Via the H.V.Morton blog, named after the South African travel writer, I learn of a novel thing.
How many of us have old hardbacks, bought second-hand, where the dust jackets have long since gone? The colourful dust jackets of H.V. Morton’s travel books on my shelves are long gone, leaving only a bible-black cloth cover, which is, to say the least, uninviting.
But what if you could buy a new dust-jacket? A reproduction of the original, with the colours restored?
Well, an enterprising gentleman has set up a website called Reprojackets to do just that. Here is an example of his work, the original and his colour corrected version:
H.V.Morton, “Middle East” – original dust-jacket faded by time, and then modern colour corrected reproduction.
The range is, perhaps inevitably, a limited one. The price is high, but then how many will he sell?
A remarkable spot of private enterprise, which can only benefit us all.
A good long time ago, before I ever heard of the internet, I was a member of the Egypt Exploration Society (EES). This society was founded in Victorian times in order to raise funds for archaeology in Egypt, and to promote interest in the country.
Every year I used to receive a thick, uninviting-looking copy of The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, bound in some dull coarse paper wrapper, and containing a variety of technical articles of no real interest to the ordinary person. It was my first encounter with an academic journal; and although I dutifully worked through it, I learned nothing. Someone eventually realised the madness of this proceeding; for the society in my later years issued instead a glossy magazine full of accessible articles. My copies of the JEA have long since gone to the landfill.
The EES also ran lectures. I remember going to one at the Egyptian Embassy, which was held in a room that stank of unwashed curtains – a familiar smell to anyone who has visited Egypt! – and being looked down on by some of the smartly dressed embassy staff, for I was just a young man and dressed informally, and they evidently thought me of no importance. Of course they were right, and I was too humble to take offence, but it seemed a curious way to promote the country to people who might grow up to be important. I asked them what to read for news about Egypt; and they mentioned al-Ahram. In those days, of course, there was no way to access that paper, and I never saw a copy until the web came along.
Another lecture was advertised “for the public”, to be given one Saturday at a university building by no less a person than I. E. S. Edwards, author of The Pyramids of Egypt, a widely read popular volume. In fact I saw it a few moments ago, in the Penguin paperback, on my shelf, which sparked these old memories.
All the EES lectures that I ever attended were in London. So that Saturday I took the train down and made my way across the city, and sat in a lecture theatre just like those from college.
The lecture itself was disappointing. There were lots of references to other lectures in a series, which of course I had not heard. And, although quite well informed on Egyptology, for a layman, it was pretty dense and dry. I reached the end, somewhat dissatisfied.
But I did have a question about pyramids. I knew that there were structures around the step-pyramid at Saqqara – the “south tomb” for instance – of which I knew nothing. Perhaps Dr Edwards could point me in the right direction so that I could read more?
So I went down to the front at the end, and waited to talk to him. There was a gang of young folk already talking to him; and of course I didn’t grudge them this. So I waited … and waited … and waited. Much of the talk seemed inconsequential, which was odd at a public lecture. Finally one girl yawned and said to Dr E., “See you next Tuesday” and off they went. Plainly these were his students! I wondered at the time whether they could not have found some other opportunity to talk to their supervisor, than at a lecture open to the public.
At last I got my chance. But I was disappointed to find that Edwards simply wanted to get out of there. My words were brushed aside brusquely. I was made to feel a nuisance. Persisting, my enquiry was met with “Perhaps in Lower?” which meant nothing to me (I realised later that it was a reference to J.-P. Lauer, the French excavator – nothing that a member of the public could do anything with). And off he went, leaving a sour impression behind.
I was a member of the public, and of the EES, in whose name this lecture had been given. I had travelled a considerable distance at some expense to do so. And … I felt rather cheated. Of course I didn’t complain to the EES – I was far too humble to do what I would do today.
In retrospect, it seems clear what had happened. Edwards had long since ceased to deliver that “public lecture”. Instead he had used the time as part of his ordinary course of lectures to his students. Nobody from the public was expected or wanted, and nothing was done for them.
Did the EES pay him an honorarium to deliver that lecture? I would be surprised if it was not so. For I can think of no reason why a man would choose to mislabel a lecture otherwise. No doubt he had come to consider it a perk, requiring no special work on his part.
It’s a shame. He’s dead now, and he certainly did some good in his time. All the same, I do wish that he had found five minutes for that harmless youth, all those years ago. I think I will put his book where I don’t see it so easily. It’s a good book. But looking at it, I find the memory leaves a funny taste behind.
We must never be rude to the youthful amateur enquirer. You never know who they will grow up to be. They will, without doubt, be those who write our obituaries.
I’ve had some correspondence in the last few days, posing a couple of interesting questions which are actually quite hard to answer definitively. But I thought that I would mention both, and give some thoughts about them.
The first asked about bias in translations of ancient texts. It’s an interesting question. Can you actually do an accurate translation, and still introduce bias? Or does bias necessarily involve deliberate mistranslation? Of course I have never worried in the slightest about this! I’m lucky if I can get someone to make a translation. And if I am translating, I am not thinking about how to smuggle my own views into the text – I want to know what it has to say!
It is certainly possible to create “translations” where the words have been changed; “anthropos” rendered as “human” rather than “man” comes rather readily to mind, as introduced into the text of the bible by modern scholars of a certain political persuasion. It is quite possible that we live in an era of mass mistranslation, for these political reasons. There is definitely an agenda at work here; but this is mistranslation, or even corruption; the introduction of a gloss into the text, rather than translation.
The bible has always been a controversial text. Perhaps a study of the versiones – translations into the vernacular – of classical and biblical and patristic texts would reveal how this works.
But on the whole I would tend to dismiss the idea of mistranslation, rather than corruption. A word appears in a phrase, which appears in a sentence, which is part of the flow of ideas. It is really quite hard to deviate without deliberately rewriting the text. People intent on translating are not likely to accidentally introduce bias.
The second question was equally interesting. The writer asked, “Are ancient texts reliable?” He attached a quotation naming Jewish forgeries of texts in the Hellenistic period, for controversial purposes against Greeks.
This is, if anything, a larger subject. Are any texts reliable? Is my daily newspaper reliable? Few of us would commit unreservedly to the proposition that any literature made by men is absolutely reliable. Even those attempting to be reliable will not escape the unconscious preconceptions of their authors; and then we have authors who write with no other purpose than to promote their opinions, and the facts go hang. Then there are forgeries, works written under a false name for the purpose of money or advantage. For ancient texts the question of accurate transmission arises.
Yet, with all this, I would answer this question thus: Yes, ancient texts are reliable. They are mostly transmitted OK, or at least we have a good idea of to what extent typos may be expected. They represent the opinions of their authors. The forgeries we have largely identified, since they were never forged to fool us, but rather their contemporaries. The authors themselves may not be reliable – O indeed! this must be determined in the usual way – but the texts as such are fine.
Perhaps I may come back to one or both of these questions at some other point.
I’ve been busy, tearing the backs off books, in order to turn them into PDFs. It’s far quicker, if you have a scanner with a sheet feeder, than turning pages laboriously. First you pull off the card cover. This leaves you with the book block. Then you break it apart, a dozen pages at a time. Then you guillotine off the ragged spine section, removing glue etc. Finally you pop the leaves into your scanner and … le voila! a PDF emerges. I make the book searchable – i.e., I OCR it. The remains of the book can then be discarded, freeing up much needed shelf space.
It’s mostly been texts and translations, so far; things that I never read through, but often want to search for a phrase or idea. I find that some major English series of paperback translations break very well!
Also a hardback study in German has passed under the knife. In fact books in languages like German are good candidates for this; if I can get them into PDF, I can use Google Translate on them, and read them more easily.
On the other hand, in some cases, you want both. Thus I have had PDFs of Graf’s Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Litteratur for many years; but the volumes will remain, for how else can one skim through to get an overview? This is so much the case that I actually used the PDF’s of Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur to create some printed volumes.
The first volume I did, very much hands-a-tremble. But it’s getting easier. And … I’d better carry on!
I’ve spent this evening breaking another book. This one is genuinely not valuable, selling for a few euros a copy on second hand site. It’s a deeply dull exhibition catalogue in German from 1969. I think I wanted a photograph from it or something. Anyway it’s an inch thick, and will go to its reward.
I’ve also changed the site theme again, this time to underskeleton 1.03. It is curious that the WordPress-supplied theme, TwentySixteen, was so very bad in so many ways. Editing in it was a pain, because of some strange formatting in the editor. Images were handled oddly. Yet, as I have said before, so few of the themes made available are actually right for text-based blogging!
So … I’ve tried again. I think I’ll need to tweak the header, but it’s getting too late now for that.
Tomorrow is New Year’s Day, 2017. As usual I don’t use my computer on Sunday, so please let me wish you all a Happy New Year!
It’s a good time to look back, and to look forward. A good resolution is not to grumble, but to be positive. It’s also a good idea to plan; to think about what we want to have done, by this time next year.
If we don’t plan, then the urgent stuff will fill all our time with chores of no importance once they are done. There’s never any time left over!
The Roma Ieri Oggi site is a vast resource of old and wonderful photographs of Rome. It’s rather a pity that these are being embedded in an on-site “viewer”, to make it hard to download the things. But in them we see Rome before Mussolini made his necessary but destructive changes.
Today he posted a very useful item, showing something which I have long wanted to see. It’s a photograph of the Colosseum, from 1920, from an unusual angle:
Today much of the stuff on the right is gone, demolished by Mussolini and replaced by the Via del foro imperiali.
But notice the platform, against the wall to the right of the Colosseum:
The pedestal of the Colossus of Nero. Rome, 1920. Via Roma Ieri Oggi.
This is – this must be – the base of the colossal statue of Nero, from which the Flavian Amphitheatre drew its name of “Colosseum”. The statue was 100 foot tall, and was erected outside of Nero’s Golden House. Of course it is long gone – it was converted into a statue of Sol, after Nero’s fall, and resited here, and was melted down at some unknown date thereafter.
The base also is gone today, demolished by Mussolini; but there it is in the photograph; and we owe Roma Ieri Oggi a great debt for allowing us to see it!
The passing of the British Empire has deprived the world of the memoirs of colonial officials. Doubtless some were leaden; but many a character, who might have been lost to obscurity in Britain, bloomed under an Eastern sun. Last night my eye fell upon A Life in Egypt by Bimbashi McPherson, and I pulled it down from my shelf and began to read it again.
McPherson joined Egyptian service before World War One, and died in 1946. Egypt at the time was still under Ottoman rule, at least in theory, so he held the rank of “Bimbashi”, equivalent to Major. His first role was in teaching Egyptian students; not an advanced one, and indeed he never held any official post of importance. But he mastered Arabic so completely that he could pass for a native Egyptian with ease; and his personality meant that he loved the Egyptians and they him. With stuffy official expatriates, on the other hand, he had less in common.
One of his friends was the Grand Mufti:
To Isabel. 21 November 1903
I propounded to him a question which was rending my servant Hagazy’s soul; whether he has broken his fast by swallowing some of my cigarette smoke accidentally. His reply strangely coincided with my argument to Hagazy: ‘Tell the boy’, he said ‘that if swallowing smoke is the breaking of one’s fast then the smelling of food is more so. Yet if he smells the best of food throughout Ramadan, he will die of starvation before the feast of Bairam, and he will die because he has not broken his fast; and here,’ he said, ‘is a suffragi (steward) who would rather thrust out his eyes than break his fast, bringing your excellencies’ coffee, lacoum, and lighted Narghilehs.’ …
Some of what went on was more seedy. Cairo still has a reputation as “sin city”, even today.
To Jack 1902
Many of the lady visitors to Cairo are pretty hot and one wonders sometimes whether they are attracted most by the antiquities or the iniquities of Egypt. On Xmas night, when Hamid and I rode out to the Sphinx we saw in the moonlight in the sand hollow a colossal bedouin and from beneath him appeared a little feminine attire, so little that it would not have betrayed its wearer, but that a little voice said in English: ‘Mind tomorrow night’. When we called for our bikes at the Mena House Hotel a little gentleman was looking for his wife and fearing she would catch a cold through her stupid habit of wandering ‘alone’ in the moonlight.
You know how frightfully rigorously the Moslem ladies are kept, but in spite of Eunuchs and all sorts of precautions they often bribe their custodians and escape to keep assignations in apartments which are kept up for the purpose – usually over fashionable shops. The pimps who keep these ‘private houses’ either accommodate the (amateur) friends of these ladies or more often procure boys for them. Perhaps the most characteristic and worst vice of Cairo is this traffic in boys as no handsome European boy of poor circumstances is not liable to be tempted to become the lover of one of these women, for the Egyptian ladies as a rule prefer European youths and men to Arabs. (And the vice is not limited to Moslem women only but is I believe more common amongst European residents than is generally supposed.)
A few nights after my arrival in Cairo I lost my way in an after dinner stroll and after vainly trying to get directions from Arabs, I met a gentlemanly well-dressed chap who spoke Spanish and a little French and Italian (he was half-Spanish, half-Greek). He politely conducted me back to the Hotel Bristol, and on the way and more particularly over a cafe cognac, he told me that he had a ‘lover’ who paid him well, but although she was nearly seventy, she was very exigeante and compelled him to consummate the act every night. He was barely sixteen and sometimes he said it half killed him but she would never let him go until he succeeded.
Stories of this kind go round today about western women in Egypt, and not always without foundation.
I’ve spent a little time looking for information about the ancient Egyptian deity who lies behind the Greek figure of Harpocrates.
The results are discouraging, because I find so very little. Admittedly I have no access to Egyptological databases; but I can’t help feeling that if there was much more to know, that the articles that I have read would tell me so.
It’s as if we really don’t know that much about large sections of ancient Egyptian mythology. Can that be so?
It seems that the word “Harpocrates” is in fact just the ancient Egyptian word “Harpekhered”, rounded off with a Greek ending. The actual word is without vowels, and may be transliterated variously, such as Hor pe khrod, or Har pe khered, or Heru p xrat, depending on how we vocalise the name. It means simply “Horus the child”.[1]
Obviously we would all want to see this name engraved on a monument, attached to a statue or relief of the deity. This would give us a clear indication of how Harpekhered was depicted.
They do seem to exist – at least, the Meeks article to which I will refer in a moment says that they do. But I have been unable to find a photograph of any such monument. In fact he also says that depictions of the god appear with someone else’s name on the bottom. Someone like Rameses, for instance. That’s not very helpful.
But I was able to find a hieroglyphic representation of the name. In Budge’s dictionary,[2] the entries for “Harpokrates” are:
The middle one is the one we want.
Note the last glyph in the name is of a child, putting its finger to its lips. Doing a search for “child” at http://www.hieroglyphs.net shows me:
At the start of the name is the hawk, which Wikipedia (shudder) tells me is the sign for Horus himself.
So the characteristic depiction of Harpekhered and of Harpocrates is simply derived from the hieroglyph for “child”. So we get statues like this:
Egyptian Museum
Harpekhered appears in the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts[3] and here is one of them, taken from the pyramid of Teti at Saqqara:
RECITATION. Cobra, to the sky! Horus’s centipede, to the earth! Horus’s sandal has stepped, nãj-snake. The nãj-snake is for Horus, the young boy with his finger in his mouth. Teti is Horus, the young boy with his finger in his mouth. Since Teti is young, he has stepped on you: had Teti become experienced, he would not have stepped on you.
The best information that I could find was in an article online by Dimitri Meeks on the Egyptian iconography of Harpokrates.[4] From this I learn that the “iconographic type is considered a depiction of the new born sun god”; that the actual name first appears late on in Egyptian history, in the 21st dynasty, ca. 1070 BC. It first appears associated with the iconography of Harpokrates in the 22nd dynasty, in the reign of Sheshonq III (835-785 BC). The name of Harpokrates appears for the first time in Phoenician and Aramaic in the 5th century.
But … did people worship Harpekhered? Well, there are lots of statues around. What did they do to worship him? Well, I don’t know. Do we even know? Was there a priesthood? I see no information on this. Was there a mythology? I haven’t seen any sign of one.
All we seem to have is the name… meaning Horus-the-child. The rest appears to be modern guesswork.
Here I find myself stumped. Possibly an Egyptologist, reading this, would guffaw and say, “Well why didn’t you consult xxxxx?” But of course I don’t know anything about xxxxx. The Reallexikon of Bonnet is not online, as far as I know; or I would consult that to see if it gave primary sources.
Faced with this, there is not much we can do.
If we go back to Acharya S, Christ in Egypt, and look at references to “Harpocrates”, with what knowledge we have been able to glean, we find, as usual, only secondary sources, of doubtful value. This is asserted to “be” that, it is argued; this looks like that, so this is that, or this must be derived from that. Unfortunately without a proper database of ancient Egyptian sources, we are no further forward.
[1]E.S.Hall, “Harpocrates and other child deities in ancient Egyptian sculpture”, Journal of the American Research Centre in Egypt, 14 (1977), 55-8. JSTOR; C. Christea, “Egyptian, Greek, Roman Harpocrates – A protecting and savior god”, in: Moga, Angels, Demons and representations of afterlife, 2013, 73-86; 75.↩
[2]E. Wallis Budge, An Egyptian Hieroglyphic dictionary, 2 vols. 1920. Vol. 1, p.501, col. b. Index vol. 2, p.1131. If you open both volumes from here, and have one looking at the index, and the other just enter the page number, then you can find the glyphs fairly easily.↩
[3]James P. Allen, The ancient pyramid texts, SBL, 2005, p.88, number 248. These are inscriptions which cover the walls of the Old Kingdom pyramids of Unas and Teti at Saqqara in Egypt. The standard edition is apparently R.O. Faulkner, 1969: spell 378; lines 663c-664a; but I have been unable to locate a copy.↩
[4]Iconography of deities and demons. Electronic pre-publication. Last updated 22 Dec. 2010. Online here in the pre-publication section. It gives a catalogue of objects and types. Annoyingly the PDF is locked, which makes it awkward to run it through Google Translate.↩
A news report in Turkish newspapers suggests that a Mithraeum may have been discovered.
DCIM100GOPRO
Dec. 27, 2016: Excavations at Zerzevan Kalesi in the Cinar district of Diyarbekir suggest that there is an underground temple of Mithras, a mysterious cult of the Roman period.
Excavations were started in 2014 at Zerzevan castle, located on a hill near the Mardin Road in the Cinar district of Diyarbekir. The excavations conducted by the Dicle University Archaeology Faculty revealed underground churches, secret passages, shelters, soldiers’ houses, rock tombs, altars, water cisterns, jewelery, bronze coins and much military and medical equipment.
It is thought that the fortress, located on the eastern border of the Roman empire, was built to protect the trade and military route passing close by, known to the Persians as the Way of Kings and used originally by the Assyrians. The fortress was built in the 3rd century AD and continued in use until 639 when it was taken by the Islamic armies under the leadership of Khalid bin Walid.
Zerzevan castle is the first Roman-period excavation in the region, and the excavator, Assoc. Dr. Aytac Coskun, thinks that the studies carried out over a large area will answer many questions about the Roman presence in the area…
“Zerzevan has an underground church, altar, hidden passages and cisterns, as well as a new structure which we have discovered. We have not yet fully examined this. We are only looking at a small section. We think that it is very likely a Mithras temple because of its structure and some features. Our excavation period has ended because of winter. We will start again in February. Then we will find out. It will be the first temple of Mithras in this region.”
Very interesting indeed. There is a tendency for any underground structure to be labelled a “temple of Mithras”; but Dr Coskun sounds as if he knows what he is doing.
