Category: Manuscripts

New fragments of the Turin King-list

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Our knowledge of the dynasties of the Pharaoh’s derives in the first place from Manetho, a Greek working for the Ptolemies. Actually that well-worn statement is misleading; Manetho is lost, and our knowledge of the contents of his work derives from quotations by Eusebius, mostly in the Chronicle.

In the 19th century Drovetti discovered a papyrus roll, dated to the 12th century BC, containing a list of kings so far.  This he sold to the Italians, and in the process of being passed around the nearly complete roll was reduced to a heap of fragments. 

From this article I understand that some mislaid fragments have been located, and that the British Museum will be trying to piece them into the remains.

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Asterix, manuscripts, and the Bibliothèque Nationale Français

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In Asterix and the Normans, the Gauls encounter the Normans, who know no fear but would like to.  They are invited to listen to the village bard, the aptly named Cacafonix.  After his first number, the Normans look pained.  “By Thor!” says one; “By Odin!” another; “Bite on the bullet!” says a third.  A few more numbers, and they run!  Recommended, actually, this one.

What brought this on, I hear you cry?  Well, I want to get images of a manuscript of the History of the Arabic Christian historian, Al-Makin.  The British Library let me down when I ordered some from them, so I’ve asked the BNF in Paris for help.  The invoice arrived today.  For Ms. Arabe 294 and 295, total number of pages 648, the price is going to be…. 234 euros!  OUCH!

I’ve paid it anyway.  I have to have it to progress.  But this is serious money.  Each page costs 26c from the first ms and (mysteriously) 36c from the second.  But of course it hardly costs that much to make these copies. It certainly doesn’t cost a different amount for each of the two halves! Greed, I fear, is responsible for this bill. And all these images, I suspect, will be low quality monochrome. It’s enough to make any digital camera owner spit!

I know that I have banged on about this before, but this is serious stuff.  The medieval manuscripts are the raw stuff of scholarship on all ancient texts.  If we can’t access the dratted things — and a bill of 234 euros per manuscript is no different to refusing access, for most people — then we can’t work.  This is particularly bad for unpublished texts, which means most of Arabic Christian and Syriac and Armenian and…

The fact is that these institutions are making money off this.  Come on, you scholars; clamp down on it!

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The lost libraries of Timbuktu

Posted on by Roger Pearse

One evening last week I happened to see part of a BBC4 TV programme, The lost libraries of Timbuktu:

Aminatta Forna tells the story of legendary Timbuktu and its long hidden legacy of hundreds of thousands of ancient manuscripts. With its university founded around the same time as Oxford, Timbuktu is proof that the reading and writing of books have long been as important to Africans as to Europeans.

I couldn’t watch this programme for long — too much left-wing or “blacks are wonderful” propaganda, and not much hard information at all.

However I did learn from it that there is a trove of hand-written books in Timbuktu.  They all stem from the Moslem invasion of West Africa in the middle ages.   The oldest are 13th century.  The older books were in Arabic; the more recent ones in tribal languages, written in Arabic script.  The latter were naturally preferred by the modern holders of the books.  During the French period — the only period of civilised rule it has ever known — an unspecified number were rescued and carried off to an unspecified destination (we are invited to consider this as an “indignity”!).  Doubtless they are in the French National Library, and probably properly catalogued too, although this was not said.  Wild estimates of the number of such books were tossed around; anything up to 700,000 was mentioned, although this seems unlikely.  We saw a desktop scanner being used to digitise a page.

There was lots of talk about “riches” of books.  But… what precisely do these texts contain?  How many are of what age?  This I could not learn.

I found online a Moslem Timbuktu Educational Foundation — based in California, as it seems the “riches of African culture” don’t extend to adequate internet connections.  They claim to own the manuscripts.  The site solicits a donation of $100 to preserve and translate each manuscript — although the contact form doesn’t work, and the one and only newsletter is dated to 2003.  The site also is infuriating vague, but gives a little more:

The manuscripts cover diverse subjects: mathematics, chemistry, physics, optics, astronomy, medicine, history, geography, Islamic sciences and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), government legislation and treaties, jurisprudence and much more.

Yes?  So, which authors?  Which texts?  Is there a catalogue?  And… can’t they get some money off the oil-rich states, being good Moslems and all?  (I certainly would, in their shoes).

The BBC is to be commended for commissioning a programme on manuscripts.  Someone there should be shot for making a piece of political agitprop instead.  A wasted opportunity, then; but still good to see manuscripts on the box.  More please.

PS: The Washington Post has a much better article on all this here.  Manuscripts are 16-18th century.  Some of the mss are online at the Library of Congress here.  See also this article.

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Manuscripts online from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

Posted on by Roger Pearse

One of the Cambridge colleges has put its manuscripts online; or rather, has allowed an American university to do it for them.  Thanks to the catalogue in the last item, I find that the Parker library at CCC is online here.

The website is a bit useless.  What you want is a list of manuscripts and a bunch of PDF’s to download.  What you get is one of these airy-fairy-force-the-user-to-do-a-junk-registration, and then badly categorised materials – no search by author, as far as I could see.  The most useful access seems to be the browse by title.  This gives a single page, from which the alert can pick out the stuff they want.  The actual stuff underneath that, for each manuscript, seems normal, if fussy. 

But I can’t avoid saying this: how these people love to obtrude themselves between the user and the actual page images!  You have to click repeatedly to get an image of  a page large enough to read; then the same for the next page, etc.  Come on, guys; think of the user for once!

Most of the collection is medieval, lots of it concerned with Old English, some of it stuff by Parker himself.  But there’s a copy of part of Orosius there, some stuff by Isidore of Seville, Augustine, Jerome on Ecclesiastes, a sermon by Chrysostom, some Bede, Nennius, Origen on Numbers, letters of Symmachus, and bits of Sulpicius Severus.

Great to have it online, anyway.

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Catalogue of digitised medieval manuscripts online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A new catalogue of medieval mss online has appeared.  It’s here.

The man responsible, Matthew Fisher, in this article in Science Daily makes exactly the right points.

A member of a new generation of scholars who cut their teeth in the San Francisco Bay Area during the dot-com era, the Los Angeles native is motivated by a commitment to democratize access to some of the world’s most exclusive repositories.

“The price of admission shouldn’t be a plane ticket to a library in Europe or even Australia,” he said. “These documents are part of the world’s cultural patrimony. Everybody should have access.”

After all, we’re paying for them.  Most mss are owned by state-funded libraries, or are state-owned.

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Recipient names in Isidore of Pelusium

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The recipient names in the letters of Isidore of Pelusium have a different textual history to the body of the text.  These names appear at the top of each letter, sometimes followed by a one-line summary.

I learn from Pierre Evieux’s excellent study that in the manuscripts, these items were not copied at the same time as the rest of the text.  This is because they are written in red, and are therefore done by a rubricator.  The copyist had to leave a space for them, and then someone — himself or another — would come back and fill in the gaps in red ink.

The same approach was taken in medieval texts to decorated initials.  Quite a large number of those initials were never done, and there are many manuscripts which still have a gap at the appropriate place.  So we can see immediately that the names can be lost in transmission far more easily than the rest of the text.

Nor is this all.  In a modern edition the names would be on a separate line.  But in a manuscript, saving parchment is all — especially if you had to kill the sheep necessary to make that parchment!  So the names would be inline, and distinguished by the colour to indicate the start of a new letter.  If you didn’t leave enough space, what then?

The only possible answer would be to abbreviate the words.  But names are hard to abbreviate.  Consequently the result could well be obscure symbols, also leading to loss.  This would be hard to fix next time the text was copied, especially as the next copyist would be liable to leave the same amount of space, thereby preventing the abbreviation from being expanded.

Finally the red ink tended to fade more than the black ink, leaving portions illegible.  A few scattered letters would be all that could be copied.

A further factor is the nature of the manuscript.  When it contained a copy of the letters of Isidore of Pelusium, the names of the recipients were important to the reader, and are generally included.  But there are also manuscripts which only contain a selection by subject of his letters, e.g. on some point of scripture.  In these manuscripts the name of the author was important, as an indicator of authority, but the recipient names hardly so.  In these type of manuscripts the recipient names suffer much more damage.

All these features are found in the manuscripts. 

These interesting comments by Pierre Evieux would seem to have wide application to many other sorts of texts.  They explain how letters can easily be combined in transmission; how the names can easily be corrupted or mistaken.  All these little details help us to understand what we see in any text that has reached us.

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Cicero at Oxyrhynchus

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I wonder how many people know that 10 papyrus fragments of Cicero exist from Oxyrhynchus, etc, the earliest dating from the start of the 1st century AD and the latest from the 6th? I certainly didn’t!

I owe this knowledge to CEDOPAL, the online database of 7,000 papyri.  A look at the drop-down list of authors is interesting by itself.  Julius Africanus is represented.  Three fragments of the lost works of the 2nd century jurist  Ulpian are there.  A few bits of Galen; surprisingly few, really, considering that his works amount of 10% of the now-surviving Greek literature before AD 300.  A fragment of Juvenal Satire 7 from ca. 500 AD from Arsinoe is a poignant relic, considering that he ended his days in exile in Egypt.

Only two snippets of Libanius were found, one from his Monody for Julian the Apostate.  A fragment of an epitome by Manetho exists from the 5th century.  Another 2nd century fragment is from the Chronicle of Phlegon of Tralles; and Hippolytus gives us a fragment of his own Chronicle, 6-7th century.  Polybius is present in a 1st century AD fragment.  And so the list goes on.

I was glad to see that links are starting in CEDOPAL to appear to online images of some of the papyri.  This must come, I think, and will put an end to the absurd concealment of these things behind barriers of money and privilege.  But much remains to be done.

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Tebtunis temple library

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This blog reports a publication (offline – these papyrologists really don’t get it, do they?) of some narrative texts from the temple in ancient Tebtunis in Egypt.  Look at the contents!

The book presents ten narrative texts written in the demotic script and preserved in papyri from the Tebtunis temple library (1st/2nd century AD).

Eight of the texts are historical narratives which focus on the first millennium BC. Four concern prince Inaros, who rebelled against the Assyrian domination of Egypt in the 7th century, and his clan. One is about Inaros himself, while the other three take place after his death. Two other narratives mention Necho I and II of the Saite Period. The story about Necho II is particularly noteworthy, since it refers to the king as Nechepsos and for the first time provides us with the identity behind this name. Nechepsos is well attested as a sage king in Greek literary tradition, above all in relation to astrology. Of the two final historical narratives, one belongs to the cycle of stories about the Heliopolitan priesthood and the other concerns the Persian occupation of Egypt in the 5th or 4th century. The volume further includes a prophecy that forms the continuation of Nectanebo’s Dream, known from the Greek translation by Apollonios, and a new version of the mythological Contendings of Horus and Seth. Apart from a translation of the prophecy, none of the papyri have previously been published.

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Numbering the letters of Isidore of Pelusium

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Following my last post on the letters of the 5th century writer Isidore of Pelusium, I have found that much of Pierre Evieux’s book Isidore de Peluse is online at Google books, and p.6 onwards discusses the text as we have it. 

The letters are mostly extracts, and very brief.  In Migne’s edition, we find these letters arranged in five books.  But this is the result of chance, and does not reflect the manuscripts very well. 

As might be expected, different manuscripts contain different material.  Some contain more or less extensive sections of a numbered collection of letters.  Others contain groups of letters in a different order.   All derive from an ancient collection of 2,000 letters.

There is ancient evidence as well.  A collection was consulted by Facundus of Hermianus ca. 548 (Pro defensione trium capitulorum 2, 4; PL 67, 571-4);  the same by Rusticus in 564 AD, who encountered a collection in four books, each of 500 letters (translation of Synodicon Orientale, ACO I, 4, 4).  In the same period, Severus of Antioch records that collections existed at many places, including Antioch, Caesarea, Alexandria, Pelusium; indeed that he went to Alexandria when doubts arose about the copy at Caesarea (Contra Impium Grammaticum, 6th book of Letters).  Apparently some of the letters (to Cyril, Theodoret) may be bogus.  Severus estimated that around 3,000 existed (the Suda says the same); the discovery of at least 40 unknown letter in Syriac indicates that some of these may still exist.

The early editors discovered manuscripts fairly randomly.  Jacques de Billy (1585) published a bunch of letters from Parisinus gr. 832, which he arranged in three books; a fourth book was added by Conrad Rittershuys (1605) using a copy of Marcianus gr. 126, which was an anthology rather than a manuscript of the collection; a fifth in turn by Andre Schott (1623 and 1629) from Vatican manuscripts, and the whole reprinted by Migne with various other materials and collations.

Evieux decided to junk the division into books, and go back to the numbering in the manuscripts.  This comprises 1,999 letters or fragments (no letter numbered 1378 has reached us).  A Latin translation contains a selection which circulated at Constantinople; three Syriac manuscripts also contain a collection.  One of these (BL Addit.14731) contains letters which did not survive in Greek.

This week I have been typing up the concordance between the numeric series and the numbers in Migne, which I will make available online.  But what a mess the early editors made of it all!

Apparently C.H.Turner in JTS 6 (1905) p.70-86 had an article on the letters, which I will try to locate.

PS: I’ve found that volume on Google Books here, free to US readers.  The Journal of Theological Studies does have a website, but demands money of the UK taxpayers (who fund the show) to allow them to see it.  Greedy little bastards.

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