Modern scholarship on the origins of Mithras

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A correspondent drew my attention to this interesting statement in a current handbook.  He also added some glosses (in square brackets) to make it generally comprehensible:

Cumont’s [late-19th- and early-20th-century] reconstruction suffered a mortal blow at the first conference of Mithraic studies, held in Manchester in 1971 (GORDON, 1975), and has not been revived since.  The past twenty-five years have instead given rise to many—mutually exclusive—theories on the origin and nature of the Mithraic mysteries, which virtually all share a stress on the absence of [clear] links between [Iranian] Zoroastrianism and [largely post-Christian Greco-Roman] Mithraism.[1].

That seems to hit the nail on the head.

The Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible is not a handbook that I have encountered before.  But the material on Mithra/Mithras — present in this volume because of the names Mithredath (Ezra 1:8) and Mithradates (1 Esdras 2:12) — seems interesting.  It is a digest of secondary literature, naturally enough, and I found that it was particularly useful for Mitra, the Persian deity, and nicely drew together the various seemingly contradictory elements that make up the aspects of this god.

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  1. [1]H. J. W. Drijvers & A. F. de Jong, “Mithras,” Dictionary of deities and demons in the Bible (Eerdmans/Brill, 1999), p. 579↩

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Today was taken up with a trip for family reasons.  But I did manage to correct a few more pages of Ibn Abi Usaibia this evening.

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The seven initiations of Mithras in a bronze plaque in Budapest

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In the Budapest National Museum, there is a rather splendid bronze plaque depicting a tauroctony.  Julianna Lees has uploaded to Picasa this photo, which I came across this evening.  (I hope that link works, by the way: for some reason it isn’t at all obvious what the URL is).  She gives the date of the item as 213 AD.

While looking at it intently, something caught my eye.  Along the bottom are seven figures (you’ll have to click on the image to see it full size).

Now the number seven in the cult of Mithras always reminds us of the seven grades of initiation.  Is this, perhaps, what we are looking at?

Notice that all of them seem to be wearing armour.  And each of them has something different over their right shoulder.  The third from the left has horns on his head and has something — a torch over his shoulder.  The third from the right has a caduceus behind him and a winged helmet.  The middle one seems to have a bird on his head — a crow?

I am by no means sure of what I am looking at.  But once again it highlights the possibility of gaining more information from a comparative study of the monuments.

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Problems upgrading from IE8 to IE9 on a Sony Vaio on Windows 7

Posted on by Roger Pearse

For some months I have been using Internet Explorer 8, when I really wanted to upgrade to IE 9.  But I just couldn’t!  When I tried, the installation seemed to work; then my PC would reboot; and then it would come up in black and white, attempting to set “personal settings”, and would just hang.

Nothing I could do would fix this.  Even if I went to the Advanced Options in IE, and tried to Reset to factory settings, this would hang too.

This evening I finally managed it.  Since I never actually found a page which explained the problem, here are my thoughts.

Firstly, I usually used the 32-bit version of IE8, rather than the 64 bit version.  This was on Windows 7 64-bit.  The reason for this was that IE8 64-bit did not support flash, so a lot of sites did not display their content.  The Flash driver for 64 bit IE8 never did arrive, as far as I can tell.  But I don’t think doing the Reset on the 32-bit does any good.  You need to do whatever you do on the “main” version.

Secondly … you can’t reset IE8 while it is running.  This was the breakthrough.  Instead, close down all your IE instances, and then do Start … Run … inetcpl.cpl.  This is the Control Panel options for IE, and you can access it without IE running.  I was able to do a reset to factory settings OK!  Then, when I started IE8 — using  the 64-bit one, you may be sure — it started normally.

Then, from the 64-bit IE8, I clicked on the IE9 icon and did the install.  I closed IE8 as it ran — no reason to have it open.  I also paused Kaspersky Internet Security — which notoriously interferes with a lot of things.

And … bliss!  IE9 installed just fine.

At least Google should now stop nagging me about using an old version.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m still chopping away at Ibn Abi Usaibia, and I’m on p.463 now.  <sfx:groan>  I’m almost sure this was less hard work ten years ago.  Of course the OCR software wasn’t as good back then.  Maybe it’s just my imagination.  I shall have some time over the next couple of weeks to make real progress with this, tho — a training course that I had booked for the week after next is not going to run.  This leaves me at a loose end, suddenly and unexpectedly. 

The first two pages of the translation of Methodius, De lepra have come through and I think that they are basically sound.  The translator actually translated the entirety of the page and laid it out in Word, notes and apparatus and all, which was rather impressive.  At the moment we’re discussing what to do with all of Bonwetsch’s notes: first a set of biblical and other references, and then an apparatus.  It looks as if we’ll just translate a few of the major notes where these would affect the meaning.

But I haven’t managed to pay for any of it yet.  Indeed I’m still learning how www.peopleperhour.com’s website works.  But the system requires a large deposit, which I have paid.  Thankfully this can be done from Paypal, so your purchases of CDROM’s etc can be used to fund the new work directly.   I have no strong feelings either way, so far, about whether www.peopleperhour.com is a good place to get work done.  I suppose that means that it is basically going well.

One interesting problem is that, while the translator knows his German, he isn’t familiar with the bible, or the ecclesiastical-speak that we find in so many patristic works.  One sentence confused him rather seriously, because he didn’t recognise the reference to the parable of the mustard seed.

Nor could this be expected, necessarily — a general translator probably specialises in contemporary documents where everyone is thinking in the same culture-pattern, whatever language they are writing those common thoughts in.  We, on the other hand, are accustomed to work which is honeycombed with biblical language and ideas. 

But it’s a warning to us all, in a way.  Material that we think is clear and obvious does in fact involve a jargon, and some unusual ways of assembling sentences and referring out to the biblical text.

I wish Bonwetsch had written in French.  I could probably have done the whole text myself in a day or two.  But German always hurts, when I have to translate it.  I suppose it just means that I need to read much more stuff in German, and get used to it, in the way I did for French.  But when would I get the time?

UPDATE: 9pm, I’ve just completed p.500, and it’s now time to back up my PC for the weekend!

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Problems with Abbyy Finereader 11

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Tonight I realised that I was getting close to the end of one section of Ibn Abi Usaibia, and that the next 350 pages was in sight.  I thought that it might be a good idea to create a Finereader project for those pages, and run the optical character recognition on them, and do a few global search-and-replaces.

So far I have been working with Finereader 10, although I did a small experiment with Finereader 11 when I got it.  But this new chunk is an obvious break-point to move up.

I started up Finereader 11, and attempted to import my settings — primarily my custom English-Arabic language setting — from FR10.  This promptly crashed.

I restarted FR11, and after a bit of fiddling recreated the language and saved it.  I then opened the PDF with the 350 files, which was fine.

Then I OCR’d the lot.  This seemed to go OK; and then started popping up horrible-looking internal error messages.  In fact it just would not allow me to view the “read” pages.

I ended up going back to FR10, which is running at the moment.  Doubtless I have done something wrong, but it is troublingly easy to crash FR11.

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Ibn Abi Usaibia update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I may be on holiday this week, but the sky is leaden grey, and has been so for a week, apart from a few hours yesterday.  So I’m working on OCR’ing Ibn Abi Usaibia’s History of Physicians.

I’ve reached page 353, where begins the entry on Hunayn ibn Ishaq, the great translator of Greek medical works into Arabic.  I hope this will be interesting.

In truth I am relieved to reach this point.  The last 50 pages have been all about the physicians of the early Abbasid period; venal, money-grubbing, treacherous, self-important and — one and all — evidently incompetent.  Reading about the palace intrigues in which all took part has been tedious enough. 

The interesting thing is that, because most of them had no medical skill, they placed their patient in danger.  They all had the same patient too — the Caliph — who alone had the money to hire them.  So the Abbassid ruler who hired them was at more danger than any of his subjects!

UPDATE: I have just reached p.400 of Ibn Abi Usaibia. 

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Methodius update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have now agreed terms to translate the Bonwetsch text of Methodius De Lepra.  The work survives in Old Slavonic, plus Greek fragments.  Bonwetsch did not print the Old Slavonic, but a German translation of it, interspersed with untranslated passages of the original Greek. 

I would have much preferred to translate the Old Slavonic, but I have no clear idea of how to obtain this, since it has never been published.

I’ve not used this translator before, so we will see what sort of job he does.  The price is quite a bit more than I really like; but I’ll do it as an experiment.  The result will go online as public domain, of course.  I shall add in whatever footnotes are useful from Bonwetsch — biblical references and the like.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve spent part of this afternoon working on proofing a fresh chunk of the translation of Ibn Abi Usaibia, History of Physicians.  I’m beginning to find that I need to make global find and replaces in each chunk for the same sorts of things: Abu needs to become Abū, Air to become Alī, Ibrāhfm change to Ibrāhīm, and so on.  Unfortunately Finereader does not give me any macro facility; I have to hit Ctrl-H and go through as much of the list as I can remember.

What is needed, obviously, is a script.  Or else a macro facility, or some kind of automation.  It needs to operate by recording what I do, and then be editable.

Anyone got any suggestions?  I have tried AutoIt and AutoHotKey, and neither has the recorder facility.  AutoHotKey claims to have it, but it is not in fact installed.

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The date of the Mithraeum of San Clemente in Rome

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Someone online told me today that the Mithraeum underneath the church of San Clemente in Rome was first century.  Of course I knew that Mithraic archaeology starts ca. 100, so I wondered what date the Mithraeum really was.

The Mithraeum was discovered by an Irish father, Fr. Joseph Mullooly, whose publication Saint Clement (1873) is online[1] says that the Mithraeum was discovered in 1869, but because of ground water excavation only became possible in 1914, that it is “of the early third century” and gives references of E. Junyent, Il titolo di San Clemente in Roma (1932), p.66-81; Vermaseren Corpus 1.156-59; and Nash (?) 2.75-78.  It is  unfortunate that none of this material is accessible online.  It would be useful to know more.

Thanks to the generosity of a friend, there is mention in JSTOR in an American journal of a 1915 article by Franz Cumont:

In C. R. Acad. Insc. [?] 1915, pp.203-211 (3 figs) F. Cumont reports on “recent archaeological work in the cellar of the church of Saint Clement in Rome.  This church rests upon the foundations of a temple of Mithra built at some unknown date in  a large house of the time of Augustus.  After much trouble water was diverted from the site which is now dry and open to inspection.  Part of a heavy wall belonging to the republican period can now be seen. Recent discoveries include a fountain which stood before the temple; numerous remains of animals, especially of wild boars; and part of the altar discovered in 1859.  It is inscribed CN. ARRIVS. CLAVDIANUS | PATER POSUIT. and dates from the end of the second century A.D.  The head of a solar deity found in 1869 is of the same date.

Don’t you just hate abbreviations?  Thanks to Google and some guessing, it seems to be ” Comptes Rendus de l’Academie des Inscriptions”.  Thankfully French journals are starting to come online, thanks to www.persee.fr, and the CRAI is here.  A  bit of poking around and the article proves to be Découvertes nouvelles au Mithréum de Saint-Clément à Rome.   But it doesn’t give us much.

The need for access to the Vermaseren’s CIMRM online remains acute.

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  1. [2]↩
  2. [1]Fr. Joseph Mullooly, Saint Clement, Pope and martyr, and his basilica in Rome, Rome, 1873.  http://www.archive.org/details/saintclement00mulluoft[/ref].  A recent topographical dictionary[2]Lawrence Richardson, A new topographical dictionary of ancient Rome, p.257: preview here.↩