Limestone statue of Heracles | C1st-2nd CE, excavated at Hatra (Iraq), on display in Tokyo National Museum | Image Source
On AJR
Lev Weitz in a new publication piece: Creating Christian Marriage in Early Islamic Arabia
Weitz: “George’s canon signals a development at once smaller yet just as enduring: the continued elaboration in the Muslim caliphate of a characteristically late antique concern to regulate sexuality and hitch its symbolic power to the religious community. Christian marriage wasn’t invented in the Arabic-speaking, Muslim-ruled Middle East, but that setting was vital to its history.”
Book Note: Christian C. Sahner, Christian Martyrs under Islam: Religious Violence and the Making of the Muslim World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018)
Mugler: “Martyrdom has long fascinated the scholarly and popular imagination. Legends of martyrdom shaped Christians’ collective memory of the early centuries after Christ, and as a result scholars have repeatedly analyzed these earliest martyr accounts, especially with an eye to proving or disproving their historical veracity. With this focus on the pre-Constantinian era, however, there has never been a full-length study of Christian martyrs in the early Islamic period, and Christian Sahner’s new book aims to remedy this situation.”
Articles and News
The eighty-two chapters of Isaac of Ninevah’s Discourses online at the Digital Syriac Corpus.
Updates to e-Clavis include Pseudo-Cyril On the Life and Passion of Christ.
Judaism and Coptic magic at the ongoing Coptic Magical Papyri project.
AJS Perspectives call for papers on the issue for Fall 2019: The Body.
Revisit an oldie but a goodie; Roberta Mazza on women and petitions in papyri.
New issue of Hugoye online featuring new sources, Syriac grammar, poetry, and OCR tech.
New exhibit at the Met Museum tackles the contested ground between the Roman and Parthian empire, including reflections on recent events in the region.
Reminder of the ongoing crowdsourced project to digitally transcribe the Cairo Geniza run out of the Penn Libraries.
March 14, 92 CE: In a visit to the Colossi of Memnon statues circa 7 am, Titus Petronius Secundus, governor of Egypt, heard the statue sing & then followed tradition by inscribing upon the statue his visit date and some Greek verses in gratitude (CIL III, 37=Colosse de Memnon 13) pic.twitter.com/3WgkUxK2fa
— Dr. Sarah Bond (@SarahEBond) 14 March 2019
Just landed on my desk in the flesh! Congrats to @emuehlbe on a splendid book which is filled w my marginalia sign to myself: think more about THIS. pic.twitter.com/EiJvpP4lYo
— Laura Nasrallah (@lnasrallah) 11 March 2019
#ChickenWeek brings us a delicate pastel chicken today, from a grammatical work by Joseph Zarka dating from 1474 (Harley MS 5531, f.6v). Have a look at this page on our digitised manuscript for a bonus bunny 🐰 https://t.co/O1U5GBPzeI #HebrewProject pic.twitter.com/tikKiJHoUs
— BL Hebrew Project (@BL_HebrewMSS) 14 March 2019