Thoughts on Antiquity

For some time I have been trying to write a program on Windows XP which would help me work with Syriac text.  It has been quite a dreadful experience, and I am barely started!  The problem is finding out how to get one text box in my application to handle text as Right-to-Left Syriac, both […]

The HBO series of Rome is now for sale on DVD. While I haven’t watched the whole season, what I did watch was very entertaining. I’m not too much of a fan of inaccurate portrayals, but overall, it was well done enough to make me forget that for an hour. Well recommended.

I probably should have mentioned in the introduction to this series that the canonical lists I intend to post are New Testament only. That said, let us dive right in with the canon of scripture as Marcion would have it.The limitation of my discussion to New Testament scripture would not have displeased Marcion, who rejected […]

I was looking at Wikipedia and found there considerable numbers of colour photographs of pages from manuscripts, most apparently professionally produced and so probably done by in-house departments at major libraries.  
Among these was one from the British Library, whom I know to be bitterly hostile to anyone seeing or using their holdings:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:British.Library.MS.Add.33241.jpg
This had a notice […]

I wonder how many people know that the Seleucid era (Anno Graecorum=Year of the Greeks) was still being used in 1900? I’m reading through the English translation of Nestorius, “The Bazaar of Heracleides“, at the moment, and came across this footnote on p.192: 
2 The Syriac copyist has here added a note to the following effect: […]

This link, written in 2004, describes damage to the Christian churches at Kurdish hands in Iraq.  It mentions “Rabban Hormizd, the ancient stone monastery outside Alqosh on the Nineveh plain which was bombed so severely that many of its magnificent epigraphic memorials, dating from a hundred centuries ago, have been shattered. These memorials were some of […]

I have referred before to the library at the Chaldean archbishop’s residence at Séert.  Even copies of the catalogue of manuscripts made by Addai Scher in 1905 seem scarce.  Here in the UK a copy is listed in the British Library, but this is useless to most people.  Yesterday I looked at the copy in Cambridge University […]

I’ve come across a new blog in the blogo-sphere - The New Antiquarian. So far, there’s plenty of good pictures of antiquity to plunge through, enough to keep one occupied for a while looking through all of them. Congrats and welcome!

Ben C. Smith, author of TextExcavation., is also joining Thoughts on Antiquity. He makes his first post planning out a series of Canonical Lists.
So please everyone welcome Ben Smith to Team Antiquity!

I am on record as saying that the study of the canon of scripture is not really my thing. However, I am very interested in tracing the attestation for the earliest Christian texts, and I have found that the canonical lists that patristic writers occasionally compile can provide useful clues and information to that end.
I […]