manuscripts in the East are the library of Mt. Sinai; the library of the Catholic University of Saint-Joseph in Beirut; the Coptic Patriarchal museum and library in Cairo; and the library of Paul Sbath in Aleppo.
Searching for information on the last, often referenced in Graf’s history of Arabic literature, I found this link to the Schoyen collection. On it, there was this statement: “Paul Sbath had one of the most important collections of Arabic MSS ever formed, ca. 3000 MSS. 2000 MSS are in the Vatican Library, 1000 MSS were destroyed during the war, 2 MSS including the present one came to England.” Yet I find that the HMML expect to photograph some of the Sbath mss in Aleppo.
Fortunately this turns out to be nonsense. An enquiry on the Hugoye list brings the following information:
Sbath’s catalogue of his manuscripts (P. Sbath, Bibliotheque de manuscrits Paul Sbath, pretre syrien d’Alep: catalogue, 3 vols. Cairo, 1928-34) lists 1349 manuscripts.
Of these, nos. 1-338, 340-776 are in the Vatican (I don’t know what happened to no. 339, and I can’t remember now why I know it’s missing).
Most of nos. 777-1349 are in Aleppo, in the possession of Fondation Georges et Mathilde Salem. The manuscripts are (or were in 2001) in their office in Aziziyeh. Some of the manuscripts have gone missing; there are also a number of additional manuscripts not listed in Sbath’s catalogue. I gather from the Internet that a new catalogue of this collection is about to be published: Francisco del Rio Sanchez, Catalogue des manuscrits de la Fondation Georges et Mathilde Salem (Alep, Syrie) (Sprachen und Kulturen des christlichen Orients), Stuttgart: Reichert, 2008. — Hidemi Takahashi.
That’s more likely. I wonder how the mss ended up in the Vatican, tho. Another email from John C. Lamoreaux tells us:
Sbath himself collected around 1300 MSS — though he claimed to have more, perhaps as many as 1500. About half of these ended up in the Vatican Library (fonds Sbath). These are well preserved, and copies are easily had. Apparently, there were legal troubles getting the remaining mss out of Syria. Most of the rest of the mss, but not all, passed to his brother, and are now in the Foundation Sbath, near the Jesuit Residence in Aleppo. Hill is now said to be digitizing the mss remaining in Aleppo. For a list of the mss still in Aleppo, see the entry on the foundation in Takahashi’s bibliography on Barhebraeus (2005).
Sbath also published in the 1930s a three-volume catalogue of mss in private holdings, mostly in Aleppo. It lists about 3000 mss, most otherwise unknown. To my knowledge, none of these mss has yet to be found. I am about finished with an article arguing that Sbath was being less than honest, that he never actually saw many of these mss.
This all makes sense and gives us a little more.
The massive Arabic Christian history begun by Severus ibn Mukaffa in the 9th century and running down to our own times is a gem. But I was looking at Google books today, and found a statement here in vol. 1 p. 211 of the Cambridge History of Egypt that the English translation published in Cairo in the 1950’s is unreliable. The first four chunks were published by B. Evetts in the Patrologia Orientalis, are presumably sound, and are here. 5 chunks of the Cairo publication are at this site, and 3 more exist. It’s a very hard book to get hold of, as I can testify!
This is the sort of thing that makes me wish that I was a rich man. I’d just hire someone and fix the translation.
After the Council of Ephesus in 433, Cyril of Alexandria had to politick fairly hard for his side of the arguments over whether it was OK to call Mary “mother of God” or not. One of the texts that he wrote at this time was a vindication of himself and his actions, directed to the emperor Theodosius II. Actually the emperor was a figurehead, so presumably the real addressee was the imperial court, courtiers, and above all the eunuch Chrysaphius, who was the real ruler of the empire.
The text has never been translated into any modern language. Some time back a scholar agreed to translate it for me.
I’ve just heard that the first sample chunk should be available this weekend. I can’t wait!
There is an interesting article by Andrew Criddle on Hypotyposeis here. He addresses the question of whether the ‘fragments’ of Clement of Alexandria found in the Sacra Parallela of John Damascene are authentic. This is a patristic anthology, written ca. 700 AD, of which no English translation exists, sadly.
John also quotes portions of the lost books 11-20 of Cyril of Alexandria, and indeed bits of many other earlier authors, so the value of his work is a question of some importance. I recall that Denis Searby in his edition and translation of the ‘wit and wisdom’ collection in the Corpus Parisinum also linked some of the material to the Sacra Parallela. We really need a route-map through this sea of Byzantine anthologies, catenas, gnomologies, etc.
Today I learned about the Google news archive, a searchable collection of journals and newspapers. Sadly much of this is payment only, but older material can be free, and can be located with a little effort.
I located a puff-piece for the Ante-Nicene Fathers series here, in the New York Times for Sept. 2, 1886 on p.2. Amusingly it neglects to mention that the whole enterprise involved piracy!
I’ve looked for reviews of P.Pusey’s translation of Cyril of Alexandria – in vain, so far.
… is here, with a very nice note on this blog (even if my name is misspelt; I see Mike Aquilina suffers as well)
The collection of links to patristic-themed posts is impressive.
Mike Aquilina at Way of the Fathers highlights a recent find of a colossal head of Marcus Aurelius, and discusses what our attitude should be to this emperor, considering that he was in fact a persecutor of the church.
I sometimes hear people of limited education argue that because no “secular first century historians” (sic) mention Jesus, this proves he never existed (!). I usually respond by asking who specifically these historians are, whereupon I get only silence.
But, religious issues aside, wouldn’t it be really interesting to have a list of all the extant texts written by non-Christian writers between 30 and 100AD? Indeed wouldn’t such lists be almost an education in ancient literature and the classical heritage, listing one century at a time?
I’m not sure that I have the resources to investigate this, but I thought that I would start to compile a few authors. Corrections and contributions welcome!
Any more? This is mostly Romans, so we need more Greeks.
Updates: Epictetus died ca. 135, and his notes were published by his pupil Arrian after his death, so he doesn’t count. Plutarch seems to squeeze in, if that date is right. I’ve culled this from Wikipedia mostly (yuk!) as the source most readily available. I need to rearrange the list by decade, tho.
Update: Of course one can search the online TLG canon of authors by date, which I am now doing. 122 results come back, but nearly all are tiny fragments, found in the Greek Anthology or collected from Byzantine collections. Strabo is too early (d. 24 AD). Thessalus of Tralles, On the powers of herbs, was addressed to Claudius so again too early. Comarius On the philosopher’s stone would appear to be earlier. Thallus is only fragmentary and of uncertain date.
I was excited yesterday to discover an out-of-copyright English translation of the Life of St. Augustine by his friend Possidius. The translation was done in 1919 along with a Latin text, originally as a dissertation (which is online here at Archive.org), then published in the same year.
The text escaped me because it was published under a Latin title, which usually signifies a Latin text without translation. I suspect it escaped a lot of people! It is my intention to scan it and place it online.
I’ve not read it yet, but the life is apparently not a hagiography but more a biography. If so, this would make it valuable.
The Edinburgh translators of St. Augustine’s works — now found in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series — commissioned a translation of Possidius along with the Augustine. Unfortunately they commissioned it from a busy man, who never actually made the translation.