Month: September 2011

British Museum catalogue now online and searchable (with pictures!)

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Another item I spotted via AWOL is that the British Museum (upon whom be blessings) has made its database of what it holds available on the web.  You can search it here, and an advanced search is here.

Welcome to the British Museum collection database online. Search almost two million objects from the entire Museum collection.  

1,974,761 objects are available
609,419 of these have one or more images

The database is updated weekly. The range of the Museum’s collection includes: …

  • …
  • Objects from ancient Egypt and Sudan, from the Neolithic period (around 10,000 BC) until the twelfth century AD
  • Objects from Ancient Greece and Rome (including Roman Britain), from the beginning of the Greek Bronze Age (about 3,200 BC) to the Roman emperor Constantine in the fourth century AD
  • …

    • Work is continuing on the parts of the collection that have not been catalogued and new entries are continuously being added.

    They’ve also implemented some kind of webservice, so you can access it programmatically.  I haven’t looked at the latter — too much like what I’m doing at work at the moment.

    I tried using the search, and entered ‘Mithras’.  I got back quite a lot of interesting items; but these were drowned in dozens and dozens of coin images.  Quite how the coins were relevant I did not see, and I can see that these will drown out all the other content.  Gentlemen: you need to implement an option to exclude coins!

    Another useful feature would be a permalink for each item, and also a way to embed the photos (because most of us would not want to copy them).  The link “use digital image” is very good, very comprehensive, and allows the museum to sell reproductions to libraries etc, without obstructing the ordinary man who wouldn’t buy one in a million years.  Well done, whoever thought of this.

    Here’s one interesting item, which I think we might say gives pretty much everything you’d want.  The date of the item is 200 AD.  I wish I had the CIMRM here, so I could identify it. 

    Bronze tablet dedicated to Sextus Pompeius Maximus, chief priest of the cult of Mithras and president of a guild of ferrymen; given by fellow priests of Mithras. Above the text are a bust of Mithras with a sacrificial knife and a patera.

    SEX ~POMPEIO~ SEX~FIL~
    MAXIMO~
    SACERDOTI~SOLIS~ IN
    VICTI~MT~PATRI~PATRUM
    QQ~ CORP ~TREIECT~TOGA
    TENSIUM~SACERDO
    TES~SOLIS~INVICTI~MT
    OB~AMOREM~ET~MERI
    TA~EIUS~SEMPER~HA
    BET

    Sexto Pompeio Sexti filio
    Maximo Sacerdoti Solis
    Invicti Mithrae Patri Patrum
    Quinquennali Corporis Treiectis Togatensium
    Sacerdotes Solis Invicti Mithrae
    Ob amorem et merita eius. Semper habet

    “Dedicated to Sextus Pompeius Maximus, son of Sextus, High Priest of the Sun God, Mithras, all powerful, and Father of Fathers, President of the Guild of Master Ferrymen. We, Priests of the all powerful Sun God, Mithras, do this on account of the high regard and affection we hold for him and his worthy deeds. He has this for ever.”

    Translating “invictus” as “all powerful” is interesting, isn’t it?  This chap was the high priest in his day.  Also note how the priests of Mithras do NOT call themselves “patres” but “sacerdotes”.

    The image is here, and I reproduce it below:

    Notice how Mithras is NOT depicted in a typical fashion, but rather face forwards with a radiate crown.  If you or I were devising such an image, we would have had a tauroctony, wouldn’t we?  Indeed without the inscription, would any of us recognise this as Mithras?  

    Possibly the workshop adapted an existing image type, of course.  But otherwise it is a salutary reminder that our assumptions on iconography can be widely mistaken.

    The other items are a bowl and a hatchet.  I wonder if these are part of the priest’s tools.  If so, we might ask what a priest of Mithras would use them for?  Do these suggest some form of sacrifices?

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    Early CSCO volumes from the Coptic series online

    Posted on by Roger Pearse

    Via AWOL I learn that some of the early volumes of the Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium series are now online.  All of them are from the Scriptores Coptici sub-series.  The gentlemen responsible are the University of Chicago Oriental Institute.

    Admittedly the volumes seem rather dull — Saint’s Lives and martyrdoms.  But it is something to have them!  The texts were often published in pairs of volumes: ‘textus’ with the Coptic text, and ‘versio’ with a Latin translation.

    Well done the Oriental Institute.  More please!

    UPDATE: Alin Suciu has found some more!

    Much the most interesting of these is the Festal and Pastoral Letters of Athanasius in Coptic, as edited by Lefort.  Google translate is very good with French, so it should give some good results.  What I don’t quite know, however, is how these relate to other collections of such letters.

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    From my diary

    Posted on by Roger Pearse

    A CD arrived today from a kind correspondent, containing photos of the entire unpublished study and translation of the 6th century Jewish medical text by Asaph.  I confess that Jewish literature is not something I know anything about; but it seems clear that this item is not otherwise translated.  The translation is public domain, but OCR’ing it would be quite an effort.  Not sure what to do with this, if anything.  I think my correspondent may do something.

    Meanwhile my commission for a translation of further parts of John the Lydian On the Roman months, has been accepted, so this should happen.  The result will be made public domain and placed online, as ever.

    Another correspondent kindly pointed out that a PDF online contains an electronic text of the Greek of this work.  This professes to be from Migne; but I have my doubts.  I don’t know if De mensibus is in the TLG, but if so, I would guess that this is the text in question.

    I spent a little time reading the introduction of the Wunsch 1898 edition, but not really enough to master it properly.  But it seems that only a single manuscript, from the 9th or 10th century, preserves the text.  There are lacunas later on, indeed.  The work was known to Photius, who mentions it in his Bibliotheca, so the surviving manuscript, Caseolinus Parisinus supplementi graeci 257 (=O), is contemporary with him.  This seems to have been discovered during the 19th century, for I found a publication on Google books from the 1820’s, which contained only excerpts.  Wunsch, indeed, lists a bunch of manuscripts containing extracts, as well as a group of manuscripts containing a ‘recension’ by Planudes, and another group containing a ‘recension’ found in the Vatican Barberini manuscript and its relations.  Both recensions, I would guess, are really collections of extracts.  So this is a text that only just survived in something like its complete form.

    I also found that there are quite a few snippets about John and his career in Google Books, in previews.  John the Lydian seems to have been a contemporary of the historian Procopius, although nothing links the two except that both pursued a career in the imperial civil service in the same period, the early to middle 6th century.

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    More on John the Lydian

    Posted on by Roger Pearse

    I spent a bit of time this evening with the 1898 edition of John the Lydian, De mensibus, which I got from Google books.  There is no table of contents, so I opened it in Adobe Acrobat pro and went through adding bookmarks. 

    The result was as follows.  It’s far more useful as a guide to the work, and made me realise how book 4 is actually the largest portion of the work, larger than books 1-3 together.  Getting a translation of book 1 (18 pages) will cost less than I paid for the March section of book 4 (23 pages).

    It’s worth considering that it was a worthwhile exercise, just to edit this PDF in this fashion.  I shall also OCR the praefatio, so that I can have the assistance of automated translation tools in trying to come to grips with the transmission of the text.

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    Getting John the Lydian into English

    Posted on by Roger Pearse

    The 6th century antiquarian John the Lydian has left us three works, all of great interest for the light they shed on Roman customs.  Most interesting of these, to me at least, is De mensibus — On the Roman months.  This is in 4 books, and the fourth book walks us through the year, detailing the festivals and annual events.  But it has never been translated into English.

    This morning I’ve emailed a friend and commissioned him to translate September, and perhaps October.  He’s already done March, some time back, and part of December.  September, October and November are all short, and it will be nice to have them in English.

    UPDATE: The March portion was announced here.

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    From my diary

    Posted on by Roger Pearse

    Very busy with ‘real life’ at the moment, so I’m in no position to make progress with any of my projects. 

    Someone suggested that I do a kindle version of the Eusebius book, containing only the translation of the Gospel Problems and Solutions.  Helpfully he offered advice on how to make the thing.  I will certainly consider this at some point.

    At the weekend I found myself in a newsagent with quite a book selection.  I came out with a book from a series of historical novels, about a couple of chaps in the 1st century army.  The book was Simon Scarrow, The Legion, and was set in Egypt.  I read it over the weekend.

    In honesty it was a disappointment to me.  It was professionally written, but there was almost no atmosphere to the book.  When the scene shifted, I hardly noticed.  There was no scenery, no sense that we were in pharonic Egypt — just the narrative, just the adventures.  In fact this was so much the case that I wondered whether you could turn it into a ‘Western’ novel about the US cavalry, simply by doing some global search-and-replace on names, locations, weapons, etc.  I really felt  that you could!  It was pleasant enough but it went straight to my “out” pile for disposal. 

    I noticed, in the same shop, that fantasy and horror were now shelved as interchangeable.  I don’t want horror and misery as entertainment, thanks — I get plenty of that from my boss! — and the two genres used to be very distinct.  I suspect it marks the decline of fantasy, in truth.   I can’t remember the last time I saw an innovative fantasy novel.

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    Islamic medical manuscripts now online at the Wellcome trust

    Posted on by Roger Pearse

    A correspondent directs my attention to an announcement by the Wellcome Trust.

    Arabic medicine was once the most advanced in the world, and now digital facsimiles of some of its most important texts have been made freely available online. The unique online resource, based on the Wellcome Library’s Arabic manuscript collection, includes well-known medical texts by famous practitioners (such as Avicenna, Ibn al-Quff, and Ibn an-Nafis), lesser-known works by anonymous physicians and rare or unique copies, such as Averroes’ commentaries on Avicenna’s medical poetry.

    Curiously the manuscripts are hosted in Egypt, at the new Library of Alexandria site.  The “Browse and find” reveals 121 manuscripts.  I did a search on “Ibn Abi”. I was looking for Ibn Abi Usaibia, but the last name is spelled so variously that I had no hope of locating it thereby.  I find that an ms. of this work does exist, WMS Arabic 432 and 433.

    A very welcome discovery indeed.

    Interestingly you can download PDF’s of manuscripts, at least in principle.  This is very welcome!  It is far easier to work with a local PDF than remotely.  But on my first attempt I couldn’t get the “all  images as PDF” to work.

    So I tried again in Firefox, for just a single page, and it tried to open something in a new tab, which was blank.  Then I reconfigured Firefox; in the Options, Applications, for Adobe Acrobat documents I changed the Action to “Save file”.  When I pressed to download a page, it saved something with file name “pdf” (that’s the entire file name!) in my download directory.  Renaming it to 1.pdf and double-clicking on the file brought up the image. 

    Retrying with “all images as PDF” still didn’t do anything.  I just left Firefox open and went off to work on something else, and eventually it opened the download window — again it named the download file “pdf”.  So patience is required, it seems.  And they need to fix that filename issue.

    Of course if this is how the Wellcome Library stuff is being made available at the Library of Alexandria, possibly there are more mss for download available!

    UPDATE: I note that 432 is not online.  So not all the mss are available.

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    An unintentionally humorous passage in Ibn Abi Usaibia

    Posted on by Roger Pearse

    The following passage in the dictionary of medical writers by the 13th century Islamic writer Ibn Abi Usaibia made me chuckle.

    The physicians of note who lived in the time between Hippocrates and Galen, apart from Hippocrates’ own pupils and his sons, were the following: S . . . , the commentator on Hippocrates’ books; Ancilaus the physician, Erasistratus II, the dogmatist; Lyco, Milo II, Gallus, Mircaritus, the author of a book on medicaments, Scalus, a commentator on Hippocrates’ works, Mantias, another commentator on Hippocrates’ works, Gallus of Tarentum, Magnus of Emesa, the author of a book on urination, who lived 90 years; Andromachus, who lived 90 years: Abras [?] also known as the “Remote,” Sounachos the Athenian, the author of a book on drugs and pharmacology, and Rufus the Great, who was from the city of Ephesus and was unrivaled his time in the medical art.

    Poor Magnus, to be so remembered, from a life of 90 years.

    Likewise the unfortunate Abras must have had a rough time at school.  “Pass me the ‘remote’, boy” gains a whole new meaning!

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    JSTOR start to make content available to independent scholars

    Posted on by Roger Pearse

    An email has reached me this evening, drawing attention to a change of policy from JSTOR, announced yesterday.

    On September 6, 2011, we announced that we are making journal content in JSTOR published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world.  This “Early Journal Content” includes discourse and scholarship in the arts and humanities, economics and politics, and in mathematics and other sciences.  It includes nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals. This represents 6% of the content on JSTOR.

    While JSTOR currently provides access to scholarly content to people through a growing network of more than 7,000 institutions in 153 countries, we also know there are independent scholars and other people that we are still not reaching in this way.  Making the Early Journal Content freely available is a first step in a larger effort to provide more access options to the content on JSTOR for these individuals.  

    The Early Journal Content will be released on a rolling basis beginning today.

    Emphasis mine.  At the Oxford Patristics Conference, indeed, there was considerable unhappiness by those independent scholars I met about the lack of access to resources like JSTOR. 

    The FAQ’s give some more details.  The following questions explain what is happening, I think:

    Why did you decide to make this content freely available?
    Our mission involves expanding access to scholarly content as broadly as possible, in ways that are sustainable and consistent with the interests of our publishers who own the rights to the content.  We believe that making Early Journal Content freely available is another step in this process of providing access to knowledge to more people; that we are in a position both to continue preserving this content and making it available to the general public; and this is a set of content for which we are able to make this decision.

    Did you do this in reaction to the Swartz and Maxwell situations?
    Making the Early Journal Content freely available is something we have planned to do for some time.  It is not a direct reaction to the Swartz and Maxwell situation, but recent events did have an impact on our planning.  We considered carefully whether to accelerate or delay going ahead with our plans, largely out of concern that people might draw incorrect conclusions about our motivations. We also have taken into account that many people care deeply about these issues.  In the end, we decided to press ahead with our plans to make the Early Journal Content available, which we believe is in the best interest of the individuals we are trying to serve and our library and publisher partners.

    Yes, well, perhaps.

    For those who don’t recall, Gregory Maxwell uploaded 32Gb of JSTOR scientific articles, all published before 1923, to BitTorrent.  He did so as a protest against the obstruction of access to what were public domain materials, in reaction to the arrest of Aaron Swartz in July 2011 for downloading 5 million articles from JSTOR.  Maxwell’s action made JSTOR’s position impossible.

    I suspect that JSTOR was blamed for actions forced on it by the publishing industry, who ‘own’ the copyrights to this material, under the over-extensive copyright laws created by … the publishing industry.  And I suspect JSTOR and the publishers had a rather frank discussion.

    Perhaps I am over-imaginative, but I suspect that Maxwell gave JSTOR precisely the ammunition it needed to reason with the industry sharks.  “Now look what you made happen!” JSTOR could say, “Now someone has called the bluff.  Are you going to sue him, then?  For uploading out-of-copyright stuff?  For making state-funded scholarship available?  With the world’s journalists watching, and hostile?  Do you want the whole copyright law reviewed, with you plainly morally in the wrong, and perhaps legally in the wrong too?”  I imagine that, faced with that reality, the publishers decided to play safe.

    Reading the FAQ, it looks as if even then the European publishers — vermin in human form, many of them — tried to block it, confident of their total control of EU access.  Why else would we get the nonsense of journals only before 1870?  As ever, the non-US reader loses out.

    But it is to be welcomed.  JSTOR should indeed be addressing the problem of access by independent scholars.  There is, in truth, still no means for us to access JSTOR.  That is morally wrong.  But this announcement is a small step in the right direction.

    Thank you, JSTOR. 

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    Materials from the Greek Ephraim

    Posted on by Roger Pearse

    Dominique Gonnet from the Sources Chretiennes has drawn my attention to a little known Greek Orthodox site, http://www.anastasis.org.uk/.  It is the property of an “Archmandrite Ephrem” and it contains English translations of all sorts of snippets.  In particular there are a  number of letters and sermons by Ephrem the Syrian, translated here.  I think few of these exist in English otherwise.

    There are no contact details on the site, and the last date I could find was 2008. 

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