Category: Arabic Christian Literature

Searching for books; Origen, Agapius, and the Didache in Shenouda.

Posted on by Roger Pearse

My trip to the University Library at Cambridge was successful, and they did let me in. I was able to get photocopies of the Baehrens GCS edition of Origen’s Homilies on Ezechiel.  Mind you, it cost 15c per page, which made it costly and prevented me from copying the whole volume.  I wish someone with borrowing privileges would scan all these early GCS editions — they’re all out of copyright.

I also took a look at the CSCO edition of Agapius, by L. Cheikho, from 1912.  I’m not all that impressed by this; if it is using al-Makin to supplement the text then it doesn’t really say so.  The apparatus seemed rather feeble to me.  It does seem to me that a modern critical edition of this text is required.  Modern technology such as multi-spectral imaging should allow the material that was illegible in those days to be read with relative ease.

Some time ago I discussed the Arabic life of the 4th century Coptic churchman Shenouda.  This is of interest because it contains, improbably, a version of the Didache.  It was printed with a French translation in several versions by Amelineau, over a century ago.  Unfortunately all of these are offline.  CUL did have the Vie de Schnoudi volume, but had consigned it to the dungeon which is the “rare books” department.  This means that you can’t photocopy it, which makes getting a copy difficult and costly.  However the version printed in the Monuments pour servir a l’histoire de l’Egypte…, t. IV, in 2 vols, was accessible and could be copied.  The text is found on pp. 289-478; which means photocopying over 150 pages, one page at a time.  However the format is Arabic at the top, French at the bottom, and there isn’t actually that much text on each page; less than in the Patrologia Orientalis editions. 

I would have photocopied this, but a call on my mobile cut short my visit, to attend to family business.  I’ll get a copy of this another day.

Wish it didn’t cost so much, tho.

 

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Agapius almost ready

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve finished turning the French translation of the 10th century Arabic Christian historian Agapius into English, formatting it and so forth.  Only a couple of issues remain, but these are important.

People get interested in Agapius for two reasons only, in my experience.  The lesser reason is that he preserves a fragment of Papias not found elsewhere.  This undoubtedly comes from a Syriac version of some lost Greek chronicle.

The main reason is that Shlomo Pines quoted a version of the Testimonium Flavianum as from Agapius, which has since attracted a lot of attention.  Pines made his own translation, using the 1912 CSCO text. 

The passage is found in the second part of Agapius.  This is preserved only in a single damaged manuscript in Florence.  The manuscript breaks off in 776 AD, in the second year of the Caliph al-Mahdi; but the text originally continued to 941 AD.  Quotations from Agapius are found in the 13th century Arabic Christian historian al-Makin.  The CSCO text supplemented the text found in the Florence manuscript from al-Makin. 

Methodologically this seems unsound to me.  We all know that texts tend to grow in transmission, as marginal notes find their way into the text, and additional material gets added.  It would be most interesting to learn whether attention was paid to this.  Since no edition exists of al-Makin, it is rather hard to judge.  Unfortunately the CSCO edition did not come with a translation.  Let’s hope it has a non-Arabic introduction!

Either way I need to look directly at the CSCO edition, and give both passages a special treatment.  So I shall drive up to Cambridge tomorrow, and get copies of the relevant passages.   I think I will take a little digital camera with me and just photograph the pages — the photocopiers at the university library are a disgrace!

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Vatican ms orders received

Posted on by Roger Pearse

On May 19th I ordered reproductions of two manuscripts of the unpublished Arabic Christian historian al-Makin from the Vatican.  I didn’t receive any acknowledgement, so wasn’t expecting much.  Anyhow a UPS man arrived a few minutes ago, bearing a parcel.  So it took just under 7 weeks to get, from posting the order to now.  That’s really not too bad.

Less good is the payment arrangements.  They’ve sent me an invoice, which has an international bank account number (IBAN) and a SWIFT number on it, so I can do a bank-to-bank transfer.  These are marvellously expensive things to do from the UK (because the banks rip you off).  There seems no facility to do a credit card payment.

The images arrived as two PDF’s  — which is good.  The images are scanned from black-and-white (not even monochrome) microfilm — which is terrible.   The consumer really should be protected from this rip-off racket of selling substandard images at very premium prices.  The price for the two mss. was 215 euros; the charge for postage and packing was 15 euros; quite a bit for 43Mb of data, which could perfectly well have been made available for download. 

Of course the library is profiteering pretty heavily here.  The microfilms already existed, so to produce these PDF’s required them to load them in a microfilm scanner, hit “scan”, and go and have a coffee.  200 euros for a trivial bit of work; nice if you can get it, eh?

I was amused to find a “copyright” notice included.  This is almost certainly fraudulent, as ever; these images cannot be considered creative works of art!  Only in the UK could this even possibly be in copyright, because of the foolish wording of the law in this country.

Still, the failings of this service are historic and traditional; the advantages of it are all new, and I think we may expect radical improvements in service.  Everyone will expect better quality, and we may hope to get it.

UPDATE: I discovered by chance that HSBC customers can do their own international transfers from their online system, at a price of 9 GBP; far cheaper than Lloyds TSB at 15 GBP, etc.  So that’s the way to do it, if you have such an account.

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Agapius once more

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Well that was a good day’s work; starting late morning, continuing this afternoon with a couple of breaks, and finishing now — I’ve translated the remainder of Agapius, some 38 pages.   The first draft of the whole work is done!  Frankly I am delighted.

Thankfully I had scanned the page images before I began, presumably whenever I scanned the last chunk.  Then I marked up the pages for scanning, corrected the OCR, and got a French text in an RTF file.  Then I ran it through a programme that split it into sentences.  I took the output and ran it through the machine translator.  Then input both the French and the English into another tool to interleave automatically the French and English sentences.  From there on, it was just a task of working through the file, making the English version correct, and removing the French as I did so.  I suppose it took, what, seven hours?  Hmm… that’s longer than I thought.

Not bad on a day when the outside temperature hit over 27C.

I’m done for today, now; the days when I could work to midnight on Friday and Saturday in order to work on the website are sadly behind me. 

The next stage, when I get some time, is to go through these files, add page numbers, correct awkwardnesses, check things, and so on.  That may be a couple of days work.  But we’re getting close to a free, online English version of Agapius! 

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Agapius again

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have resumed work on turning the French translation of Agapius, published by A. Vasiliev in the Patrologia Orientalis, into English.  In fact I never totally halted on this, except when I was working at full speed on the Greek translator.  My work has no scholarly value, but there must be 2bn people who can read English and cannot read French, so I hope that making this freely available will promote interest in this text.

Long term readers will be aware that Agapius was a 10th century Arabic Christian writer, who has left us a world chronicle.  This is best known for supposedly containing a unique version of the so-called Testimonium Flavianum of Josephus; and also has a fragment of Papias not otherwise known.  His work is largely made up of material from earlier chroniclers, mostly Syriac and Byzantine.  The text was published in 600 pages of the PO, in four parts, all of which are now on Archive.org.  I have made a translation of parts 1, 3 and 4, and am halfway through part 2 at the moment *.  The current text is taken from legendary material about Alexander which circulated through the east.  In truth it is quite tedious, but I hope that easier access to this text will promote study of this material.

Here is a sample.  Alexander has just defeated the Indians by rolling red-hot brass elephants (with a coal furnace inside each) into the ranks of the enemy, who happen to be downhill.

The troops of Alexander pursued them in all directions and killed a very great number of them. After this the auxiliary troops of the king of China, agitated and drawn out, came to the king of India, with their tired beasts of burden. They halted in the camp of the Indians without movement or resources. Alexander, who was unaware of their situation, thought, after having seen their camp, that this was a trick on their part. So he gathered his philosophers and said to them: “You have already seen with which speed their reinforcements arrived and what a state of exhaustion we are in; [you see] that we have fewer resources than they do. Yesterday, at nightfall, we had massacred them and made them perish. But hardly has the day begun, and their army has returned more numerous than before. What is your opinion on this, our situation and our position?” While they were reflecting, the oldest of their philosophers said: “I believe that we must attack them and fight them next Tuesday.” However this opinion was pronounced on Wednesday, seven days before Tuesday.

In Agapius, Alexander is always hanging around after battles, and asking his philosophers what he should do next.  Of course the Arabic word using is probably hakeem; usually translated “doctor”, but often “philosopher”, and in any case a learned man of some sort, of the kind that might be met with in the Arabian nights in the Bazaar.  The word might even mean “magician” or “sorceror”, as Sinbad the Sailor found to his cost.  There is an Arabic correspondance of Alexander and Aristotle, in which the former seeks ways to defeat the Persians, and the latter advises him on spells and incantations to do so!

In a sense all this is tedious.  Yet in another sense it is salutary to be reminded that the rise of superstition in the west during the Dark Ages was paralleled also in the East, even without the barbarian invasions.

* Postscript: I was translating away and suddenly found myself at the end of the chunk.  I divided each part of Agapius into three chunks, you see, each of 50 pages.  So I have in fact completed two-thirds of part 2.  Only another 38 pages to go!

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Abu’l Barakat’s catalogue of Arabic Christian literature

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Abu’l Barakat was a medieval Arabic Christian.  In one of his works, he devoted a chapter to listing Arabic Christian literature.  Of course this catalogue of what exists or existed is an invaluable guide to someone who is starting to explore patristic material surviving in that language.  Riedel published it long ago, with a German translation * , and a kind friend sent me a copy in PDF form today.  It urgently needs to go online.  If he’s OK with it, I’ll upload the PDF to Archive.org.

But we also need an English translation.  It’s about 154 words per page and 36 pages, in the German translation; if the Arabic is similar, that makes 5,544 words, or about $500 at my usual 10c per word.  I can afford that, I think.  I need to find a translator!

* Wilhelm Riedel, Der Katalog der christlichen Schriften in arabischer Sprache von Abu’l-Barakat, in Nachrichten der K. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. Philologisch-Hist. Klasse, 1902 (Heft 5), pp. 636-706.

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An new hero takes on the ancient astronomical works

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve just discovered http://www.wilbourhall.org/index.html.  This site deals with Mathematics, and Mathematical Astronomy in the works of ancient writers.  It does so by getting hold of whatever texts exist and fixing the errors in the Google scans and so forth.  If you want the complete works of Hero of Alexandria, they’re here.  Archimedes, Ptolemy… likewise.  Arabic writers?  They too.  The author, Joe Leichter, writes:

I hope to make available public domain materials that are essential for the study of ancient and early modern mathematics and mathematical astronomy. Google, for example, has done some things to achieve this through its books.google.com project. However, like most other efforts at digitally copying non digital materials, “mistakes were made”. For example, Google currently has several (all incomplete) versions of Teubner’s’s edition of Euclid available for download. Most of these unfortunately contain page after page that are illegible, missing, out of order or otherwise unusable.

The man is a hero.  Ancient scientific works are a horrendously neglected part of the ancient world, because they require skills and interest in both the humanities and the sciences.  Still more neglected are the Byzantine writers on this subject.

All this from a blog that I had not seen before, opuculuk by Nick Nicholas, reporting on a search that he did on the works of Chioniades.  (Nick works for the TLG, and was working on their lemmatizer, when he started to come across chunks of untranslated Arabic in the scientific works of Chioniades.  Mr. C., a 12th century writer, had been taking lessons from some Persian, so had got a whole load of jargon for his pains!)

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More on morphology, and on life

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Still fighting with the morphology data, trying to find a way to work on it and add back in the part-of-speech data.  Amazing how difficult it is to even load a lot of this stuff into a database so I can run some SQL queries on it.

In my hands I have volume 4 of the Rene Henry edition of Photius.  It has to go back to the library tomorrow, but I was pleased to discover that I could run it through a scanner in around an hour.  I ordered it by mistake, but might translate some bits of the review of Eulogius, sometime.  Tomorrow I get volume 6, which contains Damascius’ Life of Isidore.  Apparently this contains a passage on Attis.

I need to get back to Agapius as well.  I’ve done a few more lines, but I need to make progress with the Greek translator.  Once I stop work on it, it will be psychologically impossible to get started again.

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Nau’s version of the Syriac life of Shenouda now online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve hastily uploaded my translation of the short Syriac life of Shenouda, published by Nau, here.  I really need to add a short preface, but I just don’t have the time at this moment.

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More on Shenouda and the “Two Ways”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Arabic life of Shenouda is briefly discussed in van de Sandt and Flusser’s The Didache: Its Jewish Sources and its Place in Early Judaism and Christianity(Fortress, 2002), chapter 2, pp. 66-67.  Their note is so useful that I think we had better see it, as we start to look at this text:

THE ARABIC LIFE OF SHENOUTE

Shenoute (Sinuthius) was an abbot of the famous White Monastery of Atripe in Upper Egypt.43 When he died around 466 at the age of 118, his life was written by his successor, the abba Besa. In the form of a memorial speech, Besa idolizes the personality of his great teacher and idealizes his achievements. The account, which was thus a hagiography rather than an ordinary biography, was written in Sahidic Coptic and served as a source for translations into Syriac, Arabic and the Bohairic dialect. The text in the Bohairic dialect dates from the Middle Ages and was first published by Emile Amelineau 44 in the late nineteenth century and again by Iohannes Leipoldt in 1906.45 For our present study, the Arabic text of the Life of Shenoute is of significance because only this translation includes a version of the Two Ways. After the publication of the Arabic text as a whole by E. Amelineau 46 in 1888, it was L.E. Iselin who identified the very beginning of this hagiography as a form of the Two Ways instruction.47

The Two Ways form in the Arabic Life of Shenoute, like the Apostolic Church Order, leaves out the materials which are presented in Doctr./Did 4:9-14. This does not mean, however, that the Arabic version was indebted in this respect to ACO. For ACO (and the Epitome for that matter) omits the Way of Death passage as well, which in an abbreviated shape is present in the Arabic version. Another outstanding feature in this design of the Two Ways is that the “te/kvov” sayings are not limited to the passage that corresponds with Doctr./Did 3.1-6. In the Life of Shenoute, the hearers/readers are addressed as “my son” from the phrase which runs parallel to Doct./Did 2:6 and this stylistic device (with exceptions in the parallel passages to3:9-10; 4 :7) is maintained as far as the saying analoguous to 4:8. However, the distinctive repetitive pattern which characterizes all five literary units in Doctr./Did 3:1-6 is lacking here. Finally, the present form of the writing, referring to “Jesus Christ” (cf. the parallel item in Doctr./Did 2:5 and, possibly, in 4:14c) and “Jesus'” (cf. id., 4:7), shows some obvious instances of Christian editing.

Amelineau supposed that the Arabic text of the Life of Shenoute is a faithful translation from the Sahidic Coptic original. Modern scholarship, however, no longer accepts thus view and believes that the Arabic Life represents an adaptation and elaboration of the Sahidic Coptic archetype.48 The revision may date from the late seventh century. Besa (or “Visa” in the Arabic version), on the other hand, composed his original in the second half of the fifth century. It is clear that these data concerning the process of tradition and transmission do not inspire confidence with regard to a well-founded judgment on the earlier shape of the present text. This much is clear, however, that the monks in the White Monastery in Atripe had a Coptic version of the Two Ways at their disposal.49 This version was not a secondary elaboration of this instruction, like, for example, the Apostolic Church Order. For despite the additions, omissions, and alterations, the Arabic text has many terms in common with the Doctr./Did 1:1 -5:150 and these agreements largely occur in the same sequence. The Coptic Two Ways treatise as seen in the Arabic translation betrays a feature of its primitiviness in omitting the evangelical section of Did 1:35b-2:1. It may thus be considered a witness to a Two Ways form that circulated independently of the Didache and was closely related to the one in the Doctrina.

43 For the following, see Quasten, Patrology 3, 185-187; Altaner-Stuiber, Patrologie, 268-269; Bell, Besa: The Life of Shenoute, 1-35 (Introduction); Davis, ‘The Didache and early Monasticism’, 353-358.
44 Memoires 4.1, 1-91: ‘Vie de Schnoudi’.
45 We had only access to the following publication: Leipoldt, Sinuthii Vita Bohairice (1951). A Latin translation (completed by L.T. Lefort) is found in Wiesmann. Sinuthii Vita Bohairice (1951).
46Memoires. 4.1: Monuments, 289-478 and for the Two Ways, see esp. 291-296.
47Eine bisher unbekannte Version des ersten Teiles der “Apostellehre” (1895) with a German translation from A. Heusler. An English translation of the Life’s Two Ways section (“from the rendition of the French translation by Emile C. Amelineau”) is found in Davis, ‘The Didache and early Monasti­cism’. 365-367.
48 See Bell. Besa: The Life of Shenoute. 4. For the view of Amelineau. cf. Memoires 4.1: Monuments. I.II-LVIII.
49 Cf. also Davis. ‘The Didache and early monasticism’. 35 8.
50 Goodspeed traced seventy-seven corresponding items; cf. ‘The Didache’. 237.

It is pleasing to learn from the footnotes that even these professional academics had difficulty locating copies of Amelineau’s work!  I think that there are copies in Cambridge, and I will try to obtain a copy when I go up there in July.

The scribe Besa is called “Visa” in the Syriac life published by Nau which I have translated and will put online.  This I found slightly confusing, while I was translating, since I was also making a claim against the French National Library on my credit card at the time.

Thanks to Brandon W for letting me have a copy of this, in response to my previous post.

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