Antiquitopia

Just to remind ourselves how much we don't know, the New Scientist has an article on eight ancient scripts from around the world that remain to be deciphered. WRITING is one of the greatest inventions in human history. Perhaps the greatest, since it made history possible. Without writing, there could be no accumulation of knowledge, no historical record, no science - and of course no books, newspapers or internet. The first true writing we know of is Sumerian cuneiform - consisting mainly of wedge-shaped impressions on clay tablets - which was used more than 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Soon afterwards writing appeared in Egypt, and much later in Europe, China and Central America. Civilisations have invented hundreds of different writing systems. Some, such as the one you are reading now, have remained in use, but most have fallen into disuse. These dead scripts tantalise us. We can see that they are writing, but what do they say? That is the great challenge of decipherment: to ...

One of the few remaining independent bookstores in my neighborhood, Morningside Books, will be closing its doors today . I have often browsed their sale tables. It is a very sad day.

Strange question, yes? I guess we often do not think of angelic genitals, much like in the movie Dogma . But there is a rather difficult passage in Jubilees that may just raise this issue: This law is for all the eternal generations and there is no circumcising of days and there is no passing a single day beyond eight days because it is an eternal ordinance ordained and written in the heavenly tablets. And anyone who is born whose own flesh is not circumcised on the eighth day is not from the sons of the covenant which the LORD made for Abraham since (he is) from the children of destruction. And there is therefore no sign upon him so that he might belong to the LORD because (he is destined) to be destroyed and annihilated from the earth and to be uprooted from the earth because he has broken the covenant of the LORD our God. Because the nature of all the angels of the presence and all the angels of sanctification was thus from the day of their creation. And in the presence of the...

Peter Brown reviews Paula Fredericksen's Augustine and the Jews in the New York Review of Books in a beautifully written, vivacious style (if a book review can be beautiful and vivacious). In the same review he also discusses Hadith Sivan's Palestine in Late Antiquity . Here are some excerpts from the first half (the Fredricksen half): It is a pleasure to write on a book that derives from a modern scholar's brain wave about the fateful insight of a thinker over a millennium and a half ago. Paula Fredriksen's sudden inspiration occurred in an altogether appropriate place—Jerusalem: I remember staring out the window of the Mishkenot Sha'ananim at daybreak, watching the walls of the Old City glow gold. She realized that, between 394–395 and 399–400, Augustine, bishop of Hippo in Roman North Africa (modern Bône/Annaba in Algeria), had his own brain wave—or rather, a series of brain waves. As a result, Augustine had come to a view of Jews and of Judaism that differed...

I have been rereading Jubilees today, mostly because I am finding it increasingly relevant to my chapter on the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice , and I found the passage on the expulsion of Adam and Eve particularly interesting (and a bit funny): And he made for them garments of skin and he dressed them and sent them from the garden of Eden. And on that day when Adam went out from the garden of Eden, he offered a sweet-smelling sacrifice--frankincense, galbanum, stacte, and spices--in the morning with the rising of the sun from the day he covered his shame. On that day the mouth of all the beasts and cattle and birds and whatever walked or moved was stopped from speaking because all of them used to speak with one another with one speech and one language. And he sent from the garden of Eden all of the flesh which was in the garden of Eden and all of the flesh was scattered, each according to its kind and each one according to its family, into the place which was created for them. But...

I tend to be fairly anti-over-specialization. "Specialists," such as those who focus their entire lives on one book (or I would even say a single body of literature), tend to have scholarly myopia. A piece in the SBL Forum by Michael F. Bird with Craig Keener addresses some of these issues: Young scholars beginning their careers in biblical studies may have to decide if they are to pursue a career as a “specialist” in one particular field like Pentateuch, Prophets, Paul, Petrine literature or be a “generalist” with expertise across a whole Testament, Second Temple literature, and often even rabbinic and early Christian writings. The attraction to the specialist track can easily be identified: (1) It is easier to master the primary sources of one specific area; (2) secondary literature in our guild is growing exponentially and it is impossible to keep up with the scholarly developments in more than one field; and (3) in terms of career prospects it is easier to develop a re...

Today I was trying to double check a reference regarding the פרוכת or "veil" that separates the holy place from the most holy place (Exodus 26:31; 36:35; 2 Chronicles 3:14) in b.Yoma 72a, regarding the distinction between embroidered and woven work in the Tabernacle. And I found a lot of good resources for studying the Talmud. For example, you can find the entire Soncino translation at halakhah.com , where you can download it in .pdf format. Perhaps more impressively for scholarship, you can view digital photographs of different MSS themselves at Online Treasury of Talmudic Manuscripts . The navigational tools are all in Hebrew. You indicate what order, tractate, page (daf), side (amud), and then which manuscript. Seeing the page is important, since the arrangement is very important for Rabbinic documents. Unfortunately, however, it only includes the Bavli and the Mishna. There are numerous other sites, many including streaming audio, so you can hear the text, but these ...

The translation link I set up in the last post for Sappho's Fragment 31 is a website, Ancient Greek Online , I just happened upon that seems to be quite useful for those learning and refreshing their ancient Greek, with very readable Greek (including restored digammas), helpful lexical tools, and English translations for cheaters. The rather instructive site has an edition of the Iliad , Sappho's Lyrics , Aristotle's Poetics , and the Gospel of John for a rather wide range of ancient Greek literature in terms of style, substance, a nice balance of poetry and prose, etc., in different dialects. It has far fewer texts and options than Perseus Digital Library , but seems more user friendly and the Greek is larger and more readable. It might be fun to work through the Iliad , or sections of it.

Fragment 31 φάινεταί μοι κῆνοσ ἴσοσ τηέοισιν ἔμμεν ὤνερ ὄστισ ἐναντίοσ τοι ἰζάνει καὶ πλασίον ἀδυ φωνεύσασ ὐπακούει καὶ γαλαίσασ ἰμμερόεν τὸ δὴ ᾽μάν καρδίαν ἐν στήθεσιν ἐπτόασεν, ὠσ γὰρ εὔιδον βροχέωσ σε, φώνασ οὐδὲν ἔτ᾽ ἔικει, ἀλλὰ κάμ μὲν γλῳσσα ϝέαγε, λέπτον δ᾽ αὔτικα χρῷ πῦρ ὐπαδεδρόμακεν, ὀππάτεσσι δ᾽ οὐδὲν ορημ᾽, ἐπιρρόμβεισι δ᾽ ἄκουαι. ἀ δέ μ᾽ ί᾽δρωσ κακχέεται, τρόμοσ δὲ παῖσαν ἄγρει χλωροτέρα δὲ ποίασ ἔμμι, τεθνάκην δ᾽ ὀλιγω ᾽πιδεύϝην φαίνομαι [ἄλλα]. πᾶν τόλματον [......] ~Sappho~ See a translation here . Sappho to Philaenis Where is that holy fire, which verse is said To have? is that enchanting force decayed? Verse, that draws Nature's works, from Nature's law, Thee, her best work, to her work cannot draw. Have my tears quenched my old poetic fire; Why quenched they not as well, that of desire? Thoughts, my mind's creatures, often are with thee, But I, their maker, want their liberty. Only thine image, in my heart, doth sit, But that is w...

For the garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it Until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert .... The Real is what will strike you as really absurd (W.H. Auden, "Advent IV," For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratio )

That's what makes the traffic here so fun! From US News & World Report : The worst drivers in America live in New York. Of course, you knew that. You've been in the Holland Tunnel. But now, we have proof. GMAC Insurance has released the results of its National Drivers Test for 2009. The test, which measures basic knowledge of driving laws, was given to more than 5,000 drivers from all 50 states and the District of Columbia -- and New Yorkers finished last. Last year's loser, New Jersey, improved its score just enough to leap over New York. Hawaii, California and Georgia rounded out the bottom five. Evidently, Idaho and Wisconsin have the best drivers. My home state of Illinois came in 29th.

According to the NYTimes , Obama told human rights activists that he is ruminating over the idea of preventative detention. What is "preventative detention"? It is what it sounds like. It is the incarceration of suspects, who, it seems, as of yet have not done anything (or we cannot prove they have done anything) who cannot be tried. This sounds eerily like the movie "Minority Report" with its concept of "pre-crime," but without all of the psychic stuff. The two participants, outsiders who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the session was intended to be off the record, said they left the meeting dismayed. They said Mr. Obama told them he was thinking about “the long game” — how to establish a legal system that would endure for future presidents. He raised the issue of preventive detention himself, but made clear that he had not made a decision on it. Several senior White House officials did not respond to requests for comment on the outsiders...

I rarely quote scholarship. Even in my written work, I give pride of place to ancient sources with scholarship relegated to footnotes. Nonetheless, I have been reading the volume of Bakhtin and Genre Theory in Biblical Studies , edited by Roland Boer of Stalin's Moustache fame. Bakhtin, by the way, is my favorite (at the moment) literary non-theorist (I am always fascinated by how the most productive "theorists" claim to be anti-theory as Bakhtin himself claims). I primarily activate his "chronotope" in my current writing, yet his concepts of heteroglossia, polyphony, dialogism, etc., highly inform my approach even if I do not use the lingo. The final chapter in the aforementioned volume is the response to the essays of the Bakhtin and Bible SBL group by Vernon Robbins (famous for his "sociorhetorical criticism), and some of his final words on the chronotope (a dialogized chronotope), I thought worthy of blog quotation: Perhaps...the idea of a new Mos...

Reading out loud, something taken for granted in antiquity, something part of sociality just a couple hundred years ago, is becoming a dying art : May 16, 2009 EDITORIAL OBSERVER Some Thoughts on the Lost Art of Reading Aloud By VERLYN KLINKENBORG Sometimes the best way to understand the present is to look at it from the past. Consider audio books. An enormous number of Americans read by listening these days — listening aloud, I call it. The technology for doing so is diverse and widespread, and so are the places people listen to audio books. But from the perspective of a reader in, say, the early 19th century, about the time of Jane Austen, there is something peculiar about it, even lonely. In those days, literate families and friends read aloud to each other as a matter of habit. Books were still relatively scarce and expensive, and the routine electronic diversions we take for granted were, of course, nonexistent. If you had grown up listening to adults reading to each other regular...

My candle burns at both ends It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends - It gives a lovely light. Edna St. Vincent Millay, "A Few Figs from Thistles", 1920

I personally do not have a Latin diploma. IWU and my current Columbia use English (yes, even Columbia). Dickinson College's Latin professor, Christopher Francese, says, indeed, Latin diplomas must go : Latin is a beautiful language and a relief from the incessant novelty and informality of the modern age. But when it’s used on diplomas, the effect is to obfuscate, not edify; its function is to overawe, not delight. The goal of education is the creation and transmission of knowledge — not the creation and transmission of prestige. Why, then, celebrate that education with a document that prizes grandiosity over communication? .... I know that getting rid of the Latin diploma will not be easy. While most colleges and universities now issue English diplomas, some prominent holdouts — including Yale, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania — still use Latin. Many students and alumni cherish the tradition. In 1961, when Harvard switched to English diplomas, about 4,000 students pr...

Anthem Let us praise our Maker, with true passion extol Him. Let the whole creation give out another sweetness, Nicer in our nostrils, a novel fragrance From cleansed occasions in accord together As one feeling fabric, all flushed and intact, Phenomena and numbers announcing in one Multitudinous oecumenical song Their grand givenness of gratitude and joy, Peaceable and plural, their positive truth An authoritative This, an unthreatened Now When, in love and in laughter, each lives itself, For, united by His Word, cognition and power, System and Order, are a single glory, And the pattern is complex, their places safe. ~W.H. Auden~

In honor of the current Hubble repair mission, here are some amazing pics from the most successful telescope ever!

What signs ought we to make to be found, how can we will the knowledge that we must know to will? (W.H. Auden, "The Dark Years")

"The Kingdom Of Heaven" A suffering soul on the way to the Kingdom of Heaven Held up a sign that says "God hates America" A child has been lost A mother is shocked and is grieving And turning away, turning away He said there is a love that is so hideous and destructive We must drive it from Earth to save all of our children He must know it well In the night it's the hell that he speaks of It keeps him awake, keeps him awake My God is love My God is peace My God loves you My God loves me A suffering soul on the way to the Kingdom of Heaven Prayed in the dark, "Death to the infidel" He strapped all his desperate pain and his faith to his body And blew them away, blew them away A suffering soul on the way to the Kingdom of Heaven Shouts on the news, "They are the godless ones" The anger inside and the fear that it hides never leave her When the cameras are gone, when the cameras move on Oh, people, c'mon? tell me where is your Kingdom of Hea...

When a NYTimes article is headlined as "Ancient Figurine of Voluptuous Woman is Found," it is difficult not to read further! May 14, 2009 Ancient Figurine of Voluptuous Woman Is Found By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD No one would mistake the Stone Age ivory carving for a Venus de Milo. The voluptuous woman depicted is, to say the least, earthier, with huge, projecting breasts and sexually explicit genitalia. Nicholas J. Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, who found the small carving in a cave last year, says it is at least 35,000 years old, “one of the oldest known examples of figurative art” in the world. It is about 5,000 years older than some other so-called Venus artifacts made by early populations of Homo sapiens in Europe. Another archaeologist, Paul Mellars of the University of Cambridge in England, agrees and goes on to remark on the obvious. By modern standards, he says, the figurine’s blatant sexuality “could be seen as bordering on the pornograp...

hmmm...maybe I should start collecting these...

From the NYTimes : May 13, 2009 Christians in Mideast Losing Numbers and Influence By ETHAN BRONNER JERUSALEM — Christians used to be a vital force in the Middle East. They dominated Lebanon and filled top jobs in the Palestinian movement. In Egypt, they were wealthy beyond their number. In Iraq, they packed the universities and professions. Across the region, their orientation was a vital link to the West, a counterpoint to prevailing trends. But as Pope Benedict XVI wends his way across the Holy Land this week, he is addressing a dwindling and threatened Christian population driven to emigration by political violence, lack of economic opportunity and the rise of radical Islam. A region that a century ago was 20 percent Christian is about 5 percent today and dropping. Since it was here that Jesus walked and Christianity was born, the papal visit highlights a prospect many consider deeply troubling for the globe’s largest faith, adhered to by a third of humanity — its most powerful and...

I wonder how many times Moses had to hear, "Are we there yet?" in forty years of wandering...but this is almost as bad:

In the NYTimes : May 11, 2009 PRAGUE JOURNAL Hard Times Give New Life to Prague’s Golem By DAN BILEFSKY PRAGUE — They say the Golem, a Jewish giant with glowing eyes and supernatural powers, is lurking once again in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue here. The Golem, according to Czech legend, was fashioned from clay and brought to life by a rabbi to protect Prague’s 16th-century ghetto from persecution, and is said to be called forth in times of crisis. True to form, he is once again experiencing a revival and, in this commercial age, has spawned a one-monster industry. There are Golem hotels; Golem door-making companies; Golem clay figurines (made in China); a recent musical starring a dancing Golem; and a Czech strongman called the Golem who bends iron bars with his teeth. The Golem has also infiltrated Czech cuisine: the menu at the non-kosher restaurant called the Golem features a “rabbi’s pocket of beef tenderloin” and a $7 “crisis special” of roast pork and potatoes that would s...

προαιρεῖσθαί τε δεῖ ἀδύνατα εἰκότα μᾶλλον ἢ δυνατὰ ἀπίθανα: Probable impossibilities are preferable to implausible possibilities. (Aristotle, Poetics 60a (1460a); trans. Malcolm Heath)

Becket's famous "Waiting for Godot" is not just in NYC, but has been revived in London's West End , starring no less talents than Ian McKellen, whose King Lear was fabulous, and Patrick Stewart: The opening moments of Sean Mathias’s production of Samuel Beckett’s benchmark 1953 play suggest that this will be a “Godot” with a difference, and for two-and-a-half alternately crushing and beautiful hours, Mr. McKellen and his scarcely less distinguished colleague, Patrick Stewart, do not disappoint. There are innumerable ways to play Estragon (Gogo) and Vladimir (Didi), the two tramps suspended in the limbo that, broadly speaking, is life. But in my extensive experience of this play, I’ve never seen a staging as attuned to the presence of mortality that underpins even Beckett’s jauntiest repartee. Think of Didi and Gogo as two clowns on a road to nowhere, their banter possessed of the constantly changing push-me/pull-you quality one associates with long-married couples. As...

From Rant/Rave : It is generally believed that Coptic is an extinct language, alive only in the prayer books and scriptures of Coptic Christianity, which is one of the major branches of the Christian faith tradition. Coptic is the language of ancient Egypt. Unlike Arabic , it is not Semitic but Afro Asiatic. In its earliest from, it was written with hieroglyphics. Later, it was written with a phonetic alphabet which is mainly Greek but has added characters for sounds not found in Greek. The Islamic conquest of Egypt involved harsh repression of coptic as a spoken language. Indeed even today, the adherents of Coptic Christianity endure civic liabilities in Egypt that are unimaginable in the west. The most commonly believed time line of the Coptic language lists the mid 1600’s as the time in which the last speaker of this language died. Now there are reports that the language may still be spoken, still a living language. The most solid report of Coptic language survival comes from the Co...

Outside of King Tutankhamun's richly decorated sarcophagus, perhaps the most recognizable ancient Egyptian artifact is the bust of Nefertiti...but a new book argues that it is an early twentieth century fake, originally meant to test ancient pigments found on an archaeological site (thus the pigments are ancient, but the bust itself is not). From Yahoo! News : Famed Nefertiti bust 'a fake': expert 2 hrs 1 min ago PARIS (AFP) – The bust of Queen Nefertiti housed in a Berlin museum and believed to be 3,400 years old in fact is a copy dating from 1912 that was made to test pigments used by the ancient Egyptians, according to Swiss art historian Henri Stierlin. Stierlin, author of a dozen works on Egypt, the Middle East and ancient Islam, says in a just-released book that the bust currently in Berlin's Altes Museum was made at the order of German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt by an artist named Gerardt Marks. "It seems increasingly improbable that the bust is an orig...

There are more responses to Mark Taylor, but these are actually interesting...at Gawker : Mark C. Taylor, chairman of Columbia University's Religion department, started some shit. So much we need two posts to flush-it down properly. First up: Kate Perkins and Dan Kois. God can't save you now, Mark! So Professor Taylor's main thesis: If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin with six major steps And he outlines his manifesto for reform in six points. All of it raises central questions about the purpose of education in our new information age. I got some peeps to discuss: When an article starts off like this, who wouldn't want to keep reading? Here was my favorite response from a "peep": The ivory tower, traditionally, has stood as a haven fo...

No one...must try to get to know from me what I know that I do not know, unless, it may be, in order to learn not to know what must be known to be incapable of being known! (Augustine, City of God 12.7) Go ahead, read it again to know what you can know and cannot know or know that you cannot know (which is better than not knowing what you can know) about knowing and not knowing from Augustine.

I saw this via Agade; Al-Ahram Weekly reports on the cataloging and restoration of many deteriorating Coptic Manuscripts in the Coptic Museum archives: The Coptic Museum archives, considered to be the world's most important Coptic library and containing more than 5,000 manuscripts and books, are being given a facelift. Serenity, peace and complete quiet are the overwhelming sensations in the museum library, despite the presence of two dozen experts and restorers who have spread themselves to each corner of the reading room. Since January, the library has been converted into a scientific laboratory so that a comprehensive survey to assess the current conditions of its treasured manuscripts and books can be carried out. Armed with white gowns, masks, small brushes, glass plaques, small pieces of cottonwool and special liquids, junior and professional restorers sit in front of their improvised desks examining the piece of manuscript win their hands. They are looking for parts of each...

May May with its light behaving Stirs vessel, eye and limb, The singular and sad Are willing to recover, And to each swan-delighting river The careless picnics come In living white and red. Our dead, remote and hooded, In hollows rest, but we From their vague woods have broken, Forests where children meet And the white angel-vampires flit, Stand now with shaded eye, The dangerous apple taken. The real world lies before us, Brave motions of the young, Abundant wish for death, The pleasing, pleasured, haunted: A dying Master sinks tormented In his admirers' ring, The unjust walk the earth. And love that makes impatient Tortoise and roe, that lays The blonde beside the dark, Urges upon our blood, Before the evil and the good How insufficient is Touch, endearment, look. (W.H. Auden)