Vatican Shadows

A couple of days ago, the Vatican library opened free online access to hi-res photos of what is generally believed to be one of the oldest books in the world, P75, the remains of a papyrus book of the Christian Gospels in Greek that is commonly dated to the third century. That turned out to be the story of the year on this blog, with over 900 reads, 85 retweets and 7,500 Twitter impressions.

[The next two grafs have been revised, after I realized that I had posted on the same topic in January this year, and clean forgot.] P75 got me interested in the library's other Bodmer papyrus, donated to it in 1969, the famous P72, shelved as Pap.Bodmer.VIII. The new digital site neither indexes nor mentions it on the front page of the digital manuscripts site.

The old BAV portal's link still gives you access to Pap.Bodmer.VIII, a booklet of epistles, containing all the text of 1 Peter, 2 Peter, and Jude. [This link I am giving you is not a secret, but rather one forgotten by the designers of the new portal. My apologies for overstating the case, when I first put this post up and claimed I had "discovered" the link.]

The writing on the P72 papyrus is thought to date to the 3rd or 4th century, roughly of the same period as the Codex Vaticanus, probably the world's oldest intact parchment codex.

The Wikipedia entry notes that P72 was dismembered from the "Bodmer Miscellaneous Codex," a little book dug from the sands of Egypt in which other works were: Nativity of Mary, the apocryphal correspondence of Paul to the Corinthians, the Eleventh Ode of Solomon, Melito's Homily on the Passover, a fragment of a hymn, the Apology of Phileas, and Psalm 33 and 34.

We don't know if  P72, where you can see the folds in the folios, is the oldest papyrus codex in existence, but Brent Nongbri, the Australian scholar, has recently argued: "It would seem that P.Bodm. VIII had a previous life, in which it preceded another work that was later removed when P.Bodm. VIII became part of the ‘Miscellaneous’ or ‘Composite’ codex." So it could be years or decades older than other parts of the codex.

You can read his short paper on his Academia.edu page, as well as a blog post he wrote.

As for P75 (the gospels), its date of making has long been estimated to be the 3rd century, but Nongbri published a critique this year in the Journal of Biblical Literature where he argued that this date is slapdash (my word, not his) and that the correct date is more likely to be 4th century, more or less of the same period as the Codex Vaticanus. I'll have more as the story continues.

Aside from all this excitement, the BAV has this week released an additional 34 items. Here is the full list:

1. Vat.ebr.32,  - Details
2. Vat.ebr.33, - Details
3. Vat.ebr.230, - Details
4. Vat.ebr.250, - Details
5. Vat.ebr.270.pt.1, - Details
6. Vat.ebr.270.pt.2 - Details
7. Vat.ebr.271 - Details
8. Vat.ebr.283 - Details
9. Vat.ebr.286 - Details
10. Vat.ebr.289 - Details
11. Vat.ebr.296 - Details
12. Vat.lat.276 - a 12th-century Augustine in Caroline minuscule with some Beneventan script on fols 258v-260v (my thanks to AaronM on Twitter for this info: https://twitter.com/gundormr/status/756196478452924416), Details
13. Vat.lat.288 - Ambrose of Milan, Details
14. Vat.lat.295 - Ambrose, Details
15. Vat.lat.296 - a 10th-century Ambrose, Details
16. Vat.lat.373 - made for the Renaissance bishop Pietro del Monte (c. 1400–57), from fol 111 he added the prologue to his Repertorium utriusque iuris, a major legal text - Details
17. Vat.lat.650 - a 10th-century compilation with Alcuin and others, many very faint pages have also been scanned with what seems to be ultraviolet light. Details
18. Vat.lat.674 - 14th century theological and scientific: here are some shape diagrams in the margin in a geometrical piece (140v, rotated):
    
      second half empty, Details
19. Vat.lat.740 - Aquinas, Details
20. Vat.lat.773 - Details
21. Vat.lat.775 - Details
22. Vat.lat.778 - Details
23. Vat.lat.779 - Details
24. Vat.lat.786 - Details
25. Vat.lat.789 - Details
26. Vat.lat.813 - Details
27. Vat.lat.819 - Details
28. Vat.lat.834 - Giles of Rome, Quaestiones, Details
29. Vat.lat.836 - Giles of Rome, c. 1243-1316, Commentarius in librum II Sententiarum, Details
30. Vat.lat.837 - ditto, Details
31. Vat.lat.852 - Details
32. Vat.lat.866 - Details
33. Vat.lat.875 , Details,
34. Vat.lat.14747 , an 18th century fair copy cataloguing the authors in the papal collection of printed books, the seventh volume, arranged by names, S-Z. Here is the pen drawing for S:
    

This is Piggin's Unofficial List 61. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to Digita Vaticana.

Maybe This Is the Oldest Book

Over a year ago, we debated on this blog and on Twitter what was the oldest bound book in the work. See the first post: Is this the world's oldest bound book? and the second post: Older than the Oldest.

Some authoritative experts said the crown should not go to the Codex Vaticanus, a parchment bible which is still bound, but to the 102 battered and now separated pages of Pap.Hanna (the sole Hanna Papyrus), also known as P75, which is a little 3rd-century booklet containing most of the Gospels of Luke and John.

On July 18, all the extant pages of this booklet were placed online by the digitization program at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana in Rome.

It's a battered little papyrus book from Egypt, originally sewn together in a codex and now kept between sheets of glass. This is among the most famous of the so-called Bodmer Papyri discovered in Egypt in 1952 and is an important source of the gospels within 200 years of their composition. It also contains an early Christian "brand logo", the Tau-Rho symbol or staurogram.

In all, 50 new items were placed online in this summer batch. Here is my full unofficial list:

1. Cappon.229
2. Cappon.297 
3. Pap.Hanna (the bibliography page for this item still uses the former shelfmark, Pap.Bodmer.XIV-XV).
4. Vat.ebr.25
5. Vat.ebr.26
6. Vat.ebr.27
7. Vat.ebr.28
8. Vat.ebr.30
9. Vat.ebr.31
10. Vat.ebr.214
11. Vat.ebr.215
12. Vat.ebr.220
13. Vat.ebr.221
14. Vat.ebr.222
15. Vat.ebr.223
16. Vat.ebr.225
17. Vat.ebr.229
18. Vat.ebr.232
19. Vat.ebr.234
20. Vat.ebr.235
21. Vat.ebr.236
22. Vat.ebr.239
23. Vat.ebr.241
24. Vat.ebr.242
25. Vat.ebr.244
26. Vat.ebr.247
27. Vat.ebr.249
28. Vat.ebr.252
29. Vat.ebr.257
30. Vat.ebr.260
31. Vat.ebr.261
32. Vat.ebr.262
33. Vat.ebr.265
34. Vat.ebr.266
35. Vat.ebr.267
36. Vat.ebr.268
37. Vat.ebr.273
38. Vat.ebr.275
39. Vat.ebr.277
40. Vat.ebr.279
41. Vat.ebr.284
42. Vat.ebr.285
43. Vat.ebr.290
44. Vat.ebr.292
45. Vat.ebr.293
46. Vat.ebr.295
47. Vat.ebr.298
48. Vat.ebr.299
49. Vat.ebr.303
50. Vat.lat.9973

This is Piggin's Unofficial List (PUL) number 60. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to Digita Vaticana.

World's Top Jobs Predictor

Germany's Labour Agency believes it has the most fine-grained statistics on labour in the world, illustrating place by place throughout the country many things you thought you knew, but couldn't quite prove to your kids, such as how poor educational performance correlates with unemployment.

It has now thrown this data storehouse open to the public using dynamic data visualization tools, and the displays are impressive and amazing. Here for for example is a graph where lack of a high-school leaving certificate (X axis) is correlated with regional unemployment (Y axis) whereby circle size represents city or county population and circle colour represents alphabetical order of state name (from blue (B) to red (T), which is about the dumbest thing I can find in this intelligent package).

The image above is from a page compiled on the fly. You can alter all four of those axes to other data streams to correlate whatever you please. There's even a slider to go back in time. This is an amazing and impressive demonstration of data visualization for everyman.

According to a report by Klaus Tscharnke of dpa (in German only), the Bundesagentur für Arbeit (Federal Labour Agency) which operates the nation's labour exchanges purchased a Google Analytics package to visualize its database in this way. That explains why the URLs are in English, which is handy since there is no English version of the data controls themselves.

What does the above graph illustrate? Look at the two biggish blue discs at top right: one represents central Berlin and the other the adjacent Neukölln region of the capital. They have enormous school dropout rates and huge heavily frequented labour offices where people apply for the dole. If you have been a tourist in Berlin, you have perhaps noticed the poverty amid the glamour.

The discs do bunch themselves along a diagonal line. At far left on the graph are Bavarian cities like Regensburg, where only 2.7 per cent of the working population failed to complete high school, and only 2.4 per cent are unemployed. That does strongly suggest a correlation that's not just true in Germany, but worldwide. Show it to your kids.

What's It About?

I get asked: what's your book's title, and what's it about?

The working title is: Expositor. The project investigates the world's oldest information visualization, a 3-metre tree diagram drawn up in the Roman Empire. This chart in Latin which sets out biblical genealogies from Adam to Jesus, intertwined with threads of Jewish political history, has been hidden in plain sight for centuries and has never been examined at book length before.

The original chart is now lost, but medieval copies allow us to reconstruct how this diagram might have looked. Its historic title is unknown, so it is nowadays code-named the "Great Stemma" (GS). You can see a provisional reconstruction of it online on my website, which serves as a long-term data-dump for my research (and is not especially easy to read).

The book will a good read. Using a narrative in the style of a documentary film, Expositor meets with investigators, proceeds from clue to clue, skirts dead ends, and climaxes at a solution which reveals  the origin of the GS. As the story unfolds, it emerges that the chart is five centuries older than previously thought, probably drawn with disciplined skill and careful design in about 420 AD.

Expositor will propose that the GS was inspired not by maps or geometry, but by board games and the abacus, and relates how it was the progenitor of a 16th-century craze for genealogy as well as a remarkable Chinese chart, along with all our modern trees, timelines and mind-maps. The book culminates in a discussion of what it means to visualize information.

The Roman-era chart effectively invented a new technology, leading up to the graphic user interface used in every touch-screen today. I argue that diagrams and visual displays exploit the computing power of human vision to short-cut reasoning tasks. Cognitive science is only now able to grasp what a major shift in human culture this was. My research places that shift in the ancient world.

Michel and Marianne

A scala in Latin is a ladder. The German artist who drew the infographic below in 1965 must have had an education in the classics, because a ladder was the figure he chose as a matter of reflex to compare factory pay-scales around the globe.The dpa-infografik company recently re-issued it to mark its 70th anniversary in business.

-- dpa-infografik GmbH

As an information visualization this is fairly simple, setting up the vertical scale and scattering the data loosely to draw the reader in. The scattering is an early version of a technique known as the jitterplot, which is handily explained in this infographic from @joemako

These numbers are an education in what has changed in the world. Back then, US factory workers had the "good jobs" that have now been destroyed by Washington's economic policies. Curiously, German workers earned only half as much. I was surprised to see New Zealand workers were so high up. New Zealand did not feel particularly prosperous in those times. It was hard to buy quality goods. Availability of everything from cars to shoes was limited by a legal regime called import licensing.
Still, the numbers here supposedly factor all that in, comparing hourly rates of pay, converted to Deutschmarks and adjusting for differences in purchasing power. A US worker got 8.70 DM and an Indian worker 0.51 DM per hour.

The figures are types: Uncle Sam, a RCMP mountie, an English trawlerman, the typical German Deutscher Michel, an Austrian in gamsbart hat, a shapely French Marianne, an Argentinian gaucho, a Japanese salaryman, a Yugoslav miner and an Indian porter. In those days it was thought clever, not racist, to depict people by stereotype.

Imperial Handbook

Among the most precious documents to survive from late antiquity is the Notitia Dignitatum, a handbook to the Roman Empire's civil government and military structures as of about 400 CE.

It survived in a book known as the Codex Spirensis which vanished before 1672, but was copied out half a dozen times by interested readers. One of those copies, the Vatican's arrived online on July 7 and this is a major event for anyone interested in this extraordinary sourcebook. Dr Ingo Maier, who has spent many years studying the handbook, has a website devoted to many of its details.

Fairley's English partial translation of the text (1899) is online at Fordham. Online, you can compare the Vatican copy, Barb.lat.157 with three other online copies: the two in clm10291 in Munich and that in BNF lat. 9961 in Paris (jump to fol. 72r to begin reading the latter). As far as I know, the Trent codex is not online and from the Oxford codex, only the pictures are on the internet.

Below is the Vatican codex's copy of the Provincia Dalmatiae page, compared to the W copy (Munich) below it. It is plain that the Vatican copy is more fanciful and that the artist has willfully converted the town into an early modern one.

However the other manuscripts are hardly more accurate, as you will see from the Luke Ueda-Sarson Praeses Dalmatiae (i.e. Governor of Dalmatia) composite page. Many of the images, including the specific shields of the military units, require considerable expert interpretation to understand.

Even this figure of a coach and horses needs interpreting:

My especial personal interest in the Notitia is that the Codex Spirensis also preserved a major Roman legal diagram which acquired the medieval name arbor juris or arbor consanguinatis and which is among the important classical precursors to the invention of information visualization in late antiquity:

Here is the full list of 38 uploads by Digita Vaticana on July 7 bringing the posted total to 4,794

1. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.F.28 - Details
2. Barb.lat.157 - Notitia Dignitatum (above) - Details
3. Borg.copt.109.cass.XVIII.fasc.64 - Details
4. Capp.Giulia.XVI.16 - Details
5. Chig.H.VI.188 - Details
6. Ott.lat.1190 - Details
7. Vat.gr.186 - Details
8. Vat.lat.401 - Details
9. Vat.lat.424 - Details
10. Vat.lat.466 - Details
11. Vat.lat.534 - Details
12. Vat.lat.724 - Details
13. Vat.lat.751 - Details
14. Vat.lat.762 - Details
15. Vat.lat.764 - Details
16. Vat.lat.769 - Details
17. Vat.lat.774 - Details
18. Vat.lat.777 - Details
19. Vat.lat.798 - Details
20. Vat.lat.799 - Details
21. Vat.lat.800 - Details
22. Vat.lat.801 - Details
23. Vat.lat.802 - Details
24. Vat.lat.805 - Details
25. Vat.lat.806 - Details
26. Vat.lat.810 - Details
27. Vat.lat.811 - Details
28. Vat.lat.816 - Details
29. Vat.lat.817 - Details
30. Vat.lat.824 - Details
31. Vat.lat.825 - Details
32. Vat.lat.830, Details,
33. Vat.lat.839, Details,
34. Vat.lat.842, Details,
35. Vat.lat.843, Details,
36. Vat.lat.11543, Details,
37. Vat.lat.12939, Details,

This is Piggin's Unofficial List 59. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to Digita Vaticana.

Romantic Love

One might argue that western ideas of romantic love have their roots in certain ideas of the Renaissance, when the Roman poet Ovid was re-interpreted through a Christian lens and seen as a harbinger of courtly and noble love. In fact, Ovid was probably just a Boris Johnson of ancient Rome, a public school cad with a gift for words, and not a person particularly worth following.

The Vatican Library has just digitized an Epistulae of Ovid drawn ca. 1430-1440, possibly in northern Italy, which depicts in its margins ten pairs of lovers framing the start of each letter (see article by Rabel).

Leaf through Ross.893 to see them. Here for example is Leander of Abydos clutching the M of "Mittit Abydenus ..." like a shield as he writes in Heroides Letter 18 of his desire to swim long distance to see his girlfriend:

You can also admire him wearing a most extraordinary Italian Renaissance high hat as letter 19 arrives by return of post from lovely Hero:

Here is the full list of 32 digitizations uploaded on July 5, 2016:

1. Borg.copt.109.cass.IX.fasc.29 - Details
2. Borg.copt.109.cass.XIX.fasc.71 - Details
3. Borg.copt.109.cass.XIX.fasc.74 - Details
4. Borg.copt.109.cass.XVII.fasc.62 - Details
5. Borg.copt.109.cass.XVII.fasc.63 - biblical fragments including a page of Luke's Gospel - Details
6. Borg.copt.109.cass.XVIII.fasc.65.1 - Details
7. Borg.copt.109.cass.XVIII.fasc.66 - Details
8. Borg.copt.109.cass.XVIII.fasc.67 - Details
9. Borg.copt.109.cass.XVIII.fasc.68 - Details
10. Chig.H.VII.229 - Horace - Details
11. Ott.lat.3382 -historical? Armenia and Persia - Details
12. Ross.893 - Ovid, Epistulae (above) - Details
13. Urb.lat.679 - Rambaldi's commentary on Dante's Divine Comedy Details
14. Vat.lat.101 - glossed bible, later books Details
15. Vat.lat.293 - Ambrose, Details
16. Vat.lat.309 - John of Damascus, attrib. Details
17. Vat.lat.310 - John of Damascus, Chrysostom, Anselm - Details
18. Vat.lat.331 - Jerome on prophets, Details
19. Vat.lat.351 - Collection of Epistulae, Details
20. Vat.lat.652 - Johannes Scotus Eriugena and his famed exposition on the heavenly hierarchy, from which derives our modern use of "hierarchy" as a key abstraction - Details
21. Vat.lat.669 - Bernard of Clairvaux, Details
22. Vat.lat.687 - Augustine plus bits and bobs including this nifty circular calendar for 1401 onwards,
    
    
23. Vat.lat.690 - Peter Lombard, Sententiae Details
24. Vat.lat.699 - Psalms commentary attributed to Innocent III - Details
25. Vat.lat.708 - Albertus Magnus, bishop Regensburg, Summae theologiae, Details
26. Vat.lat.753 - Details
27. Vat.lat.794 - 14th century copy of Thomas Aquinas commentary on gospels. It seems from notes in it that Bermond de Montferrier, a Montpellier law professor was involved in transferring the codex to a convent in that city. With fine initial (below) showing the angelic doctor - Details
    
28. Vat.lat.812 - Franciscan sermons Details
29. Vat.lat.828 - works of Aegidius Romanus Details
30. Vat.lat.856 - Henry of Ghent, 15th century, first exemplar? Details
31. Vat.lat.12504 - letters of Enea Silvio Piccolomini, humanist, diplomat and pope, Details
32. Vat.lat.14741 - Giorgio Grippari's 1694 handwritten list of the printed books in the Biblioteca Vaticana. This is only initial letters A-B. Details

This is Piggin's Unofficial List 58. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to Digita Vaticana.

New BAV Portal

The Vatican's launch of a new portal for the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana reached maturity July 4 when the portal, which had been slowly filling since May, finally surpassed the old site in its posted total of content, reaching 4,724 items with the addition of thirty Hebrew manuscripts.

The numbers may still by slightly out of whack, with some subtotals not up to the old site's levels, but I would say that now is the time to change your links, begin using the new portal, and grin and bear its inadequacies. I have already built a whole new suite of searches with scripts to monitor it, and will no longer be monitoring the old site from now on.

Here is the full list of novelties, with notes taken from Malachi Beit-Arié's codicological descriptions:

1. Neofiti.4, Details
2. Neofiti.7, Details
3. Neofiti.9, Details
4. Neofiti.11, Details
5. Neofiti.14, Details
6. Neofiti.15, Details
7. Neofiti.22, Details
8. Neofiti.23, Details
9. Neofiti.24, Details
10. Neofiti.30, Details
11. Neofiti.31, Details
12. Neofiti.32, Details
13. Neofiti.34, Details
14. Neofiti.36, Details
15. Neofiti.40, Details
16. Neofiti.41, Details
17. Neofiti.43, Details
18. Neofiti.44, Details
19. Neofiti.45, Details
20. Neofiti.46, Details
21. Ross.328, Hebrew Details
22. Ross.359, Hebrew Details
23. Ross.362, Hebrew Details
24. Ross.363, Hebrew Details
25. Ross.436, Mahzor, Roman rite. Italy, about 1400. Details
26. Ross.477, Canon (Book II, Fens 1–2) by Avicenna, in the translation of Nathan ha-Meati. Details
27. Ross.599, Sefer Mizvot Gadol by Moses b. Jacob of Coucy. Incomplete. Details
28. Ross.601, Pentateuch, Former Prophets and treatises in Hebrew, written out by scribe Joseph b. Jacob ibn Janah in Huesca, Spain in 1275. Details
29. Ross.883, Hayyim b. Joseph Vital's kabbalistic work Ozerot Hayyim in an 18th-century Italian manuscript with this concentric diagram at fol. 1v. Details
    
30. Ross.1015, Genesis i:1–xxvi:32. Probably copied by a Christian hand. Details

This is Piggin's Unofficial List 57. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to Digita Vaticana.

Storm on a Pie Chart

Longtime German infographics company Globus has just re-released an entertaining pie-chart graphic from 1962 which harks back to the day when travelling outside your home country for a vacation was rather a foreign idea, but the economic miracle had creating this new option for middle-income Germans.

The artwork shows a German man in the inevitable Roman sandals smirking on a lounger with a Chianti wickerwork bottle next to him (Italy was the place Germans adored visiting). The graph says: "Per 100 adults in West Germany, 32 plan a holiday abroad this year," and offers a breakdown of why: better weather (8%); to meet foreigners (8%); see foreign sights (4%); it's cheaper (4%); get away from the same-old (4%); other (4%). The source of the survey data is not given.

-- dpa-infografik GmbH

Look closely for what has happened to the rest of the pie: it has vanished into a storm-cloud. Probably an allusion to the summer thunderstorms enjoyed by the stay-at-homes. Incomplete pies are not so common in infographics, but the artist took this liberty because pies were and still are common and familiar in German information visualization.

The art was released in 1962 with the ironic strapline: "Every third adult German wants to shake the dust of West Germany from their feet in the 1962 holiday season. But why? Are the attractions of Germany really used up? (Jeder dritte erwachsene Deutsche will im Urlaubsjahr 1962 den Staub der Bundesrepublik von seinen Füßen schütteln. Warum? Sind die Schönheiten Deutschlands schon allzu bekannt?)

A subtext that is not mentioned: East Germans were mostly forbidden to travel abroad. The Berlin Wall had just gone up. In later years they were able to visit Hungary and the Black Sea.

A Digital Library is a Tin Box

A digital library looks wonderful on screen, but did you ever wonder what the physical server looks like? A US company has published images of the servers it installed at the Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana for the new virtual library, and yes, they look like nothing more than a big black tin box:

Read the Panduit brochure for more information on the energy demands and cooling requirements of this installation in a secure room at the Vatican.

Of course the stacks of the library where the manuscripts are stored are not exactly beautiful to look at either. I have not seen them myself, but a blogger has photographed BAV posters showing them to consist of a great many rolling bookshelves under a bare concrete ceiling:

So now you know what goes on behind the scenes.

Trithemius, Graphic-Minded Historian

Tabulated chronicles have a special place in the history of infographics, since they convert a story into a semi-graph. They tabulate events so that our human vision can make sense of what normally has to be handled by human aural comprehension. A timeline may look natural and obvious to the reader, but is in fact the product of a great deal of research and arranging.

Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516), the pioneering literary historian, gets a prized place as the introductory figure at the start of Anthony Grafton's and Megan Hale Williams' Christianity and the transformation of the book: Origen, Eusebius and the library of Caesarea, a book that is a favorite of every classics+graphics reader.

He is important to the evolution of infographics because he thought tables and indices were not just "back-matter" but really do matter. On his outstanding work, I will quote from a Hill exhibition catalog:

The Annales of Hirsau, finished in 1514 ... was Trithemius’ greatest achievement as an historian. The work was commissioned in 1495 by Abbot Blasius of the monastery at Hirsau but proved to be a slow and complex undertaking. [His theory of history was] embraced by the Christian humanists, among whom Trithemius was a major figure [via the Wayback Machine].

Trithemius offered his readers different views of the same material so they could literally "figure it out": a narrative, an index, and an arrangement of all the events in date order in his autograph second recension (1514) which is online at the Bavarian State Library in Munich. Grafton/Hale see it as a modern beacon pointing back to inventions by Eusebius and Origen.

Complementing the Munich codices now is the first recension Trithemius wrote by his own hand 1495-1503, which lacks the tables, but opens with an index:

This famous first edition, Pal. lat. 929, part of the Vatican collection, has arrived online in the last few days thanks to the efforts of a program in Heidelberg, Germany to digitize the Pal. lat. collection. Here is the list of eight novelties (whereby Trithemius was on the tail of the last group, but I overlooked it at first):

1. Pal. lat. 745 Infortiatum (14. Jh.)
2. Pal. lat. 746 Infortiatum (13. Jh.)
3. Pal. lat. 749 Digestum novum (14. Jh.)
4. Pal. lat. 750 Digestum novum (13.-14. Jh.)
5. Pal. lat. 751 Digestum novum (13.-14. Jh.)
6. Pal. lat. 752 Digestum novum (13.-14. Jh.)
7. Pal. lat. 753 Digestum novum (13. Jh.)
8. Pal. lat. 929 Trithemius, Johannes: Chronicon insigne monasterii Hirsaugiensis ordinis S. Benedicti (Sponheim, 1495-1503)

This is Piggin's Unofficial List 56. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to Digita Vaticana.

Language of Jesus

Half of this week's 98 DigitaVaticana digitizations are books in various forms of Aramaic, famously the language spoken by Jesus. In scholarship and librarianship, old manuscripts in Aramaic are described as "Syriac," whereby as far as I know no especial connection to Syria or to a particular Syriac-liturgy church is intended. It's simply from the classical Latin word for Aramaic.

Aramaic was once spoken over vast swatches of the Middle East, has many dialects and has left "Syriac" liturgical and literary texts which are so antiquated as to be unintelligible to most of the dwindling number of speakers of modern colloquial Aramaic.

The latest round of digitizations (which began June 20 and was completed June 22) brings the posted total to 4,708 manuscripts. The count on the new front page of the portal is currently just 4,595. Actual availability is somewhere between those two numbers. About a third of the following list was triggering "Client Error" when I put up this post, but this can only get better.

You will notice that I am now doing extra work for you, dear reader, processing the links so that the first link leads directly to the manuscript front page while the "Details" link leads to a catalog page.

Obtaining permalinks to specific manuscript page remains a major headache, as one now has to guess them. The method involves noting the folio number, doubling it, adding 6 and converting it to a three-digit format, then writing it on the end of the URL, testing it, correcting it, etc. No fun.

[Late add: Digi has just added a JPEG download button which you can now creatively mis-use to discover the permalink with less effort. On a page you want to refer to, press the JPEG icon, then hover over the "Download" button and you will see the page number in the browser's status bar.]

1. Borg.ar.129, Details,
2. Borg.ebr.3, Details,
3. Borg.ebr.4, Details,
4. Borg.ebr.10, Details,
5. Borg.ebr.12, Details,
6. Borg.ebr.13, Details,
7. Borg.ebr.20, Details,
8. Borg.sir.28, Details,
9. Borg.sir.67, Details,
10. Borg.sir.74, Details,
11. Borg.sir.93, Details,
12. Borg.sir.112, Details,
13. Borg.sir.117, Details,
14. Borg.sir.160, Details,
15. Borg.sir.169, Details,
16. Chig.R.VI.37, an early 15th century-Hebrew bible, Details,
17. Ott.gr.14.pt.2, Details,
18. Reg.lat.1988, Vergil's Georgics in a Renaissance manuscript with this opening. Details.
    
    
19. Ross.604, Seneca, with this opening. Details
    
20. Urb.ebr.59, Details,
21. Urb.gr.82, key manuscript of Geography of Ptolemy, full blog post separately - Details,
22. Urb.gr.149, Details,
23. Vat.ar.32, Details,
24. Vat.ar.158, Details,
25. Vat.ar.317, Details,
26. Vat.copt.1, Details,
27. Vat.copt.6, Details,
28. Vat.ebr.17, Details,
29. Vat.ebr.151, Details,
30. Vat.ebr.152, Details,
31. Vat.ebr.153, Details,
32. Vat.ebr.154, Details,
33. Vat.ebr.155, Details,
34. Vat.ebr.157, Details,
35. Vat.ebr.159, Details,
36. Vat.ebr.168, Details,
37. Vat.ebr.169, Hebrew divorce bills, 15th century. Details.
38. Vat.ebr.172, Details,
39. Vat.ebr.174, Details,
40. Vat.ebr.177, Details,
41. Vat.ebr.182, Details,
42. Vat.ebr.185, Details,
43. Vat.gr.2220, Details,
44. Vat.lat.428, Augustine, City of God, 11th/12th century. Details.
45. Vat.lat.654, Details,
46. Vat.lat.655, Details,
47. Vat.lat.665, Details,
48. Vat.lat.680, Details,
49. Vat.lat.763, Details,
50. Vat.lat.768, Details,
51. Vat.lat.770, Details,
52. Vat.lat.776, Details,
53. Vat.lat.1645, Details, another Seneca with very beautiful scenes in the initials, like this princess on a cellphone on fol 67r:
    
54. Vat.lat.2194, Details,
55. Vat.lat.4781, Details,
56. Vat.lat.8210, Details,
57. Vat.lat.9967, Details,
58. Vat.lat.9974, Details,
59. Vat.sir.1, Details,
60. Vat.sir.14, Details,
61. Vat.sir.16, Details,
62. Vat.sir.20.pt.1, Details,
63. Vat.sir.20.pt.2, Details,
64. Vat.sir.21, Details,
65. Vat.sir.22, Details,
66. Vat.sir.23, Details,
67. Vat.sir.24, Details,
68. Vat.sir.148, Details,
69. Vat.sir.152, Details,
70. Vat.sir.154.pt.1, The older parts of this date from the 8th or 9th century and contain a commentary on the Gospel of Matthew which George of Beeltan wrote while he was imprisoned in Baghdad in about the year 770. George was patriarch of Antioch 758-790 and his citations of earlier theologians such as Julius Africanus are useful in recovering that deeper past. Details,
71. Vat.sir.154.pt.2, ditto, Details.
72. Vat.sir.155, This contains writings of Mar George or Georgi, bishop of the Arab Tribes (died 724), a philosopher and scholar. Details,
73. Vat.sir.156.pt.1, Details,
74. Vat.sir.156.pt.2, including this structure on folio 187v: Details,
    
75. Vat.sir.182, Details,
76. Vat.sir.203, Details,
77. Vat.sir.216, Details,
78. Vat.sir.266, Details,
79. Vat.sir.267, Details,
80. Vat.sir.272, Details,
81. Vat.sir.273, Details,
82. Vat.sir.275, Details,
83. Vat.sir.278, Details,
84. Vat.sir.279, Details,
85. Vat.sir.447, Details,
86. Vat.sir.470, Details,
87. Vat.sir.471, Details,
88. Vat.sir.502, Details,
89. Vat.sir.508, Details,
90. Vat.sir.510, Details,
91. Vat.sir.525, Details,
92. Vat.sir.540, Details,
93. Vat.sir.556, Details,
94. Vat.sir.578, Details,
95. Vat.sir.596, Details,
96. Vat.sir.622, Details,
97. Vat.turc.145, Details,
98. Vat.turc.388, Details, 

This is Piggin's Unofficial List 55. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to Digita Vaticana.

12 Greatest TextArch News Stories

I posted last week on the fuss over The Gospel of Jesus's Wife, where the new evidence overwhelmingly indicates this tiny papyrus at Harvard University is a forgery.

That prompted me to look for a list of great news stories in the past few years about the archaeology of text, that is to say, recognizing by intelligent reading that a found historical text or diagram attaches to a noted author or a previously unsuspected context. There isn't any list I can find that spans ancient, medieval and modern, so I have compiled one for your reading pleasure.

In this 21st-century tally of great recent #TextArch news stories in date order: the years are of the media attention, not of the discoveries:

1. Troyes ms. 1452 contains 113 anonymous love letters attributable to Héloïse and Abelard (2000 book reviews)
   
2. BAV Vat. sir. 623 contains an unknown comedy by Menander palimpsested with Dyscolus (Harlfinger 2003; Pearse 2011)
3. Artemidorus Papyrus (below) contains only known ancient Greek topographical map (2006 exhibition)
   
4. Archimedes Palimpsest found to contain lost Stomachion and The Method of Mechanical Theorems by Archimedes, Against Timandra and Against Diondas by Hyperides (2007 book)
5. Vlatadon 14 found to contain Galen's lost On Consolation from Grief (2010 Libé; Pearse)
6. Munich BSB cod. graec. 314 found to contain lost Homilies on Psalms of Origen (2012; edition)
7. Papyrus lent to Harvard claimed to contain an unknown Gospel of Jesus's Wife (2012; discredited 2016)
8. Copiale Cipher (book in private ownership?) decoded and linked to German Oculists (2012)
9. Cod. Hierosolymitanus Sancti Sepulcri 36 found to contain a lost text of Euripides (2013)
10. Green Collection cartonnage said to contain portions of two poems by Sappho (2014)
11. Sulaymaniyah Museum Tablet T.1447 revealed to contain 20 lost lines of Gilgamesh (2015)
    
12. Paris BNF NAL 3245 (below) identified as a lost Vita of Francis of Assisi by Thomas de Celano (2015)
    

And next year? Maybe the publication of my book disclosing that an unsuspected Roman-era chart of genealogies and timelines has been reconstructed from segments in medieval manuscripts and turns out to be the world's oldest information visualization. Let me know now (by comments or by Twitter) if this is a book you would want to read or spread word about!

The criteria for my list above (and these all concern the identification of a text or a diagram, not the finding of the support on which the text is written) are:

• the text or diagram lacks any author's name or date;
• scientifically tenable grounds are advanced for the attribution;
• the work is famed: either lost or altering our knowledge of the past;
• stories of it had to crop up over several days in major news media.

I suspect these bunch in years because we in the media tend to re-enact memes, then grow weary of them. A recent article in The Guardian, John Dugdale lists celebrated refindings of 20th-century works in a sudden 2015 rush, which I think tends to support my explanation. I nearly included two great media feasts of 2006:

1. Linking of the anonymous Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things to Percy Bysshe Shelley, but that was essentially about finding the sole surviving printed copy
2. Launch of Antikythera Mechanism project, culminating in this year's Almagest 7/1 edition, but that is essentially an artefact story.

There's also a list at Oxford including some more obscure Graeco-Roman rediscoveries.

And what would you add to my list?

Top TextArch Story of 2016

The general news media only pick up on text-archaeology stories once a year at most. The big story of 2012 was the emergence of a piece of papyrus containing what was supposedly a gnostic gospel with a saying by Jesus referring to "my wife." It looks like the huger story of 2016 will be the emergence of damning doubts about the provenance of that snippet.

Late on June 15, The Atlantic published an investigative story by Ariel Sabar linking the papyrus to Walter Fritz, a German man now living in Florida who has studied egyptology. Take the time to read this story, as it is likely to go down in history as one of the great pieces of text-archaeology journalism.

Christian Askeland writes in a comment on the usually authoritative Evangelical Text Criticism blog that Sabar was not in fact the first to identify Fritz as principal in the matter or flag his knowledge of Coptic, but adds in praise, "Sabar’s work is clearly original. The large majority of his presentation is material uniquely discovered by him."

A Google New search indicates French and Dutch media have reported this now, but the retail German news media have yet to pick up on this amazing back story, which has yet another back story behind it: the employment of Mr Fritz as director of the Stasi Museum in Berlin when he was 27 years old in 1991-92. The German freelance journalist involved, Petra Krischok, does not mention the story on her website.

What's also very striking to me as a journalist is how hugely difficult under restrictive German laws it would have been to expose this story if it had happened in Germany: the Fritz trail through company incorporations, land ownership and so on would have been unsearchable. All of this public registry data is treated as confidential under Germany's ridiculous Datenschutz laws. The new EU "right to be forgotten" law makes it even harder to track what someone did in 1991.

As a law grad I would also be interested to hear discussion of whether any of the alleged actions during the production of this papyrus to Professor Karen King of Harvard could possibly constitute a crime.

And as an observer of life, I am struck by the psychological issues here. Sabar suggests that King, so academically gifted, is perhaps a poor judge of real life. Watch Sabar on the video which is entitled "To Catch a Forger" (did The Atlantic's lawyer really okay that?) and you'll see that he is very much the writer, a bit shy. Read the quotes from Fritz and you are struck by the great emotional intelligence of such a person, able to yield slivers of truth in a patient bid to convince someone of falsity. The next step I guess is for one of the great tiger interviewers of the business to get Fritz into a TV studio.

A for Andrew

The latest round of Heidelberg digitizations of the Palatine manuscripts at the Vatican includes this fine A for Andrew initial on folio 1r. of Pal.lat.850, a 15th-century book of saints arranged by feast day:

You can see it on the Bibliotheca Palatina website, along with 15 other recent digitizations, the majority of them lawbooks.

1. Pal. lat. 721,1 (Guilelmi de sancto Amore) collatio catholice et canonice scripture: Band 1 (1514)
2. Pal. lat. 721,2 (Guilelmi de sancto Amore) collatio catholice et canonice scripture: Band 2 (1514)
3. Pal. lat. 728 Tractatus inscriptus manu saec. XV: de regimine principum (14. Jh.)
4. Pal. lat. 741 Digestum vetus (13.-14. Jh.)
5. Pal. lat. 743 Infortiatum (14. Jh.)
6. Pal. lat. 760 Codicis Iustiniani imp. libri IX (14. Jh.)
7. Pal. lat. 763 Codicis Iustiniani imp. libri IX (14. Jh.)
8. Pal. lat. 764 Codicis Iustiniani imp. libri IX (13. Jh.)
9. Pal. lat. 765 Codicis Iustiniani imp. (14. Jh.)
10. Pal. lat. 768 Institutiones Iustiniani imp. (14. Jh.)
11. Pal. lat. 769 Institutiones Iustiniani imp. (13. Jh.)
12. Pal. lat. 770 Institutiones Iustiniani imp. (15. Jh.)
13. Pal. lat. 774 Liber statutorum et legum Venetorum illustris Iacobi Teupuli incliti ducis Venec (14. Jh.)
14. Pal. lat. 781 Summa de edendo que dicitur Oli (12.-13. Jh.)
15. Pal. lat. 782 Summa decretalium (13.-14. Jh.)
16. Pal. lat. 850 Sammelband (15. und 16. Jh.)

This is Piggin's Unofficial List number 54. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to Digita Vaticana.