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Vatican Library Puts 4,000 Ancient Manuscripts Available Online for Free
- valarauca1 12y agoThe Vatican is really a amazing piece of history in and of itself. Despite how you may personally feel about its religion, or the effects of it on the world. The enlightened western world we live in today would not exist without it, and without all the knowledge, art, and culture it (and its local branches) preserved for ~1000+ years.
- netcan 12y agoWell… That's true of any strong and long lasting institutions. Incidentally, many of the ancient documents in those archives were copied into it during the renaissance after surviving for hundreds of years in the Muslim-Arab world. The Hebrew document in that article (I think 'Supplement to The Torah' is a decent translation) by Maimonides is a great example. Maimonades was a Jewish Scholar who lived in Spain (during the Muslim period), Morocco & Egypt. He can (and is) claimed by Arabs, Jews & the Helenic culture of the middle ages. If you think in terms of 'The Flame of Western Civilization' he was part of the movement that carried that flame for a few hundred years before it was carried back to Christendom during the Renaissance. You could also make the argument that European Christianity joins Western culture during the Renaissance. But certainly, the Vatican is an incredible influence on Western culture, good, bad or odd.
- huxley 12y agoThough forgotten by pretty everyone who doesn't study Medieval history, the Muslim scholar Averroës (Abū l-Walīd Muḥammad Ibn ʾAḥmad Ibn Rušd) was perhaps the single most significant figure, influencing all medieval scholars including Maimonides. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averroes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averroes "Famous scholastics such as Aquinas believed [Averroës] to be so important they did not refer to him by name, simply calling him 'The Commentator' and calling Aristotle 'The Philosopher.'"
- dbdr 12y agohttp://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119629/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119629/ I saw this film a long time ago, and as I remember it was enjoyable and inspiring, so I recommend it as an easy to watch introduction on this topic and era.
- 23david 12y agoFound some references: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maimonides http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mishneh_Torah http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/682956/jewish/Mishneh-Torah.htm Although it's great fodder for movies and ppl into conspiracy theories, getting an audited list of all the Vatican books/artifacts tucked away (and then digitizing everything) would be amazing to see in our lifetime. The really really old stuff inherited from the Roman Empire days would be of particular interest. Not too many secret ancient libraries left these days...
- riffraff 12y agonot only preservation either: a ton of scholars were catholic priests[0], the "obscurantist church" is a rather recent meme. [0] i.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_scientists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_scientists
- coliveira 12y agoUntil a few centuries ago everyone in the western world was a catholic, so this doesn't mean much. It is not because of the church that great things were made, but in spite of it.
- toyg 12y agoWell, for several centuries, to be a scholar you had to be a priest or monk. There were no educational institutions who could pay you money, and support from rulers (as well as rulers themselves) could come and go on a whim. So if you wanted a "career" in research (i.e. you were a smart and curious fellow who could read) the Church was your only choice. This, of course, gave the Church the power to set the cultural and research agenda, and many bad decisions were taken with that power (as well as many good ones, of course), hence the "obscurantist" label. Also, burning one at the stake when you disagree with his theory of the universe is a bit harsh, you'll agree.
- riffraff 12y agoI do agree, but I meant that for a very long time science was not considered to be in contrast with faith.
- contingencies 12y agoThat last claim is a bit rich: as center of hierarchical monotheism during an expansionist era they sure did a good job of sponsoring the destruction of the Meso-American cultures - the fact they're now accepting donations to share digital copies of some of the stuff they secreted does not really let them pass the buck.
- tempodox 12y agoOm nom, this is highly tasty. I hope one day all libraries will be accessible like that.
- wavefunction 12y agoIt's the least they could do. Now let's open up the rest of the archives of all the manuscripts and artwork they've stolen and confiscated in the name of "moral purity."
- cristianpascu 12y agoYeah, people will only then know that Galilei was not actually burned or tortured for "proving" that the Earth is not the center of the Universe.
- 23david 12y agoReleasing all documents from the Inquisition would be interesting... I think most trials were well documented.
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoThey want to crowd-fund the digitizing of their own collection? A multi-billion-dollar outfit needs to pass the hat to keep their own house in order?
- chton 12y agoPassing the hat is very much in character for them, unfortunately. It still happens in church every single time. As long as people keep giving, they'll keep doing it.
- wmeredith 12y agoPassing the hat has been the church's business model for thousands of years.
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoSure, for your community. But this is the central organization wanting community money to manage their fabulous collection of priceless texts. They could sell one of them to pay for the whole operation. Its ludicrous.
- bane 12y agoThen they'd be 1 short of their collection of fabulous texts. It would no longer be a complete collection.
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoHa ha. They have bought/stolen thousands. They also do NOT own thousands. One text changing from the first category to the 2nd doesn't threaten their collection.
- bennettfeely 12y agoIt's a museum. Should museums sell off their collections to pay to keep running?
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- mmmm 12y agoAnyone know if it's ok to make profit out of these? Think: Retouch and sell as a painting.
- twright 12y agoI'm going to lean no because of this section in their "Rules for Readers" section: https://www.vatlib.it/home.php?pag=regolamento#regVIII https://www.vatlib.it/home.php?pag=regolamento#regVIII On the other hand, I'm not sure that there's a team of scholar-lawyers scouring the web for infringement.
- joshvm 12y agoIANAL Short answer, no. Long answer, it depends and you'd need to be careful. The issue isn't copying the artwork per se, it's copying the Vatican's picture of the artwork. They will likely release the images for free, but retain copyright over the digitisation. Would you be caught for stealing a plate from an ancient book and incorporating it somewhere? Dunno. The Holy See is part of the Berne convention so you're still bound by their claimed copyright. Are they really going to go after you? I find it rather unlikely unless you're peddling images of the Sistene Chapel. On the other hand if you made a reproduction of the image, say you found a drawing and manually vectorised it, then I think you would be safe - as after all, it's the photo that's copyright, not the manuscript. In principle, taking a photo of a Van Gogh and putting it on a Tshirt is perfectly legal. The bans on photography in galleries boil down to: - Light sensitive works - Copyright on newer exhibits - Profit making for the gallery (as many galleries in the UK are free, this is how they make their money) - House rules, you may not be violating image copyright, but you may be violating house rules which they could kick you out for
- rmc 12y agoThey could put it under a CC licence?
- ars 12y ago> The issue isn't copying the artwork per se, it's copying the Vatican's picture of the artwork. They will likely release the images for free, but retain copyright over the digitisation. In the US they can not claim copyright for this. This is very clear. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel.... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Portrait_Gallery_and_Wikimedia_Foundation_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Portrait_Gallery_and_...
- gdonelli 12y agoIs there actually a website to see the digitized art works?
- gdonelli 12y agoFound it: https://www.vatlib.it/home.php?ling=eng&res=1920x1080 https://www.vatlib.it/home.php?ling=eng&res=1920x1080
- twright 12y agoMore specifically here's an index of digitized manuscripts. Click on the book to view one. http://www.mss.vatlib.it/guii/scan/link.jsp http://www.mss.vatlib.it/guii/scan/link.jsp
- adriand 12y agoAbsolutely incredible. Historical documents like this are priceless. I always get a chill when I look at stuff like this: these manuscripts give us the opportunity to "hear" from minds that vanished from this earth centuries ago. Even if you can't read the text, there's something moving about seeing the painstaking and beautiful work that went into creating these. Those marks were made by a hand that has long since turned to dust... Made by someone who felt that what they had to communicate was vitally important to humanity.
- sho_hn 12y agoYour post reminded me of one of my favorite books of all time, Chadwick's The Decipherment of Linear B. Linear B is the name given to a syllabic script used on clay tablets excavated on Crete around 1900. Chadwick's book recounts the tale of how Michael Ventris ultimately deciphered it and revealed the text to be Ancient Greek rather than any other language, which was against scholarly opinion of the time - and even his own. It's a wonderful story about human intelligence (there was no Rosetta stone equivalent for Linear B; the decipherment had to be accomplished purely by deriving rules from the corpus), the transferability of skills (Ventris was an architect, not a linguist or cryptographer), dispassionately following where the evidence leads, and the value of sharing information openly in the sciences (Ventris' insights were enabled by data compiled and shared by others, notably the equally brilliant American researcher Alice Kober, as Margalit Fox documented in a more recent book). Now, after it gets done describing this accomplishment, it ends with a brief section on how the now-readable documents revolutionized our view of ancient European history, and what their contents tell us about their authors and their lives. It was a hugely inspirational read on so many levels. I read it as a teenager, and if there's any teen around you who seems like they might enjoy it - give it to them.
- 23david 12y agoOne of the coolest things about old manuscripts is definitely learning about where and when they come from, and which group of people wrote them and why. Lots of backstories... learning history is so much more interesting when a physical object gives it relevance and context.
- sakri 12y agoThat Aztec illustration! I was a bit disappointed with all the mentions of "ancient" and the oldest thing on that page was 400 AD.
- bane 12y agoYou don't have to go too many centuries before then and you start running out of writing.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago400AD is closer to today than it is to the invention of writing.
- netcan 12y agoThat said, as you go back there is a lot less writing. Less writing happened and less survived. The Hamurabbi code from 1754 BC is amazing partly because it's an island. A longish piece of text when all we have from the periods around it is lists of names and other short texts. Reading the Hamurabbi code (or the best translation we can get) really lets you feel like these people were real. Still, there's a huge difference between that and something like Plato or Sun Tzu 100 years later. They were literate in a way we would recognize as literate and they could explain themselves through text, writing to convince other literate people like us, like we are doing write now on These guys really do exist through their works. You can form a mental model of how they think.
- huxley 12y agoThere are much finer examples of ancient literature, surviving versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh can be as old as the Code of Hammurabi, some Old Babylonian tablets from 1800 BCE survive though the version Sîn-lēqi-unninni compiled in Akkadian is a relative latecomer at 1200 BCE. While I have only read it in translations, I find that it deals with concepts of personal death, friendship, loss, jealousy, love and sexuality in ways that are remarkably erudite and sophisticated. "The Lament for Ur" is utterly stunning to me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lament_for_Ur http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lament_for_Ur and "The Debate between Bird and Fish" or "The Debate between Winter and Summer" are incredibly creative works: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_between_bird_and_fish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_between_bird_and_fish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_between_Winter_and_Summer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_between_Winter_and_Summe... Some of the Pyramid Texts of the 5th and 6th Dynasties (about 2400 BCE) --especially Utterance 373 for the Pharaoh Teti-- are quite beautiful. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_Texts#Examples http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_Texts#Examples And if legal codes and injunctions are your thing "The Instructions of Shuruppak" or "The Maxims of Ptahhotep" are probably 700-900 years older than The Code of Hammurabi. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_of_Shuruppak http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_of_Shuruppak http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maxims_of_Ptahhotep http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maxims_of_Ptahhotep
- netcan 12y agoThe Vatican is also turning to crowdfunding and is now seeking donations of €5o save a single page in a manuscript, while donations of at least €1,000 will see the backer included on the official supporters list If they had literally put this on kickstarter, it would have been sureal.
- davidwihl 12y agoI think the Vatican has some prior experience with crowdfunding.
- pavlov 12y agoFortunately Kickstarter is not a store, so the Council of Trent [1] and Pius V should have no problem with offering indulgences as perks. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence#Council_of_Trent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence#Council_of_Trent
- simonebrunozzi 12y agoLOL. You are definitively right :)
- TheEnder 12y agoDoes anyone know how/where I can back the crowdfunding?
- erainey 12y agohttps://support.digitavaticana.org/ https://support.digitavaticana.org/
- touristtam 12y agoThe only issue I see with this method is the lack of flexibility in the amount: 5 euro per page or a 100, 1000 or 1000 euro donation as a one off or on a regular basis. What If I am willing to donate 10 euro a month? Do I have to do it manually every month .... seems a bit awkward. After all they are asking for the money, not me.
- orionblastar 12y agoAt one point in time before we had universities, science and math research was done in monasteries. The Vatican paid for a lot of that research and education. So I assume they got a lot of books they collects or had written that they want to made free access to the public by digitizing them. A lot of people have left the Catholic Church to go to Non-Denominational Churches, or else just became Atheists. So passing the hat around doesn't work as well as it used to. Priests and Nuns take a vow of poverty, they are not spending the money on themselves. They use it for food panties, for homeless shelters, for healthcare, for education, and to pay their employees. A lot of times churches are in debt even if the people pledge to donate over a million dollars to the church, people don't always donate what they pledge or promise and many families even with good paying jobs just don't donate at all. There is nothing that forces people to donate 10% of their salary to a church, in fact most donate less than that. Some don't donate anything at all. The documents won't rot away they are being taken care of and preserved. If there is not enough donations to digitize them, the world will have to go without them. Just think this is a large collection of books from around the world that hasn't been seen since the Library of Alexandria. Books that were protected from the Nazis who wanted to burn them. Books that governments had wanted banned or censored. Books that brought about human advancement and civilization throughout history.
- k-mcgrady 12y ago>> "Priests and Nuns take a vow of poverty" It depends. "Priests who belong to a religious order (e.g., Benedictine, Dominicans, Franciscans, etc.) take the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Diocesan priests make two promises, celibacy and obedience; these promises are part of the ordination ceremony."
- GFK_of_xmaspast 12y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostolic_poverty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostolic_poverty
- sadfaceunread 12y agoCan we change this link to the actual source? http://www.mss.vatlib.it/guii/scan/link.jsp http://www.mss.vatlib.it/guii/scan/link.jsp Or the Vatican library homepage or this tweet: https://twitter.com/vaticanlibrary/status/522270002012246016 https://twitter.com/vaticanlibrary/status/522270002012246016
- Shivetya 12y agoOne feature I would love within HN submissions is to include alternate links, chose to link to the page I did because it the article was eye grabbing in the pictures they chose and they did provide sufficient background on the project I didn't feel as if it were merely blog spam; I have never been to that site before.
- WalterBright 12y ago> The Vatican is also still seeking funds to digitise the remaining 76,000 manuscripts, which it estimates will take more than 15 years, over €50m, and the efforts of more than 150 specialised experts. What I'd do is do a quick pass over all the documents with a basic digital camera and store them as jpgs. Then, go back and do the painstaking, hi res scans. I also worry about "FITS, the format developed by Nasa" for long term storage, as we all know what has happened to older Nasa storage formats and technologies. When I archive family pictures and stuff, I use jpg, for the simple reason of its ubiquity.
- dmix 12y agoThey require very careful handling. This wouldn't save any money or much time in the process.
- krapp 12y agoI don't think you can do a "quick pass" over 76,000 fragile, ancient manuscripts, for any sane definition of "quick."
- Sanddancer 12y agoFITS was developed in part because of the problems NASA had with long-term storage formats. NASA realized that they were losing historical data because people were creating one-off file formats and then losing how they designed and developed them; libraries that understand FITS are available for pretty much every non-trivial language. For what the Vatican wants, it is better than JPEG -- it's lossless, it supports arbitrary color depths, its metadata format is much more extensible than JPEG's Exif, and it can support multiple images per file; for example, holding an entire multiple page manuscript in one file.
- amass 12y agoMy university has a very similar digitized collection, albeit smaller. One common denominator with these types of online collections is software that leaves much to be desired. Accessing the collection and searching through it is usually very painful. I realize they are on a tight budget, but it is disappointing nonetheless. Maybe it would be a good open source project.
- ommunist 12y agoThis is just in time. When everyone but the clergy forgot how to read those, they are putting 'em online. I especially like Old Slavonic ones, where notation for numbers is purely alphabetical with tilde. A+B is not boolean there. It returns Г, meaning V.