
Archive for September, 2006

Nestorius, The Bazaar of Heracleides — now online

I hope that I may be forgiven for a small announcement.  Nestorius wrote in exile in his own defence.  Since his books were ordered to  be burned, and his name used in much the same way as moderns use accusations of ‘racist’ — to shut down discussion — he was obliged to circulate it under the name of Heracleides of Damas.  It’s quite hard going, but since it has survived to our own day, people may like to know that the English translation is now online here.  I have also translated some material about the manuscript find from the French edition and translation.
In some ways the story is familiar.  A single manuscript had survived.  A copy was taken “in secret”, since the owner clearly didn’t want copies made.  The single manuscript was, it turns out, destroyed in WW1.  Fortunately the owner’s wish to prevent copying did not lead to the loss of the text.  Other texts extant in Syriac in 1914 were not so lucky, as I have remarked before.  But what is it about people who own manuscripts that makes them so desperate to prevent the text circulating?

Medieval manuscripts for sale – part 2: “no, we won’t photograph our collection”

Well!  It looks as if the Karlsruhe state library may really have to hand over 2,500 manuscripts (including some papyri) to the Counts of Baden.  There is much scaremongering going on online (e.g. in the PAPY-L list) about what happens, how many books are involved, books being sold, “broken up”, etc.  None of the mss seem to be online, and lots — they’re very shy about saying what — are unphotographed. 

What can we do?  Well, I have been emailing the library, and suggesting that they get a bunch of volunteers in to take photos of the lot with digital cameras, or as much as can be done in the time.  After all, if the library doesn’t put the interests of scholarship first — which is access and preservation — then it doesn’t deserve to have the books.

The responses have been interesting, but negative.  Apparently, despite all the scaremongering, the library still can’t face the idea of scholars taking photographs.  This is very odd indeed; surely books at risk should be photographed?

Even more interesting was the response of a certain poster from Heidelberg University on the PAPY-L list, which I will quote as it probably reflects very accurately just why many state-funded libraries have obstructed public access to images of mss online:

“…I want to stress that I would not appreciate either having anyone here who seemingly does not realise that certain differences between original and copy still exist, but who is interested only in taking pictures of our collection and distributing them all over the world just as he likes it.”

I admit that, in my innocent way, I rather thought that getting the public looking at images of books all around the world was what state-funded libraries were for.  It makes one realise how far many libraries have to  go.  We live in a world in which google book is freely available to Americans, yet here we have people actively hostile to the idea.

“… To put it briefly, I am not in any way willing to accept either this attitude nor that of our government. … Any do-it-yourself attempts of this sort do not appear to be very helpful at this point because they almost seem to condone the selling.”

I worry about this, whether the attitude behind this is that the manuscripts belong to the institution, not the public.  I myself have more manuscripts online at my website than the Karlsruhe library.  Anyone who wants to work with them can.  The world has not ended.  The trouble is that very few people care much about mouldly old books.  Unless we publicise them, no-one will.  That’s part of the reason that the problem has arisen — the politicians do not care about a collection of books.

Collections should not be broken up.  The bureaucrats may be wrong-headed about digital photography — although I bet they all own digital cameras, and I bet more than a few of the staff have snapped pages for their own use.  But in fighting against an indifferent legislature handing over a collection to be auctioned, aren’t they serving us all?  Perhaps: if it were not that they were so determined that this collection would be of so very little service to the world.   Then again, if they had spent more time serving the public, perhaps the law-makers of Baden would have a better idea of how the public benefits from keeping the collection together.

I’m ambivalent, not least because there is no material known to me at Karlsruhe that is relevant to my research interests (attempts to find out what the collection contains have been ignored).  It doesn’t matter to me who owns manuscripts, so long as they are safe, recorded and accessible to the public.  But is the public interest served by breaking up this collection?  Surely it would be better to simply get rid of the obscurantist staff, and keep the books together? 

It will be most interesting to see what happens.  If only we had a handlist of the books, online!

Thefts from the British Library

An article in the Times today tells us that a reader who used a razor-blade to remove 98  rare maps from books in the British Library and other libraries has been jailed for three years and fined one million pounds (around $2m).  The maps, we are told, were then sold to dealers and collectors.  He was found with 7 maps, alone worth around $1m.  US readers will be amused to learn that the reader will be released automatically after a year, unless he annoys the turnkeys, and in any event after two.  The Library officials are said to be furious at the leniency of the sentence. 

The story has many interesting aspects.  The weak sentence means that it is now open season on the collections of British Libraries.  Many will consider the possibility of becoming a multi-millionaire well worth the chance of a year in conditions not markedly worse than a boys’ boarding school.  Fortunately the number of criminals equipped to sell the items must be limited. 

The Times report glosses over the motive, which is said to be “resentment” of the library.  I wonder what the nature of his resentment was.  Could it possibly be that, like so many other readers, he was tired of being robbed blind in charges for reproductions of material that he wished to examine?

Medieval manuscripts for sale

The Baden state library (Badische Landesbibliothek) in Karlsruhe has a problem.  Some of its manuscripts actually belong to the House of Baden, not the state.  The family is now short of cash — all those redistributive taxes beloved of the political Left, no doubt — and is proposing to sell them off at auction.  An article appeared in the Stuttgarter Zeitung, and posts about this have appeared in the MEDTEXTL, and MEDIAEVISTIK listserves (the latter in German), reposted in PAPY-L (papyri) decrying the “cultural atrocity” and inviting us to join them in condemning the move.

But I have mixed feelings.  The library hasn’t photographed any of these mss, as far as I know.  Indeed there doesn’t seem to be a full list of them, even.  They have just one (!) manuscript online.  I suspect that readers have been prevented from photographing them.  One scholar, when I queried why they weren’t online, suggested that it was good for scholars to have to travel to Karlsruhe to consult them!  Frankly, it would be better if these mss were in hands that would record them and place them online.  Perhaps the House of Baden would be agreeable to a proposal to do so!

I have written to various people suggesting that a few volunteers take digital cameras and record them.  It will be interesting to see whether those involved would rather allow the ‘atrocity’ than allow people to photograph them.

Editing old translations

A little while ago, I scanned the 1882 English translation made by William Wright of the Chronicle of Joshua the Stylite.  The text is of great interest, recording the war between the Romans and the Sassanid Persians in the reign of Anastasius I ca 507 AD, and written from the perspective of a resident of Edessa.  Those who wish to read it will find it here.  

But there was a problem.  The translator had chosen to render the Syriac term for the Eastern Romans, ‘Rom’ as ‘Greeks’.  This makes sense in 1300; does it make sense in 500?  He had also rendered the name of the city of Edessa as ‘Urhay’, which is the name of the modern town on the ruins of Edessa; and Amida as ‘Diyarbekir’ (where the bombing took place recently, where there is a substantial library of Syriac texts, and where there is also, I believe, a US airbase).  Again, do these names make sense at this period?  Finally there was the usual profusion of Jacobean English: “what befel”, “thou”, etc, which the reader must mentally translate as he goes.  The footnotes were studded with Syriac, which I could not sensibly transcribe, so much had to be changed to put the text online.

What should we do?  There is always a case for leaving the text alone, and this is the course that I normally prefer.  But in this case I chose otherwise; I fixed all three of these things.  Was I right to do so?

Syriac text of Eusebius “On the star” now online

There are few Syriac texts online in electronic form, so I thought that I would highlight that Fr. Mathew Koshy Modisseril has kindly typed in the text of Eusebius of Caesarea “On the star” from the text printed in the “Journal of Sacred Literature”.  It’s available here, and the English text from here.  Users of Windows XP will find that they already have the Estrangelo Edessa font needed; others may need to download the Meltho unicode fonts

Part of one page of the unique manuscript was erased, though.

The text is public domain, so help yourselves and do whatever you like with it.
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