WebApp for Estimating Scroll Dimensions

David Carr has produced a free web app for estimating the dimensions of scrolls. It allows you to fetch biblical texts and strip them to the consonantal bare bones for help with calculations. By inputting measured data for the text density, you can then estimate scroll length and surface area. I have played around with it a bit, and it looks like it will be a rather useful tool. His methods of measurement and calculation are slightly different from how I have done it in the past, but in principle should yield pretty much the same results when accounting for measurement error.

Proverbs and Amenemope

Bernd Schipper has posted a fascinating article on Proverbs' use of the Wisdom of Amenemope, arguing that the author was familiar with the Egyptian practice of studying wisdom texts over extended periods of time and focusing on the incipit verses of chapters. According to Schipper, Proverbs primarily uses these incipit verses and frames them with terms of chronological sequence that fit an Egyptian scribal context.

Tov on the Original Text of the Torah

Emanuel Tov has published a nice piece on what we can know about the archetype and/or original text of the Torah from the manuscript witnesses.

Quranic Textual Scholarship

There is a fascinating recent interview with Hythem Sidky on the current state of textual scholarship on the Quran that might be of interest both for its historical significance and methodological parallels with discussions in biblical textual criticism. Sidky argues that there were multiple reading traditions in interaction with a controlling written textual tradition from earliest times. Prior to the Uthmanic standardization of the tradition, we have little manuscript insight into what might have happened, though the undertext of the Sanaa palimpsest sheds some light on alternative versions of Mohammed's companions, which includes different sequences of Surahs and a higher degree of variation (though still restrained and relatively mundane) than in the later manuscripts. The discussion of the interrelationship between oral and written are particularly interesting for biblical scholarship.

Cook, The Targum of Psalms

Edward Cook has revised his 2001 translation of the Psalms Targum.

Aramaic Literature from Egypt and the Levant

Tawny Holm has published a useful anthology of Aramaic literature with English translations. She has done a lot of work recently on P. Amherst 63, an Aramaic psalm collection in Demotic script, so I'm sure she will have lots of helpful observations.

Multispectral Gaze: New Approaches to the Cotton Genesis

Medieval Art Research reports of a forthcoming conference on June 19 at the British Library. The Cotton Genesis is a fascinating example of a beautifully illuminated Septuagint manuscript that is of immense importance for art history, Greek paleography, and the history of the Greek text of the Bible.

From the conference website:

The Cotton Genesis (British Library, Cotton MS Otho B VI) is one of the greatest works of manuscript art to survive from late Antiquity and one of the most tragic casualties of the Cotton Library fire of 1731. New multispectral imaging completed at the British Library and sponsored by the Gina Goldhammer Foundation, has opened exciting opportunities for major breakthroughs in the study of this late-fifth-century artwork. Parts of the texts and illuminations of the Cotton Genesis, damaged in the fire and barely visible to the naked eye, can now be seen through a set of ultraviolet, infrared, and visible light images.

The interdisciplinary conference Multispectral Gaze: New Approaches to the Cotton Genesis aims to celebrate the completion of the digitisation campaign and the discoveries it can generate. By drawing on the manuscript’s multispectral images, leading specialists on late antique book production, art, palaeography, and collection history will provide new insights on the Cotton Genesis.

Program

9.30 – 10.00: Registration

10.00 – 10.10: Introduction

Elena Lichmanova and Emanuel Zingg

10.10 – 11.40: The Cotton Genesis in the Early Modern Period

Chair: Andrea Clarke, British Library

Tom Roebuck, University of East Anglia

The Cotton Genesis in Early Modern English Scholarship

Julian Harrison, British Library

Picture This: Early Reproductions of the Cotton Genesis

Raphaëlle Goyeau, British Library / University of East Anglia

The Lost Cottonian Binding of the Cotton Genesis

11.40 – 12.00 Coffee break

12.00 – 13.00 Text and Palaeography

Chair: Peter Tóth, Bodleian Library

Emanuel Zingg, CNRS, Sorbonne University

The Cotton Genesis’ Place in the History of Greek Palaeography

Reinhart Ceulemans, KU Leuven

The Biblical Text of the Cotton Genesis

13.00 – 14.00 Lunch break

14.00 – 15.30 Art of the Cotton Genesis

Chair: Scot McKendrick, British Library (retired)

Jaś Elsner, University of Oxford

The Cotton Genesis and Early Christian Art

Anne-Orange Poilpré, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University

Visualizing Genesis: Image, Narrativity and Sacrality in the Early Middle Ages

Nancy Thebaut, University of Oxford

Looking Back at Lot in the Cotton Genesis

15.30 – 16.00 Coffee break

16.00 – 16.45 Key-note Lecture – Coactive Scrutiny: What the Cotton Genesis’ Vulgata Tituli Divulge about the San Marco Mosaics

Herbert Kessler, Johns Hopkins University

16.45 – 17.30 Drinks reception

Organisers:

Andrea Clarke (British Library), Elena Lichmanova (British Library), Emanuel Zingg (CNRS, Sorbonne University)