Philolog

The work underway using X-ray fluorescence to tease out information from the Archimedes palimpsest is back in the news.

Jonathan Fildes of the BBC reports this concerning the text and its "excavation" which is taking place at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lab:

Until now, the pages have remained obscured by paintings and texts laid down on top of the original writings.

Using a non-destructive technique known as X-ray fluorescence, the researchers are able to peer through these later additions to read the underlying text.

The goatskin parchment records key details of Archimedes work, considered the foundation of modern mathematics.

The writings include the only Greek version of On Floating Bodies known to exist, and the only surviving ancient copies of The Method of Mechanical Theorems and the Stomachion.

In the treatises, the 3rd Century mathematician develops numerical descriptions of the real world.

"Archimedes was like no one before him," says Will Noel, curator of manuscripts and rare books at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland and director of the imaging project.

"It just doesn't get any better than rereading the mind of one of the greatest figures of Western civilisation."

Considered by some as the "eighth wonder of the world" a live webcast of the researchers revealing some of the original Greek will be shown at 4:00 pm PDT on 4 August.

Continue reading the BBC article here.

Posted by Christopher Witmore at 10:29 AM | Permalink

Well now, this looks like it might be the first post on the first scholarly blog in classical philology. So I might as well start by asking, "Were there weblogs in the ancient world?" Or rather, equivalents?

What, o Socrates, /is/ a blog? First of all, a blog is chronological discourse, organised by day and hour. It is continuous, but episodic. It may be collaborative (like this blog) or exclusive (with a single author); it provokes comment from its readers, whose comments become part of the blog and in turn stimulate new comment; yet all is centered on the post as an (expansive) entity.

Perhaps, in ancient terms, the blog most resembles epic poetry. Epic, too, is episodic; and the basic idea behind each episode (eg. "Heracles slew the beast with his sword") would stimulate expansion by later tongues ("Tell me, goddess, the genealogy of the best . . ." or "The forging of the sword"). Of course, epic expansion would involve the total reworking of each post every time someone commented upon it -- the later version erased the earlier. So the analogy breaks down.

Perhaps, rather, the blog is like a /catena/ - a Late Antique multi-sourced commentary on a canonical text, by means of which a manuscript would bring, say, Zigabenus', Theophylact's, and Cyril the Alexandrian's commentaries on the Gospel of Luke onto a single page, "indexed" by chapter or passage. This analogy works even in terms of physical medium - the script of exegesis typically being smaller (say, 6pt) than the script of the canonical text (say, 10pt), just as comments tend to be in small-sized Arial font. The difficulty with a "canonical" analogy is that the blog is always in the process of being written; it never achieves a definitive form, and comments posted too many days after the original post tend to be disregarded: the blog's readership has moved on. This entirely contradicts the idea of the canon.

Perhaps, rather, the blog is like a long day in the Ecclesia? The strategos, say, makes a long and interesting speech (the post), and the citizens rise without regard to rank or race or ready money, each tacking on his impassioned, sometimes irrational comment on the main event? The comment section is certainly volatile, like the Athenian demos: inclined to overrate Sicily, destined to irritate Plato. And the principle of the Ecclesia is non-telic: it will continue forever, just like a blog, addressing whatever the moment requires.

Posted by Jack Mitchell at 9:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)