ARC010: The Aramaic Lord's Prayer

ARC010 is almost completely transitioned over to DARIUS. I'm still tinkering with getting some of the filters to work properly, but the moment it's ready I'll be contacting everyone who's enrolled and set them back up with a new username and password.

Peace,
-Steve

The DARIUS Upgrade Commenceth

I'm now working on migrating the old courses from Moodle, over to the CMS I've developed for DARIUS, and then taking the classroom modules for DARIUS live. Unfortunately with how late it is now, I fear that I might have to call it quits for the night and go at it again early tomorrow morning.

Peace,
-Steve

Featured at Rutgers

It's sometimes the little things that make me smile. :-)

I've been put on the "interesting career paths" list over at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information's website.

Peace,
-Steve

John The Baptist's Remains Found?

More along the Mandaic theme, some Bulgarian archeologists believe that they have "found the remains of John the Baptist." Where this was "presided over" by the Eastern Orthodox, John the Baptist is a central figure in Mandaism, and with all of the funding going out to preserve Mandaic works, I found it ironic. :-)

I honestly don't know much more about this than the video over at BBC says about it, nor the reliability of the claims.

[Remains of John the Baptist 'found' - BBC]

Peace,
-Steve

Israel Science Foundation to Fund New Aramaic Research Project

Crazy how two projects I'm currently working on "converge" in such a way, between the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon and the Mandiac Book of John. :-)

August 02, 2010 via Biblical Archaeology Review

"The Israel Science Foundation will be funding a three-year research project to transcribe and study the unpublished manuscripts of the Mandaic culture. Mandaean religious texts were written in a dialect of Eastern Aramaic, which is very grammatically similar to Jewish Aramaic of the Babylonian Talmud. Mandaeans are the last surviving Gnostic religious group and can be traced back to the Talmudic period; political problems over the past few decades have threatened the continued existence of this ancient culture.

The Mandiac texts themselves will be kept in Israel, but they will be digitized through the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Project of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio. This will be the first time the texts will be made accessible to the public. They will eventually be made into a dictionary of the Mandaic language."

Peace,
-Steve