Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
I’ve been thinking about Mithras and Mithra, Roman and Persian. Some of the comments on my recent post, Why Cumontian Mithras studies are dead, suggested that Roman syncretism could not be left out of account, and that any eastern cult that entered the Roman world was likely to undergo modification. There is much truth in […]
An idle search in Google images for “Mithra Zoroastrianism” brought up precisely NO images of the Zoroastrian god. It’s quite interesting, really, not least because I have no idea how he was depicted — if he was depicted — in reliefs. It also brought up a number of unfamiliar tauroctonies of Mithras. The need for […]
A post in an online forum queried whether an English translation existed of the “Halkin Vita” of Constantine. I had never heard of this item, but a little searching revealed that it is a medieval Greek Saint’s “Life”, mostly fictitious, of the Emperor. A reference to a medieval patriarch dates it to after the iconoclast disputes, […]
Over the weekend I was thinking about the ancient information that has reached us about the cult of Mithras. There is a considerable quantity of not-very-useful literary testimonies, but the majority of the material is inscriptional or in the form of reliefs and statuary. All this was sparked by thinking about a depiction of the […]
Another item I spotted via AWOL is that the British Museum (upon whom be blessings) has made its database of what it holds available on the web. You can search it here, and an advanced search is here. Welcome to the British Museum collection database online. Search almost two million objects from the entire Museum […]
A couple of interesting articles have come my way today. Tommaso Leoni has written an overview of the textual transmission of the works of Josephus.[1] This reads rather like a summary of secondary literature, rather than a piece of new research, but, since much of that literature is in languages which anglophone scholars tend to […]
Reading the Cranmer blog this evening, I find that the good archbishop has been obliged to place some limits on who can comment. His Grace is now forced to devote more time each day trying to stem the tide of offensive and irrelevant comment than he is able to dedicate to each morning’s missive. When […]
I forgot to mention that at breakfast I found myself in the queue, and talking to a chap who, like myself, wasn’t wearing his name badge (the name badges this year were excellently readable). It turned out to be Mark DelCogliano, who has translated a number of the prefaces to books of the Vulgate and […]
Out after work this evening, and bought a new, disposable laptop which I can take to Oxford and lose without heartburn. Now setting this up. At the moment it is creating recovery disk(s), and taking ages to do so. Next I shall have to remove all the crapware and install the stuff I want to […]