Category: Thoughts on Antiquity

Will JSTOR kill the web?

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
I don’t belong to any academic institution, so like most people I have no access to the electronic resources now becoming available unless they happen to be accessible from somewhere that I can visit. But today I had the chance to use JSTOR. It contained complete runs of mostly anglophone-centred journals. Frankly, after seeing it, I see no reason to ever scan another academic article myself.

Indeed it contained all the articles from Vigiliae Christianae from the 1950’s which I was myself refused permission to scan! Amusingly it discusses a time ‘wall’ after which articles won’t appear, so that it doesn’t interfere with publishers’ revenue streams — of about 10 years before the present! This makes ironic reading for those of us afflicted by the copyright law: only material 70+ years old may appear. But of course it is good that they have found a way around that. It also highlights that the material protected by copyright law really is nearly all commercially worthless.

Clearly this system must have a huge impact on how people access information, if you can access it. It’s accurate, it’s searchable, the articles can be exported to PDF, and it’s fast. I did searches on “Severus Sebokht” (who gets relatively few mentions on google) and came up with a mass of recent and not-so-recent scholarly articles about him.

There are still limitations. The coverage of French and German serials was negligible; but I think that this will change, such is the obvious benefit to all of the system. Likewise I think that access will be broadened as time goes by, probably as central institutions buy access for all colleges in a country or something like that. It was interesting to learn that all educational establishments in Africa will be given free access. But I don’t think that the general public will ever get access, and I think that the period of non-inclusion will remain or extend. This allows publishers to sell their CDROMs.

So what will be the impact on the web? Why would anyone use amateur sites, when this is available? Likewise, what is the point of Project Gutenberg, the CCEL, indeed my own collection, if instead the books can all be downloaded in PDF? Well, this last is not yet the case. But the success of the Early English Books Online project (likewise inaccessible to the public, but free to all educational institutions in the UK at least) which does just this for all English printed books to 1700 means that the writing must be on the wall. A project to do the books to 1900 must be in proposal somewhere already, I would imagine.

As these sorts of projects become more mature, I think that we will see more attempts by publishers to push sites like my own offline using copyright law, so as to bring the whole dissemination of data under commercial control again. After all, all these projects involve fees, payments, revenue streams. They have completeness, and state-funding, so they are far more desirable than some amateur site full of typos. The publishers profit, the average student doesn’t care. But the publisher has thus a financial interest to ensure that only the approved site is used.

One thing is for sure, in 10 years time the internet will be a very different beast for people with our interests. We may all be much better informed (if we belong to one of the favoured groups with access). But the “Wild west” days of the internet will be over.

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New issue of Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies has appeared

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
The new issue of the online peer-reviewed journal of Syriac studies Hugoye has appeared.  It contains a review of Aphrem Barsoum’s “Scattered Pearls”, on which I wrote a few posts back; a travelogue of a journey of 15 scholars last year into the regions in Eastern Turkey around Tur Abdin, Edessa and Nisibis, where there is still a Syriac-speaking population; a catalogue of Syriac Mss. at Yale, which includes a modern copy with unpublished translation of 5th century writer Marutha of Maiperkat on the Council of Nicaea (I have already asked for a copy!); and a discussion of the form of the letter of Mara bar Serapion with reference to the Second Sophistic.  The new issue can be found here:

http://syrcom.cua.edu/hugoye/Vol9No2/index.html

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When does antiquity end?

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
This week I have been reading Ignatius Aphram Barsoum, “The scattered pearls”, which is a monster history of Syriac literature (mostly ignoring the Nestorian half) at the monster price of $100. Barsoum wrote in the 1920’s, from notes of visits that he had made to libraries around the world and in the east, and so he gives lists of manuscripts where texts can be found. He’s pretty vague, sometimes, tho, and also adds that World War 1 may have destroyed some of them.

I’ve been looking at this to see what texts are of interest now. Since I have online collections of patristic texts, this raises the question of where the cut-off is, in the east. If we draw the line ca. 640, with the Arab conquest, this is a sensible point. It also fits in with the death of Isidore of Seville in the west. But then we have writers working later who still have access to ancient sources. Jacob of Edessa, I was interested to note, wrote a Syriac translation of Eusebius of Caesarea’s “Chronicle” and extended it down to his own time. Do we exclude such texts?

On the other hand the scholiast to Dionysius Bar Salibi writing in the 13th century is routinely quoted online as a source about the origins of Christmas. We can’t really go that far, surely?

When does “antiquity” end in the east? And why?

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Translations of Jerome’s biblical prefaces

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
I’d like to highlight that Kevin Edgecomb has been quietly working away translating into English the prefaces to books of the bible from the Vulgate written by St. Jerome. These are all interesting, and offer insight into the way in which Jerome worked. Those done so far are here. We should all be grateful to him. I hope that Kevin will place them in the public domain, and we’ll all be able to use them.
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Lost Syriac manuscripts found?

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
I wrote on Saturday to the author of this site http://sanate.free.fr/.  I got back a most interesting note about the books burned at Seert in 1915 (see preceding post). 

It seems that five years ago a case of books was found in the Bibliothèque Nationale Française in Paris.  It contained some twenty of the most precious manuscripts, brought from Seert by Addai Scher, just before the start of WW1!

I referred to the found and then lost text of “De incarnatione” of Theodore of Mopsuestia.  Is it possible that this text, thought lost, has all the while been slumbering in a packing crate, through two world wars?  I will investigate further…!

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Porphyry Against the Christians

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
I’ve been reading Robert M. Berchman’s translation of the fragments of Porphyry’s attack on the Christians.  It’s good to have this book, because those fragments were not really accessible to English-speaking readers.  

Half of it is full of introductory stuff, with lots of philosophical jargon.  This isn’t nearly as useful as T.D.Barnes article in the JTS from 1973 on Porphyry; to read that is a liberal education!  But it’s not bad. 

Berchman does refer to the translation of R.J.Hoffmann, which I reviewed on my site, unlike l’Année Philologique who ignore it.  The translations aren’t as readable as Hoffmann, but are probably more accurate.  Berchman seems aware that his intended audience is undergraduates — although how many American undergraduates know the meaning of terms like “hylic” might be queried!  But at $130, few will buy it.  My guess is that  it will get extensively photocopied.  It’s a good, solidly useful thing to have, and I’m glad that Brill recognised the need for such a book.

On my own site is a page which starts out to do the same thing, but is incomplete.  I intend to go through the Patrologia Graeca and add in more.  Berchman’s book means that at least I can check my translations!

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Syriac Studies

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
At the moment I’m doing things with Syriac. Since this is obscure, perhaps a few words of introduction would be appropriate.

The Syriac language is a late dialect of Aramaic originating in the city of Edessa. It became the common tongue throughout the ancient near-east and literature exists written in Syriac from the 2nd to 13th centuries AD. Even today the language is understood in the mountains of Kurdistan, and also in Kerala in India, where Syriac-speaking Christians brought it. The same missionaries also travelled the Silk Road to China, although the only trace of their presence is an inscription, some texts, and the fact that modern Mongolian is still written in Syriac characters.

Why is Syriac interesting? — Because a lot of Greek literature was translated into it, and often a Syriac translation will exist where the original is lost. This is how the Arabs came into possession of Greek science, and so it was transmitted to us. The entire works of Aristotle were translated into Syriac, not once but twice (by different factions) so that Syriac-speakers could take part in the theological arguments which dominated the eastern Roman empire and were all phrased in Aristotelean dialectic.

Sebastian Brock’s Introduction to Syriac Studies is a relatively short overview of the subject.

In the 1900’s, the then Chaldean Archbishop of Seert, Addai Scher, toured around the monasteries of his region and published brief catalogues of the contents of their libraries, often as articles in the Journal Asiatique. This is now online at Gallica. So I have PDF’s of these catalogues of Notre-Dame des Semences at Alqos, the Borgia collection in Rome, and the Jerusalem Patriarchate, and each has a list of names in an index at the back.

I have been attempting to track down information about Syriac authors and their works. Last night I made a rather surprising discovery. I was compiling some information about John bar Penkaye. I could only find information on one of his works, the Rish Melle or Historical Summary. Book 15 of this is a contemporary record of events after the Arab invasion, including the death of Mohammed’s grandson Hassan. But I knew other works existed.

In the indices, I found works listed! I then repeated this for others that I am interested in — the 7th century astronomer Severus Sebokht, and the obscure Thomas of Edessa of the 6th century. In both cases there were manuscripts of works whose existence was quite unknown to me.

Of course I have only a few catalogues here. The catalogue of Seert itself was published as a book of ca. 100 pages, of which I will try to obtain a photocopy (only 2 copies here in the UK!).

I fear that the catalogue of the library at Seert will make mournful reading — it was burned by the Turks in 1915, and Addai Scher himself was martyred. It contained the only copy in the world of Theodore of Mopsuestia De incarnatione. Scher had discovered it in 1905 — only fragments were known before then — and brought it to Seert for safekeeping. But it was never published, and no man living now knows what that work said.

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