It’s remarkable how much one can achieve in a few dedicated days. I’ve managed to get my new Mithras site up and functional, although far from complete. It may be found here.
I don’t think that there is very much more to do to the PHP scripts, which is nice. The content needs to be reviewed, checked, and worked over, but that can happen in slow time.
One of the drivers for the new site was that I want to make use of all the photographs of statues of Mithras (etc) that are online. The printed literature tends to have few photographs, and all of those black and white. But there are very many colour images of statues, inscriptions, frescos, and so on, online. These convey information … if, if, we know what we are looking at, and can get an overview of more than one of them.
The first thing that might be done is to link as many as possible to their entry in Vermaseren’s Corpus Inscriptionum et Monumentum Religionis Mithriacae. These descriptions are very useful, in that they explain much of what we are looking at. Without this information, the images by themselves are little more than decoration.
I’ve created a few pages in the new site for individual images, but I’m not happy with how that is going. I’m looking at the moment at how Wikimedia Commons handles images, and galleries of images. This will require some thought, some design and some special scripting. Since I don’t quite know what I am trying to achieve, I will put that to one side this evening.
Instead I shall review translations of Ephraim the Syrian’s Hymns against Heresies, nos. 23 and 24. Adam McCollum has sent these in, and I need to read over them for glitches of any sort. Once I am sure that they are complete, I will post them online and announce them.
A worthy achievement ! If you would like I can provide you with high resolution of various mithraic finds I’ve seen around the Mediteranean, but while I usually know the museum I took the pictures in, I don’t have the scientific references…
I would be very delighted to have them! I’m having reasonable luck finding the CIMRM references myself, so long as I know *something* about the image, such as where it now lives.
In case you hadn’t noticed, BBC’s “In Our Time” is to explore Mithras tomorrow.
Interesting stuff.
No comments on the content yet, but I did notice that the css layout on some pages (“about” and “History”, for example) seems to have an incorrect width setting for the main text, which overflows the right margin by a character or two (on Chrome at least).
Hmm. It looks OK to me, again using Chrome (on Win7). Rats! There is no fixed setting for the width.
The HTML and CSS has got away from me rather, and needs some rework. I’ll take a look at this.