Tag: Information access

Offline and forgotten … but still $126, thanks!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

From time to time I find myself in uncharted waters.  The waters are always German, one finds; and the shouts that drift over the waters tend to things like “Hande hoch!” and “Internet Schwein!” and “Give us your money now, pig-dog”.

These melancholy reflections were brought on by my discovery that the artefacts of the Dieburg Mithraeum, discovered in the 1920’s and published by Behn, are illustrated in Behn’s 1928 book, Das Mithrasheiligtum zu Dieburg.  Nothing wrong with that, except … that it isn’t online.  It may be nearly 90 years old, but it is still only available if you pay De Gruyters money – and lots of it.

Here’s the page on the De Gruyters site.  The item is 47 pages, plus plates.  So $126 is a fantastic sum.  No-one would ever pay it, of course; but De Gruyters do the dog-in-the-manger thing.  “Ja, Ve own zis buch, and nobody gets to read it without our permission.  Ha!  Ja, if you want to read it, schwein, ve’re going to shaft you gut!”  Knowledge is considered merely an opportunity for profit.  I’m probably the first person in decades to want to consult it.

It’s contemptible, and it shows how corrupt the copyright situation has become.

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JSTOR: Now includes books, and more free stuff than before

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A correspondent advises me to go to JSTOR; that “something is happening”.  So I do.  And … the website has changed.  A big heading … “A new chapter begins: search journals, primary sources and now books on JSTOR”.  Hmm.  How does that work?

There’s also better access to materials for those unfortunates who are not in full-time education.  You can’t download PDF’s, mind.  But you can read at least some articles for free online if you register.  I’m not sure how this works, as I now get full access via Oxford University’s alumnus programme.

All very welcome, all the same!

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have flu and can’t do anything!  Rats!  But I did manage to add CIMRM 335 to my Mithras pages.  It’s a marble relief of Mithras killing the bull, with some quite clear images of the other figures that hang around while the Persian guy is sticking it to the bull.  So it gets referenced quite a bit.  I noticed David Ulansey referred to it, while discussing the meaning of Cautes and Cautopates.

What’s interesting about this relief is … it’s lost.  Indeed it’s long since been turned into lime and pasted between some renaissance bricks.  Franz Cumont, in his collection of 1894, could do no more than reproduce the  line-drawing given by Montfaucon in the 18th century.  Which is not great, since the original was found and published in 1564.

One of the marvellous things about the web is that you can find original materials.  In the days when we all had to rely on libraries, you’d be very lucky if your research library even had the book.  The chances were that you wouldn’t be allowed to handle a book of that era.  As for getting a copy of a page… oh no!  Ask and the librarian would look down their long nose and make quite clear that you were not likely to be allowed to do that.  Dear me, no!  At the most you might get a very poor quality reproduction.

Today I just typed the stuff into Google, and in seconds came to the University of Chicago site, found the original, downloaded it — thoughtfully they indicated their permissions policy — uploaded it and was all done in less time than it took an old-type clerk to purse his lips and look distasteful.

Magic!

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Surfing the information wave: yeeehaaaa!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I found a picture of Mithras killing the bull online today.  There’s loads of photos on the web, of various monuments, all slightly different.  Identifying them is fun!

Anyway, using the lettering “Alexander”, that I could see on the photo, I did a search in the PDF’s I have of Vermaseren’s CIMRM– collection of all the monuments.  I found it fairly easily.  It’s CIMRM 603.   So I created a page on the new Mithras site for CIMRM 603 and 604.  I included the image.

Anyone searching for CIMRM 603 ought to find it, although, as yet, Google doesn’t seem to pick my site up.  Wonder why.

Vermaseren’s entry, tho, was interesting.  Because he obviously hadn’t seen the monument!  All he had was a literature search.  He reckoned that it was probably the same as an item published in 1746 in Museum Romanum.

Here’s the good bit: I thought it might be fun to find the 1746 publication.  And I did.  It took a bit of faffing around, but then it all just worked.  And I grabbed that engraving, and included that as well.

You know, we are so blessed to live in an age when books are freely available.  Despite the best efforts of German publishers to screw it all up, we can get hold of stuff that previous scholars — like Vermaseren — could only dream of.

The limit is your imagination…

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Accessing images of monuments and inscriptions of Mithras

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Anyone who searches for “Mithras” in Google images is confronted with a mass of photographs by all sorts of people from all sorts of sites across the web.  There’s a lot of good images there, clear and useful … but the site owners rarely give the CIMRM reference number, and usually have no real information on what you’re looking at.

I’ve started to address this on my new Mithras site.  I’ve created a gallery of selected monuments, and an upload wizard that allows me to create new entries fairly easily.  Each monument has a page with an image or two, the CIMRM text, and whatever else is to hand.

The idea, simply, is that if you find a reference in the scholarly literature to “CIMRM 593”, you don’t just sigh and rub your eyes.  Instead you can go to the gallery, find out what it looks like, find links to a couple of images, and then, if need me, hunt down some more photos yourself.

CIMRM 593 is a good example.  That’s it, on the right.  It’s an item which must be photographed dozens of times every day, because it lives in the British Museum in London, on public display.

What makes it important is that it seems to be one of the very earliest tauroctonies – monuments of Mithras killing the bull.  The two chaps at the back are Cautes and Cautopates, the torch bears, in an unusual position.  Unfortunately the statue was restored at some remote date.  Various bits are not original: the head should be facing towards us, and there are other bits that are not right.  But now … you can get details of what is not authentic from my page above.

And suddenly, you don’t have to be a specialist in order to know anything about the monument.  We can all look, even if we don’t have the training of a professional, once we know what those images on Google Images are.  We can all see what the argument is about, at least.

Which is what I want to make possible.

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Ezquerra, Romanising Oriental Gods – freely accessible online!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Just discovered that Jaime Alvar Ezquerra and his publisher Brill have done something marvellous with Richard Gordon’s translation of his book Romanising oriental gods: Myth, Salvation and Ethics in the Cults of Cybele, Isis and Mithras (2008).  I needed to consult it, and Google books gave me so very little with which to do so.

They put the thing online.  In PDF form.  Here:

http://archive.org/details/RomanisingOrientalGods

I could have wept!  How amazing!  How useful!

Thank you, gentlemen.

UPDATE: Oh rats! They omitted the plates!

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French dissertations online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Via AWOL I learn that French dissertations are starting to come online, at theses.fr.

Good news.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Via AWOL I learn that an edition and translation of Bar Hebraeus’ scholia on the Old Testament is now available in PDF form online from the University of Chicago.  The PDF is here (linked on that page under the red down-arrow next to the text “Terms of Use”.

In addition, an interesting volume, The Early Text of the New Testament, ed. Charles E. Hill and Michael J. Kruger, Oxford, has appeared and is discussed by Larry Hurtado here.  It has wider interest than merely biblical scholars:

There are cogent discussions of wider issues, including in particular Harry Gamble, “The Book Trade in the Roman Empire” (pp. 23-36), and Kruger (a former PhD student), “Early Christian Attitudes toward the Reproduction of Texts” (pp. 63-80).  …

Charles Hill (“‘In These Very Words’:  Methods and Standards of Literary Brorowing in the Second Century,” pp. 261-81) provides a valuable study showing that pagan and Christian authors followed a different set of conventions in citing texts than used by copyists of texts.  …

This volume (though expensive!) is now probably the most up to date analysis of earliest evidence about the state and transmission of NT writings in the second century CE.  Given the limitations of our evidence, scholars are required to make the best inferences they can.  This volume provides essential resources in doing so, and largely shows that we can with some confidence posit that the NT writings, essentially as we know them, were copied for both ecclesial and private reading.

Which is what we would tend to expect, surely, of any ancient literary text not belonging to the corpus of astrological handbooks or similarly fluid literature?

Michael Kruger adds a note here.

I’d very much like to read this volume: it seems likely to be relevant to classical and patristic scholars.  It’s about $175, tho, which is a bit above my budget!

UPDATE: A corrrespondent writes to point out that I have confused two books in the above.  I referred to The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research: Essays on the Status Quaestionis. Second Edition (eds M.W. Holmes & B.D. Ehrman; NTTSD 42; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2012), which appeared at a ridiculous price ($314).  But the book that I was discussing was actually the Charles Hill volume!  Many thanks for the correction.  Friday night tiredness, I’m afraid, is responsible.

The Holmes volume, however, is also likely to be interesting, as may be seen from the list of chapters given by Peter Head here.  But at $341 is way out of reach.  However I suspect it will be quickly pirated in PDF form, unless students have become wealthy in the last few weeks!

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Modern Coptic Christian materials online in PDF

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It’s not very easy for non-specialists to find material by modern Coptic authors in Arabic.  Yet it does exist, and much of it is even online.

In a series of comments, John Rostom has very kindly let us know about a bunch of links which are simply too useful to be left only as comments.  Here is a digest.

Firstly, over 40 books by the late Pope Shenouda III are online in PDF form, in English translation.  The URL is http://copticorthodoxy.com/BooksbyPope.aspx, and all the items are downloadable (with the exception of only 2 of the links, i.e. “The Spiritual Man.pdf” and “The Spiritual Means.pdf” which don’t work).

Second, the History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria is online in Arabic, compiled and edited by the late Bishop Samuel, Bishop of Shebeen el-Qanter (all published in 1999):

In addition is another book:

This is by the late Father Samuel Tawadros al-Syriani which appears to have been published much earlier (1st ed. 1977), with the 2nd edition being the one presented by the online bookshop (2nd ed. 2002) and revised by Bishop Mattaos, current Bishop and Abbot of Dair al-Sorian (Syrian Monastery). This book covers the History of the Patriarchs from Pope Peter VII (109th Pope) to Pope Cyril VI (116th Pope), thus a bit of an overlap with Bishop Samuel’s books.  Why it is called “part 6” is not clear, but that title only applied to the 2nd edition.

Thirdly, the 4th volume (part) of Bishop Samuel’s edition of Abu’l Makarem’s History Of Churches & Monasteries – Part 4 is online here.  Together with links by Dioscorus Boles, that gives links to the entire Arabic text.  (Can anyone find a copy of the English text that exists somewhere?)

Thank you very much indeed, Mr Rostom – invaluable!

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Progress on Paulys Realencyclopadie at German Wikisource

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Via AWOL I learn that the project to digitise the old (but comprehensive) Realencyclopadie is going very well indeed.  Ten thousand articles have now been completed.  The press release is here, and using Google Translate, we get something like this:

For five years, there has been a project at Wikisource for Pauly’s Realencyclopädie of the study of classical antiquity (RE), with the aim to make the public domain articles from this available online in full text form. Although only a few volunteers are working on it, their constant work has recently reached an impressive milestone: with the article “Herod (King of Judaea)” they have transcribed 10,000 items.

The advantage of such a project is obvious.  Many articles in the RE still offer the best starting point, and most of the details, for each topic. However, they are only accessible in public libraries, for hardly any private individuals can afford such an expensive Lexicon.  It was published from 1893 to 1980 in Stuttgart by Metzler and is still sold by this company. The articles from the RE on the Internet are not only searchable by keyword, but available to everyone for free.  Of course the RE project can only upload articles which are now in the public domain.  These are usually those whose author died more than 70 years ago. And in the RE this applies to many authors already.

Among the most significant items that are already available on Wikisource, we may include the articles on the epic poet Hesiod, the tragedians Aeschylus, [13], and Euripides [4], the comic poet Eupolis [3] and Aristophanes [12], the scholar of the same name, [14] the philosopher Aristotle [18], the rhetoricians Anaximenes of Lampsacus [3], Annaeus [17] Seneca and Libanius, the Archbishop Eustathius [18], of Thessalonica, but also the products agriculture, Athenai [1a], signboards, Basilica, libraries, beekeeping, beer, soil science, embalming, epistolography, Hermes Trismegistus, didactic poems, mushrooms, roses, stringed instruments, navigation, suicide and Taurus.

Unlike other similar sites on the Internet, Wikisource lays great emphasis on the quality of the provided texts. Each text is proofread at least twice (the respective correction status is displayed on every page) and on the basis of scans of the original, which are checked each time and are stored on Wikimedia Commons. The RE project also uses the hyperlink feature of the world-wide web, by linking keywords to each other, and provides each item with identifiable reference and author abbreviations. One particular aspect of the project is that here the many authors of the RE are systematically collected and identified. The bio-bibliographic index of authors is now one of 1111 entries and is about 70% complete.

This is almost the only open-source initiative in the German language, and is highly praiseworthy.  The RE is hardly known outside of specialists; but the combination of exhaustive references, online access, and Google Translate should increase its reach manyfold.  Well done.

UPDATE: The RE at WikiSource is here.

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