Nokia have developed a mobile phone handset which can send and receive text messages in the Ge’ez script. It is being trialed in Ethiopia, where the unicode script is still being used for Amharic.
Category: miscellaneous news
British Library Readers Forum
If you have any interest in books in the UK, if you ever borrow books by inter-library loan via the British Library document supply service, please join the BL readers forum and add your comments!
Web hosting?
Libya visit problems
The BBC reports on a sudden change in policy:
Libya changes tourist entry rules
Hundreds of European tourists have been refused entry to Libya after an unannounced change to passport rules. From the evening of 11 November, visitors without an Arabic translation of their passports have been denied entry, even if they have valid visas. … No warning of the change was given to foreign embassies. …
Switzerland has lodged a formal complaint to Libya after about 40 air passengers on board a Swiss carrier were denied entry to Tripoli on Sunday.
The travellers were forced to return to Switzerland on the same plane later that evening.
More than 170 passengers on board a charter flight run by France’s Air Mediterranee had to do the same. They were not allowed to get off their plane which had landed at Sebha airport, in southern Libya.
A passenger on board the P&O cruise ship Artemis has contacted the BBC to say the vessel was not allowed to land passengers in Tripoli on Tuesday morning for a planned day trip.
Plustek Opticbook 3600 impresses
I’m becoming increasingly impressed by Plustek’s specialised book-scanner, the OpticBook 3600. I bought one ages ago, and was unimpressed to discover that the built-in TWAIN driver only supported 300 dpi, since scanning and converting to text is best done at 400 dpi. Later I found that, when using Abbyy Finereader 8 OCR software, the Abbyy driver did allow access to a 400 dpi mode, but by then I’d sort of lost interest.
However this weekend I got hold of vol. 1 of Graf’s Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Litteratur from the library. Since you can’t buy this book, I thought that I would pull out the Opticbook. It is amazingly fast — zoom! zoom!, in fact! The scan goes up to the edge of the machine, meaning that you can hang the book over the edge rather than flatten the spine. It takes barely longer to scan than to turn a page and reposition the book. The quality is at least as good as my main scanner, which cost three times more. (Trimming the images to a common size is handled excellently by Abbyy Finereader’s crop tool).
I also used it a while back on vol. 1 of Michael the Syrian, and indeed on a large 19th century edition of Eusebius’ Chronicle. In each case it produced an excellent PDF, and the results OCR’d very well.
The price is very modest. If you do any book scanning, consider it seriously.
Manuscript photographing and discoveries
These posts from CSNTM about a team photographing manuscripts at Patmos are models of how things should be done. Well done chaps!
http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2007/10/16/manuscript-discoveries-from-summer-2007-expeditions
Tertullian.org offline
Tertullian.org will be inaccessible for the remainder of the month. This is because on 30th August and 1st September my site was hit by massive overusage of the Additional Fathers url — apparently all the index page — with the result that my ISP intends to charge me $40 overusage fees unless the average drops. I can find no way to avoid this except by taking down the site and hoping for the best. My apologies to everyone.
Libya and Leptis Magna
I’m off to Libya for a long weekend in a couple of weeks. Actually I went 18 months ago, but didn’t see as much of Leptis Magna as I would have liked. This time I hope to walk down to the quayside, and walk across the sandy beach that runs between the breakwaters of the silted-up harbour. On the eastern wharf the warehouses are apparently pretty much intact, and a temple of Jupiter Dolichenus is somewhere beyond that.
I’ve never been able to find out much about research and archaeology in Libya. Emails to people who might know have all been ignored. I wish that I knew more.
Quasten’s “Patrology” — new volume available!
Everyone knows that Quasten’s 4 volume handbook of the fathers of the church ends ca. 451. Few know that the Italian edition has two further volumes. I discovered on Monday that the first of these has been translated into English; I bought one on Tuesday while at the Oxford Patristics Conference, on seeing the publisher in a corner of a tent! Get it from Amazon.com NOW!
The format is exactly as before; writers are introduced in chronological order, their life and works are summarised (with bibliography), their works are then discussed individually (editions and translations listed); finally for major writers their theology is discussed.
This volume covers Greek and oriental church fathers from 451 AD (Council of Chalcedon) to John Damascene in the 8th century, the last of the patristic writers. It includes separate sections on Syriac and Coptic writers.
Frankly this is invaluable. Prior to this one had to rely on scanty mentions in short works like Altaner’s “Patrology”, itself elderly.
It’s not as good as Quasten vol. 4, which was prepared by the same team. The bibliographies are shallower. Annoyingly instead of listing the edition, entries sometimes just refer to the entry no in the “Clavis Patrum Graecorum”. No-one has that to hand, since none of us can afford it. Likewise the translations are scanty. It’s a bit odd that it is published separately, rather than as Quasten vol. 5 (which is what it is), but possibly commercial tussles are responsible.
But it’s still essential. I’ve finally worked out who the Julianists were that Severus of Antioch denounces, for instance. But then, I’ve only read around 60 pages so far. It can be taken to bed and read sequentially, as an excellent way to access the story of those centuries. And I will! (Mind you, whatever will I do now with my copy of the Italian version?)
Sadly the translator, Adrian Walford, has died. He did start on translating the other volume, on later Latin writers, but died of cancer before getting very far. Let us hope that the Institutum Augustinianum find another English translator.
Disturbing the sacred dead
The BBC reports that an Italian professor of anthropology has violated the tombs of Pico della Mirandola and Angelo Politian, for some frivolous reason or other. Both were leading figures in the recovery of ancient literature in the 15th century.
I remember one day finding a letter from Politian bound into a manuscript that I was examining. It was to Tristano Chalci, about the works of Tertullian — what existed, what survived. At that date little had been printed. Politian went on a journey with Tristano Chalci through the Veneto in 1494, looking for manuscripts of classical and patristic works. Something of the sunshine of that civilised journey, in search of lost learning and civilisation, still trickles through his words to the reader, even today. The letter to Chalci exists in handwritten copies bound into a number of humanist manuscripts of the works of Tertullian, and was printed often in the 16th century.
Italy is largely a cultured land, aware of its past as the cradle of the Renaissance of ancient learning and the modern world. It is melancholy to see such impiety.