Category: Arabic Christian Literature

Scribe, take down an apocalypse

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Intrigued by some notes in the edition of the apocalypse of Samuel of Kalamoun.  It says that bits seem copied from older apocalypses, such as those of Pisentius or Ps.Methodius, although not verbatim.

Are we dealing with a genre here? — A way to describe the failings of events up to your own time, ascribe them as a prophecy to some long-dead person, and then end with a conventional set of statements about the return of Christ (or something of the kind) as a coda.  If so, the history of the genre would be interesting to read, and it would allow us to make use of them as historical documents.

Maybe it was a way to blow off steam, more edifying, perhaps, than diatribes against bankers.

The apocalypse of Samuel of Kalamoun is a very moving document, probably from ca. 1000 AD (because of the description of the Caliph el-Hakim).  The author is grief-stricken at the destruction of coptic culture, at the loss of “our beautiful coptic language, which is like honey in the mouth”.  He tells how the lives of the saints are no longer read, because people can’t understand them.  Many of the books are simply lost.

This may explain the find of Coptic books at Qurna near Luxor a couple of years ago by the Polish Mission in the ruins of a monastery.  I recall that one of them was a life of St. Pisentius.  If you had a bunch of books that you couldn’t read but were fairly sure were ‘holy’, you might bury them.  Probably there are treasure troves of Coptic patristic literature to be found near many old monasteries in Egypt.  Indeed it makes you wonder a little about when the Nag Hammadi books were buried.  Could it have been much later than we usually suppose?

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Finding Samuel of Kalamoun on my hard disk

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Erm, yes, well <cough>.  I’ve just found the Arabic text and French translation of the Apocalypse of Samuel of Kalamoun on my own hard disk.  A friend slipped me a collection of PDF’s of articles a while back.  Probably this will be more useful if I, erm, look at them.

This is going to be such a problem for us all, losing stuff that we have.  Thank heavens I didn’t pay money and put in an ILL for it!

One other thought: the PDF was at 200 dpi.  Come on, guys — scan at 400 dpi and give us chaps with OCR software a chance!  (Mind you, Finereader 9 is making a splendid attempt!)

Next day: Of course there is very little point in scanning and running the OCR through a machine translator, if you then leave the output file at home… <gnashing teeth>

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Agapius – three quarters done

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have now translated 75% of the 10th century Arabic Christian historian Agapius, from the French of A. A. Vasiliev.  Of course the translation has no scholarly value — more in the way of research notes.  But there are a considerable number of people who do not read French easily, if at all, and so to make this version has utility.  I hope also to trigger a “virtuous circle”: the existence of this translation may inspire someone to make an English translation direct from the published Arabic.  This in turn would lead someone to get an ultra-violet photograph of the Florence manuscript, fill the lacunae, and make a full scholarly critical edition and translation.

I’m typing this while scanning the page images of the remaining part; scan, turn page, scan, etc.  Each quarter is around 150 pages of the Patrologia Orientalis.  I’m working on a chunk of no more than 50 pages at a time.  Any more than that, and I get oppressed by the size of the task before me, and depressed.

So far I have done part 3, part 4 and part 1.  Now to begin part 2.

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End procrastination, but not yet

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Isn’t it remarkable how much you can get done, doing it in odd moments?  And how little gets done, when you sit down to it with a full day ahead of you?

Here I am, on Bank Holiday Monday.  I have the whole day off.  It’s grey outside, so no real reason to go anywhere.  I have Agapius before me, and am getting close to the end of translating another quarter of the text.  And my mind wanders.  Compare that with when I was working on it last, in odd moments, and got some 300 pages done.

Of course then I start reading the blogs, pop over to the shop, and so on.  In the process I came across bits and pieces.  At ETS I learn (who get it from Archaic Christianity) that a photographing expedition by CSNTM has put several more new testament manuscripts online.   

I also see this truly revealing comment on a political blog, here.  Defending the a political leader from a smear, he writes:

Take a bow – the guy’s son has just died and you are attempting to smear him for doing what every 19 year old student does, or at least should do – getting an STD test. Scumbag.

Every 19 year old is fornicating with such abandon that they all take a test for the clap?  God help our rotting society, if so.  But one must remember that this is written by a student politician, and such people are notoriously self-seeking, self-indulgent, and devoid of any morals, and were even in my day. Probably this one is merely projecting his own vice onto others, or repeating what he believes true. 

For the last 30 years the ruling class in this society has sought to debauch the young by every means possible.  It has failed, of course, since few are that self-destructive!  But they would be pleased to learn that their efforts have been so fruitful as this, that even a conservative could write like that.  All of us rely on our families, in sickness and in health, to help us through life.  Yet what family life is possible in these circumstances, when no permanent attachments can be formed?  No wonder the divorce rate is ato 50%.  Those from stable homes, with wealth and opportunity, will suffer only emotional damage thereby, and be corrupted in their sense of right and wrong.  The less fortunate have their lives destroyed, as may be observed on every TV programme jeering at trailer trash. 

This is all self-limiting, of course.  Every society rests on the labours of those who do the real work.  When the Roman peasantry was destroyed, replaced by the slave-run latifundia and encouraged to drift into Rome to become parasites, the Roman state did not immediately collapse.  But when that state faced the stresses of the 5th century, no-one made much effort to save it.  Self-indulgence is utterly destructive.  Why risk your pleasures for others, when you’ve never done so before?  It was not Gothic strength, but Roman weakness that destroyed the Western Empire.  Augustine chronicles that when the refugees from Rome came to Africa, their first question was not how to fight back, but what games were planned at the public entertainments.  As the rulers trash the ruled, the state crumbles from within.  When a war comes, as come it will, such a people will not fight.  The state will be destroyed, the corrupt attitudes replaced by those of the victors.  The diseased portion of the body drops off. Thus is the sickness contained.  That is why God allows wars to take place; because, in times of peace, the moral rot sets in.

Back to avoiding Agapius… maybe a diet coke would help.  And I need to wash my hands.  Perhaps I should turn the heating on.  Not long to lunch, now.  Perhaps I’ll have a lie-down after lunch.  Is there anything on the box?

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Bibliotheque National Francais – more bloodsucking

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Very angry this morning with the BNF.   They’ve just demanded $30 per page for a copy of two manuscripts. 

People will recall that I ordered reproductions of these two mss from them.  They charged me $400 — a huge, bloodsucking sum, enough to win them the March 2009 Bloodsucker award.  What arrived was some incredibly cheap and nasty scans of a microfilm!!! (I nearly typed “scams” instead of “scans” – maybe I was right first time!)  Worse, the results were actually unusable, because the ends of the lines were blacked out.

Their reaction was to offer me a refund!  They don’t seem to grasp that what scholars need is copies.  As far as they are concerned, they’re just selling products.

I’ve written them a courteous but angry email.  What all this means is that I cannot obtain a reproduction of those mss.   I’m trying to get work done on al-Makin, and simply can’t obtain the manuscripts to do so!

Still, with initiatives like the Virtual Manuscript Room, soon we will all look back at this exhibition of irresponsible greed and shake our heads.

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Mass manuscripts online? – The Virtual Manuscripts Room project

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Possibly a very important announcement here.  The project proposal is very badly worded, so I’m not quite sure of this, but it sounds as if the Mingana library is going to make all of its manuscripts available online.  A German NT group is also involved.  I’ve buzzed an email to the Mingana to see what it’s all about.

Later: OK, I think I understand what is going on.  Here’s my understanding, and yes, this could be HUGE!

A bunch of people at Birmingham called ITSEE are developing a website to allow researchers to work on texts.  If you want to see a passage in an ancient text, the idea is that you can just click and see the relevant manuscript witnesses, then and there, for each part of the text.   The site will be a kind of manuscripts workbench.

Imagine you want to work on some text.  First you get images of the manuscripts uploaded.  Then you go into the workbench, and start tagging the page images — image 1 shows text chapter 1, verse 1; image 2 shows text chapter 1 verse 19, and so on.  Repeat this for all the manuscripts in the system, and then you get a set of links for the text.  Then enter some kind of raw electronic text, and link that in the same way.  You then end up with a way to browse the text, and see whatever variants you want, in the manuscripts, at the click of a  button.

In order to make this work, they need to prime it by uploading lots of images of manuscripts.  This is the bit that will start everything else.  At the moment, they have two sources to draw on.

Firstly, the Birmingham people have access to the Mingana collection of oriental (Syriac and Arabic) manuscripts.   They’ve started to digitise these and upload them.  At the moment the website isn’t working or displaying anything much (because someone forgot to install a Python library on the server; early days, all this), but there are definite signs of Syriac mss there.

Secondly a German institute have a load of New Testament manuscripts in horrible low quality microfilm, and are going to input these.  Their particular interest is to make it possible to work on the critical text of the New Testament.

The images will need lots of tagging.  This tagging will be a huge job, and the idea is to involve volunteers — suitably qualified scholars — to do this in their own interest as they work on the text.  The more people contribute, the more valuable the results will be.  We’ll start with raw manuscript pages, which will gradually — for some texts — grow tagging data (data like “this page starts at chapter 3, verse 2”, etc).

The project is being talked about a lot by people interested in the New Testament.  But that’s really accidental; that’s just one community around one text and one set of manuscripts.  But the clear intention is to provide this online workbench for all scholars to work — collaboratively or alone — on critical texts using the manuscript evidence from photographs. 

Because the Mingana Syriac and Arabic mss will be digitised, this will have a really important effect on Syriac and Christian Arabic studies.  Frankly it could revolutionise things!

If a community comes into being, as it will for the NT mss, then a Wikipedia-type effect will occur.  That would mean that far more can be done, far more quickly, than is presently possible.  Once the data base has a certain number of manuscripts in it, the hope is that it will snowball, and more and more material will be added.

There is a formal launch date in July.  They aren’t ready yet, tho.  But isn’t it exciting!?!

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A couple of interesting Coptic texts

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An email asks me whether I have come across a couple of texts, previously unknown to me; the Coptic apocalypse of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of Samuel of Kalamoun. It continues:

The Apocalypse of Daniel was used during the Crusades to predict the downfall of Muslim rule. The Apocalypse of Samuel contains the strongest denunciation of language shift in the Middle Ages of Egypt by which Coptic was replaced by Arabic.

I think we can agree that both sound very interesting!  I’ve been unable to find out anything about either.  Does either exist in English, even?

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Agapius can be tedious

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I hope no-one ever tries to translate Agapius from Arabic by starting at the beginning.  I started my translation from French at the time of Jesus, mid-way.  That’s not too bad, and the material to the end is moderately interesting.

But the first quarter of it… yuk!

I expected it to be largely based on embellished versions of biblical narratives.  But I had not expected it to go round and round, repeating calculations of the years from the creation to the time of Christ again and again.  I’ve now seen the same material come round three times, and my patience is beginning to fray.  And in each case, he attacks the Jews for forging their Old Testament, in comparison to the “genuine” Torah of the Septuagint. 

Obviously it’s wrong in point of fact; but I could cope with that.  However I’m currently wading through a long fictitious story, told with obvious glee, about how Constantine consulted with the bishops and the Jews and “discovered” the truth.   It’s unbelievably tedious.

So advice for future translators; leave the first quarter until last, or you may never get further.

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Manuscripts of the history of al-Makin

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The 13th century Arabic Christian chronicle of George Al-Makin or Ibn Amid has never been published in full, or translated into any other language.  However it contains a version of the so-called Testimonium Flavianum, based on that in Agapius.  Some access to this text is desirable, therefore.  It’s a big text, in two halves.  The first need is to get hold of copies of manuscripts.

This has drawn my attention before.  I ended up ordering copies from a Paris manuscript, which cost a lot and turned out to be wretchedly poor quality; too poor to be usable.  I’ve gone back to them, and we’ll see if they will send me something useful.

In the meantime a scholarly friend has been going through this, listing the sections and how long they are, so that we can get an idea of contents.  The poor state of the Paris microfilm has become very apparent during this process.

According to Georg Graf’s Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur, vol. 2, p. 349, the following manuscripts exist of the first half:

  • Vatican arab. 168 (16th c.).  215 folios.
  • Borg. ar. 232 (in Karshuni, 1659 AD)
  • Paris ar. 294 (14th century) – of which I received so poor a copy at so very high a price
  • Paris ar. 4524 (1672 AD; “sehr fehlerhaft”)
  • Paris ar. 4729 (19th century). 176 folios.
  • Bodleian ar.683 (Pococke 312 = DCLXXXIII).  170 folios.  AD 1591.  Catalogued here.
  • Bodleian ar.773.
  • Bodleian ar.789.
  • Gotha ar. 1557 (karshuni, 1661 AD)
  • Breslau, Stadtbibliothek ar. 18 (ca. 1270 AD) – Graf leaves it unclear whether this is merely extracts of two lives.
  • Munich ar. 376, by the same copyist as the Oxford ms.
  • Vienna or. 884.
  • St. Petersburg or. 112 (1672)
  • Cairo 572 (1685)
  • Coptic patriarchate 1103, 1 (1876)
  • Sarfeh syr. 16/4 (karshuni)
  • Sbath 1938 (13th century) but only pp. 155-168 so is an extract.

Manuscripts exist of the second half, as does a printed text, Thomas Erpenius Historia Saracenica (1625) with Latin translation.

  • Paris ar. 295 (1854) breaks off at 1023 AD – I got a somewhat better microfilm of this.
  • British Library ar. 282, I (17th century)
  • Bodleian ar. (Uri) 715, 735.
  • Leiden or. 758
  • Leipzig university or. 643 (17th century), containing fragments on 1123-1259 AD.
  • Beirut 6 and 7 (18th century)
  • St. Petersburg As. Mus. ar. 161 (but probably copied from Erpenius, as several other copies are)

I need to have another go at getting manuscript copies from the Vatican. Last time my email was ignored.  I don’t know that the Bodleian has changed its policy of charging the customer vast prices for full-colour images, but only supplying him low-grade monochrome derivatives.  Being poor, such a policy amounts to prohibiting access.  But it may be possible to obtain images from some of the other institutions.

Isn’t it odd, what a struggle it is to just obtain access?

UPDATE (16th Dec. 2013).  I have added some notes from Martino Diez, “Les antiquities greco-romaines entre al-Makin ibn al-`Amid et ibn Khaldun”, Studia Graeco-Arabica, 3, (2013) 121-140.

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Syriac words in the Koran

Posted on by Roger Pearse

To what extent does the Koran contain Syriac words?  I’ve been reading a review of Christoph Luxenberg’s book about the Koran  by Martin F. J. Baasten in Aramaic Studies 2.2 (2004), pp. 268-272 (here), and finding it rather excellent.  It has been claimed — he cautiously states — that 80% of all loan-words in the Koran are from Syriac. 

Luxenberg has asked whether some passages in the Koran, which are difficult to understand, make more sense if you strip off the vowel-markings, thereby discarding the standard understanding of the text, and imagine that they contain Syriac loan words.

During the first century of the Arabic period, texts were written without all the marks above and below the line which indicate vowels, and indeed distinguish some consonants.  As Baasten rightly remarks, Arabic is a seriously defective script in this respect; worse than Syriac, where only two letters can be so affected.  Only seven Arabic letters — the rasm — are unique without some dotting.

Apparently some passages really do make much more sense if you do this.  Baasten gives a single example.

The implications of this for the transmission of the Koran are considerable.  If this can be proven, then it means that the Koran did not initially circulate orally, but passed through an early stage in written form, without vowel markings.  Only such a stage can account this symptom.

This would not be unreasonable.  There is no real reason to suppose that early followers of Mohammed memorised the new document, which was dribbling out chapter by chapter anyway.  It is likely that writing was used.  Thus we have the situation where early Korans differed, and a recension had to be created by the early Caliph Othman.  This situation also indicates that a good many people did NOT know the Koran orally, and relied on a written form of the text.

It seems that Luxenberg has overstated his thesis, however, and derived far more than this from Syriac sources, and much more tendentiously.  This is unfortunate, as it tends to undermine the credibility of his work.  But thus far, it would seem likely that he has indeed discovered something solid. 

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