Mark Vermes has completed for us an English translation of Contra ludos et theatra (PG 56, columns 261-270), which I have put in the public domain. I’ll make an HTML version later, but you can get a PDF and a DOCX from Archive.org here:
http://archive.org/details/ChrysostomAgainstTheGamesAndTheTheatres
As always, you are free to use or distribute this for any purpose, personal, educational or commercial. I hope it’s useful!
I recently became aware of these great shoes for a Doctor Who fan:
They come in men’s sizes and styles too, and so if anyone is looking for a Christmas gift for me, I’ll gladly accept a pair!
Just today (29 October 2012), a seller on eBay posted anauction with the title, “Greek-Coptic Roman Rare Egyptian Uncial PapyrusFragments.” This seller (“mixantik”), who is from Turkey, has been auctioning hundreds of ancient Coptic and Greek papyrus fragments in lots on eBay for at least a year. I have contacted this seller on several different occasions to inquire about some of his papyri. He tells me that all of his papyri come from Egypt, although it is not clear precisely where in Egypt. But it is clear that someone has discovered a very large quantity of papyri. A colleague has suggested to me that perhaps the locals are continuing to find papyri in Oxyrhynchus, which is a possible scenario. The papyri that are sold by this dealer are 100% authentic; this can be verified by an analysis of the handwriting from the images the seller posts on eBay—usually very good images. I check eBay daily, with the search phrase “papyrus fragment,” to see if this seller (or any other) is auctioning off papyri. This seller's previous lots have sold for pennies, anywhere from $20 to $300.
Most of his fragments are in fact Greek. It would seem that, given the quantity of Greek fragments that he has sold over the last year or so, someone has made a big find. In the images he posts, there is dirt all over the papyri, which tells me these are coming straight from the ground.
Here’s what I wrote, in answer to his three questions:
1- In a few paragraphs describe how you came to be interested in Ugaritic.
The answer to this question requires multiple paragraphs. If there is one thing that I have learned from my undergraduate students, it is that one can always postpone the substance of what one has to say by including an introductory paragraph which does nothing other than postpone the matter at hand.
I am interested in Ugaritic for many reasons. I have long been fascinated with the texts that provide earlier parallels to stories and concepts we find in the Bible, and so I have been interested in Ugarit and the texts recovered there ever since I was an undergraduate. With my recent focus on Mandaic and other dialects of Aramaic, I have been focusing more attention on Semitic languages, and would love to be able to explore Ugaritic as well.
But in the final paragraph, I will confess the real reason for my interest in the volume. I am primarily a New Testament scholar. Most NT scholars know Koine Greek and little else. I would like to be the one cool guy in gatherings of NT scholars who knows Ugaritic.
2- Are you presently in University or Grad School and pursuing Ugaritic studies?
No – who would be so foolish as to pursue Ugaritic in grad school, when one can devote that time to major languages and learn Ugaritic on one’s own with the help of a handy volume like the one you are giving away?
3- If you’re chosen as the completely random winner based on your responses to the first 2 questions above, what will you do with the volume?
If I win I promise that I will never use the volume for the purpose of propping up table legs, swatting flies, or corporal punishment. I will, on the other hand, read it over and over again until I know Ugaritic!
African nations’ cultural objects have been harvested by foreign powers; attacked by religious movements and political factions; and, sometimes under duress, reduced to commodities and sacrificed for subsistence or survival [...] In addition to these activities, communities have been gouged by economic forces; they have been forced to tear their archaeological heritage out of the ground and sell it in order to subsist.So why looting and not prostitution, nicking cellphones or selling kidneys? I do not think anyone is "forced" to sell knocked-off Nok heads or dugup pots, it surely is a choice. We too easily impose our own ideas of "heritage" on people to whom it is basically a foreign concept - see C.A. Folorunso, 'The Practice of Archaeology in Nigeria' pp 807-826 in L. Lozny 'Comparative Archaeologies: A Sociological View of the Science of the Past' (Springer 2011:ISBN:9781441982247), a book I recently had the misfortune to review.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal provides a wonderfully satirical take on depressingly common assertions by preachers and pundits. If gays and lesbians were indeed the cause of hurricanes and earthquakes, imagine how that power could be harnessed for good…
HT Pharyngula
Via Access to Mideast and Islamic Resources, I learned of the Marsh Arabs Heritage Project, which looks at the cultural, religious, and social life of the marshlands of Southern Iraq, including the Mandaeans, but also Muslims, Jews, Christians, Yezidis and others.
The pdf downloads appear not to have been added yet, but there is in essence an entire book online. Those interested in the people of that region and their heritage will find it interesting!
It was, perhaps, inevitable that Homo floresiensis, the three-foot-tall species of primitive human discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores, would come to be widely known as “hobbits”. After all, like JRR Tolkien’s creation, they were “a little people, about half our height”. But a New Zealand scientist planning an event about the species has been banned from describing the ancient people as “hobbits” by the company which owns the film rights to The Hobbit.
Dr Brent Alloway, associate professor at Victoria University, is planning a free lecture next month at which two of the archaeologists involved in the discovery of Homo floresiensis in 2003, Professor Mike Morwood and Thomas Sutikna, will speak about the species. The talk is planned to coincide with the premiere of The Hobbit film, and Alloway had planned to call the lecture “The Other Hobbit”, as Homo floresiensis is commonly known.
But when he approached the Saul Zaentz Company/Middle-earth Enterprises, which owns certain rights in The Hobbit, he was told by their lawyer that “it is not possible for our client to allow generic use of the trade mark HOBBIT.”
“I am very disappointed that we’re forbidden … to use the word ‘Hobbit’ in the title of our proposed free public event … especially since the word ‘Hobbit’ is apparently listed in the Oxford English Dictionary (and hence apparently part of our English-speaking vocabulary), the word ‘Hobbit’ (in the Tolkien context) is frequently used with apparent impunity in the written press and reference to ‘Hobbit’ in the fossil context is frequently referred to in the scientific literature (and is even mentioned in Wikipedia on Homo floresiensis). I realise I’m in unfamiliar word proprietry territory (as an earth scientist) … so I’ve gone for the easiest option and simply changed our event title.” said Alloway.
The event is now called “A newly discovered species of Little People – unravelling the legend behind Homo floresiensis”.
“Certainly, this name change won’t diminish the curiosity of the New Zealand public nor our collective enthusiasm for the Hobbit – whichever form you might be interested in knowing more about – the movie/book fantasy version or the fossil version found in Flores,” said Alloway.
• This article was amended on 1 November 2012 because the first paragraph and a quotation from Dr Brent Alloway referred to the Saul Zaentz Company/Middle-earth Enterprises as “representatives of the Tolkien Estate”. While the Saul Zaentz Company/Middle-earth Enterprises hold the film rights and some other rights to certain of JRR Tolkien’s literary works including The Hobbit, they are not representatives of the Tolkien Estate. The Estate has also asked us to clarify that it was not approached concerning Dr Alloway’s lecture.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
Sounds and Symbolism from the Netherworld:Acoustic Archaeology at the Animal Master’s Portal
Archaeologists working at the site of the future Truro Eastern District Centre (TEDC) in Cornwall, southwest England, have discovered the fragmentary remains of a prehistoric enclosure built around 5,500 years ago.
Initial surveys of the site were carried out in 2009, with a condition of the planning approval being to carry out further archaeological research. Preliminary findings from the excavations, led by Cornwall Council’s Historic Environment Service, suggest the eastern end of the site may represent a henge or possible causewayed enclosure dating to the early Neolithic period (circa 3800 to 3600BCE).
“A causewayed enclosure was a sizeable circular or oval area enclosed by a large bank and ditch,” said Dan Ratcliffe from the Council’s Historic Environment Service. “These sites date to the early Neolithic – a period which also saw the first introduction of agriculture to Britain, the domestication of animals, the manufacture of pottery, and the first appearance of large communally built and used ceremonial monuments. Both the construction of the site and the activities within and around it probably served to bring communities together.”
Recent research in the British Isles indicate that causewayed enclosures were constructed within a relatively short time frame. The concept seems to have originated in mainland Europe spreading quickly through France, Germany, Scandinavia and into the UK. Using the latest in dating techniques along with statistical analysis of C14 results, it has been shown that causewayed enclosures in Ireland appeared earlier than those in Kent, with those in Essex coming in at a slightly later period.
Around 80 sites with evidence of causewayed enclosures are known across southern Britain. The find at Truro – if it is a causewayed enclosure – is the first to be discovered to the south west of the border between Dorset and Devon although the ‘tor enclosures’ at Carn Brea and Helman Tor are thought to have been built at the same time and may have served similar functions.
Now, the team will catalogue their finds, process samples and prepare to write a report on their work, but before then, they will carefully re-bury the partially excavated site to protect it for future generations.
Among some of the remarkably well preserved finds are large sherds of Late Neolithic Grooved Ware pottery (a type of pottery that is first produced in Orkney at the opposite end of the UK) and an unusual slate disc which is engraved on both sides. One side has a distinctive chequerboard pattern while the other has lozenges with arrowhead decoration. It is apparent that this artefact has been deliberately placed within a pit, but it is too early to posit a firm theory about it’s function or deposition.
Often, but not always, Grooved Ware is found within ceremonial and ritual locations, possibly acting as a receptacle for fermented drinks. It ranges in size from drinking cups to large straight sided vessels.
“While it is important that we take the opportunity to learn more about our findings now, best practice is for the site to be preserved for future generations of archaeologists who will have better technologies to understand it than we do today,” said Dan Ratcliffe from the Council’s Historic Environment Service. “Scientific analysis of evidence recovered during the excavations is expected to take some years after the sample excavation has concluded.”
Tim Wood, Cornwall Council’s assistant head of transportation, says: “The proposed development has sufficient flexibility in the design to ensure that the construction above does not interfere with the archaeological remains.”
Source: Cornwall Council
Revue de presse égyptienne compilée régulièrement à partir du Bulletin d’Information Archéologique (BIA) qui paraît sous le double parrainage de l’IFAO et de la chaire « Civilisation pharaonique : archéologie, philologie et histoire » du Collège de France sur le site :
http://www.egyptologues.net/archeologie/bia.htm
Last summer the University of Lausanne held a conference on the new forms of publication offered by Digital Humanities: From Ancient Manuscripts to the Digital Era). Now the proceedings of the conference have been published:
Taking advantage of the topic which was the theme of the conference, the editors choose to publish several versions of the proceedings. The videos from the main conferences were released quite soon after the venue on the conference’s main webpage (Humanités digitales@unil ). These are now also available in the more conventional paper-edition of the proceedings. The e-book version however covers the whole venue and contains 38 contributions.
Logos Bible Software has released the new version of their flagship project: Logos 5.
It incorporates some massive changes in datasets and built in resources while keeping much of the user experience quite similar to Logos 4. I had originally intended to have a useful post ready this evening surveying how tools for studying Greek have changed and have been improved, but prior commitments in thesis writing and a couple other undisclosed Greek projects have held me back. So that’s still in process right now (sorry). Ideally, it will be up by tomorrow. We’ll see.
The most exciting thing about Logos 5, in my opinion, is all the effort they have put into meaningful access to content. It isn’t about searching a massive number of books any more. It’s about finding useful information for specific questions. It’s about making the semantic web real within Logos. The Bible Sense Lexicon is an incredibly exciting project and a great example of creating structured and meaningful information and making it easily accessible.
I know a lot of people that work with languages at the same level I do (or higher) tend to be rather cynical about how tools for using Greek and Hebrew are present in Bible Software packages, but Logos also put significant effort into academic projects and they’re only able to do it because of the pastoral and layperson user base that they have to support such projects. Steve Runge’s Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament is an important example of this. Another is the SBLGNT. Personally, I’d rather work with them to improve how language study is done in the future than merely dismiss them. And, well, that’s what I have been doing and will continue to do so.
I’ll have more thoughts on Greek databases and changes and advancements in the coming few days (because there are some important ones), which is probably just fine. It looks like users are swamping Logos’ servers right now anyway…
There was an almost complete absence of recent gene flow from European populations to the Mozabite gene pool (Figure 6A). For the Sub-Saharan African ancestral component, there were more long CSDAs at the tail of empirical distribution than those in the HI model, which confirmed that recent gene flow from African populations had contributed to the Mozabite gene pool (Figure 6B).
Both Central African Pygmy populations in the HGDP, the Mbuti and Biaka, show evidence of admixture (Table 1), about 28 +/- 4 generations (800 years) ago for Mbuti and 38 +/- 4 generations (1100 years) ago for Biaka, estimated using San and Yoruba as reference populations (Figure 2A,C). The intra-population heterogeneity is low, as demonstrated by the negligible affine terms. In each case, we also generated weighted LD curves with the Pygmy population itself as one reference and a variety of second references. We found that using populations French, Han, or Yoruba as the second reference gave very similar amplitudes, but the amplitude was significantly smaller with the other Pygmy population or San as the second reference (Figure 2B,D). Using the amplitudes with Yoruba, we estimated mixture fractions of at least 15.9 +/- 0.9% and 28.8 +/- 1.4% Yoruba-related ancestry for Mbuti and Biaka, respectively.For Sardinians:
We detect a very small proportion of Sub-Saharan African ancestry in Sardinians, which our ALDER tests identified as admixed (Table 1; Figure 3A). To investigate further, we computed weighted LD curves with Sardinian as a test population and all pairs of the HapMap CEU, YRI and CHB populations as references (Table 2). We observed an abnormally large amount of shared long-range LD in chromosome 8, likely do to an extended inversion segregating in Europeans (PRICE et al. 2008), so we omitted it from these analyses. The CEU–YRI curve has the largest amplitude, suggesting both that the LD present is due to admixture and that the small non- European ancestry component, for which we estimated a lower bound of 0.6+/-0.2%, is from Africa. The existence of a weighted LD decay curve with CHB and YRI as references provides further evidence that the LD is not simply due to a population bottleneck or other non-admixture sources, as does the fact that our estimated dates from all three reference pairs are roughly consistent at about 40 generations (1200 years). Our findings thus confirm the signal of African ancestry in Sardinians reported in MOORJANI et al. (2011). The date, small mixture proportion, and geography are consistent with a small influx of migrants from North Africa, who themselves traced only a fraction of their ancestry ultimately to Sub-Saharan Africa, consistent with the findings of DUPANLOUP et al. (2004).Moorjani et al. (2011) had estimated 2.9% admixture in Sardinians occurring at 71 +/- 28 generations, so the new results appear to be different, perhaps on account of the the treatment of the chromosome 8 inversion or the ability of ALDER to pick the distance threshold (hard-set at 0.5cM in rolloff) adaptively. Also, note that ALDER is able to estimate admixture proportions based on the amplitude of the weighted LD, whereas in the previous test the proportions were calculated using an F4 ratio test which did not take into account East Eurasian-like gene flow into the CEU population, and considered both CEU and Sardinians as having experienced no Asian-related gene flow.
Genetic studies have suggested that present-day Japanese are descended from admixture between two waves of settlers, responsible for the Jomon and Yayoi cultures (HAMMER and HORAI 1995; HAMMER et al. 2006; RASTEIRO and CHIKHI 2009). We also observed evidence of admixture in Japanese (Table 1), and while our ability to learn about the history is limited by the absence of a close surrogate for the original Paleolithic mixing population, we were able to take advantage of the one-reference inference capabilities of ALDER. We observed a clear weighted LD curve using HapMap JPT as the test population and JPT–CHB weights (Figure 3B). This curve yields an estimate of 45 +/- 6 generations, or about 1,300 years, as the age of admixture. To our knowledge, this is the first time genome-wide data have been used to date admixture in Japanese. As with previous estimates based on coalescence of Y-chromosome haplotypes (HAMMER et al. 2006), our date is consistent with the archaeologically attested arrival of the Yayoi in Japan roughly 2300 years ago (we suspect that our estimate is from later than the initial arrival because admixture may not have happened immediately). Based on the amplitude of the curve, we also obtain a (likely very conservative) genome-wide lower bound of 41 +/- 3% “Yayoi” ancestry using formula (12) (under the reasonable assumption that Han Chinese are fairly similar to the Yayoi population). It is important to note that observation of a single-reference weighted LD curve is not sufficient evidence to prove that a population is admixed, but we did find a pair of references with which the ALDER test identified Japanese as admixed, which, combined with previous work and the lack of any signal of reduced population size, makes us confident that our inferences are based on true historical admixture.This is a useful application of the idea that you don't need both reference populations to estimate admixture. If a population A experiences gene flow from another B, then A will become more like B over time, and allele frequency differences between A and B will diminish but will continue to reflect differences between the local and introgressing element. This idea was first used by Pickrell et al. (2012), and a new variation of it is used in the current paper.
troubles tribal members, who generally say that Indian artifacts should remain where they are. "This is our identity," said Darrel Cruz, cultural-resources director for the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California. [...] In recent years, his tribe has encountered disturbed graves and stolen petroglyphs, he said.There is an interesting "them and us" thread running through this. Here the ancient artefacts in US soil are being preserved not for "us all", but for a "them living among us who are disturbed by it". This might go some way to explaining some of the (to us Europeans) odder opinions one comes across in a US milieu about cultural property and who it "belongs to", which seem at odds with other US statements and opinions about everybody's place in the world.
