The Lead Codices: Coptic Characters?

"But first, we must TEST!"

So, there's been a new development concerning the Lead Codices where the Jordinian Government apparently has seized several of them.

In the article that announced this, the Jordinian Department of Antiquities Director Ziad Saad, is quoted saying,

“There has been a debate all over the net - some think they are fakes, some think they are very genuine - but we have yet to have a definitive conclusion based on a scientific approach.”

Overall, Saad's words surprise me. There really hasn't been anyone who thinks they are "very genuine." The consensus among scholars and expert bloggers has been that they're fakes from the very beginning.

Jim Davila has already voiced his opinions about this latest development as well as a lengthy list of the evidences against it. Looking over everything, Saad's declaration of this consensus as "premature" is (in my opinion) refusing to call a spade a spade. The only shred of hope, at this point, for anything truly genuine is to investigate the pieces that haven't been photographed yet.

So here's where I'd like to share a funny thing I've been mulling over. I've come across a couple of characters on one of the plates which are certainly not Aramaic or Hebrew.



The only thing that it seems it could match would be Coptic, and if parts of this are in Coptic it would suggest that the initial claims by Elkington about their source were true (i.e. that they came from Egypt, and not Jordan).

Which would make the Jordinian Government seizing them look very, very silly.

However, since Coptic is a bit beyond my expertise, I'd love to hear some more learned opinions on this matter. :-)

Peace,
-Steve

UPDATE May 2nd: I, showing how much I actually know about Coptic, didn't get the dates right. :-)

UPDATE May 2nd #2: I've contacted a few Coptic scholars about this and I'm waiting to hear back.

Hebrew University and eTeacher Group Offer Aramaic Language via Online Program

There's a new online course to learn Biblical Aramaic from Hebrew University, online:

Hebrew University and eTeacher Group Offer Aramaic Language via Online Program

The Ancient Language of Daniel's Prophecies

April 27, 2011 03:07 PM Eastern Daylight Time

JERUSALEM & TEL AVIV, Israel--(EON: Enhanced Online News)--The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and eTeacher Group announced the addition of Aramaic to its unique offering for students around the world to participate in its joint Biblical Hebrew program.

The new program builds upon the success of the Biblical Hebrew program introduced in 2007 and which now boasts students from around the world including North America, South America, Asia, Australia and Europe.

The 14 week course focuses on reading Aramaic-based texts in the Old Testament more specifically examining the Aramaic prophecies of Daniel and the sections of the book of Ezra.

So if you have an interest in Daniel or Ezra, check it out. :-)

Peace,
-Steve

Aramaic Finds in Saudi Arabia

Archeological finds announced

RIYADH: The Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities (SCTA) has announced a series of discoveries of historical interest made over the last year at sites across the country.

An annual report from the SCTA’s Antiquities and Museums Research Center said explorations by a joint Saudi-German team of archeologists at the site of a village in the Tayma region of Tabuk uncovered Aramaic engravings and earthenware pots decorated in the style of similar artifacts found in Madina and usually dated to the second millennium BC.

Also in Tabuk, in the area of Kilwa, a Saudi-French team found a number of rock drawings of humans and animals, as well as engravings in the Thamudic script from pre-Islamic times. In Jarash in Ahad Rufaidah in the province of Asir, Saudi archeologists uncovered a stone town fort and containers of various types, segments of baked brick, and other artifacts from different layers of the earth dating to different periods from before Islam to both early and late Islamic times. Also found at the site were several drawings and engravings, one of the most prominent being the image of a lion killing a bull.

At Najran’s Al-Akhdoud site, a Saudi team uncovered an earthen pot containing metal coins and rings, as well as stones bearing engravings in the South Arabian Musnad script.

Surveys and digs were also conducted at Al-Ghat and Al-Quwaira in Riyadh, with findings including engravings and rock drawings, as well as in Mada’in Saleh and the Eastern Province.

The SCTA report added that a Saudi-British team conducted an archeological survey of Juba in Hail, taking aerial photographs of sites with engravings and rock drawings.

SCTA vice president Ali Al-Ghabban said the commission currently had a range of archeological digs on the go.

Read it all here in the Saudi Gazette.

Jim Davila mentions a very pertinent point:

"The second millennium BCE sounds early for Aramaic inscriptions. If the date is accurate, this would be an extremely important find. I would guess the first half of the first millennium or later to be a more likely date. Perhaps there is an error here or perhaps the pottery and the inscriptions are from different strata."

I hope to see some pictures of these finds in the news some time soon so we can all take a peek. :-)

Peace,
-Steve

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter to everyone out there!

Peace,
-Steve

So Who's Making Money on the Lead Codices?

So, just for fun I decided to search Amazon.com for David Elkington's book on the Lead Codices; however, instead I came across what you can see in the image above.

In short, where there appears to be a strange and overly convenient hole in the Internet where one would expect his book to exist (i.e. a number of listings, but nowhere is it "in stock"), I found that anything else with Elkington's name on it had a price that shot sky-high:

• $176-$187 for his book "In the Name of the Gods."
• $300-$757 for a multimedia CD on Classical Civ.

Nearly 200 bucks? What?? I found that a signed first edition copy of "In the Name of the Gods," went for 20 quid over at BooksAndRecords.

The second one I'm not even sure is the same Elkington, as it goes new for $300 from Oxford University Press.

In either case, it seems that anything that has his name on it has inflated considerably since the Codices broke to the press.

Perhaps the phantom book may yet show up somewhere? Unlikely. In the meantime, Elkington memorabilia is selling like hotcakes.

Peace,
-Steve

The Biblioblog Reference Library: Featured Articles

A request for comment has gone out to figure out what a good set of categories would be for Featured Articles over at the Biblioblog Reference Library.

Peace,
-Steve

Chicago Assyrian Dictionary - From Alap to Taw

Via James McGrath:

The news that the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary has been completed, and all its volumes are free online, has been shared by Charles Halton, Duane Smith, H. H. Hardy, and AWOL.

Peace,
-Steve

Introducing The Biblioblog Reference Library (Beta)

And after all of this craziness in the press... and how it doesn't seem to want to stop... I am proud to introduce:

After getting a bit more than irked with the recent press coverage concerning the Lead Codices and other sensational news, one Biblioblogger decided to find a way to bring together all of the rapid research, commentary and genuine peer review that had been done by his fellow Bibliobloggers into one organized, indexed, and searchable place.

The Biblioblog Reference Library is the fruit of that brainstorming, combining over 270 Biblioblog feeds with full text search.

In the future, there are hopes to fully develop a number of specialized indexes that go over key commentary on pertinent Biblical Studies issues as well as a Press Room to aid news reporters towards getting the story right the first time.

Will this be successful? Only time shall tell. In the meantime, the care of this experiment is left in the hands of:

-The Reference Librarian

Check it out the Biblioblog Reference Library here.

Peace,
-Steve

The Lead Codices on LiveScience - And My Interview

This morning I was contacted by Natalie Wolchover who is a writer for LiveScience and Life's Little Mysteries and she wanted to interview me about my script analysis of the Lead Codices. I could not be more pleased to lend my assistance. :-)

Here are links to the articles:

• Early Christian Lead Codices Now Called Fakes - LiveScience
  
• Early Christian Lead Codices Now Called Fakes - Life's Little Mysteries

Peace,
-Steve

The Lead Codices: Character Sheet

(Click to enlarge. Careful, it's big!)

So I've gone over each clear picture of the Lead Codices I've been able to get my hands on, and I've compiled a table of every readable glyph with more to follow.

In summary:

• Only 8 characters are shared amongst all plates thusfar. This is rather odd, given the number of characters on each plate.
  
  
• Assuming it's Aramaic, it seems to be a mix of Old Aramaic, Palmyrene, and Nabatean forms, not a single known and well-established script. There may even be a bit of Samaritan influence. Where some mixture of scripts has occurred in ancient documents under rarefied circumstances (such as with the tetragrammaton amongst some of the Dead Sea Scrolls), this mix is unprecedented. Also if we were to ponder about an "Old Palmyrene" or "Old Nabatean" we'd more expect to see "Imperial" forms mixed in, not Old Aramaic forms. To me, this seems like someone was trying to make this look older but blundered the script (like others have done recently...).
  
  
• There are a number of features in the stroke order that indicates that these were not written by a professional scribe (see the examples with numbers for each stroke). Scribes were taught very carefully what order to write characters in along with their shape, and it is this consistency that we are able to apply some of the principles of epigraphy to date inscriptions in the ancient world. This is a "stroke" against its authenticity that needs to be weighted with everything else.
  
  
• The "Christ Head" and "Palm" plates were made by the same person / at the same time, and seem to have repetitive gibberish as the letter variety is very slim and the distribution of letters doesn't look like a natural Semitic language. Specifically on the "Palm" plate, the well-defined "words" aren't known words in any Aramaic dialects I am familiar. These are *big* strokes against their authenticity.
  
  
• The "Menorah" and "Crusty Menorah" plates were made by the same person / at the same time. There are a few funky things with the distribution, but there are more "letters" than the previous pair. Several letters on the prior pair appear to be "flipped" in comparison. I would not be particularly surprised if we find these were copied from somewhere, albeit badly (badly enough that I still cannot make anything sensible out).
  
  
• This is certainly not the script used on the Madaba bilingual inscription where the Greek was lifted from. That script was distinctly Nabatean. However, looking at the "Aramaic" script on the Greek plates (look at the top of the image) we find it matches the above script neatly (a *HUGE* stroke against their authenticity, as the Greek plate was proven to be a forgery). I've tried a number of times to align the text on the plates to the Madaba inscription in hopes to use it as a "Rosetta Stone" to decipher the rest of the script (i.e. match up known Nabatean characters to this script's odd variations) but so far to no avail.

Again, to reiterate: On a scale of 1 to 5 where 1 is fake and 5 is genuine, all signs point to 1.

UPDATE APR 11: I've cleaned up this post a bit and expanded the bullet points.

Peace,
-Steve

The Lead Codices: Nabatean Script Watch

Daniel McClellan via Mark Chan realized that the inscription that the fake Bronze Codices came from a bilingual funerary inscription in Greek and Nabatean.

However upon examination I've determined that the Nabatean portion of the inscription does not match any of the text on any of the good quality pictures on the plates revealed thusfar (although I'm still running comparisons).

As such I am issuing a "Nabatean Script Watch" if any new photographs emerge so that Bibliobloggers keep an eye for any similarities to the above inscription. :-)

Peace,
-Steve

Call for Papers: Ancient Religion, Modern Technology Workshop

Via James McGrath:

Via The Stoa Consortium, [he] learned of this call for papers:

Workshop Call for Papers
February 13-14, 2012
Brown University

The Program in Judaic Studies in collaboration with the Brown University Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship is pleased to announce plans for a two-day workshop devoted to investigating the ways in which the digital humanities has or can change the study of religion in antiquity. The workshop will take place on February 13-14, 2012, at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

We invite proposals for papers and presentations that explore the intersection of ancient religion and the digital humanities. We are particularly interested in presentations of projects that have the potential to open up new questions and avenues of research. Can digital tools not only allow us to do our work faster and more thoroughly but also enable entirely new kinds of research? How might different digital data (e.g., textual, geographic, and material culture) be used together most productively? The workshop will concentrate primarily on research rather than directly on pedagogy or scholarly communication. One session will be devoted to “nuts and bolts” issues of funding and starting a digital project.

The focus of the workshop will be on the religions of West Asia and the Mediterranean basin through the early Islamic period. Proposals relating to other regions, however, will also be considered.
Please submit proposals of up to 300 words by October 31, 2011, to Michael Satlow (Michael_Satlow@Brown.edu).

Workshop Themes

While all areas relating to the intersection of the ancient religion and the digital humanities are open, we anticipate focusing our discussions on four themes and encourage submissions that relate directly to them:

Corpus Development. While this has comprised the bulk of the effort to date, we welcome further discussion and investigation of best practices, challenges, and standards. How should data be structured?
Digital Tools. What resources that might apply to the analysis of our data already exist? Can they be easily configured to work with the data? We will be demonstrating some projects that might have applications to our data. What tools would we like developed?
Interoperability. How might data from different corpora operate together? How might data interoperability advance research?
Visions. In an ideal world, what would we like to see? What do we want to be able to do and what scholarly questions could these new approaches help to solve or open? We welcome presentations of prototypes or even mock-ups.

Workshop Accommodations

Attendance at the workshop is open to all. Travel subsidies may be available for presenters. Discounted accommodations are available at The Saunders Inn at Brown (http://www.brown.edu/Facilities/Saunders_Inn/). All workshop activities will take place within walking distance of the Saunders Inn.

For travel information, see http://www.brown.edu/Administration/Conference_Services/prov_travel.php.

Sponsors

The workshop is generously funded by the Ruth and Joseph Moskow Fund in the Program for Judaic Studies. It is co-sponsored by the Brown University Library as well as the Departments of Religious Studies and Classics and the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World.

==========

Now all I need to do is sit down and write up a few proposals. Top on my list are:

1. Anything relating to my work on the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon (which can hit on all four foci in spades).
2. The Mandaic Book of John project I'm working on with James McGrath and Charles Häberl and the software I've been developing for that.
3. An article I've been working on and off about Unicode and how it is more of a hindrance than a help when dealing with encoding Aramaic languages in certain circumstances due to multiple encoding schemes for the same alphabet.

Now I must enforce the discipline to (read: get my Other Half to sufficiently kick me in the buttocks towards) getting on it, as with a deadline in October I shall surely procrastinate! :-)

Peace,
-Steve

Repeat after me: Abba does not mean Daddy.

I'm glad to see that I am not the only person who is habitually troubled with the whole "'Abba' means 'Daddy'" meme. (Keep fighting the good fight, Doug!)

You may have heard on the Internet, or through a sermon, or even may have read in a number of books that the Aramaic word "abba" is akin to the English word "daddy."

Unfortunately, this anecdote is just as true as "the eye of the needle" being a gate in Jerusalem or a rock formation where one had to dismount their camel in order to get through. (Read: It's a myth. It's false. It's not the case.)

If you'd like to learn more, please check out my earlier post on this issue, here where everything is dealt with in greater detail.

Peace,
-Steve

"Paleography" in Unexpected Places

So earlier today when I blogged about some of my findings concerning the script of the Lead Codices, I was asked via email, "[Steve,] where did you get your ability to recognize errors ancient scripts like that?"

I jokingly replied, "Well, I think it's in my blood."

To better explain what I mean I request that you, the reader, examine the as of yet unpublished inscription at the top of this post that I was recently studying. I have enhanced the image a bit to make it more readable.

As you can see, in a rather sloppy hand there is scratched out with some sharp instrument, "יומדין אית שמש בשמיין". I assume it was meant to convey, "Today it is sunny," as it literally reads, "Today there is sun in the sky." Where the letters are malformed, they exhibit all of the characteristics of an Herodian hand (perhaps arguably with a few late Hasmonean elements with the mims, but the shins look a bit stretched)... :-)

However, looking at the original photo before I enhanced it may speak more to its condition and context:

It was composed on our chalkboard by my 4 year old daughter. Not quite the way I would have rendered it, but not bad for a 4-year old with her own drive to learn Aramaic. :-)

Peace,
-Steve

Finally a Good Look at the "Lead Codices" Script

Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots has been going on around these "Lead Codices" among the Biblioblogs and media (and unfortunately, the latter just isn't comparing notes with the former).

After a bit more digging here and there I finally was able to come across a picture with some of the writing on it clear enough to "read" at the Examiner (shown above).

If it was in Hebrew in "code" (as the media claims), this alphabet is completely out of place from where the codices are "supposed" to come from, not to mention that some of the letter forms are simply wrong (what appears to be gimel and lamed to me is flipped compared to other letters such as mim and nun).

UPDATE: Here's an illustration of what I mean:

(Feel free to use the above image however you like, but I'd appreciate a link back here in case anyone has any comments and so its context remains intact. :-) )

On a scale of 1 to 5 where 1 is fake, and 5 is genuine, on consideration of the script alone, I'd give it a 1.

FURTHER UPDATE HERE: Daniel McClellan via Mark Chan realized that the inscription that the fake Bronze Codices came from a bilingual funerary inscription in Greek and Nabatean.

However upon examination I've determined that the Nabatean portion of the inscription does not match any of the text on any of the good quality pictures on the plates revealed thusfar (although I'm still running comparisons).

As such I am issuing a "Nabatean Script Watch" if any new photographs emerge so that Bibliobloggers keep an eye for any similarities to the above inscription. :-)

Peace,
-Steve

Delmeh d'Kefa Arnva Cover Art

I thought I'd share the draft cover art for Delmeh d'Kefa Arnva (דילמיה דכיפא ארנבא "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" in Galilean Aramaic).

Peace,
-Steve