Today I sent off 50 copies of the leaflet promoting the Eusebius book to someone who can make use of them at a conference next week. I also heard from the translator of the Coptic section of the book, who has some suggestions for improvements. This will probably become a list of errata — although in fact they’re not errors as such. I’ll probably host the list here.
An email arrived yesterday with a draft translation of the portion of John the Lydian’s On the Roman Months IV which deals with November. I responded with my (few) comments — it was really rather super, and excellently footnoted, as you will doubtless see in due course.
I’m still working on digitising the English translation of Ibn Abi Usaibia. The photographs that I have were done in stages, at somewhat different resolutions and so on. I’ve just moved into a chunk of 300+ photos. That’s rather daunting to start in on, when you can only do a few pages an evening. I spent some time last night peeling off the first 40, and then the next 40 pages into separate FineReader projects, so I could work on the pages in that form. You get a feeling of achievement when you finish a “project”, and 40 pages is not nearly so oppressive as 350! When I’m at home, and can spend hours and hours on proofing, of course, it’s different. In the end it’s all about ways to keep your motivation going.
This evening I OCR’d some stuff about early Islamic physicians. It consists mainly of gossipy stories of the various people. It was all very well to be the favourite physician of Haroun al-Rashid, the Caliph of the Arabian nights; but when the latter fell into his fatal illness, his favourite physician soon ended up observing events from a dungeon! Those who live by the favour of a capricious oriental despot have no security of property, nor life.