Author: Roger Pearse

The “Two Ways” in the Arabic Life of Shenouda

Posted on by Roger Pearse

We’re all familiar with the material common to the Didache and the Epistle of Barnabas, known as the Two Ways.  However it seems from a note at CCEL that this material also appears in the Arabic version of a hagiographical text called the “Life of Shenouda the Archimandrite”.  This text exists in multiple Coptic and Syriac versions as well, all somewhat different.

From this source I learn the following:

The Life of St. Shenouda was recorded by his close disciple St. Besa, shortly after his repose. It was done in Sahidic Coptic but only the Bohairic translation survived intact in a 10th century AD manuscript. Some Sahidic fragments have been identified and published. There is also, a more expanded version extant in Arabic as well as one similar to the Bohairic surviving in Ethiopic. The Coptic Text was edited by Dr. Johannes Leipoldt from Vatican Copt. LXVI, ff. 19r-82r (CML 55C). It was translated in French by Prof. E. C. Amelineau, in latin by Prof. Weitzmann (?), and in English by Dr. D. N. Bell. The excerpts provided below are from the English translation.

…
Bibliography

Abd an-Nur Seifin, History of the Great Saint Anba Shenouda the Archimandrite. Alexandria 1959 (In Arabic)
Amelineau, E. C., Les Moines Egyptiens: Vie de Schenoudi. Paris: Leroux, 1898
Amelineau, E. C., Oeuvres de Schenoudi: Texte Copte et Traduction Francaise. 2 vols. Paris: Leroux, 1907-14
Basset, R. Le Synaxaire Arabe Jacobite. Patrologia Orientalis vol 17 no. 3, Paris, 1923 (Entry under the 7th of Abib)
Bell, D. N. The Life of Shenoute by Besa. Michigan: Cistercian Publications, 1983
Bell, D. N., Shenoute the Great: The Struggle with Satan. Cistercian Studies, 21, 1986, 177-85
Bethune-Baker, J. F., The Date of the Death of Nestorius: Schenute, Zacharias, Evagrius. Journal of Theological Studies, 9, 1908, 601-5
Brakke, D. Shenute: On Cleaving to Profitable Things. Orientalia Lovaniensia Periodica 20, 1989, 115-41
Burmester, O. The Homilies or Exhortation of the Holy Week Lectionary. Museon 45, 1932, 21-70
Butcher, E. L., The Story of the Church of Egypt. vol. 1 London, 1897.
Chassinat, E. Le Quatrieme Livre des Entretiene et Epitres de Shenouti, MIFAO v.23Cairo, 1911
Emmel, S., Shenoute’s Literary Corpus Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University 1993

A look in Graf’s Geschichte der christilichen arabischen Literatur would give more info on the Arabic version, I suspect. My copy is at home, tho.

A search on Gallica.bnf.fr reveals “Une version syriaque inédite de la vie de Schenoudi, par F. Nau,… – E. Leroux (Paris) – 1900“. This includes Syriac text and a French translation (about 12 short pages in length). It also draws a tree of the relationship of the various versions.  In the introduction, Nau says that Amelineau published the Coptic life and an Arabic life, with French translation, of which the copies above were reprints, in Memoires publies par les membres de la mission archaeologique francaise au Caire, tome IV.

Unfortunately, despite the industry of Amelineau, none of these versions are online.  This is a pity, since we could usefully have a translation of it.

I’ve translated into English the Syriac version published by Nau, and will upload it soon.  But it does not contain the two ways.

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Notes on John the Lydian, De Mensibus

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Looking at the downloadable PDF, I find book 4 of De Mensibus (on the months) starts on p. 127 (p.50 of the printed text).  It is devoted to discussing events in the Roman calendar, month by month, so starts with January.  February starts on p. 138;  March on p.143; April on p.153; May on p.163; June on p.169; July on p.171; August on p.178; September on p.182; October on p.184; November on p.185; and December on p.186.  So the whole work is not very extensive.

IV.41 reads:

On day 11, the kalends of April, a pine tree is carried into the Palatine by the tree-bearers.  But the emperor Claudius instituted these these ferias, a man of such justice in judgement that…

This event looks like the carrying of the sacred tree into the temple of Cybele.  That the festival was created by Claudius again indicates the lack of Attis-related events in Republican times.

The short entry on December does not seem to mention Christmas, nor Saturnalia, nor any solar festival.

I can’t find any translations of De Mensibus, although a 1983 English translation of his work in 3 books on the Roman Magistrates exists, and a French edition and translation of the same work was made in 2006.  An Italian version of another of his works.  I’ve asked in the BYZANS-L if anyone is working on this text, and also emailed Prof. Jacques Schamp, who did the French translation of the Magistrates book.

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Changing settings on WordPress

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This copy of WordPress has got very slow, so I’m trying to find out why.  I’ve switched appearance back to classic, and things may appear and disappear while I work out what is slowing stuff down.

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Using X-Rays on the Herculaneum scrolls

Posted on by Roger Pearse

When Vesuvius went pop in 79 AD, the lava flows buried the city of Herculaneum.  One of the houses buried contained a library of papyrus rolls, mostly containing otherwise lost works by the epicurean philosopher Philodemus.  When rediscovered, they were in the state of charred logs, unreadable and very difficult to unroll.

Now Brent Seales is going to see if he can read two of the charred scrolls without trying to unroll them.  (They tend to fall to dust when unrolled, you see).

Brent Seales, the Gill professor of engineering in UK’s computer science department, will use an X-Ray CT scanning system to collect interior images of the scrolls’ rolled-up pages. Then, he and his colleagues hope to digitally “unroll” the scrolls on a computer screen so scholars can read them.

“It will be a challenge because today these things look more like charcoal briquets than scrolls,” Seales said last week. “But we’re using a non-invasive scanning system, based on medical technology, that lets you slice through an object and develop a three-dimensional data set without having to open it, just as you would do a CT scan on a human body.”

The two scrolls that Seales and his team will work on are stored at the French National Academy in Paris. The UK group will spend July working there.

Their system was developed at UK through the EDUCE project, or Enhanced Digital Unwrapping for Conservation and Exploration, which Seales launched through a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Experts say that if the UK system works as well as hoped, it could provide a safe new way to decipher and preserve more scrolls from Herculaneum, as well as other ancient books, manuscripts and documents that are too fragile to be opened.

“No one has yet really figured out a way to open them,” says Roger Macfarlane, a professor of classics at Brigham Young University who also has worked on scrolls from Herculaneum. “If Brent is successful it would be a huge, potentially monumental step forward.”

Seales admits that there are hurdles, the biggest being the carbon-based ink thought to have been used on the scrolls. He says that since the papyrus in the scrolls was turned to carbon by the fury of Vesuvius, it might be impossible to visually separate the writing from the pages, even with powerful computer programs.

“The open question is, will we be able to read the writing?” Seales said. “There is a chance that we won’t be able to do it with our current machine, and that we’ll have to re-engineer some things. But if that’s the case, that’s what we will do.”

The full story is here.

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Latin translation of John Lydus

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I was looking at the edition of John the Lydian, here.  I had not realised that the Bonn Scriptores Historiae Byzantinae editions came with Latin translations at the bottom of the page.  This makes things much easier for those of us whose Latin is much better than our Greek. 

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All the hot chicks love Indiana Jones

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Occasionally I wonder whether scholars have all been shot through the brains before receiving tenure.  But then I read an article which cheers the heart.  This from Dan Shoup at Archaeology hits the nail on the head.

On that note, I offer you two propositions about the discipline.

1) In the popular imagination, archaeology is a form of science fiction.

2) Archaeologists should embrace this, and start writing science fiction that promotes their vision of the past and agenda for the present.

You heard that right: for most people, archaeology is just a flavor of science fiction. And that’s not a bad thing.

Dan has grasped what the role of archaeology in popular culture is.  His article is well worth reading.

But don’t we *envy* the archaeologists?  Their effortless access to the media, their “Indiana Jones” image?  Their state-funding?  Of course we do.  Most scholars of classics or patristics can only dream of such things.

But the cure is in our hands.  We need to communicate better.  We too need to be selling Science Fiction to the masses.  If we want funding, that is.

We’ve coasted, for a long time, on the image of the ivory tower, and the elitism of classics.  But these don’t play nearly as well today as they did when university meant Oxford or Cambridge, where the sons of the gentry went to learn Latin verse.  So what kind of image should we pursue?

For patristrics, we have to ask why patristics scholars make no effort to communicate with the Christians — the natural and normal audience for their work?   The nearest we get is cranks  going out to look for Noah’s ark!  Well, can’t we think of something better?

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John Lamoreaux’s Adventures in Christian Arabic

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Let’s give a warm welcome to a new blogger, John Lamoreaux, who has just created his own site at johnlamoreaux.org, and started a blog (although I think he ought to use WordPress for the blog bit, so that he gets all the links etc).

John works in the neglected field of Christian literature in the Arabic language.  This contains translations of all sorts of things which have not survived in the original, as well as interesting historical texts.  There’s no proper handbook to the field in English — the only real handbook, Georg Graf’s Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur, in 5 volumes, being in German.

Anyone working in the field is breaking new ground. 

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Attis – a useful dissertation

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There is online a 1900 dissertation on Cybele and Attis by Grant Showerman, The great mother of the gods, Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, vol. 1 (1898-1901). p. 219, online here, starting on p. 219, which is very good on ancient literary sources for its statements.  Thanks to Christopher Ecclestone for the link!  Some notes:

Herodian gives (book 1, ch. 11) an account of the origins of the cult of Cybele, although not mentioning Attis.  Pliny the Elder also gives an explanation of the term ‘Gallus’ for the eunuch priests, in NH V.147, VI.4.

He says that the legend of Attis first appears “in the elegiac poet Hermesianax, around 340 BC” (p.240). No reference is given; but about a hundred lines of this otherwise lost writer is preserved by Athenaeus, xiii. 597.  This can be found online here, and Hermesianax starts on p. 953.  However it seems very questionable that any of this really refers to Attis; and a look at Vermaseren, Cybele and Attis, p.111 tells us that he means the statements of Pausanias, which the latter attributes to Hermesianax.

The thesis then lists the four different legends known to us (respectively in Pausanias, Arnobius the Elder, Diodorus Sicilus, Firmicus Maternus).  Different accounts again appear in Ovid, Sallustius and Julian.

An identification of Attis with Adonis is given by Hippolytus, Refutation, V.9, and apparently Socrates HE III.23 refers.  This is a description of the confused system of the Naassenes.  But it tells us little except that the Naassenes were syncretists, or liberals as they prefer to be known today. 

Attis is also referred to  by Theocritus, XX.40 ff.  About the same time, Neathes of Cyzicus wrote something about Attis which is referred by Harpocration the lexicographer as a myth, under ‘Atths’.  Nicander at the start of the 2nd century BC mentions him in the context of the creation of galloi (Alex. 8).

There is clear evidence that Attis was not worshipped at Rome in Republican times; Dionysius of Halicarnassus says (II.19.2)  ca. 30 BC that:

And no festival is observed among them as a day of mourning or by the wearing of black garments and the beating of breasts and the lamentations of women because of the disappearance of deities, such as the Greeks perform in commemorating the rape of Persephonê and the adventures of Dionysus and all the other things of like nature.

whereas such a procession did exist as part of the annual rites of Cybele, for Attis, in imperial times (p.263).  A similar piece of information can be found in the Fasti praenestini (ca. 3 AD). (See article in TAPA 1900, p.46 f).  At this date he was merely a mythological person associated with Cybele, rather than a separate deity.

 In the calendar in the Chronography of 354, on March 22 “arbor intrat” — the sacred tree of Cybele is taken into the sanctuary.  John the Lydian, De Mens. IV, 36, 41 f. gives information on the dates of the festivals.  On March 24 is the “sanguem” in the calendar, labelled elsewhere as “dies sanguinem” (Treb. Poll. Claudius IV).  This was the day when the galli got the chop.

The scholiast on Nicander’s Alex. 8 writes: τοποι ἱεροὶ ὑπογειοι ….. οπου ἐκτεμνόμενοι τὰ μήδεα κατετίθεντο οἱ τῷ αττει καὶ τῇ ῥέᾳ λατρεύοντες. indicating that in the taurobolium, the removal of the bull’s genitals commemorates Attis.

Attis is described by Michael Psellus as the “Phyrgian Zeus” (Peri Onomaton 109), and there is a reference in Arrian.

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Ordering from the Vatican library

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve never ordered anything from the Vatican library, so this note is for those who have thought about it but never got around to it.

Today I’ve downloaded the PDF order form from here and posted it off, with an order for PDF’s of microfilms (! — all I can afford) of two Vatican mss. of the unpublished history of the Arabic Christian writer Al-Makin.

I’ve ordered a copy of Ms. Vatican Arab 169 (which I mentioned here when discussing complete copies), and, for good measure, a copy of Ms. Vatican Arab 168 (which from this post contains the first half).  I am nervous, tho, that the description in Graf says that the former is folios 1-194r; i.e. around 400 pages, which doesn’t look long enough to me to contain the complete work.  Let’s hope I’m wrong.

The order form is simple and obvious — one of the better examples I’ve seen — and in English.  They intend to do it online, which they indeed should, but the website isn’t quite ready. 

Prices are listed on the form, and are 50 euros for 100 pages, then 20 euros for each chunk of 100 pages thereafter.   Payment is on delivery, apparently; I hope they take credit cards!

I will keep you posted on how this goes, and how easy they are to deal with.

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Writing a Greek-English translation tool

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I want to translate bits of ancient Greek from time to time.  Since I don’t do it a lot, I have trouble remembering vocabulary and which part of speech or inflection it is. 

There are tools out there which help.  There is the Perseus look-up tool, although it is too slow to be useful.  There is the Diogenes tool, based on the Perseus dictionaries, which runs fine on Windows and is fast and useful.  But it’s not quite what I want.  There are various text files for the New Testament which are good, but… a bit raw.

I feel that what I want is something that gets rid of time spent looking in dictionaries.  It must save me the trouble of moving my head left-and-right between text and translation.  It must handle text in unicode Greek, and given me transliterations when I need them.  It must handle accents, and do something when they are wrong.

It doesn’t need some of the facilities of Perseus and Diogenes.  It doesn’t need a TLG, for instance. It might be useful to research a word in depth, and look at use in other texts, but what I need more is a quick idea of meaning and then onto the next word, so that I can understand the sentence, the thought.

For the last few months, as time permitted, I’ve been putting together a small Windows application which suits my special requirements.  I’ve tried in the past, but there has never been time to spend the day-after-day coding that wears down obstacles and refactors code into better form.  Issues of speed of loading are also something that can rarely be addressed quickly.

But today was something of a red-letter day; today I used it for something useful, and got an answer.  I pasted into it a bit of an inscription from Pessinus, and got a clear idea of what was being said, in a few words.

Of course I also got a clear message of some deficiencies that must, must be fixed now!  Nothing like real use to highlight these. 

But for the first time I got a clear idea that it will work, and will do what I want.

There will be licensing issues on dictionaries etc, but these I will have to look at and negotiate.  I hope to make it available as shareware, in a few months, if I can get permission.

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