Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
In the museums of the world there are a number of Roman sculptures of a head, with particular characteristics. The person depicted is completely bald, lacking even eyebrows. Deeply incised upon the head, usually on the right but sometimes elsewhere, is a cross-shaped or X-shaped mark. In some cases the mark is shaped like the […]
While under lockdown I have not been able to progress any of my projects very much. I suspect the background strain is affecting us all. Everyone is on edge, I notice. But I am certainly more fortunate than most. After a break, I have started to nibble again at my translation of John the Deacon’s […]
In a previous post here we discussed a medieval Christian Arabic collection of apocryphal oracles by pagan philosophers, predicting the coming of Christ. Much of this material was discovered in 2007 by Andrew Criddle, who had a further suggestion relating to it, and what follows is his work. I post it here because it should […]
I’ve been updating the Mithras site with images that people have sent me over the last year. These go into the catalogue of monuments and inscriptions that I maintain, as and when I feel like it. I’ve added an entry for the “new” Mithraeum at Ostia, which has been dubbed the “Mithraeum of the coloured […]
Back in the 1970s, following the international conferences on Mithraic studies, a rising young scholar named Richard L. Gordon created a journal specifically for Mithras studies. He named it the Journal of Mithraic Studies, and got contributors, and supporters, and a publisher. There was definitely a demand for such a journal, as somewhere to report […]
A couple of busy days. A look in the spam folder – Akismet is behaving erratically these days – revealed a week old but deeply interesting comment on the Printing banned by Islam? post from 2009. I ended up adding a long extra section to the post, full of material about early Ottoman firmans – […]
The coughs and colds and tummy bugs of winter have arrived, and I’ve had other things on my mind for the last three weeks. But there are a few updates. I’ve been updating my Mithras site with a few extra photographs found online. Every so often I see one, sometimes on Twitter, and track down the […]