Thoughts on Antiquity

People may recall that I’m working on a Garshuni text preserved in Mingana Syr. 142, and that I got a PDF of some microfiche printouts a while back, which I sent to a translator.
This was a bit hard to read, but I found that the Mingana (well, Birmingham university special collections) would allow me to go and […]

I’m moving web hosts (to www.site5.com) and so these sites are offline while the various DNS servers around the web update each other.  Email to me probably won’t work either, unless you send it to roger_pearse@yahoo.co.uk!  But www.tertullian.net is already available, however.

This news came up on the CLASSICS-L email list. I’m stunned, actually.

CAIRO (AFP) - In a potential blow to themed resorts from Vegas to Tokyo, Egypt is to pass a law requiring payment of royalties whenever its ancient monuments, from the pyramids to the sphinx, are reproduced.
Zahi Hawass, the charismatic and controversial head of Egypt’s […]

A week in Luxor leading up to Christmas — pure delight!  I stayed at the Maritim Jollie Ville (formerly the Movenpick), which consists of chalets in gardens of palm-trees, and ate a fillet steak every lunchtime on the terrace overlooking the Nile.  The steak, indeed, was only 6 GBP.   The hotel is on an island […]

In the PAPY-L list today there was an announcement of a papyrus codex, found among the finds of a Belgian museum.  It’s been carbon dated to the 11th century, and is thought to be local, and probably containing a Latin text.  A number of other papyrus codices are known from the medieval period in that region, […]

As an experiment I have used my own heavily-taxed salary and commissioned a translation from Arabic of the Commentary on the Nicene Creed by the 9th century Melchite priest, al-Majdalus, using a commercial translator.  This is expensive, but I have read that this is how the Ante-Nicene Fathers translations were made.  It will be interesting to […]

I first went to Luxor in March 1986 with a friend from college, and staying in the Hotel Philippe, where the air-con didn’t really work.  It was very scruffy, and we had to negotiate our own way to the Valley of the Kings.  But it was very special.
I seem to remember going again at Christmas […]

Nokia have developed a mobile phone handset which can send and receive text messages in the Ge’ez script.  It is being trialed in Ethiopia, where the unicode script is still being used for Amharic.

Published in 1930, Life and Literature in the Roman Republic is a mediocre attempt to relate half the history of the Roman Republic. The general aim of the book is to present Roman literature against the backdrop of Roman life. In his own words, Frank says:

These lectures [Sather Classical Lectures, of which this book is […]

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