Saturday, March 19, 2016

Cairo Geniza at the Cambridge University Library

http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/genizah

From the site:
 
The Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection at Cambridge University Library is the world's largest and most important single collection of medieval Jewish manuscripts. For a thousand years, the Jewish community of Fustat (Old Cairo), placed their worn-out books and other writings in a storeroom (genizah) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue, and in 1896–97 the Cambridge scholar, Dr Solomon Schechter, with financial help from the Master of St John’s College, Charles Taylor, arrived to examine it. He received permission from the Jewish community of Egypt to take away what he liked (explaining later, ‘I liked it all’), and he brought 193,000 manuscripts back to Cambridge, where they form the Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection.

The storeroom where the manuscripts were stored by the community of Fustat was a genizah, a sacred storeroom. According to rabbinic law (see, for instance, Mishna Shabbat 16:1), once a holy book can no longer be used (because it is too old, or because its text is no longer relevant) it cannot be destroyed or casually discarded: texts containing the name of God should be buried or, if burial is not possible, placed in a genizah.

At least from the early 11th century, the Jews of Fustat, one of the most important and richest Jewish communities of the Mediterranean world, reverently placed their old texts in the Genizah. Remarkably, however, they placed not only the expected religious works, such as Bibles, prayer books and compendia of Jewish law, but also what we would regard as secular works and everyday documents: shopping lists, marriage contracts, divorce deeds, pages from Arabic fables, works of Sufi and Shi'ite philosophy, medical books, magical amulets, business letters and accounts, and hundreds of letters: examples of practically every kind of written text produced by the Jewish communities of the Near East can now be found in the Genizah Collection, and it presents an unparalleled insight into the medieval Jewish world.

Alongside the T-S Collection, Cambridge University Library is also now the home of the Jacques Mosseri Genizah Collection. Assembled by the successful Cairene businessman, Jacques (Jack) Mosseri in the first decade of the twentieth century, these manuscripts were intended to remain in Egypt as part of the Jewish community’s cultural heritage. However, after Mosseri’s premature death in 1934 and his family’s subsequent departure from Egypt, his eponymous collection disappeared from scholarly view until the 1970s, when it was microfilmed by a team from the Jewish National and University Library. Following recent discussions with members of the Mosseri family, in 2006 this 7000-fragment collection came to Cambridge University Library on a 20-year loan. During its stay in Cambridge, the Mosseri Collection will be conserved and digitised, and a new, detailed catalogue produced.
At the moment, over 18,000 manuscripts from across the Taylor-Schechter, CUL Or. and Jacques Mosseri Collections are available online, including a substantial number of documents (letters and legal deeds) and liturgical texts (the fruits of a joint project with Ben Gurion University). More manuscripts will be added on a regular basis, until the entire Cambridge Genizah Collection is online.

Sunday, March 13, 2016

BHS, LXX, NA28, UBS5, Vulgate -- online via academic-bible.com

http://www.academic-bible.com/en/online-bibles/about-the-online-bibles/

The Scholarly Bible Portal of the German Bible Society has the following original Bible texts available online:
These versions are without critical apparatus or Masoretic notes, but are great resources all the same.

Also available are:

 

Saturday, March 5, 2016

SBL Seminar Papers

http://www.sbl-site.org/Meetings/AMseminarpapers.aspx

The Society of Biblical Literature has recently made available a number of seminar papers from 2002-2010. From the website:

Seminar Papers


In years past, a print edition of the SBL Seminar Papers was made available in advance of the Annual Meeting each year in order to stimulate discussion of these works in progress during the meeting itself. Beginning in 2004, however, the print edition was discontinued, with a selection of papers presented at the meeting being made available online. In addition, a number of papers from previous years have been archived on the SBL Web site. Because these papers represent works in progress, they should not be quoted or otherwise cited without permission from the author. If you wish to post your program unit's papers here, please contact Charles G. Haws at charles.haws@sbl-site.org.

Before you contact us, please note these guidelines for seminar paper:
  • Papers must be provided as PDF documents.
  • Each document must be named with the author's last name and the first two or three words of the paper title.
  • No spaces may appear in the document title.
  • We will not post documents that do not meet these specifications.

2010 Papers

2009 Papers
2008 Papers
2007 Papers

2006 Papers


2005 Papers


2004 Papers


2003 Papers


2002 Papers
 

Thursday, March 3, 2016

Digital map of the Roman Empire

http://pelagios.dme.ait.ac.at/maps/greco-roman/

Just like the title says.



As you can see, toponyms are in Latin, so you may need to brush up in that wonderful, dead language.