Still plodding on with Ibn Abi Usaibia

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The process of OCR’ing Ibn Abi Usaibia’s History of Physicians is continuing, and the proofing has reached page 600.  This is something of a milestone, in that this leaves only one more “chunk” — the portion from 601-946, which the translators thought of as “book 4” (although they did not divide the first 600 pages into books).

I’ve been noticing changes in the way the text is translated.  In the last few pages, the translator has started to reference the authors named with a footnote linking to Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur.  This is welcome in a way, but of course indicates a change in approach.

A much less welcome change is that, from Ibn Sina onwards, the translator is not bothering to translate the names of many of the works written by the authors listed, leaving them in a transliteration of the Arabic.  This is a really serious defect, and one that may require attention.  It will be annoying if, in order to make this useful to the rest of us, I have to hire an Arabist to translate these bits of text.

Likewise there are embedded chunks of verse, mostly omitted by the translator.  I feel less compunction here — it is unlikely that most of  these will give us anything.

Kopf, the translator, must have been under a rather strange brief when making the translation.  He has represented all the long vowels and the sub-linear dots, albeit doing so with his typewriter must have been painful, and he doesn’t always catch every one.  But for whom would it be useful to write “Allāh” rather than “Allah”?  Only, surely, to those who could read Arabic anyway?  I can’t help feeling that he shouldn’t have indicated either.  In English we don’t use these things.

My own approach in my transcription is to represent the long vowels, but not the sub-linear dots.  In many cases the characters with the latter are simply not present in the common fonts anyway, as I have found while proofing.  I’d like to have them, of course; but I’m not sure it’s worth the effort.

I hope that all these long vowels won’t mean that searches in Google and Bing don’t find important matches, tho.

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The lost preface to Suetonius’ “Lives of the 12 Caesars”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Many will remember the BBC series I, Claudius, which was based on Robert Graves novel of the same name.  The series drew heavily on his translation of the Vita Caesarum of Suetonius Tranquillus.  This was composed under Hadrian in the early 2nd century and published in 120 AD.

Suetonius covered the lives of twelve Caesars, from Julius Caesar down to the murder of Domitian in 93 AD.  His gossipy, colourful work, has always been popular.

Few perhaps are aware that it has reached us only in an incomplete form.  The opening pages of the work are missing in all the handwritten copies that we now have.  It seems that only a single copy from ancient times, now lost, made it into the 9th century — not an unusual pattern for a classical text — but that this copy had lost the opening quaternion.  This means that we do not have the prologue, nor the opening for the Life of Julius Caesar.

I learn from L. D. Roberts’ excellent work on the transmission of Latin literature[1] that as late as the sixth century, John the Lydian had seen a copy which was complete, and included a prologue with a dedication to Septicius Clarus.   This interesting statement is referenced to p.ix-x of the 1858 edition of K. Roth, which is described as the standard critical edition.  I thought it would be interesting to look and see precisely what is said.

Fortunately the Roth edition is easily accessible on Google books.  Here is p.ix, where the facts are laid out in the rather less than straightforward form popular with certain editions of the period.

On p.286 is the text of the extract from John the Lydian concerning the prologue:

Τράγκυλλος τοὺς τῶν Καισάρων βίους ἐν γράμμασιν ἀποτίνων Σεπτικιῳ, ὃς ἦν ὕπαρχος τῶν πραιτωριανῶν σπειρῶν ἐκ̕ αὐτοῦ, πραίφεκτον αὐτὸν τῶν πραιτωριανων ταγμάτων καὶ φαλάγγων ἡγεμόνα τυγχάνειν ἐδήλωσεν.

 This is apparently from On the Roman magistrates, 2. 6, and may be found on p.171 of the Bonn edition.  It tells us that “Tragkullos” — i.e. Tranquillus — in the “letter” or prologue dedicated the lives of the Caesars to Septicius, who was prefect of the Praetorian cohort. (I can’t quite make sense of the titles given above).  I think it is a reasonable inference from this statement that John had seen a copy with such a preface.

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  1. [1]L. D. Reynolds (ed.), Texts and Transmissions: A Survey of the Latin Classics. Oxford: Clarendon, 1983, p.399, at the start of the article on Suetonius written by Michael Winterbottom.↩

Methodius in Russian to go online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

As I remarked a while back, the works of Methodius were published in Russian  by Evgraf I. Loviagin (d. 1909).  The second edition appeared in 1905, and although very rare, a copy does exist at the University of Chicago.  So I wrote to them and asked for a copy, but heard nothing.

Today I’ve had an email back:

We can digitize this book here and the fee would be $20.00 US. The book is in poor condition and we will put it online with the other books we scan locally. We would send you a pdf file or point you to a url for it. Would you like us to proceed?

I’ve said ‘yes’, of course.  It’s 289 pages, so that’s not really very much.  Quite how I send a piddling sum like that I don’t know — maybe stick a 20 dollar bill inside a card! — but I’ll manage it somehow.

Good news, all the same; and making it generally available is also a good thing.  Let’s hope the results will OCR OK.

Well done, the University of Chicago.

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Where do we find a primer on Christian history?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An email, evidently from someone fairly young, reached me today.

I don’t find many who might give me some deeper information about the historic document of the Christian faith.

I am interested in learning more about the NT cannonization process.  I understand the Ethiopians, Orthodox, Protestants and Catholics have differences between their Cannons.   Which one do you believe is correct?

I wish there was a good book that I could recommend on this; solid, soundly referenced, and accurate.  I don’t know of one.

I’ve scribbled some notes in a response, but I also asked what sort of things people want to know.  Someone ought to produce such a book, I feel.

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No more typewriters (Greek or otherwise)

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In March this year I asked whether anyone knew where a mechanical typewriter fitted up to produce Greek characters might be found.  As might be expected, the answers suggested that they were few and far between.

Today I read in the Daily Mail that the last typewriter factory in the world is to close.

Godrej and Boyce – the last company left in the world that was still manufacturing typewriters – has shut down its production plant in Mumbai, India with just a few hundred machines left in stock.

Although typewriters became obsolete years ago in the west, they were still common in India  – until recently.  Demand for the machines has sunk in the last ten years as consumers switch to computers.

The company’s general manager, Milind Dukle, told India’s Business Standard newspaper: ‘We are not getting many orders now. … ‘Till 2009, we used to produce 10,000 to 12,000 machines a year. …

The company is now down to its last  200 machines – the majority of which are Arabic language models.

The firm began production in the 1950s – when Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru  described the typewriter as a symbol of India’s emerging independence and  industrialisation. It was still selling 50,000 models annually in the early 1990s, but last year it sold less than 800 machines.

Treasure your typewriter.  It will not be easy to replace.

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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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