Nokia have developed a mobile phone handset which can send and receive text messages in the Ge’ez script. It is being trialed in Ethiopia, where the unicode script is still being used for Amharic.
Author: Roger Pearse at ToA
British Library Readers Forum
If you have any interest in books in the UK, if you ever borrow books by inter-library loan via the British Library document supply service, please join the BL readers forum and add your comments!
Syriac mss in Jerusalem in the Greek Patriarchate
Fr. Dale A. Johnson has made freely available online a Catalogue of the Syriac manuscripts of the library of the Greek Patriarchate of Jerusalem. It also describes his experiences in trying to gain access!
Web hosting?
Reader photography of manuscripts at the Mingana collection (Birmingham Special Collections)
Glasnost is spreading through UK manuscripts collections! First the National Archives; now the Mingana!
I wrote over the weekend to the Mingana collection of Syriac and Arabic manuscripts at Birmingham university. Without much hope, I asked if I could bring my own digital camera; if not, what would they charge me for some images? Today I got a prompt and courteous reply:
You would be welcome to come to the Special Collections Department (4th floor, Main Library, Edgbaston campus) and make your own copies from Mingana manuscripts. We allow the use of hand held cameras (without flash) by researchers, subject to completion of a permission form. Any copies made are for personal research use only. We do not make a charge for this.
We would need advance notice of your visit (ideally 7 days) as we will need to transfer the manuscript from a store on another campus to our reading room here in the Main Library. We would need full details of the manuscript… you will need to bring a letter of introduction…
Alternatively you can place an order for digital images. You should complete the appropriate form (available from printing on our website at
http://www2.special-coll.bham.ac.uk/Blueprint/info_repro.htm – click on the image to enlarge to a format suitable for printing) and return to the Special Collections Department, Main Library, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT. There is a minimum charge of £10.
The images are £1 ($2) each, which is a perfectly reasonable price. On a visit there you can also print off monochrome images from the microfiches of the whole collection (probably get them by mail also).
Birmingham has suddenly catapulted itself into the major league, I think. Someone needs to scan the catalogues of the Mingana collection and get them online!
Copyright issues blog
By chance I came across an interesting blog, Collectanea, devoted to discussion of the absurdities of the over-extensive copyright law in the digital age. There any many interesting snippets in this. Most interesting is the rise in sales of books indexed by Google books, leading to the probable consequence of a settlement of lawsuits against Google by publishers. Another snippet is finding others, like myself, devoted to the Public Domain. Apparently a new Creative Commons license has arrived, specifically to make this possible.
Mss from the Bibliothèque Orientale, Université Saint-Joseph, Beirut
A couple of weeks ago I decided that I needed to get reproductions of a few pages from some manuscripts which Georg Graf in Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur mentions. These were in Beirut; i.e. at the Université Saint-Joseph, in the Bibliothèque Orientale. So I emailed them on bo@usj.edu.lb in English, apologised for my inability to write French and asked.
I got emails back very promptly from Dr May Semaan Seigneurie, the director of the library, first in French (which www.freetranslation.com could easily read) then in perfect English. The pages were available in PDF form if you want it (I did!). You had to pay in US dollars, either by bank-to-bank transfer (they supply a SWIFT code and an account number) or by a cheque that can be cashed in Lebanon.
I chose the former. I found that HSBC bank (who have branches in Lebanon) were particularly good for this transfer (although they charged me $42 for the privilege!) The money went through in 6 days, and I got an email telling me the CDROM will be in the post — sent by DHL, in fact.
I may draw up a list of manuscripts that I want and do a further order. It really is not too difficult to do, and the service is first-rate. Recommended.
Greek texts online complete
A couple of interesting pages which I stumbled across while looking for material about the engineer Philo of Byzantium (ca. 250 BC). The first points to a lot of Greek texts online:
http://www.mikrosapoplous.gr/en/linksen.html
The second is a French site with a vast collection of PDF’s of medical writers, such as Galen:
Libya visit problems
The BBC reports on a sudden change in policy:
Libya changes tourist entry rules
Hundreds of European tourists have been refused entry to Libya after an unannounced change to passport rules. From the evening of 11 November, visitors without an Arabic translation of their passports have been denied entry, even if they have valid visas. … No warning of the change was given to foreign embassies. …
Switzerland has lodged a formal complaint to Libya after about 40 air passengers on board a Swiss carrier were denied entry to Tripoli on Sunday.
The travellers were forced to return to Switzerland on the same plane later that evening.
More than 170 passengers on board a charter flight run by France’s Air Mediterranee had to do the same. They were not allowed to get off their plane which had landed at Sebha airport, in southern Libya.
A passenger on board the P&O cruise ship Artemis has contacted the BBC to say the vessel was not allowed to land passengers in Tripoli on Tuesday morning for a planned day trip.
Coptic Gospel of Judas – critical edition released
Well, I’ve just learned that the critical edition of the Coptic ‘Gospel of Judas’ has finally appeared. It came out very quietly over the summer, and it seems that hardly anyone noticed. If you want a copy, it’s very cheap indeed. It’s on Amazon here.
The volume also contains the other texts from Codex Tchacos. Long-term readers will remember the incredible story (here) of how a fourth century papyrus book was found under dubious circumstances, smuggled out of Egypt, bought and sold secretly, hidden in 1983 in a bank vault, sold to a dodgy dealer named Bruce Ferrini in the late 90’s, repossessed, and eventually published by National Geographic.
The edition contains all three texts found in the manuscript: the gospel of Judas, the letter of Peter to Philip and James, and the book of Allogenes.
Nothing whatever has been heard since of the other three manuscripts sold at the same time. Bits of the Coptic Exodus keep surfacing. The scholars entrusted with publishing the Greek mathematical treatise have done nothing further to publish it, as far as I know. The manuscript containing a Coptic text of Paul’s letters remains resolutely lost — or rather, lost as far as you or I know.
Damn all these secretive, self-serving papyrologists. How dare they play their little games with the heritage of all mankind?