Author: Roger Pearse

Another Wikipedia murder

Posted on by Roger Pearse

One of the pleasures of reading the Wikipediocracy forum, as I do from time to time, is to see hard evidence of what I experienced myself, that it is very dangerous for ordinary people to attempt to contribute to Wikipedia.

Today’s thread discusses a long term editor hiding behind the name “MaterialScientist”.  This post comments:

You should talk to Artem R. Oganov about his long running dispute with Materialscientist. He got indefinitely blocked, then unblocked on the condition he didn’t edit subjects of his expertise. He decided to wash his hands and walk away.

“Some time ago I entered Wikipedia using my own name, which was a mistake. Now, due to the continuing smear campaign by the user Materialscientist, I want to completely withdraw from Wikipedia both my account an any mentions of my former relations to it. Now I know the identity of the user Materialscientist, and have proofs that he does not act as an impartial editor, but instead is involved in a conflict of interest with my group. Moreover, he uses every opportunity to attack my real name …”

Dr Oganov is a professor of Geosciences at Stony Brook University, and is responsible for breakthrough discoveries in Boron science (link to New York Times article).  “MaterialScientist” is … well, someone who doesn’t care to put his name to his work.

Dr Oganov was accused of “sock-puppeting”.  The real meaning of this term is someone who uses several accounts to give the false impression of multiple people.  However in Wikipedia it gets used for anyone who someone doesn’t like who has used more than one account on the system; say, perhaps, if he has edited under his own name and then found himself the target of a vicious campaign of personal attacks designed to ruin his real-world reputation. 

The disgusting “trial” is here.  The accusation was made by “MaterialScientist”, who submitted “evidence” under his alternative account “NIMSOffice”.  Likewise it is fairly obvious that “Uncle G” is a pawn of “MaterialScientist”, rather than an unbiased bystander; using one minor account to shriek accusations, and the main account to pretend to be calm and unbiased.  I have myself been the victim of just this techniqe.

No doubt MaterialScientist maneouvred cleverly, and played the game to win.  Bait your foe into hiding behind a false identity, use obvious socks and tempt him to respond in kind; and then accuse him of sock-puppeting with some pre-warned friends to implement a ban … nice.  

I have no doubt that Dr Oganov was very hurt by the treatment he received.  And … what kind of morons, finding that they have a world-expert on hand, issue him a  ban from editing on the topic of his expertise?!  You couldn’t make it up.

The end result was that one of the major scientists in Boron studies was forced out of Wikipedia.  And I suspect that this happens quite a lot.

Don’t contribute to Wikipedia.  The owners do not care what happens to any of the contributors, while the place is overrun with low-lifes, who will, coldly and deliberately, do you an injury while remaining anonymous themselves.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve been trying to think of an Arabic text which would be suitable for a beginner to translate.  No luck so far, mainly because I am so busy.

An email tells me that the old translation of Macrobius, Saturnalia has arrived at my local library.  I look forward to perusing that!

I’ve written to Francesca Schironi, author of To Mega Biblion, which I discussed last week, asking if she has any ideas about papyri that preserve the start and end of books of the multi-volume Greek histories.  Those would surely be interesting to see.

A little time this evening I spent reading chunks of the Fabulae of Hyginus (late 1st century BC), a schoolboy abbreviation of the original, which gives us much on Greek myth.  An English translation may be found here, although the level of interest is low.  One of the more interesting entries is 221, on the Seven Sages:

[221] CCXXI. SEVEN WISE MEN

Pittacus of Mitylene, Periander of Corinth, Thales of Miletus, Solon of Athens, Chilon of Sparta, Cleobulus of Lindus, Bias of Priene. Their sayings are as follows:
Moderation is best, says Cleobulus of Lindus;
Everything should be carefully studied, comes from Periander of Ephyre;
Know thy opportunity, says Pittacus of Mitylene;
Bias, he of Priene, avers that most men are bad:
and Thales of Miletus says: Suretyship is the precursor of ruin;
Know thyself, says Chilon, sprung from Lacedaemon;
and Cecropian Solon enjoins: Nothing in excess.

The association of these people with sayings, even at this date, is interesting.  Sayings literature blossoms during the imperial and Byzantine periods, and legends of the Seven Sages with it.

I gather that this text is yet another one that only just survived.  Apparently a single manuscript made it to the renaissance, only to be dismembered at the printer.

It’s a busy time of year.  Expect sporadic posting!

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Is there an Arabic text of the “History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church” online anywhere?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The monster history of the Coptic church, which Wikipedia says is called Ta’rikh Batarikat al-Kanisah al-Misriyah,  is online in English, at least as far as 1894.  But I know that modern authors have written continuations; and I wonder whether any of these are online.

Does anyone know?

I have someone who might be interested in translating some of it into English, you see.

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Progress on Paulys Realencyclopadie at German Wikisource

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Via AWOL I learn that the project to digitise the old (but comprehensive) Realencyclopadie is going very well indeed.  Ten thousand articles have now been completed.  The press release is here, and using Google Translate, we get something like this:

For five years, there has been a project at Wikisource for Pauly’s Realencyclopädie of the study of classical antiquity (RE), with the aim to make the public domain articles from this available online in full text form. Although only a few volunteers are working on it, their constant work has recently reached an impressive milestone: with the article “Herod (King of Judaea)” they have transcribed 10,000 items.

The advantage of such a project is obvious.  Many articles in the RE still offer the best starting point, and most of the details, for each topic. However, they are only accessible in public libraries, for hardly any private individuals can afford such an expensive Lexicon.  It was published from 1893 to 1980 in Stuttgart by Metzler and is still sold by this company. The articles from the RE on the Internet are not only searchable by keyword, but available to everyone for free.  Of course the RE project can only upload articles which are now in the public domain.  These are usually those whose author died more than 70 years ago. And in the RE this applies to many authors already.

Among the most significant items that are already available on Wikisource, we may include the articles on the epic poet Hesiod, the tragedians Aeschylus, [13], and Euripides [4], the comic poet Eupolis [3] and Aristophanes [12], the scholar of the same name, [14] the philosopher Aristotle [18], the rhetoricians Anaximenes of Lampsacus [3], Annaeus [17] Seneca and Libanius, the Archbishop Eustathius [18], of Thessalonica, but also the products agriculture, Athenai [1a], signboards, Basilica, libraries, beekeeping, beer, soil science, embalming, epistolography, Hermes Trismegistus, didactic poems, mushrooms, roses, stringed instruments, navigation, suicide and Taurus.

Unlike other similar sites on the Internet, Wikisource lays great emphasis on the quality of the provided texts. Each text is proofread at least twice (the respective correction status is displayed on every page) and on the basis of scans of the original, which are checked each time and are stored on Wikimedia Commons. The RE project also uses the hyperlink feature of the world-wide web, by linking keywords to each other, and provides each item with identifiable reference and author abbreviations. One particular aspect of the project is that here the many authors of the RE are systematically collected and identified. The bio-bibliographic index of authors is now one of 1111 entries and is about 70% complete.

This is almost the only open-source initiative in the German language, and is highly praiseworthy.  The RE is hardly known outside of specialists; but the combination of exhaustive references, online access, and Google Translate should increase its reach manyfold.  Well done.

UPDATE: The RE at WikiSource is here.

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Mithras and the Portable Antiquities Scheme database

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Another day another database, or so it sometimes seems.  But this is not a complaint!  On the contrary, it makes accessible material that no-one could ever see.

Today I learn via Cultural Property Observer of the PAS database.

The information provided by members of the public over the last 15 years is available for all to see on the PAS database. This now contains around 810,000 items and spans objects dating from the Stone Age to Anglo-Saxon, Roman, medieval, and post-medieval times. Every entry includes archaeological information on the object in question, details of where it was discovered and often incorporates notes of scholarly interest. The database provides a historical snapshot of human settlement in England and Wales and is an awesome example of what can be achieved by harnessing the power of the public.

Now that sounded interesting, so I headed over there and typed Mithras into the search box.  Three results came up, one of them interesting:

A Roman copper-alloy figurine depicting Cautopates, Mithras’ attendant who symbolises darkness. He is shown holding a torch pointing downwards in his right hand and his left hand is placed on his waist. Cautopates stands facing forwards with his head turned slightly to the right, his legs crossed at the calves and with his left hand placed on the left hip. He wears a Phrygian cap, trousers, a short-sleeved tunic, a cloak and has mid-length tousled hair. The cloak is ornamented with V-shaped motifs and grooved, curved lines on the trousers and tunic represent the folds of the cloth. The figurine is 81.5mm long, 33.9mm wide and 11.2mm thick. It is not free-standing and despite the lack of evidence for an attachment it must have been fixed to a base.

The article continues, full of useful data.  It’s undateable, of course, and comes from Yorkshire.  Usefully there are a couple of excellent photographs.  And these are downloadable!

Nice.

 

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Mithraeum in Rome under Baths of Caracala reopens

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Mike Aquilina of Way of the Fathers draws my attention to this piece:

Few people have ever visited the long network of underground tunnels under the public baths of Caracalla, which date back to the third century AD and are considered by many archaeologists to be the grandest public baths in Rome. This underground network, which is due to be reopened in December, is also home to a separate structure, the largest Mithraeum in the Roman Empire, according to its director Marina Piranomonte.

The Mithraeum was discovered a century ago and was almost entirely devoid of decoration. Only a small and poorly conserved fresco of Mithra remained, …

Ignore the statement about a “fossa sanguinus”, tho.

I’d love to see it.  I must go to Rome again.

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Mithridates Chrestos – the fate of a younger brother

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The sleepy little kingdom of Pontus in what is now Northern Turkey was a backwater in the Hellenistic era.  Its rulers affected a Greek culture, but ruled over a largely Persian land, that had changed little since Alexander overthrew the Achaemenid Persian empire.

Mithridates V Euergetes married a princess named Laodice, from the Seleucid dynasty that ruled Syria and was descended from one of Alexander’s generals.  She bore him two sons, and a gaggle of daughters.  The elder son was Mithridates VI Eupator, known as the Great, who achieved fame as an enemy of Rome who had the military and political talent to defy even Sulla and Pompey.  But what of his brother?

The literary sources are very limited.  Strabo tells us:

Dorylaüs was a military expert and one of the friends of Mithridates Euergetes. … But when, a little later, he learned that Euergetes, as the result of a plot, had been treacherously slain in Sinopê by his closest associates, and heard that the succession had passed to his wife and young children, he despaired of the situation there and stayed on at Cnossus…. Now Euergetes had two sons, one of whom, Mithridates, surnamed Eupator, succeeded to the rule when he was eleven years old.  Dorylaüs, the son of Philetaerus, was his foster brother; and Philetaerus was a brother of Dorylaüs the military expert. And when the king Mithridates reached manhood, he was so infatuated with the companionship of his foster brother Dorylaüs that he not only conferred upon him the greatest honours, but also cared for his kinsmen and summoned those who lived at Cnossus.[1]

Appian tells us:

He [Eupator] was bloodthirsty and cruel to all – the slayer of his mother, his brother, three sons, and three daughters.[2]

Photius includes an epitome of Memnon:

After this, the grievous war between the Romans and Mithridates king of Pontus broke out; the apparent cause of this war was the seizure of Cappadocia. Mithridates gained control of Cappadocia when he captured his nephew Arathes after breaking his oath concerning a truce, and then killed him with own hands. This Arathes was the son of Ariarathes and of the sister of Mithridates. Mithridates was a persistent murderer since his childhood. He had become king at the age of 13 years, and soon afterwards he imprisoned his mother, whom his father had left as joint ruler with him, and eventually put an end to her by violence; he also killed his brother. [3]

No literary source records the brother’s name.  Fortunately there are two inscriptions from Delos that do mention it,[4] which are accessible:

[βα]σιλέω[ς Μ]ιθραδάτου Εὐπάτο[ρ]ος [Ε]ὐ[— — —]
[καὶ το]ῦ ἀ[δελφοῦ α]ὐ̣τοῦ Μιθ[ρ]αδάτο[υ]
[Χρ]ήστου Δ[ιονύ]σιος Νέωνος Ἀθ[ηναῖος]
[γυ]μνα[σιαρχή]σα[ς] ἀνέθηκεν.[5]

Διὶ Οὐρίωι ὑπὲρ βασ[ιλέως]
Μιθραδάτου Εὐπάτορος
καὶ τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ αὐτοῦ
Μιθραδάτου Χρήστου
καὶ τῶν πραγμάτων αὐτῶν.[6]

To Zeus Ourios on behalf of King
Mithradates Eupator
and his brother
Mithradates Chrestus
and their fortunes.[7]

His name, then, was Mithradates Chrestos or Chrestus.  He suffered the fate that rivals to the throne traditionally suffered in oriental despotisms — to be murdered by a successful sibling.

Is anything else actually known about this man, or boy?  I can’t find any other sources[8] that mention him.

My thanks to the correspondent who drew my attention to this obscure and luckless princeling.

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  1. [1]Strabo, Geographica, Book 10, chapter 4. Online here.↩
  2. [2]Appian, History of Rome, c.112.  Online here.↩
  3. [3]Photius, Bibliotheca, codex 224. Online here.↩
  4. [4]B. C. McGing, The foreign policy of Mithridates VI Eupator, King of Pontus, Brill, 1986, p.89, accessible sometimes in preview.↩
  5. [5]Ins. Delos 1560 (Durrbach, Choix D’Inscriptions de Delos 187, no. 113), ca. 115-4 BC.  Accessible online here.↩
  6. [6]IDelos 1561, ca. 121-111 BC.↩
  7. [7]A. B. Cook, Zeus: a study in ancient religion, CUP, 1914, p.154. Preview online here.↩
  8. [8]http://www.ancientlibrary.com/smith-bio/2204.html↩

Al-Maqrizi on the pyramids

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Jason Colavito has done something great, and something sensible.  He has translated all the passages in al-Maqrizi’s al-Khitat which relate to the pyramids of Egypt and placed them online:

Ancient astronaut proponent Giorgio Tsoukalos claims that the fourteenth century Al-Khitat of Al-Maqrizi (1364-1442 CE) contains evidence that ancient astronauts assisted human beings in the construction of Egypt’s pyramids. This book, the most significant collection of medieval Arabian and Coptic pyramid lore ever assembled, has never been translated into English, so I have translated the passages dealing with pyramids to make this text accessible to interested readers. The following contains all of the significant references to the pyramids in the volume, though some minor allusions have been omitted.

He adds, quite properly:

I do not speak Arabic, so I am translating from the French edition published in 1895 and 1900. I cannot claim to be a professional translator, so before citing any material below, be sure to consult the original Arabic version.

The fact is, however, that this enterprise will still make these passages far more accessible.  It is rather a point against the “ancient astronauts” people that they have not made such a translation. 

It doesn’t seem to be possible to add comments, or I would have asked where he found the French edition.  I suspect it is online somewhere, and it would be nice to know where.  The book itself should plainly be translated into English in its entirety.

(Via Paleobabble)

UPDATE: From Wikipedia I get the following:

The most important is the Mawaiz wa al-‘i’tibar bi dhikr al-khitat wa al-‘athar (2 vols., Bulaq, 1854), translated into French by Urbain Bouriant as Description topographique et historique de l’Égypte (Paris, 1895–1900; compare A. R. Guest, “A List of Writers, Books and other Authorities mentioned by El Maqrizi in his Khitat,” in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1902, pp. 103–125).

Volume 1 is on Google books here.

The whole book in two volumes is at Gallica.bnf.fr here.

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An ancient roll-end from the 1st century BC / 1st century AD

Posted on by Roger Pearse

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 talking about.

Number 10 in this dossier is P.Oxy. 42, 3000.  It contains the remains of the last two columns of a lost epic work, Eratothenes’ Hermes.  The papyrus dates from the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD.

Fortunately the item is online, and may be found by a search at Oxyrhynchus online for “3000”.  Curiously there seems to be no way to get a direct link.  Possibly this link to the Hi-res image will persist?

I would like to mark up the image, to highlight its features.


Click through to see the full size image.

The fragment has two columns.

At the top of the remains of the second column (the left hand side only is preserved) is the end of the work, with a coronis — a bird-like mark — on the left.

Then there is a gap, and then some scribbled scholia in various hands.

In the middle of the second column, rather larger than the original text, is the end-title, which reads ERMHS | ERATOSQENO[US] – the last two letters being lost.

Underneath the end title is a numeral.  This is a bit of stichometry — a count of the number of verses.  It reads ARIQ … X.  In the gap, in superscript, is M[OS].  The editor considered that this added up to about 1600 lines, if restored.  This is about the average length of a tragedy or comedy, according to Schironi, so probably this is close to the end of the roll as well as the end of the work.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have continued to proof the OCR output of Sabbadini’s Scoperte chapter 3, in Finereader 10.  Note the version number! I have abandoned the disastrous Finereader 11 software, which has effectually prevented Theodoret on Romans coming online by erasing all the italics every time I try to export my work.

Chapter 3 is the chapter concerned with the rediscovery of Greek literature in the 15th century.  It’s about 29 pages.  When the OCR errors are corrected, I shall pass it through Google Translate, and see what we have.

One volume often referred to in the notes is the Epistolae of Ambrogio Traversari, the monk who was friends with the humanists and took part in their many endeavours to recover classical and patristic literature.  His letters are a treasure trove of information about this process.  How I wish this existed in English!

I have seen a physical copy of this work, published in an immense format in the 18th century by Mehus, in two volumes.  It is physically exhausting to handle and read.

It seems that the book scanners at Archive.org and Google Books have found the same.  For sadly it remains inaccessible, and off-line.

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