Yes! My wife and I arrived home safe and sound and dutifully observing our 14-day self isolation.
We had planned to make the trip to DC a bit of a Spring holiday. The Museum was hosting us in their opulent VIP apartments, and my wife was looking forward to exploring Smithsonian museums and monuments on the Mall.
She managed to get out on Friday to the Natural History Museum and the National Air and Space Museum before they closed everything on Saturday. I was busy with meetings and in the academic panel all day Friday, and after dinner that evening we scramble to get our flights changed and get home ASAP.
It's disappointing for her to have missed out on the rest of her holiday, and for me to have another lab-day, and to present again at the public event which was originally scheduled for Sunday.
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Dealing with Everything from Dead Sea Scrolls to Red C Trolls
Quote:
Originally Posted by woob
"...harem warfare? like all your wives dressup and go paintballing?"
The Museum of the Bible uploaded in its entirety the symposium from Friday about the scientific studies of their collection of Dead Sea Scrolls. The presentations featured in order:
Welcome: Jeff Kloha, Chief Curator, Museum of the Bible
Introduction: Mike Holmes, Director, Scholar's Initiative at MOTB
Overview: Colette Loll, Art Fraud Insights, and Abigail Quandt, Senior Paper Conservator, Walters Gallery, Baltimore
Respondents
1. Greg Bearman, NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (ret.) via ZOOM
2. Christopher Rollston, Professor of Northwest Semitic Languages and Literatures, George Washington University
3. Kipp Davis, Acerbic Cyberbully, CalgaryPuck
4. Sidnie White Crawford, Professor Emerita of Classics and Religious Studies, University Of Nebraska-Lincoln
5. Lawrence Schiffman, Professor of Jewish Studies, NYU
The responses are followed by a question and answer period.
(Honestly, I felt like something of a rube sitting on the panel and surrounded by such luminaries in the field.)
The Museum of the Bible uploaded in its entirety the symposium from Friday about the scientific studies of their collection of Dead Sea Scrolls. The presentations featured in order:
Welcome: Jeff Kloha, Chief Curator, Museum of the Bible
Introduction: Mike Holmes, Director, Scholar's Initiative at MOTB
Overview: Colette Loll, Art Fraud Insights, and Abigail Quandt, Senior Paper Conservator, Walters Gallery, Baltimore
Respondents
1. Greg Bearman, NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (ret.) via ZOOM
2. Christopher Rollston, Professor of Northwest Semitic Languages and Literatures, George Washington University
3. Kipp Davis, Acerbic Cyberbully, CalgaryPuck
4. Sidnie White Crawford, Professor Emerita of Classics and Religious Studies, University Of Nebraska-Lincoln
5. Lawrence Schiffman, Professor of Jewish Studies, NYU
The responses are followed by a question and answer period.
(Honestly, I felt like something of a rube sitting on the panel and surrounded by such luminaries in the field.)
While the whole video is worth watching if you're into this sort of thing, the timestamp for Textcritic's talk is at 1:22:22.
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Spent a good 90+ mins going through this. Some of it was drier than the desert the forgeries came from but lots was really interesting. The forgers were really good. Pretty cool that perhaps ancient leather sandals were used. The analysis and technology to uncovery the forgeries was really awesome. The presentation on forgeries from antiquity by Prof Rollston was really interesting. (starts about 58:40)
Interesting forensics by the panel and cool that you are given some credit for sounding the alarm. The last speaker, Larry, was hilarious, I could listen to him for days. I feel like he'd have a billion stories. I laughed when he said things like "I think the museum has been completely kosher." That to me is such a NY line.
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a feeling, and sex is just repetitive motion.
[Dirk] Obbink had once kept hundreds of Oxford’s uncataloged mummy masks in his rooms, as a favor to the university, which was short on storage. But a longtime colleague told me he’d never seen Obbink perform a dismounting. “This sort of thing never took place in his university teaching”...
It was one of some 20 masks Obbink sold the Greens. A source who has seen the figures told me that on top of the $4 million to $8 million he charged for papyri, the family paid him $1 million to $2 million for a host of other antiquities. Among them was a medieval Latin manuscript titled “On Stolen Things.”
In early 2014, headlines appeared across the world: Obbink had discovered a pair of breathtaking new Sappho poems—on a piece of papyrus salvaged from a mummy mask. “For a couple of months, it was just me and a girl named Sappho—nothing between me and the text,” Obbink said on BBC Radio. “It was like being shipwrecked on a desert island with Marilyn Monroe.”
It is an incredible story, and one that I have been following for several years now. Ariel Sabar is the same reporter who broke the so-called "Gospel of Jesus's Wife" forgery back in 2016. In addition to being a top-notch reporter, he is also a good guy that I have had the pleasure to share beers with on a couple occasions.
The timing of this story is serendipitous: it coincides with the conclusion of my own provenance research on the Dead Sea Scrolls-like fragments and forgeries in private collections, which I expect to deliver to the Museum of the Bible in the next few weeks, and then will begin pitching to publishers.
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Dealing with Everything from Dead Sea Scrolls to Red C Trolls
Quote:
Originally Posted by woob
"...harem warfare? like all your wives dressup and go paintballing?"
I found this to be fascinating. Even though it doesn’t have tigers for the people, it is quite an intriguing story.
Congrats on your milestone and I hope your delivery of results is well received. I hope you are successful with publishers and would be interested to keep up on that, as well
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THE 16 PURPORTED fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Museum of the Bible might be fakes, but at least four such fragments housed at the University of Manchester in the UK are the real deal. For decades, those fragments were presumed to be blank, but a new analysis has revealed the existence of actual text, most likely a passage from the book of Ezekiel.
The important parts from the article
Spoiler!
The Manchester fragments never entered the antiquities market, where many forgeries originated. After being unearthed during the excavations of the Qumran caves, the fragments were given to the Kingdom of Jordan in the 1950s by a leather expert at the University of Leeds named Ronald Reed. He did so in exchange for permission to study them, since they were presumed to be blank. They remained in long-term storage until 1997, when the collection was donated to the university. It was while examining them as part of the new study that Joan Taylor of King's College London noticed a striking detail.
“Looking at one of the fragments with a magnifying glass, I thought I saw a small, faded letter—a lamed, the Hebrew letter ‘L,’” said Taylor. “Frankly, since all these fragments were supposed to be blank and had even been cut into for leather studies, I also thought I might be imagining things. But then it seemed maybe other fragments could have very faded letters, too.”
Intrigued, Taylor photographed the front and back of all the blank fragments over one centimeter—51 in all—using multispectral imaging (MSI), a technique that is being used more frequently in archaeology because it can reveal hidden materials, pigments, and inks that would be invisible to the naked eye. As Sarah Bond noted at Forbes in 2017, "MSI can take three visible images in blue, green and red and combine them with an infrared image and an X-ray image of an object in order to reveal minute hints of pigment. It can even reveal hidden drawings, stains or writings underneath various layers of paint or grime."
Four of the 51 fragments so analyzed had readable text written in carbon-based ink, along with parts of characters and ruled lines. “With new techniques for revealing ancient texts now available, I felt we had to know if these letters could be exposed," said Taylor. "There are only a few on each fragment, but they are like missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle you find under a sofa.”
Taylor found that one fragment in particular showed the remnants of four lines of text, consisting of about 15 letters. Only one word, Shabbat (Sabbath), was readable, but based on her analysis, she thinks the text relates to the passages in Ezekiel 46:1-3. The team's analysis of the fragments is ongoing, and a report on their results will be published later. In the meantime, the University of Manchester has the distinction of housing the only authenticated Dead Sea Scrolls in the UK.
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Hockey is just a game the way ice cream is just glucose, love is just
a feeling, and sex is just repetitive motion.
Since 2011, researchers have photographed 74 palimpsests, which boast 6,800 pages between them. And the team’s results have been quite astonishing. Among the newly revealed texts, which date from the 4th to the 12th century, are 108 pages of previously unknown Greek poems and the oldest-known recipe attributed to the Greek physician Hippocrates.
But perhaps the most intriguing finds are the manuscripts written in obscure languages that fell out of use many centuries ago. Two of the erased texts, for instance, were inked in Caucasian Albanian, a language spoken by Christians in what is now Azerbaijan.
According to Sarah Laskow of Atlas Obscura, Caucasian Albanian only exists today in a few stone inscriptions. Michael Phelps, director of the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library, tells Gray of the Atlantic that the discovery of Caucasian Albanian writings at Saint Catherine’s library has helped scholars increase their knowledge of the language’s vocabulary, giving them words for things like “net” and “fish.”
Other hidden texts were written in a defunct dialect known as Christian Palestinian Aramaic, a mix of Syriac and Greek, which was discontinued in the 13th century only to be rediscovered by scholars in the 18th century. “This was an entire community of people who had a literature, art, and spirituality,” Phelps tells Gray. “Almost all of that has been lost, yet their cultural DNA exists in our culture today. These palimpsest texts are giving them a voice again and letting us learn about how they contributed to who we are today.”
I did an interview a few months back, which was published in the Evangelical periodical, Christianity Today. The interviewer also hosts his own weekly podcast, and split our chat into three episodes as part of a pretty extensive series on the entire fake fragments affair. There are lots of worthwhile discussions in there with scholars like Christopher Rollston and Sidney White Crawford. The episodes in which I appear are called "Dead Sea Scrolls Detective."
I cannot get the individual interviews to launch from his page, but I did find another link where you can listen to them; ]unfortunately, they are not as neatly organized: https://player.fm/series/the-book-and-the-spade-feed
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Dealing with Everything from Dead Sea Scrolls to Red C Trolls
Quote:
Originally Posted by woob
"...harem warfare? like all your wives dressup and go paintballing?"
Anything notable about this find that you're aware of that wasn't covered by the CBC article? Sounds like they were found as part of a structured and official search so hopefully that's unequivocally good news.
Anything notable about this find that you're aware of that wasn't covered by the CBC article? Sounds like they were found as part of a structured and official search so hopefully that's unequivocally good news.
This is very good news, and as you pointed out, this bit in the discovery is crucial: "They are the first new scrolls found in archaeological excavations in the desert south of Jerusalem in 60 years."
IAA supervised excavations tend to be rigorously controlled and documented. Criticism directed toward them is more focused on their treatment of sites in accordance with Zionist principles, and less so with regards to their actual excavation practices.
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Dealing with Everything from Dead Sea Scrolls to Red C Trolls
Quote:
Originally Posted by woob
"...harem warfare? like all your wives dressup and go paintballing?"
Neat article about the use of AI to show that one of the dead sea scrolls was written down by two different people.
Quote:
"[The] likely scenario is [one of] two different scribes working closely together and trying to keep the same style of writing yet revealing themselves, their individuality."
The researchers said the similarity in handwriting suggested the scribes could have undergone the same training in a school or family, such as "a father having taught a son to write".
They said the scribes' ability to "mimic" the other was so good that until now modern scholars had not been able to distinguish between them.
Without prior assumption of writer identity, based on point clouds of the reduced-dimensionality feature-space, we found that columns from the first and second halves of the manuscript ended up in two distinct zones of such scatter plots, notably for a range of digital palaeography tools, each addressing very different featural aspects of the script samples.
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New video on kipp's channel and it starts off with an apology; can you be any more Canadian?!?!?!?! ;-)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by New Era
This individual is not affluent and more of a member of that shrinking middle class. It is likely the individual does not have a high paying job, is limited on benefits, and has to make due with those benefits provided by employer.
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Malden Popovic offered me the post-doc position for this project when they began in 2015. I was sadly missing home and my family, and had to turn it down.
It's a cool project, though. Still in its infancy, and so the early results are more confirmatory than ground-breaking: it has been accepted for decades already that 1QIsaiah-a was copied by multiple scribes.
Sent from my SM-G960W using Tapatalk
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Dealing with Everything from Dead Sea Scrolls to Red C Trolls
Quote:
Originally Posted by woob
"...harem warfare? like all your wives dressup and go paintballing?"
