Tag: Perseus

Help wanted by Perseus with metadata for Patrologia Graeca

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Perseus project are working on the Patrologia Graeca and Patrologia Latina.  I’m not entirely certain what they are hoping to produce as output, but it looks as if they are OCRing the volumes, as best they can, and producing lists of what texts are contained, on what pages/column numbers, what footnotes, introductions, etc.  They also need help with proofreading.

It might be a fun thing to get involved in, if you have some time (which I don’t myself).  Although how you contact them I don’t know (for, curiously, they do not say).

Via here, and slightly reformatted:

Help sought with Metadata for the Open Patrologia Graeca Online

http://tinyurl.com/p39fx3f  [draft — January 19, 2015]
Gregory Crane (Perseus Project and the Open Philology Project, The University of Leipzig and Tufts University)

We are looking for help in preparing metadata for the Patrologia Graeca (PG) component of what we are calling the Open Migne Project; an attempt to make the most useful possible transcripts of the full Patrologia Graeca and Patrologia Latina freely available.

Help can consist of proofreading, additional tagging, and checking the volume/column references to the actual PG.

In particular, we would welcome seeing this data converted into a dynamic index to online copies of the PG in Archive.org, the HathiTrust, Google Books, or Europeana.

For now, we make the working XML metadata document available on an as-is basis.

They’ve been attacking the OCR in an interesting way:

Nick White … trained and ran the Tesseract OCR engine and Bruce Robertson [ran] … the OCRopus OCR engine on scans of multiple copies of each volume of the Patrologia Graeca.

The resulting OCR [outputs] contain … a very very high percentage of the correct readings [allowing] very useful searching, as well as text mining…

This is all very well; but of course you need to be able to label each text, so that you can find things.  This means indexing the texts and tagging them.  There is already an index, created by Cavallera in 1912.  So…

To support this larger effort, we are working on Metadata for the collection.

We have OCRd and begun editing the core index at columns 13-114 of Cavallera’s 1912 index to the PG ([link] here).

A working TEI XML transcription, which has begun capturing the data within the print source, is available for inspection here.

I must confess a small bit of pride here: for I had long forgotten that I uploaded that PDF of Cavallera to the web.  But this is the beauty of the web – each contribution makes another contribution possible.

Share

Reading Ulansey’s “Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I got David Ulansey’s book on the Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries from the library this morning, and I’m reading through it.  I’ll probably do a review once I’ve read the whole thing, but here’s some thoughts so far.   This is the first time that I have really sat down with it and tried to read it cover to cover, but I dipped into it before.

Firstly it’s a better piece of work than I recalled. The opening chapters are well done, and well referenced, and very clearly written.  The suggestion that the god in the secret cult of “Mithras” turns out to be Perseus is by no means impossible.  I was quite struck by his exegesis of the passage in Statius, the earliest literary reference to the cult:

717 ……  seu te roseum Titana vocari
Gentis Achaemeniae ritu, seu praestat Osirim
Frugiferum, seu Persei sub rupibus antri
Indignata sequi torquentem cornua Mithram.

Whether it please thee to bear the name of ruddy Titan
after the manner of the Achaemenian race, or Osiris
lord of the crops, or Mithra as beneath the rocks of the Persian cave
he presses back the horns that resist his control.

This latter passage is given by Manfred Clauss as:

Mithras ‘twists the unruly horns beneath the rocks of a Persian cave’.

Ulansey points out correctly that Persei is not the correct form of “Persian” but rather means “Persean” or “Of Perseus”; and “antri persei” could be “the cave of Perseus”.

Likewise pointing out that the 5th grade of initiation is “Perses”, which is not merely “Persian”, but also the name of the son of Perseus, and that this idea — meaning “son” — would give point to the 7th grade, “Pater”, i.e. “Father”, meaning Mithras / Perseus himself.

The “Persian” bit, then, was eyewash for outsiders; the real truth was that the cult was “Persean”.  Mithras was the “Persean god”.  I can quite imagine that this sort of pun would appeal.  The members could talk about the cult, safe in the knowledge that they were telling the truth, and that they would be totally misunderstood, and laugh about it among themselves.  The real teachings of the cult would then be based on astrology.

It’s all possible, although a certain degree of scepticism seems appropriate.  We don’t know any of this for sure, after all.  It’s just a theory to explain some of the data.

But when I got to chapter 6, I was starting to lose confidence.  It all got a bit von Daniken for me.

The Swiss maestro and former hotel-keeper used to write his books about Chariots of the Gods according to a set pattern.  He would think up his theory, and then hunt around for bits of data that could decorate them.  He would propose his theory, as a theory; and then he would introduce some bit of information; and then another, and then he would exclaim at the coincidence as proving he was right.  The fact that he had selected this material precisely because it fit the theory — there was no coincidence — was quietly ignored.

Throughout chapters 5 and 6 this old trick appeared again and again, and indeed I have just lost patience and stomped off to have a bath.  I’ll return to the book later.  It’s just speculation, not interpretation.  Not that I accuse Ulansey of deception; it’s quite likely to be self-deception.

But the problem is simply that the contortions that he gets into, to try to fit the stars in the sky into his theory, get worse and worse and worse.  You can feel the man straining.  There is not the slightest chance, in my humble opinion, that anyone devising a cult ca. 50 AD decided to represent in stone the configuration of the constellations in 2000 BC.  The fact that the precession of the equinoxes had been discovered is irrelevant; you just wouldn’t do that.  You’d make your cult myth fit what people could see up in the sky.

But it’s better than I had thought.

Share

Images of Perseus with a phrygian hat

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Reading David Ulansey’s Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries, I was struck by the following statement on p.26:

However, in two of the earliest surviving pictures of the constellation Perseus — the Salzburg Plaque and Codex Vossianus Leidensis 79 — Perseus is shown wearing a Phrygian cap, demonstrating that this was a frequent attribute of Perseus the constellation as well as of Perseus the hero.[2]

On p.129 is the note:

2. For the Salzburg plaque, see A. Rehm and E. Weiss, “Zur Salzburger Bronzescheibe mit Sternbildern,” Jahreshefte des Österreichischen Archäologischen Instituts 6 (1903), 39; for Codex Vossianus Leidensis 79, see Georg Thiele, Antike Himmelsbilder (Berlin: Weidmann, 1898), p. 111.

I’m not sure that two examples, one of them a medieval ms., is evidence that this is a “frequent” way to depict Perseus.*  But I am always curious to check such references.

The first volume appears here:

http://wel.archive.org/details/jahresheftedes06oste

(Isn’t it remarkable how badly Google Books handles series?)  The “Scheibe” is a disc, or platter, rather than a plaque, which leads one to wonder whether Ulansey verified his reference.  Anyway on p.39 there is this a diagram, of a zodiac.  It looks as if we have just a portion of the disc.

It’s not a particularly satisfactory image, I think.  I presume the bottom bit is the reverse of the top.  The article says that the item is of unknown provenance, and came into the Salzburg museum from two unidentified worker.  It probably came from some Roman tombs in the Salzburg area.  The item was published in the same journal, plate 5, in volume 5 (1902), apparently.  This may be found here:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=WQ5aAAAAYAAJ

The image is on p.416 of the PDF, although for some reason I cannot export it.  So here are two screen grabs of the top and bottom of the page:

The actual publication is E. Maass, Salzburger Bronzetafel mit Sternbildung, p. 196-7 + Tafel V.  This tells us that the piece came to light in Salzburg, with a thick crust on it, and was sent to the museum in Vienna for cleaning by the conservation staff.  It is the fragment of a large circle, with the edges punched.  The find site was searched for further pieces but without result.

Antike Himmelsbilder can be found here:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=59wsAAAAYAAJ

It’s an interesting work, which really should have had colour images.  On p.111 we get this image:

Certainly this is an image of Perseus — the Gorgon’s head makes that clear.  The manuscript seems to contain the text of Aratus, and this is accompanied by a series of images of the constellations.  The original is in colour, of course.  The ms. is 9th century, copied from a 5th century exemplar, and various copies of it exist.

 So far, then, so good; we have depictions of Perseus without his winged hat.  I must admit, however, that Ulansey’s interpretation of this — he’s trying to show that Mithras is really Perseus — seems a little thin.

* UPDATE 29/5/15: This is a misunderstanding on my part – see the comment kindly added by David Ulansey to this post, clarifying the context – thank you.

Share