Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
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 […]
A mention in a post at the Theology Archaeology blog drew my attention to the question of the sacrifice of children at Carthage. I think that we all remember that the Carthaginians sacrificed their children to their god. It is, indeed, one of the things we think of, when the word “Carthaginian” is mentioned. But […]
Microsoft do make some rubbish software, don’t they! This evening I sat down to work with the new Mithras pages that I am working on. This involves running a little web server on my PC, so that I can run some PHP scripts. Last weekend I installed (with some difficulty) IIS, FastCGI and PHP on […]
I’ve had an email with some material extracted from Matthieu Cassin’s thesis about Gregory of Nyssa, with the pages discussing the chapter titles in the manuscripts. I’ve not had a chance to read it yet, but it looks fascinating. Dr Cassin has done some real work here, and I will discuss it further. Also I […]
A post by a headbanger on a crank site drew my attention to this page on the web: Verjuy Mithra Temple, the Oldest Surviving Mithraist Temple in Iran By: Afshin Tavakoli Iran, Daily Newspaper No. 2802, May. 16th, 2004, Page 12 Abstract:Maragheh is one of Iran’s most ancient cities having its roots in legends. In the […]
Today I’ve obtained copies of some of the pages from Maarten Vermaseren’s great compilation of Mithraic inscriptions and reliefs, the Corpus Inscriptionum et Monumentorum Religionis Mithriacae or CIMRM. This work is frankly very useful indeed. There are two volumes, and neither is at all easy to access, or available in print. I do wish that it was […]
Lots of excitement on the Methodius manuscripts this morning — Adrian Tanasescu-Vlas has been through the STSL Ms. 40 and identified the works on Methodius in it. I’ll do some more on this after lunch. He confirms that De lepra is in there, which means that it is now possible to get someone who knows […]
I’m still working on Ibn Abi Usaibia. Yesterday I started going through the .htm files exported from Abbyy Finereader, to rejoin paragraphs and add in page numbers. I’ve so far found two pages which are out of order in the manuscript — the numerals at the bottom in pencil were clearly added after the pages […]