THE HOLY GRAIL is in the news. Science Daily has the following:

Archeologist says Holy Grail is in Rome

ROME, June 21 (UPI) -- An Italian archeologist says the Holy Grail -- a cup used by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper -- is buried beneath a church in Rome.

Alfredo Barbagallo said ancient records show the cup is buried in a chamber beneath the Basilica of San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura, one of the seven churches Christian pilgrims used to visit when they came to Rome, The (London) Telegraph said Thursday.

[...]

I'm in a hurry and and can't locate the Telegraph article right now. As for the Grail, I'll believe it when I see it.

For earlier PaleoJudaica coverage of Holy Grail news, see here and here.

THE JERUSALEM FORGERY CONFERENCE, convened by the Biblical Archaeology Society in January of this year, is the subject of a special report on the BAS website. There's also an audio file of the paper by Gabriel Barkay.

(Via Joseph I. Lauer's list.)

HAPPY SUMMER SOLSTICE to all those celebrating.

AN EGYPTIAN JEWISH MUSEUM? An outfit I don't know called "AME Info" has the following interesting brief item:

Egypt resisting Jewish museum

Talks between Egypt and Israel to open a Jewish museum in Cairo are making minimal progress, according to eTN. The Jewish Community Council in Cairo believes there are enough Jewish monuments and artifacts in Egypt to build a museum. But many Egyptian archaeologists dispute the country's Jewish history, and claim that only indigenous Egyptian artifacts have been found in areas that Jewish scholars claim have Hebrew history.

It's heartening that the idea of a Jewish museum seems at least to be under discussion. Certainly there would be ample material. There is the Ben Ezra Synagogue and attached Cairo Geniza; the excavated ruins at Elephantine and the Jewish Aramaic papyri discovered there (some of which are currently in the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities); many Jewish and biblical texts among the Oxyrhynchus papyri; legends about the translation of the Septuagint in association with the Library of Alexandria; lots of Jewish traditions associated with Alexandria, notably the works of the philosopher Philo. And so on and so on. (See also the material collected in this TourEgypt! article by one Jimmy Dunn [not the Durham NT scholar of the same name!].)

I hope this concept of an Egyptian Jewish Museum gains some traction, although I don't doubt it will be resisted.

On a related note, in the last few days I've been meaning to point out that Egypt Today had an article celbrating Egypt's rich religious heritage, but unfortunately the article would lead us to believe that these consist only of Islamic and Christian sites. The closest we come to Jewish sites is this, listed under Christian sites:

If hiking’s your cup of tea, head to the Sinai and trek up Mount Sinai to watch the sunrise from the spot where it is believed the prophet Moses received the Ten Commandments from God. St. Catherine’s Monastery below shelters the Burning Bush of Old Testament fame, and an impressive collection of icons and jeweled crosses.

It's also odd that the TourEgypt! website entry for Elephantine Island makes no mention of the Jewish garrison and Jewish papyri excavated there, although the other TourEgypt! piece cited above does mention them.

THIS WEEK I have to attend seven graduation ceremonies (plus a rehearsal), four lunches, and two dinners as Principal of St. Mary's College and Dean of the School of Divinity. Blogging, if any, is likely to be light!

THE MODERN HISTORY OF THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS, with special reference to the controvery about access to them up to 1991, is surveyed in an article in the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. Surprisingly, it says nothing about the role of the Huntington Library in the controversy when it released its Scrolls microfilms in 1991.

I think the piece is a little hard on the original Christian team, who did put a lot of effort into placing the Scrolls into their Jewish context, although they also were understandably quite interested in their Christian background and they did neglect (through lack of specialist knowledge) connections with Rabbinic literature. And I don't think that any of the team members argued that the "sectarians were proto-Christians," in the sense of their having some clear genetic connection with Christianity. That the form of Judaism represented by the Scrolls had some interesting overlaps with Christianity is hardly under debate.

The article could also have mentioned that the original team spent ten years piecing together the bits of manuscripts that came from Cave Four. The Scrolls did not land in our hands in anything like complete manuscripts. I like to say that their reconstruction was like taking a thousand jigsaw puzzles, mixing them all together, throwing away most of the boxes, discarding 80-90% of the mixed pieces, then trying to reconstruct the puzzles. However much you want to criticize the original team for their policies on access, the collating of the scattered fragments into what was left of the individual manuscripts was a heroic piece of work that took up a large chunk of their careers and for which they rarely receive explicit credit. This article is a case in point.

(Full disclosure: I was one of the postgraduates in the 1980s who received Scrolls from team members to publish in our doctoral dissertations. For the record, I did not turn down any requests from scholars to see the material I was working on, and as far as I know, none of those other postgrads did either.)

A DEAD SEA SCROLL and some other ancient manuscripts are on display next week at ACTS Bible College in Minnesota:

A manuscript fragment in Hebrew on brown leather, the beginning of a scroll with characters in a Herodian Hebrew book script, dating from the late first century A.D.

There's a photo of the scroll as well (click on it to enlarge).

SOME OF NEWTON'S THEOLOGICAL AND APOCALYPTIC WRITINGS are on display at the Hebrew University's National Library:

Father of modern science calculated: World to end in 2060
By Ofri Ilani (Haaretz)

At the top of the ancient, densely written English manuscript a verse in Hebrew stands out: "Blessed is the name of His glorious kingdom for ever." Other pages contain sketches of the Temple and calculations of the end of the world, based on verses from the Book of Daniel. The author of these mysterious ruminations was not a sorcerer nor a religious fanatic but none other than Isaac Newton, the 17th-century mathematician and physicist considered the most influential scientist of all time.

Newton's original theological and mystical writings will be on display in a special exhibition entitled "Newton's Secrets," opening today at the National Library at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This is the first time the manuscripts, in Israel since 1969, have been presented to the public. A digital version of some of the letters can be seen on the National Library's site: at www.tinyurl.com/28ervr.

One of the most intersting manuscripts is a letter from 1704, in which Newton calculates that the world will end in 2060, based on a phrase from Daniel 12:7 "for a time, times, and a half." Newton interpreted this phrase as meaning 1,260 years would pass from the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire by Charlemagne in 800, until the End of Days.

[...]

THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON meets the Mafia.

HEROD THE GREAT'S ACCOMPLISHMENTS are reflected on in Forbes:

Herod's Lost City
Todd Pitock 06.18.07

From the shoreline of Caesarea on Israel's north coast, it's just a few fin kicks and a short descent below the sun-glazed surface of the Mediterranean until you reach the sunken ruins of the harbor that made this one of the great cities of antiquity.

My dive-buddy, Avi Baz, is a buoyant 56-year-old spirit who can go to depths on either of two of his favorite subjects: diving and Caesarea. Like most Israelis, he is fluent in Hebrew, English and politics. We float on our backs a couple of hundred yards toward a buoy that marks one point of entry into Caesarea's newly opened Underwater Archeology Park, a roped trail where recreational divers can view artifacts and excavated ruins along the contours of the sunken marina.

"The visibility will be excellent," Avi says. "I tell you, there is nothing like this in the world. Do you realize," he adds, "that after the fall of the Roman Empire, the technological know-how [that built this port] disappeared for more than 14 centuries?"

[...]

QUMRAN ENTERS VIRTUAL REALITY:

Armchair archeologists can explore Qumran virtually
By Tom Tugend, Contributing Writer (Jewish Journal)

After glancing at the nearby caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were stored, I walked through the entrance to the main building at Qumran, checked out the scriptorium with its ink wells and oil lamps and the pottery-making workshop, and then up to the four-story tower for spotting approaching Roman legions.

Although it was a hot day, I was perfectly comfortable because my virtual walking tour of the desert settlement was conducted at a sophisticated UCLA computer site, courtesy of the Qumran Visualization Project.

"What we've built here is a fully reconstructed, three-dimensional, real-time, interactive model of Khirbet Qumran," explained Robert C. Cargill, a graduate student in the UCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures.

Joining Cargill was his department chairman, professor William Schniedewind, who initiated the project to graphically enliven his class on ancient Israel and to probe current scholarly disputes on the genesis of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

[...]

Cargill and Schniedewind, who developed the computer model over a 15-month period, plan to eventually replace the panoramic photography with satellite imagery, which will allow them to simulate the surrounding topography and terrain. They also hope to create virtual models of the caves where the scrolls were found.

[...]

Joseph I. Lauer notes that the UCLA virtual Qumran site can be found here.

AN ANCIENT JEWISH SETTLEMENT has been found in Israel in a salvage excavation:

Second Temple Jewish settlement found between Jerusalem and TA
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS (Jerusalem Post)

A Second Temple Jewish settlement has been uncovered between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, including structures that may have been used as hiding places during the Bar Kochba Revolt, Israel's Antiquities Authority announced Monday.

[...]

I've been meaning to note this one, but things have been busy around here.

THE ANCIENT BIBLICAL MANUSCRIPTS CENTER at the Claremont School of Theology has a semi-annual newsletter called The Folio, which I have been receiving for many years. I notice that the ABMC website now has an archive of The Folio starting with its inception in 1981 and complete up to 2005. (These are photographic reproductions in PDF format and some of the files are very large.) The archive preserves a lot of the history of the ABMC and each Folio issue usually has an interesting article on some research subject. For example, the current one (24.1, not yet online) has a piece by Marvin A. Sweeny on "Targum Jonathan on Zechariah 3: An Early Vision of Heaven."

A PAGE FROM A TALMUD MANUSCRIPT in the British Library is available online. Manuscript Boy has the details over at Hagahot.

THE CRADLE OF CHRISTIANITY EXHIBITION is in Atlanta on its final stop. It contains, among other things, a fragment of the Temple Scroll.

FRAGMENT OF THE MONTH: The Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge University has a new feature on its website:

A fragment that has provoked interest in the Unit in the last month will be displayed together with a brief explanation as to why it deserves attention.

Day in, day out, Unit researchers are working on cataloguing and describing the Taylor-Schechter Collection; hundreds and thousands of manuscripts are examined each month. Just occasionally work stops and colleagues call each other over to take a look at an unusual, unexpected or particularly interesting fragment. In itself the small piece of paper or vellum may not be that significant — when viewed in the wider context of the tens of thousands of pieces in the Collection — and it may ultimately get no more than a brief mention in one of the Genizah Series catalogues, but it has provoked our interest for a moment and so earned a place here.

So far, three fragments have been posted:

April 2007, two new responsa of Moses Maimonides

May 2007, St Augustine in the Genizah

June 2007, Redating a leaf from a medieval Hebrew Book of Tobit (T-S A45.25)

(Via Jack Sasson's Agade list.)

UNESCO'S MEMORY OF THE WORLD PROGRAM is doing great work in manuscript preservation, through both conservation and digitization. The UNESCO website has a page on the project (link above). There's an introductory interview with Abdelaziz Abid, "a programme specialist in the Memory of the World programme." Excerpt:

That means that digital documents are even more fragile than those on traditional materials?

Of course. A piece of parchment can survive for several centuries. Newsprint lasts several decades. It isn’t that the CD-ROM or the USB key can’t last for decades too, but the way in which the information is coded soon becomes obsolete. The problem isn’t the lifespan of the physical materials, but the progress in formats.

In Yemen, manuscripts were discovered in the main Sana’a mosque by chance that had remained walled up for 13 centuries! If you forget a digital document somewhere, at the end of ten years there’s nothing left of it.

If we don’t pay attention to preserving digital documents, we will leave a black hole for future generations. They’ll find Sumerian clay tablets, Chinese, Arabic and European manuscripts and paper…and getting to the 20th and 21st centuries, nothing! We must preserve traces of what we have created.

As regular readers know, I keep a special eye out for manuscript collections and hoards that may preserve early Jewish texts and somewhat later Jewish and Christian biblical apocrypha and pseudepigrapha. A couple of the projects seem relevant.

Timbuktu manuscripts: Africa’s written history unveiled

Excerpt:

Long forsaken treasures

But do the indigenous populations of Mali know that they possess, under their feet or in their attics, hundreds of thousands of vital manuscripts dating from the 13th to the 19th century? Nothing is less certain. Because of a sanctified notion of African oral tradition, an absence of translation due to lack of funds (barely 1% of texts are translated into classical Arabic, French or English) and a certain reserve about rummaging through the memory of Africa, however honorable, government authorities are hesitant to exhume what resembles a political golden age.

Let us judge for ourselves: treatises on good governance, texts on the harmful effects of tobacco, pharmacopeial synopses…works on law (particularly on divorce and the status of divorced women), theology, grammar and mathematics sit in dusty heaps in private libraries or at the Ahmed Baba Documentation and Research Centre in Timbuktu. Written commentaries by the sages of Cordoba, Baghdad or Djenne can still be seen there. On screen-fronted shelves, legal acts regulating the lives of Jews and apostate Christians testify to the intense commercial activity of the era. Parchments concerning selling and freeing slaves, the market prices of salt, spices, gold and feathers are propped against correspondence between sovereigns from both sides of the Sahara, illustrated with illuminations in gold.

All this is frightening. It is intimidating, to the point that even scientists are troubled by so much available knowledge. George Bohas, professor of Arabic at the Ecole normale supérieure in Lyon and an initiator of the Vecmas program (evaluation and critical editing of sub-Saharan Arabic manuscripts) notes, “We estimate the body of existing manuscripts at 180,000, of which 25% have been inventoried, less than 10% catalogued, and 40% are still in wooden or iron containers!” Not counting all the manuscripts stashed in the homes of families, who don’t want to give them up, either out of ignorance or for sordid profiteering reasons.

PaleoJudaica has been following the story of Timbuktu's manuscripts for some time. See here and follow the many links back.

The second project is:

The Matenadaran, from copyist monks to the digital age

In the heart of Erevan, capital of Armenia, the Matenadaran houses seventeen thousand manuscripts and 30,000 documents, some dating back to antiquity. Texts on very varied subjects, written in Arabic, Persian, Syriac, Greek, Latin, Amharic, Japanese and certain Indian languages, are stored together in this museum-library, created at the same time as the Armenian alphabet in 405. Today the Matenadaran is entering the digital age thanks to UNESCO.

Good stuff. Who knows what they're going to find in these collections?

UPDATE: The dratted transition to New Bloggger seems to have screwed up a lot of my internal links in past posts, which is most irritating. Earlier references to the Timbuktu archives can be found here, here, here, and here.

THE SACRED EXHIBITION AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM gets an article in Newsweek. It concentrates on later manuscripts in the exhibit, but here are some interesting things it mentions:

With the Middle East riven by religious and political tensions, it's bittersweet to see such gorgeous proof of its multifaith history. A 13th-century Christian manuscript from near Mosul, Iraq, depicts the three Marys at Jesus' tomb. While many of the details are Byzantine, the tomb's onion dome and the stylized cedar trees draw on Islamic artistic traditions. A similar culture-melt between Islam and Judaism is apparent in a 17th-century manuscript by the Jewish Persian poet Imrani, called "Fathnama," or, "The Book of Conquest." Written with Hebrew characters in Judeo-Persian, the dialect of Iranian Jews and based on the Old Testament books of Joshua, Ruth and Samuel, the manuscript includes a delicate illustration of Joshua's attack on Canaan, with turbaned, bearded priests blowing rams' horns outside the gates of Jericho.

"Sacred's" manuscripts are a reminder that ancient mono- theisms played a critical role in spurring the global spread of culture. On display is a Torah from 17th-century China, made for the Jews of Kaifeng, whose community and synagogue in northern China lasted from the mid-12th to the mid-19th century. Among the British Library's astonishing array of Christian manuscripts are a number of Ethiopic Psalters, with Christian clergymen in bright Ethiopian robes, and the Angel Gabriel appearing in a traditional house with ostriches strutting on its roof.

For more on the exhibition, see here.

ARAMAIC WATCH: The Boston Globe reports on a researcher in Syriac Christianity who just received a Guggenheim Fellowship:

Christian-Muslim history not all hostile

By Rich Barlow | June 9, 2007

From the Crusades to 9/11, history has given many laypeople a tale of unrelenting hostility between Christians and Muslims. Michael Penn, who teaches religion and gender studies at Mount Holyoke College, is assembling a different picture by poking in an obscure nook of history.

He recently was awarded $120,000 in grants, including the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, for research into Syriac Christians who, he says, "arguably have the most direct relationship with Muslims" during Islam's formative years. Populating what is today Iran, Iraq, and eastern Turkey, these Christians lived under Muslim occupation from shortly after the Prophet Mohammed's death in 634. Few moderns know the Syriac language, so troves of documents from the period were largely ignored until Penn began burrowing into archives at the British Library and elsewhere.

[...]

That's an exaggeration, but it's very true that there are treasure troves of Syriac manuscripts crying out to be studied and very few researchers to study them. The focus of this article is Syriac and Muslim-Christian relations, but ancient apocalypses do get a mention.

Cogratulations to Professor Penn.

(I haven't meant to neglect you all, but I've been very busy in the last week with the New Testament and Hebrew Bible searches, among other things, and it really has been a quiet week in the news.)

A CULTURAL CENTER IN THE UAE has arranged to digitize the manuscripts in St. Catherine's Monastery and to archive copies of them:

Centre to help preserve monastery's collection

By Daniel Bardsley , Staff Reporter [Gulf News]


Dubai: A senior church leader in the Middle East has praised a Dubai cultural centre for offering to preserve Christian heritage.

Archbishop Damianos of Sinai, the Abbot of St Catherine's Monastery in Egypt, has thanked the Juma Al Majid Centre for Culture and Heritage for saying it will assist in taking copies of the monastery's well-known collection of manuscripts.

Some of the manuscripts at the Greek Orthodox monastery date back 1,500 years and the Juma Al Majid Centre will provide expertise and equipment so that digital records of the documents can be taken.

[...]

St Catherine's Monastery was built in the sixth century at the foot of Mount Moses. As well as holding an important collection of Arab mosaics, Greek and Russian icons and western oil paintings, the monastery has what has been described as one of the most significant collections of illuminated manuscripts in the world.

There are more than 4,000 volumes in the collection, most of them in Greek, with others in, among other languages, Arabic, Syriac, Slavic, Latin and Georgian.

Archbishop Damianos, who is himself Greek, said in the future it might even be possible to organise an exhibition of some of his monastery's manuscripts in the UAE. "Dubai is not so far from Egypt - it is only three hours," he said.

[...]

I don't know the Juma Al Majid Centre and its website is currently under construction, but this sounds like a positive development.