Field research on manuscripts and monasteries in Ethiopia

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Via the EthiopianLit list, I receive this intriguing announcement of a talk at Princeton University in March, which I would certainly go to, if I could.

Nobody has any idea what exists in Ethiopic.   There’s gold out there, you know?

Preserving the African Archive: Field Research on Early Manuscripts and Monasteries in Northern Ethiopia

Denis Nosnitsin, University of Hamburg
March 27, 2012 4:30 pm
127 East Pyne, Princeton University

Ethiopia has one Africa’s largest archives, with tens of thousands of written sources held in around 600 monasteries and 20,000 churches, some of which date to the early Middle Ages. Very little from these archives has received scholarly evaluation, with less than ten percent having been microfilmed or digitized and far fewer being researched or translated. A great part of this unique heritage is on the verge of extinction and urgent action needs to be taken to save it from complete disappearance.

In this talk, Dr. Nosnitsin will present information about his innovative project Ethio-Spare based at Hamburg University, funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant, and focused on digitizing the most important monastic libraries and archives in Ethiopia and creating searchable databases that will allow quantitative and qualitative research into Ethiopian literature. He will then present his own historical and philological research on two of the more important Ethiopian hagiographies. For more information, contact Wendy Laura Belcher wbelcher@princeton.edu.

Dr. Denis Nosnitsin, a research fellow at Hamburg University, is an expert in African literatures, especially that in Ge`ez (Ethiopic), Amharic, and Tigrigna, as well as in the pre-modern history of the region. He is the principal investigator of the project Ethio-SPARE. His current research is on Ethiopian hagiography and historiography, monastic manuscript collections and Ethiopian Christian manuscript culture, and historical analysis of marginal notes and documents in Ethiopian manuscripts. His  degree in African (Ethiopian) philology is from St. Petersburg State University. He has published in Aethiopica, Orientalia Christiana Periodica, Scrinium, and Africana Bulletin. For more information, see
http://www1.uni-hamburg.de/ethiostudies/ETHIOSPARE/ethiospare.html 

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What kind of Thule am I?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m off to Iceland soon, a trip booked early this year.  I hope to see the Northern Lights.  Considering the cost, I really hope to see the Northern Lights.  But man proposes, and God disposes, and it will be very well in either case.

This evening I was wondering if there was any classical angle to Iceland, and I found myself remembering Antonius Diogenes, The incredible wonders beyond Thule.  This is a Greek novel of unknown date, preserved now only in Photius’ Bibliotheca, codex 166.  I made a translation of this from the French here long ago.

I don’t know anything about the classical idea of “Thule” at all.  I find a certain amount in the Wikipedia article, which gives a series of classical sources including Strabo and Pliny.

I have doubts that any classical traveller ever made it so far as Iceland, however.

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The church that Constantine built over the grave of St. Peters, 1450

Posted on by Roger Pearse

We all know that during the 4th century the emperor Constantine constructed a Roman basilica over the grave of St. Peter.  This was replaced during the renaissance with the current structure, as the old church had become structurally unsound during the interval.

A reconstruction of the old church, drawn in 1891, is here:

It would be interesting to know the authorities on which this drawing was based.  Are there, indeed, old sketches of the basilica?  There surely ought to be!  And it was a Roman basilica, preserved intact, so should be of interest to classicists.

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Google’s personal search makes the search engine useless

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’d noticed for some time that I wasn’t getting very good results from searches on Google.  Kate Phizackerley explains why:

I really hate what Google has done with search.  If I search for the Valley of the Kings of KV64 I looking for something I don’t already know, for news.  It’s bad enough for Valley of the Kings and even worse for KV64 because my News from the Valley of the Kings is the top blog on the subject and I have written much of the material about KV64.

Google’s new personalised search algorithm makes matters worse.  It shrinks the world.  So as well as News from the Valley of the Kings, half of the images shown are photographs I took and the front pages adds my review of Nick Reeves’ Complete Valley of the Kings on Egyptological.  Far from helping me to find new material it shrinks my world, not just down to things I already know, but down to things I have written.  You’d have to be extremely narcissistic to like a search that works like that.

Fortunately it only works if you are logged in so I work with two browsers and only log in to Google on one of them, the other I use for searching.  I can see the advantage of geo-searches.  If I type in Sutton cinema, I like the fact search shows me the programme.  That is useful.  But not search which makes me the apparent centre of the World Wide Web.

That calls for a test.  So, I fired up Safari and went to the google.co.uk page and ran a test for “Roger Pearse”.  It gave one set of results.  Then I swapped over to IE, where I am logged into Google, and did the same — and I got another set.  They were not the same.

Neither set was particularly special.  But you’d expect consistency!

This is like the problem with Google Books Search where Google doesn’t show books to non-Americans — annoying but Europublishers threatened them — but worse, doesn’t show them in the search results so you never know that you’re missing them.

Stop it, Google.  Stop doing this kind of thing.  A search should give the same results.  Anything else is a pain in the butt, unless or until you can (a) see the modifiers being used, explicit, obvious, listed at the top of the page and (b) decide to turn them off.

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How do we search sites that no longer exist?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There’s a lot of material in the WaybackWhenMachine at Archive.org.  Images of websites from days gone by, full of material that may not be online now but that we might like to see if we could.

But how?  If we know the site, we can go to it and look through.

What we need is a Google for the WaybackWhenMachine.  And this does not seem to exist.

Anyone know of anything?

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Christian bookshops — the key part of the local church?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I did something unusual today.  I didn’t buy a book from Amazon.

Not that I buy a book every day from Amazon: I mean that I decided to buy a book, but to order it in from my local Christian bookshop.

Almost certainly it will cost more.  But the Christian bookshop is a funny thing.  That’s because it isn’t really just a bookshop.

A friend gave me the name of the manager of my local one at Christmas, and I’ve popped in and introduced myself.  Suddenly I find myself connected to a network of people who know people, or know of someone.  Today I wanted to learn of someone connected to me who was working in the church in a town in the south of England, in order to  help someone.  The lady knew of someone.  For the managers of these places effectively function as an information exchange.

The pastoral role of the Christian bookshop is invisible unless you know that it is there.  Yet this too is critical — you can go in, and find people to talk to.  The churches themselves — I mean real churches — are lamentably bad at working together in a single small town, and the common need of their members for books means that the bookshop acts as a centre, a place where notices are displayed and people congregate. 

Some bookshops take it a step further and add on a coffee shop.  St Aldates bookshop in Oxford ca. 1980 did just that.  It was very cramped, but then students don’t mind that at all.  I often went there as a convenient place to meet.

Christian bookshops came into being in the 60’s and 70’s because bookshops and news agents would not stock popular Christian paperback books or publications.  You could order them, but this involved a long wait, no chance of browsing and often was frankly a faff. 

Consequently the publishers started to set up retail outlets where their wares could be displayed.  Since Christians always wanted the books of Michael Green or David Watson, they naturally became information exchanges.

The convenience of internet shopping means that it will usually be quicker and cheaper to buy a book at Amazon.   That was not the case back in the day, since the Net Book Agreement standardised book prices anyway. 

So the problem is that the modern Christian bookshop has no real economic basis.  The publishers are finding them unviable.  They can now sell their books through Amazon.

Yet the bookshop is needed.  Indeed if you want some advice on books to buy — as I did today — what use is Amazon?

I don’t know what the answer is, I admit.  Let us pray that God finds a way around this.  Change is inevitable; but not at the price of wiping out the bookshop.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I pulled up the OCR project for the Book of Asaph the physician in Finereader 11 this lunchtime.  It’s a 6th century Jewish medical text, which apparently contains interesting quotes from classical writers.

Readers may remember — I can hardly remember myself — that I was experimenting with deskewing the pages, increasing the brightness, etc, in order to improve OCR.

Pretty much the last thing that I did was to open the PDF and import it into FR11, without doing any work.  I ran the OCR anyway, just to see what the raw result would look like.

The raw result is certainly better than some of the rubbish that I have had to clean up in the past.  But it is far from simple.  I think deskewing etc would be the answer.  However there are 250 pages to do, one at a time.   It might be a gentle task to do some time.

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A camel for your thoughts, my dear

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In certain societies, in order for a marriage to take place, the groom must purchase the bride from her father, in return for a certain number of camels.  (I vaguely remember reading this somewhere, or perhaps heard it on the radio, so it must be true)

In others, the father is obliged to pay the groom to take his daughter away, again in livestock, i.e. camels.

One can only speculate as to why this is so.  Possibly the daughters in the first tribe are more attractive than those in the second. 

But the important thing is the central role played by the camel.  It is hardly important in which direction the camel is travelling, after all.

Which leads naturally to the question of why this foul-tempered, evil-smelling, vicious quadruped has become the medium of exchange necessary for the continuance of the human race in these tribes?

Possibly it explains the preference for raiding instead, in which obtaining a wife does not require the involvement of camels.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Proofing of the Latin text of Origen’s Homilies on Ezekiel 8-10 has completed, and I have been sent a revised text of these, plus some tweaks to the English. 

Tommy Heyne has kindly sent me a copy of his article on Tertullian and Medicine from Studia Patristica 50, for upload to the Tertullian Project.  I’ll do this in a day or two.  Tertullian’s works contain considerable allusions to ancient medicine, including fragments of writers like Soranus, and he refers to abortions performed by these bunglers in condemning the practice.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This afternoon I sat down with Origen, Homilies on Ezekiel 8-10 (and Jerome’s preface), and compared our translation with the 2010 ACW one.  The object of the exercise was to locate any serious differences in understanding, and allow us to revise the translation if the ACW version suggested an improvement.  I am pleased to say that I think all the deviations so far are in our favour.  There is one obscure section where I am not convinced that we are right, but we’ll see.  I’ve passed this material over to the translator for review.  I still have homilies 11-14 to do, but I think I have done what I will do today.  It is hard work!

This evening I’ve been playing with Abbyy Finereader 11, using the PDF’s of the unpublished translation of Book of Asaph the Physician, discovered by Douglas Galbi at the US National Library of Medicine.  I don’t know a sausage about this text, I should say at once, so it’s a voyage of discovery here.  I’m not committed to OCR’ing it either!  But it’s a convenient vehicle for experimentation.

Now in the past I found that Finereader 11 wouldn’t play with my Finereader 10 projects, so I ignored it.  But starting afresh, I’m discovering some interesting and useful new facilities.

The photos of Asaph are all rather skewed.  This is inevitable in photographing books, unless you can press the pages on a glass to get them flat.

But in Finereader 11, I find that some new tools have been added to the image editor.  There’s a very nice facility to adjust for “trapezium” effects — and it works well.  Even better is the line straightener.  Also there is a brightness/contrast control. If the type on the far side of the paper shows through, you can lose it by increasing the brightness.

The image files for Asaph are pretty bulky, so things are slow.  But I was able to turn a page that was skewed to blazes back into something straight.  Skewed pages require intervention on pretty much every line, which slows OCR to a crawl.  But Finereader 11 can cope with this.  I’d like the facility to apply the same deskew to a bunch of images, rather than one-by-one, tho.

Something Abbyy could usefully do is allow us to change the background colour of the OCR window.  The green-ish coloured images result in a green-ish coloured background in the text window, for some reason, and this is very unpleasant and impossible to remove.

One pleasing thing that I see has at last arrived: an “insert symbol” facility.  Long overdue and very welcome it is too!

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