Category: miscellaneous news

What I did on my Easter holidays III

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

A bright sunny day, and I thought that I would have a day away from the computer. So I went to Cambridge.  I had some vague thoughts of supplementing my photocopies from Karst’s translation of the Chronicle of Eusebius, but the relevant volume was out.  So I thought that I would try to locate Aucher’s 1818 Armenian edition. 

To my surprise, this was not in the rare books section of the university library, but in the classics faculty library.  Over the road I went, and found a faculty library with books for students.  Piled behind the desk were a few rare volumes under tins of biscuits!  The one that I wanted was in two large-quarto volumes in a glass-fronted cabinet, with broken spines.  I looked through them, and decided that if possible I wanted photocopies or whatever, so I have placed an order for the lot if possible and for vol.1 anyway.  I expect the price to be pretty aggressive!

I also discovered that Paschal Aucher also published a dictionary and a grammar of Armenian in English with the aid of a certain Mr. Brand, as well as French versions.  What a man!  But he was lamentably slow to publish Eusebius, I gather.

Then I went and wandered in the streets of Cambridge, enjoying the summery weather and eating an ice-cream! We’re all entitled to a holiday, even from holidays.

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What I did on my Easter holidays II

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

Book 1 of the Chronicle of Eusebius of Caesarea doesn’t exist in English.  But like most of his works, it contains long verbatim extracts from lost works.  The text survives in two Classical Armenian manuscripts, and was published with a Latin translation by P. Aucher at Venice in 1818.  A fresh Latin translation was made by H. Petermann in 1875; and a German translation by J. Karst for the GCS in 1911.

Andrew Smith of Attalus.org has translated sections, and I’m interested myself.  Quotes of long chunks exist in Syncellus for which an English translation also exists.  I scanned but didn’t proof Karst’s translation some time ago.

I bought a copy of Petermann for $100 some time ago.  So I got down a Plustek Opticbook 3600 book scanner, which I bought some time ago.  I hadn’t used it, since I found that the TWAIN driver apparently only supported 300 dpi and 600 dpi, whereas OCR is best with 400 dpi.  But I found by accident that if I used it through Abby Finereader 8.0 with the Finereader Twain driver, it did in fact support 400 dpi!  So I tried scanning a page or two of Petermann, first as grey-scale and then as black-and-white, and the results were perfectly satisfactory.  So I went on and scanned all 150 pages of book 1 and created a PDF of this.  I then ran the OCR on the Latin and got very good results, although I still need to proof most of this.

My intention is to do an online collaborative effort using Petermann’s translation.  Put the text up there online, in one sentence editable sections, broken down into around 160-section chunks at a time, with all the reference material around it, and invite fun-loving people like yourself to help produce an English translation. 

But why not translate directly from Armenian?  Well, few of us know Armenian, but this did not seem a problem per se.  There is a good tutorial online (somewhere – I can’t find it at this moment), and probably we could manage.  However I learn that no dictionary from Classical Armenian (grabar) to English exists; only into German.  But we have a German translation made by an expert already!  So what would we gain by struggling with German-language dictionaries?  I think that using all these materials, we will be able to produce a satisfactory translation.  Look forward to this in the summer!

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What I did on my Easter holidays I

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

I’ve got a whole week off this week.  I’ve started by typing up a couple of stray early 19th century translations of monodies by Libanius which I found on google books and printed off.   Copious use of the long-S prevents any real use of OCR, so it’s manual typing.

It’s curious but the only out of copyright texts by Libanius translated into English all seem to be monodies!  A monody, I learn from one of the footnotes, is a dirge sung by a single actor on stage.  The two texts are monodies over Nicomedia, destroyed by an earthquake; and over the temple of Apollo at Daphne.  This was a famous oracle just outside Antioch, and was also famous for temple prostitution.  When Julian the Apostate was wintering in Antioch in 362, before his Persian campaign he oracle complained that the presence in the town of the body of the martyr St. Babylas was preventing the god giving oracles.  The emperor ordered that it be moved; and shortly afterwards the temple burned down. 

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Titus of Bostra, “Contra Manichaeos”

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
Titus of Bostra wrote a long work in 4 books against the Manichaeans.  Large parts of the Greek exist, but a complete Syriac version was found in British Library Ms. 12150, brought from Deir al-Suryani (St. Mary Deipara) in the Nitrian desert in Egypt by Archdeacon Henry Tattam in 1842.  This manuscript was written in 411 AD, and also contains various works otherwise lost by Eusebius of Caesarea.

By chance while searching on Google Books, I came across a study of Titus’ work.  I learned from this that an unpublished French translation of books 1 and 2 existed (I have written to the translator and asked for a copy) and a century-old unpublished German translation of book 4 and part of book 3.  I wish that the work were online in English, or at least an English version of the existing translations. 

Returning to the Nitrian desert finds, I also stumbled across a statement that after these were brought to the UK, the Assistant Keeper of Manuscripts, William Cureton, reserved all the most interesting finds for himself (!).  This forced scholars to work on other parts of the vast collection of texts, with good results.  It is depressing to think that those who control the national collection, now as then, treat it as if it exists mainly for the benefit of its staff and not the nation; special rates for reproductions, refusal of any photography except by themselves, limited access, etc.  Nor is the BL alone in this, I would guess.

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Learning Syriac — first session

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
As I mentioned earlier, I am trying to learn Syriac.  A week ago I went down to London, and 5 of us had a day of intensive tuition.  It was interesting that several had bought the grammars, but had been quite unable to get into them.  We were taught how to form and transliterate the Serto letters — something that all the books do very badly indeed –, with the vowel-system of Jacob of Edessa, and given some homework.  In the afternoon the mysteries of Syriac nouns and adjectives were laid out.  My general impression is that the language is not complicated, and that the poor quality of the books is actually the main obstacle.  The homework so far has really succeeded in teaching me the serto alphabet — much more easily than my struggles to learn the simpler estrangelo alphabet by myself.
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Learning Syriac

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
I’m going to have a go at learning Syriac.  It’s rather a lot of years since I left full-time education, so I face the prospect with trepidation.  An academic here in the UK is going to run 4 intensive Saturdays for us, starting in December.  The bad news is 5 weeks of homework between the first and the second. It will be most interesting to see if I can learn anything. I wonder if other people would like to recount their experiences of picking up a language as a mature student outside the education system.  I don’t agree with the idea that no-one is entitled to use an ancient text unless they can read it in the original — how many academics even can consult most oriental languages (Syriac, Ethiopic, Armenian, Persian, etc) in this manner?  But I think that we can all agree that we would rather be able to!
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Dionysius Exiguus and AD/BC

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
Isn’t the web wonderful?  I’ve long wondered why there was no English translation of the work in which Dionysius Exiguus first stated the date using AD and BC.  Indeed it should have been translated, surely, as part of the millennium celebrations, I thought.  But quite by chance I find that a certain Michael Deckers has translated a large chunk of it, which appears on a Russian site here.  A link to the full Latin text is also on that page.  I have written to Dr Deckers to ask permission to include it in the Additional Fathers, and perhaps I will translate some more of the work. 
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Nestorius, The Bazaar of Heracleides — now online

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
I hope that I may be forgiven for a small announcement.  Nestorius wrote in exile in his own defence.  Since his books were ordered to  be burned, and his name used in much the same way as moderns use accusations of ‘racist’ — to shut down discussion — he was obliged to circulate it under the name of Heracleides of Damas.  It’s quite hard going, but since it has survived to our own day, people may like to know that the English translation is now online here.  I have also translated some material about the manuscript find from the French edition and translation.
In some ways the story is familiar.  A single manuscript had survived.  A copy was taken “in secret”, since the owner clearly didn’t want copies made.  The single manuscript was, it turns out, destroyed in WW1.  Fortunately the owner’s wish to prevent copying did not lead to the loss of the text.  Other texts extant in Syriac in 1914 were not so lucky, as I have remarked before.  But what is it about people who own manuscripts that makes them so desperate to prevent the text circulating?
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Medieval manuscripts for sale – part 2: “no, we won’t photograph our collection”

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
Well!  It looks as if the Karlsruhe state library may really have to hand over 2,500 manuscripts (including some papyri) to the Counts of Baden.  There is much scaremongering going on online (e.g. in the PAPY-L list) about what happens, how many books are involved, books being sold, “broken up”, etc.  None of the mss seem to be online, and lots — they’re very shy about saying what — are unphotographed. 

What can we do?  Well, I have been emailing the library, and suggesting that they get a bunch of volunteers in to take photos of the lot with digital cameras, or as much as can be done in the time.  After all, if the library doesn’t put the interests of scholarship first — which is access and preservation — then it doesn’t deserve to have the books.

The responses have been interesting, but negative.  Apparently, despite all the scaremongering, the library still can’t face the idea of scholars taking photographs.  This is very odd indeed; surely books at risk should be photographed?

Even more interesting was the response of a certain poster from Heidelberg University on the PAPY-L list, which I will quote as it probably reflects very accurately just why many state-funded libraries have obstructed public access to images of mss online:

“…I want to stress that I would not appreciate either having anyone here who seemingly does not realise that certain differences between original and copy still exist, but who is interested only in taking pictures of our collection and distributing them all over the world just as he likes it.”

I admit that, in my innocent way, I rather thought that getting the public looking at images of books all around the world was what state-funded libraries were for.  It makes one realise how far many libraries have to  go.  We live in a world in which google book is freely available to Americans, yet here we have people actively hostile to the idea.

“… To put it briefly, I am not in any way willing to accept either this attitude nor that of our government. … Any do-it-yourself attempts of this sort do not appear to be very helpful at this point because they almost seem to condone the selling.”

I worry about this, whether the attitude behind this is that the manuscripts belong to the institution, not the public.  I myself have more manuscripts online at my website than the Karlsruhe library.  Anyone who wants to work with them can.  The world has not ended.  The trouble is that very few people care much about mouldly old books.  Unless we publicise them, no-one will.  That’s part of the reason that the problem has arisen — the politicians do not care about a collection of books.

Collections should not be broken up.  The bureaucrats may be wrong-headed about digital photography — although I bet they all own digital cameras, and I bet more than a few of the staff have snapped pages for their own use.  But in fighting against an indifferent legislature handing over a collection to be auctioned, aren’t they serving us all?  Perhaps: if it were not that they were so determined that this collection would be of so very little service to the world.   Then again, if they had spent more time serving the public, perhaps the law-makers of Baden would have a better idea of how the public benefits from keeping the collection together.

I’m ambivalent, not least because there is no material known to me at Karlsruhe that is relevant to my research interests (attempts to find out what the collection contains have been ignored).  It doesn’t matter to me who owns manuscripts, so long as they are safe, recorded and accessible to the public.  But is the public interest served by breaking up this collection?  Surely it would be better to simply get rid of the obscurantist staff, and keep the books together? 

It will be most interesting to see what happens.  If only we had a handlist of the books, online!

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Thefts from the British Library

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
An article in the Times today tells us that a reader who used a razor-blade to remove 98  rare maps from books in the British Library and other libraries has been jailed for three years and fined one million pounds (around $2m).  The maps, we are told, were then sold to dealers and collectors.  He was found with 7 maps, alone worth around $1m.  US readers will be amused to learn that the reader will be released automatically after a year, unless he annoys the turnkeys, and in any event after two.  The Library officials are said to be furious at the leniency of the sentence. 

The story has many interesting aspects.  The weak sentence means that it is now open season on the collections of British Libraries.  Many will consider the possibility of becoming a multi-millionaire well worth the chance of a year in conditions not markedly worse than a boys’ boarding school.  Fortunately the number of criminals equipped to sell the items must be limited. 

The Times report glosses over the motive, which is said to be “resentment” of the library.  I wonder what the nature of his resentment was.  Could it possibly be that, like so many other readers, he was tired of being robbed blind in charges for reproductions of material that he wished to examine?

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