Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
I wish this one all the best — it’s a great idea. The Libanius Translation Project:
You are invited to join this open, collaborative project to translate the writings of the the fourth-century CE orator Libanius of Antioch. The first phase is the translation of the fifty-one Declamations, short orations on historical and mythological subjects. Most of these have never been translated into English.
(Via AWOL).
There are already some translations up!
Some 2,000-year-old Roman scrolls are stubbornly hanging onto their ancient secrets, defying the best efforts of computer scientists at the University of Kentucky to unlock them. …
The UK team spent a month last summer making numerous X-ray scans of two of the scrolls that are stored at the French National Academy in Paris. They hoped that computer processing would convert the scans into digital images showing the interiors of the scrolls and revealing the ancient writing. The main fear, however, was that the Roman writers might have used carbon-based inks, which would be essentially invisible to the scans.
That fear has turned out to be fact.
Yes, there is indeed a gospel manuscript which has a picture of a set of telegraph poles, running from Constantinople to “Babylon” — i.e. Baghdad. Adam McCollum has written a fascinating post on it at the HMML blog. There doesn’t seem to be a way to link to specific articles, but it’s here.
The manuscript is a Syriac manuscript, written in 1867 in the Ottoman empire. The picture labels all the bits — the poles, the wires, etc.
Adam also outlines how the telegraph came to run through the Ottoman lands (because our people wanted to be able to telegraph to India, basically).
Read it. You’ll love it.
John Carr has emailed me:
I am starting up a small web-log with no other aim than to collect bibliographies of English translations of the fathers, both in print and online. I’m also linking either to your ‘Additional Fathers’ page or to google books if there is a free version online. The URL is http://bibliotecapatrum.blogspot.com/
Do you know of another website already existent that is doing the same thing? I don’t want to needlessly repeat anyone’s labor. I’m only getting started so there’s not much there yet, but I will add fathers as requests come and I have time.
The dry and dusty art of bibliography is one that we all shirk, but is always useful. I wish John all the best with his site.
The remarkable story of Grenfell and Hunt and the Oxyrhynchus Papyri is told by Peter Parsons in a delightful new book, The City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish.2 Parsons, employed since 1960 with cataloging, deciphering and publishing the Oxyrhynchus Papyri under the auspices of the British Academy and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, is just the person to narrate this saga. His assembled chapters explore the workings of the city of Oxyrhynchus, the presence of the empire and the imperial cult, the Nile and its rhythmic effects, economic matters, personal life, the literary predilections of its citizenry, ancient bureaucracy, the use of medicine and magic to cope with accident, disease and distress, and the city’s late-antique Christian legacy. Parsons introduces us to all of it with great erudition and expert commentary and a welcome sense of humor.
Tom Schmidt writes:
The TLG added a new free section to their website which contains a updated and digital version of the LSJ a dictionary which supersedes the version available at the Perseus Project. It’s quite good and has all sorts of good hyperlinks for cited authors. I talk about it a bit on my blog.
Have a look at that article, which makes clear just how useful this is, even if you don’t have a TLG subscription.
An blanket email from Tony Burke of Apocryphicity:
I just wanted to bring your attention to a conference that Phil Harland and I are planning at York University April 29, 2011 on the Secret Gospel of Mark. This is intended as the first in a series of annual symposia on Christian Apocrypha, so we really hope for a good turnout. If you cannot (or would rather not) attend, please be so kind to let others know about the event (on blogs or what-have-you). See the link below for information. Thanks.
This is a Canadian university, not York in the UK as I thought on first reading.
On the link the few speakers I recognise all seem to belong to the “Secret Mark is genuine” camp. But apparently there is no intention to push this agenda. Tony adds:
We wanted Stephen [Carlson] to attend but he declined. He will contribute a paper to the published proceedings, however. Several other “nongenuine” scholars declined also. But we have Craig Evan, Bruce Chilton, Peter Jeffery, and Pierluigi Piovanelli, all of whome feel it is not genuine. We DID aim for balance.
I myself always had doubts about the supposed Letter to Theodore and all it contained, without ever spending much time on it. I was persuaded definitively by Stephen Carlson’s convincing book on the subject, which crystalised much of the unease that I had found hard to articulate. But there is certainly room for argument, I would have thought.
Last night I was reading some Christian blogs and I stumbled on Curious Presbyterian. The author has run a series of detailed posts about some of the problems Christians are facing in modern Britain, and unlike so many has not minced his words.
Comments seem to be disabled — at least I couldn’t add comments on any of them. But other Christian bloggers have written on how the organised haters simply abuse the comment facilities on their blogs to try to start fights and generally wear them down, and this may be the reason why.
There is a disturbing post there about Stephen Green of Christian Voice, from the Daily Mail. Let us hope that it isn’t true; Stephen has done a great deal to organise Christian action against some of the taunting that goes on.
Back to ‘real life’, and I’m still reading Eleanor Dickey’s book on the scholia in ancient Greek texts. It is very dense, but very sound. With great difficulty I got through the first chapter last night. It’s not long, but full of good things.
I kept asking myself, “Why has no-one done something similar for the catenas?” Inevitably it could use some more references at points, tho.
I’ve just discovered a blog by Alin Siciu which will be of interest to those interested in papyrology and early Christian texts. One post caught me eye in particular:
An Unknown “Apocryphal” Text From the White Monastery
I recently edited together with Einar Thomassen a parchment folio owned by the Norwegian collector Martin Schøyen. The Schøyen leaf (MS 1991) was immediately followed in the codex by another dismembered fragment which ended up in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. They seem to belong to an unknown apocryphal writing.
Excerpts from A. Suciu & E. Thomassen, “An Unknown “Apocryphal” Text From the White Monastery,” in P. Buzi & A. Camplani (eds.), Christianity in Egypt: Literary Production and Intellectual Trends in Late Antiquity (Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum) forthcoming 2011.
The link is to a PDF, which gives a translation of at least part of it. I wish the whole article was there!
If one leaf of the codex is in the Schoyen collection, and another in the BNF, then we are dealing with a find of a codex in Egypt which has passed through the tender hands of the antiquities trade, and been cut up for maximum profit in the process. One wonders whether any other leaves are out there.
This sort of thing tends to make me annoyed. A book survives for centuries, only to be ripped apart by greedy men to make a buck. This sort of thing leads people Paul Barford to demand that the trade is banned. Barford, indeed, is so vehement on the issue that he sounds rather demented to normal people. Much of what he says is plainly wrong. But the sentiment is genuine enough, and arises from a real desire that we don’t destroy our heritage in order to enrich sleazy Swiss or Arab middle-men (no names, no libel actions).
On the other hand, I sometimes reflect, we don’t ever seem to get papyrus discoveries from countries like Morocco and Algeria any more, not since the French handed over these countries to their traditional oppressors. We do get them from Egypt, a country in which the most ignorant peasant knows that antiquities mean MONEY, and where Cairo dealers keep agents in rural areas. We get them because only a fool would destroy such a find. We get them precisely BECAUSE they are worth money to the peasants who find them.
And then we get them cut into pieces, because the middle-men who buy them find that they can get twice the price for two separate leaves, than for one item of two leaves. We get the awful destruction visited upon the papyrus manuscripts (including the ps.gospel of Judas) left in a moist bank box for twenty years by a Coptic emigre because scholars wouldn’t meet his price.
It’s not at all clear what to do about this. Stuff that is worth money will be sold. Stuff that is not worth money will be thrown away or burned. That’s the way of the world. That’s human nature.
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.