Tag: From my diary

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Just bits and pieces happening at the moment.

So, you want to learn Coptic? arrived from Lulu.com very quickly indeed.  I’ve had it a couple of days, and it’s very easy reading indeed.  I do need to actually memorise the ‘extra’ Coptic letters, tho, I find.

I saw a facebook post in which someone referred to the “hunger for languages”.  I feel this too.  But Google translate will help us all, in a way hard to imagine even ten years ago.

I took a look at the Eusebius PDF again last night.  Reading So you want to learn Coptic has clarified a lot about the djinkim (=grave accent).  I’m in the daft position that the first couple of fragments seem to have been transcribed exactly.  Then the remainder were adjusted to use the djinkim.  Finally the new fragment I did myself was exact transcription.  This will have to be normalised.  Since I don’t know which words should have what, I think I will have to go with the original use of dots above words.  Unfortunately it means comparing every fragment with the original.  I’ll do this as soon as I can, and finish the book then.

Today I’ve been looking again at QuickGreek.  I’ve added code to catch unexpected exceptions — just makes it a little more professional.  I’ve also started creating a way to add extra words.  When I was looking at the Calendar of Antiochus of Athens, the names of stars were not being recognised, and I would like to add these.

One problem I had with entries in the calendar was whether a particular word, applied to a star setting or rising meant “at dawn” or “in the morning”.  There is clearly a need for a specialised glossary.

The days are very short now, and I feel a tremendous lethargy.  What I need is sunshine!

I don’t know that I shall blog on Christmas day this year, as I may be otherwise engaged.  Boxing day is Sunday, so no computer use then.  I’ll get to these things on Monday.

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The reputation of Amélineau

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I spent part of yesterday evening updating the Wikipedia article on Émile Amélineau.  The old version described him as an archaeologist, but was oblivious to his work as a Coptologist.  More seriously it was unaware of the very serious criticisms levelled against his excavation work at Abydos by the great Flinders Petrie. 

Petrie more or less created Egyptian archaeology as a scientific discipline.  Prior to this, there was really only tomb raiding or treasure hunting.  Every anglophone archaeologist has been influenced by his work.  He was certainly egotistical. His 1931 publication Seventy years in archaeology mentions very few other Egyptologists — not even the discovery of Tutankhamun. 

When I was a boy, reading about Egyptology in the books of Leonard Cottrell, Amelineau was simply a villain.  This view has prevailed.  So it was quite a shock to find his endless publications of Coptic texts.  Often these are the only edition.  The Journal Asiatique is full of them, and then there are the great volumes of the works of Shenoute.

These too have not gone without criticism.  Modern coptologist Stephen Emmel, familiar from his role in the Gospel of Judas saga, has criticised them as containing many errors, but he acknowledges that no-one since has edited them.  We may recall that Emmel is editing some of the texts afresh, and so perhaps unconsciously he feels the need to justify the production of a new edition by drawing attention to the defects of the editio princeps? 

 I wish I could have found a French biography of Amelineau.  Petrie’s bitter remarks, written many years later, can only be one side of the story.  Doubtless Amelineau really did do wrong, and should never have attempted archaeology, for which he had no special qualifications.  But a balanced picture of the man must recognise his real contribution to scholarship.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An email drew my attention to an article by Amelineau in the Journal Asiatique for 1888,  Fragments coptes pour servir a l’histoire de la conquete de l’Egypte par les Arabes.  This gave two Coptic fragments with a French translation.  Let’s hear Amelineau introduce them.

If we except the two works to which I drew attention ten years ago[1], and of which I published the second here[2], we possess no other complete text in the Coptic language on the history of Egypt after the Muslim conquest.  While we await a happy accident that will discover another text, I believe we must think ourselves amply rewarded, during our research, if we put our hand on some fragment which deals with history, if not history as we understand it, at least history as it was known to the ancient Egyptians, and to their descendants, the Copts.

Last August, when I was researching at Oxford [3] the fragments of the works of that celebrated monk, Shenouda, I came across by accident two fragments in the Theban dialect, containing the history of two people very well known in Egypt at the time of the arrival of the Arabs.  One was a simple monk, the other the archbishop of Alexandria.  I believe it would not be without value to publish these, because they make known the state of feeling in Egypt during the last years of the Byzantine domination, and one of them perhaps gives us the solution to a historical enigma which has until now defied the efforts of the most competent and patient scholars.

The fragments which I publish today belong to the Clarendon Press in Oxford and have now been deposited in the Bodleian Library.  The first forms part of the life of Apa Samuel, a monk of the Nitrian desert, who finished his life at the Fayoum, a very little time before the arrival of the Arabs in Egypt.  The other belongs to a life of the patriarch Benjamin, in whose patriarchate Egypt escaped from the Greeks only to fall under the domination of new masters, as she was not slow to learn.

The first of these two fragments is composed of a double folio, paginated […] which was found in the middle of a quire.  This fragment, like the second, must have been purchased in Egypt at the end of the last century, and then sold to Woide.  (Woide himself could not have bought them in Egypt since he never went there[4]). 

The second is composed of four numbered folios […].  I have been unable to determine the age of the fragments, but it is quite clear from their content that this cannot be before the middle of the 7th century for the first, and perhaps the end of the same century for the second.  If we consider the place where Samuel and Benjamin lived, their lives must have been composed in the Memphis dialect, and a certain time must have elapsed before they were translated into the Theban dialect, or, at least, for the Theban author, if he was the first editor, to gather his materials.  Whatever the case, here are the fragments.

Perhaps I will translate these also at some point.

UPDATE: Some footnotes:

1. Cf. Mémoire sur deux documents coptes écrits sous la domination arabe in the Bulletin de l’Institut egyptien, 1885, p. 324-369.
2. Journal asiatique, févrer-mars 1887.
3. Here I must express my thanks for the generosity of Mr Guimet, who both sent me on the journey and made it possible for me to research a great deal of material which is of interest to science.
4. These fragments are not the only ones that Woide possessed.  There are around 150 others which I have copied, apart from 15 or 20.  Woide examined them to discover the Theban text of scripture; he seems to have studied them only from that point of view.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I came down this morning at 7:15 am.  The outside temperature on my wireless thermometer told me that it was -10.8°C outside.  The max/min display told me that it had reached -12.5°C during the night. 

Driving into work, rather gingerly, the thermometer on the car, while I was on the Ipswich bypass, read -10.5°C. 

I’ve lived in this house for 13 years, and I have never seen readings lower than -5 or -6 until these last few days. 

When I think of the ancient world, I find myself thinking of a world which bright and sunny.  It never rains, or not much, in my imagination.  All those Athenians and Spartans at Marathon, and all those Romans teaching the world the arts of peace, they all lived in near continuous sunshine, at least in my mind.

My imagination tells me that once the Romans invaded Britain, that they had to march in the rain.  But I know why I think this — because in Carry on Cleo Sid James, playing Mark Anthony, does just that, and has to pour the rain out of his helmet.  “What a country!” he exclaims.  But even in that movie, the rest of the events take place in sunshine.

I’m not a great movie-viewer, yet my imagination has been influenced in these respects by Hollywood.  In reality it got cold in the Roman world, just as it does today.  Those legionaries at Hadrian’s wall cannot have enjoyed the climate.  Even in Rome itself it snowed in the winter.  In Palestine, a country we think of as endlessly warm, it can get very cold indeed at night, and probably always did.

Still, it’s pleasant on days like today to imagine an ancient world where the sun always shone!

UPDATE: I just went into the dashboard on this blog, and saw the following message:

Akismet has protected your site from 50,564 spam comments already…

Sheesh!

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Apparently Coptic doesn’t have “endings”,  in the way that Greek and Latin do.  Not sure how it does things, then — apparently prefixes are important.

I’ve ordered a copy of So you want to learn Coptic? A guide to Bohairic grammar, available here with sample chapter, and from Lulu.com here.  Lulu have lately been sending out books very quickly, so I chose the latter.  The sample chapter seemed easy enough reading, and since I can only glance at these things in odd moments, easy is what it had better be.  Let’s hope it arrives before New Year.

Meanwhile my quest for electronic Coptic resources has continued.  A search in the Yahoo groups gthomas group — which I joined ages ago but never read — for “electronic” revealed the existance of something named Marcion 1.3.  It’s not quite clear what this does or how it does it.  Complaints there were many!  But it displays various resources and seems to have a list of Coptic words in it.  I downloaded the source, which was in C++, but not in Visual C++ (which would have been much too simple!)  It does contain some lists of Coptic word and English meaning, which is the key thing after all.  I will try to make more sense of this over the coming days.

An update on one of my commissions.  Andrew Eastbourne has emailed me the completed translations of the fragments of Philip of Side, plus the Religious dialogue at the court of the Sassanids.  All that is now required is an introduction, which he has promised to write.  When this is all done, I shall place it all in the public domain as usual and upload it to my own site, Archive.org, etc.

I’m sitting on the Eusebius book.  I suspect I will do the last touches at Christmas.  I need to tweak the Coptic bits a little, and it may be simpler just to pull the Coptic out of the PDF into Word, edit it myself, and invite the typesetter to reset those fragments.  Because otherwise he has to go through and make a lot of changes from spurious grave accents, and change them to dots above the word.

The other reason for delay is that I have yet to get the formal approval from Les editions du Cerf.  I’m reprinting their Greek text for part of it, and the contract specifies I need their approval.  It’s been two months now since I asked.  My spies tell me that approval has been given, but the clerk who handles the paperwork has not replied to any email of mine in two months.  It’s disappointing, such needless delays.

I did some more on the Greek translation assistant today.  I hope to do some more over the coming days. 

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I written a couple more emails this morning. 

The first is to a certain Ellen Black, who is apparently one of those in charge at the Project Hindsight website.  They sell what I believe are photocopies of translations of Hellenistic and Roman astrological texts, made by Robert Schmidt during the 80’s and 90’s.  There are none in the UK, and people have trouble even buying from the Project.  So I’ve asked whether they would consider placing the material online in PDF form, and offering to help with the conversion process.  After all, if no-one actually buys these things — and it seems questionable whether anyone does — there is no loss to them in putting them where people can use them.

The second is an interesting discussion that I am having on Coptic matters.  I keep feeling the urge to learn some Coptic, after all that transcribing.  I’d like to see a morphologised Coptic text or two.  The obvious choice is the New Testament, but the Gospel of Thomas is apparently of wide interest too.  I believe that electronic texts of the NT exist. I don’t know whether there is an electronic Coptic text of the GoT available.

What I want to see is something like this, only in Coptic:

010101 N- —-NSF- βίβλος βίβλος
010101 N- —-GSF- γενέσεως γένεσις
010101 N- —-GSM- Ἰησοῦ Ἰησοῦς
010101 N- —-GSM- Χριστοῦ Χριστός
010101 N- —-GSM- υἱοῦ υἱός
010101 N- —-GSM- Δαυὶδ Δαυίδ
010101 N- —-GSM- υἱοῦ υἱός
010101 N- —-GSM- Ἀβραάμ Ἀβραάμ
010102 N- —-NSM- Ἀβραὰμ Ἀβραάμ
010102 V- 3AAI-S– ἐγέννησεν γεννάω
010102 RA —-ASM- τὸν ὁ
010102 N- —-ASM- Ἰσαάκ Ἰσαάκ
010102 N- —-NSM- Ἰσαὰκ Ἰσαάκ
010102 C- ——– δὲ δέ
010102 V- 3AAI-S– ἐγέννησεν γεννάω
010102 RA —-ASM- τὸν ὁ

This is the start of Matthew’s gospel in Greek — book, chapter, verse, then whether it is a noun, then whether it is nominative singular or genetive, then the word as it appears in the NT, and then the base form of the word (nominative singular, or whatever). 

This extract is from the MorphGNT file, made by James Tauber at who knows what effort and released very generously for us all to use in computer analyses of the text and much else.  The German Bible Society responded to his generosity by threatening to sue him, on the absurd basis that they “own” the Greek New Testament (!). Rather than pay lawyers, he withdrew it and is reworking it to use the SBL Greek New Testament instead.

Something of this kind for a Coptic text would be a very useful thing to have.

Likewise we really need a Coptic-English dictionary in XML form.  Crum’s dictionary is the obvious choice.  I wonder whether the Andrew Mellon Foundation could be induced by a Coptic scholar to fund such a transcription?  They did, for the Greek dictionary of Liddell and Scott, which is part of the Perseus Hopper.  Indeed Perseus ought to know who could do it and what it would cost to do.   I wonder if it is possible to find a Coptic scholar who would cooperate?

My third email was to the Packard Humanities Institute, with a PDF of an application form for a copy of their Latin corpus CDROM.  Let’s hope that goes through OK!

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More on Macrobius Saturnalia at Chronicon blog

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There’s a very interesting post on the Saturnalia of the 5th century A.D. pagan writer Macrobius, here at Chronicon blog.  The editor has obtained access to the English translation — lucky chap — and has discovered that a new translation and edition has appeared in Loeb.  This I did not know.

It’s a really interesting post on an interesting work.  Read it.

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Morphologized Coptic texts?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve been working on my translation tool for ancient Greek again.  The calendar of Antiochus of Athens seems like a perfect text to translate using it.  But the deficiencies of the software are still great.  I’ve been adding code to handle numerals today, with modest success.  Much of the trouble is in the unicode-to-betacode converter.  That apostrophe at the end of the number is represented with a special unicode character, with an apostrophe, and a tilted accent.  I’ve got the first two working, but not the third, not really.

But Coptic is written mostly in Greek letters.  When I was typing some up earlier this week, I was very conscious of this.  Why can’t I add some extra files to the code, and be able to look at Coptic text as well?

For Greek we have things like MorphGNT, where each word is listed in a text file, together with the base form, the part of speech, number, gender, etc.  But I can find no evidence of such a thing for any Coptic text.

Anyone know what we have, in the way of electronic Coptic texts, and electronic XML Coptic dictionaries?

I can’t help feeling that, if we have the New Testament in Coptic in electronic form — and I think we do — that some kind of morphologisation shouldn’t be hard to do.  I wonder if one could hire someone to make such a file?

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Cicero: The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled…

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The following quote is circulating online:

The budget should be balanced, the treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.” — Cicero , 55 B.C.

So are other misstatements about it:

This alleged quote from Marcus Tullius Cicero that began circulating on the Internet in October, 2008, is based on a true statement from the great Roman orator, but someone added a lot to it to make it match some of what the United States was facing economically.

The actual quote is:   “The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and assistance to foreign hands should be curtailed, lest Rome fall.”

A quick Google books search reveals that the quote greatly precedes 2008, however — and I place no confidence in that “actual quote” either.

Does anyone know the real quote, if any?

 

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How to do a word search for all uses of Nazaraeus in Latin?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have a problem.  I want to know where and how Nazaraeus is used in Latin.  I know it can mean Nazirite; I want to see where it is used instead to mean “Nazarene”.

If this were Greek, I’d search the TLG.  Anyone know what I could use for Latin? 

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