Category: Information access

A bunch of online Oriental books – Bibliothek Goussen

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An email from Jesus de Prado draws my attention to a new bunch of online books, which we all need to take a look at:

Contents: http://s2w.hbz-nrw.de/ulbbn/nav/classification/16431

Misc books: http://s2w.hbz-nrw.de/ulbbn/nav/classification/135030

Arabic Christian: http://s2w.hbz-nrw.de/ulbbn/nav/classification/16475

Armenian: http://s2w.hbz-nrw.de/ulbbn/nav/classification/17269

Coptic: http://s2w.hbz-nrw.de/ulbbn/nav/classification/17261

Ethiopic: http://s2w.hbz-nrw.de/ulbbn/nav/classification/17268

Georgian: http://s2w.hbz-nrw.de/ulbbn/nav/classification/17270

Syriac: http://s2w.hbz-nrw.de/ulbbn/nav/classification/17267

Full coloured-image, quite high resolution reproductions with full bibliographical details.  

Thank you!  Well, I had to go and look.  The list of titles is quite impressive.

The interface is a bit clunky, but there are PDF’s to be had, although it looks as if each section is a PDF (which is a bit silly, and a nuisance; please fix this, chaps).  In some cases they have placed a PDF of the lot on the left-hand side.

Design is a little weird.  They seem to imagine — as librarians do — that you would want to use the books over a slow internet connection on a slow site, rather than on your PC.  The interface is the usual, fussy, self-centered thing that library sites so often are, designed to maximise their traffic rather than assist the reader.  Come on chaps; Google books and Archive.org show how it should be done.  Why reinvent the wheel?

But these are small points.  On to the good stuff!

The Arabic list contains a considerable quantity of really old books, 17th century, of great value.  These belong to the first wave of European interest in Arabic studies.  The 1661 Eutychius, for instance, is there.

The Armenian list includes a catalogue of the Mechitarist daughter monastery in Vienna.  Aucher’s edition of Eusebius Chronicle is there — a year or two back I paid a serious sum for a photocopy of just volume 1!

The Coptic list includes a catalogue of the Borgia mss in the Vatican.

The Syriac list includes six volumes of Bedjan’s Acta martyrum et sanctorum.   The Urmiah catalogue is there, which I have only seen so far in a rather rubbishy photocopy PDF.  Mind you, they don’t seem to have learned the trick of photographing with a piece of black paper behind each page, to stop bleed-through of the text on the reverse.  You can download the whole Urmiah catalogue.

This is probably the first sign of useful material from a German source that I have seen.  More please!

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Chrysostom project dead

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Two-thirds of Chrysostom’s Oratio 2 against the Jews have never been translated into English.  The text was lost, and only recovered a decade ago.  I commissioned someone to translate it, but the sample was unsatisfactory.  I’ve had to cancel him, therefore.  I won’t proceed with this translation project now, as I am feeling rather over-committed and worn out.  So I need to load shed.  Maybe another time.

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More project news

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Origen’s 10th homily on Ezekiel (out of 14) is pretty much done, a bit of discussion aside.

Better yet, I have received the Arabic transcription and English translation of three treatises from Sbath’s collection of Arabic Christian theological material.  These are #17, #18 and #19.  All look very good, and one at least will bear posting here when I’ve paid for it.  All are concerned with the truth of Christianity, ca. 900 AD.

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Burning the Arian books after Nicaea

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A very nice image has appeared on Wikipedia here, albeit with a daft title.


Bookburning
Bookburning

“Drawing on vellum. From MS CLXV, Biblioteca Capitolare, Vercelli, a compendium of canon law produced in Northern Italy ca. 825.” Click on the image to get the full size image.

Of course the people doing the burning at the bottom are all tonsured, and I suppose represent the church, not the state.

While we’re on the subject of freedom of speech, I enjoyed the note at the bottom:

The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that “faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain, and that claims to the contrary represent an assault on the very concept of a public domain”.

Well said.  Attempts by libraries to extort money through blocking circulation of images like these are scandalous.

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Lots of progress

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It never rains but it pours.  Today, in my inbox I find:

  1. The first draft of the translation of Origen’s 10th Homily on Ezekiel.
  2. The sample chunk of the translation of the lost 60% of John Chrysostom’s Oratio 2 adversus Judaeos.
  3. Portion 15 of the translation of Sbath’s collection of Arabic theological and philosophical texts.

It is nice to see all these projects coming along, tho!  I’ve asked the Eusebius translator to look over the Chrysostom sample.  The other two translators are well known to me for the quality of their work.

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Hunain ibn Ishaq – update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve had another delivery of the English translation of the short treatise by the 10th century Arabic Christian writer Hunain ibn Ishaq.  Hunain translated most of Galen and was a key figure in the passage of Greek literature into Arabic.  His treatise on true and false proofs of religion is now entirely translated into English, although needs a bit of tweaking.  I’ve also bunged it over to an online contact to review for accuracy etc.

Sbath also published a Coptic Arabic commentary on this text, which I had hoped to get done as well.  But the translator is finding himself rather busier than he had thought, so this may not go ahead.  All the universities are starting teaching, so it isn’t the best time for such projects.  Let’s hope that work does resume.

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UK law to change on internet — in a small but beneficial direction?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This article in the Register says:

Defamation law currently states that someone has the right to sue every time defamatory material is published. This means that publishers could be liable many times over for the online publication of an article if a court agrees that the mere delivery of a web page to a reader counts as publication.

It seems that the Ministry of Love –sorry, that should be the equally Orwellian-sounding “Ministry of Justice” — is consulting on a change, and about time too.

In most countries, the law is different.  You publish something online, and that’s it.  But in the UK “publication” online is when someone accesses it.  This is very bad news, when the laws on what is allowed to be said keep changing.  In the last five years the UK government has used the excuse of “hate speech” to criminalise people expressing disapproval of various favoured groups and policies.  So expressing a perfectly legal distaste for some evil or other in 2000 — and I probably did — means that I can be prosecuted now for publishing “hate speech” today.

Obviously the UK shouldn’t be criminalising free speech, however deserving the perverts that it wants to privilege.  But still more, it shouldn’t be doing so retrospectively, which is the current situation.

So … a little step towards ironing out a silly legal situation, and bringing UK law into line with the US.  Now if only they would see sense on copyright and introduce a horizon of 1923 for copyright too…

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Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on John, vol. 2 now on Archive.org

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A customer for my CDROM of the Fathers wrote to ask if I had a PDF of vol. 2 of Cyril’s Commentary on John, since I had scanned it for my site.  Luckily for him I had the chance to look, and found the images first shot.

I’ve now uploaded a searchable PDF of this volume to Archive.org.  It’s here:

http://www.archive.org/details/CyrilOfAlexandriaCommentaryOnJohnVolume2Tr.T.Randell

(Or will be in a few minutes)

This was the final volume in the Oxford Movement Library of the Fathers series of translations.  The series began in 1838.  By 1880 E.B.Pusey was dead, and the movement was history.  Yet, somehow, this one last volume appeared, in 1885.  It wasn’t published by Parker of Oxford, and it wasn’t edited by Pusey; but the title-page was uniform with it.  The last few volumes were unnumbered.

By this time the Ante-Nicene Fathers series was 20 years old.  Most collections of the Library of the Fathers were obsolete.  Very few of them indeed ever acquired this last, final volume.  I obtained this one through the courtesy of Glasgow University Library, who benevolently photocopied it and posted it to me.  May their name be ever remembered; for I doubt any other copy of this very, very uncommon book, is ever likely to get scanned.

Volume 1 of the Commentary contained books 1-5.  It was translated by Phillip E. Pusey, the crippled son of old Pusey, who predeceased his father.  P.E.Pusey edited Cyril’s works, and his editions still have value.  But as a translator he was useless, tending to transliterate the Greek.  A vicious review, which I have never been able to locate, halted his efforts and he never proceeded further with Cyril on John.  The otherwise unknown T. Randell did this volume, and made a nice job of it.  It’s far easier to read than vol. 1!  It covers books 6-12, although some of those books are lost and only catena fragments were available.

There’s quite a lot of Orthodox interest in this text.  Let’s hope this helps make it more available. 

 

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Fragments of Eusebius in the Mingana collection

Posted on by Roger Pearse

PDF’s are such a blessing.  I’ve been looking at the PDF of volume 1 of the Mingana collection of Syriac manuscripts in Birmingham.  How quickly we take these for granted!  Once, just to consult such a volume, would have meant a day off work, a 60 mile journey, and being robbed blind for copies — if I was even allowed copied.  That was the situation, only five years ago.  Not now!

This will be a dull post, I fear.  Because I ordered some photos of manuscripts in the collection, but no longer remember what was so precious in them!  This post is my journey of discovery.

On p.599 of the PDF (col. 1197 of the book), there is listed the various snippets of Eusebius in various manuscripts.  In July 2008 I went through these, and ordered the following from the Mingana:

Ms. Mingana Syr. 332      Folios 1-9a          Eusebius
Ms. Mingana Syr. 480      Folios 29a-31b       Eusebius
Ms. Mingana Syr. 589      Folios 1-6a          Eusebius

Time to refresh my memory on these!

First I’m opening the Mingana catalogue in Adobe Acrobat and running an OCR on the file to create scannable text.  I only wish Adobe used some decent OCR software.  Come on chaps, talk to Abbyy!

 OK.  On p. 308 of the PDF (col. 616) we find ms. 332.  On ff.6b-7a there are quotations on the genealogy of Jesus, from Ephraim, Eusebius of Caesarea, and Philoxenus.  Wonder why I ordered as far as 9a.

 On p. 432 of the PDF (col. 863) is ms. 480.  Ff. 29a-31b consist of tables to show that there is no contradiction between the two genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke.  The first table is from Severus of Antioch; the others from Ephraim, Eusebius and Philoxenus.  Not sure why I thought this stuff was worthwhile, now.

On p. 562 of the PDF (col. 1125) is ms. 589. 

  • Ff.1b-3b = A short treatise on ecclesiastical chronology dealing with the lunar and solar months. 
  • Ff. 4a-5a : Another short treatise on chronology by Eusebius of Caesarea (called Eusebius of Palestine).
  • Fol. 5 : The months in which the year begins in the calendar of the Jews, the Arabs, the Copts, the Syrians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians and the Armenians.
  • Ff. 5b-17b: A medical treatise on the composition of the human body, by Ahud’ immeh Antipater, who mayor may not be the same man as Ahud-‘immeh of Tegrit.
  • and so on.

Fascinating stuff… or not.  This is what so manuscripts consist of, tho; pages of short, dubious-looking texts.

The upshot is that there is unlikely to be much here to impact on my Eusebius project.  Wonder what the “short treatise on chronology is”?  I might toss that over to my translator and ask.

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