Year: 2011

A letter of St. Pisentios on Islam

Posted on by Roger Pearse

While looking rather carelessly through the online volumes of the Revue de l’Orient Chretien, whose Syriac contents are listed here, I found myself looking at something interesting and non-Syriac.

In ROC 19 (1914), on p.79f. and 302 f. (the article was split into two parts, issued in successive quarters), A. Perier publishes the Arabic text of a letter of St. Pisentios, Coptic bishop of Qeft, to his flock.  The letter exists in four manuscripts in the French National library, the Bibliotheque Nationale, and Perier gives a French translation.

The second half of the letter consists of a prophecy of the coming of the Moslems, and their leader Mamadanous (Mohammed) whose name, in Coptic letters, is said to add up to 666.

Unfortunately the letter cannot be genuinely by the pre-Islamic bishop.  The predictions of the actions of the Turks, the very general terms in which Moslem atrocities are described, the whole feel of the letter suggests a later composition, in which past history and current woes are depicted in apocalyptic terms as a prophecy.  Several Coptic apocalypses are of the same kind, which I think means that we are probably dealing with a literary genre here, rather than several attempts at forgery.

It is rather too long and diffuse for me to turn the French into English, sadly, with my current concerns. 

But it is by no means uninteresting.  It makes the point that the ROC contains a great deal more than just the Syriac articles.  It contains, indeed, publications of texts from the Near East.  Wouldn’t it be nice if someone would digest down a table of contents of these articles also?

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An online translation of the Greek magical papyri

Posted on by Roger Pearse

At Abnormal Interests there is an interesting poston the find of the Greek magical papyri.  The anecdote is taken from H. D. Betz translation of all these papyri, which someone has uploaded to ScribD (Hans Dieter Betz, ed., The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including the Demotic Spells, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.)   

This is fortunate in many ways, for so obscure a subject would otherwise hardly escape the confines of major academic libraries.  The papyri themselves were discovered in the 19th century by an adventurer.

… the discovery of the Greek magical papyri was often still is the outcome of sheer luck and almost incredible coincidences. In the case of the major portion of the collection, the so-called Anastasi collection, the discovery and rescue is owed to the efforts (and, if one may use the term, cooperation) of two individuals separated by more than a thousand years: the modern collector d’Anastasi and the original collector at Thebes.

In the nineteenth century, there was among the “diplomatic” representatives at the court in Alexandria a man who called himself Jean d’Anastasi (17801-1857). Believed to be Armenian by birth, he ingratiated himself enough with the pasha to become the consular representative of Sweden. It was a time when diplomats and military men often were passionate collectors of antiquities, and M. d’Anastasi happened to be at the right place at the right time. He succeeded in bringing together large collections of papyri from Egypt, among them sizable magical books, some of which he said he had obtained in Thebes. These collections he shipped to Europe, where they were auctioned off and bought by various libraries: the British Museum in London, the Bibliotheque Nationale and the Louvre in Paris, the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, and the Rijksmuseum in Leiden. Another papyrus was acquired by Jean Francois Mimaut (1774-1837), also a diplomat, whose acquisition ended up in the Bibliotheque Nationale (PGM III). Unfortunately, we know almost nothing about the circumstances of the actual findings. But it is highly likely that many of the papyri from the Anastasi collection came from the same place, perhaps a tomb or a temple library. If this assumption is correct, about half a dozen of the best-preserved and largest extant papyri may havc come from the collection of one man in Thebes. He is of course unknown to us, but we may suppose that he collected the magical material for his own use. Perhaps he was more than a magician. We may attribute his almost systematic collcctions of magica to a man who was also a scholar, probably philosophically inclined, as well as a bibliophile and archivist concerned about the preservation of this material.

The references for these statements may be read in Betz.  They are to works that few have seen; but which, perhaps, may now be online and accessible to us all.

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A new Coptic nationalist blog

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Dioscorus Boles, who comments regularly on Coptic materials here, has started his own blog here, discussing history and politics from a contemporary Coptic point of view.

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Slightly worrying…

Posted on by Roger Pearse

… that over the last 5 days, since 4pm on 1st April, I have received or sent 184 emails.

No wonder I find myself gasping for breath!

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Did the plays of Menander survive to the renaissance

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I was very tired last night, and in need of something gentle to read.  So I took Andrew Lang’s Books and Bookmen to bed with me.  The name of Andrew Lang is one that I knew when I was a lad, for Tolkien refers to him often in his essay on fantasy, as the author of the Blue Fairy Book and other collections of literary. 

The essay was published in Tree and Leaf, which, like many another Tolkien fan I bought and found somewhat uncomfortable.  The ‘leaf’ story, Leaf by Niggle, was charming, although I was oblivious to the deeper meaning that only time could bring.  But as for ‘tree’, the essay, it was a puzzle. I had never heard of literary criticism, when I read it; nor, indeed, of Andrew Lang, who is perhaps a forgotten author these days.

The copy of Books and Bookmen itself was a century old, on good paper, and a delight to read and handle.  Stamps at various places indicated that it had once belonged to Norwich public library, which had foolishly disposed of it.  So I read of the Elzevir editions, of the bibliophilia of France, of the famous Derome blue binding which fades so badly, and of other things of no real importance to a poor man like myself, but curiously soothing.

In the middle of the book was an essay on literary forgeries, itself of considerable interest and relevance today, when the so-called Jordan Lead Codices are being touted.  But one passage caught my eye:

After the Turks took Constantinople, when the learned Greeks were scattered all over Southern Europe, when many genuine classical manuscripts were recovered by the zeal of scholars, when the plays of Menander were seen once, and then lost for ever, it was natural that literary forgery should thrive.

Is it so?  Were the plays of Menander then extant?

I don’t know what Lang’s source is for this remark, and I can’t find any leads.  If any reader does know, perhaps he would share his knowledge with us?

In the mean time, tonight, I shall continue to read Books and Bookmen.

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Coptic fragments from Sothebys

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Alin Suciu has a couple of interesting posts, identifying some Coptic fragments recently auctioned at Sothebys.  More info here!

http://suciualin.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/the-identification-of-the-coptic-fragments-auctioned-by-sothebys/

http://suciualin.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/the-sothebys-coptic-fragments-supplementary-identifications/

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Bibliotheca Orientalis online!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An email from a correspondant brings great news: Assemani’s Bibliotheca Orientalis is online!

You have here the list of the 4 volumes from Bonn’s University :
http://opac.ulb.uni-bonn.de:8080/webOPACClient/search.do?methodToCall=volumeSearch&dbIdentifier=-1&forward=success&catKey=708760&periodical=N
 
And the pdf for each volume is here (I had no time to download them):

Vol. 1 = http://s2w.hbz-nrw.de/ulbbn/content/structure/31899 
Vol. 2 = http://s2w.hbz-nrw.de/ulbbn/content/structure/32610
Vol. 3 = http://s2w.hbz-nrw.de/ulbbn/content/structure/33339
Vol. 4 = http://s2w.hbz-nrw.de/ulbbn/content/structure/34086
 
The Goussen’s Library is very rich in Oriental Texts. Look here:
http://s2w.hbz-nrw.de/ulbbn/nav/classification/17267

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Some notes on David Elkington

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Jordan Lead Codices continue to attract my interest.  This evening I went looking for an email address for the gentleman, with a view to asking him some questions.  It is, after all, entirely possible that he is the victim of a fraud, rather than its perpetrator.  The latter, indeed, seems unlikely to me.

I didn’t find an email address, but I did find a biography at the literary agent, Curtis Brown, here.

David Elkington is the author of In the Name of the Gods, the highly acclaimed academic thesis on the resonance and acoustical origins of religion. David is primarily an Egyptologist, specializing in Egypt-Palestinian links that have inevitably drawn him into the field of Biblical studies.

Between 1987 and 1990 he trained under Julia Samson, curator of the Petrie Museum, University of London, specializing in the Amarnan period of Egypt (c. 1500 BC), and also under Prof. Christine el Mahdy at the British School of Egyptology. He has co-hosted academic tours of the major ancient sites of Egypt and has been a member of the Egypt Exploration Society, the Palestine Exploration Fund and well as a fundraising Vice-Chairman of the Oxford China Scholarship Fund Working Group. He has lectured at universities all over the world and written many papers on ancient history and linguistics.

Interesting.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Starting a new job today, so not very much free time.  The new job demands 8 hours a day, rather than the usual 7.5 — there is a nasty trend in modern work to increase hours worked, and to try to get even more than that, and get hours unpaid.  Oh well. 

Meanwhile a correspondent, who needs a copy of the Eusebius book for academic purposes, has agreed to buy the first proof from me.  This proof has an unsatusfactory dustjacket, which is being worked as we speak, but is otherwise as production so is fine for his purposes.  The sale will help pay for the second proof.  Unfortunately I can’t find any time to answer emails to do with this.  Maybe tomorrow.

I’ve spent a little leisure time — I have only a little time — working on the Wikipedia article on these lead codices from Jordan.  Not that I am doing any of the research which is exposing the scam; just linking to those like Tom Verenna who are emailing the key figures in the story. 

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Lead codices are fake

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I mentioned a few days ago the find of a stash of lead books, supposedly from the time of Christ, in Jordan. 

One of the few people to see the collection is David Elkington, a scholar of ancient religious archaeology who is heading a British team trying to get the lead books safely into a Jordanian museum.

Elkington, however, may not be a reputable scholar, at least according to blogger Clayboy here.

Today Jim Davila gives a damning email from Peter Thonemann, of Wadham College, Oxford, here.  It turns out that Elkington approached Thonemann last year, asking for information about one of the codices, on copper.  And he got it; clear evidence of forgery.  Unfortunately it seems that Mr. Elkington did not heed the warning.

Key excerpts:

On 15 September 2010, I received the following email out of the blue from a certain David Elkington …

“… one of the copper codices that brings me to you. … It has an inscription in Greek along the top. A putative investigation has failed to find the meaning, dialect or type of Greek used and we are seeking to find an expert who might help in determining what it says. Would you have the time and the knowledge to be able to help?”

I received on the 13 October the following three photographs of this ‘copper codex’ from Mr Elkington … I replied later that same day…

“The text was incised by someone who did not know the Greek language, since he does not distinguish between the letters lambda and alpha: both are simply represented, in each of the texts, by the shape Λ.  The text literally means ‘without grief, farewell! Abgar also known as Eision’. This text, in isolation, is meaningless.  However, this text corresponds precisely to line 2 of the Greek text of a bilingual Aramaic/Greek inscription published by J.T. Milik, …

‘For Selaman, excellent and harmless man, farewell!  Abgar, also known as Eision, son of Monoathos, constructed this tomb for his excellent son (i.e. Selaman), in the third year of the province’. 

This is a stone tombstone from Madaba in Jordan, precisely dated to AD 108/9, on display in the Archaeological Museum in Amman.  

The text on your bronze tablet, therefore, makes no sense in its own right, but has been extracted unintelligently from another longer text …  The longer text from which it derives is a perfectly ordinary tombstone from Madaba in Jordan which happens to have been on display in the Amman museum for the past fifty years or so.  The text on your bronze tablet is repeated, in part, in three different places, meaningless in each case.  

The only possible explanation is that the text on the bronze tablet was copied directly from the inscription in the museum at Amman by someone who did not understand the meaning of the text of the inscription, but was simply looking for a plausible-looking sequence of Greek letters to copy.  He copied that sequence three times, in each case mixing up the letters alpha and lambda.

This particular bronze tablet is, therefore, a modern forgery, produced in Jordan within the last fifty years.  I would stake my career on it. 

And Jim adds:

At least one of David Elkington’s metal codices (a copper one) is a forgery. It seems very unlikely indeed, therefore, that any of them are genuine.

Which sums up my feelings too.

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