Shroro: the Syriac Orthodox Christian digest is an online magazine which I had not come across before, and looks very nice. Among recent articles is one on Hunain ibn Ishaq.
Category: Syriac
A Syriac summary of the Iliad
An interesting discussion in the BYZANS-L list on attitudes to Homer in Byzantium has produced the following fascinating comment from J. J. van Ginkel:
A very interesting reference to Homer can be found in a `pseudo-byzantine’ source. In a Syrian Orthodox Chronicle (written in a ecclesiastic context, in the Syriac language) there is a summary of the Iliad running for more than 10 pages of the text edition. Intriguing is that according to this Chronicle the Iliad was to be found in books 43 to 51 of the Chronography of Homer …
See J.-B. Chabot, Anonymi Auctoris Chronicon ad Annum Christi 1234 Pertinens I (CSCO 108 (text), 109(latin translation)), Paris 1916, 1920, pp. 66-78 (txt); 50-59 (tr)
Agapius and the Syriac Old Testament
I’m still translating Agapius. In part 1.1, while discussing the length of the lives of the Patriarchs, he performs a calculation based on the Septuagint. He then gives the values from the Jewish Torah, commenting on how the Jews changed the text after Christianity came long. He then says:
The Syriac Torah depends on the Torah (of the Jews), because it was translated from Hebrew after Christianity and the deterioration (of the text).
I’m not sure whether modern scholars are certain of when the Old Testament was translated into Syriac, which makes this testimony interesting.
Manuscript digitisation gathers pace
Jim Davila’s excellent PaleoJudaica blog highlights a number of interesting non-Jewish items this week. I don’t seem to be able to link to his individual posts, so here are some excerpts.
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PHOTOGRAPHS of the Cologne Mani Codex are available online here.
The Cologne Manichaean codex is a tiny parchment codex from middle Egypt, containing an account of the youth of Mani. Digitising it and placing it online is such an excellent idea. This is where the internet scores. Suddenly people can SEE the thing! I wonder if an English translation of the text is around, tho?
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ARAMAIC WATCH: More on the manuscript digitization project in Kerala, India: Kerala to preserve Christian heritage
Jim has posted on this before and links to other posts. It seems that the mass of Syriac manuscripts in Kerala are to be photographed. Let us hope they go online! But the easy availability of digital cameras makes digitisation simple. Well done, the Kerala clergymen who seem to be leading this one. They’re also trying to encourage interest in Syriac.
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PHILIP JENKINS’S BOOK, The Lost History of Christianity, is reviewed by Brother Jeffrey Gros, F.S.C. in the Catholic Review Online.
This is a book that discusses Oriental Christianity, and which has been criticised to me for being too Christian, and not Christian enough. I’m going to have a read once the paperback comes out here. Anything which will increase the number of people interested in the obscure Syriac and Arabic Christianity must be a good thing.
Eusebius and Islam
There are some things which are obvious, once they have been invented. It took the genius of Eusebius of Caesarea to digest down into a tabular form of dates and events all the information about dates and events for Greece and Assyria and Persia and Rome — and the Hebrews — contained in the literature available to him. But once this Chronicle of World History existed, running up until the 20th year of Constantine, every copyist would feel the urge to add extra lines on the bottom, to bring it up to date. It’s sort of obvious, isn’t it?
To this obviousness we owe a mass of chronicles, not just in Greek but in Latin and Syriac. One such continuator was James of Edessa, the 8th century scholarly West Syriac bishop who attempted to introduce Greek vowels into the Syriac script, and partially succeeded. His continuation was composed in 692 AD.
The text is lost, but portions of it remain. The text of the 10th century World History of Michael the Syrian makes use of it verbatim in places, although not in tabular form. Better still, a 10th/11th century Syriac manuscript from the Nitrian Desert, now in the British Library (Ms. Additional 14685) contains a substantial chunk of it, albeit in an abbreviated form. It starts where Eusebius left off, and begins with a preface in which James discusses an error in calculation which he has found in Eusebius. Then it goes into a set of tables. Like the Armenian version of Eusebius (but unlike the original, or the Latin version), the columns of year numbers are positioned in the centre of the page, and events for those years written on either side.
I was looking around the web today for the ancient texts which mention Mohammed, and came across this site. To my surprise this chronicle by James is one of the earliest mentions of Mohammed. This has given impetus to me to put it online. But how to do so?
E. W. Brooks published the Chronicle in Zeitschrift fur deutschen morgenlandischen Gesellschaft 53 (1899), p. 261-327. He didn’t publish the preface. He published the Syriac text, laid out in tabular form. He followed it with an English translation, not of all the text, but of the wording (events) against each year. He then republished it, this time with the preface, in CSCO Syr. 5, with a Latin translation of the lot in CSCO Syr. 6. Both text and translation contained the tabular layout.
I’m not going to transcribe the Syriac, or the Latin. I have already OCR’d the English, but there is a problem. The Islamic website above rightly quotes three chunks of relevant information. But… two of these are embedded in the table in the middle of the page, so not present in the English translation. Anyway… don’t we want to see the proper layout? I certainly would!
I think the solution will be to take the Latin translation, lay it out in HTML, and then substitute the English where it is available, translating the trivial bits of Latin where it is not. It will be fiddly; but it will work. Considering its importance, tho, something must be done.
Using Lulu.com to get copies of books
Once I got interested in Arabic Christian Literature, I quickly found that the only book of use was Georg Graf’s 5 volume Geschichte der arabischen christlichen Literatur, published 50 years ago by the Vatican library. I was able to buy volumes 2-5 online, but not volume 1. The first two volumes deal with literature up to 1500, so are really the only part that would interest readers of this blog.
In this post, I mentioned that I intended to try using the print-on-demand service, lulu.com, to make a personal copy of volume 1. Indeed I did so, and perhaps my experience will be of use to others.
My first step was to borrow the book from the library, and run it through a scanner to create a directory of images, one per page. This took quite a while, because it’s 700-odd pages! I used Finereader 8.0 OCR software, not to do OCR but simply to manage the scanning. I used an OpticBook 3600 book scanner (very cheap and very fast) to scan each page.
In FineReader you can crop the pages to the same size, and erase dots etc. I did this, producing images with only small margins. You can also export all the pages to create an image-only PDF, and so I did, getting a 50mb PDF.
At this point I got rather ahead of myself, and omitted a crucial step, but I found this out later.
I opened an account on lulu.com (which is free), and started to create a book. To do this, you choose a paper size and binding. In my case this was 7.44″ x 9.68″, perfect binding. The site prompts you to upload a PDF, which is pretty awkward and fails a lot. I found that I had to follow the alternative path given on the site ‘for large files’ and upload my PDF using FTP.
When I had uploaded it, the site warned me that my PDF pages were smaller than the paper size. This meant that it would resize them. Foolish chap that I was, I presumed they would add white space. But this was wrong… they stretched the pages. They were still readable, but looked a bit odd.
You’re also asked whether your book should be made available to the public for sale (with whatever markup on cost you choose); only available on a private URL; or only available to you. I chose the latter, in case there were copyright issues.
The site allows you to design your own cover — I did this in a basic way. You then get to see the PDF that results from all of this, which they send to a printer. You save, and that’s it. A link appears, offering you the chance to buy a copy yourself, which I did. For this volume the cost price was about $22, and the postage was extra of course. Manufacture of the book takes 3-5 days, and then the post office do their thing for however long they like.
In my case it was three weeks before it arrived. It looked perfectly acceptable; except for the slightly stretched letters.
What I should have done, after scanning the images and cleaning and cropping them, was to pad them with whitespace myself before making the PDF. This is something that Finereader doesn’t let you do. But it stores the images in .tif format, so you can use other tools on them.
Since there were 700-odd files, I wasn’t going to do this by hand! I used a free command-line tool called ImageMagick. I don’t know it well, but it did the trick. I found that I needed an up-to-date version.
Now the TIF files from Finereader all include a thumbnail. This makes them hard to work with. What I did was write a little .com file containing a series of commands:
convert 0001.tif 0001.png convert 0002.tif 0002.png convert 0003.tif 0003.png ...
This gave errors, but converted all the pages to png format. I had to do this, because the next step wouldn’t work if I did it on the TIF files directly.
I then wrote another batch file:
convert 0001-0.png -background white -gravity center -extent 2978x3872 0001-ok.png convert 0002-0.png -background white -gravity center -extent 2978x3872 0002-ok.png convert 0003-0.png -background white -gravity center -extent 2978x3872 0003-ok.png ...
This took all the pages and plonked each of them in the middle of a white background sized 2978 by 3872 pixels. I knew that this was the size of the pages in the ‘print ready’ PDF that lulu.com had generated (because I downloaded it, opened it in Finereader, and got the size of the image of page 1 in pixels).
Then I created a new Finereader project, read in all those PNG’s at one go, saved them as a PDF, and this time had a PDF which was of the correct dimensions.
I’ve just finished uploading that, and bought a new copy of it. It ought to be perfect.
The PDF’s that we find on archive.org and the like are generally of low resolution, so I don’t know if they could be used for this. I scanned Graf at 400 dpi; the PDF of Agapius that I have been looking at on archive.org was 200 dpi. So we may all have to scan our own books.
But this clearly works. If you need a copy of an out-of-print and unobtainable book for private research purposes, you don’t have to rely on a pile of photocopies. We all have piles and piles of those, I know! But no; scan them instead, save your floor space, and print them at lulu.com. You could even produce compilations in this way. You could print extracts, ring bound, with blank pages between each opening. All sorts of things are possible.
Of course if you made them available to anyone else, you would need to be sure that they were out of copyright. If it is in print, buy a proper copy. But if it’s a 19th century library catalogue, this is probably a nice way to get your own copy.
8th August 2008: the printed copy arrived, and it’s perfect!
Ancient sayings literature
I collect joke books. Most evenings I get home, tired, and I’m not really in the mood to read something heavy. Instead I pick up a joke book, open it anywhere, read a few lines and always find something to make me smile.
Anyone who has bought joke books will be familiar with the way that the exact wording can change. The contents of any book will vary, depending on what the author had access to. Some jokes are attributed to famous people in one book, and are anonymous in others.
Collections of wit and wisdom are not modern inventions. Someone has invented the horrible term ‘gnomologia’ – literally ‘words of wisdom’ – to describe these things. That’s enough to put anyone off! But it means the same. These are ancient collections of wit and wisdom.
I’ve been reading Denis Searby’s edition of the Corpus Parisinum (although the library have seen fit to only send me volume 1, the Greek text!). I am struck by the way in which the contents of this monstrous 9th century collection of sayings, anecdotes, apophthegms (a long word for ‘bits of sage wisdom’) follow these rules also.
Joke books are a low-brow form of literature in our day, but a very popular one. Likewise collections of sayings and wit were a popular form of literature, and occur all over the place in the manuscripts. It is worth considering that one of Caxton’s first publications in English was a translation of an Arabic collection of wit and wisdom. Doubtless he printed it primarily because he believed that he could sell it readily.
Some versions of the collection omit some or all of the names of the authors to whom each saying or story is attributed (the jargon for this is the ‘lemma’). But clearly it is the wit of the saying which is important, not the specific person as a rule. We would never criticise a joke book author for changing attribution, if it made the joke funnier, after all.
As the Greek language changed, sayings had to be rewritten. An archaic word might dull the point of some saying; it would have to be rephrased. Translations into Syriac and Arabic were initially very literal. But quickly they would be rephrased or rewritten in order to work in their new context. Impact is everything with a joke or anecdote; without it, it loses its point. Unfunny jokes are not repeated.
Modern jokes are usually delivered orally. There is thus an oral stage to transmission, particularly with the Arabic material, where the culture favours quotations of sententious wisdom and so is favourable to exactly this form of literature.
Other volumes are collections of anecdotes. After-dinner stories can be bought in most bookshops. Again, Bar Hebraeus compiled a volume of anecdotes, published by E. Wallis Budge as “The laughable stories.” These follow the same sorts of rules. Many a modern story is attributed to Churchill, or Oscar Wilde. Arabic ones tended to end up attributed to Aristotle.
Dr Searby makes a couple of interesting points about the transmission of these works. For one thing, if we are trying to produce a critical edition, precisely what is the autograph? In what sense is there an original?
Secondly he suggests that, within the limits given above, the transmission of the content of sayings is quite faithful.
It’s clearly a mistake to treat these sayings collections as if they were literary works like a poem or a history. Their nature means that they must be transmitted differently, the text is expected to be altered, is expected to have additional material added. There is no fraud or dishonesty in this; merely the nature of the genre.
PS: After writing this I began to read the “Laughable stories”. Saying 56: “A rich man wrote above the door of his house, ‘No evil thing may enter.’ Diogenes said, ‘Fine; but how is your wife to come in, then?'”
New Syriac mss finds in the Nitrian desert
An article in the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog points up a find of another stray page from British Library Additional 12150, which dates from 411 AD.
The manuscript was bought from the Monastery of the Syrians (Deir al-Suryani) (St. Mary Deipara) in the Nitrian desert by Archdeacon Henry Tattam in the 1840’s, but his agent kept trying to cheat him. However this page was clearly a stray, and has been found in the monastery.
Details can be read at this link:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/found-at-last-the-worlds-oldest-missing-page-783378.html
Syriac books at lulu.com
I was fascinated to discover today that a reasonable number of reprints of Syriac texts are for sale at reasonable prices online at Lulu.com. These can be rather cheaper than reprints from Gorgias press, for instance. Quality is unknown, tho. Quite a number of Alphone Mingana’s works are there. Search for ‘Assyrian’ or ‘Syriac’.
Postscript (12/1/8). After the last post, I ordered two volumes to see what the quality was like. These arrived some time this week. Both had coloured card covers.
The first was a reprint of Alphonse Mingana’s Syriac text and English translation of The Debate on the Christian Faith between Timothy I and Caliph Mahdi in 781 AD. The book was well-made, paper quality was cheap but OK. The printing was plainly from a scan of the page, and showed the increased blackness interspersed with lighter patches that always seems to attend this sort of reprint. However it was perfectly legible. The effect was not entirely professional; the spine only contained the title with no publisher, the rear cover simply had a url at the foot of it. Inside the first page was the title-page of the 1928 original. There was no indication of ISBN or any other details of the reprint. The original pages had been printed too low, so that the large page number at the bottom was perilously close to the page edge! In short, it was quite serviceable but looked a bit cheap. It cost around $18.
The other was a self-published collection of ‘articles’ on The Assyrian Levies; military formations raised by the British between the world wars from the East Syriac Christians in the mountains of Iraq. This had all the failings of the first volume, of course; these are clearly features of lulu.com publication. The volume was $10.
The author plainly knew a great deal about his subject, and had even obtained photographs for reproduction. The printing of these was very grainy, however. But the real problem was that he didn’t know how to write a story that would engage the reader. The human interest was entirely absent, and the volume was confusing to read. Campaigns were recorded in outline, with little indication of why and wherefore. The volume only came to life in recording the defence of a Royal Air Force base from German-led Iraqi troops during WW2, and this was over too quickly. I kept feeling the urge to rewrite the book, for it is plain that an interesting book is waiting to be written on this subject. But this is not it!
I think that we can see that lulu has a useful purpose to students and scholars. If you have some out-of-print book and need to supply copies to your class, then this is a good way to do so. (Copyright ownership would have to be checked if the material is one’s own; I have not looked into this, but you would not wish to transfer any property to lulu.com!) The prices are not impossible, for a few copies.
In fact I intend to experiment a bit; to get a copy of Graf’s Geschichte vol. 1 — which is out of print — made this way, for personal purposes. I have a PDF of most of it, and I will have it printed, but with a blank leaf bound into each opening, so that I can write notes against each page. This is a practical and effective measure for me to get a working copy of the book. Of course I won’t sell it, or indeed make it available to anyone else (because of copyright). But it will permit me to study a book in a language which I don’t know very well, in repeated passes.
But if you wanted to start a publishing business, I think lulu.com is not the way to go. I am advised that for more than a few copies it is convenient rather than competitive. But the cheapness of the products would not give a favourable first impression. I compared those I saw to the Sources Chretiennes volumes, which may be small but are on good paper and well printed. I could sell the latter to any academic library; but not the lulu volumes.
Colour photos of Mingana collection manuscripts
People may recall that I’m working on a Garshuni text preserved in Mingana Syr. 142, and that I got a PDF of some microfiche printouts a while back, which I sent to a translator.
This was a bit hard to read, but I found that the Mingana (well, Birmingham university special collections) would allow me to go and photograph it myself; or else they would charge 1 GBP ($2) a page and send me a CD.
The CD arrived today, and the results were spectacular. They aren’t publication grade, but then I didn’t want that kind of photo. They are simply wonderfully clear. For the first time the text is red is visible!
Seriously, the people at the Mingana have been amazingly helpful, the price is right, and the turnaround very quick. My total heroes!