Category: Announcements

General announcements

The 1412 inventory of the manuscripts of Amelungsborn Abbey

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I reported yesterday on the discovery of two new sermons by St Augustine in a Latin manuscript in a monastery in Poland.  One statement in the press release is also of great interest.  The discoverer, Prof. Christian Tornau, of the University of Würzburg, stated:

“An old catalogue from the monastery mentions a text that bears the same headings and has the same sequence of content as our manuscript. It could have served as a model,” the researcher explains. Tornau cannot confirm this assumption with absolute certainty, however, as the entire library holdings of Amelungsborn Monastery were destroyed by fire during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648).

The “old catalogue” in question is the inventory of 1412 of the Cistercian Abbey of Amelungsborn. This takes a little locating.

The inventory is listed in a catalogue of surviving medieval inventories, published by Theodor Gottlieb, Ueber mittelalterliche Bibliotheken (1890 – online here).  Amelungsborn is on p.18-19:

The footnote reads:

Im Anniversarienbuch sind 7 Schenkungen von Büchern aufgeführt; dies wird pg. 18 gesagt. – Ferner ist auf einer Seite des Catal. ein Verzeichniss von Büchern mit der Ueberschr.: Hii de Corbeja, (von woher sie nach Dürres Vermuthung  zur Abschr. entlehnt waren).

The anniversary book lists seven donations of books; this is mentioned on page 18. Furthermore, on one page of the catalogue, there is a list of books with the heading: “Hii de Corbeja” (from where, according to Dürre’s presumption, they were borrowed for copying).

The inventory of 1412 is preserved, then, in a manuscript, once in the Ducal Library in Wolfenbüttel, today in the Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv (NLA) where it has the shelfmark “Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv Wolfenbüttel VII. B. 111.”  A monochrome microfilm is online.  Each image is two pages: the catalogue is right at the end, on pages 101-105, i.e. images 54-56.  Here is the start of it:

Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv Wolfenbüttel VII. B. 111, folio 101r, top (image 54)

The inventory has been printed, but those seeking it may find that it can take a bit of time to locate thanks to a pleasant custom in 19th century German scholarship, whereby the author publishes the article twice under the same title in the same year but with different contents.  So it has been here.

The actual article, that contains a transcription of the inventory of 1412, is this:

H. Dürre, “Beiträge zur Geschichte der Cistercienserabtei Amelungsborn”, Programm des herzoglichen Gymnasiums zu Holzminden. Ostern 1876, p. 3-24; esp. 19-24.

This may be downloaded from here, and the inventory starts on page 19 thus:

But the unwary or unlucky researcher will search Google for “Dürre Beiträge zur Geschichte der Cistercienserabtei Amelungsborn” or something of the sort and will be presented with this:

H. Dürre, “Beiträge zur Geschichte der Cistercienserabtei Amelungsborn”, Zeitschrift des Historischen Vereins für Niedersachsen. 1876

In this volume, Dr Dürre’s article is the fourth, begins on p.179, and ends on 212, omitting the transcription of the inventory altogether.  It was only when you start to search for Programm des herzoglichen Gymnasiums zu Holzminden that you will make progress.

Looking at the inventory, the entry for the new sermons is on p.22, line 220 of the printed inventory.

The manuscript:

NLA WO VIII B 111, fol. 103r, column 2, part way down.

So there is the reference explained.

I think we will all be very interested to see the text of Dr Tornau’s discovery in full!

Another two sermons of St Augustine discovered: on the Witch of Endor

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Excellent news from the University of Würzburg, where a researcher has discovered two unknown sermons by St Augustine in a Latin manuscript in Poland!   The reporting (by Martin Brandstätter) is unusually good:

One day in 2024, the phone rang for Professor Christian Tornau, a Latinist at the University of Würzburg: An employee of the Bad Doberan Monastery Association in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania asked him to decipher a 12th-century manuscript that originally belonged to Bad Doberan Abbey but is now kept in its daughter monastery, Pelplin, in Poland. The manuscript contained six sermons by the Christian Church Father Augustine of Hippo (354-430).

What initially seemed like a routine philological assignment turned into a discovery: “Two of the six sermons are previously undiscovered writings by Augustine,” Professor Tornau rejoiced at the unexpected find. He is currently working with Professor Dorothea Weber and Dr. Clemens Weidmann from the CSEL series (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum) on an edition of the two Latin sermons.  …

The newly discovered sermons deal with the Old Testament story of the Witch of Endor from the First Book of Samuel. “Saul believes himself to be in a hopeless situation shortly before a battle against the Philistines. God does not hear his prayers. He turns to a witch,” explains Tornau. At Saul’s request, she summons the supposed spirit of the deceased prophet Samuel, who foretells his death in battle.

The story raises a theological question: “Why can a necromancer summon the spirit of a prophet? This, in turn, opens up the problem of theodicy: How can an omnipotent God allow this, or is he not truly omnipotent?” the Latinist explained. Theologically, there are two interpretations: Either it must be a case of deception by the witch, or God permitted the summoning to warn Saul of certain death.

The sermons play with these interpretations. “The first sermon was given during the Sunday service and ends with the question of theodicy and its interpretations. Only the second sermon, on the following Wednesday, weighed the options,” Tornau explained. The congregation was thus given a certain degree of freedom to form their own thoughts on the biblical passage.  …

There have already been cases in which supposed writings by Augustine turned out to be forgeries. Therefore, the professor of Latin studies proceeded cautiously: He analyzed the text together with the expert Clemens Weidmann, conducted meticulous research, and organized a summer school in Vienna in the autumn of 2025. Twenty other Latinists attended to discuss and verify the authenticity of the text. In the end, everyone agreed: The sermons are genuine.

Reconstructing the transmission history of the sermons proved challenging. “First of all, the creation of such a manuscript in the 12th century is unusual. A copy from the beginning of the 8th or 9th century would be more typical,” says Latinist Tornau. He therefore considers it very likely that the manuscript is based on an earlier version from the Lower Saxon monastery of Amelungsborn.

“An old catalog from the monastery mentions a text that bears the same headings and has the same sequence of content as our manuscript. It could have served as a model,” the researcher explains. Tornau cannot confirm this assumption with absolute certainty, however, as the entire library holdings of Amelungsborn Monastery were destroyed by fire during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648).

The first edition will address the transmission of the texts and contextualize their content and authenticity. “This isn’t a sensational find like the 30 Augustinian writings discovered in Mainz in 1990. But we are supplementing Augustine’s extensive body of work with two further fascinating texts in a critical edition,” Tornau summarizes. The edition is expected to be published by CSEL at the end of 2026.

The article even includes a legible photograph of the first page of the manuscript, and clearly identifies it – a first, in my experience.  The red title reads, I think: “Sermones Augustini de phitonissa et de resuscitatione samuelis”, (i.e. de pythonissa…?)

Excerpt from the manuscript (in red): “Augustine’s sermons on the fortune teller and the appearance of Samuel.” Source: Pelplin, Diocesan Library, Codex 114 (195), fol. 14r. (Image: Biblioteka Diecezjalna im. Biskupa Jana Bernarda Szlagi w Pelplinie)

The town of Pelplin originated from the monastery, itself populated by monks from Bad Doberan in Mecklenburg, according to Wikipedia.  The Biblioteka Diecezjalna library has a website here, although it does not seem to have any manuscript material online.  There is a website for the “Friends of Bad Doberan monastery,” mentioned in the article, here.  I was unable to locate a publication of the “old catalogue” of Amelungsborn unfortunately.

It’s very good news, and it will be most interesting to see what Augustine had to say on this curious passage of the bible.

Update (16 June 2026): The “old catalogue” of Amelungsborn, mentioned by Dr. Tornau, is discussed in my next post.

Let’s all agree that Amelineau needs to be flogged!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Today I received an email asking me about a letter of St Shenouda of Atripe, the 4th century Coptic abbot.  The letter in question was apparently written to a nun, saying “I knew you long ago.”  The email asked if I knew the source.

Well, I have almost no familiarity with the works of Shenouda (or Shenoute), so I thought that I would poke around a bit.  The email author was French, so I wondered what existed in French.

Interestingly Emile Amelineau translated some material by Shenouda into French as long ago as 1907, in his “Oeuvres de Schenoudi”.  Vol. 1 is here; vol. 2 here.  But… neither has a table of contents!  Cunningly, the editor has also ensured that none of the names of the works appears in the running titles.  This would not be great in printed volumes; in a PDF it is impossible to gain an overview of the volume and its contents without significant work.  Flinders Petrie had hard words for Amelineau’s destructive ineptitude as an archaeologist at Abydos; a century later, I feel ever so slightly vexed at such carelessness.

On reading his interminable introduction, in search of information, I find that he is not really editing anything.  What he is doing is printing chunks of fragments from papyri.  So, for him, each section is just whatever was found in such a manuscript.  That may be better than nothing, but it does not help us here.

It seems that the reconstruction of Shenouda’s works had to wait until modern times, and the labours of Stephen Emmel.1.  But that will have to wait for another day.

  1. See https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2023/2023.08.22/[↩]

Garbage in… Greek out? Experiments with Deepseek using OCR’d Italian containing embedded Greek.

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The letters of the 6th century sophist Aeneas of Gaza have been sitting in a folder on my desktop for a month or two now, and I want to make some progress with making a translation into English.

It’s not a big text.  Each letter is only a short paragraph, and there are only twenty-five letters.  So the whole text would fill less than a dozen pages perhaps.  I have the 1962 edition with Italian translation by Lidia Massa Positano, which is more than a hundred pages.  There seems to be a rule that editions of tiny texts can be obese!  I have never forgotten the Gerlo edition of Tertullian’s “De Pallio” – a very short text of a page or two – which filled two lengthy volumes.  But Gerlo published in 1940 in the Netherlands, and it may have been expedient for him to be engaged in such a project at that time.  Anyway the Positano edition is not that daft, and consists of an introduction, the Greek text, the Italian translation of each letter with commentary and footnotes.

At some earlier point I seem to have run the Positano book through Abbyy Finereader 15 software to create a Word document, which is 77k in size.  So today I extracted the portion to do with the letters.  The OCR language was Italian, so the portions of the commentary that contained quotes from the Greek were gibberish at those points.

Anche Procopio scrive lettere riguardanti prestiti di libri. Per esempio, dall’ep. LXIII, diretta a Pizio, risulta che Procopio si rammarica di non possedere un libro chiestogli in prestito da co­stui. Nell’ep. CHI, diretta a Stefano, Procopio vivamente lo rim­provera di un grave ritardo nella restituzione di un libro (p. 572,46 : èpuO-piàv cpiQaec^ w; napa^à; tVjv òrtoo/eaiv xaì xà? auv^xaj uirepi- Swv xal tò pi^Xfov i/wv Tpkov v) ré-capTov toutI ó p^SèrpiTOV xaftéÉEiv è7raYYeiXàp,Evo<;) e cita come esempio di solerzia e di zelo proprio un Giovanni (p. 573,12 àXX’ où/ 3 y£ aocpuiTaxo; ’IwàvvTj;

The printed text is as follows:

I thought, as a first step, that I would load the Word document into ChatGPT and get an AI translation of the lot, commentary, footnotes etc.  The idea was only to allow me to skim the material, and decide what to focus on.

But ChatGPT started complaining that it was a long file, a very very long file, etc etc:

The document you uploaded is very large (roughly 130,000 characters / 60+ pages). Translating the entire file accurately would be too long for a single response.

Then it offered various ways to make my life difficult if I carried on.

Well, I didn’t.  I popped it into Deepseek instead.  My prompt was “Translate this Italian text into English” – nothing exotic.   Deepseek made no objections and speedily output an English version of the whole thing.  I did have to copy and paste the output to Word, but that was not too burdensome.

But as I copied and pasted, I noticed something strange.  My eye was drawn to the gibberish sections of the Greek.  Here is the same passage, converted from exactly that gibberish above:

Procopius also writes letters concerning loans of books. For example, from ep. LXIII, addressed to Pyzius, it appears that Procopius regrets not possessing a book requested from him by the latter. In ep. CIII, addressed to Stephen, Procopius severely reproaches him for a serious delay in returning a book (p. 572,46: ἐρυθριᾷν φῂς ὡς παρελθὼν τὴν ὑπόσχεσιν καὶ τὰς συνθήκας ὑπερβὰς καὶ τὸ ἐμὸν χρέος τεταρτεῦσαι τοῦθ᾽ ὁ μηδὲ τρίτον καθέξειν ἐπαγγειλάμενος) and cites as an example of diligence and zeal a certain John (p. 573,12 ἀλλ᾽ οὐχ ὁ γε σοφώτατος Ἰωάννης…

It has recognised that the text is Greek – I did not tell it so – and it produced that accented Greek output.  The Greek is not actually completely correct.  But it’s very close!

In computing, there is no magic.  If it looks like magic, it means only that you don’t understand what is going on.  The input that I gave it was not enough to produce that Greek output.  It was just the attempts of an OCR engine to make Italian out of Greek.  So the Greek was retrieved from elsewhere, and the garbage string used to search for it.

I then tried the following prompt with a page of the garbled Greek:

This comes from a book in Italian, displaying Greek. Correct the Greek. ”’….”’

This it proceeded to do, with an interesting commentary underneath:

So the garbled text is being used for a look-up of some sort.

We know that the databases in these “AI” engines – the Large Language Models (LLMs) – are essentially a search database made by pirating vast amounts of books and everything else. In this case it is perhaps using the garbled strings to look up stuff in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae database.

But, as ever with AI, you just cannot trust what it gives you.  You have to check, and checking can take longer than doing it yourself.

Interesting, and frustrating.  As ever!

Another drawing of the serpent column in Constantinople

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Easily the most important monument in Istanbul is one that few visitors look at.  Located today in the Hippodrome is an ancient bronze column missing its head.  This is, in fact, the monument erected by the Greek states to commemorate the victory over the Persians at Plataea, and moved here later.  It is extraordinary that it still exists.  Originally it had a golden disk at the top, supported by three serpent headed brackets, but the latter were broken off during the Ottoman period.

However there is a drawing of the column before this happened, in a portrait of the procession of the Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent.

The Procession of Suleiman the Great through the Hippodrome, fol. 7 from the series ‘Ces Moeurs et fachons de faire de Turcz’, Pieter Coecke van Aelst  1502–1550) – made in 1533/53

The drawing forms part of a series of woodcuts made by Pieter Coecke van Aelst, who arrived in Istanbul with his wife in 1533, and was originally published in Antwerp.  The complete set forms a massive panorama of the city.  This section is on the extreme right.

There are various copies online, but this one is screen-grabbed from that at the Princely Collections of Lichtenstein, online here.  Another at lower resolution is at the British Museum here. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has all ten blocks online here.

I’m not sure where I downloaded this one from, but it shows the context of our screen grab:

The set of woodcuts is placed within a frame of caryatids by the publisher.  The circle of columns to the right once stood on top of the sphendone, which supports the end of the hippodrome even today.

H/t from Twitter here.

A quick postscript: another account, Barış Yaralı, did some interesting AI-colourisation on the image.  As AI always does, it distorts: somehow losing the serpent column and much else in the process, but bringing up the figures quite nicely.  Note the soldier staring at the artist.

AI colourisation of excerpt.

The lost “De Baptismo” of Melito? Text and English translation online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

As I mentioned a day or two ago, Alin Suciu has proposed that a Coptic text in a papyrus in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow is in fact the remains of a lost work by the 2nd century writer Melito of Sardis.  His article will appear in Adamantius sometime later this year or early next.  But the first page of it is on Academia.edu here, and begins as follows:

In the early 1990s, Alla Elanskaya published a fragmentary Sahidic papyrus codex housed at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow[1]. The manuscript contains a homily which provides elaborate speculations on baptism, the elements, and the human being as a microcosm of creation. The authorship of the homily remains uncertain due to the dilapidated condition of the manuscript and the absence of its initial section, which presumably contained the title and author. Elanskaya tentatively titled the text the Treatise on the Symbolics of Baptism and the Elements, based on the surviving contents.

Despite its sophisticated theology, the homily published by Elanskaya attracted little scholarly attention,….

Like most Coptic manuscripts in Moscow, the fragmentary codex published by Elanskaya was once part of the collection of the Russian Egyptologist Vladimir Golenishchev (1856-1947). Unfortunately, neither the circumstances of Golenishchev’s acquisition of the papyrus nor its original provenance can be documented. However, the orthographic features suggest a Middle Egyptian, probably Fayyumic, origin for the codex. …

  1. A.I. ELANSKAYA, Coptic Literary Texts of the Pushkin State Fine Arts Museum in Moscow (StudAeg 13), Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest 1991, 48-83, 223 and plates 7-25. Republished in ID., The Literary Coptic Manuscripts in the A.S. Pushkin State Fine Arts Museum in Moscow (SVigChr 18), Brill, Leiden – New York – Köln 1994, 167-200 and plates 59-77.

The second publication, The Literary Coptic Manuscripts in the A.S. Pushkin State Fine Arts Museum in Moscow, is in fact online at Archive.org here.  I had never heard of Golenishchev – I must learn some more! – or this publication, but the volume is full of interesting material as a glance at the table of contents makes plain.

Better still, every text in the book comes with an English translation of all the texts included in the volume.  Including this one!  It’s on page 193 ff.  The translation printed is intended as an aid to working with the papyrus, but the various brackets and marks make it hard to read.  Furthermore it is not necessarily the case that the pages are in the right order.  But let’s omit the markings and brackets, and see what we have.  Unfortunately the result still does not make very much sense.

Note that each number below indicates a page in the papyrus manuscript, which is written in two columns.

1. … There came the shepherds to worship him, together with the magi. The powers that are above glorified him and the angels worshipped him … He came unto John to the Jordan to be baptized in order to purify water by the Spirit, and as for the world, in order to cleanse it from impurity, and man, for his part, to liberate him from sin; since sin permeated man in the womb of the world after the manner of a child who is polluted in the womb of his mother. Also like … lest … should let him … Thus also man was polluted in the womb of the world in fornication, and glut­tony, and covetousness, and the love of money, and uncleanness, and idolatry …

2.  … that is in the womb, and when he is born it is not the soul that is washed from sin, but it is the body that is washed from pollution. And he who is born in the desires of the world, that is he who does impure deeds of the world, it is not only his body that he has defiled in uncleanness … but his soul also he has polluted … but … soul … Spirit… be … together … they touch … and the Spirit touches it; his body, however … touches it … of baptism … in … Reason, too, is inferior to the Spirit, so that the body may be washed in water, while the soul, for its part, in the Spirit, or rather they both may be washed in the Spirit, because when the soul is purified by the Spirit, the body also becomes purified as soon as the nipples have been anointed. And when it (scil. the body) is anointed by the Spirit, it …

3.  … of the soul, that is the words, holy and true and pure, with their superior wisdom. The ark, too, keeps the Law, that is, a wooden box overlaid with pure gold on the inside and outside that it may keep the salutary Tables of the Law. Such is also the nature of anointing and washing which were created for the salvation of the mankind, it (scil. the salvation) being effected by two elements, that is, the Spirit and water. Be not surprised that the Holy Spirit is united with the senses of the soul …  This is the wind. Then how will man, too, be not moved by the Holy Spirit, he who is made superior to all other species in the whole material world? I am speaking about man. It is not by material spirit, that is, the wind, that he is moved, but by the Holy Spirit… man … that is … Spirit…

4.  liken (?) them to those things that produce water. Fire is hot and dry and, at the same time, it is spiritual, because it soars up high. It is, furthermore, moved by the spirit, that is, the wind. That is why it was said that it was spiritual. Water, however, and the air are wet and psychic. That is why … and … wet … The wind (raises?) waves … the first one, because the wind, this one alone associates with water. The following entities, however, are hostile to each other, namely the entities wet and dry, that is, liquid and dry, and cold and hot, that is, those things that produce cold and those that produce heat. And the earth is a receiver of them all together, because it is supported by water and fire and the air, having effected a perfect harmony of those who are hostile to each other through the communion of the Spirit…

5.  … those which are hostile to each other, that is, … and those things that … of matter. And they … they are assembled together by … the earth. And man is a receiver of both classes, the dry as well as the wet substances. He is the domicile of the soul. It is necessary that man should be washed through the Spirit and water, that is, those, through which he gained strength and became pure into his salvation. Because if the soul is from the Spirit of God, for it is written thus: “…” … And as for the flesh, he made it out of the ground, while the soul, it is in the flesh. Out of all these man came into being. It is necessary that the Spirit and water should be united with the flesh, that which is out of the ground. And the Spirit … before …

6.  … to the Spirit. The Spirit is from God, and man, too, was made by the hand of God. And if the Spirit is beloved by God and water is sanctified by the Spirit, the earth is made firm by … and man is united with the Logos … and therefore is immortal, too. And if he is immortal, then he is the Son of God, having been … many … God, whose image and likeness is his creation, the Spirit and the soul. And he also accepted the True Logos, through whom he became immortal after his resurrection from the dead. And if immortal he is, then he is a god, and … is a god … God …

7.  … of this sort … Christ Jesus and those who will rise from the dead. And if you become immortal, O man, through faith and baptism and through the Holy Spirit. Since it is for you that the descent of the Spirit took place, and Christ’s coming down into the water, and the voice of John the Baptist, and the acceptance of the Lord in the Jordan, and the communion of baptism; and since fire is destined to consume the universe on account of sin … is water; and the Spirit brings to naught salvation because of sin; and the wings, it is a flight from the evil things. That is why our Saviour came into the world. He prepared a spiritual laver out of Holy Water  and Pure Spirit, that, in which, after the immersion of his creature in it, he kept him (i.e. man) hidden like Noah … the world … man … in … in order that…

8.  … will ascend into the midst of the pure on the right side of the Father who reigns forever. And that this washing is not alien to man, and that the mystery of baptism is not polluted, either, and that the doctrine of baptism is not new, I shall show it in truth with the help of examples … and the full image of the world. He laid a division between each element according to … that they all may exist in good order. The flame of fire he divided from the height, and the dry land he divided from water, and the sea he surrounded with the land. And the air, liquid and wet, he placed it spread over the earth … And fire is a hot essence. He put it within them all … move them in their …

9.  … and … divide … among the elements. When you see them keeping their communion with one another through … in the order of the movement, because they have a regular movement and a perfect harmony. You will observe these (i.e. the movement and the harmony) among them if you pay attention to their relationship to one another. For the sky kisses the earth, secretly, by shedding light on it, day and night. That is properly why the earth … its … the form of a mat (i.e. a smooth surface, plane) in the middle of a row (line?), because the sky always goes round the earth. And the air, too, was liquid and wet, from its communion with the dry land, it spreads and flows and produces the wind that nourishes the earth, so that it may bring forth fruits and all kinds of animals. And the earth, too, being …

10.  and you see, furthermore, the sun on high. This one, through the rotation of its fire, goes down onto the ocean and immerses itself into it after the great toil of its daily course, in order that the sun hidden in the ocean may receive a new force by the cooling and that it may thus find strength enough to pierce through the thickness of the air. And when it goes up into the air on the dazzling chariot and when it completes its course of the day … of their course on account of their sympathy towards those which produce cold to be come wet … are tools. They struggle with them and look for the substance that produces cold … they … the essence of fire that has a communion and a fellowship with the wet essence that produces cold. And if fire is hot and dry, having a communion and a fellowship with those which struggle with it, namely, the wet and those which produce cold, then why does the flame come forth from the earth … ? …

11.  … the rational soul by the Holy Spirit. Because the pure soul is holy and it can receive … of God, exactly as the earth can receive the elements all together … Water cannot receive them all and neither can the air accordingly. And the earth alone can receive all the elements, because it is a receiver of fire, since fire is from stone and stone belongs to the earth, and it (scil. the earth) is also a receiver … from the sky by the dew, and it is a receiver of the breath of the wind, for it is moved by the spirit of the wind. If, however, the earth is a receiver of the elements that are hostile to one another, that (scil. the earth) which was created by the word of God, then in a much greater degree will man, who was moulded by God, be a receiver, too, of… but… of God … his soul … by … to receive …

12.  He (scil. man) is a partaker of the Spirit through God. The essence, however, of the soul is spirit. That is why man has so much in common with the Spirit and water, those, in whom having been purified, he became the immortal son of God. For many reasons which are as follows: on account of … of God … the soul … because of … image of… of the Logos … he … namely … of water … the whole world. For if he could endure fire and water and the Spirit … therefore … of God … new, this one, in him he combined and united the elements with the Divinity into a unity, having shown by this act that man was superior to the whole world, because he is rational and has nothing in common only with stone, but … immortality … because …

13.  and he lacks … body and soul. He arrayed himself in the robes of immortality and put on the imperishable panoply. If man, however, became immortal, he also became god. And if he becomes god after his resurrection from the dead, through the Spirit and water, it means that he has already partaken of them. As for me, I … in … imperishable … the soul … while he … while they

14.  … life … rise … who will receive the … of baptism … He who came to the Jordan, the one (scil. the Holy Spirit) who danced round Christ like a virgin and like a dove, the one, too, who preached to the Apostles, the one who abides in the churches, the one who appears over him who is baptized … again … know

15.  … If you do not lie … you are born anew. If you do not worship idols, you are born anew. If you, furthermore, are not possessed with the lust for pleasures, you are born anew. If you are washed from many impure passions, you are born anew. If you remove the burden of sin from yourself, you are born anew. If you divest yourself of … “Cease from doing your evil deeds. Learn to do well; relieve the oppressed one; judge the orphan, justify the widow, and come, and let us have an agreement together”, said the Lord, “and if your sins are like purple dye, I shall make them white like snow If you are willing and obedient to me, the good of the land you will eat.”[Is. 1:17-18] It is of the purity of baptism that he is speaking, because divesting yourself of evil means arraying yourself in good …

16.  … passion … and the false father, he confesses the Father in truth He goes from the belligerent tyrant and enlists himself as warrior under the King of peace. He divests himself of his suit of armour and arrays himself in the panoply of peace. He divests himself of slavery and arrays himself in freedom. He divests himself of fornication and arrays himself in purity. He divests himself of ruin and arrays himself in immortality … like the sun, which is blazing in the rays of justice. He, however, who is superior to all these, he rises, shining, and is confessed as Godly Son. It is for your sake, O man, that the confession of the Father came upon the Son at the time when it was signified from the heavens to those who were there (scil. on the bank of the Jordan at the time of Christ’s baptism) …

17.  … move … wash … “The river of God was filled with water.” And again: “You visited the earth, you watered it. May its furrows be watered! Multiply its seed! It will rejoice in the drops and sprout up. You will bless the crown of the year with your goodness,”[Ps. 64 (65):9-11] Even as a river which was filled and a … and a crown which … and a man? …

18. … if … he … Moses … a sweet source and he quenched the thirst of the people of Israel, so that they glorified God through Moses the wise prophet. And again, when Naaman the Syrian, the captain, had washed himself seven times in the Jordan, he cleansed himself from leprosy and arrayed himself in salvation …

I omit the translations of tiny fragments.

Not incredibly helpful stuff, so clearly there is much room for work to be done on this.

Elanskaya, The Literary Coptic Manuscripts in the A.S. Pushkin State Fine Arts Museum in Moscow, plate 59

A Welsh Saint – The “Historia” of St Melangell

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A rather charming twitter post from here, about a saint unknown to me:

In Wales, the 27th of May is the feast day of St Melangell, the patron saint of hares.

St Melangell’s patronage of hares is attributed to a story of how she protected a hare (under her dress) from a pack of snarling hunting dogs belonging to a Welsh prince, named Brochwel. After hearing how she came to be in Wales (she was an Irish princess who had fled an arranged marriage in Ireland) Prince Brochwel granted her the land on which she was standing.

There, St. Melangell founded – and became abbess to – a community of nuns. She lived out her life in this place and community, until her death, 37 years later.

Hares and other wild animals behaved as though tamed in St. Melangell’s company, and miracles were attributed to them.

Her church still stands today at Pennant Melangell in the Berwyn Mountains, and remains a place of pilgrimage.

Art by Jemima Jameson

St Melangell, by Jemima Jameson

This led me to wonder how we know all this, and what the literary source for it might be.

St Melangell appears to be a Welsh-only saint. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints gives her feast day as May 27.

Her legend is preserved in a 15th century Latin text, the Historia Divae Monacellae, – the use of “divus” itself indicating a 15th century date or later.  This is not included in the Acta Sanctorum.  There is a well-referenced Wikipedia article about the text.

The most recent text and translation of the Historia is H. Pryce, “A New Edition of Historia Divae Monacellae”, in: Montgomeryshire Collections 82 (1994) p. 23–40.  Montgomeryshire Collections is the journal of the Powysland Club, who have a web page about it here.

I rather despaired of locating the Pryce article, but I was quite wrong.  The National Library of Wales have a collection of Welsh Journals Online.  The interface is a bit awkward, but if you drill down the Montgomeryshire Collections are here.

Volume 82 is here, with one of those useless online browsers that civil servants try to foist on us and that neither they nor anybody else uses.  More usefully there is a text version of the material also, although I did not look at this.

There is a direct permalink to the article at hdl:10107/1271085.

It does not seem possible to download the whole volume.  But there is a way to download individual articles, which is easy to miss, easier to forget, and hard to find. I’ve done it twice now, and am struggling to remember how right now.  Poking at the site…

Oh yes… found it.  There’s a list of volumes on the left.  But if you scroll that list down, until vol. 82 is visible, there’s a list of articles in the current volume off-screen underneath!  Then click on it, get the article, and then click on the download link at the bottom.

The PDF contains the whole article, although it is not searchable.  But no matter.

I must say that I am deeply impressed with the National Library of Wales.  I suspect they operate on a shoestring budget, but if you want access to Welsh sources, they are very much your friends and allies.  The glitches here do not matter.  The great thing is that this obscure journal is accessible!

Let’s give the translation by Huw Pryce of the text here.

THE HISTORY OF ST MONACELLA

Once upon a time there was in Powys a most illustrious prince by the name of Brochwel Ysgithrog, also earl of Chester, who was living in the town called at that time Pengwern Powys, now in fact Shrewsbury, and whose residence or dwelling stood where the College of St Chad the bishop is now situated. But the same excellent prince gave in alms, and conceded in perpetuity for himself and his heirs, his aforesaid residence or manor by his own pure generosity for the use and service of God.

When at length on a certain day in AD 604 the said prince had gone hunting to a certain place, called Pennant in Welsh, within the said principality of Powys, and where the hunting dogs of the same prince had aroused a hare, he and the dogs pursued the hare until they came to a certain large and thorny bramble bush. In that bramble bush indeed he found a certain virgin beautiful in appearance praying as devoutly as possible, and given up to divine contemplation, together with the said hare lying down under the hem or girdle of her garment, with its face turned towards the dogs boldly and calmly. Then as the prince [camel shouting, ‘Catch it, pups, catch it!’, the more he shouted to urge them on, the more distant and farther away the dogs retreated and fled from the little animal howling. Finally the prince, totally astonished, asked the virgin for how long she had lived on his lands alone in such a wilderness. The virgin said in reply, ‘For the past fifteen years, nor have I looked at the face of a man at all during that time.’

Afterwards he asked the same virgin whose [daughter) she was, and where she had been born and come from. And she replied with all humility that she was from Ireland, the daughter of the king of lowchel, ‘And because my father had decided [that I should be given) as a wife to a great and noble man of Ireland, fleeing my native soil, God leading, I came here to serve God and the spotless Virgin with my heart and a clean body for as long as I remain.’ Then the prince asked the name of the virgin, to which she said in reply that her name was Monacella.

Then the prince, considering from the depths of his heart the well-being of the virgin in her solitude, broke forth into these words: ‘O most worthy virgin Monacella, I have discovered that you are a true handmaiden of God and the most truthful worshipper of Christ. Whence inasmuch as it pleased the highest and greatest God to bestow on a courageous hare, by your merits, safe conduct to this place and protection from the attack and pursuit of tearing and biting dogs, I give and donate these my lands to you with as willing a mind as possible for the service of God, and so that there shall be a perpetual asylum, refuge and protection in honour of your name, excellent virgin. And let no king nor prince be so rash or foolhardy towards God that he presume to drag out to anywhere any man or woman fleeing thither desiring to delight in and enjoy your protection in these lands, as long as they do not contaminate or pollute your sanctuary or asylum. If, on the other hand, any guilty person enjoying your sanctuary shall go out to do any kind of wrong, then let the free tenants called abbots of your sanctuary (who alone have cognizance of the crimes of those persons), if they shall find them to be guilty and culpable in this regard, endeavour to hand over and deliver them for punishment to the officials of Powys.’

This virgin Monacella most pleasing to God lived a solitary life, as mentioned before, in the same place for thirty-seven years and the hares, wild little animals just like tame or gentle beasts, were friends with her every day throughout her life, through whom even, with the assistance of divine clemency, miracles of different kinds are not lacking to those invoking help and the favour of good-will with the deepest feeling of heart.

After the death of the said illustrious Brochwel, his son Tysilio held the principality of Powys, then Cynan, Tysilio’s brother, afterwards Tambryd, then Curmylk and Durres the lame. All of these decreed that the said place of Pennant Melangell should be a perpetual sanctuary, asylum or most secure refuge of the wretched, confirming the acts of the said prince. The same virgin Monacella took pains with all care and diligence to institute and establish certain virgins in the same region so that they might live holily and chastely, persevering in the love of God; intent upon divine services, they used to spend their days and nights doing nothing else.

Then, as soon as the virgin Monacella herself departed from this life, a certain person by the name of Elise came to Pennant Melangell, who, desiring to ravish, seize and defile the same virgins, came to an end most wretchedly and perished suddenly.

Whoever has violated the aforementioned liberty and protected holy place of the said virgin has rarely been seen to avoid divine vengeance in this region, as one can perceive every day.

Praises to the most high God and his virgin Monacella!

“Once upon a time” is a rather loaded translation of “olim”, I think!  The text is rather notably concerned with property rights, as monastic texts so often are.

Welsh saints are something about which few of us know much.  Still interesting to see, however.

A little more on the lost “De baptismo” of Melito of Sardis in Coptic

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Ten years ago Alin Suciu proposed that a homily preserved in Sahidic Coptic in a fragmentary manuscript in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow was in fact a genuine work by second-century patristic author Melito of Sardis.  Remarkably his article arguing this is now about to appear, in Adamantius.  The first page is on Academia.edu here.

Here’s the abstract:

This article reexamines a fragmentary Sahidic papyrus codex in Moscow that preserves a homily on baptism and the four cosmic elements. First edited by Alla Elanskaya, the text has remained largely neglected because of its damaged state and uncertain authorship. It is argued here that the homily is best understood as an authentic work of Melito of Sardis († ca. 180 CE). A close philological investigation shows how the homily combines Aristotelian and Stoic physics with Middle Platonic philosophy, presenting Christian baptism as both the realization of cosmic harmony and the path to human deification. Its theology and stylistic features closely parallel Melito’s Peri Pascha and On the Soul and the Body. By situating the Moscow papyrus within Melito’s literary corpus, the study expands the understanding of his theology and demonstrates how second-century Christianity adapted philosophical cosmology in its reflection on baptism.

The text itself was printed back in 1991, but apparently attracted little attention.

Let’s hope that this is indeed a work of Melito!

Were the pyramids built alongside a now lost branch of the Nile?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Back in 2017, I reported on the discovery of the log book of Inspector Merer in the Wadi al-Jarf in Egypt.  Merer was the captain of one of the boats that shipped stone to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu / Cheops at Giza.

In antiquity the Nile had seven branches which emptied into the sea in the Nile Delta. We can see from tomb paintings that in those days there were tropical animals such as crocodiles and hippopotamus in Egypt.  But only two branches of the Nile delta remain today, and the crocodile has long since receded to the Sudan.  The climate in the Near East grew dryer in late antiquity, causing the Sahara to invade the cornlands of north Africa, and affecting Syria also.

Today the Nile is four miles from the plateau on which the pyramids stand.  But in antiquity the level of the Nile was higher, and there were many branches running to what are today isolated ancient Egyptian monuments.

In 2022, a study by H. Sheisha &c in PNAS (online here) revealed the existence of a lost watercourse close to the Giza plateau, which they call the Khufu branch of the Nile.1  Abstract:

The pyramids of Giza originally overlooked a now defunct arm of the Nile. This fluvial channel, the Khufu branch, enabled navigation to the Pyramid Harbor complex but its precise environmental history is unclear. To fill this knowledge gap, we use pollen-derived vegetation patterns to reconstruct 8,000 y of fluvial variations on the Giza floodplain. After a high-stand level concomitant with the African Humid Period, our results show that Giza’s waterscapes responded to a gradual insolation-driven aridification of East Africa, with the lowest Nile levels recorded at the end of the Dynastic Period. The Khufu branch remained at a high-water level (∼40% of its Holocene maximum) during the reigns of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure, facilitating the transportation of construction materials to the Giza Pyramid Complex.

The article explains:

Core drillings and subterranean engineering works for Giza’s modern urban projects have yielded stratigraphic evidence consistent with a paleo-branch of the Nile. In particular, Old Kingdom structures unearthed during these interventions offer insights into the local cultural waterscape at the time of the pyramid builders. Furthermore, the Wadi el-Jarf Papyri, discovered at a Khufu-age port on the Red Sea coast (9, 12, 13), attest to the existence of such a harbor complex, called Ro-She Khufu (“Entrance to the Lake…” or “…Basin of Khufu”). The Journal of Merer, a large corpus of these papyri, describes the transport of limestone from Toura, ∼17 km from the Giza Plateau, to the construction site of the Great Pyramid of Khufu. A striking parallel exists between the names of the basins and waterways in the papyri and the spatial organization of Giza’s Fourth Dynasty waterscape, as reconstructed by archaeologists (5).

The fluvial-port-complex hypothesis postulates that pyramid builders cut through the western levee of the Khufu branch of the Nile and dredged basins down to river depth in order to harness the annual 7-m rise of the flood like a hydraulic lift, bringing the higher water levels to the base of the Giza plateau (5, 6).

Building upon this, a further article in 2024 by E. Ghoneim suggests that the lost branch of the Nile – which they call the Ahramat or “Pyramid” branch – was much more extensive than just the Giza area.  They propose that it ran close to thirty-one pyramids.   The Ghoneim article is published and open-access in Nature here.2

Abstract:

The largest pyramid field in Egypt is clustered along a narrow desert strip, yet no convincing explanation as to why these pyramids are concentrated in this specific locality has been given so far. Here we use radar satellite imagery, in conjunction with geophysical data and deep soil coring, to investigate the subsurface structure and sedimentology in the Nile Valley next to these pyramids. We identify segments of a major extinct Nile branch, which we name The Ahramat Branch, running at the foothills of the Western Desert Plateau, where the majority of the pyramids lie. Many of the pyramids, dating to the Old and Middle Kingdoms, have causeways that lead to the branch and terminate with Valley Temples which may have acted as river harbors along it in the past. We suggest that The Ahramat Branch played a role in the monuments’ construction and that it was simultaneously active and used as a transportation waterway for workmen and building materials to the pyramids’ sites.

They add:

The branch appears to have a surface channel depth between 2 and 8 m, a channel length of about 64 km and a channel width of 200–700 m, which is similar to the width of the contemporary neighboring Nile course. The size and longitudinal continuity of the Ahramat Branch and its proximity to all the pyramids in the study area implies a functional waterway of great significance.

Great significance indeed.

  1. H. Sheisha, D. Kaniewski, N. Marriner, M. Djamali, G. Younes, Z. Chen, G. El-Qady, A. Saleem, A. Véron, & C. Morhange, “Nile waterscapes facilitated the construction of the Giza pyramids during the 3rd millennium BCE,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 119 (37) e2202530119, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2202530119, (2022).[↩]
  2. Ghoneim, E., Ralph, T.J., Onstine, S. et al. The Egyptian pyramid chain was built along the now abandoned Ahramat Nile Branch. Communications Earth & Environment 5, 233 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-024-01379-7[↩]

Eusebius of Emesa, Homily 1 – Latin text

Posted on by Roger Pearse

As promised, yesterday I scanned the text of the ancient Latin translation of the first homily of Eusebius of Emesa (fl. ca. 330), “De arbitrio, voluntate Pauli and domini passione”, “On freewill, the will of Paul, and the passion of the Lord”.  This work has the reference number CPG 3525.  In fact I learn from the CPG that this is one of the few homilies by Eusebius of Emesa where the original Greek is preserved; printed in PG 86: 536-545.

Here’s the scan, in MS Word .docx format, of the edition by E. M. Buytaert, Eusebe d’ Emese. Discours conserves en latin, vol. I; series: Spicilegium sacrum Louaniense 26, Louvain (1953):

I’ve not been through this, so there are certainly OCR errors in it.  Indeed I just spotted one while reading over the first sentences: “Stephanus” had been read as “Stephaniis” (!) which certainly confused the machine translator.  You can only get clean scans if you manually type the thing yourself. Alternatively you get much better texts if you work with each word and sentence, as you do when translating.

The only manuscript source for the homily is MS Troyes 523 (12th century), otherwise known as the Codex Trecensis 523.  A microfilm of this can be accessed here.  I’ve posted this picture before, but here is the picture of the opening:

And here is the corresponding page from E. Buytaert’s edition:

I.e.

EUSEBIUS EMESENUS: DE ARBITRIO, VOLUNTATE PAULI ET DOMINI PASSIONE.

[I] Paulus lapidabatur ob Dominum Iesum. Qui properabat et laetabatur ut Stephanus lapidaretur et qui persequebatur et interficiebat Stephanum ut non praedicaret Christum ante, invenitur post agnitionem Christi haec pro Christo pati, quae adversum Christum ante gerebat. Antequam enim lumen videret, putabat palpans invenire se viam; viso autem lu­mine, agnovit et viam.

The heading given by Buytaert is taken from the coloured list of sermons – De Filio is the second – at the start.  What a pity that no coloured images of this are available.  But full credit to the French for getting the microfilms online.

It’s also interesting to see the punctuation; that Buytaert starts a new sentence with “Qui” where no capital appears in the manuscript, and does not where “Et” is marked in the manuscript.

Should we attend to medieval punctuation?  Is it even ancient?  Or the product of some monastic copyist?  I must confess that I do not know the answer.  It would be interesting to know if there is a handbook or paper on how to convert what we find in the manuscripts into a modern punctuation scheme.  I slightly suspect that each editor makes it up as he goes along.  But surely there should be rules?

But is the homily interesting?  Is it worth our time?  Well, I’ve uploaded this file into Deepseek, as a way to get a quick no-guarantees output in English.  On the face of it?  Not very.  But maybe it will reveal more as I work with it.  More soon.