Category: Information access

Another bit of Sbath commissioned

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A while ago I commissioned translations into English (with transcription of the text) of some of the Arabic Christian texts in Paul Sbath’s Twenty Philosophical and Theological Treatises.  Treatises 15-19 were translated by Sam Noble, and I placed them online and into the public domain.  You can find them here.  So do as you like with them. 

The first five pages of treatise 20 (by Hunain ibn Ishaq, with a commentary by Youhanna someone-or-other) were partly translated, but from a more modern text which is not in the public domain.  This limits the circulation of what was done.  ThenI had to stop commissioning stuff back in October, as I joined the ranks of the unemployed. 

Now that I seem to be employed again, at least for a few months, I have decided to commission a translation from Sbath’s public domain text of the whole of treatise 20, including the commentary of Youhanna, with a transcription of the text.  In this way I can place that in the PD as well.  It’s a small thing, but will round out the texts nicely.

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Daremberg and Saglio’s “Le Dictionnaire des Antiquités Grecques et Romaines”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

… is online here.  (The page is the start of stuff on bruma).  This French dictionary looks very useful, and the referencing to ancient sources isn’t bad either.

Thanks to Bill Thayer for pointing me at this one!

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Ancient medicine online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

AWOL notes that a French site has a massive collection of ancient medical writers online here.  Not that any of us want recipes for colds from that source, but the incidental information about ancient society is worth looking at.

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That which we are not allowed to hear

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The UK mass media is controlled by a relatively small number of people, but sets the “tone” of public debate.  In the last week I have come across three examples where stories of considerable public interest are simply not reported, and strangled by silence.

The first of these is the climate-change emails scandal.  Hackers stole a bunch of emails from the University of East Anglia, by leading climate change scientists, together with source code for the climate models being used as the basis for all the predictions of world catastrophe.  This revealed much data which Freedom of Information requests had failed to extract.  It revealed systematic and seemingly fraudulent tampering with the data and the algorithms by those same scientists. The source code revealed comments showing intentional “fudges” to mask the fact that global temperatures had actually been declining during the late 20th century.  There are endless extracts from this at Small Dead Animals.  But you wouldn’t know anything about this scandal from the UK mass media.  The “theft” of emails is reported; not the fraud thereby apparently uncovered.  The fact that Phil Jones, the director, has been forced to step aside is reported, as a minor thing, with the expectation that he will be vindicated.  Mid-week I watched a “news” item on ITV droning out propaganda for minute after minute as if this scandal had never broken.

Another item has been the scandal where Members of Parliament have claimed “expenses” for such items as cleaning the moat at their stately home and other items clearly not for the purpose of carrying out their duties.  This has been a major national scandal.  The local MP, John Gummer claimed $15,000 a year for gardening services, for four years.  Other MP’s who have helped themselves to our taxes have had to resign.  Yet … I have seen little trace of this in the local media, on the TV.  A local MP, a substantial scandal, and … silence.  As a result it seems that he is likely to continue as MP for a further 5 years, despite being 70 years old and doing little that I can see.

We should be grateful for the blogosphere.  Those who tell us what the mighty and corrupt would rather we did not hear do us all great service.  This is why we need free speech online. 

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Origen update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I commissioned a translation of Origen’s fourteen homilies on Ezekiel earlier this year.  Today I had what must be very nearly the final versions of homilies 11-14, including translations of relevant Greek fragments from the catenas.  This means that the job is nearly done.  It also means, less pleasantly, that I need to start thinking about how to market these, in order to recover at least some of the money, so that I can then put them online.

The sermons are lost in the original Greek; what we are translating into English for the first time is St. Jerome’s Latin translation of them.  We’re using the GCS critical text.  In the Patrologia Graeca is a pre-critical version.  But also present is an excerpt from Origen’s Commentary on Ezechiel — also mostly lost — which is about a page in length.  We’ll do that as well.

In Migne there is also a collection of Selecta in Ezechielem.  These are fragments of Origen’s original Greek text, found mixed with excerpts from other authors in the medieval Greek commentaries or catenae.  The labelling of which father contributed which excerpt can be pretty erratic in the catenas, so not all his material labelled “Origen” is probably authentic.  Migne prints what there is, tho.

Translation of the Selecta has begun, and the fragments on chapters 1-3 of Ezekiel have been completed.  Interestingly the catena fragments are much more readable than Origen at full length.  Probably the brevity of the chunks has something to do with this, but I think people will find them interesting.  Here’s one on chapter 1, verse 3.  Origen writes:

“in the land of the Chaldaeans.”  “Chaldaean” is translated as “all work.” And these [i.e., Chaldaeans] are astrologers, who talk about fate, and are completely tied to perceptible things, and work hard among them, making them into gods.  The “land of the Chaldaeans” is the worst position and attitude.  Indeed, the Chaldaeans represent a symbol of those who are arrogant in impiety.

I smiled when I read this, since later Syriac fathers would identify with the Chaldaeans.  I think we may be sure that they never saw this comment when doing so!

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Update on Abu’l Barakat

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There is a 13th century list of works that exist in Arabic Christian literature by a certain Abu’l Barakat.  It was published long ago by Riedel, with a German translation, but has never found an English translator.

Such a list is a “road-map” of the unexplored land, a guide to the wayfarer as to what might exist.  It includes works translated into Arabic, such a material by the Cappadocian fathers, plus original compositions.  The translations may be interesting — because material does exist in Arabic now lost in Greek and Syriac.  The original compositions should help us to get an idea of what there is in the language.

I commissioned a translation of this back in the summer, which I intend to give away online.  It’s been delayed because the same translator was working for me on the Syriac fragments of Eusebius.  But today I heard back.

Riedel is about 25 pages, so the idea is that we’ll do it in 5-page chunks.  That’s less intimidating for him, and easier on my pocket!

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Troubles at Documenta Catholica Omnia

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Paul Chandler writes to query what is happening with the Documenta Catholica Omnia site.

Roger, do you know the story of Documenta Catholica Omnia and what’s going on there? Their project seems hugely ambitious but strangely unusable. They had the Patrologia Latina up in beautifully OCRed, proof-read, re-typeset versions, keyed in the margin to the Migne columns (so useful!). It must have been an enormous amount of work. But the PL was distributed over 12,000 separate files, and basically could not be searched. Now they have taken down this “beta version” and are replacing it with PDF page scans, which are available elsewhere (Google Books, Gallica), and which seems a totally backward step.

There is much else there, but in barely usable forms, unless you just want to download a treatise or two. Migne’s projects were remarkable, but he published some of the worst-printed books of the 19th century, on the worst paper. PDFs of tatty library copies of Migne volumes are not the advance we need for the 21st century!

Paul is not wrong.  Take a look at the Augustine materials.  Files marked MLT are from Migne; and these are clearly bitmaps.

I also looked at Cyril of Alexandria.  The MGR material I suspect is supposed to be Migne (Greek).  But opening a few of the files reveals a copyright notice at the top, giving the TLG as the origin and that these are now appearing there by permission.

I don’t know who runs the DCO site.  Doing a Whois search tells me only that it is an Italian site.  But I would guess that all the material was in fact taken without permission from the Proquest digitised version of the Patrologia Latina.  This used to be available in CDROM form, and was widely pirated in Eastern Europe years ago.  After all, with a price of $23,000, what else could people do?  It looks to me as if the copyright people have attacked the site.  Probably the whole thing is the work of a few people, and, although the original texts cannot possibly be in copyright, those people couldn’t afford the lawyers to uphold it. 

It looks as if they did a deal with the TLG people for the raw Greek texts, which I always suspected were not from Migne but from the TLG.  It may be relevant that the TLG director has an Italian name.  But all credit to the TLG, who I believe have made the right decision here.  Professional scholars will increasingly want more than bare Greek text, and I believe the TLG is moving to supply that, parsed and morphologised and cross-referenced.  But ordinary people will still find value in the simple text. 

Paul has a further question, which is very interesting:

Also I heard today that some group in the U.S. has begun a project to scan, OCR and make searchable the PL (and PG?) and make it available at a small fraction of the ProQuest price. Apparently the first CD is being offered a pre-publication subscription price. This would be a wonderful boon to scholars without access to such expensive resources. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to track down any details. Have you heard of this?

Is this perhaps the Logos effort, that I vaguely recall hearing about?  Here?

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