Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, freedom of speech, information access, and more
I wonder how many of us know the name of Archduke Rainer? Very few, I would imagine. Yet he played an important part in the history of Egyptology. Archduke Rainer (1827-1913) was an Austrian nobleman, some time Prime Minister of Austria. He is notable for his collection of Egyptological items. In particular his collection of [...]
Via Paleojudaica I learn of a workshop, taking place in Oslo, which sounds rather interesting: WORKSHOP AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OSLO: Textual Transmission and Manuscript Culture: Textual Fluidity, “New Philology,” and the Nag Hammadi (and Related) Codices This is the first major international workshop of the NEWCONT-project.Starting tomorrow. Pseudepigrapha and Hermetica figure in the program [...]
A little while ago I mentioned the lexicon of Sextus Pompeius Festus, a rather battered survival of Latin literature, probably from the 2nd century AD. I also referred to the Festus Lexicon Project, which had set out to try to produce a reliable text and a translation. The status of this was uncertain, so I [...]
Francesca Schironi’s book on how the end of a work was marked in an ancient papyrus roll ends with a dossier of photographs, as I remarked earlier. I think that it would be useful to give some extracts from this, as we all think about a subject better when we can see what we are [...]
Ancient works were frequently divided into many books. What did the end of a book look like, in an ancient roll? To answer this question requires examining papyri which contain such items. Francesca Schironi assembled a dossier, with photographs, of 55 papyrus fragments, 51 of them from Homer. Her analysis is very dense, and her conclusions deserve to [...]
There is a useful article here at Tyndale House by Simon Gathercole on this curious discovery of a 4th century fragment of papyrus with a Coptic apocryphal text on it. I hope that the media attention may raise the profile of papyrology, and Coptic studies, and perhaps draw people into an interest in either of [...]
Via Tommy Wasserman at Evangelical Textual Criticism I learn of some rather exciting news! The Baptist Standard reports (2012-07-10) from the same summer institute citing Jeff Fish (editor of the new Brill series) who said: Scholars also mentored students editing some of the earliest fragments of the New Testament, with some dating to the second [...]
Today I learned of the Green Collection, a large private collection of manuscripts and papyri. It is owned by the Green family of Oklahoma, who are (a) billionaires and (b) Christians. In consequence they have been collecting material of wide interest. Brill have announced a new series of publications for the papyri: The new series [...]
Pliny, Natural History, book 13, ch, 23: 23. Paper is made from the papyrus, by splitting it with a needle into very thin leaves, due care being taken that they should be as broad as possible. That of the first quality is taken from the centre of the plant, and so in regular succession, according [...]
Via AWOL, I learn that a Photographic Archive of Papyri in the Cairo Museum is now online. It is mainly documentary material, but one literary codex seems to be involved: Gospel of Peter: Photos of all the pages of the Gospel of Peter ms. from Akhmim (P.Cair. 10759) 1 Enoch, chapters 1-27 (same) A list of [...]