Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
I’ve been thinking again about how a reliable Mithras site might look. One of the problems has been layout. I’ve had great difficulty finding a format for the top-level page that worked for me. But I had something of a breakthrough last night, when I started working from the Tertullian Project home page as a basis. […]
Regular readers will know that I had a very bad experience attempting to contribute to the Mithras article on Wikipedia, when I was the target of a deliberate campaign of violence and defamation by an obvious troll operating at least two accounts, who simply wanted to own my work and push a falsehood. It ended with a […]
News on the translation that I commissioned of the 4th century Acts of ps.Linus . The second half arrived last night! That’s the Passio Pauli portion. I’ve reviewed it, and it seems very close to completion, bar a couple of sentences. That’s good news, and it will be good to have that complete and paid […]
A correspondent writes to tell me of the discovery of a Mithraeum in Scotland, at Inveresk. There is an announcement in Epistula 1 (PDF), page 5, the organ of the Roman Society, from John Gooder (AOC Archaeology Group) and Fraser Hunter (National Museums Scotland): Excavations on the eastern edge of the fort complex of Inveresk in East […]
Quite by chance I found myself looking at a vivid description of the pagan revival of the late 4th century AD, in the elderly pages of Rudolpho Lanciani’s Ancient Rome in the light of recent discoveries (1888). Lanciani was an Italian archaeologist who was digging in Rome, and unearthing all manner of ancient inscriptions. His […]
An email from a correspondent pointed me to an image in Wikipedia Commons, itself from the Walters Art Gallery, of an intaglio ring, and enquired about the date of the item. The item consists of an ancient gold ring, with a depiction of the killing of the bull by Mithras cut into a gem of sard. It […]
Jim Davila at Paleojudaica notes an interesting article and makes some useful comments upon it: Are online aliases ever justified in academic debate? Sock puppets – online commenters that create a false identity – are disrupting academic freedom and scholarly debate, says Simon Tanner (The Guardian). If it’s just a matter of discussing evidence and […]
I chopped up the paperback English translation of Quintus Curtius, and ran it through my sheet-fed scanner. It did work, but the results were less than satisfactory. The scanner — a Fujitsu Scansnap — tended to look through the paper, or distort the colour of it. That said, the OCR took place just fine. But […]
I’ve spent today working on some PHP scripts to work with the new Mithras pages. It’s slow work, programming, especially when you’ve spent the week at the terminal. Thankfully tomorrow is Sunday, and I never use my PC on Sundays. I suspect that a farm near me will be selling home-grown strawberries, and I shall go […]