Aramaic Tattoo Critique - Actually, not too shabby. :-)

A potential customer brought this tattoo to my attention. Overall it's not too bad. It's completely legible and all in the right order (bravo!). There are -- however -- a few things that need to be addressed:

1. Half of the small number of things that rub me the wrong way is the inconsistent use of diacritical marks. There is only one seyame (plural marker; the two little dots above a short letter) in the entire design, and when you use seyame in one place, it's customary to use it throughout the document.
2. Another stray diacritical mark is a dot under the ܟ (kaf) in ܡܠܟܘܬܟ (malkuthakh = "your kingdom"). Here, this mark's purpose is to indicate that the ܟ (kaf) is pronounced soft (like ch in Bach). Again, if you use it in one place, you're expected to use it throughout the document unless it is specifically to disambiguate places where it's not obvious. (Which this is not.)
3. Next, we have another stray dot under ܡܢ (men = "from") as well as a final ܡ (mim) at the beginning of a word. A dot could occur here in un-marked texts to disambiguate ܡܢ (men) from ܡܢ (man = "who"), but again, it's inconsistent and unnecessary in this context.
4. Finally, there is a case of incorrect word division, which given its position (a descender right above an ascender, which could potentially overlap) is excusable, but there are other ways to resolve overlapping writing than this.

However, these errors aside, this is one of the better Syriac Lord's Prayer spirals that I have seen that I did not aid in typesetting (and I know that sounds like I'm tooting my own horn... but seriously it personally pains me when I see avoidable mistakes). :-)

Peace,

-Steve

Géza Vermes (1924-2013)

Sadly, the field of Biblical Studies has lost a great scholar: [1] [2]

Géza Vermes

בשלמיה
(Rest in Peace)

Peace,

-Steve

Meanwhile in the Mandaic Book of John...

Sometimes the scribe simply couldn't make up their mind what they were trying to write...

For those of you who aren't familiar with the Mandaic alphabet, here's a better illustration:

Quite sloppy. I'm still trying to figure out how to represent this with sigla...

Luckily the scribe just gave up and re-wrote it from scratch as the next word. :-)

UPDATE: Here's how it looked in the manuscript where we can see that the scribe just gave up and started over:

/mlalkun/ "your (pl.) speech" was intended as you can see. :-)

Peace,
-Steve

For Christian Brady

In honor of Chris Brady (aka "Targuman")'s brand new Facebook photo. :-)

Peace,
-Steve

A Curious Inscription

Curious.... 

Very curious... That's *awfully* familiar... :-)

Peace,
-Steve

"New experiments on [the Shroud of Turin] show it’s not medieval" -- What??

The numbers 'mitre' be wishful thinking.

"The new tests carried out in the University of Padua labs were carried out by a number of university professors from various Italian universities and agree that the Shroud dates back to the period when Jesus Christ was crucified in Jerusalem. Final results show that the Shroud fibres examined produced the following dates, all of which are 95% certain and centuries away from the medieval dating obtained with Carbon-14 testing in 1988: the dates given to the Shroud after FT-IR testing, is 300 BC ±400, 200 BC ±500 after Raman testing and 400 AD ±400 after multi-parametric mechanical testing. The average of all three dates is 33 BC  ±250 years."

Pardon my exasperation as I usually do not comment on such things here -- especially in a vulgar manner as this -- but:

no.. no.. No.. NO.. NO! This is not how you average dating tests!

All three tests are completely inconsistent with one another, and due to this large swath of inconsistency should be thrown out (and would be thrown out by your average statistician). Think about it: The collective margins of error min-max to 700 BC to 800 AD -- Or about 1500 years of uncertainty.

Averaging them the way the author did falls victim to the so-called Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.

In essence, it's hole-y argument, not a holy one. Wholly. :-)

If you want to know more about some more serious Shroud of Turin research, I suggest that you go read the work of Antonio Lombatti (blog, turin search). His commentary can be a bit biting at times, but he's quite the expert on it.

Peace,
-Steve


UPDATE: Archbishop Cesare Nosiglia (The Archbishop of Turin and custodian of the Shroud) has come out against these test results, saying that the provenance of the cloth that Fanti and Gaeta tested is squiffy and probably did not come from the Shroud at all:

"Non essendoci nessun grado di sicurezza sull'appartenenza dei materiali sui quali sarebbero stati eseguiti detti esperimenti al lenzuolo sindonico - si legge in una nota di monsignor Nosiglia - la proprietà e la custodia dichiarano di non poter riconoscere alcun serio valore ai risultati di tali pretesi esperimenti." - [Ansa.it]

Roughly (as my Italian is a bit rusty):

"Since there is no degree of certainty as to whether the materials upon which these experiments were carried out belonged to the Shroud -- says a statement from [Archbishop] Nosiglia -- the custodian declares they cannot recognize any serious value from these alleged experiments."

DISCLAIMER: Don't think me wrong. I think that relics are awesome (for example, I'd honestly love to grow a cutting of the Glastonbury Thorn, regardless of its origins), but the Shroud, like so many other relics, is a fake. It doesn't fit how Jews were buried in the 1st century (both the size of the cloth, how it was folded, and the weave of the fabric, itself). Sadly, when it comes to bogus relics they say that if one were to gather up all of the pieces of The True Cross that have circulated throughout the ages, that one could easily build Noah's Ark with enough left over for a couple of deck chairs.

So What Does Transcribing a Manuscript Look Like?

Working on the Mandaic Book of John.

Well, in truth it's rather boring if you're not a linguist. But this tends to make folks like me geek out. :-)

Gotta admit, though, (and I'm not endorsing Apple, just stating a fact) using a Retina Display makes it so much easier on the eyes. Big improvement. :-)

Peace,
-Steve