Category: Thoughts on Antiquity

Books 24-31 of Ammianus Marcellinus went through the scanner by lunchtime, and in the afternoon I went through proofing the result.  As I have found before, reprints of the Bohn translations tended to get fainter over time, as the plates grew worn.  Towards the end this began to be a problem, although fortunately I was able to see what every word was, and I completed proofing of books 14-31 around 9pm.

The version has very limited footnotes, and many of these seem useful.  But with the very limited time available to me — I had hoped to complete the whole task in one day — something had to be omitted. 

I’ve now begun to format up the results for upload, and have completed books 14 and 15.  It seems as if it will probably take the rest of today to do this. 

The translation itself is fine, with little ps.Jacobean English.  It’s a very interesting text, actually, and I have enjoyed reading it.  Beginning part way through the reign of Constantius II, it runs down to the death of Valens at Adrianople.  The Penguin translation omits the digressions — yet these are interesting too, particularly the one on Egypt.

Another sunlit day of blue skies beckons (I’m writing these notices in the early morning). Time to go forth and enjoy Saturday morning before I get on with it!

This morning is Good Friday, the sun is shining and a beautiful day is in prospect.  It is the anniversary of when an ordinary middle-class man was done to death horribly by one part of the establishment, the other part (which could have saved him) being unwilling to use up political capital over a “trivial” matter.  I’m nobody; so are most people.  It could have been us.  That’s what human nature in a position of power looks like – indifference to what is right in the cause of what is convenient for the selfish. Historically the festival is now nearly 2000 years old, which is remarkable. When it was first celebrated, there was still an emperor on the throne in Rome.

After finishing at 9pm last night with the Syriac program (I was starting to make mistakes), I started thinking about the Roman History of Herodian.  This writer of the 3rd century AD is little known. A Loeb Classical Library translation from 30 years ago exists.  But so do two public domain versions.  The first is a 17th century one; the other much more modern from 1749, by a Mr. J. Hart.  Neither is online in any form and I have seen neither.  The first, indeed, might well be just a rendering from a French version.

I’d like to get the Hart text online.  The first question is where to find a copy.  Glasgow university had one, and are helpful people.  But it was fragile, and I could only have 20 pages (out of 400+).  Leeds ignored my email; when I repeated it, I was told courteously that they saw no need to make a copy, and had no obligation to the general public anyway, although I wonder if they say that in funding applications for taxpayers’ money.  Aberdeen also ignored my email (no doubt, as for Pilate, it wasn’t convenient).  The British Library have one, and will make a copy for $250, which is a lot of money — probably the price of the book itself, if one could find one for sale — and I will consider it. 

Another issue is that a book of that date will employ the long-S fairly enthusiastically, which is unrecognised by OCR.  A dozen corrections per page for 400 pages might be time-consuming.

The other history that should be online and isn’t is Ammianus Marcellinus.  The Loeb may be in the public domain, even; and there is a C.D.Yonge translation from Bohn’s Library that definitely is.  The latter is even on Google books, for US readers only, as Chris Weimer verified for me.  I have had a photocopy of it for years, almost 2 inches thick, sitting on a shelf.  Anyhow I checked that no-one had scanned it since I last looked, and then began to run it through the scanner.  I did 6 books, and OCR’d and proof-corrected 1 book, by midnight.  (At that point I retired to bed with Northanger Abbey!).  At this moment book 23 (9th of those extant) is going through the scanner.   It is high time that this work was online, and I will now do it.  The quality may not be great, there will be no footnotes; but if anyone wants to correct typos, they can; if not, then it doesn’t matter.  Either way it will be done.  I do wish that my scanner could take more than 25 pages at a time, tho!

After a morning outdoors, I’m working away on the Syriac program, and finding how slow software development is! 

But I’ve also been thinking a bit about translating Eusebius Chronicon book 1.  There are materials in Syriac; Jacob of Edessa continued Eusebius’ text, and fragments of that survive.  They’re published in the Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium (CSCO) series by Peeters of Leuven and so can be purchased over the internet.  Armenian texts often have some kind of Syriac connection.

The way that the translation needs to be done is to put online a large table in two columns.  The left hand column will contain the Latin text, with the German translation underneath, and underneath that any existing English translation (e.g. from Syncellus or the Loeb Manetho); the right-hand the translation, in short 1- or 2-sentence sections, initially blank.  Each section will have an edit button.  When clicked on this will bring up the section full-screen, with links to the Armenian, the printed version of Petermann, and whatever else is available.  This will just be a couple of PHP scripts, of course.  Last time this backed onto bunches of text files, but I might use mySQL to store the data this time.

I’d like us to be able to look at the Armenian text, at least. Of course when printed small it’s just squiggles, but, hey, let’s display it in 30 pt! I notice that in Coakley’s 5th edition of Robinson’s Syriac Grammar, the whole text is printed so small that I had to use a magnifying glass to pick out the supra-linear vowels (invented by Mar Jacob of Edessa, as above). But I see no need to make such a mistake.

I’d love to get on with Eusebius (see below) but I can now work on that in weekends. But for the last two days I have been working on my Syriac-English program, which has needed some uninterrupted time spent on it.  The idea is to allow you to paste or type a bunch of vocalised (or not) Syriac text into a window, hit a key and get some kind of English translation back.  Also you will be able to hover over a word in Syriac and get a transcription, and grammatical details. 

Coding for right-to-left text has various pitfalls, which I have been labouring over, but have solved and written up a summary online.  Likewise I wanted to use modern test-driven development with it (a decision that proved itself yesterday) and this also was less easy than it should have been. Again I have written a summary online.

I decided to use (by permission) George Kiraz’ database SEDRA.  This contains all the words in the New Testament, with morphologies and basic meanings.  This itself is quite difficult to fight with, and you do need the article that he published in Symposium Syriacum.

Yesterday I finally made some progress, and I was able to paste the first chapter of John into the program, hit the button, and find it recognise all but 3 words (and I think that missing spaces in the HTML Syriac text that I used were the case for these).  Now I need to output the right information for these words. 

There is only one fully vocalised Syriac text in Serto available online.  I found that the site is clearly about to disappear, so spent some time in mirroring it here.  The author directs enquirers to the texts at the Complete Aramaic Lexicon site, but this is very hard to use.

I wonder what I’ll do today.  That darned sun is shining again, and my hedge-trimmer is calling to me…

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.

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!

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.