Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, freedom of speech, information access, and more
Adam McCollum is the dedicated cataloguer of manuscripts at the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library run by Fr. Columba Stewart. The latter is doing an enormously valuable job; of getting copies of all the Syriac and Arabic manuscripts located in oriental monasteries in places like Syria and Iraq. The urgency and importance of this task should [...]
I want to know some details about an Arabic writer. I look in Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Literatur, right? It’s not very easy. My first port of call was the index. But this is in a strange order, and also heavily abbreviated. After a lot of effort, I gave up. My next thought was to [...]
A correspondent has written and let me know that French translations exist of chunks of Ibn Abi Usaibia’s History of Physicians. They were done by Sanguinetti in the Journal Asiatique, with the chunks starting in 1854. I’ve seen five bits so far. The first chunk is here (1854, series 5, tome 3, p.230 f.), and includes [...]
I’m interested in the references to the Christians that appear in the works of the 2nd century medical writer Galen. I discovered that a bunch of them appear only in the medical dictionary of the Arabic writer Ibn Abi Usaibia. A while back I discovered that an unpublished English translation exists in typescript at the [...]
A little while back I discovered that an English translation of the dictionary of medical writers by Ibn Abi Usaibia might exist at the US National Library of Medicine, and I sent an enquiry. The enquiry was ignored; but my second enquiry got a response! Firstly, apparently I can’t have a copy. The thing is [...]
I’ve spent some more time today hunting for the great dictionary of medical writers by Ibn Abi Usaibia. In the process I find that I have done this before! But yesterday I discovered that all the Arabic quotations of Galen on the Christians are in the entry on Galen in this work. Thanks to a [...]
The July sales figures (through Amazon) for Eusebius’ book on differences between the gospels (and how to resolve them) have arrived and are encouraging. I still haven’t launched an online marketing campaign, yet we sold more in July than in June. Interestingly most of these seem to have been hardbacks. The purchasers certainly got a good deal [...]
Brockelmann’s History of Arabic literature does list English translations known in 1940. One of these was by Alfred von Kramer, from 1854, and was a translation of al-Wakidi’s biography of Mohammed. It was published in British India at Calcutta as the History of Muhammad’s Campaigns by Aboo Abd Ollah Mohammad bin Omar al Wakidy, by [...]
It’s always worth doing a Google trawl. You never know what you may find. This evening I was idly looking to see what I could find in English by Galen. I kept hitting “next page”. Much of it was dross. But then… I struck gold. I found myself looking at a page at the British [...]
One of the few Arabic historians that I know by name is Abulfeda. This evening I thought that I would see what I could find about him online. A Google search brought up a rather useless Wikipedia article. Once I might have edited it, but these days I know better. But it seemed to be based [...]