Electra Atlantis: Digital Approaches to Antiquity

I had to scan the introduction to Francisco Javier Caubee Iturbe’s edition of a Christian Arabic catena on the gospel of Matthew.  I found myself wondering how well Google translate would handle Spanish.  After all, it gives Spanish as the default foreign language, so I hope it might be good!  So I experimented a bit. 

The following notes are abstracted from Iturbe’s comments.  Since both volumes of his work have a 50-page introduction, these are very much short notes!  Anyhow, he introduces his edition thus:

Studies and research on gospel catenas – comments by various fathers listed successively around the text of the Gospel – to date have been limited almost exclusively to those conveyed to us in Greek. As regards those preserved in Arabic, we can say that, nothing exists apart from some brief references in a few authors.  And yet there are several Arabic manuscript codices containing exegetical catenas on the Gospels, with markedly different characteristics from Greek catenas. The problems that these codices present with regard to their origin, their language, the patristic extracts used, the method and means by which they have been transmitted, and so on, are various, and often difficult. There are some differences, more or less marked, in the text of the comments found in the manuscripts, but fundamentally, at least for the Gospel of Matthew, they are all the same catena, conceived as an organic whole, with proper proportions, in this surpassing many of the Greek catenas, which sometimes comprise lengthy scholia joined with other tiny extracts by many different fathers juxtaposed against the same verse. The copies of almost all these manuscripts were made in Egypt, in the Coptic Monophysite church, and they were long in use, especially in the monasteries of Scetis.

 Of all the existing Arabic manuscripts, of which thirteen are known to contain gospel catenas, four are in the Vatican Library, three in Cairo, two in Paris and one in each of the following cities: Strasbourg, Oxford, Gottingen and Baghdad. All have the catena on the Gospel of Matthew, except for one in Cairo and another in Paris.

A description of the manuscripts containing the catena on Matthew is presented in this volume, beginning with the oldest of them, ms. Vatican Arab 452, which is the basis for the text published here; in the notes of the apparatus are the variants of the other manuscripts that rely on the same textual tradition.

He then lists the sigla for his edition.  It is interesting to learn of so many manuscripts.  M and P belong to a different family to the rest.

B  = Ms. Vatican Arab 452.
C = Ms. Arab Cairo 411.
D = Ms. Arab Cairo 195.
G = Ms. Gottingen ar. 103.
K = Ms. karsuni Vatican syr. 541.
L =  The catena in the coptic ms. of Curzon, as printed in the edition by P. de Lagarde, Catenae in evangelio aegyptiacae quae supersunt,  Gottingae 1886.
M = Ms. Vatican ar. 410.
O = Ms. Arab Bodleian Hunt. 262.
P = Ms. Paris ar. 55.
S = Ms. Arab Strasbourg or. 4315.

The copies all derive from the Coptic catena printed by De Lagarde, which is now sadly missing many of its leaves. 

Iturbe begins by describing the first of these.  Since Arabic catenas are probably almost unknown to anyone, I think it’s worth translating this as a sample of what the manuscript contains.

MS. VATICAN ARABIC 452 – Siglum B.

1214 AD. Paper, 250 x 165 mm., the written area is 175 x 110 mm., 376 folios, 17 lines per page.

The manuscript is divided now into two volumes, bound in white leather: one has 196 pages and the second 180. The missing folios at the end, probably about thirty-five, are more or less what is needed to complete a version of the Gospel lessons of the holidays, Sundays, Saturdays, and so on, for the whole year, introduced and started on f. 369v  at the end of the manuscript; as it currently is, it only goes as far as 4th Hatur, which is the third month of the Coptic calendar.

On the first page, in the center of a large rectangle, to whose sides are attached 16 identical circles, enclosing as many Coptic crosses – four circles with crosses, one on each of the horizontal sides, two on the vertical, four more identical at the corners of the rectangle all drawn in red and black –, the manuscript title is written in black ink, indicating its contents: Book of the Gospels, its explanation and calendar.

On most of the rest of the page, above and below the rectangle, there is a certificate of ownership of the book, dated 55 years after the composition. We will discuss this document later.

A few short sentences in Arabic, which can barely be read — some of which seems to be an essay written by an ignoramus — plus two seals of the Vatican Library and the indication “452 Arabic”, occupy the remaining free space on the page, which because of that, plus humidity and other stains, presents a sorry state, which is felt in part on the verso of the same folio. This folio 1 is the most deteriorated of the manuscript, except folio 135v. The latter was originally left blank, before the commentary on the Gospel of Mark.  But then four lines were written in Karshuni, also repeated in Arabic, which a few illiterates then wrote over and over again like vandals, which, added to the horrendous lines crossing at the top of the page, has completely smeared the page. Something similar on a smaller scale, has occurred in ff. 188v-189, which were almost completely blank between the gospels of Mark and Luke, and on ff. 368v-369, the end of the Gospel of John. Except for these cases and others of less importance, the manuscript has been preserved in good condition.

On ff. 1v-5v, after a preface, the Ammonian sections are arranged in the ten canon tables of Eusebius, and marked by Coptic numerals.
Ff. 6-135 contain the Gospel of St. Matthew with the patristic commentaries.
Ff. 136-188v: Gospel of Mark and their comments.
Ff. 189v-298: Gospel of St. Luke and comments.
Ff. 299-c68: Gospel of St. John and their comments.
Ff. 369v identifies the Coptic gospel lessons for the first part of the year, as I indicated above.

A little further on he adds:

The colophon to the Gospel of Mark says (f. 188v): ‘The text of the Gospel of Mark the Evangelist and the commentary on its meaning is finished with the help of God – may He be exalted! — and by the blessing of His grace, on Wednesday, 6 Tut of the year 921 of the pure Martyrs. May his blessing be with us. Amen’.

The date is 3rd September, 1204 – the same year as the sack of Constantinople by the renegade army hired for the Fourth Crusade, in which so much ancient literature perished.

Iturbe published his edition in two volumes, the first with a preface on the manuscripts and then the Arabic text, the second with a preface on the contents and a Spanish translation.  The introduction to the second volume begins as follows:

The patristic catena on the Gospel of St. Matthew in ms. Vatican ar. 452, the text published in Volume I, which we here give in translation, after almost all of the 68 sections into which it divides the Gospel text, has one or more pieces of commentary — scholia — each preceded by a very brief indication - lemma – written in red, which states, most of the time, who is the Father or interpreter who composed it. In total, there are 336 scholia with corresponding lemmas.

But there are 86 lemmas which are no more than the word ‘interpretation’, and we may wonder whether the compiler of the catena – or the copier - meant to assign the scholia which immediately follow to the named author of the preceding passage. That certainly agrees with the reading of the Coptic manuscript of Curzon and other similar Arabic manuscripts, and in a comparative study of them all we find that of the 86 scholia, 82 belong  to the author last named in a lemma; 3 to a different author than the one listed in B above, and only 1 of them is unknown.

Having clarified the previous difficulty, and incidentally shedding light on other such mss, Coptic and Arabic, we have 113 which are scholia by St. Cyril of Alexandria and 109 of St. John Chrysostom. The two great Eastern doctors thus cover two thirds of all the commentary of St. Matthew in the catena. Then comes Severus of Antioch, with 53 glosses. And then, with a much smaller number, the other contributors. The list of all those in B, with the number of scholia that each must be awarded is as follows:

Cyril of Alexandria = 113
John Chrysostom = 109
Severus of Antioch = 53
Hippolytus of Rome = 15
Gregory the Theologian = 8
Gregory Thaumaturgus = 6
Epiphanius = 5
Eusebius of Caesarea = 5
Clement (Alexandria) = 5
Athanasius = 4
Basil = 4
Severian of Gabala = 2
Simeon the Hermit = 2
Cyril of Jerusalem = 1
Titus (of Bostra ) = 1
Isaiah the Anchorite = 1
An elder of the Desert Fathers [the abbot Ammon] = 1

These, then, are the authors for which we may find textual witnesses in this Arabic catena.  Iturbe also states:

On the other hand there are various authors in Greek catenas who do not appear in Coptic-Arabic catenas: Apollinaris, Gregory of Nyssa, Irenaeus, Theodore of Heraclea, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret, etc; and above all Origen, who in almost all Greek catena families has many scholia, such as in the third of type B, where Origen comprises 227 out of the total 874.

There is little point in looking for material by Origen in Coptic or Arabic, it seems.

Back in the first introduction, Iturbe discusses the Coptic catena published by De Lagarde, from which all the Arabic mss. derive.

The Curzon Coptic manuscript catena, siglum L.

In 1886 Paul de Lagarde (P. Boetticher) published the Bohairic text of a manuscript obtained by Robert Curzon in March 1838 in the Monastery of the Syrians, Wadi ‘l-Natrun. Never translated, little use has been made so far in the scholarly field of this good edition of De Lagarde.  But for the present study, however, we are particularly interested in this Coptic ms.

It contains a patristic catena on the four gospels – next to the Gospel text – divided into sections, as in B and other Arabic manuscripts. The text of the Gospels has only a short verse or verses, which are generally given before the lemmas and scholia: in this, then, it is similar to M and P. This codex was written in the year 605 of the holy martyrs (888/89 AD), more than three centuries before the oldest of our Arabic mss, codex B, which was written in the year 1214 AD as regards the part of Matthew. Because sixteen folios were lost, the comments on Matt. 2:1-5:5; 5:44-6:3; 7:24-29; 9:27-9:37; 12:48-13:10; 24:16-29 are missing; see the introduction.

All this detail  may swamp us; but we need to recall that almost no-one working on New Testament texts or on the patristic comments on them found in catenas — is there anyone working on the latter? — has any awareness of material that has made its way into Arabic.

When my Eusebius volume appears, at least those dealing with the Gospel problems and solutions will be aware that there is material that should be consulted in Christian Arabic.

This is a version of a communication I just posted on IraqCrisis

As of this weekend the United States and the Coalition have been at war in Iraq for seven years.
Millions of people have been forced from their homes as refugees or internally displaced; hundreds of thousands have been killed and basic services remain unattainable for many. Hundreds of thousands of US soldiers have been sent to fight resulting in over 4,000 deaths and many more injured. In addition, the war has cost U.S. taxpayers at least $3 trillion that could have been spent on jobs, healthcare, and schools. There are no winners.

The Library of Congress has undertaken to archive web sites selected by subject specialists to represent web-based information on the Iraq War.

Iraq War, 2003 Web Archive

Scope: On March 20, 2003, the United States initiated offensive military action against Iraq for the stated purpose of deposing Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and preventing his use of suspected nuclear weapons (weapons of mass destruction.) British, Australian, Polish, and Danish forces participated in the invasion. U.S. led forces took control of Baghdad on April 9, 2003. There was both support and opposition to the war.

The war continued with the United States coalition forces facing increased insurgency from Shiite militants, Sunni militants, and terrorists aligned with Al Queda. The United States has had more than 150,000 troops deployed at any one time in Iraq. The Library continued with two more phases of web capturing from December, 2003 to the present. These last two phases are not yet available but will be in the future.

Included in the web archive are U.S. government sites, foreign government sites, public policy and political advocacy groups, educational organizations, religious organizations, support groups for military personnel, anti-war groups, sites that target children, and news sources.

This collection is part of a continuing effort by the Library of Congress to evaluate, select, collect, catalog, provide access to, and preserve digital materials for future generations of researchers.

Collection Period: The Iraq War Web-capture has three phases of collection. The first phase, a weekly capture, began on March 13, 2003 with the commencement of the war and ended June 30, 2003.

Phase 1 has been processed and is available from this site.

Phase 2 is a weekly capture and covers December 2003 to December 2004. Phase 3, also a weekly capture, was begun in January 2005 and is ongoing as of January, 2008. Phases 2 and 3 are not yet processed.

Number of Sites: 231 constituting Phase 1.

The Iraq War Web Archive includes two websites under the subject heading "cultural property"

1. Iraq -- The cradle of civilization at risk: H-Museum Current Focus
linking to http://h-net.msu.edu/~museum/iraq.html
2. LOST TREASURES FROM IRAQ
linking to http://www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/IRAQ/iraq.html

Almost nothing else in the resource makes reference to archaeology, archaeological sites, museums, or libraries in Iraq. A search for the phrase "stuff happens" yields no results.

Fortunately two other sites remain online.

1. Francis Deblauwe's The Iraq War & Archaeology Blog
2. The IraqCrisis list Archive

I've asked that the Library of Congress include them in the next phases of the Iraq War Web Archive.

VESUVIUSonLINE: LA RASSEGNA STAMPA di www.vesuvioweb.com

See the full List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies.

In 2010, using and developing free and open source software for archaeological research is not interesting news: lots of us do that nowadays, and the quality and quantity of available software and programming libraries is something not questionable. But was it the same 5 years ago ? It was very different, believe me. In 2005 the IOSA project was less than one year old, GRASS GIS 6.0 beta was right there and it looked to us like just having a human graphical interface to a free GIS program would help solving any problem. Ubuntu Linux was just a Warty Warthog. But this is history.
What I'm going to write today is instead the archaeology of free and open source software in archaeology. A few weeks ago I found two unrelated items that will fit perfectly in such an archaeological study.

read more

Iturbe’s edition of the Arabic catena containing bits of Eusebius has arrived.  There are five fragments.  I’ve commissioned a translation of them, and also a transcription; also a transcription of the Syriac text translated earlier.

Some cool quick hits on a chilly spring Friday morning:

• If you haven't tracked it down yet, check out Dan Reetz's home page and blog.
• The Electric Archaeologist is experimenting with Vue (Visual Understanding Environment) here and here.
• The Iklaina Archaeological Project publishes its final reports online on a fairly nice looking site.   
• Here's an update on the project sponsored by the University of Bristol to included homeless people in the excavation of an urban site.
• Here's a link to a somewhat interesting First Monday article on how students use Wikipedia and an interesting article on how peer governance works on that site.
• My lovely wife has offered to get my an iPad for my birthday. At the same time, I've been talking the Scott Moore who recently purchased a Kindle. And now I discover that I can read Kindle books on my Mac in a real mediocre way.
• Did I link to this interesting (and sort of long) talk by J. Zittrain on the Historical Record in the Digital Age?
• Some of Ryan Stander's work based on his time in Cyprus was recently declared indecent by the good folks at the County of Somerset Culture and Heritage Council.
• This is a very funny version of Classics version of Adam Sandler's Hannukah song produced by students at my old stomping ground, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.
• Joel Jonientz, one of our collaborators in the Working Group in Digital and New Media, interviewed Art Spiegelman.
• One of the fun things to do during the NCAA tournament is to check Google Trends to see what universities are getting lots of attention for their teams' success during the NCAA Tournament.
• For a tiny bit, it looked like New Zealand v. Australia might be interesting, but then folks settled in.
• Bristol this week.
• And the NCAA Tournament. I broke my own record for how quickly I could lose my NCAA Champion (Georgetown): first day, third session. What was I thinking?

As a point of comparison, I captured this photo at 7:22 am today. Compare it to the capture from 24 hours before.

Chroniques assyriologiques: Le nouveau site des Chroniques

Depuis 2005, le site des Chroniques assyriologiques offre des notes de lectures en assyriologie et hittitologie, principalement à partir des notices publiées dans la Revue Historique de Droit Français et Etranger (=RHD). Ce site a été créé à l’initiative d’Alice Mouton, qui contribuait alors régulièrement à la section « hittitologie » des Chroniques, et de Sophie Démare-Lafont, éditeur en chef des Chroniques assyriologiques de la RHD. Il reprend l’ensemble des notices publiées depuis 1991 et jusqu’à la dernière parution des Chroniques de la RHD en 2004.

Après une période d’inactivité relative principalement due à des difficultés techniques (problèmes de plateforme), le site renaît de ses cendres à cette nouvelle adresse.

Par souci de commodité, ce nouveau site des Chroniques assyriologiques reprend les anciennes notices du précédent site, mais y ajoute de nouvelles notes de lecture. L’ancien site des Chroniques ne sera donc plus mis à jour.
Bonne lecture à tous !

Dr. Alice Mouton, responsable du site internet

Contribuez aux Chroniques assyriologiques !

Avec la création du nouveau site internet des Chroniques, il a été décidé d’ouvrir les notices à l’ensemble des langues de l’assyriologie. Seront dorénavant acceptées les notices en anglais, allemand, italien et français. Autre nouveauté : le nom des auteurs des nouvelles notices sera spécifié, contrairement à l’ancien usage des Chroniques.
Toute notice doit être transmise à Alice Mouton à l’adresse suivante : alice.mouton@misha.fr
Il est rappelé que chaque notice doit comporter entre 5 et 10 lignes maximum.

Abréviations
Alalah, Ugarit, Amarna
Archéologie hittite
Comptes rendus
Elam
Généralités
Hittite
Médio-assyrien
Médio-babylonien
Néo-assyrien
Néo-babylonien
Néo-sumérien
Paléo-assyrien
Paléo-babylonien
Paléo-sémitique
Présentation des Chroniques – Archives

These are some rough notes taken last week at Late Antique Archaeology conference 2010 about Local economies? Production & exchange of inland regions, that took place at King's College, London, Friday 12th to Saturday 13th March 2010. Overall, this conference was interesting, and I had a chance to meet lots of nice people working in Late Antique Archaeology. Inspiration for my PhD research was just great.

Contents

read more

A few years back, we published a series of seven books called Guides to New Testament Exegesis. The seven titles are also available individually (links below go to individual volumes), but of course you save by purchasing the collection:

• Introducing New Testament Interpretation by Scot McKnight
• Interpreting the Synoptic Gospels by Scot McKnight
• Interpreting the Gospel of John by Gary M. Burge
• Interpreting the Book of Acts by Walter L. Liefeld
• Interpreting the Pauline Epistles by Thomas R. Schreiner
• Interpreting the Epistle to the Hebrews by Andrew H. Trotter Jr.
• Interpreting the Book of Revelation by J. Ramsey Michaels

These books provide a general introduction (by Scot McKnight, no less!) to the interpretation of the New Testament, as well as genre-specific methods and materials for doing exegesis. One thing I didn't know (but learned from reading the product page on Logos.com — good stuff there!) was that:

The vision for this collection comes from Gordon Fee’s New Testament Exegesis: A Handbook for Students and Pastors. By developing handbooks for each genre and book collection, this collection operates as an extended treatment of Fee’s narrower scope.

Fee's work is detailed and valuable; to have his methodology distilled and applied to these particular genres is a helpful thing. It's like getting a jump start in New Testament exegesis. And to have it done by folks of the caliber of Scot McKnight, Thomas Schreiner, and Gary Burge? Even better. Check it out.

Speaking of New Testament exegesis, another title that you might find helpful is Donald Hagner's introduction, New Testament Exegesis and Research: A Guide for Seminarians. This is geared toward seminarians, but helpful for everyone. If I understand correctly how the book came about, it is basically the information that Hagner gives incoming seminarians, to get them properly grounded at the start of their seminary career.

Need some more suggestions? I'm out of room here, but you might try I. Howard Marshall's New Testament Interpretation, David Alan Black's Interpreting the New Testament, or perhaps even Katharine Barnwell's Linguistics and New Testament Interpretation. Check 'em out!

Michael J. Lewis has published a fascinating little article on Louis Kahn's 1932 entry for a Lenin Memorial. The competition is largely unknown from Kahn's corpus because he intentionally expunged it from his resume in order to save himself from future political embarrassment. Although Michael Lewis had studied a verbal description of the monument (donated to the University of Pennsylvania

Wow, Publishing Archaeology placed number 33 in the list of "50 Best blogs for archaeology students." What a great finish, something to feel proud of. Or maybe I should be depressed. They do list a bunch of nice blogs, but they leave out the one I have been projecting before class as we get set up: Archaeopop (I put on the music videos filmed at major sites).

Right now, though, this "inspirational" poster on blogging may be more in line with my attitude (thanks to my daughter Heather for pointing out the Demotivators site with many such inspirational posters. My favorite is this one, a materialist manifesto if I ever saw one:

My students prefer the Sacrifice poster, though (check it out at Demotivators).

Time to do some work, enough of this nonsense.

With Erica’s link, I think I might be able to make some headway on getting Opencontext.org materials into VUE… in the meantime, I thought it might behoove me to start on something more straightforward. So I took the feed from Tom Elliott’s Maia Atlantis feed, to see what’d happen… and I think it might be useful for working out the links of our own little corner of the blogosphere. With a does of network analysis (VUE generates connectivity matrices) it should be able to figure out who are the keyplayers, and other implications for information flow. Hmm!

(I also ran the feed for this blog through it, and discovered just how awful my tagging/categories really are. Great big blocks of unconnected posts – the categories are the links – so I should really try to rationalize all that).

A similar idea – well, standard social network analysis – is being done using VUE with regard to the WWI Poets:

Stuart Lee from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive is using VUE to draw out relationships between poets covered in the archive. From his post at the World War One Literature google group:

What I have done, therefore, is take a preliminary stab at showing -
in a mind-map – the relationships between the poets we have
concentrated on in the project (or will be) and show how they might
have known each other, etc. By no means is this complete, but it
begins to show poets who were clearly at the centre of things
(Sassoon, Thomas, Graves, and eventually Owen) and those who were on
the periphery (Leighton, Jones, Brittain).

Check out the map he created:

See the VUE blog, and the original post

Getting Logos 4 for the Mac finished is one of our top priorities. Recent Alpha releases are in good shape, and offer many of the core features. We're working at top speed to get everything else done, too.

The number one questions, of course, is "When?" And we can't say, because we don't know. We're putting our energy into coding, not estimating. And, because of the unique challenges involved in sharing code between platforms, there are many things we can't predict the time-frame for, even if we tried.

The good news is that the Logos 4 Mac team is seeing success after success. Our shared-code strategy is working, and ensuring compatibility of both content and documents. And as the platform becomes more stable we're seeing increased speed implementing features at the interface layer.

We've been hiring Mac developers for quite a while, and we have even brought some of the Windows development team over to the Mac side. But we couldn't hire enough great Mac developers fast enough here in Bellingham, so we decided to do something even more dramatic: We opened a temporary office in Bellevue, Washington where we could get access to a bigger pool of Mac developers.

We rented an apartment and moved our Mac team lead there for four days a week. He's helping keep the half-dozen programmers there coordinated with the larger team in Bellingham.

The bottom line? Logos 4 Mac is full-speed ahead, and making lots of progress. We can't predict the final ship date, but we're confident we're doing everything possible to make it as soon as possible. And, of course, there's a new Alpha release every two weeks, which many users report is stable and meets their needs on a daily basis.

Want even more updates? Keep an eye on our forums, where you can hear about the latest progress and even interact with the development team.

In conjunction with the annual meeting of the TEI Council, the Digital Humanities Observatory is sponsoring a Symposium on TEI and Scholarly Publishing. For details, please see the symposium website.

The 2010 Conference and Members’ Meeting will be held at the University of Zadar, Croatia. Proposals for papers are due by 1 May; proposals for pre-conference workshops are due 31 March. Please see the conference website for details.

It's that time of year again: flood season. Since so many of you have asked, I've embedded Grand Forks' flood cam in this post:

Streaming .TV shows by Ustream
To offer some perspective, I've included a screen grab of the flood cam as of 7:30 am today:


As you can see the bridge is still open and the Mighty Red River of the North is still largely within its banks. The flood obelisk is just to the right of center immediately to the left of the electrical pole on the right side of the bridge. As you can see it's in the water, but that's not too unusual or scary. The crest is predicted for early next week and to be between 47 and 49 feet. Apparently the long, early thaw combined with a snowy winter and relatively damp March has caused the major problems this year. Current predictions put the crest safely inside the to 10 historic crests:

Historic Crests1) 54.35 feet - April 22, 1997
2) 50.20 feet - April 10, 1897
3) 49.34 feet - April 1, 2009
4) 48.81 feet - April 26, 1979
5) 48.00 feet - April 18, 1882
6) 47.93 feet - April 6, 2006
7) 47.41 feet - April 16, 2006
8) 45.93 feet - April 21, 1996
9) 45.73 feet - April 11, 1978
10) 45.69 feet - April 16, 1969
Source: National Weather Service via Grand Forks Herald

I guess there is some worry about ice jams -- or at least that was the topic of conversation last night at dinner. If you want to know as much as we do out here, check out the Grand Forks Herald's flood page. We'll do all we can to stay dry and hope the best for our friends to the south.

I’m still trying to get the manuscript of Eusebius Gospel problems and solutions completed.  We’re getting ever closer, tho!

I’ve started working on the text of the Latin fragments myself, faux de mieux, which I will get done by the end of the week. 

The two extra Syriac fragments, culled from Severus of Antioch and Ishodad of Merv, will be translated by the same time (I am promised).

I’ve got all the Greek in electronic form.  The passages from Cramer’s catena have all been proofed excellently, but I’ve now got a friend looking at the material from Migne: the first three chunks from Nicetas’ catena on Luke are with him.

I’ve heard nothing from the people doing the Coptic for a month, when I last prompted.  Time to prompt again.

I’ve also ordered a copy of the Arabic translation of the Coptic catena on Matthew.  I need someone with Coptic and Arabic to translate the relevant bits and compare it with the Coptic.

Follow my Day of DH, an initiative started last year by the University of Alberta, Canada.

“A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities (Day of DH) is a community publication project that will bring together digital humanists from around the world to document what they do on one day, March 18th. The goal of the project is to create a web site that weaves together the journals of the participants into a picture that answers the question, “Just what do computing humanists really do?” Participants will document their day through photographs and commentary in a blog-like journal. The collection of these journals with links, tags, and comments will make up the final work which will be published online.” (Day of DH)

Ghost of a flea pointed me to jeff black, berlin, who writes:

A page from a 7th century Sanaa ms.

German researchers preparing “Qur’an: The Critical Edition”

This is a serious business. A team of researchers at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences is preparing to bring out the first installment of Corpus Coranicum – which purports to be nothing less than the first critically evaluated text of the Qur’an ever to be produced.

 What this means is that the research team is in the process of analysing and transcribing some 12,000 slides of Qur’an mansucripts from the first six centuries of the text’s existence. Once that is complete, the way is open to producing a text that annotates and, presumably, provides some sort of exegesis on the differences found in the early manuscripts.

…

The Potsdam-based team of Corpus Coranicum have so far concentrated on Suras 18 to 20, and are due to produce a first slice of the final product from that in the next few weeks. The whole book is meant to take until around 2025.

UPDATE: The English language site seems to be down but the Google cache contains the following, seemingly from an old update:

Welcome to the Corpus Coranicum

The project “Corpus Coranicum” contains two unworked fields of qur’anic studies: (1) the documentation of the qur’anic text in his handwritten as well as orally transmitted form and (2) a comprehensive commentary which elucidates the text within the framework of its historical process of development.

Because of the ambiguity of the early defective writing system of the Qur’anic manuscripts, a strict separation of the data on the one hand provided by manuscripts and on the other hand transmitted via the tradition of recitation is recommended. The documentation of the Qur’anic text will provide a documentation for both traditions and compare them afterwards.

The planned commentary focuses on a historical perspective, the Qur’an seen as a text which evolved through the period of more than twenty years, thereby getting formal and content-related differences through abrogation and re-definitions within the text. Furthermore, the commentary is based on an inclusion of the judeo-christian intertexts and looks at the Qur’an as a document of the Late Antiquity. “Corpus Coranicum” is in the early stage of its development; the first results are planned to be published online in 2009.

That shows a very sensible approach.  You eat an elephant a little at a time.  Rather than working on a Koran text as such, work on the early witnesses to the text, the physical remains, the unvocalised scripts, and find out what we actually have from that period and what it says.

Today is the day of DH! over 150 people in digital humanities will be blogging throughout the day, saying what they are up to, and showing the diversity of the discipline.

You can see my own mini blog here, although its not going to be the day I thought, for yesterday my dear little laptop keeled over, forever. I am currently typing this on my TV in my living room (thank goodness we have 5 or 6 computers just kicking about, that come in useful in situations like this). But still - I am oddly bereft.

Bereft, but not tearing my hair out. I keep pretty good backups, so think I may have irrecoverably lost about 30 mins of work, and a to do list, so its not the disaster it could have been. But my little machine! my machine!

I'll remember the good times. sniff.

We've hand-picked 64 titles to compete in the 2010 Logos March Madness tournament and it is up to you to decide which one we should sell at 75% off!

The premise is simple—at www.logosmarchmadness.com we’ve taken 64 titles available in Logos Bible Software and split them into four divisions. You vote for your favorite titles in each division and the ones with the most votes at the end of each of the six rounds advance. Titles that don’t advance are then offered at a discounted rate between 25% and 50% off the retail price. The title that gets crowned the champion will be discounted at 75% off!

Voting is now open for the first round, and will remain open thru March 20th. The complete schedule is as follows:

Round 1: March 18-20
Round 2: March 21-23
Sweet 16: March 24-26
Elite 8: March 27-29
Final 4: March 30 – April 1
Championship: April 2-5
See the full brackets

As I said, the titles that don't get enough votes to advance out of a round will be offered at a discount. Here is how the discounts will break down:

Titles not advancing out of round 1 will be 25% off.
Titles not advancing out of round 2 will be 30% off.
Titles not advancing out of the sweet sixteen will be 35% off.
Titles not advancing out of the elite eight will be 40% off.
Titles not advancing out of the final four will be 45% off.
The second place book in the tournament will be 50% off.
The tournament champion will be 75% off.

So, go check out the full list of titles being offered and vote for your favorites. Of course, if you really want a title to win (so you can get it for 75% off) be sure to spread the word to all your friends and family and tell them to go to www.logosmarchmadness.com and vote for your favorites!

So, what are you waiting for?

A touch of insomnia this evening led me to hunt around the web for native English-speaking academics who know Coptic and Arabic.  No luck so far!

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, March 23rd, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“The Design and Use of StoryKit: An Intergenerational Mobile Storytelling App”
by BETH BONSIGNORE

Today’s mobile devices are natively equipped with multimedia means for families to capture and share their daily experiences. However, designing authoring tools that effectively integrate the discrete media-capture components of mobile devices to enable rich expression remains a challenge. This presentation will provide a brief overview of collaborative technologies that support children’s storytelling, with a focus on mobile applications. It will detail a 4-month study on the observed use of StoryKit, a mobile interface that integrates multimodal media-capture tools to support the creation of multimedia stories on an iPhone/iPod Touch. The primary objectives of the study were to explore the ways in which applications like StoryKit enable families to create and share stories; and to investigate how the created stories themselves might inform the design of, and learning potential for mobile storytelling applications. Its results suggest that StoryKit’s relatively simple but well-integrated interface enables the creation of vibrant, varied narratives. Further, its portability supported the complementary co-construction and spontaneous, playful capture of stories by children and their trusted adults.

BETH BONSIGNORE is a doctoral student at the University of Maryland’s iSchool and a graduate research assistant at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), the Center for the Advanced Study of Communities and Information (CASCI), and the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL). At MITH, she has enjoyed being a member of the talented Developers’ Cohort guided by MITH Associate Director, Doug Reside, and has been involved in database design for Shakespeare’s Quartos and TheatreFinder, a collaborative interface for scholars and aficionados of historic theatres. Supported by an NSF EAGER grant under the direction of Kari Kraus (iSchool/ARHU) and Derek Hansen (iSchool/CASCI), she is exploring the potential of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) to support the design of collaborative technologies for education. Participatory design work with Allison Druin and the HCIL KidsTeam, a group of children aged 7-12 working to develop new technologies, is an integral part of her research, which lies at the intersection of New Media Literacies studies, technology development for collaborative sensemaking and storytelling, and social analytics for communities of learning.

Coming up @MITH March 30th: Nick Chen and Kari Kraus, “Prototyping a Dual-Display e-Reader in the Literature Classroom”

View MITH’s complete Fall Speakers Schedule here:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_spring_2010.pdf

All talks free and open to the public!

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).

ACLS Humanities E-Book has just added 576 books to its collection, bringing the total to 2790 works across a wide range of disciplines and subject areas.

HEB offers access to the collection at competitive rates to subscribing institutions, either directly or through consortia, as well as to individual members of all ACLS constituent societies.

The following list (alphabetical by author name) includes those titles in the collection relating to the ancient world, known by me. If you are within a subscribing domain or proxy server or if you are a subscribing individual you should be able to get access via the links below. If not, you or your institution will need to subscribe. This list has 244 items.

Manzikert to Lepanto: the Byzantine world and the Turks 1071-1571 : papers given at the nineteenth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Birmingham, March 1985
link to this item directly |
The position of women in Hindu civilization: from prehistoric times to the present day, Altekar, Anant Sadashiv.
link to this item directly |
Studies in Byzantine intellectual history, Anastos, Milton V. (Milton Vasil), 1909-
link to this item directly |
The New York Cruciform Lectionary, Anderson, Jeffrey C.
link to this item directly |
Women and law in late antiquity, Arjava, Antti.
link to this item directly |
Frauen in altsumerischer Zeit, Asher-Greve, Julia M.
link to this item directly |
Among women: from the homosocial to the homoerotic in the ancient world, Auanger, Lisa, 1965-
link to this item directly |
World archaeoastronomy: selected papers from the 2nd Oxford International Conference on Archaeoastronomy, held at Merida, Yucatan, Mexico, 13-17 January 1986, Aveni, Anthony F.
link to this item directly |
Egypt in late antiquity, Bagnall, Roger S.
link to this item directly |
Reading papyri, writing ancient history, Bagnall, Roger S.
link to this item directly |
Women's letters from ancient Egypt, 300 BC-AD 800, Roger S. Bagnall, Raffaella Cribiore, with contributions by Evie Ahtaridis
link to this item directly |
The demography of Roman Egypt, Bagnall, Roger S.
link to this item directly |
Relations between East and West in the Middle Ages, Baker, Derek, 1931-
link to this item directly |
Manuel II Palaeologus (1391-1425): a study in late Byzantine statesmanship, Barker, John W.
link to this item directly |
Turkestan down to the Mongol invasion, Bartolʹd, V. V. (Vasiliĭ Vladimirovich), 1869-1930.
link to this item directly |
The wonder that was India: a survey of the culture of the Indian sub-continent before the coming of the Muslims, Basham, A. L. (Arthur Llewellyn)
link to this item directly |
Hittite diplomatic texts, Beckman, Gary M.
link to this item directly |
The literature of the Old Testament, Bewer, Julius A. (Julius August), 1877-1953.
link to this item directly |
Greek sophists in the Roman Empire, Bowersock, G. W. (Glen Warren), 1936-
link to this item directly |
Byzantium confronts the West, 1180-1204, Brand, Charles M.
link to this item directly |
The magistrates of the Roman Republic, Broughton, T. Robert S. (Thomas Robert Shannon), 1900-
link to this item directly |
The magistrates of the Roman Republic, Broughton, T. Robert S. (Thomas Robert Shannon), 1900-
link to this item directly |
Anticlassicism in Greek sculpture of the fourth century B.C., Brown, Blanche R.
link to this item directly |
Venice & antiquity: the Venetian sense of the past, Brown, Patricia Fortini, 1936-
link to this item directly |
The body and society: men, women, and sexual renunciation in early Christianity, Brown, Peter Robert Lamont.
link to this item directly |
The making of late antiquity, Brown, Peter Robert Lamont.
link to this item directly |
Roman imperial themes, Brunt, P. A.
link to this item directly |
The Byzantine monuments and topography of the Pontos, Bryer, Anthony.
link to this item directly |
The Byzantine monuments and topography of the Pontos, Bryer, Anthony.
link to this item directly | Iconoclasm: papers given at the ninth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, March 1975, Bryer, Anthony.
link to this item directly |
Peoples and settlement in Anatolia and the Caucasus, 800-1900, Bryer, Anthony.
link to this item directly |
History of the later Roman Empire: from the death of Theodosius I to the death of Justinian, Bury, J. B. (John Bagnell), 1861-1927.
link to this item directly |
History of the later Roman Empire: from the death of Theodosius I to the death of Justinian, Bury, J. B. (John Bagnell), 1861-1927.
link to this item directly |
The imperial administrative system in the ninth century: with a revised text of the Kletorologion of Philotheos, Bury, J. B. (John Bagnell), 1861-1927.
link to this item directly |
Circus factions: Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium, Cameron, Alan.
link to this item directly |
Art, myth, and ritual: the path to political authority in ancient China, Chang, Kwang-chih.
link to this item directly |
From hunters to farmers: the causes and consequences of food production in Africa, Clark, J. Desmond (John Desmond), 1916-
link to this item directly |
Athenian economy and society: a banking perspective, Cohen, Edward E.
link to this item directly |
Catalogus translationum et commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin translations and commentaries : annotated lists and guides, Cranz, F. Edward (Ferdinand Edward)
link to this item directly |
Catalogus translationum et commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin translations and commentaries : annotated lists and guides, Cranz, F. Edward (Ferdinand Edward)
link to this item directly |
Catalogus translationum et commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin translations and commentaries : annotated lists and guides, Cranz, F. Edward (Ferdinand Edward)
link to this item directly |
Catalogus translationum et commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin translations and commentaries : annotated lists and guides, Cranz, F. Edward (Ferdinand Edward)
link to this item directly |
Catalogus translationum et commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin translations and commentaries : annotated lists and guides, Cranz, F. Edward (Ferdinand Edward)
link to this item directly |
Catalogus translationum et commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin translations and commentaries : annotated lists and guides, Cranz, F. Edward (Ferdinand Edward)
link to this item directly |
Roman Republican coinage, Crawford, Michael H. (Michael Hewson), 1939-
link to this item directly |
Roman Republican coinage, Crawford, Michael H. (Michael Hewson), 1939-
link to this item directly |
Gymnastics of the mind: Greek education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, Cribiore, Raffaella.
link to this item directly |
Writing, teachers, and students in Graeco-Roman Egypt, Cribiore, Raffaella.
link to this item directly |
Law and life of Rome, Crook, J. A. (John Anthony)
link to this item directly |
The making of the slavs: history and archaeology of the Lower Danube Region, ca. 500-700, Curta, Florin.
link to this item directly |
Commerce and social standing in ancient Rome, D'Arms, John H., 1934-
link to this item directly |
Beyond illustration: 2d and 3d digital technologies as tools for discovery in archaeology, Bernard Frischer and Anastasia Dakouri-Hild
link to this item directly |
Athenian propertied families, 600-300 B.C., Davies, John Kenyon.
link to this item directly |
The cult of Saint Thecla: a tradition of women's piety in late antiquity, Davis, Stephen J.
link to this item directly |
Women's bodies in classical Greek science, Dean-Jones, Lesley.
link to this item directly |
Birth, death, and motherhood in classical Greece, Demand, Nancy H.
link to this item directly |
Byzantine mosaic decoration: aspects of monumental art in Byzantium, Demus, Otto.
link to this item directly |
The ancient Egyptian pyramid texts, Der Manuelian, Peter.
link to this item directly |
Greek forms of address: from Herodotus to Lucian, Dickey, Eleanor.
link to this item directly |
The settlement of the Americas: a new prehistory, Dillehay, Tom D.
link to this item directly |
Diodore of Tarsus: commentary on Psalms 1-51, Diodore, of Tarsus, Bishop of Tarsus, d. ca. 392.
link to this item directly |
The Roman family, Dixon, Suzanne.
link to this item directly |
Greek homosexuality, Dover, Kenneth James.
link to this item directly |
Greek popular morality in the time of Plato and Aristotle, Dover, Kenneth James.
link to this item directly |
Flinders Petrie: a life in archaeology, Drower, Margaret S.
link to this item directly |
Comparative studies in the archaeology of colonialism, Dyson, Stephen L.
link to this item directly |
The Origins and diversity of axial age civilizations, Eisenstadt, S. N. (Shmuel Noah), 1923-
link to this item directly |
Virgins of God: the making of asceticism in late antiquity, Elm, Susanna.
link to this item directly |
The classical monument: reflections on the connection between morality and art in Greek and Roman sculpture, Fehl, Philipp P.
link to this item directly |
Epicurus and his gods: Épicure et ses dieux, Festugière, A. J. (André Jean), 1898-1982.
link to this item directly |
Ancient history: evidence and models, Finley, M. I. (Moses I.), 1912-1986.
link to this item directly |
Politics in the ancient world, Finley, M. I. (Moses I.), 1912-1986.
link to this item directly |
The ancient economy, Finley, M. I. (Moses I.), 1912-1986.
link to this item directly |
The Nazareth capitals and the Crusader Shrine of the Annunciation, Folda, Jaroslav.
link to this item directly |
Late antiquity, A.D. 267-700, Frantz, Alison.
link to this item directly |
Landlords and tenants in imperial Rome, Frier, Bruce W., 1943-
link to this item directly |
The Horace's Villa Project, 1997-2003, Bernard Frischer, Jane Crawford, and Monica De Simone
link to this item directly |
The sculpted word: epicureanism and philosophical recruitment in ancient Greece, Bernard Frischer
link to this item directly |
Biographical texts from Ramessid Egypt, Frood, Elizabeth.
link to this item directly |
Republican Rome, the army, and the allies, Gabba, Emilio.
link to this item directly |
Famine and food supply in the Graeco-Roman world: responses to risk and crisis, Garnsey, Peter.
link to this item directly |
The Roman nobility, Gelzer, Matthias, 1886-1974.
link to this item directly |
The American Historical Association's guide to historical literature, Gerardi, Pamela, 1956-
link to this item directly |
Beholding the sacred mysteries: programs of the Byzantine sanctuary, Gerstel, Sharon E. J.
link to this item directly |
The Bible in the Latin West, Gibson, Margaret T.
link to this item directly |
Mesopotamian chronicles, Glassner, Jean-Jacques.
link to this item directly |
A Mediterranean society: the Jewish communities of the Arab world as portrayed in the documents of the Cairo Geniza, Goitein, S. D., 1900-1985.
link to this item directly |
A Mediterranean society: the Jewish communities of the Arab world as portrayed in the documents of the Cairo Geniza, Goitein, S. D., 1900-1985.
link to this item directly |
A Mediterranean society: the Jewish communities of the Arab world as portrayed in the documents of the Cairo Geniza, Goitein, S. D., 1900-1985.
link to this item directly |
A Mediterranean society: the Jewish communities of the Arab world as portrayed in the documents of the Cairo Geniza, Goitein, S. D., 1900-1985.
link to this item directly |
A Mediterranean society: the Jewish communities of the Arab world as portrayed in the documents of the Cairo Geniza, Goitein, S. D., 1900-1985.
link to this item directly |
A Mediterranean society: the Jewish communities of the Arab world as portrayed in the documents of the Cairo Geniza, Goitein, S. D., 1900-1985.
link to this item directly |
L'empereur dans l'art byzantin: recherches sur l'art officiel de l'empire d'Orient, Grabar, André, 1896-1990.
link to this item directly |
Pseudo-Gregory of Nyssa: testimonies against the Jews, Gregory, of Nyssa, Saint, ca. 335-ca. 394.
link to this item directly |
Byzantium in the seventh century: the transformation of a culture, Haldon, John F.
link to this item directly |
The acts of Mār Māri the apostle, Harrak, Amir.
link to this item directly |
Ancient literacy, Harris, William V. (William Vernon)
link to this item directly |
Restraining rage: the ideology of anger control in classical antiquity, Harris, William V. (William Vernon)
link to this item directly |
War and imperialism in Republican Rome, 327-70 B.C., Harris, William V. (William Vernon)
link to this item directly |
Land and politics in the Valley of Mexico: a two thousand-year perspective, Harvey, H. R., 1931-
link to this item directly |
Time, history, and belief in Aztec and Colonial Mexico, Hassig, Ross, 1945-
link to this item directly |
Ancient Panama: chiefs in search of power, Helms, Mary W.
link to this item directly |
Heraclitus: Homeric problems, Heraclitus, 1st cent.
link to this item directly |
Invention and method: two rhetorical treatises from the Hermogenic corpus, Hermogenes, 2nd cent.
link to this item directly |
Women in purple: rulers of medieval Byzantium, Herrin, Judith.
link to this item directly |
4 Baruch (Paraleipomena Jeremiou), Herzer, Jens.
link to this item directly |
The chreia and ancient rhetoric: classroom exercises, Hock, Ronald F., 1944-
link to this item directly |
Hittite myths, Hoffner, Harry A.
link to this item directly |
Hymns, prayers, and songs: an anthology of ancient Egyptian lyric poetry, Hollis, Susan T.
link to this item directly |
Theodosian empresses: women and imperial dominion in late antiquity, Holum, Kenneth G.
link to this item directly |
The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire, Hussey, J. M. (Joan Mervyn)
link to this item directly |
Inka settlement planning, Hyslop, John, 1945-1993.
link to this item directly |
The limits of empire: the Roman army in the East, Isaac, Benjamin H.
link to this item directly |
Studies on Byzantine history of the 9th and 10th centuries, Jenkins, Romilly James Heald.
link to this item directly |
The lives of Peter the Iberian, Theodosius of Jerusalem, and the Monk Romanus, John Rufus, Bishop of Maiuma, fl. 476-518.
link to this item directly |
Byzantine military unrest, 471-843: an interpretation, Kaegi, Walter Emil.
link to this item directly |
Byzantium and the decline of Rome, Kaegi, Walter Emil.
link to this item directly |
Some thoughts on Byzantine military strategy, Kaegi, Walter Emil.
link to this item directly |
Progymnasmata: Greek textbooks of prose composition and rhetoric, Kennedy, George Alexander, 1928-
link to this item directly |
Deeds of John and Manuel Comnenus, Kinnamos, Iōannēs, b. ca. 1143.
link to this item directly |
Byzantine art in the making: main lines of stylistic development in Mediterranean art, 3rd-7th century, Kitzinger, Ernst, 1912-
link to this item directly |
Caesarius of Arles: the making of a Christian community in late antique Gaul, Klingshirn, William E.
link to this item directly |
Shenoute & the women of the White Monastery: Egyptian monasticism in late antiquity, Krawiec, Rebecca.
link to this item directly |
Puritans in Babylon: the ancient Near East and American intellectual life, 1880-1930, Kuklick, Bruce, 1941-
link to this item directly |
The expressiveness of the body and the divergence of Greek and Chinese medicine, Kuriyama, Shigehisa, 1954-
link to this item directly |
Constantinople and the Latins: the foreign policy of Andronicus II, 1282-1328, Laiou, Angeliki E.
link to this item directly |
Women's earliest records: from ancient Egypt and western Asia, Lesko, Barbara S.
link to this item directly |
"Women like this": new perspectives on Jewish women in the Greco-Roman world, Levine, Amy-Jill, 1956-
link to this item directly |
Ancient Ghana and Mali, Levtzion, Nehemia.
link to this item directly |
Libanius's Progymnasmata: model exercises in Greek prose composition and rhetoric, Libanius.
link to this item directly |
Barbarians and bishops: army, church, and state in the age of Arcadius and Chrysostom, Liebeschuetz, J. H. W. G. (John Hugo Wolfgang Gideon)
link to this item directly |
Byzantium and the Crusader States, 1096-1204, Lilie, Ralph-Johannes.
link to this item directly |
Ancient Aramaic and Hebrew letters, Lindenberger, James M.
link to this item directly |
Crusaders as conquerors: the Chronicle of Morea, Lurier, Harold E.
link to this item directly |
Art and ceremony in late antiquity, MacCormack, Sabine.
link to this item directly |
On the wings of time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru, MacCormack, Sabine.
link to this item directly |
Religion in the Andes: vision and imagination in early colonial Peru, MacCormack, Sabine.
link to this item directly |
Changes in the Roman empire: essays in the ordinary, MacMullen, Ramsay, 1928-
link to this item directly |
Enemies of the Roman order: treason, unrest, and alienation in the Empire, MacMullen, Ramsay, 1928-
link to this item directly |
Philostratus's Heroikos: religion and cultural identity in the third century C.E., Maclean, Jennifer K. Berenson, 1963-
link to this item directly |
Art and eloquence in Byzantium, Maguire, Henry, 1943-
link to this item directly |
Earth and ocean: the terrestrial world in early Byzantine art, Maguire, Henry, 1943-
link to this item directly |
The Árpáds and the Comneni: political relations between Hungary and Byzantium in the 12th century, Makk, Ferenc.
link to this item directly |
The Byzantine provincial administration under the Palaiologoi, Maksimović, Ljubomir.
link to this item directly |
Ancient epistolary theorists, Malherbe, Abraham J.
link to this item directly |
Down from Olympus: archaeology and philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970, Marchand, Suzanne L., 1961-
link to this item directly |
Authority and tradition in ancient historiography, Marincola, John.
link to this item directly |
Apollo's lyre: Greek music and music theory in antiquity and the Middle Ages, Mathiesen, Thomas J.
link to this item directly |
First converts: rich pagan women and the rhetoric of mission in early Judaism and Christianity, Matthews, Shelly.
link to this item directly |
The Uses of literacy in early medieval Europe, McKitterick, Rosamond.
link to this item directly |
The Greek peasant, McNall, Scott G.
link to this item directly |
Roman Ostia, Meiggs, Russell.
link to this item directly |
Texts from the Amarna period in Egypt, Meltzer, Edmund S.
link to this item directly |
Discovering Eve: ancient Israelite women in context, Meyers, Carol L.
link to this item directly |
The Roman Near East, 31 B.C.-A.D. 337, Millar, Fergus.
link to this item directly |
Imperial Constantinople, Miller, Dean A.
link to this item directly |
The birth of the hospital in the Byzantine Empire, Miller, Timothy S.
link to this item directly |
Iraq after the Muslim conquest, Morony, Michael G., 1939-
link to this item directly |
Burial and ancient society: the rise of the Greek city-state, Morris, Ian, 1960-
link to this item directly |
Apocalypse in Rome: Cola di Rienzo and the politics of the New Age, Musto, Ronald G.
link to this item directly |
Politics and ritual in early medieval Europe, Nelson, Janet L. (Janet Laughland), 1942-
link to this item directly |
The iconography of preface and miniature in the Byzantine Gospel book, Nelson, Robert S., 1947-
link to this item directly |
The immortal emperor: the life and legend of Constantine Palaiologos, last emperor of the Romans, Nicol, Donald MacGillivray.
link to this item directly |
Mass and elite in democratic Athens: rhetoric, ideology, and the power of the people, Ober, Josiah.
link to this item directly |
The Byzantine commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500-1453, Obolensky, Dimitri, 1918-
link to this item directly |
Seven books of history against the pagans: the apology of Paulus Orosius, Orosius, Paulus.
link to this item directly |
Classical landscape with figures: the ancient Greek city and its countryside, Osborne, Robin, 1957-
link to this item directly |
Ritual, finance, politics: Athenian democratic accounts presented to David Lewis, Osborne, Robin, 1957-
link to this item directly |
And Sarah laughed: the status of woman in the Old Testament, Otwell, John H.
link to this item directly |
Ritual and cult at Ugarit, Pardee, Dennis.
link to this item directly |
Ugaritic narrative poetry, Parker, Simon B.
link to this item directly |
Demography and Roman society, Parkin, Tim G.
link to this item directly |
Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale à Byzance, 4e-7e siècles, Patlagean, Evelyne.
link to this item directly |
Structure sociale, famille, chrétienté à Byzance: IVe-XIe siècle, Patlagean, Evelyne.
link to this item directly |
Roman images, Patterson, Annabel M.
link to this item directly |
Man in the middle voice: name and narration in the Odyssey, Peradotto, John, 1933-
link to this item directly |
Women in the ancient world: the Arethusa papers, Peradotto, John, 1933-
link to this item directly |
Pavimente und Figürliche mosaiken, Pernice, Erich, 1864-1945.
link to this item directly |
Arabia of the Wahhabis, Philby, H. St. J. B. (Harry St. John Bridger), 1885-1960.
link to this item directly |
Philostorgius: church history, Philostorgius.
link to this item directly |
Flavius Philostratus: Heroikos, Philostratus, the Athenian, 2nd/3rd cent.
link to this item directly |
On heroes, Philostratus, the Athenian, 2nd/3rd cent.
link to this item directly |
Goddesses, whores, wives, and slaves: women in classical antiquity, Pomeroy, Sarah B.
link to this item directly |
Women in Hellenistic Egypt: from Alexander to Cleopatra, Pomeroy, Sarah B.
link to this item directly |
The romance of Alexander the Great, Pseudo-Callisthenes.
link to this item directly |
The influence of prophecy in the later Middle Ages: a study in Joachimism, Reeves, Marjorie.
link to this item directly |
Whose pharaohs?: archaeology, museums, and Egyptian national identity from Napoleon to World War I, Donald Malcolm Reid
link to this item directly |
Letters from early Mesopotamia, Reiner, Erica, 1926-
link to this item directly |
Precious metals in the later medieval and early modern worlds, Richards, John F.
link to this item directly |
Contraception and abortion from the ancient world to the Renaissance, Riddle, John M.
link to this item directly |
The social and economic history of the Roman Empire, Rostovtzeff, Michael Ivanovitch, 1870-1952.
link to this item directly |
The social and economic history of the Roman Empire, Rostovtzeff, Michael Ivanovitch, 1870-1952.
link to this item directly |
Law collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, Roth, Martha Tobi.
link to this item directly |
Il metodo degli umanisti, Sabbadini, Remigio, 1850-1934.
link to this item directly |
A history of Arabia, Salibi, Kamal S. (Kamal Suleiman), 1929-
link to this item directly |
Economic rights of women in ancient Greece, Schaps, David M.
link to this item directly |
The world of thought in ancient China, Schwartz, Benjamin Isadore, 1916-
link to this item directly |
Hitler's state architecture: the impact of classical antiquity, Scobie, Alexander.
link to this item directly |
The literature of the New Testament, Scott, Ernest Findlay, 1868-
link to this item directly |
Athens in the Middle Ages, Setton, Kenneth Meyer, 1914-
link to this item directly |
The Roman citizenship, Sherwin-White, A. N. (Adrian Nicholas)
link to this item directly |
Between past and present: archaeology, ideology, and nationalism in the modern Middle East, Silberman, Neil Asher, 1950-
link to this item directly |
Records of the grand historian of China, Sima, Qian, ca. 145-ca. 86 B.C.
link to this item directly |
Hittite prayers, Singer, Itamar.
link to this item directly |
The study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, Smalley, Beryl.
link to this item directly |
Byzantium's Balkan frontier: a political study of the Northern Balkans, 900-1204, Paul Stephenson
link to this item directly |
Byzantium's Balkan frontier: a political study of the Northern Balkans, 900-1204, Stephenson, Paul.
link to this item directly |
Humanism and the church fathers: Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1439) and Christian antiquity in the Italian Renaissance, Stinger, Charles L., 1944-
link to this item directly |
Texts from the pyramid age, Strudwick, Nigel.
link to this item directly |
Pan Chao, foremost woman scholar of China, first century A.D.: background, ancestry, life, and writings of the most celebrated Chinese woman of letters, Swann, Nancy Lee, 1881-1966.
link to this item directly |
The Roman revolution, Syme, Ronald, 1903-1989.
link to this item directly |
Theodore of Mopsuestia, Commentary on Psalms 1-81, Theodore, Bishop of Mopsuestia, ca. 350-428 or 9.
link to this item directly |
Theodoret of Cyrus: commentary on Daniel, Theodoret, Bishop of Cyrrhus.
link to this item directly |
The Agora of Athens: the history, shape and uses of an ancient city center, Thompson, Homer A.
link to this item directly |
The Byzantine revival, 780-842, Treadgold, Warren T.
link to this item directly |
Byzantium and its army, 284-1081, Treadgold, Warren T.
link to this item directly |
A history of the Byzantine state and society, Treadgold, Warren T.
link to this item directly |
Roman marriage: iusti coniuges from the time of Cicero to the time of Ulpian, Treggiari, Susan.
link to this item directly |
Greek papyri: an introduction, Turner, E. G. (Eric Gardner), 1911-1983.
link to this item directly |
The Syrian princesses: the women who ruled Rome, AD 193-235, Godfrey Turton
link to this item directly |
The Syrian princesses: the women who ruled Rome, AD 193-235, Turton, Godfrey Edmund.
link to this item directly |
Ancient writing and its influence, Ullman, B. L. (Berthold Louis), 1882-1965.
link to this item directly |
The origin and development of humanistic script, Ullman, B. L. (Berthold Louis), 1882-1965.
link to this item directly |
The Huarochirí manuscript: a testament of ancient and colonial Andean religion, Urioste, Jorge.
link to this item directly |
Leadership and community in late antique Gaul, Van Dam, Raymond.
link to this item directly |
In search of history: historiography in the ancient world and the origins of Biblical history, Van Seters, John.
link to this item directly |
Epics of Sumerian kings: the matter of Aratta, Vanstiphout, H. L. J. (Herman L. J.)
link to this item directly |
Byzance et les Arabes, Vasilʹev, A. A. (Aleksandr Aleksandrovich), b. 1867.
link to this item directly |
Byzance et les Arabes, Vasilʹev, A. A. (Aleksandr Aleksandrovich), b. 1867.
link to this item directly |
Byzance et les Arabes, Vasilʹev, A. A. (Aleksandr Aleksandrovich), b. 1867.
link to this item directly |
Byzance et les Arabes, Vasilʹev, A. A. (Aleksandr Aleksandrovich), b. 1867.
link to this item directly |
Justin the First: an introduction to the epoch of Justinian the Great, Vasilʹev, A. A. (Aleksandr Aleksandrovich), b. 1867.
link to this item directly |
The Russian attack on Constantinople in 860, Vasilʹev, A. A. (Aleksandr Aleksandrovich), b. 1867.
link to this item directly |
The decline of medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor: and the process of Islamization from the eleventh through the fifteenth century, Vryonis, Speros, 1928-
link to this item directly |
The Renaissance discovery of classical antiquity, Weiss, Roberto.
link to this item directly |
A history of Byzantine music and hymnography, Wellesz, Egon, 1885-1974.
link to this item directly |
The barbarians speak: how the conquered peoples shaped Roman Europe, Wells, Peter S.
link to this item directly |
Letters from ancient Egypt, Wente, Edward Frank, 1930-
link to this item directly |
The making of Byzantium, 600-1025, Whittow, Mark, 1957-
link to this item directly |
Roman homosexuality: ideologies of masculinity in classical antiquity, Williams, Craig A. (Craig Arthur), 1965-
link to this item directly |
New men in the Roman senate, 139 B.C. - A.D. 14, Wiseman, T. P. (Timothy Peter)
link to this item directly |
Prolegomena to Homer (1795), Wolf, F. A. (Friedrich August), 1759-1824.
link to this item directly |
George Gemistos Plethon: the last of the Hellenes, Woodhouse, C. M. (Christopher Montague), 1917-
link to this item directly |
Eneas: a twelfth-century French romance, Yunck, John A.
link to this item directly |

I went to Skeptics in the Pub last week at Nottingham to hear a talk by Doug Ellison on the exploration of Mars. One of the subjects that came up was the Gorilla. The Sun recently reported that a Mars rover had found evidence of a Silverback gorilla while rambling across the dusty and arid plains of Mars. ‘Enthusiast Nigel Cooper – who has studied thousands of photos taken by Nasa rovers and posted online – said: “It’s definitely a creature of some sort.”‘

I’m rubbish at debunking this kind of thing. Basically I get as far as a lack of bananas and rain forest before yawning. If someone seriously thinks that the governments of the world are conspiring to hide the existence of a lone, and presumably very hungry, gorilla then they have more urgent problems than a lack of basic biology or geology. What is it that makes a global conspiracy to hide evidence of an advanced civilisation on Mars, with pyramids, faces and anomalous gorillas plausible? Unambiguous evidence of life on Mars would be a key to the vaults of any government with a space programme, so why would scientists hide that? You’re not going to answer that question by confirming that what we have is a rock. Still, that’s what Doug Ellison did with the video below. What makes it worth watching isn’t the conclusion but how he got there.

The tool he used in the video is the Midnight Mars Browser, which you can download on Windows or Mac for free. I didn’t know about this. It’s a tool that takes the photos from Spirit and Opportunity and displays them as virtual panoramas. You can follow in the tracks of your favourite rover. The gorilla might be dull, it’s a rock, but the tool for examining it looks brilliant. This is why the talk was so compelling. There’s masses of information about Mars you can access. You can even follow the (delayed) blog of a Mars rover driver at Mars and Me if you want the backseat driver experience.

It’s an example of debunking done well. I doubt that he’ll have converted any die-hards, because simply examining the evidence isn’t going to address their underlying problems. For everyone else he’s not only shown that it’s a not a gorilla, he’s also shown the way to more interesting places that can take our understanding of Mars further. The rest of the talk showed similar insights into the equipment on Mars and how you can use the data coming from there. As for the rest of the solar system, he runs a forum where you can find out more at unmannedspaceflight.com.

Related Posts:

• Busy Busy Busy
• Archaeoastronomy on YouTube
• Rebuilding Bamiyan
• Now qualified to talk to lagomorphs about the sky
• Re-thinking the archaeology of Mars
• Powered by Contextual Related Posts

One of the first postings on AWOL was on Open Access Bibiography: Zenon at the DAI.

Via an email with a request to distribute it to colleagues comes a call for feedback on the project:

From: DAI Stephanie Ulmer
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 08:41:17 -0000
Conversation: Online Umfrage zur Archäologischen Bibliographie, Online Poll concerning the Archaeological Bibliography
Subject: Online Umfrage zur Archäologischen Bibliographie, Online Poll concerning the Archaeological Bibliography

--- English text below ---


Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

seit vielen Jahren erarbeitet das Deutsche Archäologische Institut die
Archäologische Bibliographie (http://opac.dainst.org), die sich als
unverzichtbares Rechercheinstrument für die wissenschaftliche Arbeit auf
dem Gebiet der antiken Kulturen des Mittelmeerraumes etabliert hat. Seit
2002 ist sie als freies und aktuelles Angebot im Internet verfügbar und
bietet neben den üblichen Abfragemöglichkeiten eine systematische Suche
über einen Thesaurus an. Die Archäologische Bibliographie wird täglich
durch die Abteilungen Rom, Athen, Istanbul und die Zentrale in Berlin
erweitert und enthält den Titelbestand seit 1956 (ca. 400 000
Titelnachweise).

Das Deutsche Archäologische Institut ist ständig bestrebt, seine
Informationsangebote zu verbessern -- dem können wir nur mit Ihrer Hilfe
gerecht werden. Wir wollen die Nutzerwünsche bei der Umsetzung
berücksichtigen und bitten Sie deshalb, Fragen rund um die
Archäologische Bibliographie zu beantworten. Sie finden den Einstieg
unter http://webpoll.dainst.org. Die Umfrage liegt in den Sprachen
Deutsch, Englisch, Griechisch und Italienisch vor und wird anonym
durchgeführt.

Wir laden Sie herzlich ein, uns Ihre Meinung, Wünsche und Anregungen
mitzuteilen und möchten Sie darüber hinaus bitten, diese Information an
interessierte Kolleginnen und Kollegen weiterzureichen.

Mit verbundenem Dank

i. A. Stephanie Ulmer


Dear Sir or Madam,

For many years the German Archaeological Institute has been compiling
the Archaeological Bibliography (http://opac.dainst.org) which has
established itself as an essential research tool in the area of ancient
cultures of the Mediterranean Sea.
Since 2002 it has been freely available on the internet and offers a
thesaurus based systematical search in addition to common search options.
The Archaeological Bibliography is being expanded on a daily basis by
the departments in Rome, Athens, Istanbul and the head office in Berlin
and now comprises approx. 400,000 title references.

The German Archaeological Institute endeavours to enhance its research
and information facilities - a challenge which we can only approach with
your help. Hence, we would like to kindly ask you to participate in our
online poll (http://webpoll.dainst.org), available in Englisch, German,
Greek and Italian. The survey will be evaluated anonymously.

Please, feel welcome to share your thoughts and suggestions and help us
to advance our user oriented research tool.

We would be grateful if you could share this information with your
colleagues.

Kind regards,

Stephanie Ulmer

*****************************************************************
Stephanie Ulmer
Deutsches Archaeologisches Institut
Podbielskiallee 69-71
D - 14195 Berlin

Tel: +49-(0)30-187711-131
Fax: +49-(0)30-187711-191
e-mail: su@dainst.de
Internet: http://www.dainst.de
*****************************************************************

I've just finished reading through John Bintliff and Hanna Stöger's, Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece: The Corfu Papers (2009).  It's an edited volume produced from a conference in Corfu in 1998.  The papers, however, have largely been updated and represent a nice cross-section of the kind of work being done in Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece.  The papers focus on ceramic studies, the results of intensive pedestrian survey, studies on settlement patterns, new directions in the study of domestic and monumental architecture, and, finally, discussions of issues of cultural research management in Greece. I found W. Bowden's short analysis of the Christian archaeology in Greece with an emphasis on church in Mastron, Aetolia, which scholars have traditionally dated to the 7th-8th centuries.  Bowden suggests that simple stylistic dating based either on decoration or architecture can be misleading especially considering the prevalence of re-use and conscious anachronism in the Middle and Late Byzantine period in the region.  Also worthy of note is Platon Petrides short review of Late Antique Delphi, which doesn't say anything new here, but is still a nice overview of post-ancient period at the site. T.Gregory, F. Lang, J. Vroom offer some useful commentary on the use of intensive survey and the study of ceramics in the study of Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece; Gregory's article, which has been substantially up-dated, has a nice critiquing the impact of "second-wave" intensive survey projects on our understanding of Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece.  The final three papers (M. Mouliou, K. Sbonias, and L. Tzortzopoulou-Gregory) deal with issues of cultural resource management in Greece.  L. Tzortzopoulou-Gregory's paper provides more useful evidence for the difficult position that foreign (or even just non-local) archaeologists find themselves in when they are placed between the national archaeological bureaucracy, local communities, and non-local/non-national research interests.

I received my copy of this volume the same week that I was invited (along with many others) to a "conversation" at Dumbarton Oaks on Byzantine Archaeology in North America.  While I will not be able to attend, I was invited by the director of Dumbarton Oaks (as I am sure were many of my colleagues) to send along any thoughts I might have about this particular topic.  I was struck by how rarely Dumbarton Oaks publications appeared in the bibliographies of the various articles in this volume. The main reason for this absence is because few of the papers showed much concern for the kinds of art historical approaches long favored by Dumbarton Oaks (for this critique see Kostis Kourelis open letter).  The approaches favored by Dumbarton Oaks have tended to particularly ill-suited to research in the Greek countryside where textual evidence is relatively scarce, monumental architecture is often in poor condition, representing stylistically "crude" or provincial work, or even "late" by Dumbarton Oaks standards (although DO has contributed significantly to preservation of neglected buildings, the definition of provincial style, and late and post-Byzantine art), and the field techniques and methods require some specialized training to evaluate and critique. Ironically, Dumbarton Oaks' interest in economic history, the history of everyday life (particularly as manifest in realia in saints lives and other Byzantine documents), and the character of "the provincial" in terms of style and influence on the traditional centers of Byzantine society (Constantinople, Thessaloniki, et c.). 

The Bintliff and Stöger volume (along with another recent volume focusing on the same period and region) have shown that the tools exist to develop more nuanced interpretations of the Byzantine countryside.  And that these analyses have much to offer traditional textual approaches to the history of Byzantium.  In fact, one fault I might offer among the articles in the Bintliff volume is the relative lack of attention to questions that extend beyond the national or local boundaries of Medieval (or even post-Medieval) Greece.  The transnational approaches fostered by institutions like Dumbarton Oaks could work to counteract a tendency toward studies that emphasize the modern region or nation at the expense of more revealing Medieval concepts of political, economic, and cultural organization.  Moreover the relative absence of sustained discussion of texts, urban centers, or elite art in the Bintliff volume is not necessarily a strength.  The very areas neglected (to some extent, but not ignored) in the Bintliff and Stöger volume are areas where Dumbarton Oaks could and perhaps even should show the way by showing the value of traditional methods and approaches to contemporary archaeological research.

It seems clear to me that the archaeology of the Medieval and Post-Medieval Mediterranean is at a watershed moment.  As Kourelis noted, a generation of pioneers in the field of Byzantine archaeology are approach retirement age.  Part of their legacy is there a strong group of ambitious and dedicated young scholars.  This informally-defined group seeks not only to push the methods advanced by folks like Tim Gregory, John Bintliff, Jack Davis, and others, in their individual scholarship but to find ways to push institutions like the American School in Athens and Dumbarton Oaks to bring these methods into fold of traditional research on these periods and places.  This should not involve rejecting the important traditions of scholarship at these institutions -- after all, hardly a week goes by when I don't consult a publication produced at Dumbarton Oaks and I value the amazing support that I have received from the American School in Athens -- but showing how recent developments in, say, survey archaeology, applied post-modern or post-processural theory, or  even kinds of reflective, historical criticism of past and present institutional practices, can enrich the disciplines to which we are all committed.

A note in LT-ANTIQ drew my attention here.  A PDF at the foot of the page not merely lists the manuscripts of some of the commentaries of St. Jerome on scripture but discusses how the editions are being prepared for maximum clarity, what font is used, what forms of quotation marks, etc.

I’ve been converting a load of Greek text into unicode using Greek transcoder with much success.   But I ran across a glitch.  Depending on the option chosen, the accents can all end up to one side!

The option responsible is this one, “Use composing characters”. 

I checked that, and I should not have done; it caused off-centre accents.  But what on earth does it mean? 

A hunt around the web reveals that you can do all those accents in one of two ways.  Firstly you can use a character that includes them all inside the character.  Alternatively you just type ‘alpha’ followed by the accents, and the browser and editor should render them all correctly as one letter with some accents on the top.    The former is called “using precomposed characters”; the latter “using composing characters”.  The latter does not work very well, as applications don’t support it.  This TLG PDF says more.

I’ve also noticed that on XP the WINWORD executable tends to hang around in memory after you exit a document.  If you copy the .dot files for Greek Transcoder into the Application Data\Microsoft\Word\Startup directory, they are only picked up when the WINWORD executable starts, so get ignored in this case.  I’ve had to manually terminate it to get the utility to appear.

Once it’s loaded, the buttons appear in Word.

 

On Friday and Saturday I attended the inaugural WhereCampEU “un-conference” in London.  The short review: if one comes anywhere near you- go for it! It’s well worth it and I enjoyed every minute.

The slightly longer review: since there were no themes or papers organised beforehand, I guess it was a good opportunity to take the temperature of a certain part of the UK/EU geospatial community. So we got lots and lots of OpenStreetMap papers and iPhone apps! Don’t get me wrong, that’s not a bad thing, but personally, the papers that stood out for me were Steven Feldman’s talk on Business Models and how we are all f*cked without one, and, as always, Bob Barr’s talk on the true cost of “Free” data.  That particular talk was timely, coming just before the deadline for the consultation on freeing Ordnance Survey data.

On business models- Steven gave the talk twice due to popular request (one advantage to the un-conference format), and got remarkably different responses. The gist was whether you could come up with a one-minute elevator pitch on your business, your customers, and your prices. If you can’t do that, then you should be able to. There was quite a split in the audience.  On one hand there were people who are genuinely trying to make a business out of what they do- who have mortgages to pay, employees to pay, and kids to feed, who can see the point in a business model, and on the other hand there were people with well-paid day-jobs and a lucrative sideline in making iPhone apps who couldn’t see the point. That’s an over-generalisation, but I have work to do, so forgive me. I did start musing about doing a 140 character “tweet-pitch” too but maybe that’s just jumping on the bandwagon!

Overall, at the end of the two days I didn’t feel like I’d been at a conference, even though it was just as packed and even more fast-paced than usual. It was just more relaxing and informal, and the lack of corporate salesmen helped too! The venues were fantastic, as was the food, and the evening geo-beer was much appreciated. The team were keen to point out that next year’s “un-conference” (if it happens) should be somewhere else in Europe. At the time there weren’t that many takers, perhaps because there was a UK bias to the attendees, but I’m sure the enthusiasm and positive feedback will percolate around and we’ll get some volunteers.

After that I spent a couple of days being a tourist in London and catching up with old friends. As a test, I did my London navigation with a zoomable paper map, which I can say works very well and is pleasingly analogue (no batteries or data costs). Crikey though- who needs that many Starbucks, Costa and Caffe Neros?

It is quite surprising when we hear of people who have never heard of things we have been doing for a while. One of those things is our Refer-A-Friend program.

In just a few easy steps, we can send your pastor, friends, co-workers, ministry leaders, and/or family members a coupon code to receive 15% off a Logos 4 base package. And to make it worth a few moments of your time, if your recommendation turns into a sale, we give you a $25 gift certificate good toward a web purchase on Logos.com.

To get started, make sure you Sign In to your Logos.com account, and then head on over to www.logos.com/referafriend.

The first step asks you to enter a person's email address and their name. We will use it to send your friend two emails which you will be able to view and customize. And the email will not be added to any lists, so we won't make you look bad.

Next, you see a preview of a plain text email we will send on your behalf. You can easily edit the email to include a personal message if you want, or you can click Next to proceed.

The final step is to select one of seven base packages we include in the program. The default recommendation is set for Scholar's Library as this is our best selling collection, but you have the option to recommend up to Scholar's Library: Platinum.

At this point, you may click Send!, or you can see a preview of the fancy html message we'll send featuring your recommended product.

Chances are, your small group leader would benefit greatly using Leader's Library, and suggesting Scholar's Library or above to your relative heading to seminary would make his or her studies and term papers a whole lot easier. Since the Refer-A-Friend program works for the majority of our collections, you can suggest the collection you think would be most valuable to your friend. And don't worry if you are not sure which collection would be best. If you suggest Scholar's Library and they end up purchasing Scholar's Library: Gold, you'll still get a $25 gift certificate—as long as it is included in the program and they use the coupon code you send them!

You can suggest one of the following collections:

• Scholar's Library: Platinum
• Scholar's Library: Gold
• Scholar's Library: Silver
• Scholar's Library
• Original Languages Library
• Leader's Library
• Bible Study Library

With this ability to offer your friends a discount on a product that hopefully has transformed your devotional times, your sermon or Bible study preparation, or has helped you through seminary, why would you not take a few minutes to run down your list of contacts and send them a quick, pre-formatted email? Not only will you be helping transform their Bible study, you could also "pocket" a cool $25 credit for each person who acts on your recommendation.

So what are you waiting for? Refer-A-Friend Now!

Already a Logos Bible Software user?
Visit our custom upgrade discount calculator to see what discounts you qualify for on an upgrade to a brand new Logos 4 base package.

Want to be a Logos Bible Software user?
New customers should visit http://www.logos.com/4 to learn more and see what discounts are currently available.

You should follow us on Twitter here.

I was not created!

– Were you found in a doorway instead?

UPDATE:

No, I was found in some bull-rushes!

– Well, if you think you’re Moses, you should start taking tablets.

Today I received an email from a Romanian gentleman, asking about the translation of the lost passage by John Chrysostom from Oratio 2 adversus Judaeos, which I commissioned and then gave away recently.  He wanted to make a translation into Romanian.  So he asked what I paid the journal, in which Wendy Pradels published the Greek text with notes and German translation, for permission to have that English translation made.  I replied that I paid them nothing; there was no money in all this, and any claim to own a text by a man dead 16 centuries might be valid in some benighted lands but hardly in the USA. 

But it led me to muse on the likelihood that any academic publisher would try to sue out a claim to copyright in such a case.  It would hardly be sensible, in my opinion; why sue over what has no commercial value?  

While in bath, tho, my sense of humour took hold, and I took to wondering what questions one could ask in court.  Copyright only vests in “original, creative works.”  So…

“M’Lud, can the plaintiff tell us which specifically which words in the first line are NOT by John Chrysostom?”

“Would you give us a list of the differences between the text printed and the text composed in 400 AD by John Chrysostom?  If you cannot list the portions which are an original creative work by yourselves, on what possible grounds can you claim that any of it is by you?”

“Would you tell us what the commercial value of this item was, when you purchased — as you believed — the copyright from the scholarly author?  Did you pay any money at all for it?”

And so on.

I suspect, sadly, that courts are unimpressed by rhetoric  unless it involves clever points of law.   The layman who ventures into these waters does so at his peril, and indeed few of us ever do so unless cornered.  As Auberon Waugh remarked, from bitter experience, “He who goes to court places himself in the hands of a ring of grinning rascals who will all run up costs as fast as they can until somebody has to pay.” 

It’s probably easier and safer just to meet the plaintiff, shake hands with him, and then pitch him head first out of his office window, “accidental-like”.  Would the fines for so doing be at all likely to reach the charges that any law firm would demand?

The serious point behind all this is that the relentless march of commercial interests taking a yard where the law granted an inch has reached the point of absurdity.  Only the common sense exercised by publishers in the anglophone world is restraining them from foolishness of the sort feared by our Romanian friend; and outside that sunlit circle of generosity and mutual respect, there have been many examples of insane greed.  We need to push back. 

Genuine creative work should be protected by copyright, for the benefit of us all.  Attempts to own the work of the ancients, by one subterfuge or another, should not exist in a civilised land.

The Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, has written a classicising poem in praise of England's wounded footballing star. Duffy was interviewed on BBC Radio 4: David Beckham "is almost a mythical figure himself, in popular culture".

The last couple of postings on punk archaeology have produced some wonderful comments on Facebook that I cannot resist from sharing. Thanks to my supportive friends. You make blogging a satisfying endeavor (one always wonder if anyone is reading out there).STEPHENNIE MULDER"Kostis, hard to put into words the emotions this evoked for me, especially since I spent my teenage years running around

Archaeology is about context, about understanding relationships, about looking at the spaces between datapoints, as much as it is about the points themselves.

I’ve been experimenting with VUE, mostly as a way of organizing my Zotero libraries, and to help in the planning of a digital history course I really would like to teach next year. So far, it’s been great. But this morning, while watching some of the how-to videos, I started thinking about how VUE could be used to represent archaeological data.

Here’s the video:

So: import data from an RSS feed, along with its metadata…. Hmmm. I tried it with the atom feed from OpenContext.org, regarding the Presidio of San Francisco feed.

I’ve goofed it a bit – missed an important step – but I think there’s real potential here… further bulletins as events warrant; I’ve got a couple of training sessions to lead, so I’m off to class.

One of the texts that is not online and really should be is the legal compedium assembled in the reign of Theodosius II in 450 AD and known as the Theodosian code or Codex Theodosianus. 

The work was compiled from earlier collections of imperial edicts, or rescripts as they were known.  These took the form of a letter from the emperor to some official, usually a proconsul or prefect.  The compilation provided a systematic list of things proscribed or permitted.

The work was translated by a certain Clyde Pharr back in 1954 for Princeton University Press.  That means that it could be out of copyright in the US; unfortunately it is not.

The most interesting portion of the code is the last book.   This consists of the rescripts on religious matters issued by Constantine and his successors, which progressively made Christianity a privileged religion, then the state religion, and then prohibited other religions aside from Judaism.  The tone of these rescripts is often violent, as is often the case with the edicts of later emperors.  Pharr’s introduction points out rescripts which indicate the powerlessness of these emperors, and their repeated and futile attempts by ever heavier penalties to get their will enacted by the imperial bureaucracy.

Such interesting material is always likely to find its way online in unauthorised form.  Today I found a site with a substantial chunk of that book 15 here.  I’m not sure whether it is complete, tho.

Over the past two semesters, I've been teaching a revised version of our department's required undergraduate methods course -- the historian's craft.  I split the course into two parts: the first part is a historiographical survey of the development of the discipline. The class time is divided between a formal lecture and readings of primary sources central to the development of history.  Fortunately, most of these primary sources are easily found on the interwebs.  In fact, I've been able to teach the class without requiring a textbook or a primary source reader.

Here's the basic reading list:

Homer, Iliad, Book 1-2
Herodotus, Book 1
Thucydides, Book 1
Plutarch, Life of Alexander, excerpts
Euseubus, Life of Constantine, excerpts
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of England, Book 1, excerpts
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, excerpts
L. Valla, Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine, excerpts
L. von Ranke, History of the Reformation, excerpts
T. Mommsen, "Rectoral Address," University of Berlin (1874).
J. Michelet, The People (1846), excerpts
J.B. Bury, "The Science of History" (1903).
E. Emerton, "The Requirements for the Historical Doctorate in America," American Historical Association Annual Report 1893
H.B. Adams, "Special Methods for the Study of History," in G. Stanley Hall ed., Methods of Teaching History. 2nd ed. (1902), 113-148.
C. Beard, "That Noble Dream," AHR 41 (1935), 74-87.
F. Braudel, The Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II, excerpts.
E. Said, Orientalism, "Introduction" (New York 1978).
H. K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, excerpt.

This past semester, however, I detected some fatigue with the sources.  Some were too long and the students did not read them carefully.  Others were too difficult to digest during a busy semester.  One of the key points of emphasis in our recent revisions of this class is to make it easier for students and more like other 200 level classes.  Students were enrolling in the class, finding it difficult, and dropping it and this made it difficult to move our majors through this course in a timely and efficient manner.  So, while the subject matter is demanding, we have discovered that the course itself cannot be.  As an added benefit to this more "realistic" approach to the course, I've discovered the more non-majors have enrolled and some of these are students who like history, but have been attracted into other majors. In other words, keeping this course accessible has the potential to attract prodigal students who have wandered from their one true love.

So, as I look ahead to teaching it next fall and spring, I am wondering whether there are some classics in the European or American historical tradition that are (1) accessible online and (2) easily excerpted into a 10-15 page section appropriate for a lower level history course.  The goal of the readings is to spur discussion of principles central to history as a discipline in either the past or present or to show some particular watershed in the development of history as a professional, academic, and intellectual pursuit. Any thoughts?

Numerous studies have focused on modernity’s destructive effect on traditional life- worlds, the desertion of villages and the ruination of rural areas. However, the fact that the modern condition also produces its own ruined materialities, its own marginalized pasts, is less spoken about. Since the 19th century, mass-production, consumerism and thus cycles of material replacement have accelerated; increasingly larger amounts of things are increasingly rapidly victimized and made redundant. At the same time processes of destruction have immensely intensified, although largely overlooked when compared to the research and social significance devoted to consumption and production (González-Ruibal 2006, 2008). The outcome is a ruined landscape of derelict factories, closed shopping malls, overgrown bunkers and redundant mining towns; a ghostly world of decaying modern debris normally left out of academic concerns and conventional histories.(1)

This ruin-landscape is the topic of the current research project. Based on selected case studies of industrial ruins, abandoned fishing villages and war remains in Norway, Russia, Iceland and Spain we want to explore how the ruins of modernity are conceived and assigned cultural value in contemporary academic and public discourses. Our research will cover three main themes: the aesthetics of waste and heritage, the materiality of memory, and the significance of things. Through these themes we want to develop theoretical arguments that help to understand why the derelict materiality of the modern to such an extent has been devalued and marginalized, but also to suggest possible means for reaffirming its cultural and historic significance.

The aesthetics of waste and heritage

One outcome of the modern attitude towards things and materiality is an oppositional hierarchy between, on the one hand, functional and/or aesthetically pleasing things and, on the other, waste – all rubbish supposed to be eradicated by increasingly more effective systems of disposal and recycling (Lucas 2002, Shanks et.al. 2004, Scanlan 2005). Heritage practices may at first be seen to be mediating this opposition, reflecting a care for and attentiveness to the useless and stranded. Heritage, however, contains its own regimes of cultural valuing and othering. In the dominant conception ruins are old, they have an “age-value” which is imperative to their legal and cultural-historical appreciation. Judged by this criterion, modern ruins become ambiguous, even anachronistic. In their hybrid or uncanny state they become antonyms of the modern and blur established cultural categories of purity and dirt; in short, they become matter out of place – and out of time.

Of central importance to this project is the study of how these processes of othering reflect aesthetic preferences and values; preferences also articulated by the way “proper” (ancient) ruins are treated and conceived. The “heritage ruin” is often staged, neat and picturesque; providing visitors with a disciplined and purified space (Edensor 2005). Extraneous materials – plants, fauna, debris, modern materials – all pollutants, are to be expunged. Seemingly frozen in time, further decay is staved off through restoration and preservation. Arresting decay, of course, has always been the imperative of modern museums and heritage management. Modern ruins, in contrast, are withering and crumbling; walls and concrete decompose, nature intrudes, mingles and reclaims. They become untimely reminders of ambiguity, death, and decay—conditions conspicuously at odds with the common cultural tropes of purity, sustainability and conservation (Lucas 2002, Shanks et.al. 2004). However, precisely through their alteration and decomposition these remains may be seen as uttering their own resistance and cultural critique. Thus, an important objective of this project is to explore how the ruins of the recent past may fuel a critical discourse on the aesthetics of heritage and materiality. Do the recent claims of a “thing agency” (Gell 1998, Latour 2005) extend to the aesthetic field as well?

The materiality of memory

In cultural and social studies much attention has been devoted to how memory crystallizes into sites or places of memory, locales of collective remembering (Nora 1984, Assman 1992, Eriksen 1999). Memory is here associated with a “re-collective” conception, in other words, with memory as a conscious and willful human process of recalling the past. The materiality of the place is not considered to be decisive (despite the presence of inscribed monuments and memorials); the crucial issue is the past event, a gone past, and the will to remember it through site embodiments. This project, however, is mostly concerned with different kinds of sites, which might be called “places of abjection”—“a no-man’s land too recent, conflicting and repulsive to be shaped as collective memory” (Gonzáles-Ruibal 2008: 256). Such places still contain the material causation for their abjection, and are haunted by a present past too grim or uncanny to be embraced (Domanska 2005). There is, of course, no ontological stability to such places. New historical circumstances and public attention might transform places of abjection into sites of commemoration and collective memory (cf. Runia 2006) —a point which adds a layer of irony to our own investigations.

Places of abjection also relate materially (although ambiguously so) to another type of memory, a habit memory. While re-collective memory implies a conscious gaze directed towards a particular past, habit memory is an implicit act of re-membering embedded in our bodily routines and ways of dealing with things: “it no longer represents our past to us, it acts it” (Bergson 1896/2004:93, cf. Casey 1984, Connerton 1989). In Bergson’s formative conception, habit memory was largely a function of adaptive value: only those aspects of the past that are useful or compatible with our present conducts are habitually remembered. The ruins dealt with here were once useful, and thus embedded in repetitious practice and infused with habit memory. When discarded and outmoded, their habitual mnemonic significance is lost while their physical presence, albeit ruined, continues. As such they survive and gather as the material antonyms to the habitually useful, creating a tension-filled constellation that carries the potential of triggering a particular kind of involuntary memory (Benjamin 1999). Reverberating against the taken- for-granted materiality of habit memory, these ruins become potential agents of disruption and “actualisation”. Precisely by being redundant and discarded they reveal the gaps in the construction of history as progress, as a continuous narrative; they bring forth the abject memories that both the recollective and the habitual have displaced.

The significance of things

A closely related third theme of this project is the significance of things. Our everyday dealings with things mostly take place in a mode of inconspicuous familiarity; unless broken, interrupted or missing, ordinary things often exhibit a kind of shyness. Also in the study of society things seem to have escaped the scholars’ attention, being largely ignored or confined to the margins when the “real” spectacles of life are accounted for in political narratives or sociological analyses.2 What is inevitably also neglected by this omission is the wordless experience of people and the life unfolding outside talkative history and social discourses.

The fate of things (and the disciplines concerned with them) may well exemplify how the assignment of cultural values has caused processes of marginalization which deeply influence even scholarly work. While the causes of this neglect must be scrutinized further (cf. Olsen 2003, 2007), a central concern here is to develop the emerging but still largely unexplored awareness of things’ potential for informing studies of contemporary and recent society. This, of course, is not to dismiss the profound importance of textual or other accounts, but rather to work out how such an archaeology of the recent past may provide alternative stories and alternative modes of historical engagement. Crucial here is, of course, a concern with the way things can mediate or express the “unsayable”, the “ineffable” experience which lies outside, or is neglected in, discourse.

This reassessment includes a consideration of things in their ruination. Decay is usually understood in a negative way; things are degraded and humiliated through material alteration, while the information, knowledge and memory embedded in them becomes lost along the way (DeSilvey 2006). We suggest that things actually may release some of their meaning or generate a different kind of knowledge precisely through processes of decay and ruination (Benjamin 1999, Andersson 2001). In the destruction process new layers of meaning are revealed, meanings that are only possible to grasp at second hand when no longer immersed in their withdrawn and useful reality. Ruination can thus be seen also as a recovery of memory (DeSilvey 2006); a “slow-motion archaeology” that exposes the formerly hidden and black-boxed; it unveils the masked object, inside is turned out, privacy revealed (Edensor 2005).

Aims and objectives

The overall aims of this project are twofold. Firstly, to critically scrutinize the normative categorization of modern ruins and the discourses and practices that may have led to their academic and historical marginalization; secondly, to reassess the cultural and historical value of this “prehistory” and of the role things play in expressing the ineffable. Each of these aims involves more specific objectives (further contextualised in relation to the specific case studies): (i) to investigate to what extent the cultural reception of modern ruins reflects aesthetic preferences that also impinge on academic and public conceptions of heritage; (ii) to identify “effective-historical” traditions and values responsible for their marginalization as well for the silencing of things more generally in social discourses; (iii) to explore how these othered materialities may contribute to a critical aesthetics of things and heritage; (iv) to examine the role things play in upholding the past and thus in enabling various forms of memory; (v) to explore the significance of ruins and things in informing social and historical inquiries; (vi) to explore alternative means of disseminating this significance.

Project Collaborators

Dag Andersson

Elin Andreassen

Hein Bjerck

Caitlin Desilvey

Alfredo Gonzáles-Ruibal

Gavin Lucas

Bjørnar Olsen

and Timothy Webmoor

For more information about the project visit www.ruinmemories.org or email admin@ruinmemories.org.

Notes

1. See, however, studies by Buchli and Lucas (2001), Neville and Villeneuve (2002), Shanks (2004), Elíasson and Sigurðsson (2004), Edensor (2005), Schofield (2005), DeSilvey (2006), Burström (2007), Eikemo (2008), Gonzáles- Ruibal (2008).

2. For criticism of the “thing amnesia” in social science see Miller (1987), Latour (2005), Olsen (2007).

3. This includes a number of studies such as Rathje (1996), Buchli and Lucas (2001), Lucas (2002, 2004), Shanks (2004), Shanks et.al. (2004); Gonzáles-Ruibal (2006, 2008), Burström (2007).

4. See works by Coles and Dion (1999), Pearson and Shanks (2001), Renfrew et.al. (2004); Bailey (2009).

5. Most of these originate from the cities of Tula and Donjetsk, however, a small number of former residents are still working in the only remaining Russian town at Svalbard, Barentsburg.

6. Despite its seven post-Soviet years Piramida is first and foremost a Soviet site. Little was changed after 1991 apart from its economic rationale. The fact that Lenin’s collected works is still on shelf in the director’s office in the administrative building is a little but telling sign of its postponed Soviet identity.

References

Andersson, D.T. (2001) Tingenes taushet, tingenes tale. Oslo: Solum. Andreassen, E.,

Bjerck, H. and Olsen, B. (2009) Persistent memories. Trondheim: Tapir Akademisk

Forlag (in press). Assmann, J. (1992) Das Kulturelle Gedächtniss. Munich: C. H. Beck.

Bailey, D. (2009) Art to archaeology to archaeology to art. In I. Russel (ed), Archaologies of Art (Papers from the Sixt World Archaeology Congress). UCDScholarcast series. (/http://www.ucd.ie/scholarcast/series2.html)

Benjamin, W. (1999) The Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Bergson, H. (1896/2004) Matter and memory. Dover Philosophical Classics. New York: Courier Dover Publications.

Buchli, V. and Lucas, G. (2001) Archaeologies of the contemporary past. London and New York: Routledge.

Burström, M. (2007) Samtidsarkeologi. Introduktion till et forskningsfält. Stockholm: Studentlitteratur.

Casey, E.S. (1984) Habitual body and memory in Merleau-Ponty. Man and World 17, pp. 279-297.

Coles, A. and Dion, M. (eds) (1999) Mark Dion Archaeology. London: Black Dog.

Connerton, P. (1989) How societies remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

DeSilvey, C. (2006) Observed decay: Telling stories with mutable things. Journal of Material Culture, 11:3, pp. 318-338.

Domanska, E. (2005) Toward the archaeontology of the dead body. Rethinking History, 9, pp. 389-413.

Edensor, T. (2005) Industrial ruins. Space, aesthetics and materiality. Oxford and New York: Berg.

Eikemo, M. (2008) Samtidsruinar. Oslo: Spartacus. Elíasson, N. and Sigurðsson, A. Á. (2004) Abandoned farms. Reykjavík: Edda útgáfa.

Eriksen, A. (1999) Historie, minne og myte. Oslo: Pax forlag.

Fløgstad, K. 2006. Pyramiden. Portrett av ein forlaten utopi. Oslo: Spartacus.

Gell, A. (1998) Art and agency. An anthropological theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Gnilorybov, N. A. (1979) Советский угольный рудник ”Пирамида” на архипелаге Шпицберген. Москва: ЦНИЭИуголь. (The Soviet Coal Mine “Pyramiden” in the Spitsbergen Archipelago).

González-Ruibal, A. (2006) The dream of reason: An archaeology of the failures of modernity in Ethiopia. Journal of Social Archaeology, 6, pp. 175-201.

González-Ruibal, A. (2008) Time to destroy: An archaeology of supermodernity. Current Anthropology, 49:2 (april 2008), pp. 247-279.

Gumbrecht, H.U. (2004) Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Latour (2005) Reassembling the social. An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lucas, G. (2002) Disposability and dispossession in the twentieth century. Journal of material culture, 7, pp. 5-22.

Lucas, G. (2004) Modern Disturbances. On the Ambiguities of Archaeology. Modernism/modernity, 11, pp. 109-20.

Miller, D. (1987) Material culture and mass consumption. Oxford: Blackwell.

Neville, B. and Villeneuve, J eds (2002). Waste-site Stories: The Recycling of Memory. New York: SUNY Press.

Nora, P. (1984) Entre mémoire et histoire: La problématique des lieux. In Les lieux de mémoire, Vol. 1, La République, Pierre Nora (ed.), xv-xlii. Paris: Gallimard.

Olivier, L. (2008) Le sombre abîme du temps. Mémoire et archéologie. Paris: Seuil.

Olsen (2003) Material culture after text: Re-Membering things. Norwegian Archaeological Review, 36:2, pp. 87-104.

Olsen, B. (2007) Keeping things at arm’s length. A genealogy of asymmetry. World Archaeology, 39:4, pp. 579-588.

Pearson, M. and Shanks, M. (2001) Theatre/archaeology. London and New York: Routledge

Rathje, W.L. (1996) The archaeology of us. Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Yearbook of Science and the Future 1997, pp. 158-177.

Renfrew, C., Gosden, C. and DeMarrais, E. (eds) (2004) Substance, Memory, Display: Archaeology and Art. Cambridge: McDonald Institute.

Runia (2006) Presence. In History and Theory, 45:1, pp. 1-29.

Scanlan, J. (2005) On garbage. London: Reaktion Books.

Shanks, M. (1997) Photography and Archaeology. In Leigh Molyneaux, B. (ed.) The Cultural Life of Images: Visual Representations in Archaeology. London: Routledge.

Shanks, M. (2004) Three rooms: archaeology and performance. In Journal of Social Archaeology, 4:2, pp. 147–80.

Shanks, M., Platt, D. and Rathje, W.L. (2004) The perfume of garbage. In Modernity/Modernism, 11:1, pp. 68-83.

Schofield, J. (2005) Combat archaeology: Material culture and modern conflict. London: Duckworth.

Þorkelsson, M. (1996) Stöðin í Viðey – heimildir í hættu? In Landnám Ingólfs 5, pp. 148- 156.

On Saturday, March 13, 2010, the CHNM’s Bracero History Archive <http://braceroarchive.org> received the National Council on Public History’s award for “Outstanding Public History Project.”

The award recognizes excellence in work completed within the previous two calendar years that contributes to a broader public reflection and appreciation of the past or that serves as a model of professional public history practice. Sharon Leon and other project staff, including Peter Liebhold (NMAH), Kristine Navaro (UTEP), Mireya Loza (Brown), and Alma Carillo (Brown), were on hand to accept the honor from NCPH President Marianne Babal at the annual awards luncheon.

The Bracero History Archive is a landmark venture in collaborative documentation. With major partners at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, the Institute of Oral History at the University of Texas at El Paso, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University, and dozens of other small cultural heritage and community organizations around the country, the project has worked to collect and make available the oral histories and artifacts pertaining to the Bracero program, a guest worker initiative that spanned the years 1942-1964. Millions of Mexican agricultural workers crossed the border under the program to work in more than half of the states in America.

The Bracero History Archive is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities through the Preservation and Access division.

Yes, the wait is finally over. Yesterday's announcement of Logos Bible Software 4.0b mentioned what many have been waiting for: Support for importing LDLS3 user-created content.

Specifically, Logos 4.0b now supports importing notes, highlighting, favorites, and prayer lists. Along with this release, regardless if you are importing from LDLS3 or not, Notes now allow for user-editable titles, as well as creating Notes for a reference range, not just a single verse.

So without further ado, let's get your notes from Logos 3 to Logos 4.

Since resources have changed over the years because we’ve corrected typos, added new hyperlinks, and made other edits, in certain cases, these changes can prevent Logos 4 from importing notes from Libronix DLS 3 correctly. In order to minimize the likelihood of notes not being transferred, we highly recommend you download the Custom Toolbar for LDLS3 that prepares your notes for importing into Logos 4.

Getting the toolbar:

• Download the Custom Toolbar from http://downloads.logos.com/LBS4/LDLS3Import/UpdateNotes.lbxctb and save it to your [MyDocuments]\Libronix DLS\CustomToolbars folder. (See the Special Folder Locations article for OS-specific locations.)
  
  (UPDATE: Please make sure the CustomToolbars folder does not have a space it the title. Use CustomToolbars not Custom Toolbars.)

• Run LDLS3, and click the newly added Update Notes Now button.
• When Update Notes Now finishes, return to Logos 4.

Now are you ready for this? In Logos 4 type Import All into the Command bar, hit enter, and sit back. You'll then see the “Importing…” status message in the upper-right corner of the main window. That's it.

Content imported into Logos 4 “remembers” that it was imported such that consecutive imports can be run in Logos 4, without adverse effects. Changes to imported content in Logos 4 will clear the link between Logos 4 and LDLS3, so if you edit an imported item in Logos 4, and then re-import, you will see the original item from LDLS3 along with the edited item in Logos 4.This is intentional in order to recover an original note without over writing the new content.

If you no longer want to use some of your user-created content from LDLS3, but want other parts, like your extensive Prayer Lists, there are commands for a more targeted import.

Additional Commands:

Import Notes
Imports only notes from LDLS3

Import Highlighting
Imports only highlighting from LDLS3

Import Favorites
Imports only favorites from LDLS3

Import Prayer Lists
Imports only prayers lists from LDLS3

Import delete (All|Notes|Highlighting|Favorites|Prayer Lists)
Deletes all imported content of the specified type

If you were on the fence about upgrading to Logos 4 because you couldn't transfer your Notes, Highlighting, Favorites, or Prayer Lists, now is a great time to upgrade to Logos 4. Logos 4 is now better than ever, and you can be sure we're already working to add additional features.

You should follow us on Twitter here.

So much for all that free time... here's a brief rundown of some things that have accumulated lately.

First of all, I've been extremely remiss in neglecting to mention my friend Ross Cowan's blog. Ross is the author of, among others, The Roman Conquests: Italy, and he's been blogging about related topics. Ross has also got an article in the latest issue of the magazine Ancient Warfare, which issue (table of contents) is dedicated to "A multitude of peoples: Before Rome ruled Italy" (you know you've always wanted a two-page spread painting of the Battle of Bovianum!). I also learn that Cambridge will be republishing Salmon's Samnium and the Samnites come April -- mirabile dictu!

Big news this month is the discovery at Gabii of an Archaic tripartite building identified as a regia [La Repubblica - photos; MiBAC].

Twenty Etruscan fossa tombs were discovered at Marina Velka near Tarquinia, two of which were hit by tombaroli, along with Roman habitation [Viterbo Oggi; Viterbo Notizie].

Artifacts from three museums in Castiglion Fiorentino (Arezzo) are on display at Castel Sant' Angelo until April 11.

The Pontecagnano museum has supposedly reopened.

There's a call for papers for an Accordia conference on Etruscan Literacy in its Social Context (22-23 September 2010), deadline April 30.

The X Incontro di Studi su Preistoria e Protostoria in Etruria (10-12 September 2010) has as its theme "L’Etruria dal Paleolitico al Primo Ferro. Lo stato delle ricerche". (more)


The latest Journal of Field Archaeology (Vol. 34, issue 4) includes "Remote Sensing and Archaeological Prospection in Apulia , Italy", by S.A. Ross, A. Sobotkova and G.-J. Burgers (pp. 423-438).

Greece and Rome (Vol. 57, issue 1: April 1, 2010):
E. Bragg, "Roman Seaborne Raids During the Mid - Republic : Sideshow or Headline Feature ?" (pp. 47-64)

The Classical Review (New Series), Volume 60, Issue 01, April 2010:
• Witcher on Isayev, Inside Ancient Lucania (2007)
• Mattingly on Revell, Roman Imperialism and Local Identities (2009)
• Roth on Wallace-Hadrill, Rome's Cultural Revolution (2008)
• Perfigli on Clark, Divine Qualities. Cult and Community in Republican Rome (2007)
• Bücher on Jehne & Pfeilschifter (eds.), Herrschaft ohne Integration? Rom und Italien in Republikanischer Zeit (2006)
• Hogg on Briquel, Mythe et révolution. La Fabrication d'un récit: la naissance de la république à Rome (2007)

Bryn Mawr Classical Review:
• I. Edlund-Berry on Daniele Federico Maras, Il dono votivo: Gli dei e il sacro nelle iscrizioni etrusche di culto.
• eadem on Laura Maniscalco (ed.), Il santuario dei Palici: un centro di culto nella Valle del Margi. Collana d'Area. Quaderno n. 11.
• C. Bailey on Harriet Flower, Roman Republics
• C. Smith on Sinclair Bell & Helen Nagy (eds.), New Perspectives on Etruria and Early Rome: In Honor of Richard Daniel De Puma
• N. Carayon on Castagnino Berlinghieri, Elena Flavia, Carmelo Monaco, Il sistema portuale di Catania antica: studi interdisciplinari di geo-archeologia marittima.
• G. van Heems on Enrico Benelli (ed.), Thesaurus Linguae Etruscae. I. Indice lessicale. Seconda edizione...

For the last week I've been following Daf Yomi, the 7 year cycle by which Orthodox Jews read the entire Talmud. It's part of my "Echoes of Late Antiquity" hobby and so far I'm having fun. Take this translated quote from Sanhedrin 31a

If one witness attests [the loan of] a barrel of wine, and the other, of a barrel of oil: — such a case happened, and it was brought before R. Ammi, who ordered him [the defendant] to repay a barrel of
wine out of [the value of] the barrel of oil.

So a "barrel" of oil is worth more than the same of wine. That's nice to know. Of course, I'm relying on the translation from halakhah.com and that's always a worry.

FWIW, the legal principle here is that you need two witnesses. Since the value of the oil is higher, there are only two witnesses to the loan of the value of the barrel of wine.

Dacia - Revue d'Archeologie et d'Histoire Ancienne
Digitalised Collection 1924-1948

1924

1925

1933

1938

1941

1945

1948

See the full List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies.

From archaeologist Rodolfo Amedeo Lanciani, The destruction of ancient Rome: a sketch of the history of the monuments, p. 36 f. (here):

To what use the temples were put immediately after the expulsion of their gods, we do not know; but it is certain that they were not occupied by Christians, nor turned into places of Christian worship. This change was only to take place two centuries later, when the scruples about the propriety of worshipping the true God in heathen temples had been overcome. In the year 600, Pope Boniface IV asked the Emperor Phocas for the temple which was called Pantheon, and turned it into a church of Mary the Virgin ever blessed.” Two periods, then, may be distinguished in the converting of pagan edifices into places of Christian worship, one anterior to the year 609, the other following that date. During the first, civil edifices alone were transformed, partially or completely, into churches; such were the Record Office, which became the church of SS. Cosmas and Damian, and the round market on the Caelian Hill, now S. Stefano Rotondo. After 609 almost every available building, whether secular or sacred, was made into a church or chapel, until the places of worship seemed to outnumber the houses.

This view, expressed by a 19th century archaeologist, is interesting.  But is it true?

Analecta Romana Instituti Danici

The journal Analecta Romana Instituti Danici (ARID) publicerer studier indenfor Instituttets hovedforskningsområder: humanistiske studier (f. eks. antikhistorie, arkæologi kunsthistorie, historie, litteratur, filologi), billedkunst og arkitektur.

ANALECTA ONLINE
Det er besluttet, at ANALECTA fra efteråret 2007 skal udkomme som online-tidsskrift. I første omgang tilgængeligt på institutets hjemmeside og senere i en eller flere af de store, internationale tidsskrift-databaser, som findes på Internettet.
Ved udgangen af hvert kalenderår fremstilles en papir-udgave af de i året indkomne og godkendte artikler, kopieret eller trykt alt efter instituttets økonomiske formåen. Hermed kan man opretholde den særlige tidsskrift-bytteordning, som findes forskningsbibliotekerne imellem til fælles fordel og til fordel for bidragyderne.

The journal Analecta Romana Instituti Danici (ARID) publishes studies within the main range of the Academy’s research activities: the humanities (for instance ancient history, archaeology, art history, history, literature, philology), the fine arts and architecture.

ANALECTA ONLINE
From the autumn 2007 you will find ANALECTA published as an online periodical. The first step will be online at the homepage of the Danish institute, but as soon as possible we will try to enter ANALECTA in one of the worldwide periodical-databases.
At the end of every year we will print or copy in a simple book-form the articles from the actual year for the benefit of the authors, and for the free exchange of periodicals between the research-libraries.

2008

XXXIII

2009

XXXIV

See the full List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies.

ADIAS Newsletter: Abu Dhabi Islands Archaeological Survey

The Abu Dhabi Islands Archaeological Survey (ADIAS) was established in 1992 on the instruction of the late President His Highness Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, under the patronage of His Highness General Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, now Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces and Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi. ADIAS was charged with surveying for, recording and, where appropriate, excavating archaeological sites on the coast and islands of Abu Dhabi. In the years that have followed, ADIAS has identified over a thousand sites or groups of sites on the coast and islands of Abu Dhabi, as well as deep in the deserts of the interior. Among the sites are several of international importance, including the oldest-known settlement in the Emirates, on Marawah island,and major sites in the south-eastern deserts of Abu Dhabi, near Umm az-Zamul, these all being of Late Stone Age date, and the only pre-Islamic Christian monastery yet identified in south-eastern Arabia, on the island of Sir Bani Yas. ADIAS teams have also identified numerous sites of palaeontological importance, with vertebrate fossils from the Late Miocene period, around 6-8 million years ago.

2005-2006 season:

ADIAS Newsletter no,1 - November 2005 * NEW ! *
[ ADIAS to become part of new Abu Dhabi Culture and Heritage Authority - Official Inauguration of ADIAS Fossil Exhibition - Environmental Achievement of the Year Award 2005 - ADIAS website hits - New archaeological work on Sadiyat - More archaeological work planned for Umm az-Zamul and Marawah - Lectures - ADIAS to participate in World Heritage Meeting - Review of ADIAS publication - New Books - Other New Publications ]

---

2004-2005 season:

ADIAS Newsletter no.3 - May 2005
[ "Abu Dhabi 8 million years ago" Exhibition Opens - ADIAS website again has record number of visitors - Visit to GCC team - More work at Umm az-Zamul - OSL dating - New archaeological work at Abu Dhabi Airport - ADIAS Visit to Kuwait - ADIAS to participate in Symposium on Integrated Coastal Zone Management - Lectures - Review of ADIAS publication - New Publications - Forthcoming Publications ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.2 - February 2005
[ DNA, Flints and Fossils - DNA from UAE's First Man - ADIAS website has record number of visitors - 2nd season at Umm az-Zamul - New site at Gabat Rukhna - ADIAS Visit to Kuwait - Fossil Display - Lectures - New Publications - Forthcoming Publication ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.1 - November 2004
[ ADIAS new season underway - Interesting news about radiocarbon dating of Marawah settlement - Oldest archaeological site in the UAE - Abu Dhabi Police help identify UAE's oldest man - Sabkha experts visit Abu Dhabi- BP helps studies of UAE heritage - ADIAS team visits Dalma - Dilmun Civilisation Celebration in Bahrain - Fossil Display - New fossil site discovered at Ruwais - Shells and Archaeology - Mosques of Abu Dhabi - Lectures - Forthcoming Publications ]

---

2003-2004 season:

ADIAS Newsletter no.4 - May 2004
[ 7000 year old settlement discovered on Marawah Island - New ADIAS book published - Sabkha Workshop - 2nd Archaeology Symposium - Visit to Kuwait - Oman conference - Fossil Display - Help on other Exhibitions - Coastal Survey - Lectures - Forthcoming Papers ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.3 - March 2004
[ Neolithic settlements discovered in SE desert of Abu Dhabi - Bazm al-Gharbi: a first report - Marawah season begins - Visit to Qatar - Zayed Private Academy Talk - Peter Whybrow 1942 to 2004 - Al Ain History Symposium - More support from ADIAS sponsors - NBAD helps ADIAS technology - ABC Recruitment ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.2 - January 2004
[ 7,000 year-old houses discovered on Marawah - New archaeological work planned at Umm az-Zamul - Update on fossils exhibition - Launch of new ADIAS book - Visit to Rumaitha and Ruwais fossil sites - Visit to Jebel Dhanna sulphur mines - Survey carried out on Bazm al-Gharbi - New sponsors of ADIAS ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.1 - November 2003
[ Survey, Fossils, Lectures and Publications - a busy start to the new season - Surveys of coastal areas in western Abu Dhabi - Success for Mohammed - More help from TAKREER - More work on fossil finds - Lectures and Outreach - Visit to Sultanate of Oman - Books and Publications ]

---

2002-2003 season:

ADIAS Newsletter no.3 - June 2003
[ Dolphin support Fujairah work - Training UAE national - Rachael's find - Zayed University - ADIAS pottery expert receives award - London Seminar for Arabian Studies - New archaeology book - ADIAS website statistics - Support from NBAD ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.2 - March 2003
[ Al Ain Seminar - ERWDA - Jebel Dhanna - Karen Cooper - Marawah - Ruwais ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.1 - December 2002
[ Abu Al-Abyadh - Abu Dhabi airport - Mark Beech - Kuwait - Ruwais - Training UAE nationals ]

---

2001-2002 season:

ADIAS Newsletter no.3 - June 2002
[ Abu Dhabi airport - Dalma - Mark Beech - Mleisa - Ruwais - Sir Bani Yas ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.2 - February 2002
[ Dalma - Database - Jebel Dhanna - Marawah Marine Protected Area - Mleisa - Niqqa - Rumaitha - Umm al-Khaber ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.1 - November 2001
[ Dalma - Dan Hull - Database - Futaisi - Website ]

---

2000-2001 season:

ADIAS Newsletter no.3 - May 2001
[ Al Aryam - Database - Futaisi - Jebel Dhanna - Mleisa - Ra's Ghumeis - UAE archaeology conference ]

Please note that all newsletters prior to May 2001 are saved as Acrobat pdf files. You will need the Acrobat viewer program to view these files, which you can download from the Adobe Acrobat viewer. If you do not have this please visit the Adobe website to obtain this program.

ADIAS Newsletter no.2 - February 2001
[ Conference - ERWDA EDB - Jebel Dhanna - Ras Bilyaryar - Rufayq ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.1 - November 2000
[ Abu Al-Abyadh - ADIAS publication in arabic - Ancient Hearths - Archaeology Conference for Al Ain - Charlotte Stokes wins prize - Coastal Sensitivity Maps and ERWDA - Dalma - Halat Hail - Jebel Dhanna - Khor Al Bazm - Rumaitha ]

---

1999-2000 season:

ADIAS Newsletter no.4 - June 2000
[ Abu Dhabi Golf and Equestrian Club - Medieval occupation of Abu Dhabi - Hamim, Liwa - Marawah radiocarbon dates ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.3 - 2000

ADIAS Newsletter no.2 - January 2000
[ Al-Aryam (Bu Khushaishah) - Bahrani - Dabb'iya - Emirates archaeology 2001 Conference - Habshan - Hearths in Qatar - Oldest evidence for eating dugongs - Old shorelines ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.1 - October 1999
[ ADIAS publication in arabic - Ancient FIshing - Ghagha - Jebel Dhanna - London Seminar - Marawah - Operation Ghazal - Qarnein - Ra's Bilyaryar - Yasat al-Ulya ]

---

1998-1999 season:

ADIAS Newsletter no.3 - May 1999
[ Dalma - geology - Ghagha' - Lime kilns - Marawah - water catchment system ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.2 - February 1999
[ Bab - Balghelam - Bu Sharah - Dabb'iya - Marawah - Ostrich eggshell - Qusabi - Rufayq ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.1 - November 1998
[ Abu Al Abyadh - ADCO oilfields - Dabb'ya - Mantiqa al-Sirra - Marawah - Ras Farda - Rumaitha - Shanayel ]

---

1997-1998 season:

ADIAS Newsletter no.4 - May 1998
[ Dalma - Geology - Marawah - Publications - Qarnein ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.3 - February 1998
[ Dalma - ERWDA - Lisbon EXPO - Marawah ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.2 - December 1997
[ Dabb'iya - Fish study - GIS - Marawah ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.1 - September 1997
[ Qarnein - Ras Sadr - Taweela - Tawi Beduwa Shwaiba ]

---

1996-1997 season:

ADIAS Newsletter no.4 - June 1997
[ Sharjah Symposium - Shuweihat ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.3 - April 1997
[ Balghelam - Fish study - Mantiqa As'sirra - Marawah ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.2 - December 1996
[ Balghelam - Sir Bani Yas ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.1 - November 1996
[ Abu Dhabi airport - Sir Bani Yas ]

---

1995-1996 season:

ADIAS Newsletter no.7 - June 1996
[ Sheikh Shakhbut house - Sir Bani Yas ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.6 - April 1996
[ Al F'zaiyyah - Bida al Mutawa - Futaisi - Ghagha' - Jebel Dhanna - Sir Bani Yas - Yasat al Ulya - Yasat Sufla ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.5 - March 1996
[ Abu Dhabi airport - Sir Bani Yas ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.4 - February 1996
[ Balghelam - Sir Bani Yas ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.3 - December 1995
[ Balghelam - Qusabi - Sheleala ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.2 - October 1995
[ Abu Dhabi airport - Environmental - Geology ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.1 - July 1995
[ Abu Dhabi airport ]

---

1994-1995 season:

ADIAS Newsletter no.6 - June 1995
[ Abu Dhabi airport - Sheleala - Sir Bani Yas - Umm Amim ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.5 - April 1995
[ Al F'zaiyyah - Ghagha' - Hamr - Sir Bani Yas ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.4 - March 1995
[ Abu Dhabi airport - Abu Dhabi island - Jubayl - Ras Bilyaryar - Sila - Sir Bani Yas ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.3 - February 1995
[ Arzanah - Jubayl - Marawah - South Muhayimat - Zirku ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.2 - January 1995
[ Balghelam - Bu Khushaisah - Fiyya - Marawah ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.1 - December 1994
[ Balghelam - Fiyya - Marawah ]

See the full List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies.

Nouvelles de Jérusalem, École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem (EBAF)

Publication annuelle, paraissant en début d’année en anglais et en français, rappelant tous les grands et petits événements, donnant des nouvelles des anciens, listant les publications, elle constitue comme la mémoire de l’École.

Année 1997
Année 1998
Année 1999
Année 2000
Année 2001
Année 2002
Année 2003
Année 2004
Année 2005
Année 2006 : actuellement manquante, disponible en version anglaise
Année 2007 : actuellement manquante, disponible en version anglaise
Année 2008
Année 2009
Année 2010

See the full List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies.

As a graduate student, I promised myself that I would never be one of those professor’s that was always so busy they were always working and never seemed to have time for anyone. With practice, I’ve learned that any professor (today) that is actively doing their job will be considerably overextended. The result is that I am always running from meeting to class, or trying to fit student consultation in between various other things. But with the addition of baby #2, I find myself running late more than usual (which is saying something because I’m typically running late - that’s OK: time is cyclical, right?). I do feel bad about being late for class though, and I usually do everything in my power to avoid it. And, I have a number of students who are similarly respectful. But I also have others that are chronically late. Anyway, The Other Dr. Fee sent me this link to a NYU professor and his response to a specific student situation. It’s funny, and I appreciate much of what he’s saying - even if he’s clearly a jerk.

I've been surveying the longest words of Modern Greek, thanks to a thread at the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos' blog. But that's not the only place long words of Modern Greek can be reported from.

I've made mention previously of Hellas-L mailing list, which is available publicly as Usenet group bit.listserv.hellas. I dropped off the list in April 2008, and the last live post seems to be from March 2008: the group's Usenet feed has now gently passed into the Internetic night, like much of Usenet itself has; and the list itself was certainly winding down when I last saw it.

But Hellas-L had a glorious history behind it. In the late '80s and early '90s, when there was no substantial Internet presence in Greece, and the Web did not yet exist, this raucous mailing list of Greeks studying and working overseas was the main presence of Greek in the Internet. Given the times, it was an exclusively Greeklish medium, with all the anarchy of competing informal romanisations. Several of the erstwhile regulars of the list, as Internet oldtimers, are now in the community around the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos' Blog—including Nikos himsef.

By the time I started archiving the list in late 1996, it was starting to lose its preeminence; but I kept archives up to October 2007. (I missed three months in 1999.) Because it was a ready corpus of Greek—albeit idiosyncratic, self-conscious, English-tinged Greek—I used it as a resource in a few papers I wrote. That has led to at least one surprise to list members egosurfing.

The list cultivated a particular linguistic culture, like internet communities do. Playful use of Greeklish to roundtrip English, for example. Because some whoreson putz Wikipedian has just deleted my own paragraph on the topic from the Greeklish page, here it is for posterity:

Not withstanding the loaded politics of Greeklish, jocular use of English, transcribed into Greek and then transliterated into Greeklish, shows how users can manipulate the use of script to ironic effect: if a user, in the middle of a Greeklish conversation, types "dis iz xarnt tou rint" for "this is hard to read" (transliterated via δις ιζ χαρντ του ριντ), they are ironically distancing themselves from their code-switching to English, doubly ironic since the script is Roman but the orthography effectively Greek. (One might retort that this is aesthetically displeasing—but of course that is the point.) This artifice is particularly widespread on the Hellas mailing list.

Another particularity was a penchant for long compounds, especially during flamewars. Since we've been hunting down long words, I cranked up my grep engine, scrolled past the MIME attachments and spam email addresses, and came up with the following list from my archives of the list. Of course, these are not Aristophanes, and the compounds confirm that long words in Greek aren't that startling a thing. But several of them have linguistic interest, including where the compounding goes wrong.

Hellas-L already came up in previous discussion, with πολυμαθουφοχριστιανοπεοκρουστόπαιδο, "polymath UFO Christian penis stroking lad" (35 chars). There turn out to be 13 words 40 characters or longer in the corpus, and four 50 characters or longer.

Compounds breaking apart: #1

The words are long enough though, that they're starting to break apart. Two of the thirteen words are problematic as compounds.

The first is not really a word at all, but a run-in phrase:

Αριστεροαναρχοκαταολωνσαςγραφωσταπαλιάμου Aristeroanarxokataolwnsasgrafwstapaliamou "Leftist, Anarchist, Against Everybody, 'I-Don't-Give-A-Damn-About-You'", coined on Hellas-L by Kostas Yannakopoulos, 1997-02-04 (41 chars)

The word starts as a compound: Arister-o-anarch-o-. But then it drops in two quoted phrases, which don't belong in compounds because they're not pure stems, but inflections-and-all words: κατά όλων "against everybody" and σας γράφω στα παλιά μου [τα παπούτσια] "I write you on my old [shoes]" (common saying: I have so much contempt for you, I write your name on my old shoes' sole, so I can tread on it.)

Compounds breaking apart: #2

The second coinage is *almost* a proper compound, but goes awry with one connecting vowel:

Χανουμισσαδικομαυροφορεμενηπροσφυγομάνας Xanoumissadikomayroforemenhprosfygomanas "Harem Lady, unjustly dressed in black [= bereaved] mother of refugees", coined on Hellas-L by Sotiris Skevoulis, 2000-09-18 (40 chars)

This is a reference to AEK soccer team (Athletic Union of Constantinople), reestablished in Athens by refugees from Turkey. Skevoulis combines an uncomplimentary epithet for the team, "Harem Ladies", with a complimentary: "Mother of the Refugees". Skevoulis wants to trowel on the sentimentality of "Mother of the Refugees", so he amplifies it with a word picture: the Mother of the Refugees as mournful lady in black.

Here Skevoulis runs into a problem: he is combining the participle μαυροφορέμενη "dressed in black" with the noun προσφυγομάνα "Mother of the Refugees" (both are compounds). This is not a good idea, and there are safer alternatives: μαυροφόρ-α has an inflection straight on the root, and μαυροφορ-ο-προσφυγομάνα would be morphologically unexceptional. The noun μαυροφορούσ-α is another alternative: it is of course merely the ancient active feminine participle "wearing black"; but in Modern Greek the active participle is no longer productive as an adjective, so that μαυροφορούσα looks like any other feminine noun, and μαυροφορουσ-ο-προσφυγομάνα is no more exceptional than χανουμισσ- is in a compound.

But Skevoulis has used the passive participle, which is very much productive in Modern Greek. Again, you can do this in a compound, since participles correspond to adjectives; but it's a lot less usual. Because it's unusual, the participle ending -εμεν- calls attention to itself. Even if μαυροφορ-εμεν-ο- is possible in a compound, its unusualness in that context makes hearers think of the more usual context, as the ending of an inflected participle.

The thing is, -εμεν-ο- in that inflected context is masculine: μαυροφορ-εμέν-ος "man dressed in black", μαυροφορ-εμέν-η "woman dressed in black". So μαυροφορεμεν-ο-προσφυγομάνα, while supposedly a single compound, sounds like the ungrammatical phrase *μαυροφορεμένο (masc) προσφυγομάνα (fem). To patch this up, Skevoulis gives "dressed in black" the feminine ending -η. But now with μαυροφορεμεν-η-προσφυγομάνα, he's introduced an unambiguous inflection between the two stems.

That makes the compound breaks apart: participial -εμέν- cannot stick to a feminine noun in compounding. Not because it is impossible, but because the participle ending makes it unusual, and therefore calls to mind the two halves of the compound as separate words. Those separate words would disagree in gender, so the attempted compound sounds wrong. Again, had he used a more conventional first half of the compound, like μαυροφορ-ο-προσφυγομάνα, he wouldn't have had to tinker with the connecting vowel.

Compounds breaking apart: #3

A third coinage just misses the 40 character limit, but is even more problematic than the previous two:

in εντελαμαγκεντεΒοτανικωχαμανεχωμερακλώσει-mode in evtelamagkevteBotavikwxamavexwmeraklwsei-mode "in 'Ente la mangé de Votanik—woah, I'm feeling funky now' mode" (coined on Hellas-L by "The Marsist", 1997-01-26) (39 chars)

This refers to the pseudo-French (?) lyrics of a Rebetiko song by Spyros Zagoraios—see YouTube: "I'm the tough guy of Votaniko". The coinage follows them with the phrase ωχ αμάν, έχω μερακλώσει "ah, alas, I am in the ecstatic mood brought on by bouzouki music". (The translation above is less scrupulous.)

The whole thing is in another linguistic particularity of Hellas-L: posters signing off their posts with their name, followed by in/σε [pertinent Greek phrase]-mode. Normally the mode phrase is spaced as normal, or hyphenated:

• σε-αμάν-πια-αυτή-η-Νέα-Ορλεάνη–mode se-aman-pia-auth-h-nea-orleanh-mode "in Enough-of-New-Orleans-Already–mode" (Lida Anestidou, 1997-11-06)
  
• in–ο έρωτας κι ο βήχας δεν κρύβονται–mode in- o erwtas ki o bhxas den krybontai- mode "in 'you can't hide love or a cough'–mode" (Lamprini Thoma, 1997-11-04)
  

As the hyphens give away, the mode phrase is treated as a single unit, because the expression parodies the English use of in [single word]–mode: in sleep mode, in alert mode. I assume The Marsist has gone further, and mooshed the mode phrase together, because of the opaqueness of the song lyrics. People posting the lyrics often enough run έντε λα μαγκέ ντε Βοτανίκ together as εντελαμαγκέ ντε Βοτανίκ. Once he started running words together, he just kept going; after all, the mode phrase is meant to be a single unit.

What The Marsist did is not that unusual; online English often enough does that kind of thing using CamelCase, and if anything it's a surprise this is the only instance of that kind of thing I've found on Hellas-L. But just taking spaces out of a phrase doesn't turn it into a single word linguistically.

Compounds breaking apart: O RLY?

I'm being rather absolute about this "no internal morphology" rules, and—as I conceded in the discussion of γαμαοδέρνουλας—you can have a phrase turned into a single word, or stem, as a quotation. That's happened with the Forget-Me-Not flower in English; and it's happened with μη μου άπτου "Touch-Me-Not" (John 20:17) in Modern Greek, used as an indeclinable adjective to mean "aloof". (slang.gr: "Excessively sensitive, hypochondriac bothered by everything to the point of hysteria".)

I note that Sarantakos, unlike slang.gr, spells it as a single word, without spaces: μημουάπτου. It does help that the phrase is in Ancient Greek of course, so harder to take apart. And I still don't think it is useful to call εντελαμαγκεντεΒοτανικωχαμανεχωμερακλώσει as a single word: it doesn't look to be intended to used anywhere μημουάπτου can, like an adjective.

That's kind of an unfair burden to impose on nonce coinages, I admit. But the rarity of CamelCase in Greek gives away the game anyway: "Votanik" is not so integrated into the word that it has the same lowercase as the rest. In fact we saw another giveaway in the word I rejected as a compound from Sarantakos' thread, Ελληνοαποτηνπρωηνγιουγκοσλαβικηδημοκρατιατηςμακεδονιασόπουλο. If that was a real compound, there would be no need to spell -της- with a final sigma.

(In Greek typography of yore, you would in fact find final sigma in the middle of a word, at a morpheme boundary: προςλαμβάνω = προς + λαμβάνω. I'll daresay that's not the precedent Lefteris Dikeos had in mind when he spelled his word like that.)

Compounds not as much breaking apart

Back to Hellas-L. Here's the remaining eleven compounds from the period I have access to:

οικονομικοπολιτικοκοινωνικογεοστρατηγικές oikovomikopolitikokoivwvikogeostratngikes "economical, politicial, social and geostrategic" coined on Hellas-L by Christos Papadas, 2002-11-26 (40 chars)
οικο[νο]μικοκαταναλωτικοϋγειονομικοεργασιακοτεχνολογικό oikomikokatanalotikoygionomikoergasiakotexnologiko "economical, consumerist, sanitary, workplace and technological [paradise]", coined on Hellas-L by Pelopas@acn.gr, 2004-01-22 (53 chars)

We've seen similar coinages on Sarantakos' thread, all of them parodying the journalistic cliché of socio-politico- compounds: sonorous context-setting adjectives that don't end up saying that much.

φεμινιστοβιολογικοτουρκοφασιστομπλεξίματα feministobiologikotourkofasistomple3imata "feminist, biological, Turkish, Fascist complications", coined on Hellas-L by Lida Anestidou, 1997-05-08 (41 chars)

A summary of the various perennial topics of flamewars on the list, that the poster is trying to avoid. The humour is in the incongruous and lengthly lumping together of the disparate topics.

ινδοκινεζοουζυμβυριανοαβοριγινοκεντριστών indokinezoouzumburianoaboriginokentristwn "Indochinese, Uzymbyrian (?) and Aboriginal-centrists" coined on Hellas-L by Myron Kaisides, 1998-07-26 (41 chars)
αφροασιατοαμερικανοαυστραλιανοανταρκτικοκεντριστές afroasiatoamerikanoaystralianoantarktikokentristes, "Afro-Asian-American-Australian-Antractican-centricists", coined on Hellas-L by Myron Kaisides, 1998-07-26(50 chars)

Both coinages deride Afro-centrist approaches to history, by concocting absurd combinations of ethnicities as other biases. The point here once again is the length of the compound, as much as the incongruity of the ethnicities.

Νταϊφαδοσαλιαρεληδοκοσκωταδοκοκκαλιστανούς Ntaifadosaliarelhdokoskwtadokokkalistanous "Daifas, Saliarelis, Koskotas, and Kokkalis-istanis", coined on Hellas-L by "Asteras Amaliadas", 1998-02-11 (42 chars)

Referring to scandal-ridden presidents of soccer teams. Notice that the surnames are suffixed with -δ-, which is used in the plural of the names (Νταϊφάδ-ες, Σαλιαρέληδ-ες, Κοσκωτάδ-ες). Asteras is intending the plural proper names as a genericising description, the same way Ancient Greek used Ἀριστοφάνεις and Πλάτωνες. So, "inhabitants of a Third World country characterised by people such as Daifas, Saliarelis, Koskotas, and Kokkalis"

ΠαπαδοπουλοΠατακοΜακαρεζοΧουντοΪωαννιδικών PapadopouloPatakoMakarezoXouvtoIwavvidikwv "followers of Papadopoulos, Patakos, Makarezos, the Junta, and Ioannidis" coined on Hellas-L by Andreas Dakanalis, 2000-11-17 (42 chars)

Reference to the leaders of the 1967–74 dictatorship. Note the English-derived CamelCase: useful for clarity of the compound, particularly as proper names are involved, but not really necessary, and not part of conventional Greek (or English) orthography: the preceding compound of proper names did without it.

ΠαρασκευοΣαββατοΚυριακοΔευτεροΤριτοΤετάρτη ParaskeuoSabbatoKyriakoDeyteroTritoTetarth "Friday–Saturday–Sunday–Monday–Tuesday–Wednesday" coined on Hellas-L by Sotiris Skevoulis, 2006-02-02 (42 chars)

Expansion of Σαββατοκύριακο "Saturday–Sunday = weekend": by enumerating four more days, Skevoulis is saying he has gone to London for a six-day–long weekend. Again, this uses CamelCase.

ποντικοηρακλειωτικοownerιλιτικομπινελικωμάτων pontikohrakleiotikoownerilitikompinelikomatwn "Pontikas, Irakliotis, and Owner-ly flame wars", coined on Hellas-L by Nick Venedict Economides, 1996-12-21 (45 chars)

An example of the fluidity of Greeklish, allowing English and Greek terms to be combined relatively inobtrustively. Pontikas and Irakliotis were list personalities of yore, and Economides is harking back to the flamewars they were involved in.
Greeklish is that fluid, but Greek morphology is not. If I've understood the morphology correctly, Economides can't just drop the English [List]Owner in the compound without some sort of connective suffix: ποντικοηρακλειωτικο-owner-ο-μπινελικωμάτων, with a purely English owner root in the compound, would sound like broken Greek. So owner is nativised through the adjective derivation -ίτικ-ος "-itic", in combination (I think) with the Turkish-derived -λής -li "one characterised by", and an extra /i/ echoing -ίτικ- for good measure, to connect owner to -λ-ίτικος.
I think. Economides clearly had to attach *something* to owner to get it to fit in a Greek compound. I'm surprised he went as far as attaching something as long as the adjectival -ιλίτικο-. Then again, the point is to make a long compound.
No CamelCase here; the two proper name compounds using Camel Case are later than the two that do not, which may suggest increasing influence from English.

αναρχοκομουνιστοσυνδικαλιστοφασιστοαντιδημοκρατική, avarxokomouvistikosuvdikalistikofasistikoavtidnmokratikn, "anarcho-communist-syndicalist-fascist-antidemocratic", coined on Hellas-L by "The Marsist", 1997-01-22 (50 chars)

Parodying the only slightly less longwinded invective from the right against communists, as already seen in the preceding post: αναρχοληστοκομμουνιστοσυμμορίτες, Εαμοβουλγαροκομμουνιστοσυμμορίτης.

The longest word, like, ever

So we've seen several compounds long enough, and composed of heterogeneous enough material, to strain the morphology of Modern Greek: three compounds outright collapsing, and at least one more teetering. It should still be said, most of the compounds have been in good faith linguistically: they haven't had the outright fakery of the winning entries on the Longest Word In English blog, which don't count as words by any notion of wordness. You don't just take all the spaces out of a War-And-Peace–length book and call it a word. Unless you're a prat. Or a conceptual artist, which is the same thing.

That said, the longest word of Greek I now know of, Ancient or Modern, does not fall apart, and obeys the simple rules of root compounding.

Ουγγροτουρκομογγολοϊνδιανοπερσοβουλγαροαλβανοσλαβοϊταλοφραγκο­γερμανοαγγλοϊσπανοαβαροτσιγγανοαραβοαιγυπτιακοσυριακο­ασσυριακοϊρακινο­σουηδορωσσο­σερβοκροατομουσουλμανοβουδιστοϊεχωβαδο­μιθραϊστο­σιντοϊστοϊνδουιστο­έλληνες, Ouggrotourkomoggoloindianopersovoulgaroalvanoslavoitalofragkogermanoaggloispano-avarotsigganoaravoaiguptiakosuriakoassyriakoirakinoevraikosouhdorwssoservokroato-mousoulmanovoudistoiecwvadomi9raistosintoistoindouistoellhnes, "Hungarian, Turkish, Mongol, Indian, Persian, Bulgarian, Slav, Italian, French, German, English, Spanish, Avar, Gypsy, Arab, Egyptian, Syrian, Assyrian, Iraqi, Swedish, Russian, Serb, Croat, Muslim, Buddhist, Jehovah's Witness, Mithraist, Shinto, Hindu Greeks" coined on Hellas-L by Myron Kaisides, 2001-08-18 (204 213 chars)
[EDIT: transcription error: I left out "Assyrian" after "Syrian"]

Coined as an indignant retort to someone questioning the genetic continuity of Greeks: "From what I gather, you believe that we are in fact..."

This word did not break Greek morphology, the way Χανουμισσαδικο­μαυροφορεμενη­προσφυγομάνας or Αριστεροαναρχοκαταολωνσας­γραφωσταπαλιάμου did. But even with its ASCII hyphens, it clearly broke Usenet, as you can see from the randomly interspersed spaces on the Google Groups citation linked.

… Was that it?

Two concluding remarks after all that.

Are you let down by the word that dislodged Aristophanes? Are you thinking, "any random Internet poster can chain together thirty ethnicities and creeds and beat that"? Why yes, so one can. But I already discussed as much in the end of the preceding post. There's no special genius to producing really long compounds—although as the linguistics I've gone through this post shows, it's harder than it looks. What it takes is chutzpah, and perseverance.

The other thing to note is something I also noted in the previous post: while we have a well-defined canon from antiquity, in which the Comic authors' long coinages stand out, now everyone gets to be an author, and there's much more of a sample base for long coinages. And if you look back at the Byzantine instances I gave of long words, where the corpus is already substantially widened, you'll see Hellas-L is not doing that much new. ΠαπαδοπουλοΠατακοΜακαρεζοΧουντοΪωαννιδικών "followers of Papadopoulos, Patakos, Makarezos, the Junta, and Ioannidis" is not that different from Ἡρακλειανοκυροσεργιοπυρροπαυλοπετρῖται "followers of Heracleus, Cyrus, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul and Peter". φεμινιστοβιολογικοτουρκοφασιστομπλεξίματα "feminist, biological, Turkish, Fascist complications" is not that different from ἀκτινοχρυσοφαιδροβροντολαμπροφεγγοφωτοστόλιστος "dressed in golden-shining, thundering and incandescent clothes". Kaisides' melange of 29 30 ethnicities and creeds is not that different from Aristophanes' lopado-temacho-thing of 17 dishes. And "Pelopas@acn.gr" is not more obscure than "Gregory, hegumen of Oxia".

And if that's all left a sour taste in your pursuit of longest words, well, maybe it's given you some linguistic edification as well...

Wieland Wilker kindly sent me a copy of Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams, Christianity and the transformation of the book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea.  This arrived on Friday, and I read through it over the weekend.

The first thing to strike me was the absence of footnotes.  That’s because they had all been banished to the end.  This habit of American publishers is a nuisance to the reader.  It necessitates flipping to and fro the end of the book.  Doing so is weary; consequently it is impossible to glance at the note while reading more than once or two.

The book also places two further difficulties in the way of the critical reader. 

Firstly the numbering of the endnotes is broken up by chapter.  In order to find a note, therefore, I have to memorise both the endnote number (23) and the page on which it appears (15). 

Secondly, once you have found your note, it will not infrequently have a reference in the form “BLOGGS, 1997, p.123″.  Now unless you have memorised the bibliography, this may not take you further forward.  To get an idea of which book is being referred to — a study?  an edition? a paper? — you must then locate the bibliography, hunt through that, then return to the note, reread that now you know what the book is, and then return to your place in the book.

It’s obvious why the book is so arranged; it is very convenient and concise for the author and publisher.  But it is rather a problem for the reader.  I wish that publishers in the US would avoid these habits.

But on to the book.  Grafton’s prose style is a fluid as ever and the book slips down easily.  The view expressed is that we all owe rather more to the innovations in book design required for the Hexapla of Origen and the Chronicle of Eusebius than is generally realised.  The argument is made well, and is one that I have long wished to hear made.  The description of the Hexapla is very clear, and I read it with deep attention, while cursing my inability to glance at the bottom of the page to see the footnotes and assess the data behind the claims.

The authors  also make the valuable point that Eusebius’ innovation of verbatim quotation was itself a useful innovation.  The links that Grafton makes with the activity of renaissance scholars are also useful and interesting.

Another very useful aspect of the book was how G&W related the activity of Origen, supported by the private sponsorship of Ambrose, to the way in which freelance teachers of philosophy operated in the period.  This must be the right approach to take, and such links must be illuminating.  A letter of Origen in which he describes how Ambrose kept Origen’s nose to the grindstone in his enthusiasm was new to me, and most interesting!

The plates are good, although the quality of images supplied by some of the institutions is risibly poor.  The book came out in 2006, at which time many manuscript libraries were waging a die-hard campaign to prevent access to their collections. I think really the page images need to be in colour, and there seems no reason technically not to do this now. 

The content of the book is mainly an essay of interpretation.  To cover the ground, the authors reply mainly on the secondary literature and reflect the consensus of US-based scholarship without too much discussion.  The breadth of the topic necessitates some such approach, indeed.  This is handled well, and there is certainly a need for such books.  The translations that are given of some texts are fresh and readable.  

But the approach also means that sometimes a view is expressed without any backing other than a scanty reference, if that.  Some of the views so skipped over are very controversial, as anything to do with christian origins tends to be.  Do we wish to be told, as fact, that the gnostics were Christians, for instance?  The apostles did not think so, the Christians did not think so, modern Christians do not think so.  This idea seems to me to reflect more the desire of the Selfish Generation to evade the moral teaching of Christianity than anything in the historical record.  But doubtless Dr. G and W just picked this nonsense up from their sources.  In view of the tendency of said Generation to promote daft ideas by incessant reiteration, we must always check whether some agenda is being promoted when we read stuff from US sources. 

Another bit struck me as unintentionally funny.  At one point the book offers as fact the theory that Demetrius, the enemy of Origen, was in fact the first Bishop of Alexandria.  This contradicts the sources, which tell us of an episcopate beginning with St. Mark.  The idea that in fact Mark created some form of presbyterate, or whatever, is of course possible; but our sources do not say so.  But G&W treat this theory as fact, with the odd result that they are forced to describe the statement of Eusebius as “the conjectures of Eusebius”.  That is, the primary source written a century later around 100 miles away is “conjectures”, while a theory contradicted by the data written 2,000 years later by someone in a culture which possesses no more than 1% of the ancient literature is fact.   Really?  That seems quite unlikely to me! 

When nonsense is offered as fact, and fact is described as conjecture, there is always a reason. To debunk the idea of a succession of bishops is a standard of anti-Catholic literature.  The agenda of those who control university appointments peeks through again.

We mustn’t pillory G&W for this sort of thing, tho.  This is what happens to any of us when we don’t stick close enough to the data, and spend too much time with the secondary literature.  Doubtless the authors repeated the stuff in good faith.

Overall verdict?  A useful book.  I imagine it is aimed at undergraduates.  It must raise the reputation of Origen and Eusebius in that audience, and also connect these authors with their late antique milieu.  Both objectives are praiseworthy.

In September, I began a series of posts in which I thought out loud about the survey data from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.  The posts mainly focused on overall ceramic densities across the entire study area.  Over the last two or three weeks, I've begun working on the final analysis of the period data from the survey.  To do this, I take the finds data produced by R. Scott Moore and Mara Horowitz and plot is against the survey maps produced in the field by David Pettegrew and myself.  In most cases, this work has confirmed our long held (and argued) perspectives on the distribution of material at our site, but sometimes, bringing finds data together with our survey maps shows patterns that were not entirely apparent on the ground.

While we have dedicated much of our attention to activities along the Pyla-Koutsopetria coastal plain or in the area of the known Bronze Age site of Kokkinokremos, it may be that some important activity is taking place on the coastal ridge running north of the Koutsopetria plain and the very prominent coast height of Vigla.  The main concentration of activity in what we call Zone 4 sits along its southern edge.  The site in this area first appears during the Iron Age.

 

This image shows the site from the Iron Age to the Hellenistic period.  The blue dots are Iron Age material (1050-475 BC).  The assemblage in the red circle included everything from Classical era terracota figurines to fine wares and kitchen wares and utility wares (amphoras, medium coarse and coarse wares).  The material is highly localized in an area of 25 units or so and does not appear to extend further north. The assemblage from these periods on Vigla (the concentration of material to the southwest of the red circle) is contemporary, but far less robust and diverse.  The activity at this area appears to persist into the later Hellenistic and Early Roman period as well.

In this map, the triangles are Early Roman material, the pentagons are Hellenistic-Early Roman material and the green dots date to the more generic Roman period.  While there is evidence that the activities at the site begin to extend further to the north along the plateau, the main concentration of material is still in the southern most units of along our north to south transect.  Like for earlier periods, the assemblage is reasonably diverse including fine wares, lamp fragments, and a full range of utility wares. 

The most remarkable thing about the site is that it suddenly, within the limits of our chronological resolutions, stops in the Late Roman period.

In this map, the different colored dots are all Late Roman material and, as you can see, there is not much Late Roman activity in the area of the earlier site.  So, the question is what kind of site of sees consistent activity for close to 1200 years and then is suddenly abandoned.  To my mind, there are three options.  First, Late Roman activity does not decline over the study area as a whole.  In fact, the coastal plain becomes the center of unprecedented activity during this period. It may be that the center of settlement shifted from the more protected top of the coastal plateau to the more convenient coastal plain during the relatively peace epoch of Late Antiquity.  Second, the area on the plateau could be a religious sanctuary of some description.  The scholar of Late Antique Christianity in me is drawn to the idea that the site is a long-standing pagan sanctuary abandoned with the growing prominence of Christianity on the island.  Perhaps the very fabric of the sanctuary was quarried for the building of the excavated Early Christian basilica on the plain below.  Finally, it may be that this coastal height served as the local cemetery.  While the diversity of the assemblage at the site hints at habitation or even religious uses (which could include the same material signature as domestic activity), it may be that the main settlement was on the fortified height of Vigla (as our excavations at least hints) and they buried their dead outside the city walls to the north.  The abandonment of burial in this area occurred in Late Antiquity where (I can't resist) Christian conventions gently resisted burial among pagan ancestors.  At the same time, the persistent sanctity of the long-standing burial ground made it impolitic or even impious to use the space for more mundane activities.  As a result, the area was largely abandoned even as activity along the northern part of the plateau continued.

We do not have any definitive evidence for any of these hypothesis, although ground-penetrating radar transects recorded in 2009 might provide us with some hints once they are analyzed.  At the same time, the clear shift in activity away from this site stands out as one of the most definitive changes in the distribution of material across our site.

My readers are probably aware of the OGC's Sensor Web initiatives, but there's another, different vision of a "Web of Things" using the architecture and infrastructure of the actual web we have now (URIs, HTTP, Atom, JSON, HTML, Javascript) that's well articulated in this SXSW presentation by Vlad Trifa and Dominique Guinard (and also in their blog, via This week in REST) and in an associated technical report (PDF).

Today's post is from Morris Proctor, certified and authorized trainer for Logos Bible Software. Morris has trained thousands of Logos users at his two-day Camp Logos training seminars.

The older I get, the more I appreciate the features in Logos 4 that allow me to adjust the display of the program and resources. Here are few reminders so that you can make Logos easy on the eyes:

To adjust the text size of an open panel:

• Choose the panel menu on an open panel
• Move the slide bar at the top of the menu to adjust the text size in that panel

To change the default text size of resources:

• Choose Tools | Program Settings
• In the Fonts section select a different Default Text Size from the drop down list

To change the default font in resources:

• Choose Tools | Program Settings
• In the Fonts section select a different Default Font from the drop down list

To change the background color in resource panels:

• Choose Tools | Program Settings
• In the Accessibility section select a different color from the Resource Panel Background drop down list

To change the default size of the entire program:

• Choose Tools | Program Settings
• In the Accessibility section select a different Program Scaling percentage from the drop down list

Already a Logos Bible Software user?
Visit our custom upgrade discount calculator to see what discounts you qualify for on an upgrade to a brand new Logos 4 base package.

Want to be a Logos Bible Software user?
New customers should visit http://www.logos.com/4 to learn more and see what discounts are currently available.

You should follow us on Twitter here.

A new version of Logos 4 will be available later today as a free download to all Logos 4 users. Version 4.0b adds a plethora of new features and improvements and squashes lots of little bugs. If you have automatic updating enabled (screenshot), which is the default setting, Logos 4 will notify you that updates are ready to be installed.

When you see the balloon tooltip window, right-click on the Logos icon in your system tray and choose to “Install update” (screenshot). If Logos 4 hasn’t downloaded the update by the end of the day and you just can’t wait any longer to get your hands on the latest release, just type Update Now into the command bar (screenshot). This will force Logos 4 to check for any available updates (screenshot) and begin downloading them.

What’s New in 4.0b?

There are hundreds of new features, improvements, and bug fixes in 4.0b, but here are some of the most significant ones:

• Import your notes, highlighting, favorites, and prayer lists from Libronix 3. Tomorrow’s blog post will deal with importing in detail. In the meantime, check out “Importing from LDLS 3” and “Importing Notes from LDLS 3.”
• A new Prayer List document type in the File menu allows you to manage your prayer lists.
• Create and edit your highlighting palettes and styles.
• Export a bibliography from a collection or group of clippings for use in a paper, sermon, etc.
• Customize the Information Panel with the new settings option.
• A Parallel Resources drop-down menu lets you quickly jump to similar resources.
• Resources support navigating by data type levels, highlighting, and search results.
• Choose to “Search (while typing)” for Bible searches (similar to Bible Speed Search in LDLS 3).
• Replace a saved layout with the current layout using the new “Update to current snapshot” context menu option.

To see a complete list, check out the 4.0b article on the Logos wiki.

If you’re like me, you’d rather see it in action than just read about it. Courtesy of user and Logos video creator extraordinaire Mark Barnes comes this nice Logos 4.0b overview video.

Time to Upgrade to Logos 4?

Many of you have been cautiously watching from the sidelines, waiting for the right opportunity to make the switch to Logos 4. As you can see, Logos 4 is now better than ever. It’s had more than four months of extensive testing by thousands of users, and our team of developers has been fixing bugs, listening to user feedback, and adding some really cool new features.

But development isn’t stopping with 4.0b. The next version is already underway, and work on some really cool new features is coming along nicely. We’re in the process of adding these additional features, as well as many others that we can’t tell you about yet.

There’s never been a better time to upgrade to Logos 4. It’s a powerful, stable, cutting-edge piece of software that just keeps getting better all the time. And best of all, these updates come to you free of charge.

What’s Your Favorite New Feature?

After you’ve updated to 4.0b, drop a note in the comments and tell us what your favorite new feature is. I think I’m most excited about importing and the parallel resources menu. What’s your favorite?

What about Logos 4 for Mac?

The Mac version of Logos 4 continues to make good progress with a new build coming out about every week or two. The latest release, Alpha 15, is looking good. If you’re ready to help up test it, you can either upgrade your base package or download core engine and head on over to the Logos 4 for Mac forum.

You should follow us on Twitter here.

When I posted about the longest words of Greek, I didn't include Modern Greek, because I don't have ready access to the resources that would give me an answer. A blessing on his house (not for the first time): Nikos Sarantakos put up a post asking for suggestions from his readers. Given how arbitrary word compounding is, and how fragile the authority for words is, Nikos asked for contributions in three classes:

1. Words in dictionaries
2. Words found in texts, or derived from a word in texts
3. Made up words

Sarantakos is leaving out chemical and numerical words, "which are no fun" (που δεν έχουν γούστο).

I've promised to reproduce the results here "for the Franks" :-) , and the thread has now died down enough that I will. Remember, the longest words of pre-Modern Greek are Aristophanes' monsterpiece, 171 letters long, and then, leaving out numericals, the thunderclap word from the Magical papyri, κεραυνομεγακλονοζηνπερατοκοσμολαμπροβελοπλουτοδότα, at 50 letters. I've also cast around a couple of other online threads, but not found anything longer. To keep things manageable, I'm cutting off at 25 letters for made up words.

I do of course know that this proves little, because compounding is productive in Greek, and many other languages. In fact the WordReference.com thread on longest words discussed discounting compounds from the listing, and with good reason. I'll say more on that in a followup post, after the letdown of the actual longest word found online.

It is still significant that Greek compounds more productively in general than English say, and that words 15 letters long are not that uncommon. But Greek is not in the running with actual agglutinative languages like Inuit or Turkish; and impressionalistically, German still beats Greek for commonplace usage of very long words.

1. In a dictionary

This wasn't as rich a harvest as we expected: as I noted in comments previously, Modern Greek lexicography shy away from the literary hapax (one-off word).

• Nikos Sarantakos himself suggested κοινωνιογλωσσολογικούς (22 chars), accusative plural of κοινωνιογλωσσολογικός "sociolinguistic".
  
• The longest I could find in the ispell spelling dictionary is ηλεκτροεγκεφαλογραφήματος "of an electroencephalogram" (24 chars—better known in English as EEG)
  
• δεσοξυριβοζονουκλεϊνικό "deoxyribonucleic: DNA" (24 chars, P..Konidiaris)
  
• αλληλοεξουδετερωνόμασταν "we were neutralising each other" (25 chars, P..Konidiaris and Diver of Sinks). That verb isn't in the dictionaries, as Sarantakos notes, though αλληλοεξυπηρετούμαι "we are serviceable to each other" is in Triantafyllidis, and αλληλοσυμπληρώνομαι "complete each other" in Babiniotis, so αλληλοεξυπηρετόντουσαν "they were serviceable ...", αλληλοσυμπληρωνόντουσαν "they were completing ..." (22 chars)
  
• αρεταμαρτωλιδεοπαθοφθέγματος "of an utterance of the passion of the idea of virtue and sin (?)" (28 chars, TAK, from Anastasiadi-Symeonidi's reverse dictionary) No idea why it's in there, and noone's quite sure what it's even supposed to mean.

I'm suspicious of that last word, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was made up. The fact that dictionaries aren't as prepared to go there makes sense, given that Modern Greek dictionaries are all about words in actual use. Greek thinks a six-syllable word is relatively short, as we'll see further down; but ten syllables is about the limit of practicality.

Kriaras' dictionary of Early Modern Greek is more sympathetic to hapaxes, being a dictionary of a literary canon. It has three words of 26–28 letters, which I didn't include in the previous post, because they just missed the 29-letter barrier I set there:

• εκατοστοτεσσαρακοστοτέταρτον "1/144" (28 chars: the 14th century Rechenbuch [Arithmetic textbook] published by K. Vogel)
  
• ανακουρκουδοκλανομούστακος "squatting fart moustached" (26 chars: from the Mass of the Beardless Man. Of course.)
  
• εντεροκαρδιοσυκωτοφλέγμονα "entrails, heart, liver, and lungs" (26 chars: from the Mass of the Beardless Man. Of course bis.)

2. Made up

There were the inevitable joke non-words here, such as:

• "The longest word of Greek is whatever follows, on TV panel interviews, the phrase 'I'll just say one more word'. Said word usually lasts three to five minutes." (lots of chars, Alfred E. Newman)
  
• Τελειώνωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωω "I'm cumming!" (50 chars, Kostas)
  
• "With the help of some ακετυλοσαλικυλικού (acetylosalicylic) acid—an aspirin, get it?—I hope to manage to read through your posts. … I think I win: the longest word in the smallest package!!!" (18 chars, Misirlou)

More wordlike coinages, though not necessarily less jocular:

• οικονομικοπολιτικοκοινωνικούς "economical/political/social" (29 chars, P..Konidaris)
  
• χαζοκουτομουνογαμόσταυρος "dumb stupid cunt fuck Cross = particularly stupid individual" (25 chars, Alfred E. Newman)
  
• χαζοκουτομουνογαμοσταυρίζουμε "we say 'dumb stupid cunt fuck Cross'" (29 chars, Alfred E. Newman)
  
• ψυχοσεξανωμαλοπορνοδιαστροφικός "psycho-sexual perverted debauched deviant" (30 chars, Nikiplos)
  
• τσαχπινομπιρμπιλογαργαλογκαβλιαροσιγανοπαπαδιά "coquettish, lively-eyed, tickling, sexy quiet–priest's-daughter [cf. stereotype of librarian]", (46 chars, Epicharmus, gradually built up over a series of comments between him and Voulagx)
  
• ιστορικοκοινωνικοοικονομικοπεριβαλλοντολογικός "historical/sociological/economical/environmental" (46 chars, Thrax Vlax and Kornilios)
  
• Αυστρογερμανοελβετογαλλοϊταλομονεγασκικός "Austrian, German, Swiss, French, Italian, Monegasque" (41 chars, Kornilios)
  
• Ελληνοαποτηνπρωηνγιουγκοσλαβικηδημοκρατιατηςμακεδονιασ­όπουλο "offspring of a Greek and a Former-Yugoslav-Republic-of-Macedonia-n" (58 chars, Lefteris Dikeos and Nikos Sarantakos)

The final coinage makes its point—that the name of FYROM acceptable to Greece makes for awkward morphology; but it's so awkward as to be disqualified as a real word: it is chock full of internal inflections, and accusative and genitive articles have no business inside a word.

The other coinages fit into Greek morphology just fine, and the economico-politico- coinages parody extant journalistic cliches.

3. In texts

These lists won't be exhaustive of course, but I think they're indicative.

• σκουληκομερμηγκότρυπες "worm- and ant-holes = convolutions" (23 chars, Nikos Sarantakos) (6 hits on Google excluding Sarantakos' and this)
  
• υποδηματοεπιδιορθωτήριον "shoe repair shop" (24 chars, Nikos Sarantakos, recorded by linguist Manolis Triantafyllidis in Tripoli)
  
• οικονομικοπεριβαλλοντικούς "economical/environmental" (26 chars, Nikos Sarantakos) (no Google hits, but I'll take his word for it)
  
• αναρχοληστοκομμουνιστοσυμμορίτες "anarchist, brigand, communist gang members" (32 chars, Epicharmus, frequent official condemnation of the Communists during the Greek Civil war) (1 google hit)
  
• Εαμοβουλγαροκομμουνιστοσυμμορίτης "National-Liberation-Front (EAM) Bulgarian Communist gang member" (33 chars, Vermeer, ditto) (2 google hits in the plural)
  
• πανεξυπνοτετραπερατοσοφομεγαλοφυΐα "all-smart ingenious wise genius" (34 chars, Dokiskaki: "I'm sure I remember it from a comic book, but which one? Mickey Mouse? Asterix? Iznogoud?" Sarantakos put this under "made up words", but the hint of a citation makes me move it here)
  
• αλκοολικοσαταναρχαιολογικοψευτομεγαλοφυές "alcoholic satanic archaeological pseudo-ingenious" (41 chars, SOphia; translation of the book title Der satanarchäolügenialkohöllische Wunschpunsch. Yes, it's German.)
  
• υπηρετομαγεροσιδεροζυμωσφουγκαροκαμαριεροκηπουροαμαξο­γραμματο­γλωσσομαθής "servant, cook, ironing, baking, cleaning, chambermaid, gardener, carriage driving, secretary and linguist" (72 chars, Paliouras; a word remembered from a Karagiozis play, probably second grade primary school, 1982)

How serious are these words? Less so the longer you get of course. Linguistic polemic is one of the reasons they can get so long: Learnèd Greek liked long compounds, and people mocking them would make them exaggeratedly longer still:

• ελαδιοξιδιοαλατολαχανοκαρύκευμα "oil–vinegar–salt–lettuce–concoction", i.e. Greek salad (31 chars, TAK: Iakovos Rizos Neroulos, Korakistika [PDF], p. 42)
  
• εδωδιμολεσχοποικιλοβρωματοπωλείον "hall of edibles and shop selling various foodstuffs" (33 chars, TAK: Dimitrios Vyzantios, Babylonia [PDF])
  
• Τηλε-τηλεοπτικοδιαυλοεπιλογή or τηλετηλοψιοδιαυλοεπιλογή "remote televisual channel choice = TV remote control" (27, 24 chars, Diver of Sinks: blog post by Yannis Harris)

Neroulos' and Vyzantios' plays are early 19th century parodies of Greek sociolinguistics, and they target the long (and serious-minded) compounds of learnèd Greek in particular: the learnèd hero chokes on pronouncing "oil–vinegar–salt–lettuce–concoction", and is cured when he is forced to say the rather more vernacular λαχανοσαλάτα "lettuce salad". Though 6 syllables is a lot less than 17, λαχανοσαλάτα is still a leviathan by many languages' norms, it should be said. TAK reports there are many other such coinages in the plays; you can discover them at your leisure.

In a similar vein, Yannis Haris is satirising Vyron Polydoras learnèd construction of διαυλοεπιλογή "channel selection" for the common less Hellenic τηλεκοντρόλ "remote control". By prefixing τηλε- "remote" and τηλεοπτικο- "televisual", and then Atticising τηλεοπτικο- to τηλοψιο-, Haris is upping Polydoras' ante.

Another source of long words is tongue-twisters: yes, these are hardly intended for productive communication—and neither are the linguistic parodies above. But to be learnable, they do at least have to make sense semantically as words.

• μολυβοκοντυλοπελεκητούς "carved with a lead stylus" (24 chars, Nikos Sarantakos); Cypriot variant, μολυβοσι(δ)εροκαντζελλοπελετζημένη "carved with a lead and iron railing" (31 chars, Dimitris)
  
• ποτηροκαλαθοσκαρβελοσωμαρογαϊδουρολειβαδοποταμίσουμε "let's [put] the glass on the basket on the saddle post on the saddle on the donkey on the meadow on the river" (52 chars, Immortalité)

So where are we? Ten syllables seems to be the limit of a practical long word, which is why dictionaries peter out at around 20 letters length. The Greek constitution has 22,939 words, and the following word length frequencies:

1:	1416	11:	1251
2:	2211	12:	639
3:	5255	13:	239
4:	1784	14:	103
5:	1844	15:	60
6:	1678	16:	27
7:	1723	17:	4
8:	1618	18:	0
9:	1546	19:	1
10:	1538	20:	2

Once we go above that limit, words aren't practical any more, and the point of using them is almost always that they're overlong. They're satires of long (but not *that* long) learnèd coinages, or tongue-twisters, or literary flourishes—compounds so long just because the author can. The annoyance with the 72 letters of the longest word of all so far, the Karagiozis play's υπηρετο­μαγερο­σιδερο­ζυμω­σφουγκαρο­καμαριερο­κηπουρο­αμαξο­γραμματο­γλωσσομαθής, is that there's no incandescent literary genius to it. We'll be even more disappointed next post, when I divulge an online coinage even longer than Aristophanes'.

But Aristophanes' genius has blinded us to what long coinages are about. Aristophanes was among the first to coin such a monster, presumably; and such coinages are artifices of the written word, they're hard to sustain in an oral medium. (Not impossible, as the tongue-twisters show.) But now that everyone is an author, everyone can coin that kind of word, should the need come up.

Aristophanes' genius with his lopado-temacho-thing wasn't that he was able to compound a 171-letter long word; that's the Greek language making it possible. His genius was that he had the chutzpah to do it. And chutzpah is not the exclusive preserve of canonical literary authors.

As England prepares for the 2012 Olympics, a group of workers who were excavating a road near Weymouth uncovered a mass grave that contained the skeletons of 51 individuals. Examination of the skeletons show that the bodies had been decapitated, and radiocarbon dating dates the remains to between 890 and 1030 AD. Isotope analysis of the teeth indicates that the men were from Sweden and Norway. It will be interesting to see what future analysis of the bones uncovers.

RSM

In October of last year, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) organized a forum entitled “An Age of Discovery: Distinctive Collections in the Digital Age.” The proceedings are online. You can listen to the presentations or read the papers. A few speakers included actual physical artifacts in their collections, e.g., Kenneth Hamma with “Integrating Special Collections into the Enterprise: A Case Study of the Yale Center for British Art” (pdf). I had the pleasure of hearing him present at the “UCLA/Getty Storage Symposium. Preservation and Access to Archaeological Materials” in 2008 when he still worked for the Getty Trust (see my post in IW&A).

“As part of a Princeton archaeological expedition to Cyprus that started in 1983 I lead a small team cataloging the pottery finds – not every fragment, just those things that were sufficiently interesting or intact to qualify. But, in fact, after a few short summer seasons the pottery stores looked more like this. Wouldn’t it be nice, … to have access to related finds as well as unpublished field notes at other excavations, to collections of pottery and related works at museums and at other special collections tucked away here and there around the world. Twenty-five years later, I can say with confidence that it is easier imagined than done. … this experience helped define the goal of access to collections for me as something more comprehensive than simply access to what my undergraduate mentor used to refer to as the purple passages.  Any solutions we imagine for integrating special collections into the enterprise have to be aware that the enterprise has other interests and other collections – not all as difficult as this – but collections nevertheless that have to be part of a solution before it is meaningful for a simple archaeologist like myself.”

“There are four parts to this [Yale] project, … Technology, Data, People, and Policy.” “We discussed the incentives to explore digital asset management as a shared venture initially with the Yale University Art Gallery and with the Peabody Museum, …” “… the Center for British Art did not want to have or develop a large information technology burden …” “Let’s turn to Data. Strawberry Hill is an exhibition on the collection of Horace Walpole …” “Out of the work on the Strawberry Hill exhibition came an ideal and very extensive addition to subject indexing from the Walpole Library for all collections in the Center for British art.” “… the Walpole’s subject index … was created by Mrs. Lewis herself and not surprisingly fits hand-in-glove the knowledge domain of British art and culture.  Where else could one imagine a well-used entry like: ‘hedgehogs comma magicians’?”

“It is also useful to consider standing the usual management model on its head and then get out of the way.  The Digital Coffee group at Yale is representative of the campus.  It is self-organizing.  It reports to and is responsible to its membership.  And among its members, Digital Coffee knows everything there is to know about the production, management and dissemination of visual surrogates. They don’t need to be told what to do, just given a seat at the table.” Is it just me or did this group plagiarize the old Lucent logo? I sure always thought that one looked like a coffee stain… Anyway, Alcatel-Lucent is no longer using it so the Yale caffeine addicts probably don’t have to worry about a cease-and-desist letter…

In the post on the longest words of Greek, I mentioned the fact that Sanskrit, as reported in the Guinness Book of Records, has produced a word over twice as long as Aristophanes' monsterpiece.

If any non-agglutinative language was going to best Greek in that regard, it would of course be Sanskrit: a language of comparable pedantry, and of much more prodigious compounding. Remember how Sir William Jones discovered it: "The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either". Copious alright; because of its compounding, the 1880s Monier dictionary of Sanskrit (updated version online) has 180,000 lemmata, as opposed to LSJ's ca. 120,000.

Sanskrit's very own monsterpiece comes in the Varadambika Parinaya by Tirumalamba. This blog post has cost me 30 bucks, but I have bought the edition of the poem:

• Suryakanta. 1970. Varadāmbikā Pariṇaya Campū of Tirumalāmbā. Volume 79 of Chowkhamba Sanskrit studies. Varanasi: Caukhambā Saṃskṛta Sīrīj Āphis.

Tirumalamba is one of the few women writers in Sanskrit, writing in the early 16th century; the work is a Campu, a mixture of prose and verse, on the marriage of her contemporary king Achyuta Deva Raya. On the literary merits of Tirumalamba's work, I'm not competent to speak, so I won't; if anyone from Karnataka finds this and wants to chime in, they're welcome to. If you do go googling for the text, btw, look for Tirumalamba, and not Varadambika Parinaya: there are lots of little annoying spelling variations for the book title.

Our word comes in pp. 18–19, in the chapter on the Tuṇḍīra country (aka Thondaimandalam in Tamil Nadu, of which the capital is Kanchi). The chapter reads:

On the way, he passed through the Tuṇḍīra country.

The chapter takes up 130 lines of English translation.

The reason it takes up 130 lines is, "the Tuṇḍīra country" is preceded by 25 accusative adjectives, and followed by three more.

Those adjectives, in turn, take up several lines, and correspond to one or two sentences each in English. One or two LONG sentences.

The monsterpiece, which is only first among equals, is adjective #12. It's full of hyphens, so to my disappointment, I'm not going to destroy all the browsers in the world after all. I have taught myself enough Devanagari to type the word in, along with its translation and commentary.

I'm attaching a gif just in case, but after some initial confusion I think I did OK. The bad typography of the original was in fact helpful: the little gaps left between the vowels and consonants meant I could actually eyeball where the vowels were. The Unicode tables are missing one ligature of the edition (ङ्ग, which should look like a dotted ड्ग).

So, the Tuṇḍīra country is, among other things:



निरन्तरान्धकारिता-दिगन्तर-कन्दलदमन्द-सुधारस-बिन्दु-सान्द्रतर-घनाघन-वृन्द-सन्देहकर-रयन्दमान-मकरन्द-बिन्दु-बन्धुरतर-माकन्द-तरु-फुल-तल्प-फल्प-मृदुल-सिकता-जाल-जटिल-मूल-तल-मरुत्रक-मिलदलघु-लघु-लय-कलित-रमणोय-पानोय-शालिका-बालिका-करार-विन्द-गलन्तिका-गलदेला-लवङ्ग-पाटल-घनसार-करुतूरिकातिसौरथ-मेदुर-लघुतर-मधुर-शोतलतर-सलिलधारा-निराकरिष्णु-तदोय-विमल-विलोचन-मयू-रव-रेरवापसारित-पिपासायास-पथिक-लोकान्

nirantarāndhakāritā-digantara-kandaladamanda-sudhārasa-bindu-sāndratara-ghanāghana-vr̥nda-sandehakara-rayandamāna-makaranda-bindu-bandhuratara-mākanda-taru-phula-talpa-phalpa-mr̥dula-sikatā-jāla-jaṭila-mūla-tala-marutraka-miladalaghu-laghu-laya-kalita-ramaṇoya-pānoya-śālikā-bālikā-karāra-vinda-galantikā-galadelā-lavaṅga-pāṭala-ghanasāra-karutūrikātisauratha-medura-laghutara-madhura-śotalatara-saliladhārā-nirākariṣṇu-tadoya-vimala-vilocana-mayū-rava-reravāpasārita-pipāsāyāsa-pathika-lokān

[EDIT: restored the inherent /a/ before hyphens in the transliteration, per shreevatsa's comment. Check out his post on translating Sanskrit verse—and not just because it links here. :) ]

"It was, as if celebrating 134 the (important and) great festival of the marriage of the most suitable couple of the Goddess or Fortune and the Country, encouraged by the lovely lady in the form of the orange creeper, and the house-holder, the large garden, attractive with heaps of ripe yellow fruits, charming like numerous pellets of turmeric paste 135, set off in the silver cups of the buds of (her) bright flowers. It was admirable on account of thousands of groves of the coco-nut trees, that were richly laden with fruits and were, as if the hand of the earth, raised up to bestow the desired object on Indra's heaven, (which was) longing for her (of the Tuṇḍīra country) enviable 136 fortune. In it the beauty of the parting of the hair, filled with red-lead 137, of the young woman in the form of the earth was manifested 138 by the lovely path made 139 by the pollen to be seen in between the tall and densely grown trees that marked the lower limit of the range 140 of the rippling 141 rays of the sun. In it, the distress, caused by thirst, to travellers was alleviated by clusters of rays of the bright eyes of the girls 142; the rays that were shaming the currents of light, sweet 143 and cold water charged with the strong fragrance of cardamom, clove, saffron 144, camphor and musk and flowing out of the pitchers 145 (held in) the lotus-like hands of maidens (seated in) the beautiful water-sheds, made of the thick roots of Andropogon muricatus 146 mixed with marjoram, (and built near) the foot, covered with heaps of couch-like soft sand, of the clusters of newly sprouting 147 mango trees, which constantly darkened the intermediate space of the quarters, and which looked all the more charming on account of the trickling drops of the floral juice, which thus caused the delusion of a row of thick rainy clouds, densely filled with abundant nectar."

134. कन्दलत् —Lit. 'was producing'. 135. Lit. 'morsals of turmeric mud'. 136. Lit. 'longing' 'generating'. 137. This practice still exists in India. It is a sign of सुहाग (Skt. सौथाग्य), i.e. the husband being alive (or auspicious state of wifehood). 138. Lit. 'reminded'. 139. Lit. 'indicated'. 140. The trees were growing so very densely that the sun-beams could not penetrate through their branches. It seemed, as if the trees were the lower boundary of the field of activity of the rays of the sun. 141. Read वोचिक instead of विचिक. 142. Lit. 'their'; in the Skt. passage the noun बालिका has already occurred. 143. Lec. var. मधु-रस-शोतल for मधुर-शोतल. 144. पाटल also means the trumpet flower, but as a rule, saffron is the companion of camphor and musk in Sanskrit literature. 145. Galantikā means a pitcher and is so called because water flows out of it (गलत्यम्थोऽरुयाः गलन्तिका). 146. लवुलय —roots of Andropogon muricatus, commonly known as khas. Huts made of the sweet scented roots of Andropogon muricatus (khas ki taṭṭis) are a regular luxury in the summer season throughout India. 147. कन्दलत् in the fourth line goes with माकन्द-तरु in line 6. This custom of spreading cloth in front for a distinguished personage to treads upon still exists in India and is practiced on both formal and informal occasions. But now-a-days the colour of this cloth is not white but red. It starts from the entrance gate of a hall or a canopy and leads right up to the dais. पाकारि Lit. 'the enemy of Pāka', i.e. Indra.

GCI Bulletin (Getty Conservation Institute)

The GCI Bulletin, a free bimonthly e-bulletin, provides timely information to professional colleagues around the world on the activities of the Getty Conservation Institute.

See the latest issue.

Browse past issues:

February 2010
December 2009
October 2009
August 2009
June 2009
April 2009
February 2009
December 2008
October 2008

GCI Newsletter (Getty Conservation Institute)

See the full List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies.

Free PDF Publications

		Afshar, Mahasti, ed. Landmarks of a New Generation: User's Manual. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1997. (96pp., 5.2MB) [Getty Conservation Institute (Los Angeles, California, United States) / historic preservation / manuals (instructional materials) / photodocumentation / teaching]

		Agnew, Neville, ed. Conservation of Ancient Sites on the Silk Road: Proceedings of an International Conference on the Conservation of Grotto Sites. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1997. Downloadable in eight separate sections. [China (Dunhuang) / conferences / grottoes / mural paintings / sculpture]

" border="0" height="1" vspace="4" width="1">		Agnew, Neville, and Martha Demas, eds. Principles for the Conservation of Heritage Sites in China: English language translation, with Chinese text, of the document issued by China ICOMOS. 2nd Printing with revision. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2004. Downloadable in two parts:
		PART I, Chinese-language text (49pp., 7.6MB)
		PART II, English-language text (51pp., 6MB) [conservation policy / historic sites / site management / site protection]

		Avrami, Erica, Kathleen Dardes, Marta de la Torre, Samuel Y. Harris, Michael Henry, and Wendy Claire Jessup, contributors. "The Conservation Assessment: A Proposed Model for Evaluating Museum Environmental Management Needs." 1999. (39pp., 104KB) [environmental monitoring / museology / collections management / risk assessment / security]
		Avrami, Erica, Kathleen Dardes, Marta de la Torre, Samuel Y. Harris, Michael Henry, and Wendy Claire Jessup, contributors. "Evaluación Para la Conservación: Modelo Propuesto Para Evaluar las Necesidades de Control del Entorno Museístico." 1999. (Spanish version of the above) (40pp., 150KB) [environmental monitoring / museology / collections management / risk assessment / security]
		Avrami, Erica, Hubert Guillaud, and Mary Hardy, eds. Terra Literature Review: An Overview of Earthen Architecture Conservation. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2008. (174 pp., 1.7MB) [archaeological sites / building materials / documentation (function) / earthen architecture / structural analysis]
		Avrami, Erica, Randall Mason, and Marta de la Torre. Values and Heritage Conservation: Research Report. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2000. (100pp., 771KB) [cultural property / historic preservation / evaluation]
		Cass, Glen R., James R. Druzik, Daniel Grosjean, William W. Nazaroff, Paul M. Whitmore, and Cynthia L. Whittman. Protection of Works of Art From Atmospheric Ozone. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1989. (97pp., 904 K) [fading / air pollution / pigment / watercolor]
		Castellanos, Carolina, and Françoise Descamps. Archaeological Sites in the Maya Area: A Conservation Challenge. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2009. Abstracts of presentations and summary of discussions from panel presented at the XXII Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas in Guatemala City. (32pp., 1.1MB). [archaeological sites / decision making / Guatemala / heritage management / landscape protection / Maya / symposia / site management / site presentation / site protection]
		Castellanos, Carolina, and Françoise Descamps. Conservation Management Planning: Putting Theory into Practice. The Case of Joya de Cerén, El Salvador. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2009. Downloadable in two separate sections. [archaeological sites / collaborating / El Salvador (Joya de Cerén) / documentation (function) / heritage management / Maya / planning / significance / site management / stakeholders / values]
		Castellanos, Carolina, and Françoise Descamps. Sitios Arqueológicos en el Área Maya: Un Reto para la Conservación. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2009. Full-length presentations in their original Spanish-language form and summary of discussions from panel presented at the XXII Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas in Guatemala City. (92pp., 6.1MB). [archaeological sites / decision making / Guatemala / heritage management / landscape protection / Maya / symposia / site management / site presentation / site protection]
		Castellanos, Carolina, Françoise Descamps, and María Isaura Aráuz. Executive Summary for the Management Plan of Joya de Cerén, El Salvador. Los Angeles: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y el Arte de El Salvador, and the Getty Conservation Institute, 2007. (25pp., 1.4MB) [site management / archaeological sites / El Salvador]
		Castellanos, Carolina, Françoise Descamps, and María Isaura Aráuz. Résume Exécutif du Plan de Gestion de Joya de Cerén, Le Salvador. Los Angeles: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y el Arte de El Salvador, and the Getty Conservation Institute, 2007. (French version of the above) (25pp., 1.4MB) [site management / archaeological sites / El Salvador]
		Castellanos, Carolina, Françoise Descamps, and María Isaura Aráuz. Resumen Ejecutivo del Plan de Manejo Joya de Cerén, El Salvador. Los Angeles: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y el Arte de El Salvador, and the Getty Conservation Institute, 2002. (Spanish version of the above) (25pp., 1.4MB) [site management / archaeological sites / El Salvador]
		Castellanos, Carolina, Françoise Descamps, and María Isaura Aráuz, eds. Management Plan for Joya de Cerén. Los Angeles: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y el Arte de El Salvador, and the Getty Conservation Institute, 2002. This plan, in Spanish only, has introductions in English and French and can be downloaded in PDF format in 7 separate sections. [site management / archaeological sites / El Salvador]
		Cather, Sharon, ed. The Conservation of Wall Paintings: Proceedings of a Symposium Organized by the Courtauld Institute of Art and The Getty Conservation Institute. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1991. (181 pp., 6.3 MB) [mural paintings / environmental monitoring / frescoes / soluble salt / treatment / cleaning / consolidation]
		Corzo, Miguel Angel, ed. The Future of Asia's Past: Preservation of the Architectural Heritage of Asia. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1995. (75pp., 854KB) [historic sites / archaeological sites / cultural tourism / conservation policy / conferences]
		Corzo, Miguel Angel, and Mahasti Afshar, eds. Art and Eternity: The Nefertari Wall Paintings Conservation Project, 1986-1992. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1993. Downloadable in three separate sections. [Egypt (Valley of the Queens) / Getty Conservation Institute (Los Angeles, United States) / Tomb of Nefertari (Valley of the Queens, Egypt) / wall paintings]
		Dardes, Kathleen, and Andrea Rothe, eds. The Structural Conservation of Panel Paintings: Proceedings of a Symposium at the J. Paul Getty Museum, April 1995. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1998. Downloadable in four separate sections. A bound copy is available for purchase at the Getty Bookstore [panel paintings / wood / reinforcement / previous interventions / relative humidity / primary sources / preventive conservation]
		Demas, Martha, compiler. "GCI Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites Bibliography." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2003. (125 pp., 800KB)
		Derrick, Michele R., Dusan Stulik, and James M. Landry. Infrared Spectroscopy in Conservation Science. Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 1999. (252 pp., 6MB) A bound copy is available for purchase at the Getty Bookstore [archaeological objects / Dead Sea Scrolls / infrared spectroscopy / paintings / sculpture]
		Dorge, Valerie, and F. Carey Howlett, eds. Painted Wood: History and Conservation. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1998. Downloadable in six separate sections. [furniture / painting techniques / pigment / polychrome / sculpture / wood]
		Dorge, Valerie, and Sharon L. Jones, compilers. Building an Emergency Plan: A Guide for Museums and Other Cultural Institutions. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1999. (281pp., 3.4MB) [disaster planning / manuals] Bound copies in Spanish and French are also available for purchase at the Getty Bookstore.
		Drescher, Timothy W. "Priorities in Conserving Community Murals." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. Paper presented at the Getty symposium "Mural Painting and Conservation in the Americas," Los Angeles, CA, May 16-17, 2003. (14pp., 347KB) [mural paintings / conservation policy / stakeholders / artist's intent / funding / public art]
		Eppich, Rand, and Amel Chabbi, eds. Recording, Documentation, and Information Management for the Conservation of Heritage Places: Illustrated Examples. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2007. Downloadable in seven separate sections. [condition assessment / documentation (function) / historic buildings / monitoring / recording]
		Faulk, Wilbur, and Laurie Sowd."Collections Theft Response Procedures." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. Guidelines from The J. Paul Getty Trust and The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, 2001. (17pp., 246KB) [preventive conservation / collections management / manuals / security / museums / archives]
		Feller, R. L., and M. Wilt. Evaluation of Cellulose Ethers for Conservation. The J. Paul Getty Trust, 1990. (165pp., 2.1 MB) [polymerization / stability]
		Feller, Robert L. Accelerated Aging: Photochemical and Thermal Aspects. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1994. (292pp., 1.5MB) [photochemistry / thermal analysis]
		Florian, Mary-Lou E., Dale Paul Kronkright, and Ruth E. Norton, The Conservation of Artifacts Made from Plant Materials.bound copy is available for purchase at the Getty Bookstore. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1990. (352pp., 7.2MB) A [anatomy / climate / deterioration / ethnographic objects / fabrication / Getty Conservation Institute (Los Angeles, United States) / identification / plant materials / storage]
		Garfinkle, Ann. "The Legal and Ethical Consideration of Mural Conservation: Issues and Debates." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. Paper presented at the Getty symposium "Mural Painting and Conservation in the Americas," Los Angeles, CA, May 16-17, 2003. (22pp., 141KB). [conservation policy / public art / ethics (concept) / artists' rights / owner-contractor agreements / legislation]
		The Getty Conservation Institute."GCI Lime Mortars and Plasters Bibliography: Sorted by Author." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2003. (100 pp., 939KB)
		The Getty Conservation Institute. "GCI Lime Mortars and Plasters Bibliography: Sorted by General Category." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2003. (195 pp., 1.6MB)
		The Getty Conservation Institute. "GCI Project Terra Bibliography: Sorted by Author." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2002. (63 pp., 380KB)
		The Getty Conservation Institute. "GCI Project Terra Bibliography: Sorted by General Category." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2002. (106 pp., 603KB)
		The Getty Conservation Institute. Incentives for the Preservation and Rehabilitation of Historic Homes in the City of Los Angeles. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2004. (70pp., 3.5 MB) [USA / California / historic preservation / historic buildings / economics]
		The Getty Conservation Institute and the American Institute for Conservation. "Professional Development for Conservators in the United States: Report of the Directors' Retreat for the Advancement of Conservation Education." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. Report of meeting held in Warrenton, VA, October 10-12, 2002. (21pp., 316KB) [education / training / USA]
		The Getty Conservation Institute and Institut National du Patrimoine, Tunisia. "Formation de techniciens à l'entretien des mosaïques in situ." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2008. (133pp., 7.1MB)
		The Getty Conservation Institute and Institut National du Patrimoine, Tunisia. "Technician Training for the Maintenance of In Situ Mosaics." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2008. (133pp., 7.6MB) (English version of the above)
		The Getty Conservation Institute and Institut National du Patrimoine, Tunisia. "Technician Training for the Maintenance of In Situ Mosaics." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2008. (132pp., 7MB) (Arabic version of the above)
		The Getty Conservation Institute and Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia. The Hieroglyphic Stairway of Copán, Honduras: Study Results and Conservation Proposals. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute and Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia, 2006. Downloadable in seven separate sections. [archaeological sites / biodeterioration / building stone / Honduras (Copán) / rhyolite / tuff / weathering]
		The Getty Conservation Institute and Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia. La Escalinata Jeroglífica de Copán, Honduras: Resultados de los Estudios y Propuestas de Conservación. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute and Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia, 2006. (Spanish version of the above) (212pp., 5.2MB) [archaeological sites / biodeterioration / building stone / Honduras (Copán) / rhyolite / tuff / weathering]
		The Getty Conservation Institute and the Israel Antiquities Authority. "Illustrated Glossary: Mosaics In Situ Project." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2003. (17pp., 1.8 MB)
		The Getty Conservation Institute and Junta de Andalucía, Consejería de Cultura, eds. Methodology for the Conservation of Polychromed Wooden Altarpieces. Los Angeles: Junta de Andalucía, Consejería de Cultura and the J. Paul Getty Trust, 2006. (241pp., 7.2MB) [wood / polychrome / retablos]
		The Getty Conservation Institute and Junta de Andalucía, Consejería de Cultura, eds. Methodología para la Conservación de Retablos de Madera Policromada. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2006. (Spanish version of the above) (242pp., 7.6MB) [wood / polychrome / retablos]
		The Getty Conservation Institute and Junta de Andalucía, Consejería de Cultura, eds. "Methodology for the Conservation of Polychromed Wooden Altarpieces: Bibliography/Methodología para la Conservación de Retablos de Madera Policromada: Corpus Bibliográfico." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2006. (With introductions in Spanish and English.) (51pp., 216KB) [wood / polychrome / retablos]
		The Getty Conservation Institute and Junta Andalucía Conserjería de Cultura, eds. Workshop on Methodology for the Conservation of Polychromed Wooden Altarpieces: Document on Retablos 2002. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2004. (17 pp., 502KB) [wood / polychrome / retablos]
		The Getty Conservation Institute and Junta Andalucía Conserjería de Cultura, eds. Taller sobre Metodología para la Conservación de Retablos de Madera Policromada: El Documento de Retablos 2002. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2004. (Spanish version of the above) (17 pp., 508KB) [wood / polychrome / retablos]
		The Getty Conservation Institute and Junta Andalucía Conserjería de Cultura, eds. Journées d'Étude sur la Méthodologie pour la Conservation des Retables en Bois Polychromes: Document des Retables 2002. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2004. (French version of the above) (17 pp., 513KB) [wood / polychrome / retablos]
		Hardy, Mary, Claudia Cancino, and Gail Ostergren, eds. Proceedings of the Getty Seismic Adobe Project 2006 Colloquium. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2009. Downloadable in 23 sections or as one PDF.
		Golden, Mark. "Mural Paints: Current and Future Formulations." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. Paper presented at the Getty symposium "Mural Painting and Conservation in the Americas," Los Angeles, CA, May 16-17, 2003. (14pp., 290KB) [public art / acrylic paint / supports (artists' materials) / fading / blistering / cracking / mural paintings]
		Koestler, Robert J., and E.D. Santoro. Assessment of the Susceptibility to Biodeterioration of Selected Polymers and Resins: Final Report Submitted to the Getty Conservation Institute. GCI Scientific Program Report. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1988. (118pp., 8.6MB) [biodeterioration / deterioration / fungi / polymers / resin (organic material) / stone]
		Kumar, Rakesh, and Anuradha V. Kumar. Biodeterioration of Stone in Tropical Environments: An Overview. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1999. (95pp., 624KB) A bound copy is available for purchase at the Getty Bookstore [tropical climate]
		Letellier, Robin. "RecorDIM 2002 Activities Report." 2003. (83pp., 728KB) [recording / documentation (function) / information management / historic sites]
		Letellier, Robin, Werner Schmid, and François LeBlanc. Recording, Documentation, and Information Management for the Conservation of Heritage Places: Guiding Principles. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2007. (174pp., 13.1MB) [data processing / documentation (function) / guidelines / heritage management / recording]
		Maekawa, Shin, and Franciza Toledo. "A Climate Control System for Hollybourne Cottage, Jekyll Island Historic District, Georgia." Paper presented at conference of American Society of Heating Refrigeration Air-conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), IAQ 2001 - Moisture, Microbes, and Health Effects: Indoor Air Quality and Moisture in Buildings in San Francisco, CA, November 4-7, 2001. (17pp., 620KB) [USA / environmental control / historic houses / tropical climate / HVAC / relative humidity]
		MacLean, Margaret G.H., and David Myers. Grosse Île and the Irish Memorial National Historic Site: A Case Study.Heritage Values in Site Management for purchase at the Getty Bookstore. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2003. (49pp., 1.6MB) A book publication of the case study is available in [Canada / Québec / values / conservation policy / site management / stakeholders / citizen participation]
		Maekawa, Shin, and Franciza Toledo. "Controlled Ventilation and Heating to Preserve Collections in Historic Buildings in Hot and Humid Regions." Paper presented at the ICOM-CC 13th Triennial Meeting in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, September 22-27, 2002. (17pp., 236KB) [environmental monitoring / tropical climate / HVAC / preventive conservation / relative humidity]
		Maekawa, Shin. Oxygen-Free Museum Cases. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1998. (76 pp., 1.6MB) A bound copy is available for purchase at the Getty Bookstore [collections care / exhibit cases / anoxia]
		Maekawa, Shin, and Franciza Toledo. "Sustainable Climate Control for Historic Buildings in Hot and Humid Regions," Management of Environmental Quality: An International Journal Vol. 14, No. 3 (2003). [Also presented at the 18th International Conference on Passive Low Energy Architectures (PLEA) Conference, November 2001, Florianópolis, Brazil.](7pp., 412KB) [tropical climate / environmental control / energy conservation / HVAC]
		Martinez, Juan Manuel, Françoise Descamps, Kathleen Louw, eds. Proceedings 9th World Congress of the Organization of World Heritage Cities, Kazan, 19-23 June, 2007. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2008. (88pp., 972KB). [historic towns / cities / heritage management / conferences / sustainable development / values / economics / urban planning |adaptive reuse / cultural tourism / conservation policy / stakeholders |social issues / funding / decision making]
		Martinez, Juan Manuel, Françoise Descamps, Kathleen Louw, eds. Actes 9e Congrès Mondial des Villes du Patrimoine Mondial, Kazan, 19-23 juin 2007. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2008. (French version of the above) (88pp., 1MB). [historic towns / cities / heritage management / conferences / sustainable development / values / economics / urban planning |adaptive reuse / cultural tourism / conservation policy / stakeholders |social issues / funding / decision making]
		Martinez, Juan Manuel, Françoise Descamps, Kathleen Louw, eds. Actas 9° Congreso Mundial de la Organización de las Ciudades Patrimonio Mundial, Kazan, 19-23 junio 2007. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2008. (Spanish version of the above) (88pp, 1MB). [historic towns / cities / heritage management / conferences / sustainable development / values / economics / urban planning |adaptive reuse / cultural tourism / conservation policy / stakeholders |social issues / funding / decision making]
		Randy Mason, ed. Economics and Heritage Conservation: A Meeting Organized by the Getty Conservation Institute, December 1998. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 1999. (67pp., 351KB) [historic preservation / conferences / cultural property]
		Mason, Randall, Margaret G. H. MacLean, and Marta de la Torre. Hadrian's Wall World Heritage Site: A Case Study. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2003. (53pp., 1.3MB) A book publication of the case study is available in Heritage Values in Site Management for purchase at the Getty Bookstore. [England / values / partnership / sustainability / site management]
		Mason, Randall, David Myers, and Marta de la Torre. Port Arthur Historic Site: A Case Study. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2003. (76pp., 1.4MB) A book publication of the case study is available in Heritage Values in Site Management for purchase at the Getty Bookstore. [Australia / Tasmania / values / memory / site management / funding / interpretation / partnership]
		McDonald, John K. House of Eternity: The Tomb of Nefertari. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1996. Downloadable in four separate sections. [Tomb of Nefertari (Valley of the Queens, Egypt) / tombs / wall paintings]
		Nazaroff, William W., Mary P. Ligocki, Lynn G. Salmon, Glen R. Cass, Theresa Fall, Michael C. Jones, Harvey I.H. Liu, and Timothy Ma. Airborne Particles in Museums. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1993. (145 pp., 1.5MB) [indoor air pollution]
		Oliver, Anne. Fort Selden Adobe Test Wall Project, Phase I, Final Report. The Getty Conservation Institute and Museum of New Mexico State Monuments, 2000. (108pp., 1MB) [USA / New Mexico / environmental monitoring / site analysis / erosion / protective coating]
		Pounds, Jon. "The Gift of Absence: Mural Restoration in a Policy Void." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. Paper presented at the Getty symposium "Mural Painting and Conservation in the Americas," Los Angeles, CA, May 16-17, 2003. (10pp., 91KB) [conservation policy / public art / mural paintings / repainting / USA / Illinois / Chicago]
		Price, C.A. Stone Conservation: An Overview of Current Research. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1996. (79pp., 468KB) [building stone]
		Reedy, Terry J., and Chandra L. Reedy. Principles of Experimental Design for Art Conservation Research. GCI Scientific Program Report. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1992 (123pp., 1.6MB) Preface to the Electronic Edition, 2008. (3pp., 19KB) [scientific analysis / statistical analysis]
		Reedy, Terry J., and Chandra L. Reedy. Statistical Analysis in Art Conservation Research. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1988. (110pp., 872 K) [statistics]
		Rust, Michael K., and Janice M. Kennedy. The Feasibility of Using Modified Atmospheres to Control Insect Pests in Museums. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1993. (131pp., 2.8 MB) [anoxia / pest control / insect damage]
		Scott, David A. Metallography and microstructure of ancient and historic metals. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1991. (185pp., 9.3MB) [brass / bronze / gold / iron / metallography / silver / steel]
		Scott, David A., Jerry Podany, and Brian B. Considine, eds. Ancient & Historic Metals: Conservation and Scientific Research. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1994. Downloadable in three separate sections. [bronze / casting / cleaning / copper / corrosion / gold / metal / sculpture / weathering / zinc]
		Selwitz, Charles. Cellulose Nitrate in Conservation. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1988. (71pp., 556KB) A bound copy is available for purchase at the Getty Bookstore [adhesive / ceramics / coating (material) / conservation materials / metal / stability]
		Selwitz, Charles. Epoxy Resins in Stone Conservation. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1992. (117pp., 1.8 MB) [discoloration / mechanical strength]
		Selwitz, Charles, and Shin Maekawa. Inert Gases in the Control of Museum Insect Pests. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1998. (113pp., 1.5MB) [collections care / pest control]
		Shank, Will. "Before the Paint Hits the Wall." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. Paper presented at the Getty symposium "Mural Painting and Conservation in the Americas," Los Angeles, CA, May 16-17, 2003. (8pp., 102KB) [mural paintings / supports (artists' materials) / public art / conservation policy]
		Stanley Price, Nicholas, ed. The Conservation of the Orpheus Mosaic at Paphos, Cyprus. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1991. (88pp., 9.5MB) [cleaning / consolidation / detaching / environmental monitoring / glass / mosaics / photodocumentation / site protection / stone / training]
		Striegel, Mary F. and Jo Hill. Thin-Layer Chromatography for Binding Media Analysis. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1996. (186pp., 3.9MB) A bound copy is available for purchase at the Getty Bookstore. [binder (material) / thin layer chromatography / training]
		"Summary Report, Project Terra Research Meeting." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. Report of meeting held in Torquay, England, May 14, 2000. (21pp., 83KB) [earthen archtecture]
		"Terra Consortium: Guidelines for Institutional Collaboration." Guidelines for program of Project Terra and the UNESCO Chair on Earthen Architecture, Constructive Cultures, and Sustainable Development, 2000. (9pp., 56KB) [earthen architecture / sustainable development / collaborating / partnership]
		Tolles, E. Leroy, Edna E. Kimbro, and William S. Ginell. Planning and Engineering Guidelines for the Seismic Retrofitting of Historic Adobe Structures. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2002. (154pp., 4.3MB) A bound copy is available for purchase at the Getty Bookstore [adobe / earthquakes / historic buildings / historic preservation / seismic design / structural analysis / USA (Southwest)]
		Tolles, E. Leroy, Edna E. Kimbro, and William S. Ginell. Guías de planeamiento e ingeniería para la estabilización sismorresistente de estructuras históricas de adobe. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2002. (Spanish version of the above) (160pp., 4.8MB) [adobe / earthquakes / historic buildings / historic preservation / seismic design / structural analysis / USA (Southwest)]
		Tolles, E. Leroy, Edna E. Kimbro, Frederick A. Webster, and William S. Ginell. Seismic Stabilization of Historic Adobe Structures: Final Report of the Getty Seismic Adobe Project. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2000. (174 pp., 3.2MB) A bound copy is available for purchase at the Getty Bookstore [historic buildings / retrofitting / seismic design / stabilizing]
		Tolles, E. Leroy, Edna E. Kimbro, Frederick A. Webster, and William S. Ginell. Survey of Damage to Historic Adobe Buildings after the January 1994 Northridge Earthquake. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1996. (171 pp., 7.2MB) [historic buildings / retrofitting / seismic design / stabilizing]
		Torraca, Giorgio. Lectures on Materials Science for Architectural Conservation. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2009. (205 pp., 5.4MB) [architectural conservation / materials science / building materials / physical properties / mechanical properties / chemical properties / brick / mortar / concrete / porosity / cleaning / consolidation / preventive conservation / protective coating / surfaces OR surface layers / iron (metal) / polymer / ethyl silicate / silicone]
		de la Torre, Marta, ed. Assessing the Values of Cultural Heritage: Research Report. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2002. (123pp., 750KB) [cultural property / evaluation / economics / historic preservation]
		de la Torre, Marta, Margaret G.H. MacLean, and David Myers. Chaco Culture National Historical Park: A Case Study. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, June 2003. (66pp., 1.7MB) A book publication of the case study is available in Heritage Values in Site Management for purchase at the Getty Bookstore. [New Mexico / Chaco Canyon / archaeological sites / Anasazi / compliance archaeology / legislation / Native American]
		Ward, Philip. The Nature of Conservation: A Race Against Time.Downloadable in two separate sections. Foreword to the Electronic Edition, 2010. (1p., 36KB) Marina del Rey: Getty Conservation Institute, 1986. [conservators / education / history of conservation / museums]
		Ward, Philip. La conservación del patrimonio: carrera contra reloj.Prólogo a la edición electrónica, 2010. (1p., 40KB) Marina del Rey: Getty Conservation Institute, 1986. Calif. (Spanish version of the above) (83pp., 9.8MB) [conservators / education / history of conservation / museums]
		Weber, John Pitman. "Politics and Practice of Community Public Art: Whose Murals Get Saved?" Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. Paper presented at the Getty symposium "Mural Painting and Conservation in the Americas," Los Angeles, CA, May 16-17, 2003. (16pp., 348KB) [conservation policy / mural paintings / repainting / USA / Illinois / Chicago]
		Welch Howe, Kathryn, preparer. Los Angeles Historic Resource Survey Assessment Project: Summary Report. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2001. (34pp., 119KB) [USA / California / historic buildings / historic preservation / historic districts]
		Welch Howe, Kathryn, preparer. The Los Angeles Historic Resource Survey Report: A Framework for a Citywide Historic Resource Survey. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2008. (120pp., 6.4MB) [USA / California / historic buildings / historic preservation / historic districts]
		Wheeler, George. "Alkoxysilanes color photo supplement," containing full-color images of black and white figures from Alkoxysilanes and the Consolidation of Stone. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2005. (4pp., 1.1MB) A bound copy is available for purchase at the Getty Bookstore. [stone / consolidation]