This photo from Queens has been circulating widely, showing the devastation caused by fires which broke out in Breezy Point during Hurricane Sandy:

The survival of the statue of Mary impressed some Catholics. But as you might expect, I think this illustrates the sort of thing which I blog about often, and which I was talking about with students in my “Faith, Doubt, and Reason” class yesterday: people often use theological language without thinking about the implications, assuming that any invocation of or expression of thanks to God is an appropriate expression of piety, when in fact, the opposite may be the case.

What sort of God would cause or allow a fire to run rampant, destroying 80-100 homes, and would interrvene not to save anyone’s house or belongings, but only a statue?

As we have seen in the case of recent statements by politicians, the statement “a baby is a gift from God” – which few would find objectionable if made to happy parents who had been hoping for a child and who were well poised to care for it – takes on sinister and disturbing overtones when said in the context of rape.

And we have not yet even mentioned the idea that a hurricane itself might be a blunt instrument with which God smacks more than a dozen states, just to send a warning to people not to vote for Romney. Or who floods Wall Street because of his anger at greed and the practice of usury.

Not all mentions of God are appropriate expressions of piety, are meaningful, or are theologically correct even within the framework of the one speaking the words. The mere mention of or giving thanks to God is not an expression of piety, if the result is that you depict God as a monster.

To paraphrase a warning sometimes given in relation to another topic altogether: If you use the word God, use it responsibly.

Alphonse Mingana, at the end of his famous article (see bibliography below) touching on those passages of the Qurʾān that show up in Dionysius bar Ṣalibi‘s (d. 1171) Response to the Arabs, briefly mentions the manuscript that is now known as Harvard Syriac 91 (then 4019; see Goshen-Gottstein, p. 74):

While the above pages were in the press, the authorities of Harvard University — to whom I here take the liberty to tender my sincerest thanks — were so kind as to place at my disposal, through the intermediary of my friend Dr. Rendel Harris, a manuscript described as “Harvard University Semitic Museum No, 4019,” and containing all the controversial works of Barsalibi mentioned by Baumstark in his Geschichte der Syrischen Literatur (p.297). This MS. formerly belonged to Dr. R. Harris in whose collection it was numbered 83. On fol. 47b we are informed that it was transcribed in Mardin, Saturday, 14th March, 1898, by the priest Gabriel, from a MS. dated 1813 of the Greeks (A.D. 1502) and written in the monastery of Mar Abel and Mar Abraham, near Midyad, in Tur ʿAbdin.

I came today in my cataloging work to the manuscript Church of the Forty Martyrs, Mardin (CFMM) 350, a large book in clear Serṭo that has the same polemical treatises of Bar Ṣalibi (Against the Arabs, Against the Jews, Against the Nestorians, Against the Chalcedonians, Against the Armenians), and I was happy to light upon a colophon at the end of memra 2 of the aforementioned treatise (p. 92, image below). The first few lines read as follows:

Let the reader pray for ʿAz(iz) — the miserable, the sinful, the weak monk, “Son of the Cross” [bar ṣlibā], monk of Midyat, from Ṭur ʿAbdin — who has copied [this book] in the Monastery of Mar Abel and Mar Abraham, the teacher of Barṣawmā, that is near the ble(ssed) city of Midyat, in the year 1813 AG, at the beginning of the month of Ēlul [September] on the memorial [lege dukrānēh] of Mar Malke of Clysma.

(See Fiey, Saints syriaques, no. 282, where one of Mar Malke’s commemoration days is given as Sept. 1.) The colophon continues with a notice of some clerical happenings of the place and time not relevant to the present focus, but those interested in early 16th-century ecclesiastical history in Ṭur ʿAbdin will probably find some things of interest and value. There are several more colophons in the manuscript (pp. 287, 307, 591, 665, 781-782), the later ones having the date 1814 AG.

CFMM 350, p. 92

It appears, then, that the manuscript before us is the one on the basis of which Harris’s late 19th-century copy, now Harv. Syr. 91, was made, and indeed a cursory look at the readings of the Harvard copy as reported by Amar confirm the fact. The manuscript was formerly at nearby Dayr Al-Zaʿfarān, as evidenced by the still present bookplate at the beginning of the codex, and Dolabani lists its contents in his catalog (olim no. 98, see pt. I, pp. 376-397). The manuscript itself has hardly been widely accessible in recent years, and Dolabani’s catalog (in Syriac), itself formerly not commonly available (but reprinted by Gorgias Press) and even where available not so usable as might be hoped for due to faults in the printing process and Dolabani’s sometimes unclear handwriting, and although the indefatigable Vööbus, of course, knew the Dayr Al-Zaʿfarān/Church of the Forty Martyrs collection well, he does not (as far as I know) make much (or any?) notice of this important manuscript. It has, however, not been wholly unknown. In the introduction to his edition of the Response to the Arabs, Joseph Amar has the following to say: “A further manuscript, Mardin Syriac 350 (unfoliated), which contains one-sentence summaries of the contents of each chapter of the treatise, has also been consulted in the preparation of this edition” (vi-vii). This statement calls for a few remarks. It must be made clear that the manuscript does have those one-sentence summaries, but this is merely the beginning of the book: the remainder of it consists of the full treatises themselves, along with some related works by other authors. The reference to this copy in his introduction is distinct from the other five manuscripts he used for his edition in that those each have a siglum, while the Mardin manuscript does not, and the latter seems to have been used in the edition much less indeed than the other manuscripts listed. He does not say how he consulted this copy (on-site in Mardin, photographs, microfilm?). The manuscript is indeed unfoliated, as he says, but at least when it was photographed by HMML in 2007, it was paginated with eastern Arabic numerals.

How CFMM 350 is related to the other witnesses to Bar Ṣalibi’s polemical treatises will require closer comparison, but it will at least displace Harv. Syr. 91 in that list, since it is the Vorlage, and its antiquity is nothing to ignore, the only older witness (only of the Response to the Arabs, not the other treatises) being Vat. Syr. 96 (Dec 1664 AG = 1352 [1325 in Amar's ed. is an error]; Assem. Cat., p. 523), and that copy is incomplete. In terms of its text as well as some apparently contemporaneous marginal notes, CFMM 350 deserves close inspection by anyone interested in Bar Ṣalibi’s polemical treatises.

CFMM 350, p. 97, showing Qurʾān 2:31-32 in Syriac, with commentary (cf. Amar, ed. pp. 114, 116 = tr. pp. 107, 109)

Bibliography

Amar, Joseph P. Dionysius bar Ṣalībī, A Response to the Arabs. CSCO 614-615 = SS 238-239. Louvain, 2005.

Assemani, S.E. and Assemani J.S. Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae Codicum Manuscriptorum Catalogus. I.2. Rome, 1778.

Brock, S.P. “Dionysios bar Ṣalibi.” In GEDSH, 126-127. Piscataway, 2011.

Dolabani, Yuhanna. Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in Zaʿfaran Monastery. Dar Mardin Press, 1994; reprint, Piscataway, 2009.

Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H. Syriac Manuscripts in the Harvard College Library: A Catalogue. Harvard Semitic Studies 23. Missoula, 1979.

Mingana, Alphonse. “An Ancient Syriac Translation of the Kur’ân Exhibiting New Verses and Variants.” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 9 (1925): 188-235. (available as text, not PDF, here)

ADDENDUM: Barsoum (Scattered Pearls, p. 438, with n. 1) mentions CFMM 350 under the name Zaʿfaran 5 (cf. p. 428, nn. 2, 4, p. 439, n. 2).

Fundada en 1933 por D. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, EMERITA publica artículos, notas, informaciones y reseñas, rigurosamente originales, de Filología clásica, Lingüística griega, latina, indoeuropea e ibérica, y de Historia antigua.

EMERITA es, desde su fundación, una de las revistas científicas de alto nivel más valoradas en su campo.

EMERITA facilita el acceso sin restricciones a todo su contenido seis meses después de su publicación. Durante este periodo de embargo, el acceso al texto completo de los artículos está reservado a los suscriptores de la edición impresa.

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Southeast Asian Archaeology mentioned.

This feature from Vietnam Net highlights various heritage properties in the countries that have been improperly ‘restored’, sometimes using inauthentic materials, sometimes demolished and rebuilt from scratch.

Restorations at Va Temple in Hanoi, Vietnam Net 20121029

Destroying legacy for restoration!
Vietnam Net, 29 October 2012

In recent years, many localities have restored historical and cultural relics. However, many architectural and cultural works of the ancestors have been destroyed without mercy, because of the so-called restoration.

…

Around 50 km west of Hanoi is Va temple, the most sacred place of Thanh Tan Vien Son mountain. The temple is located in a pristine forest, with about 420 ancient ironwood trees of 1,000 years old. The temple is surrounded by a 3m tall wall of laterite, making the temple a serious and intensive closed site. However, this ancient wall was destroyed to make way for vehicles carrying construction materials for the restoration and embellishment. Earlier, in 2009, this temple was rebuilt.

Full story here.

Southeast Asian Archaeology mentioned.

The American section of the Institute for Etruscan and Italic Studies (Instituto di Studi Etruschi ed Italici) is housed at NYU under the auspices of the Center for Ancient Studies. For further information or to subscribe to the newsletter of the American section, please contact:

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Jacopo Tintoretto, The Jews in the Desert

Talmudic tradition assumes that the permissibility of constructing an eruv is derived from Exodus 16:29;

Each person shall sit in his (or her) place. Let no one go out from his (or her) place on the Sabbath day.

This interpretation seeks to understand the verb yetze as if it were equivalent to the causative yotzi’, “to take out.” The reality, however, is that this verse serves only to locate the origins of this law in the Torah, rather than in the Prophets, an effort consistently undertaken by the rabbis who, unlike the Dead Sea sectarians, wanted to derive all law from the Pentateuch, probably as a polemic against what they saw as the overemphasis on the Prophets by the early Christians. This is true despite the terminological influence that this passage had on M. Shabbat 1:1.  Explicit reference to the prohibition on carrying on the Sabbath is found in Jeremiah 17:21-22:

Thus says the Lord: “Take heed to yourselves, and bear no burden on the day of the Sabbath, nor bring it into the gates of Jerusalem. And do not bring out a burden from your houses on the day of the Sabbath, nor do any work. And sanctify the day of the Sabbath, as I have commanded your fathers.”

This is certainly an explicit reference to the prohibition. It is further paralleled by Nehemiah 13:15-21:

In those days I saw in Judah people… bringing in heaps of grain and loading them onto donkeys, and also wine, grapes, figs, and all kinds of burdens, which they brought into Jerusalem on the Sabbath day; and I warned them at that time against selling food.

While this passage clearly assumes that carrying is forbidden, we must recognize, especially when the full context is taken into consideration, that it emphasizes primarily the forbidden nature of commerce on the Sabbath. On the other hand, the passage makes clear that those who made purchases on the Sabbath were violating the prohibition against carrying from domain to domain if they brought them from the market that had been set up by the Greek traders outside of the city into the city itself and into their homes.

What these passages make clear is that early in the history of the Israelites, biblical authors considered it forbidden to carry from domain to domain on the Sabbath. At the same time, from Jeremiah’s prophecy and Nehemiah’s complaints we learn that many Israelites took this prohibition very lightly or, perhaps, were not even aware of it.

Yesterday I encountered vintageworshiptapes.com, a site which is:

A project to preserve classic worship music from the golden era of Harvestime worship music.

The worship was recorded, and cassette tapes could be purchased.  I’m not sure if I ever actually bought any of the tapes, but I did buy the Songs of Victory songbook, which I still have somewhere.

The tapes themselves were played endlessly by people that I knew who were involved in the movement.  I can hear some of those songs as I write, for they are embedded deep in my mind.

These tapes should be preserved.  They are part of the musical history of the charismatic movement in the United Kingdom.  Yet they never existed other than on cassette tape, and I imagine most of the copies have deteriorated by now.

The site owner has digitised what he has into MP3 format.  The results are pretty clean and clear, but somehow less impressive than in my memory.

What is needed, of course, is a remaster based on the master tapes.  But the Harvestime organisation has long since disbanded.  I wonder where the master tapes are?  I wonder who even knows about these things any more?

The site owner has been deterred from distributing the files because he is quite unable to determine who, if anyone, he needs to ask for permission to do so.  At the time the idea of copyright in recordings of Christian worship was ridiculous — that much I remember myself — and the idea of licensing the use of new songs only appeared during the 80′s, as a response to the difficulties that congregations had in precisely this problem.

Yet these things should be online.  There’s no money in this.  But there are people out there who would like to hear these memories of their youth again.

Mapping Movement and Sacred Topography
Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Perspectives on Ancient Pilgrimage

This seminar aims to discuss possible ways of applying interdisciplinary and intercultural perspectives on the phenomenon of sacred travel or pilgrimage from the Greek period to Late Antiquity. How can such perspectives shed light on movement to sacred places in the ancient world? Do they provide methods to better understand the construction of sacred topography within the wider landscape? And how, in turn, can movement within sacred topography be mapped? We are especially interested in furthering the use of material culture to explore these aspects of pilgrimage and sacred travel. The Workshop will take place on Saturday, 15 December 2012 at the Institute of Archaeology, University of Hamburg, Rm. 122. The poster is available here.

Organisers: Wiebke Friese (UH) and Troels Myrup Kristensen (AU)

10:00 Introduction

10:15 Troels Myrup Kristensen, Aarhus: Mapping Movement and Sacred Topography from Classical Greece to Late Antiquity (discussant: Inge Nielsen, Hamburg)

11:00 Ruth Günther, Hamburg: Early Greek Sanctuaries: Places of Pilgrimage? (discussant: Søren Handberg, Aarhus)
11:45 Coffee break

12:00 Wiebke Friese, Hamburg: Pilgrims and Prophecy. The Graeco-Roman Oracle Sanctuary as a Panhellenic Festival Venue (discussant: Kathrin Kleibl, Insbruck)

12:45 Lunch

13:45 Hedvig von Ehrenheim, Stockholm: Greek Incubation Rituals and Healing Sanctuaries (discussant: Kasper Bro Larsen, AU)

14:30 Kathrin Kleibl, Innsbruck: Evidence for Personal Pilgrimage in the Cult of Isis (discussant: Søren Handberg, AU)

15:15 Coffee break

15:30 Anna Ziel, Mainz: Hostels in Roman Sanctuaries (discussant: Troels Myrup Kristensen, Aarhus)

16:15 Kasper Bro Larsen, Aarhus: Locative and Utopian Religion in Early Christianity (discussant: Wiebke Friese, Hamburg)

17:00 Final discussion and summary

The Workshop is organised within the framework of the strategic research partnership between the universities of Aarhus (AU), Hamburg (UH), Kiel and Southern Denmark (SDU) – and with further financial support from the AU research programme „The Ancient World“.

Today I bought an LP.  Yes, that’s right: a vinyl long-playing record.

I saw it in the window of Oxfam in Ipswich, as the rain pattered on the glass and a cold wind blew through the streets under a grey sky.  It was a second-hand copy of Christian artist Steve Taylor’s third album, I predict 1990.  It appeared in 1987, through Myrrh records.

I never owned a copy of this album.  I bought his first album-ette, I want to be a clone, and liked it.  His second album, On the Fritz, I also purchased.  But the third album got him into trouble with some elements of the Christian music industry in the US and his career came to an abrupt halt.  The three albums can be obtained in MP3 form, although not in CD these days.

The LP was in good condition.  It must have been purchased by someone of my generation.  Oxfam stock tends to come from house-clearances, after funerals, so I infer that one of my contemporaries has gone to meet the Lord, leaving me his LP.

Buying it was rather a ritual.  The sleeve was in the window, but the LP itself was behind the counter.  I was invited to inspect the disk, to see if it was scratched.  Then the record was placed back in the sleeve, and the whole in a specially square plastic bag.  It was bulky, and awkward to carry, and I had to carry it upside down as I went out into the rain.  I knew that I had bought something tangible with my money.  It cost me a shade under five pounds, which is probably a little less than the original cover price, but not much.

Arriving home, I found a package on the doormat with a CD that I had ordered.  I placed the CD on the pile of music next to my CD player.  But I took the LP out, and placed it on my record deck — I still have an old-fashioned HiFi separates system, although it now has a CD player and some of the elements are not those from 1980 — and started it playing while I prepared lunch.  The 80′s sound came out of the speakers.  Somehow … it was worth listening to, all the way through, just as I used to do in the old days when buying music.  The sleeve and inserts rested on top of a pile of books nearby, conspicuous as I did this and that.

We’re all human beings.  We do tend to judge something that is small as being of limited value.  A CD doesn’t seem nearly as important as something several times larger.  The cover art on a CD is always squeezed into this tiny little square.  The notes are inserted in a little booklet, hardly large enough to read.  A CD is … just a disposable consumer item.  Has anyone ever felt about a CD as I felt, buying an LP today?  That I was doing something which was important?  I doubt it, somehow.

As for MP3′s… these were originally free.  The record industry has found a way to charge us for them, but somehow they don’t seem worth even the eighty pence or whatever the charge currently is.  A song in MP3 format is nothing, seems like nothing, feels like nothing.  Gigabytes of them are passed around by students on keydrives, I’m sure.

This is not nostalgia.  It’s about human perceptions of worth.  There is a reason why it matters whether the church steeple is the tallest building in the town.

New Open Access Article- Braid ornaments from early medieval cemeteries - 10th century

http://www.brukenthalmuseum.ro/publicatii_en/01_1.htm

My colleague Georg Kaimann alerted me about the serious mistake in the author information of several chapters in Dr. Semetsky’s book. Please do accept our apologies, also on behalf of our data conversion partner, and be assured that the problem is taken seriously.

High quality metadata, especially the correctness of titles, author names, and affiliations are of utmost importance for us. We have therefore taken the matter up with the production manager at our supplier. It turned out that errors in two places led to the incorrect author information which was published online: Firstly, the operator who created the xml metadata mistakenly used an already filled-out sample template for updating the chapter metadata; and secondly, quality control did not check the metadata in all chapters because they assumed that they were created in the approved way.

Although this is a very rare error (I don’t remember having seen such a case before), we of course want to rule out that it can happen again. At the vendors end, the technical team will work on improving the tool for capturing metadata information to avoid errors related to manual intervention. At Springer’s end, we will investigate if further data checks can be introduced so that errors are caught early in the production process.

Once again, we apologize for this mistake. Be assured that this problem is taken seriously as it affects the relationship between authors and publisher which is of high importance to us.


Best regards

Ilse Wittig
Springer
Production

Manager Quality Assurance

Following the lead of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) some enterprising folks came up with AcWriMo (Academic Writing Month). The idea is that you commit to a certain academic writing goal, and resolve to work steadily at it for the entire month of November. As with all goal-setting projects, the key is to pick something laudatory yet achievable.  Having comrades working on similar projects helps with motivation and communal support.  There’s a spreadsheet that will allow you to see what others are trying to achieve, and where everyone can post the day’s triumphs (or minor disasters, as the case may be.)  Several people in the fields of classics or ancient studies who are on twitter have set themselves AcWriMo challenges, and I’ve tried to collect a list of them, if you want to know whom to cheer on (or add yourself). To follow everyone from every discpline, use the #acwrimo hashtag.

I am going to do AcWriMo myself, with the goal of making over my doctoral dissertation, left unfinished at about the turn of 2001-2002, into an article that can be submitted for publication.  My topic was surface and subsurface archaeological methodology at Archaia Nemea Tsoungiza, a prehistoric Greek site excavated by a Bryn Mawr College team in the 1980s.  Three chapters of the dissertation will form the basis of my article.  Two of them were written and polished, and need only to be edited both for length and context and to take into consideration new scholarship published in the past decade.  (There is this 9-pound, 1200-page book by Dan Pullen that is relevant…). The third chapter was about 3/4 finished, but not polished. There, I need to re-examine my data set and write up my conclusions for the last chronological period, then edit the heck out of the entire chapter.

In preparation, I have downloaded and installed a free 60-day trial of ArcGIS. (First task accomplished!) Next I need to get my 10 year old shapefiles in there and hope there is no serious data corruption, and see what I remember about using a GIS.  My plan is to work simultaneously at getting back up to speed with the GIS analysis while editing the already-polished chapters.  I’m setting the goal of working for two hours a day – mostly 10am-12pm – weekdays during November. While I am not employed right now, and in theory have about 6 hours a day that could be spent productively, I know my work habits are better in short, focused bursts. Give me a goal of six hours working a day and I guarantee I will spend it all faffing about on the internet. Another big challenge is that my November looks like this: traveling to a conference, then chairing the Scholastic Book Fair at my kids’ school, then Thanksgiving, then my husband goes to China for 10 days.  But there’s actually a great freedom in this project for me – I already “failed” at it, by never finishing my dissertation, so hopefully everything from here on out is kind of a bonus.

Antiquity À-la-carte 2.0

The Ancient World Mapping Center is pleased to release version 2.0 of the Antiquity à la Carte application. Version 1.0 appeared in spring 2012 and served as a proof of concept for the mapping application. The application, engineered by Ryan Horne,

provides the user with a map base that can be populated by drawing on the collective databases of the Ancient World Mapping Center and the Pleiades Project. The new version, more fully featured, offers the user a range of new capabilities, including:

• The option of saving data sets assembled using the application and that of uploading data to the map (.json).
• Options for both printing and exporting the map created using the application; combining the export functionality with the ‘numbered features’ option provides an ideal template for a map-based quiz or examination.
• Version 2.0 makes extensive use of linked data opportunities by connecting to the Pleiades Project and participating in the linked data initiatives of the Pelagios Project. For Pleiades community editors and members, editing of Pleaides can happen directly by means of this interactive feature of the application.
• Version 2.0 offers an updated visual interface and site layout.
• Version 2.0 allows other websites to communicate directly with the application using .json objects or text parameters in the url.
• Version 2.0 allows the user to create a range of line work, polygons, and shading that then appear in the exported version.

These are but a few of the new features offered by Antiquity à la Carte 2.0. We encourage feedback from members of the community who use the application – your comments will help AWMC improve the application. Users can also become registered members of this site and thus be able to closely follow the discussion and receive word of further updates.

AWMC is especially grateful to the invaluable assistance provided by our colleague Joe Ryan of UNC ITS Research Computing.

New Open Access Article- Su alcuni recipienti bronzei ad ansa sormontante di produzione capenate

http://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/lanx/article/view/2410

Bernard Hours, Histoire des ordres religieux, Paris, 2012.

Éditeur : Presses Universitaires de France
Collection : Que sais-je ? 2241
128 pages
ISBN : 978-2-13-058421-6
9.20 €

Le monachisme, manière de vivre l'ascétisme chrétien, est apparu dans la seconde moitié du IIIe siècle dans la partie orientale de l'empire romain. Véritablement institutionnalisé à partir du IVe siècle, il n'a pas cessé de former jusqu'à aujourd'hui une composante essentielle du christianisme. Une composante qui recouvre des réalités diverses dans le temps comme dans l'espace.
De l'essor des abbayes aux ordres mendiants, des copistes aux missionnaires, cet ouvrage s'attache à retracer l'histoire de celles et ceux qui, au sein du catholicisme, ont voulu mener une vie entièrement vouée à Dieu, toutes ces formes de vie consacrée, réglementée et formalisée hors du cadre paroissial, en communautés fraternelles.

Bernard Hours est professeur d'histoire moderne à l'université Jean Moulin – Lyon 3. Il dirige le Laboratoire de recherche historique Rhône-Alpes (LARHRA, UMR 5190).

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