British Library posts Greek manuscripts to Web

By RAPHAEL G. SATTER 

LONDON — One of the world's most important caches of Greek manuscripts is going online, part of a growing number of ancient documents to hit the Web in recent years.

The British Library said Monday that it was making more than a quarter of its 1,000 volume-strong collection of handwritten Greek texts available online free of charge, something curators there hope will be a boon to historians, biblical scholars and students of classical Greece alike.

Although the manuscripts — highlights of which include a famous collection of Aesopic fables discovered on Mount Athos in 1842 — have long been available to scholars who made the trip to the British Library's reading rooms, curator Scot McKendrick said their posting to the web was opening antiquity to the entire world.
McKendrick said that London could be an expensive place to spend time poring over the Greek texts' tiny, faded script or picking through hundreds of pages of parchment.

"Not every scholar can afford to come here weeks and months on end," he said. The big attraction of browsing the texts online "is the ability to do it at your own desk whenever you wish to do it — and do it for free as well."

Although millions of books have been made available online in recent years — notably through Google Books' mass scanning program — ancient texts have taken much longer to emerge from the archives.

They don't suffer from the copyright issues complicating efforts to post contemporary works to the Web, but their fragility makes them tough to handle. They have to be carefully cracked open and photographed one page at a time, a process the British Library said typically costs about 1 pound ($1.50) per page.
John Franklin, an associate professor of classics at the University of Vermont, said that the British Library's efforts were "part of a quite general move to making manuscripts available online."

"Hundreds of institutions have done or are doing the same," he said, including his university.

Franklin said it was "wonderful that the general public can have an intimate view of so many manuscripts," but stressed the material's academic applications, noting that it could serve as a teaching aid for students learning to unravel medieval Greek handwriting, for example.

The British Library has worked aggressively to put much of its collection on the Internet, from 19th-century newspapers to the jewels of its collection — The Lindisfarne Gospels, a selection of Leonardo da Vinci's sketches and the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest surviving complete copy of the Christian Bible.
The library's Greek manuscript project was funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, which supports Greek-related initiatives in arts and culture.
Another batch of about 250 documents is due to be published online in 2012.
___
Online:
The British Library: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts
The Stavros Niarchos Foundation: http://www.snf.org

Source: Associated Press

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Halley's comet 'was spotted by the ancient Greeks'

A celestial event seen by the ancient Greeks may be the earliest sighting of Halley's comet, new evidence suggests. According to ancient writers, a large meteorite smacked into northern Greece between 466BC and 467BC. The writers also described a comet in the sky at the time the meteorite fell to Earth, but this detail has received little attention, say the researchers.

Comet Halley would have been visible for about 80 days in 466BC, researchers write in the Journal of Cosmology. New Scientist magazine reports that, until now, the earliest probable sighting of the comet was an orbit in 240BC, an event recorded by Chinese astronomers.

If the new findings are confirmed, the researchers will have pushed back the date of the first observation of Comet Halley by 226 years. The latest idea is based on accounts by ancient authors and concerns a meteorite that is said to have landed in the Hellespont region of northern Greece in 466-467BC.

The space rock fell during daylight hours and was about the size of "a wagon load", according to ancient sources. The object, described as having a "burnt colour", became a tourist attraction for more than 500 years.

In his work Meteorology, Aristotle wrote about the event about a century after it occurred. He said that around the same time the meteorite fell, "a comet was visible in the west".

Astronomer Eric Hintz and philosopher Daniel Graham, both of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, reconstructed the likely path of Halley's comet, to see whether it agreed with the ancient observations.

They calculated that Halley's comet could have been visible for about 80 days between early June and late August in 466BC - depending on atmospheric conditions and the darkness of the sky.

"It's tough going back that far in time. It's not like an eclipse, which is really predictable," co-author Eric Hintz, from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, told BBC News.

"But we feel fairly good about this. If the [sighting] in 240BC is accepted, this has a fairly solid possibility." He added: "If accepted, this would be three orbits earlier [than the Chinese sighting]."Halley's Comet on the Bayeux Tapestry (Getty) In the 11th Century, Halley's Comet was depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry. The reconstruction of the comet's path agrees with the ancient reports, which say the comet was visible for about 75 days.

The researchers point out that while the Chinese and Babylonians kept meticulous records of heavenly phenomena for centuries, the ancient Greeks did not.Nevertheless, the Greek accounts do provide important information, say Graham and Hintz, such as the comet's period of visibility from Earth.

Source <www.bbc.co.uk>

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Highest Paid Athlete of All Time

Last fall, Forbes magazine was all atwitter as Tiger Woods closed in on becoming “the first athlete to earn over $1 billion” in the course of his career. Presumably his fortunes will now start to droop, but Forbes missed the mark—taking the long view, Tiger was never all that well paid to begin with when compared with the charioteers of ancient Rome.

rivers were drawn from the lower orders of society.They affiliated with teams supported by large businesses that invested heavily in training and upkeep of the horses and equipment. The colors of the team jerseys provided them with names, and fans would often hurl violent enthusiasms, as well as lead curse amulets punctured with nails, at the Reds, Blues, Whites, and Greens.

The equipment consisted of a leather helmet, shin guards, chest protector, a jersey, whip, and a curved knife—handy for cutting opponents who got too close or to cut themselves loose from entangling reins in case of a fall. They adopted a Greek style of long curly hair protruding from under their helmets and festooned their horses’ manes with ribbons and jewels. Races started when the emperor dropped his napkin and a hapless referee would try to keep order from horseback. After seven savage laps, those who managed not to be upended or killed and finish in the top three took home prizes.

The very best paid of these—in fact, the best paid athlete of all time—was a Lusitanian Spaniard named Gaius Appuleius Diocles, who had short stints with the Whites and Greens, before settling in for a long career with the Reds. Twenty-four years of winnings brought Diocles—likely an illiterate man whose signature move was the strong final dash—the staggering sum of 35,863,120 sesterces in prize money. The figure is recorded in a monumental inscription erected in Rome by his fellow charioteers and admirers in 146, which hails him fulsomely on his retirement at the age of “42 years, 7 months, and 23 days” as “champion of all charioteers.”

By today’s standards that last figure, assuming the apt comparison is what it takes to pay the wages of the American armed forces for the same period, would cash out to about $15 billion.

Source <www.lapshamquarterly.org>

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