Jordanus, an International Catalogue of Mediaeval Scientific Manuscripts

Jordanus, an International Catalogue of Mediaeval Scientific Manuscripts, provides information about mediaeval manuscripts written in Western Europe between 500 and 1500 A.D., which deals with mathematical sciences, i.e. arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry and mechanics. It is the result of research projects that were funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (1977-1985) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (1985-1989). The database was originally set up at the Lehrstuhl für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich by Prof. Dr. Warren Van Egmond and Prof. Dr. Andreas Kühne, and was later brought online by Dr. Gerhard Brey. It was provided an internet platform by King's College (London University) in cooperation with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (Prof. Dr. Jürgen Renn). Jordanus is now available again on the server of the project Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich. It was restored and reinstalled by Erwin Rauner.


More see here.

Ptolemæus Arabus et Latinus

Ptolemæus Arabus et Latinus is a project of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the University of Würzburg. It has been established as part of the Akademienprogramm of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German federal states for a period of 25 years beginning in 2013. The project is dedicated to the edition and study of the Arabic and Latin versions of Ptolemy's astronomical and astrological works and related material. The project director, Prof. Dr. Dag Nikolaus Hasse, is professor at the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg, while the researchers of the project are based at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Munich. The team includes two research leaders, Dr. David Juste and Dr. Benno van Dalen, and three full-time researchers, currently Dr. María José Parra Pérez, Dr. Henry Zepeda and the doctoral student Bojidar Dimitrov. A listing of the complete PAL team can be found here.

Digital Averroes Research Environment

The Digital Averroes Research Environment (DARE) collects and edits the works of the Andalusian Philosopher Averroes or Abū l-Walīd Muḥammad Ibn Aḥmad Ibn Rušd, born in Cordoba in 1126, died in Marrakesh in 1198.

DARE makes accessible online digital editions of Averroes's works, and images of all textual witnesses, including manuscripts, incunabula, and early prints. Averroes's writings and the scholarly literature are documented in a bibliographical database.

More, see the website of the project here.

"Avec toi de Suzanne Taha Hussein"s Arabic translation is republished by Hindawi foundation (free)

Hindawi foundation republishes the Arabic translation of the memoirs of Suzanne Taha Hussein about her life with Taha Hussein "Avec toi": De la France à l’Egypte: «un extraordinaire amour» Suzanne et Taha Hussein (1915-1973).

See the Arabic translation here. If you want the French buy it from here.

Arabian Epigraphic Notes An Open Access Online Journal on Arabian Epigraphy

Two new articles online!

22 May 2015 by A. Al-Jallad

The first two articles of the 2015 issue of AEN are now online:

1. M.C.A. Macdonald, On the uses of writing in ancient Arabia and the role of palaeography in studying them
2. A. Al-Jallad & A. al-Manaser, New Epigraphica from Jordan I: a pre-Islamic Arabic inscription in Greek letters and a Greek inscription from north- eastern Jordan.

The Arabian Peninsula contains one of the richest epigraphic landscapes in the Old World, and new texts are being discovered with every expedition to its deserts and oases. Arabian Epigraphic Notes is a forum for the publication of these epigraphic finds, and for the discussion of relevant historical and linguistic issues. The Arabian Peninsula is broadly defined as including the landmass between the Red Sea and the Arabo-Persian gulf, and stretching northward into the Syrian Desert, Jordan, and adjacent cultural areas. In order to keep up with the rapid pace of discoveries, our online format will provide authors the ability to publish immediately following peer-review, and will make available for download high resolution, color photographs. The open-access format will ensure as wide a readership as possible. more here http://www.arabianepigraphicnotes.org/.

Al-Thurayyā Gazetteer of Arabic Toponyms of Maxim Romanov

This is our first usable demo of al-Thurayyā Gazetteer, see here http://maximromanov.github.io/2014/11-20.html . Currently it includes over 2,000 toponyms and almost as many route sections georeferenced from Georgette Cornu’s Atlas du monde arabo-islamique à l'époque classique: IXe-Xe siècles (Leiden: Brill, 1983). The gazetteer is searchable (upper left corner), although English equivalents are not yet included; in other words, look for Dimashq/دمشق, not Damascus.

al-Raqmiyyātالرقميات : Digital Islamic History of Maxim Romanov

Digital Islamic History, see here http://maximromanov.github.io/  is the website of Maxim Romanov, an expert in digital Arabic, who will be joining the Leipzig team of Digital Humanities this September. 

Maxim Romanov says about himself that he  is a "Postdoctoral Associate (PhD, U of Michigan) at the Department of Classics and the Perseus Project, Tufts University, who studies Islamic historical texts with computational methods, currently focusing on the analysis of multivolume biographical and bibliographical collections".

The Filāḥa Texts Project: The Arabic Books of Husbandry

The purpose of the Filāḥa Texts Project is to publish, translate and elucidate the written works collectively known as the Kutub al-Filāḥa or ‘Books of Husbandry’ compiled by Arab, especially Andalusi, agronomists mainly between the 10th and 14th centuries These systematic and detailed manuals of agriculture, horticulture and animal husbandry have been somewhat neglected and remain largely unknown in the Anglophone world - apart from some of the Yemeni works they have never been translated into English. They not only provide primary source material for the understanding of what has been called the ‘Islamic Green Revolution’ but constitute a rich body of knowledge concerning a traditional system of husbandry which is as valid today as it was a thousand years ago and has much relevance to future sustainable agriculture.


More in the website of the project here.

Garth Fowden's Inaugural lecture in in the Faculty of Divinity

On the 4 December 2013 gave his Inaugural lecture in in the Faculty of Divinity  as Sultan Qaboos Professor of Abrahamic Faiths and Shared Values. Video, Audio and Print versions are online.

Seven reasons why we need an independent Digital Humanities, by Gregory Crane

A very interesting piece of writing by Gregory. Warning: more than 40 pages ! so enjoy !

Seven reasons why we need an independent Digital Humanities

Gregory Crane

gcrane2008@gmail.com

[DRAFT as of April 27, 2015]

Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Digital Humanities

Department of Computer Science

Leipzig University

Professor of Classics

Winnick Family Chair of Technology and Entrepreneurship

Tufts University

Summary

This paper describes two issues, the need for an independent Digital Humanities and the opportunity to rethink within a digital space the ways in which Humanists can contribute to society and redefine the social contract upon which they depend.

The paper opens by articulating seven cognitive challenges that the Humanities can, in some cases only, and in other cases much more effectively, combat insofar as we have an independent Digital Humanities: (1) we assume that new research will look like research that we would like to do ourselves; (2) we assume that we should be able to exploit the results of new methods without having to learn much and without rethinking the skills that at least some senior members of our field must have; (3) we focus on the perceived quality of Digital Humanities work rather than the larger forces and processes now in play (which would only demand more and better Digital Humanities work if we do not like what we see); (4) we assume that we have already adapted new digital methods to existing departmental and disciplinary structures and assume that the rate of change over the next thirty years will be similar to, or even slower than, that we experienced in the past thirty years, rather than recognizing that the next step will be for us to adapt ourselves to exploit the digital space of which we are a part; (5) we may support interdisciplinarity but the Digital Humanities provides a dynamic and critically needed space of encounter between not only established humanistic fields but between the humanities and a new range of fields including, but not limited to, the computer and information sciences (and thus I use the Digital Humanities as a plural noun, rather than a collective singular); (6) we lack the cultures of collaboration and of openness that are increasingly essential for the work of the humanities and that the Digital Humanities have proven much better at fostering; (7) we assert all too often that a handful of specialists alone define what is and is not important rather than understanding that our fields depends upon support from society as a whole and that academic communities operate in a Darwinian space.

For the full text, see the Google Doc 

Taha Hussein and the [Ancient] European Civilization

I do know now what is the meaning of my department's name in Ain Shams University : The Ancient European Civilization. It's basically a Greek and Latin (Philology) department, but I've always wondered why it is so called and who coined this name. Taha Hussein, the one who revived Greek and Latin in Egypt, is the one who coined it. Below is p. 386 of the Arabic translation of Albert Hourani's Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939 (Cambridge University Press 1983), which states that Taha Hussein was one of the Arabic intellectuals of the so-called "liberal age", who saw the European civilization as "the superior civilization of the human history". To name "Greek and Latin" (philology) departments in Egypt as the department of "Ancient European Civilization", would have been, back then, very prestigious both for scholars and students alike.

In 2015, I don't think though that this remains the case. Simply because "πάντα ῥεῖ"  and πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει" καὶ "δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης (Plato, Cratylus ,402a). The middle east now, as we all know and see, in a state of radical change; not only (geo)politically, but also socially and mentally too.

Jones, The cities of the eastern Roman provinces (Amsterdam 1983) into Arabic Ihsan Abbas

Arnold Hugh Martin Jones's Book (Amsterdam 1983) The cities of the eastern Roman provinces, was translated by  the  late Palestinian professor at the American University of Beirut Ihsan Abbas.  Its main interest to me is in the fact that in this Arabic translation one finds the modern Arabic names side by side ( usually in square brackets) with the ancient names of the levantine cities. The book was published in 1987 by Dar El-Shorok publishing house in Amman (Jordan).  

Ain Shams' Classics go digital

 Abdel-Monem Zaki, my Friend and colleague in Ain Shams University, has begun blogging in Arabic about digital humanities. His newly started blog is called : Digital Humanities: A New Reading of the Arab Cultural Heritage.

I'm excited to see and fellow what he will be posting in this. I think also that his students will be very much appreciated for this contributions to this field of study which we seek to implement, in cooperation with colleagues from Europe and the USA, in the curricula and study programs of classics department in Ain Shams and else where in Egypt.

This is an excellent start and I wish him all the success and hoping for more to come.

Rethinking Late Antiquity—IAQS' Review of Garth Fowden's BAM by Michael Pregill

Rethinking Late Antiquity—A Review of Garth Fowden, Before and After Muḥammad: The First Millennium Refocused

Posted on March 17, 2014




By Michael Pregill


Beginning in the 1970s, the work of Peter Brown revolutionized the way scholars approach the “fall of Rome,” the decline of Roman and Sasanian power in the Middle East, and the rise of Islam in Late Antiquity. In his classic The World of Late Antiquity, AD 150-750 and other works, Brown argued that the emergence of Islam and the establishment of the caliphal empire was not a radical disruption of the course of history, but rather represented the continuity of older cultural, political, social, and religious patterns. Despite the wide influence of Brown’s work and the general recognition of Islam’s importance in the overall trajectory of Mediterranean and even European history, substantial obstacles to a full integration of ancient, early Christian, Jewish, and Islamic phenomena into a general history of the civilization of Western Asia remain.


To read the whole review go here: https://iqsaweb.wordpress.com/2014/03/17/rla/

Academia.edu News: New Horizons in Graeco-Arabic Studies

D. Gutas and S. Schmidtke, New Horizons in Graeco-Arabic Studies = Intellectual History of Islamicate World 3 (2015) (forthcoming).

See the content here; New Horizons.

Plato's Menexenus into Arabic by Abullah Almosalammy

Menexenus (dialog) of Plato was translated into Arabic by Abullah Almosalammy  of Ain Shams University (Cairo) . The translation was published in Libya by the faculty of Arts of the Libyan University in 1972 while the late professor of Ain Shams University was teaching Greek and Latin there.

Menander's Dyskolos into Arabic by Abdel Moaty Shaarawy

Abdel Moaty Shaarawy of Cairo University has translated the only new comedy preserved for us in almost a complete form i.e. Dyskolos (Δύσκολος) into Arabic. The translation has been published in the first month of this year (January 2015) by the Kuwaiti National Council of Culture, Arts and Literature (KNCCAL).

  

Characters of Theophrastus (Ἠθικοὶ χαρακτῆρες) into Arabic by Adel Elnahas

Adel Elnahas, the head of the Cairo department of Greek and Latin Studies, has just announced the publication of his translation of Character of Theophrastus (Ἠθικοὶ χαρακτῆρες) into Arabic. The translation is published by the NCT Cairo (2015). Congratulations for the translator and looking for more.

About Theophrastus see http://catalog.perseus.org/catalog/urn:cite:perseus:author.1394 and cf. also  Philosophia Antiqua Vol. 54 William Fortenbaugh et alli (eds.) Theophrastus of Eresus. Sources for His Life, Writings, Thought and Influence, Brill 1993.

My Review of Garth Fowden's BAM at Al-Araby al-jadeed Newspaper (London) 27.01.2015

My Review of Garth Fowden's Before and After Muhammad:The First Millennium Refocused
Princeton University Press 2014. The review is in Arabic and don't pretend to be exhaustive, but I have tried to highlight the main ideas treated in the book. A special emphasis has been given to his apt critics to the Eurocentricity of European histories in neglecting the role of Islam in history.

The Review is written in Arabic and you will find it in this link : http://www.alaraby.co.uk/culture/7c5266ba-21c6-48ad-85e7-6c6979849c37.

Almaany dictionaries are now in Google Store as a smartphone app

Almaany dictionaries (Arabic-Arabic, Arabic-English, Arabic French etc) could now be downloaded both from the app store and from Google store. Here is the link for the Google store: Almaany.com dictionary. For Iphones , see here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/atef-sharia/id952606462 .