A Character Style Library for Syriac Manuscripts

Paleographers study ancient and historical handwriting in order to learn more about documents of significant interest and their creators. Computational tools and methods can aid this task in numerous ways, particularly for languages and scripts that are not widely known today. One project currently underway seeks to gather a collection of securely dated letter samples from Syriac documents dating between 500 and 1100 CE. The set comprises over 60,000 human selected character samples. This paper gives details on the collection and describes the automatic techniques used to process the initial human input so as to produce high-quality segmented character samples ready for analysis

Isolated Character Forms from Dated Syriac Manuscripts

This paper describes a set of hand-isolated character samples selected from securely dated manuscripts written in Syriac between 300 and 1300 C.E., which are being made available for research purposes. The collection can be used for a number of applications, including ground truth for character segmentation and form analysis for paleographical dating. Several applications based upon convolutional neural networks demonstrate the possibilities of the data set

Case notes and clinicians : Galen's commentary on the Hippocratic epidemics in the Arabic tradition

Galen’s Commentaries on the Hippocratic Epidemics constitute one of the most detailed studies of Hippocratic medicine from Antiquity. The Arabic translation of the Commentaries by Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (d. c. 873) is of crucial importance because it preserves large sections now lost in Greek, and because it helped to establish an Arabic clinical literature. The present contribution investigate the translation of this seminal work into Syriac and Arabic. It provides a first survey of the manuscript tradition, and explores how physicians in the medieval Muslim world drew on it both to teach medicine to students, and to develop a framework for their own clinical research

Escrituras más allá de las palabras: vocabulario “islámico” en las primeras traducciones árabes de la Biblia

This article discusses the use of “Islamic” vocabulary in Christian Arabic Bible translations composed around the 9th century. It suggests that there is a link between such use and the translation’s Vorlage dependence, function, and the general translation technique attested in it. The article further proposes that a function of translations containing a notable and seemingly deliberate use of Islamic-sounding vocabulary was to show that the Christian Scriptures were able to absorb the message of Islam, just like early Christian Arabic theologians promulgated the idea that Christian dogmas permeated the Qurʾān. Thus, instead of shielding their Scriptures from a competing religion by dressing them in a more neutral linguistic register, these translators and authors presented a Christianity essentially elevated beyond words and contexts and therefore portrayable in any of them.Este artículo discute el uso de vocabulario “islámico” en traducciones árabes de la Biblia, compuestas en torno al siglo IX. El artículo sugiere la existencia de un vínculo entre dicho uso y la dependencia y función de la traducción Vorlage, y de la traducción técnica general atestiguada en ella. El artículo además propone que una función de las traducciones, que contienen un uso aparentemente notable y deliberado del vocabulario de sonido islámico, fue mostrar que las Escrituras cristianas podían absorber el mensaje del Islam, al igual que los primeros teólogos cristianos árabes promulgaron la idea de que los dogmas cristianos calaron en El Corán. Por lo tanto, en lugar de proteger sus Escrituras de una religión competidora, vistiéndolas en un registro lingüístico más neutral, estos traductores y autores presentaron un cristianismo esencialmente elevado más allá de las palabras y los contextos y por lo tanto representable en cualquiera de ellos

Chronological Profiling for Paleography

This paper approaches manuscript dating from a Bayesian perspective. Prior work on paleographic date recovery has generally sought to predict a single date for a manuscript. Bayesian analysis makes it possible to estimate a probability distribution that varies with respect to time. This in turn enables a number of alternative analyses that may be of more use to practitioners. For example, it may be useful to identify a range of years that will include a document’s creation date with a particular confidence level. The methods are demonstrated on a selection of Syriac documents created prior to 1300 CE

An Interim Report on the Editorial and Analytical Work of the AnonymClassic Project

In this collective article, members of the AnonymClassic project discuss various aspects of their work on the textual tradition Kalīla and Dimna. Beatrice Gruendler provides a general introduction to the questions being considered. This is followed by a number of short essays in specific areas, organized into three categories: codicology, literary history and theory, and the digital infrastructure of the project. Jan J. van Ginkel summarizes the challenges involved in editing the Syriac versions of Kalīla and Dimna; Rima Redwan explains the AnonymClassic team’s approach vis-à-vis the transcription and textual segmentation of Arabic manuscripts; Khouloud Khalfallah follows this with an overview of the types of data that are recorded for each codex that is integrated into the project; Beatrice Gruendler, in a second contribution, shares some preliminary results from the analysis of interrelationships among manuscripts; and Rima Redwan, also in a second contribution, discusses the sets of illustrations, or »image cycles«, that are found in many copies of Kalīla wa-Dimna. Moving into the realm of literary history and theory, Isabel Toral poses a range of questions relating to the status of Kalīla and Dimna, as (arguably) anonymous in authorship and as a fundamentally translated book; Johannes Stephan explores the references to Kalīla wa-Dimna found in various medieval Arabic scholarly works; and Matthew L. Keegan confronts the problem of the genre(s) to which Kalīla wa-Dimna might be assigned and the exceptional »promiscuity« of the text. The last section of the article, on digital infrastructure, contains two contributions: Theodore S. Beers describes a web application that the team has created to facilitate the consultation of published versions of Kalīla and Dimna, and, finally, Mahmoud Kozae and Marwa M. Ahmed offer a more comprehensive discussion of the digital tools and methods – specialized and in some cases developed »in-house« – on which the AnonymClassic project relies

An Unruly Classic: Kalīla and Dimna and Its Syriac, Arabic, and Early Persian Versions

In this collective volume, members of the AnonymClassic project will discuss, from different perspectives, a core aspect of their work with Kalīla and Dimna: the study of variation. The aim is to shed light on Kalīla and Dimna’s variance—or textual instability, in the framework of Bernard Cerquiglini—and typologies of textual mobility/mouvance across linguistic traditions and historical periods. How can these dynamics best be described, analyzed, and classified? What were the reasons for the remarkable mobility of this book; who were the agents that intervened; and how

Setting a Bishopric / Arranging an Archive: Traces of Archival Activity in the Bishopric of Alexandria and Antioch

Early Christianity was heir to the archival practice and discourse of Greek and Roman societies, in which public and private archives enjoyed a great deal of consideration. Even before creating their own archives, Christian congregations, when becoming a structured society, adhered to the archival discourse of their times, and the mention of archives in their writings served apologetic and theological aims. The article argues that the main impulse to undertake archival activity came from the new form of leadership, the bishop: alone, or in connections with other colleagues, in particular within the meetings (synods), the bishop produced a huge number of written records, which was to be arranged in archival form. After a brief presentation of the papyrological evidence, the article discusses the traces of ancient episcopal archives detectable in the historiographical and apologetic writings compiled in the main episcopal sees, such as Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch

Faith & Fable Islamic Manuscripts from Cambridge University Library

The first Islamic manuscript to enter the Library was a copy of the Qur’an donated in 1631 by the Arabic scholar William Bedwell. Since that time the Library’s Islamic manuscripts collection has grown in size and diversity to over 5,000 items. They shed a light on many aspects of the culture of the Islamic world, its beliefs and learning. Such a collection was amassed over subsequent centuries either from scholarly collectors or purchased by skilled librarians to add more depth to the already impressive range of treasures. But this extraordinary collection has remained relatively unknown outside the Library. Today, the aim is to change this with a number of different approaches. We are creating a fully searchable online catalogue of the manuscripts and digitising a selection of the most beautiful and interesting texts to make them available to the international scholarly community anywhere in the world via the internet. At the same time, the practical care of the original items, carried out by our own skilled conservators, will ensure their long-term survival for future generations. The Islamic manuscripts collection is supported within the Library by a team of specialists whose knowledge and skills, whether academic, practical or technical, aim to bring them to the attention of researchers. But only with a sustained programme of scholarly co-operation with experts outside the Library can the full content and significance of these texts be realised and their place in the wider context of Islamic scholarship become established

Textual affinities of papyrus Bodmer VII and VIII (P72)

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/ecommonsatsdissertations/2065/thumbnail.jp