Thanks to this post at PLGO, I learn that a vast number of the CSEL volumes have been uploaded to ScribD. This is excellent news – well done, lads!
Tag: Information access
Book on Syriac historiography
Several people have sent me a link to the Bryn Mawr review of Muriel Debié (ed.), L’historiographie syriaque, published in Études syriaques. This discusses how historical writing went into the Syriac world, how it changed, how it was influenced by Armenian texts, and what the effect of the Moslem conquest was — which was to isolate it from the mediterranean world, ca. 720. The review (by Daniel King) is very enticing! A few snippets:
This latest instalment, on Syriac historiography, succeeds in bringing together some of the foremost scholars in the field, often writing on the very texts they themselves have edited or translated. Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.
The extent to which literature written in Syriac partook of the Hellenic cultural baggage of late antiquity is still only faintly understood, and even less appreciated, by historians of the Eastern Mediterranean. It is the principal achievement of this excellent and useful volume not only to have provided students and specialists alike with an overview of the subject at the current state of research, but also to have highlighted the lines of transmission that carried Greek historiography into Syriac (and thence Arabic). The point is both to indicate how well integrated was the latter within the cultures of the late antique Empire, and moreover to describe the transformation these forms underwent in their ‘Oriental’ afterlives.
…
We are rightly warned of too easily viewing the Miaphysite (West Syriac) historiography as the expression of a will to ecclesiastical independence – as late as Jacob of Edessa (d.710) the (Greek) universal ecclesia remained the dream of these historians. Yet around 720 a major break seems to have occurred and here, at the moment when Syriac historians cease to note the names of Emperors and Patriarchs and begin to date events according to caliphal years, we can glimpse that self-conscious break from the Hellenic tradition that constitutes the final fracture between East and West. Up to this point, the Fertile Crescent had remained part of a classical (Mediterranean) world.
An example of just this process, the Chronicle of Zuqnin (written in 775), is the subject of the next chapter, again written by the text’s most recent translator. This contributor helpfully surveys the arguments surrounding the authorship and sources of the chronicle, reaffirming his judgment that Joshua the Stylite was its author.
…
The Syriac and Arabic literature of the Eastern Churches remains one of those disciplines in which ancient and mediaeval texts, sometimes of some importance, are still regularly found in previously unexplored manuscript libraries. The next chronicle to be considered is just such a case. The Muhtasar al-Ahbar al-Bi‘iyya was first identified in Iraq in the 1980s, one of many Arabic manuscripts from the monastery of Notre Dame des Semences (Alqosh) later transferred to the Chaldaean monastery in Baghdad. They are now, since 2008, back in Alqosh for safe keeping. Hermann Teule provides an overview of this as yet little considered work which bares a close resemblance to the better known Chronicle of Seert but which is also an independent witness to the events it describes. Among the sources explicitly mentioned by the writer are a number known from catalogues of Syriac authors but whose work has hitherto been unknown.
…
The book is rounded off with a bibliography of editions and translations of all Syriac chronicles, organized by type and tradition (East or West), making the whole a handy instrumentum for the student or non-specialist.
All this sounds most interesting, and I would love to read it. But how does someone like myself ever get to read such a volume? It is, admittedly, not that expensive by comparison with the predatory pricing from Brill these days — only 35 euros. But still…
UPDATE: I have just found the website for the French Societe d’etudes Syriaques, which lists the series Études syriaques. There are 6 volumes, and they all seem to be of wide interest.
I want copies of them all! Remarkably the volumes are issued annually free if you are a member of the society.
UPDATE2: OK, I shall try an old-fashioned inter-library loan for the Historiographie volume. That will loan me it for 2 weeks. But really I’d rather have a PDF!
Digitizing your own library, and how to build your own book scanner
The existence of Google books is causing some interesting ripples. Some people are now wondering whether they really need all those books in paper form. From Ancient History Ramblings I learn of this interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Digitizing the personal library:
Books take up space. That’s a problem for any librarian tasked with finding room on overcrowded shelves. It’s also a problem for a book-loving scholar who lives in a small New York City apartment with a toddler and more than 3,000 books. Under those conditions, something’s got to give. Chances are good it won’t be the toddler.
Alexander Halavais, an associate professor of communications at Quinnipiac University, found a partial solution to his city dweller’s no-space-for-books dilemma: Slice and scan. A digital file takes up a lot less room than a codex book does.
In a post on his blog, A Thaumaturgical Compendium, Mr. Halavais described what he had done to some 800 of his books so far: “First I cut the boards off, and then slice the bindings. I have tried a table saw, but a cheap stack cutter works better. Then I feed [the pages] into my little page-fed scanner, OCR them (imperfectly) using Acrobat, and back them up to a small networked attached storage device.” (See before-and-after pictures, above.) Many of the scanned books he also stores as image files. …
Read the whole article. It contains much of interest. Alex Halavais is using a Fujitsu Scansnap, although he doesn’t say which model. I use one myself, and the speed is definitely a selling point, as is the PDF output.
The comments on the article are also interesting. Some worry about whether this is allowed under copyright, although since they aren’t wealthy publishers, and probably never make any money from copyright, you have to wonder why they are rushing to defend someone else’s profit stream. But comment 27 is perhaps the most relevant:
I hope after all of the effort and expense put into this project there is a plan in place for preserving the digital files. Digital files are unstable and subject to corruption. It would be unfortunate if the drives on the networked storage device failed and Professor Halavais lost not only his printed books but the digital surrogates as well. With books on the shelf you can be assured that when you open them in 20 years the words are still the same words, without active management of the digital files this simply isn’t true in the digital world.
When I talk about digital preservation to people I often help people understand the issues by referencing things like eight track tapes, zip discs, floppy discs, Wordstar, etc.
This issue is a very real one, and I don’t know what the answer is. I myself had to throw away some old backup tapes from years gone by, being unable to persuade the old tape drive to read them. Both drive and tapes went into the skip.
The comments also link to a forum of people engaged in designing and building their own book scanners. I have not read through it all, but it is quite clear that it is not difficult to do. This is what you do with books too large for an A4 scanner.
Do we want to slice up our books? I certainly do not. But I do have quite a lot of academic books which I could really use better in PDF. It’s interesting. But scanning a book without cutting it up is very slow indeed.
The world, once again, is changing.
Google translate does Latin?
The Daily Telegraph has an article that Google has added 50 languages, including Latin, to the translator. It’s here.
So…. does it work? Well, not very well as yet. I grabbed the start of Friderici’s book on ancient books, which starts thus:
Quamquam plurimae fere quaestiones, quae ad antiquorum rem librariam pertinent, his temporibus pertractatae atque propremodum expIicatae sunt, tamen de una vel altera re disputatio nondum ad finem est perducta. Huc spectant, quas mihi tractandas proposui, quaestiones de libris antiquis in capita divisis, de capitum inscriptionibus, de indicibus capitum sive summariis.
This Google gave as:
And yet the most of, by questions, which the thing to its former secretaries belong, at the present time, and handled propremodum expIicatae are, however, one or two out of the discussion, the thing to the end is not yet degree. Refer to this, which I proposed to me to be treated, the questions concerning the ancient books in the first assigned to the heads of the, of the head of inscriptions, of the informers, heads or summaries.
Um. The first sentence should probably be something like this:
Although most of the questions, which relate to the copying of ancient books, at the present time have been drawn out and explained, however, one or two items of the discussion have not yet been bottomed out.
Still, it can only get better, and is a very, very welcome addition. I am using Google translate to work with Albino’s Italian article on chapter titles this morning, and it makes it possible for me to read and understand her article. I also have Systran translator, which sometimes is better, mostly not so good; and an online dictionary.
And it means that ordinary herberts like me can work with information encoded in funny languages! Magic!
284 Greek manuscripts online at the British Library
I learn from here via here that Juan Garces, the go-ahead curator of Greek manuscripts at the British Library, has got 284 manuscripts online. It’s well worth browsing the four pages of the list. There’s a manuscript of Zosimus New History in there, for instance. Despite pleas from Biblical people, it’s mostly classical or patristic or bits and pieces, which is all to the good. Synesius is well-represented too.
Note that the short list in the browse is not everything. If you click on one of the text links you get a break down of all that the manuscript contains. Works in the TLG are given the TLG reference too.
Turning the pages is quick and easy, thankfully, unlike early and very clunky online interfaces. This one is almost usable!
Putting the RealEncyclopadie online
An article here tells us that people unspecified are beginning to create an electronic version of Paulys RealEncyclopadie at the German Wikipedia. Some 3,957 articles have been turned into text. Someone has noticed that the early volumes are all in the public domain (although the whole work was only completed in 1980).
Google books and Archive.org have led the way. Sensibly the people on the project have created a page with a list of volumes accessible (here). There’s a list of what is in the volumes here.
But of course OCR’ing the text will make it searchable, and thereby increase markedly access to it. It will show up in search engines, for instance. And if part is online and part is not, when all German scholars start to use it — and why wouldn’t they? — sooner or later pressure will build to add the remainder. Already there are pirate versions of the whole series circulating around the web.
Here is the entry page for the digitisation project. The index of articles (which is not very helpful, actually — they need to get this on one page) is here.
“But I don’t speak German!” I hear you cry. No matter. Google translate gives you the means to read this stuff. Just find the article, then pop the URL into Google translate, and you’re away.
Magic. And well done to the Germans in the white hats.
Automated Arabic to English translation
An electronic text of the world history by Bar Hebraeus, known as the Book of the dynasties, has come into my hands. This led me to wonder whether Google translate does Arabic. And it does!
So I pasted in the first few paragraphs, to see what it made of it. Well… it was largely gibberish. But if you knew — say from Pococke’s Latin — vaguely what the subject was, you could see that it was giving you this, albeit in a primitive form.
I was actually quite impressed. Worth a try, anyway.
One consequence of this is that I can do a word count on the book. It’s around 84,000 words, which is quite a lot! It’s divided into ten “dynasties” — really ten groups of who was the dominant power at the time. Indeed they might be called “books”, I think. The 10th dynasty is described in the start as “from the kings of the Moslems to the Mongols”, for instance. The end of the 9th dynasty is the Moslem takeover.
It would certainly be interesting to get a few pages of this translated. When I next have an income, I must look at this.
The lack of Harnack remedied
The ancient sources for Marcion were all compiled by Adolf Harnack in his Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott, Texte und Untersuchungen 45, 2nd ed. Leipzig, 1924. Since Harnack died in 1940, all his work is out of copyright in Germany and the EU, and presumably in the US also, therefore.
Unfortunately this work is not online, as I found in a previous post. An English translation — Marcion: the gospel of the alien god — exists, but only covered Harnack’s introduction and not the essential sources.
I obtained a library copy of the book at the weekend, and started to scan it. Unfortunately the copy that came to me was rather foxed: the paper was somewhat cheap, and brown blotches have come to disfigure it. I had intended to scan it in monochrome, at 400 dpi. But the foxing meant that such areas would only be black blotches in monochrome. Reluctantly, therefore, I did a colour scan at 300 dpi. The book itself is 724 pages, which makes a mighty PDF of some 200 Mb. Oh well.
I’m uploading the book to Archive.org. I’ll add a link when it completes.
UPDATE: The volume is here: http://www.archive.org/details/AdolfHarnack.MarcionDasEvangeliumVomFremdenGott
I will look at whether I can create a monochrome version, which would be smaller.
The risks of snobbery in the classics
A few days ago I was reading the 17th century John Aubrey’s Brief lives when I came across the following statement in the life of Sir Henry Billingsley (d. 1606), who translated Euclid into English.
Memorandum. P. Ramus in his Scholia’s sayes that the reason why mathematiques did most flourish in Germanie was that the best authors were rendred into their mother tongue, and that publique lectures of it were also read in their owne tongue – quod nota bene.
There are other statements of the same kind, that people had real difficulty accessing technical works written in Latin, but that translations were the exception rather than the rule.
This evening I was reading Martial in the old Loeb edition. This contains a list of translations, ending with the following paragraph (vol. 1, p.xxi).
If a “bad eminence” confer any title to fame, James Elphinston (1721-1809) deserves special notice. He was the son of an Episcopalian clergyman, and was educated at the High School and at the University of Edinburgh. In 1750 he superintended the issue of a Scotch edition of Johnson’s Rambler, supplying English translations of the mottoes, for which he was thanked by Johnson. From 1752 to 1776 he was successively a schoolmaster at Brompton and at Kensington. He published in 1778 a Specimen of the Translations of Epigrams of Martial, with a preface informing the public that he awaited subscriptions to enable him to publish a version of Martial’s works complete. With regard to this work, it is recorded by Boswell under date of April 9, 1778 that Garrick, being consulted, told Elphinston frankly that he was no epigrammatist, and advised him against publishing; that Johnson’s advice was not asked, and was not forced upon the translator; and that Elphinston’s own brother-in-law, Strahan, the printer, in sending him a subscription of fifty pounds, promised him fifty more if he would abandon his project.
The offer was not accepted, and in 1782 the whole work appeared in a handsome quarto. It was received with derision, the poet Beattie saying, “It is truly an unique: the specimens formerly published did very well to laugh at, but a whole quarto of nonsense and gibberish is too much.” And Mrs. Piozzi records that “of a modern Martial, when it came out, Dr. Johnson said ‘there are in these verses too much folly for madness, I think, and too much madness for folly.'” And the unhappy author was gibbeted in the following epigram by Robert Burns:
“O thou whom Poesy abhors,
Whom Prose has turned out of doors !
Heardst thou that groan? Proceed no further:
‘Twas laurell’d Martial roaring ‘Murther!'”
Criticism indeed. The comment of Garrick to Elphinstone is recorded in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, where it is given verbatim (‘…you don’t seem to have that turn’). It is certainly true that Elphinstone’s versions lack literary charm, being frankly dull.
But … the fact is that Elphinstone’s translation was the first attempt at a complete Martial. Selections had been made before. There is quite a list in the Loeb. An unpublished Elizabethan manuscript by an unknown author contains many vivid versions in verse, included in the Bohn Classical Library. So too are many by William Hay MP, also in verse and of much charm.
However such selections did not make Martial accessible to ordinary people. We have already seen that, when medical textbooks were in Latin, this was enough to stifle knowledge. The criticisms above of Elphinstone achieved nothing, however well reasoned they were.
So we owe Elphinstone thanks for his charmless efforts. He started the process of creating an English Martial. The versions in the Loeb are indeed themselves greatly to my own taste, and some have real poetic power.
An obstacle stands in the way of completing such a task. This is the problem of the obscene epigrams.
Each edition edges closer to a full version, as the years of our age pass by, and moral standards fall. We live in a coarse age, and it is extremely easy for one of a coarsed nature to render common verbs like futuere by English obscenities. A complete version that would be unfit for any decent man’s bookshelf would be possible to print and sell today.
Such “choices” do not advance the process of creating an English Martial that is faithful, poetic, and non-pornographic. Perhaps it is impossible to achieve this end, I do not know. But we should certainly try.
Yet Martial is fortunate. How many texts do not possess any English translation? How many of us have been deterred from making one, for fear of criticism such as that which greeted the luckless Elphinstone?
Translations are essential. Even bad translations make an author more accessible than he was. Whatever you do with ancient literature, translate!
Islamic attack on Livius.org
Last night the Livius.org ancient history site was hacked and defaced. It is down at this moment. The vandalism indicated that the culprits were a Turkish-speaking Islamic group. We don’t quite know why they did this, or what they disliked about the site.
Jona Lendering created the site, which is invaluable for people interested in ancient history and the raw historical data. I don’t agree with every opinion expressed, but Jona has researched in detail some areas of ancient history which are of wide interest. To attack this site is no better than burning books.
In a week when I have been researching the stories about the supposed Moslem destruction of the library of Alexandria, it is curious to witness an actual, real-life Moslem attempt to destroy literature.
We live in fortunate times. Out of pure generosity, the USA has given the internet to the world, and it has made freely available a huge mass of data and enjoyment and learning to us all. It has made it possible for ordinary people to contribute, in such a way that every one of us benefits. It is an act of astonishing beneficence, which we take for granted. In turn we lesser contributors do our best to increase the amount of knowledge available online, accessible to everyone and anyone.
Then there are those who take this gift, and seek to abuse it. It is inevitable, given recent history, that there would be Moslems who do this.
The suicide bombings of 9/11 raised the question in some minds of whether Moslems should be permitted to use aircraft at all. It wasn’t Moslems who invented aircraft — they enjoy something which they could never have created by themselves. And then they abused it, as guests in someone else’s land.
Must we now ask whether Moslems should be allowed access to the internet? Is that what it will take, to put an end to this sort of activity?
Of course I doubt that this is practical politics! Nor, in calmer mood, would it be quite fair to penalise ordinary Moslems who have committed no crime for the actions of those who claim to represent them. But this was an evil act, and we need to stand up and resist attempts to intimidate us of this kind.
UPDATE: Jim Davila presses the claims of Russia and China for priority of disconnection here, although perhaps he didn’t realise it. Surely, in a tolerant and diverse world, we could agree to disconnect all three?