Why the Wikileaks attack on the US is bad news for free speech

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Wikileaks was once a reputable website which published things that the powerful and corrupt — especially third-world states and nastier corporations — would rather we did not see.  At that time I believe it was run by a group of people, some of them Chinese dissidents.  I don’t know who this Julian Assange might be, but I believe he took over the site some time ago.

The first warning that something was wrong was when Wikileaks published the membership list of the British National Party.  This small political party is the UK party opposed to immigration.  It has been targeted for violence, much of it evidently with the concurrence of the establishment and the police, and is currently being forced out of existence by an abuse of the legal process.  Far from being powerful, its members have to take their lives and livelihoods in their hands in order to belong.  And Wikileaks denounced them, Vichy-style, to the powerful, the police, and the media.  It matters nothing here what the BNP is; but to betray the abused to the abuser, to hand over those afraid to speak to those who would punish them for so doing, this was a betrayal of the whole purpose of the site, which was to deal with attempts to suppress free speech by the powerful. 

Now we have the current scandal.  I have not been able to understand how any of us benefit by the betrayal of Afghans who have assisted our forces to the Taliban.  Making it difficult for the US to conduct diplomacy, forcing it to use force rather than talking … who benefits?  Only those corrupt and hateful regimes which hate us all too.

But Assange has done the world a far greater injury, one that will last far longer than this five days sensation.   For he has found a way to force the liberal democracies to create the means to control what appears on the internet.  He has made it a matter of national security, he has made it essential for governments to have to power to take down websites on little or no notice, and for them to have the power to bring to justice those who post on them.  The Chinese will love it!  So will the big corporations, who whisper in the ears of legislators.

Yesterday I read that domain name hosting companies were refusing to point to the Wikileaks IP address.  Today I read that Paypal has withdrawn it’s support for donations to Wikileaks.  Well and good… except that here is another precedent.  For who believes that any of this did not happen with state pressure?

No-one, in London or Washington, however inclined to freedom of speech, will be able to deny any demands that national security requires this site to be silenced, whatever it takes.  It won’t be politically possible.  And once the deed has happened, what then? 

What happens then, is that the security services on both sides of the Atlantic have a brand-new method of censorship.  And it will be used.  It will be developed.  Policies will be created.  Laws will be passed.  A whole apparatus of control will come into existence.  How can it not, unless the US is run by people heedless of their own convenience? 

Generations to come will not remember the name of Julian Assange.  But he has done more than anyone to make the internet a place where the free speech that we have all relied on will become a memory, and to create corporate control of the internet. 

It is, indeed, a  bitter Christmas present for the world. 

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Artemidorus Daldianus and the interpretation of dreams

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An email arrives today asking about Artemidorus Daldianus.  “Who?” I hear  you ask?  It seems that he lived in the 2nd century A.D., and he was a professional “diviner”.  A work of his survives “On the interpretation of dreams”, in five books.  Interestingly it was translated into Arabic by no less than Hunain ibn Ishaq.  My correspondent is doing a thesis on the work at Cairo university and asks if a Syriac version is extant.

Remarkably an English version by Robert J. White does exist, although I can’t imagine why; and likewise a French version.  A search on Google books reveals a slew of older editions, and a 1644 translation into English.

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The festival of Adonis in Alexandria

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve never really read much Greek poetry, but I found myself looking at the Idylls of Theocritus yesterday.  The 15th idyll depicts in dialogue form the hustle and bustle at the festival of Adonis — the Adonia — in Alexandria in Ptolemaic times.  It ends with a dirge mourning Adonis and looking forward to his resurrection.

Thanks to the wonderful Theoi site the Loeb English translation is here.

GORGO (with her maid Etychis at the door, as the maid Eunoa opens it)
[1] Praxinoa at home?

PRAXINOA (running forward)
[1] Dear Gorgo! at last! she is at home. I quite thought you’d forgotten me. (to the maid) Here, Eunoa, a chair of the lady, and a cushion on it.

GORGO (refusing the cushion)
[3] No, thank you, really.

PRAXINOA
[3] Do sit down.

GORGO (sitting)
[4] O what a silly I was to come! What with the crush and the horses, Praxinoa, I’ve scarcely got here alive. It’s all big boots and people in uniform. And the street was never-ending, and you can’t think how far your house is along it.

…

Do read it.

I love the kind of works that give you a real impression of the ancient world — the letters of Cicero, or Pliny the Younger; and Martial and Juvenal.  Indeed I wish I had more of them.  I had hopes of Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights, but somehow it didn’t work for me.

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The Berlin Didymus / Hierocles papyrus

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In his paper on ancient chapter titles, Mutschmann next discusses something which I had never heard of before.  Here is what he says:

R. Laqueur (Berliner Klassikertexte XLIII 1908, p. 220 ff) has already taken the Berlin Didymus papyrus (Diels and Schubart, Berliner Klassikertexte I, reprinted in the Teubner library) as the starting point for his statements about the literary status of the Anonymous Argentinensis. I agree with him on the whole. However, I must differ in one respect from him. The Didymus-text, just like the text transmitted on the back of the same roll, Ἠτηικη Στοιχείωοις of Hierokles (see Arnim Berliner Klassikertexte IV), has headings on the columns, which indicate, not the content of the columns, but rather the sense of the relevant portion of the work. It would be a mistake to see them as column titles: they are rather regular chapter headings.  These titles were in existence before the scribe of the Didymus papyrus made his copy: this is shown by a mistake, where he has put over the 8th column the title already associated with the 7th column.  Sometimes there are two headings, but also often no heading over a column; a diple or a cross sign (x) in the text clearly marks the beginning of the corresponding section. The reason why these titles were transmitted with the text is clear: the idea was to escape the whims of the copyist, even when copying the contents of a constantly shifting column. For the Hierokles text, it is also of particular importance that the transcript is from the time of the author himself (von Arnim, p. VII).  But whether the author troubled himself about this material remains to be seen. It was part of the technical equipment of the book, and it had to be provided, by those who oversaw its reproduction, perhaps the corrector. So it may be related, that the title of Didymus papyrus possibly is by a second hand (Diels-Schubart p. XI), but that it was handed down for the above reason is indisputable.

The diple is an ancient mark indicating where text should be inserted.  It looks the same as the modern one.  The publication is H. Diels and W. Schubart, Didymos Kommentar zu Demosthenes (Berlin, 1904), while the other is H. von Arnim, Hierokles, Ethische Elementarlehre (Papyrus 9780), Berliner Klassikertexte. IV, 1906, p. 48-64.  The papyrus roll has the shelfmark P Berol. inv. 9780.   

An English translation of Didymus is reviewed at Bryn Mawr here.  Better still, Craig A. Gibson, Interpreting a classic: Demosthenes and his ancient commentators, University of California Press, 2002 is online in Google books preview here.  This begins as follows:

P. Berol.inv.9780 (Pack2 339) is a substantial papyrus roll from Hermoupolis dated to the early second century C.E.  The recto contains Didymus’ commentaries on Demosthenes’ Third Philippic (Dem. 9), Fourth Philippic (Dem. 10), Reply to Philip’s Letter (Dem. 11), and On Organization (Dem. 13).  Toward the end of the second century, an introduction to Stoic ethics by Hierocles (early second century C. E.) was copied on the verso and in the opposite direction.  Most of the commentary on Dem. 9 is lost; the extant text begins with the end of the commentary on that speech.  The commentaries on Dem. 10, 11 and 13 are preserved almost in their entirety, the most notable exceptions being cols. 1.31-45, 2.3-3.62, 4.16-59 and 5.32-51, which are very poorly preserved.  The surviving commentary extends for fifteen columns.  The scribe labelled some of the columns with a brief table of contents1, probably indicating his intention to consult the text frequently.  These column headers read as follows:

Col. 1 (header not restored)
Col. 2 Who are the ones… Concerning the suspicion (that) … the Thebans … alliance … That … is ill disposed … (ends of each of 4 lines not restored)
Col. 3 (header not restored)
Col. 4 (Who it was who was dragged off to the king and informed him of Philip’s preparations against him.  What those who have written about Hermias of Atarneus say about him.
Col. 5 (no header given)
Col. 6 A reconstruing of hyperbatic phrasing.
Col. 7 What the king’s recent philanthropy2 towards the Athenians was.
Col. 8 What the date was when, humbled, they (the Athenians) were receiving only 130 talents of revenue.  Concerning the Athenians’ receiving 400 talents of revenue.
Col. 9  That there are two men named Aristomedes, one from Pherae, the other an Athenian nicknamed “Brazen”.
Col.10. Dates and cities of the speech.  That the speech is by Anaximenes.
Col. 11.  What ὀρρωδεῖν (means).  Concerning Nicaea.  Concerning σκορακίζειν and the proverbial expression “to the crows”.
Col. 12.  But if (it is) not (νεομένους or ναιωμένους, then it is) νεμομένους.3 Concerning Philip’s wounds.
Col. 13  That the speech is not one of the Philippics, but is otherwise by Demosthenes.
Col. 14  Concerning Orgas.  Why he called the Megarians “accursed.”
Col. 15 (no header given)

At the end of the roll is a title identifying it as the third book of Didymus’s commentaries on the Philippics, part of a series of commentaries on twenty-eight speeches of Demosthenes.4

1.  Col. 12a is the one exception: it is a critical comment about a word occuring in the text at col. 12.3, rather than a description of the column’s contents.  D-S1, x-xi, mention the possibility that the column headers were written by a different hand from that of the main text.

Gibson has not taken into account Mutschmann’s article — the marginal status of scholarship on chapter titles should pain us all — but this is excellent stuff, and he goes on to give a translation.  But I don’t know how we reconcile Mutschmann’s comments about the titles on columns 7 and 8 with this.  I wish we could see a facsimile.

But it seems that we have some solid evidence of chapter titles, given here in a second century papyrus of some length as running titles, and marked in the text indicating where they should appear.

But who are these authors?  Well, Didymus himself is Didymus Chalcenterus.  Hierocles Stoicus seems even more obscure, although his surviving work was edited by Illara Ramelli and translated into English by David Konstan — well done! — in 2009 as Hierocles the Stoic: Elements of Ethics, Fragments, and Excerpts, and is on Google books in preview here.

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UK internet to be controlled by police

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A curious story here at political blogger Guido Fawkes.  He says that Nominet, the controller of the .uk domain, has decided to take down any site, if the police make a request for it to be taken down.   Apparently they will do so without any requirement for a court order.

The impetus behind this is to deal with sites run by organised crime.  But the implications are wider, and Guido is right to be alarmed.

The British press is subject to the D-notice system.  This is a group of senior security figures, who advise the press when to suppress some story prejudicial to national security.  It is a civilised system, and certainly every nation needs to ensure that the media do not give aid and comfort to enemies in time of war. 

The recent actions of Wikileaks highlight why such a system is needed.  Nothing is gained by betraying the secret communications of your diplomats to your enemies.

But surely we don’t want the police deciding who may and may not run a website?

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Eusebius update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve entered all the Coptic corrections as sticky notes on the PDF of Eusebius, Gospel Problems and Solutions!  VERY loud rejoicing here.  It took about 3 hours in the end, which is not at all bad. 

There’s one query outstanding, which is to do with a couple of paragraphs the translator is quite keen on adding.  Unfortunately they read more like footnotes.  So a couple of queries.

Otherwise all the corrections are done, in all languages, and ready for correction by the typesetter.  I must remember to tell him to set Acrobat up with Alphabetum as the default font for comments, or he won’t be able to see the Coptic!

One problem — I can’t get a reply from the typesetter by email.  Bob, if you’re reading this, would you email me?

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N. G. Wilson, Scholiasts and commentators

Posted on by Roger Pearse

N. G. Wilson is perhaps the dean of studies on the transmission of Greek literature.  By chance I found online a paper of his, in PDF form, here, dealing with ancient commentaries.  A little known subject, being discussed by a master — recommended.

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The manuscript of the Chronicle of Zuqnin (Ps.Dionysius of Tel-Mahre)

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Amir Harrak, who published an English translation of parts 3 and 4 of this world chronicle, introduces the manuscript in the following, very interesting way.

The Chronicle of Zuqnin is a universal chronicle which begins with the creation of the world and ends with the time of writing, A.D. 775-776. The Chronicle is known from a single manuscript of 179 folios, 173 of which are now housed in the Vatican Library (Codex Zuqninensis, Vat. Syr. 162), and an additional six are currently in the possession of the British Library (formerly British Museum), labelled Add. 14.665 folios 2 to 7. Each folio is circa 235 to 255 mm high and 150 to 165 mm wide. The Vatican folios have been bound in 1881 into a single volume, protected by a hard red cover, whereas the six folios in the British Library have been included with fragments belonging to other manuscripts. According to Tisserant’s reconstruction of the Codex, it originally comprised at least 190 folios.

Of the folios of our manuscript 129 are palimpsest—one a double palimpsest (BM fol. 3), the originally inscribed text representing a number of books of the Old Testament in Greek (the Scptuagint). In fact, the folios once belonged to six distinct manuscripts with text from five biblical books (Judg, 1 Kgs, Ps, Ezek, Dan), which have been assigned dates ranging from the fifth to the eighth centuries.

In 1715 the famous Maronite bishop and scholar J. S. Assemani found the Vatican portion of the manuscript in the Syrian Monastery of Saint Mary in the Egyptian desert of Natrun, and purchased it for the Vatican Library. The other six folios were acquired by the British Museum between 1839 and 1842. That both were part of one and the same manuscript was confirmed on the basis of the Septuagint texts by Cardinal Eugene Tisserant. Tisserant, however, dated the manuscript to the 9th century in light of the Syriac script.

According to J. S. Assemani the manuscript was written in Egypt by a monk of the Desert of Scete (Wadi al-Natrun) at the beginning of the 10th century. By the time he wrote his Catalogue with his nephew S. E Assemani, however, he had changed his mind and believed that the manuscript had been brought, along with others, from Mesopotamia to Egypt, by the abbot Moses of Nisibis (died in 944) in 932. Although this statement is only an assumption, it makes sense, since the manuscript was the product of the monastery of Zuqnin, located near Amida now in south-east Turkey, judging from a note inserted by a monk of the same monastery. This monk, Elisha by name, was a contemporary of Moses of Nisibis (see below for more details). Tisserant further observed that since the sub-script was Greek and not Coptic, as Assemani had first asserted, Syria rather than Egypt must have been the place of origin, seeing that most of the manuscripts in the possession of the monastery of Saint Mary of the Syrians in Scete (of which Moses of Nisibis was the abbot) came from Syria.

As is often the case, the first and last folios of the manuscript of Zuqnin have been lost. The preface of the work, however, has survived, albeit in a very damaged condition. It was written in S(eleucid) 1087 (A.D. 775-776) “in which (year) Mahdi son of `Abd-Allah is ruling over Syria, Egypt. Armenia, Azarbayjan, all of Persia, Sind, Kho[rasan], as well as over the Arabs, and over the Greeks Leo son of Constantine, and over the Romans Pepin”. The addressees in the preface are the “spiritual fathers (of the writer), George, chorepiscopus of Amida. the abbot Euthalius, Lazarus the Visitor, the honourable Anastasius, and the rest of the monastic community (of Zuqnin)”. Unfortunately, the Chronicler’s name, and perhaps indications of his status and origin have not survived. Moreover, the manuscript per se is scarcely in a perfect state of preservation, since several folios—especially of its first half—have either suffered erasure or are damaged in varying degrees. For some reason, the second half of the manuscript, which contains Parts III and IV, fared better, even though here, too, many folios have suffered erasure and/or are fragmentary. Furthermore, the folios housed in the British Library are worm eaten, a fact which explains why the last account of the Chronicle—the martyrdom of Cyrus of Harran—is very fragmentary and comes to an abrupt end.

As I have remarked before, manuscripts are not static things.  In fact they lead a full and interesting life, and move around like bumble-bees.

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Coptic in unicode when you don’t know the alphabet

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve been trying to enter corrections to the Coptic section of my book.  Unfortunately all I got from the translator was *paper* corrections.  I don’t know the Coptic alphabet.  Worse still, I’m working with Bohairic, using the Alphabetum unicode font, rather than the commoner Sahidic unicode fonts.  What am I to do?

Luckily we live in the age of the web.  Here’s what I have done.

Firstly, look at the Wikipedia Coptic alphabet page.  This has a really useful table, which shows and names all the letters with images.  But it also has two columns which actually use a unicode font.  Naturally these appear as squares, invalid characters. 

So what I did then was copy and paste the whole table into a Word document.  The unicode characters remained invalid, mostly — hey, my default font is Times New Roman and it doesn’t contain these.

Then I selected the two columns in Word and changed the font to Alphabetum.  And … magically I got a whole load of Coptic unicode characters, all labelled, displayed at 18pt:

 

 Now what I can do is use these characters, and just copy and paste them, one by one.  Yes, I still don’t know the alphabet.  But I can compare the letter types against the images, against the word document.  For small amounts of Coptic, it works.

It would work for Sahidic as well, of course — just use a different font than Alphabetum.

But … the translator talks about “supralinear strokes” whatever these may be.  The Wikipedia article is silent on these.

I have found a page on Coptic unicode input that does discuss these things.  You can enter any unicode character using charmap.  So:

Here are the choices made for the punctuation and diacritics used in modern printing of Coptic texts:

    Punctuation:

  • normal English punctuation (comma, period, question mark, semicolon, colon, hyphen) uses the regular Unicode codepoints for punctuation
  • dicolon: standard colon U+003A
  • middle dot: U+00B7
  • en dash: U+2013
  • em dash: U+2014
  • slanted double hyphen: U+2E17
    Combining diacritics (codepoints applied after that of the character they modify):

  • combining overstroke: U+0305
  • combining character-joining overstroke (from middle of one character to middle of the next): U+035E
  • combining dot under a letter: U+0323
  • combining dot over a letter: U+0307
  • combining overstroke and dot below: U+0305,U+0323
  • combining acute accent: U+0301
  • combining grave accent: U+0300
  • combining circumflex accent (caret shaped): U+0302
  • combining circumflex (curved shape) or inverted breve above: U+0311
  • combining circumflex as wide inverted breve above joining two letters: U+0361
  • combining diaeresis: U+0308

It is easier to enter Coptic Unicode characters if one has a customized keyboard, but it is also possible to enter any four-digit hexadecimal codepoint that you know using particular utilities in Mac OS X or Windows. … In Word for Windows, you can type a four-digit code (or a five-digit code) directly into your document and then type ALT-x, which converts the code to the character.

And there we are.

The same page also gives a Coptic unicode keyboard for Windows XP, but that’s for people who know what they are doing.

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The manuscript of the Chronicle of Zuqnin

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Brent Landau’s online thesis of the Revelation of the Magi contains a Syriac text of this work, extracted from the first part of the Chronicle of Zuqnin.  The third and fourth parts were translated into English by the excellent Amir Harrak.  Landau has some interesting things to say about the manuscript:

II. The Chronicle of Zuqnin—Codex Vaticanus Syriacus 162

The only extant version of the RevMagi has been preserved in Syriac, although it is possible that major portions of the text were actually composed in Greek, as this study will suggest. In its received form, the RevMagi constitutes part of a worldchronicle dating from the late eighth century, a document known as the Chronicle of Zuqnin (henceforth CZuq), or, less accurately, as the Chronicle of Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre.(6) Composed at the Zuqnin monastery in southeastern Turkey (near the present city of Diyarbakir),(7) the CZuq incorporates a number of pre-existing writings of various genres in its compilation of the history of the world from creation up to its time of composition, 775-776 CE. It has simply inserted the entire RevMagi at the appropriate place in its chronological framework, without anything in the way of evaluative commentary. Apart from the text itself, the author of the CZuq, anonymous but probably a stylite named Joshua,(8) has only added the descriptive phrases, “About the revelation of the Magi, and about their coming to Jerusalem, and about the gifts that they brought to Christ” (1:) at its beginning, and “The story about the Magi and their gifts has finished” (32:4) at its end.

The CZuq itself is only extant in a single MS housed in the Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, a witness catalogued as codex Vaticanus Syriacus 162. Until quite recently, the dominant scholarly opinion was that this MS was most likely a ninth-century copy of the original chronicle, a judgment based upon paleographic grounds.

In 1999, A. Harrak presented compelling evidence that this MS is actually the autograph of the CZuq, and indeed may well have been the only copy of the chronicle ever in existence.(9) The MS is a palimpsest on vellum, with the Syriac text written over fragments of the Septuagint dating from the fifth to eighth centuries. The script is predominantly an unpointed Serto, although some letters resemble an Estrangelo script. The MS currently contains 179 folios, although E. Tisserant, the editor of the Greek fragments, believed that it originally included 190 folios.10 The dimensions of the folios vary, with measurements between 235 to 255 mm high and 150 to 165 mm wide. There are twenty quires in the extant MS, most of which are quinia, that is, groupings of ten folios.

6. The latter title is the product of J.S. Assemani, who believed that its author was the ninth-century Syrian patriarch Dionysius I of Tel-Mahre, a judgment that scholars have since discredited, giving rise to the appellation “Pseudo-Dionysius.” However, as A. Harrak observes, this identification has no clear basis and is quite misleading: “Moreover, Zuqnin as a concrete location seems somehow a more appropriate anchor for the anonymous Chronicle than a phantom author dubbed Pseudo-Dionysius. The latter is not only an imaginary person, but his name fosters confusion with the real Dionysius of Tell-Mahre, who had no connection whatsoever with the Zuqnin Chronicle,” Chronicle of Zuqnin, 3-4.

7. Although Assemani found the MS in Egypt, at the monastery of Saint Mary of the Syrians in the Desert of Scete, the production of the chronicle at the Zuqnin monastery is clear, since the author mentions that several monks “from our monastery of Zuqnin” died from a pestilence, ibid., 2-3.

8. Ibid, 4-8.

9. Harrak makes two especially strong arguments for viewing the CZuq as an autograph. First, in several places there are blank spaces, as if the chronicler had intended to fill them in once he had acquired the missing information. Second, there are previously unnoticed annotations in the margins, which Harrak interpreted as memory-aids that the scribe wrote in order to remind himself to mention topics at a later point in the text. See his discussion of these features in ibid., 13-15.

10. See the introduction to his edition for codicological data pertaining to the MS, Codex Zuqninensis, vxv.

 

I wish I had a PDF of Harrak’s translation!

UPDATE: A correspondent has pointed me to this Google books preview.  But … it’s only previewable in the USA!  I didn’t know they restricted previews like that, but they certainly have.

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