Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
Someone at the British Library has had an excellent idea. They’ve uploaded a spreadsheet listing all the manuscripts they have online, with the URL. It’s here. They have 856 mss online at the moment; a small proportion of their holdings, but still very useful.
The spreadsheet lists shelfmark, contents, url and the project that did the upload. The last won’t be much use, but browsing down the list of contents is exciting!
It will be very useful to me on my current project too.
I learned today from the Evangelical textual criticism blog that the Bibliotheque Nationale Francais have been putting manuscripts online, at their Gallica.bnf.fr portal. Locating these is not straightforward; but if you do an advanced search, leave blank the title etc, and select manuscripts, Greek, you get back a list. A good number are biblical mss., but most are not. Blessedly you can download a PDF of the whole thing in each case.
I thought that a few examples might be useful. The first item is the shelfmark
I’m about half way through and have to rush off. A few more.
But a great number have no description, although I find that if you look inside, a slip glued onto the guard-folios at the front often tells you what the contents are.
This is marvellous, and I haven’t really digested what is here. There’s 146 Greek but only 15 Latin mss.
I’m looking through the Greek mss. of the French National Library online, and compiling a post with a list. Dull work.
But imagine my excitement when I find that Paris gr. 451 is online. This is the manuscript that preserves for us a bunch of early Christian apologetic works! It was copied for Archbishop Arethas of Caesarea in the 10th c., and it all we have for most of the works in it.
Contents: 1. Clement of Alexandria, Protrepicus; 2. Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus; 3. Justini epistulam ad Zenam; 4. Justin, Cohortatio ad gentiles; 5. Eusebius, P.E. bks 1-5; 6. Athenagoras, Apology for the Christians; 7. Athenagoras on the Resurrection; 8. Eusebius, Against Hierocles.
Get it here! But wait just a bit, until my download has finished. Please?
Yes, you can download a PDF of it.
Quite accidentally I find that colour photographs of the pages of Didymus the Blind’s Commentary on Ecclesiastes are online here. I can only say “wow!”
This work was lost until 1941. In that year, the threat of Rommel’s Afrika Corps caused the British Government to order works carried out at the Tura quarries near Cairo, to store ammunition. The quarries themselves were used in ancient times. At some point native workmen discovered a pile of leaves of papyrus hidden under apparently random chunks of stone. They promptly spirited them away and sold them for a song to the antiquities dealers. But word got out, and most of the find was recovered. The main portion of it was biblical commentaries by Didymus the Blind and Origen.
Now wouldn’t it be nice if an English translation of this work was also online?
I need to look at some pages from a Syriac manuscript in the collection of the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg. Rather than flying out there, paying for a hotel, it might be cheaper to just purchase a few digital photographs. At least, one would hope so!
After a look at page on the website which talks about electronic copies, I have composed an email in English and sent it off. It will be interesting to see whether they are cooperative or not. Manuscript libraries can be very bolshy!
I will let you know.
Does anyone have access to this item:
Joseph Sievers, Forgotten Aspects of the reception of Josephus’ Bellum Judaicum: Its Lists of Contents, in Eve-Marie Becker, Stefan Scholz, “Kanon in Konstruktion und Dekonstruktion”, DeGruyter, 2011. p.363-386.
Somewhat annoyingly, Cambridge University Library did not appear to have the book, and it isn’t listed in COPAC either.
If your library has it, please drop me a line using the contact form. Thank you.
UPDATE: I have it – thank you all who replied.
Via the excellent AWOL I learn of a digital repository for PhD theses. Oxford, it seems, has declined to support the British Library’s EthOs initiative, preferring to keep material produced at Oxford on an Oxford website: Oxford University Research Archive.
This afternoon I did a search of the archive (from my smart phone – the site is not well adapted for it, tho), and found rather little. But I did find some things of interest to us:
Not a great haul from one of the world’s leading classical universities; but perhaps it is early days yet. They are clearly digitising theses, which can only be good.
I’ve been looking at some of the entries for Syria in the CIMRM, the collection of all Mithraic monuments and inscriptions. In particular the two altars at Sia have drawn my attention. One is easy enough to deal with — I have a photo from the original publication, plus another from the web.
But the other one is hard to deal with. It hadn’t been published when the CIMRM came out in 1955. All that existed was a note in Syria journal in 1952 (thankfully online at Persee.fr), promising publication together with other monuments from the Hauran by a certain Mr. Sabeh, who was an official at the Damascus Museum at the time. It’s really pretty hard to find a publication from that!
Google searching suggests that possibly any publication was in “Annales Archéologiques de Syrie”, whatever that is, and that the person was a Joseph Sabeh.
But of course in 1956 the Suez incident took place, at which the USA attacked its own allies, Britain and France, and gave support to its enemy Nasser. The collapse of British and French power left a vaccuum in the region which has never been filled, and caused 50 years of constant violence and tyranny, so that was a very strange policy for the US government of the time to pursue. But it also meant the collapse of westernising initiatives in all these countries, and it may be that Mr Sabeh ended up hanging from a lamppost, as savagery returned to the region, rather than publishing anything.
It is annoying to be unable to find material of this kind. Interestingly all the later references to these altars suggest to me that nobody else has ever seen the publication either!
Worse yet, I have found a photograph of a smashed and reassembled tauroctony, apparently held in the Damascus Museum. There is no indication anywhere as to its origins, and I do not find it in CIMRM.
It’s all a sobering reminder that, while the web has made much information more accessible, it has largely done so within the region of Christendom, of western Europe and the US. Outside that pale, little is available.
Good news. I have today received the first draft of the translation of “February” from John the Lydian’s On the months (De mensibus) book 4. It’s a cracker. How this text has avoided being translated before I do not know. The footnotes added by the translator are also very, very useful. To read this stuff is a liberal education. I will post the final version online when it is ready.
Also in the works is a translation of a curious text on the Seven Sages, attributed to Athanasius but in reality part of the gnomological tradition. In this the sages predict the coming of Christ. I have the PDF, but need a Word document so that I can post it here. It’s a useful piece, showing how the Greeks in the Middle Ages created a rival “pagan prophets of Jesus” tradition to stand alongside the Jewish prophecies in the Old Testament.
Great news – Behn’s Das Mithrasheiligtum zu Dieberg, De Gruyter (1928) has arrived. Here’s an image of the title page as proof!
The discovery of the Mithraeum at Dieberg was something of a watershed. I don’t know if there were monographs dedicated to individual Mithraea before then, but it set a pattern for such monographs in future. Most notably these included the publications of Vermaseren of the splendid Mithraea of Marino and Barberini, with the amazing colour frescos.
Behn’s book was doubtless cutting-edge in its time. But what struck me, as I looked through it, was how poor the quality of the photographs was. They are small, grainy, and I don’t know how useful they are to the scholar. Yet, most likely, these are the only available images of the lesser finds.
The Mithraeum in Germany tends to contain very elaborate tauroctonies, with side panels depicting what must be elements of the mythology of the mysteries of Mithras. Unfortunately we can only guess from these what the story being told was.
So the German tauroctonies are important for the study of Mithras. The Dieburg Mithraeum is one of these.
The volume itself is A4, and less than 50 pages, so I have made a copy of it for my own use. I wish that I could share it; but the fact is that it will probably be in copyright when I am in my grave. I doubt that more than a handful of people ever consult Behn’s tome; and, so long as we have oppressive copyright laws, that is the way that it will stay.
So why scan it? Well, because I want to read it. And I don’t read German very well. Once the OCR has completed, I can copy and paste portions of the German text into Google Translate. And that will give me a very fair idea of what most of the book — much of it probably waffle – says.
It has been long since I sat at my scanner on a Friday evening, and it has been a pleasant reminder of how I used to spend my weekends. The time at my disposal grows less every year, or so it seems. The night comes, when none of us can work. But “ah, not yet, not yet”.[1]