Category: Egypt

Jesus is Horus, yes really

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Most of us will recall the vivid scenes in the gospels where Jesus’ father is killed by his brother, chopped up, and Mary has to reassemble the body.  We’ve all cried over the scene where she couldn’t find his willy, so had to fabricate an artificial substitute, in order to conceive Jesus by means of her undead husband.  Haven’t we?

At least, I’m sure it’s in the gospel somewhere.  There are so many people going around telling us about the virgin birth of Horus, and how Jesus was copied from it, that they must know of such a passage.

PhilVaz has compiled an article on some of these ignorant ideas, in which he lists the primary sources for Horus and discusses them, with references.  It’s here. It may come in useful when dealing with people who know nothing about the subject except that they are certain they are right.

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Not that far up the Nile

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Reading of Jim West’s trip to Egypt reminded me that I was looking for somewhere to go just before Christmas, to fight off the winter blues.  I was thinking about flying out to Khartoum.  After all, the location is right for sunshine in December, and spending a week in a good hotel relaxing wouldn’t be very arduous.

I came across the Tripadvisor website, for “Sudan”.  This site is quite useful for hotel reviews, although for Luxor some of the hotel-keepers have started to game the system with fake reviews.  (You can tell, because they’re tiny places no-one has ever heard of!)  But the reviews for Sudan were enlightening.

You see, I reasoned that the rulers of Sudan, as in any third-world country, enjoy acquiring foreign aid.  Those Mercedes-Benzes cost hard currency, after all!  So they would need to have at least one good hotel for all the fat-cats to stay in, while being wined and dined, preparatory to handing over money exacted from poor people in rich countries to the rich people who keep poor countries poor (as the saying has it).  If so, I too could stay in it.

The results are pretty awful.  There is the al-Rotana, which seems the probable hotel that I had in mind, charging $200 a night.  But look at the rest!!?!

The best hotel is apparently run by Greeks, which will amuse those who have read the “River War” by Winston Churchill.  Churchill, who was going up the Nile with Kitchener against the dervishes, and indeed G. W. Steevens in his “With Kitchener to Khartoum”, makes regular mentions of Greek hoteliers as the only source of civilisation!  Perhaps the Sudan has slumped back into the state that it was in a century ago — the victim of 50 years of failed policies.

PS: I looked at the UK Foreign Office advice here.  The list of disease outbreaks was pretty interesting.  You know, I don’t really want to experience all that…

PPS: I’ve been laughing all evening about the hotel reviews, which were in order of preference.  Most countries list hotels by resort.  This one contains the only 14 hotels in the country.  The first one sounded rather dodgy.  The second was the corporate one I referred to.  But the review of third one started witha single word, doubtless written with a shudder of memory: “horrible”.    One can imagine the pale and desperate frame of mind of the ‘guest’ in which that was the first word that came to mind. What hotel number 14 was like I cannot imagine!

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Blogging on the Nile

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Blogger Jim West is off to Egypt, it seems.  I hope we get to travel with him, vicariously.  Cairo should be nice at this time of year.  He’s also going on a Nile cruise, from Aswan to Luxor.  I’ve never been to Aswan myself — although I would like to.  I feel faintly envious.

In the mean time, here’s a shot of the west bank of the Nile at Luxor, taken from the Jollie Ville hotel in the evening. Somewhere in that mountain are the tombs of the kings.

The hills of Western Thebes

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The Apocalypse of Samuel of Kalamoun – now online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This very moving 10th century Coptic text records the collapse of Coptic culture and the abandonment of the Coptic language.  I’ve translated it into English from the French of the Maronite priest J. Ziadeh, and corrected it using other partial translations.  The introduction is here, together with some notes by me, and the translation itself is here.  I’ve added a couple of notes at the end from the articles that I was kindly sent.  It seems that Jos van Lent is engaged in working on a proper edition and translation as well.

I was put up to looking into this text by an email from a Copt.  I have sent him a PDF of the Arabic text and suggested that he might like to type it up.  If he does, then that also will be available.

As ever, if you would like to support my efforts to make texts available online, you can buy my CD.

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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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Coptic text of 2 Enoch recovered

Posted on by Roger Pearse

2 Enoch only exists in an Old Slavonic version.  But a Coptic version has been rediscovered in fragments from Nubia, from the now drowned site at Qasr Ibrim.  The fragments were discovered in the Egypt Exploration Society rescue expedition in 1963, as the waters rose behind the Aswan High Dam. 

Joost Hagen has been entrusted by the EES with the edition of the manuscript material in Coptic, the language of Christian Egypt and one of the literary languages used in the Christian kingdoms of Nubia.

The ‘Slavonic Enoch’ fragments, found in 1972, are four in number, most probably remnants of four consecutive leaves of a parchment codex. The fourth fragment is rather small and not yet placed with certainty, also because there is as yet no photograph of it available, only the transcription of its text by one of the excavators. For the other three fragments, both this transcription and two sets of photographs are available. The present location of the pieces themselves is not known, but most probably they are in one of the museums or magazines of the Antiquities Organization in Egypt.

The fragments contain chapters 36-42 of 2 Enoch… they clearly represent a text of the short recension, with chapter 38 and some other parts of the long recension ‘missing’ and chapters 37 and 39 in the order 39 then 37. On top of that, it contains the ‘extra’ material at the end of chapter 36 that is present only in the oldest Slavonic manuscript of the work, U (15th cent.), and in manuscript A (16th cent.), which is closely related to U. For most Coptic texts, a translation from a Greek original is taken for granted and the existence of this Coptic version might well confirm the idea of an original of the Book of the Secrets of Enoch in Greek from Egypt, probably Alexandria.

Archeologically it seems likely that the Coptic manuscript is part of the remains of a church library from before the year 1172, possibly even from before 969, two important dates in the history of Qasr Ibrim; a tentative first look at palaeographical criterea seems to suggest a date in the eighth to ninth, maybe tenth centuries, during Nubia’s early medieval period. This would mean that the fragments predate the accepted date of the translation of 2 Enoch into Slavonic (11th, 12th cent.) and that they are some several hunderd years older than the earliest Slavonic witness, a text with extracts of the ethical passages (14th cent.).

Thanks to Jim Davila for the tip.  Andrei Orlov runs a site dedicated to 2 Enoch.

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Manuscripts online now at the VMR

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Lots of Syriac, Arabic, Coptic and Persian mss are starting to appear at the VMR, here.  Contents contain all sorts of things; service books, bits of the bible, homilies, and so on.

When I first looked, I was using IE6 and couldn’t see any images.  But with Firefox it’s fine, even from behind a corporate firewall.  The images are nice, colour and clear enough to read the text and see the rubrics.  In short they are ideal for study purposes.

One less good feature is that you can’t resize the viewing window.  Often the whole image is larger than this, which means that you have to drag it around to see the whole opening.  This is undesirable.

The user interface is a bit clunky.  What you get is a list of manuscript shelfmarks.  Not having memorised the three volume Mingana handbook, I’d like to see a quick summary of contents.  In fact it would be nice if there was some way for me to enter the catalogue description in text form — it’s a PDF — so that I don’t have to click on a link, click on a PDF, just to see what each ms. contains.  But early days yet.  These are teething problems only.

Thanks for Tommy Wasserman at ETS for the update.

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Apocalypse of Samuel of Kalamoun

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I mentioned earlier this Coptic text which records the abandonment of Coptic for Arabic.  A query to the Hugoye list produced a lot of info:

A text and translation can apparently be found here: J. Ziadeh (ed./tr.), “L’apocalypse de Samuel, superieur de Deir el-Qalamoun”, in: ROC 20 (1915-17), pp. 376-92/392-404. 

I’m not sure if this is online anywhere, but if it is I might translate it.  It does seem to be one of the Revue de l’Orient Chretien volumes which is NOT online.

The subject is discussed, including the Apocalypse of Samuel,  in Zaborowski, J.R., “From Coptic to Arabic in Medieval Egypt,” Medieval Encounters 14:1 (2008), 15-40.

And here comes something about the apocaltytic context: Martinez, Francisco Javier, ‘The King of Ruum and the King of Ethiopia in medieval apocalyptic texts from Egypt’, [in:] Coptic studies: Acts of the Third International Congress of Coptic Studies, Warsaw, 20-25 August, 1984, ed. by Wlodzimierz Godlewski, Varsovie 1990, pp. 247-259; and more about the transition process: Rubenson, Samuel, ‘Translating the tradition: some remarks on the Arabization of the patristic heritage in Egypt’ Medieval Encounters: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Culture in Confluence and Dialogue, 2 (1996), pp. 4-14;

Another recent discussion of the Apoc. Samuel of Qalamun, setting it in the context of 10-11 cent. Egyptian church politics: Papaconstantinou, Arietta. “‘They Shall Speak the Arabic Language and Take Pride in It’: Reconsidering the Fate of Coptic after the Arab Conquest.” Le Muséon 120.3-4 (2007): 273-99. Also, as part of his forthcoming study on the Christian Arabic apocalyptic tradition, Jos van Lent has been working on the manuscript history of this text. Some of his findings were presented at the IACS in Cairo last September.

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Gospel of Judas, Coptic Paul, Greek Exodus

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Sometime before 1983, peasants in Egypt found four manuscript books somewhere. They were smuggled out of the country, and first seen by scholars in 1983, in boxes. They were hawked around the art market for more than 20 years. One of these contained the ps.gospel of Judas; the others were a Greek mathematical treatise, a Coptic version of three of Paul’s letters, and a copy of Exodus.

In an evil hour, these papyrus books went sold to a US antiquities dealer named Bruce Ferrini, who dismembered them and sold them, a bit at a time, to his contacts.  Ferrini eventually double-crossed his supplier, and then went bankrupt.

It seems that Ferrini retained fragments of the books, despite undertaking not to.  Despite being bankrupt, he seems to have operated a shop on e-Bay at one period.  Some of fragments then bought by collectors are now going around again on e-Bay.  A scholar is intending to purchase at least some of them and thereby get them out of this circus.

Silence has largely descended on this business.  Dutch art-dealer turned game-keeper Michel van Rijn used to expose all the dealings, but his site shut down after death threats.  Yet three of the four manuscripts are still missing.  In all this silence, it’s impossible to say whether all the pages and fragments that went to Ferrini are recovered.  I think I know where the Greek mathematical treatise is; and the anti-social scholars who have been commissioned to publish it but have not done so.  The Exodus may be in pieces; the whereabouts of the majority of the Paul are utterly unknown to me.

The fact that shreds of the gospel of Judas are turning up online can only mean that even now the find is not in safe keeping.  And every shred, remember, is a word of the text.  It’s a little bit of ancient knowledge, gone forever unless we are lucky.  It’s enough to make anyone weep.

Later:  I’ve just been to look for pieces of “manuscripts” generally on e-Bay.  There are offers of what is plainly pages from one manuscript, being dismembered and sold page by page by some reprehensible and greedy individual.  There are obvious fakes being offered.  The vision of destruction and dispersal, of the sheer lack of ethics, is horrible to see.

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