@petertarras
Postdoc @jacculturelmu.bsky.social | Blog: http://medisi.hypotheses.org | Book History | Manuscript Studies | Provenance | MENA Intellectual History | SciCom | #FirstGen https://www.naher-osten.uni-muenchen.de/personen/wiss_ma/peter-tarras/index.html
Join us next Thursday, 12 March at 10 AM CET for the paper:
Gabrielle Russo (Ghent University)
•Regional Panegyric and the Tulunid Dynasty•
If you are not yet on our mailing list, please register w/
@andyhilkens.bsky.social
“A Clear Account of the Codex Simonideios:” Ideological Infrastructures of Biblical Vulnerability in the Nineteenth Century In: Philological Encounters Author: Andrew S. Jacobs Online Publication Date: 24 Feb 2026 Abstract Metadata References Metrics Abstract Soon after Constantin Tischendorf (1815–74) publicized his “discovery” of the Codex Sinaiticus, notorious manuscript broker (and forger) Konstantinos Simonides stunned elite literary circles by announcing that Simonides himself had produced this biblical codex in his youth as a gift for the Russian tsar. Simonides claimed that his “Codex Simonideios” was illicitly being passed off as an ancient biblical codex after being mutilated and disfigured. I argue that this brief but explosive debate about manuscripts, forgeries, and “find” narratives produces a biblical text liable to revision and emendation, due to new discoveries or new methods, and so vulnerable to mischievous actors manipulating the possibilities of new discoveries and methods. The iterative process of attack and defense on display in this codicological debate has remained, in various guises, from collegial disagreement to scorched earth campaigns, an ideological component of critical biblical studies.
well helloooooo
brill.com/view/journal...
Detail of untrimmed pages with very uneven appearance
Stil life of untrimmed pages with proof corrections of the Polyglot bible
#rarebooks #earlymodern #bookhistory 📚📜💙
Exploring a 19th c. Latin catalogue our colleague Dr. Gleb Sharygin discovered the deep passion of Indologists of Romantic era like A.W. Schlegel (1767-1845) who did not just study #Sanskrit but also hand-copied mss. to incorporate ancient wisdom into the Eur. scholarship. 1/2
doi.org/10.58079/15so6
Image of a Roman tablet (fragment) over a dark background
The #Bloomberg tablets are 405 #Roman writing tablets found in London. One tablet reads "Londinio Mogontio,". This reference to #London is dated to 65-80 AD, about fifty years before Tacitus mentions London in his Annals.
📷: Udimu, CC BY-SA 4.0 < zurl.co/g54Y8>, via Wikimedia Commons
In der neuen Veranstaltungsreihe „Schätze des Wissens – arabische Handschriften im Dialog“ spricht Prof. Beatrice Gründler (#FUBerlin) am 12. März über die Überlieferungen der berühmten Fabelsammlung "Kalila und Dimna". Alle Infos 👉 sbb.berlin/6qf1l
A text worthy of a few notes: the beginning of Homer's Iliad
BL Burney MS 86; Townley Homer: Iliad of Homer, with extensive marginal and interlinear scholia; ?1059 CE; f.1r
Brief presentation of the project by Dan Batovici for AIEP/IAPS, with a preview of the ERC CoG CLAIM project that will start in September.
Many thanks Lavinia Cerioni for the kind invitation!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMCo...
"Make people dependent enough, and then make it shitty"
Still giggling at this hilarious video from the Norwegian Consumer Council "A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator" which seems a perfect embodiment of Silicon Valley and tech generally these days
www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Up...
Page titled "indigo" discussing its use in the medieval islamic world and the differences between using it as a dye or as a paint, with photographic samples of both below a photo of a lump of indigo
One of the updated pages from my book in progress, avec more visual samples. Very pleased.
Let me echo this: the future ghosts enslaved to AI forever are made from the stolen texts and images, and knowledge, and human work in general. If you are a writer or artist, you’ll be an AI ghost parroting weird content tomorrow.
Gotta love how academic books don't earn you money, but LLMs can make money off of stealing them in the aggregate and if you write enough, they can also profit from stealing your personality after you are dead.
This is not just cursed, its monstrous. The digital resurrection of a historian who died in January of this year, all so Grammarly can get some more clicks and engagement from students and/or scholars and/or others.
It feels so wrong on so many levels, these ghosts enslaved to AI forever
This is a really good book. #amreading #again
The Epistle of Christ from Heaven in an 7th/8th or 9th cent. inscription once embedded in wall in the Church of S. Maria Assunta in Piazzo (Italy). Now in the Museo diocesano of Brugnato.
Going to give a brief talk on "AI" this week, which made me come back to this:
Jeremiah Coogan, "Uses and Abuses of the Gospel(s) according to the Hebrews." Friday, March 6, 2026 at 12:00 EST. Register at nasscalworkshop@gmail.com.
Join us March 6 for the latest First Friday Christian Apocrypha Workshop with Jeremiah Coogan (Jesuit School of Theology).
I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.
Obvious ai manipulation on the left. Original photo by David Batcheller on the right. Look at the wings, feather shape, head, neck and bill shape, lack of tail etc. This is way more than a filter and absolutely destroys the joy and wonder of the original.
So loads of people are sharing an obvious ai "glow up" of an actual photo. I never share ai stuff even to dunk, but in this case I'm sharing a comparison to show the problem. We have to stand against this slop at every level or it becomes normalised. They want us to stop caring. See alt text.
I think this Arabic version is rather close to the third Syriac version published by Nestle here:
Here's the corresponding passage, not from a Synaxary, but the earliest (?) attestation of an Arabic translation of the Helena legend (MS Bryn Mawr BV 69, f. 50r, ll. 1-2:)
وانها [الانه] خرجت من روميه بعسكر كبير وقوه عظيمه حتا صارت الى بيت المقدس
openn.library.upenn.edu/Data/0003/ht...
Excerpt from 'The Illustrated Cairo Genizah', page 33: "This is the end of the biblical book of Nehemiah, written in Hebrew and vocalised with the Babylonian vowel system. In contrast to the Palestinian and Tiberian systems – which mainly used dots to represent vowel sounds – the Babylonian system also used miniature Hebrew letters for vowels and accents. Like the Palestinian system, the Babylonian vowel signs fell out of favour with the rise of the Tiberian system. This fragment includes a colophon (in the middle of the lefthand page) from a scribe named Joseph ben Nimorad, stating that he copied the book in a town in Iran in the year 903/904 CE. This makes it one of the earliest known dated Hebrew manuscripts. While Joseph was a member of the Jewish diaspora community that lived in Iraq and Iran, eventually someone carried his manuscript to Egypt." Image and catalogue description here: https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-TS-NS-00246-00026-00002/1
This is a fragment from the oldest Hebrew Bible manuscript with a given date of production. It's the end of the book of Nehemiah, pointed with Babylonian vowel signs. A Jewish scribe named Joseph ben Nimorad completed it in 903/4 CE at Gunbad-i-Mallgan (modern Dogonbadan, Iran).
Julia Doroszewska (UW) on Subversive Sainthood: Late Antique Hagiography as Evidence for Religious Mentality - at Warsaw Late Antique Seminar on 5 March 2026, 4.45 p.m. Warsaw time.
Here's the recording for the book launch of our second 4T book. Hear Fabien Muller and Aaron Johnson discuss Porphyry, theology, theurgy, and more!
Before Segal, there was Duval.
3 book covers: The Warehouse of Bamiyan, Persian World Histories in the Mongol Era and The Rise and Fall of the Barmakids
🎉The first 3 books have now published in The Islamicate East series, edited by @arezouazad.bsky.social, Hugh Kennedy and Teresa Bernheimer🎉 @invisibleeast.bsky.social
Find out more at edinburghuniversitypress.com/series-the-i...
My (free) website for learning to read from Greek manuscripts is available. Still some tweaks to be made but it’s ready with 12 lessons, tips and hints, downloadable reports if you use it for a class, and links to lots of resources.
Please share and give feedback!
xeirographa.com
Chinese landscape painting with a sage
It's #HoPWaG time again! Today we look at the theme of "wandering" in the Zhuangzi, comparing this to Thomas Nagel's idea of "philosophical absurdity."
www.historyofphilosophy.net/zhuangzi-wan...
#philsky #philosophy #podcasts #daoism #zhuangzi
Truly psychopathic stuff.