γυμνὸς or γυμνοὶ in Clement's Letter to Theodore?

[Peter Kirby]

If I knew nothing else about The Letter to Theodore and you had sent me images of the three pages and asked me what the word in dispute on III 18 is, I would almost certainly have said it was γυμνοί with a final Iota because one of basic rules of Greek is that accents go over vowels. That's the quick and easy answer. If you sent me the same images of the three pages and the same question along with the the statement from Venetia Anastasapoulou's report that the accents in the manuscript are placed either over the letter or to the right of the letter in and provided me with comparanda such as εὐθὺς and τὸν on III 2, in which the accent is placed over the letter following the vowel, my immediate response would likely have been that I can't be sure what the disputed word is, I would need to look at it some more.

I know you wanted to simulate something analogous to a 'veil of ignorance' so as not to skew the answers in favor of Smith's opinion (as I take it you think has happened in the field), but I think you have skewed the results in the opposite direction. I would weigh the opinion of scholars who have addressed the entire manuscript (Smith, Tselikas, Pannanen and Viklund, and Adams) more heavily than those were asked for and/or gave an opinion on the single word under consideration or just a few words.

Best,

Ken

Added note: I once asked Ulrich Schmid to look at a reading I was interested in and justified it by saying I wanted the opinion of 'an expert on textual criticism'. I thought he'd be flattered that I had so high an opinion of his expertise. His reply was something like: 'You can't be an expert on textual criticism. You can only be an expert on a particular manuscript'. (He did give me his opinion on the reading though).

Hi Ken,

I do think it can be a credible "awakener" for some (not you, as you have been generous with your time working through all of this) who have not yet started to reconsider seriously the previous majority view on this point, which is thinly argued in the literature. It's not just me and my buddy Randy here on the forum (and the paleographer Tselikas, who also considered it a forgery) who think they can say that this is an iota instead of a sigma. It's remarkable that nobody so far has volunteered to say it's a sigma, even for example the expert(s) who wrote that accents can be placed rapidly and incorrectly.

But, yes, this is literally the first thing that I thought too, or as I put it in my words to Pantuck, who's been following this:

Certainly its placement is counterintuitive for the omicron, which is what I mean by possibly 'overweighting' the intuitive observation that the accent appears to be placed with reference to the last letter.

It's not a complete explanation of the responses that don't mention the accent and do mention other aspects (the other two points I mentioned). But, fundamentally, I agree. I'm not saying that this e-mail polling answers the question conclusively here.

It sounds like you're saying that it would be better if I followed up, providing an apparatus of comparanda for iotas, sigmas, and accents and including a note about the placement of accents in this manuscript. This would help to overcome the most severe limitations of not personally undertaking a detailed study. Finding all the relevant data in the manuscript takes time.

Hypothetically we could even try to work together to construct a neutrally worded apparatus and presentation of relevant examples here, if you're willing to help.

Would you help with this?

I can do the work of collating. I just would appreciate some help declaring it sufficiently neutral.

Thanks,
Peter

[Ken Olson]

Could you run it again with this image? I can certainly wait until tonight to see the results.

Wait no longer....feast your eyes upon:


ken_hi_res.png

Ok, we have both requested blobs (can you tell which is which? Top is the gymnastic example, bottom is the other iota)

From left to right we have:

1. Unprocessed blob--from the hi-res images which Ken requested.

2. Sobel operator

3. Threshold the image to display the top few percent darkest pixels

4. With images this good, we can actually even detect the angle which the scribe held his pen at!! If you've done calligraphy with a squared-off nib--or better yet, cut yourself a quill pen from a feather--you will know, you hold the pen at an angle, and then as you move around, sometimes the line gets thicker, sometimes thinner.

The red lines are just the same red line cut and pasted over and over again. They represent the nib position and angle at various points during the stroke. As you can see, the scribe held the pen at a constant angle, and then made a motion like a large comma.

Both letters were drawn with the same pen, held at the same angle, in a single stoke. Time for me to stop pussy-footing around: if one of them is an iota, the other one is too. Q.E.D.

I cannot really follow what you're doing, particularly in steps 3 and 4.

When I look at the image of the character from III 13 with the naked eye, I see what appears to be a slight indentation, if that's the word for it, and I think perhaps AdamKvanta perceives it too. It seems to be preserved in the the early stages of your analysis, both in some of your earlier posts and this one, but then disappears in the third and fourth stage. This makes me think the image manipulation might be manipulating the image a bit too much.

Iota or Sigma in III 13. with arrow.png (55.86 KiB) Viewed 206 times

It doesn't look like a continuous curve to me. It looks to me like there's a slight change of direction at the point indicated by the arrow (and then, of course, another change of direction down and left).

Best,

Ken

[AdamKvanta]

For the purpose of apples-to-apples comparison, I have sent you a Google drive link with the (circa 300MB each) bitmap files of all three pages. I have additionally sent the same invitation link to Ken Olson, Andrew Criddle, and Adam Kvanta.

Thanks, much appreciated!

Tselikas performed a detailed study informed by relevant expertise not only on this point but of the entire transcription, being the only one with relevant expertise who has substantially investigated the accuracy of the received transcription that I know about. On the question of the transcription here, Tselikas found that it was an iota.

It's remarkable that nobody so far has volunteered to say it's a sigma, even for example the expert(s) who wrote that accents can be placed rapidly and incorrectly.

I just want to cite Paananen and Viklund again because it seems they also think it's a sigma saying that Tselikas made an error in that case:

The above is not the only instance of vagueness in Tselikas’s handwriting analysis. His transcription of Clement’s Letter to Theodore contains fourteen errors,¹¹² and on four occasions his own erroneous transcription is offered as evidence that the letter contains blunders that a fluent native Greek writer or scribe could not possibly make.

¹¹²I.2 ἐπιστομίσαi – should be …ας; I.5 λέγουσιν – should be …σι; I.8 το – should be τι; I.19 τα ταυτοῦ – should be ταταυτοῦ; I.26 ἑπτάκις – should be ἐ…; I.27 καὶ – should be και; II.6 καὶ – wrong line (i.e. II.7); II.7 δόξα – should be …αν; II.21 Ἱεροσόλυμα – should be Ἰ…; II.22 ἑξῆς – should be ἐ…; III.8 γυμνῷ – should be …νοῦ; III.12 προσεπορεύοντο – should be προσπ… and …ται; III.13 γυμνοὶ – should be …νὸς; TSELIKAS, “Handwriting Analysis Report,” I. On comparison, Smith’s transcription in 1973 contained two errors: I.12 εὐαγγέλιου – should be …ελίου; I.25 τὸυς – should be τοὺς; SMITH, Clement, 448–452.

https://tuhat.helsinki.fi/ws/files/1252 ... _check.pdf (p. 30)

[RandyHelzerman]

I cannot really follow what you're doing, particularly in steps 3 and 4.

Sorry about that....I forget sometime that I'm talking to humanities people and not engineers, so a piece of shoptalk jargon snuck in...

For step #3: recall, the theory behind this is that the blob will be *darkest* at the very places the nib of the pen passes over. This is because the ink has come directly from the nib--other places in the blob, the ink will have diffused through the paper to get to, so it will be more spread out and therefore lighter.



So "thresholding" just means: only show the pixels in the image which are *darker* than a certain threshold. When you do this you get the beautiful pictures I posted earlier---the path of the nib is revealed.

For step #4: After the path has been revealed--it looks *exactly* like we would expect it too look, if drawn with a flat-nabbed dip-pen. Likethis:

xlaws-of-nib1b.gif.pagespeed.ic.S2ECuPUTWr.png (33.74 KiB) Viewed 163 times

See how you can get different thicknesses with such a pen: Now take another look at the pictures

ken_hi_res.png (365.15 KiB) Viewed 163 times

The red line is meant to be the flat-tipped nib of the pen the scribe was using. You can see it sweeps out a line which looks a lot like the previous picture (just upside down).

This is as close as you'll ever come to actually *seeing* the scribe by looking over his shoulder while he was writing it.

When I look at the image of the character from III 13 with the naked eye, I see what appears to be a slight indentation, if that's the word for it,

Recall the annoying animted gif above, and how ink spread out randomly. Sure, that indentation might have been caused by a badly-drawn sigma. But that's not the only way it could get there--it could just be by accident.

It seems to be preserved in the the early stages of your analysis, both in some of your earlier posts and this one, but then disappears in the third and fourth stage. This makes me think the image manipulation might be manipulating the image a bit too much.

That's a feature, not a bug Getting rid of the accidental patterns that the ink makes as its diffusing through the paper is *the whole point*!!

I mean, say God himself gave you a 4-step process to find the path of the nib. After you do stages #1 and #2, you will start to see some of the noise going away.

We can be confident this is working correctly because:
1. For every exemplar tested so far which we know is an iota, it detects the path of a pen drawing an iota
2. For every exemplar tested so far which we know is a sigma, it detects a path of the pen drawing a sigma.

[RandyHelzerman]

A bit of the oral history of the images:

I noticed something disturbing in one of the images Ken sent me---I don't know if this is in your repo or not, Peter. But if you zoom in on the letters you will notice that image has been doctored such that there is an array of light blue rectangles over the letters;

blue_rectangles.png (94.52 KiB) Viewed 150 times

Very weird. These sorts of images are sometimes layered over an image of something you want to measure carefully--the rectangles are a known size, and are spaced a known spacing apart. Counting the number of rectangles covered by the ink gives you a way to measure the area covered by the ink, etc.

Once you can very carefully measure distances like that, you can do thinks like estimate the viscosity of the ink used, to see how fast and how far it has diffused away from the nib into the paper, etc etc. Or to measure the consistency of the letters--are thy all draw about the same? How much do they vary one from another? All kind of useful things....

I'm assuming that the Mar Saba library didn't draw those into the original sheets And I'm assuming Ken didn't put them their either (let me know if I'm wrong!) But that means that before ANY of us even got these images, they have already been digitally processed. Why knows what they've done to them? Enhanced some things? Blurred some things? Changed the color contrasts around? Etc Etc.

Given that we have been burned by low-quality images before, I think its probably a good idea to put a little asterisk next to any conclusions we draw from them. Until we have full-quality scans of these images, with a well-documented chain of custody of them, we will not have much confidence in the results. Or at least I won't. This is kind of like buying an authentic notebook by Leonardo da Vinci off of eBay. Yeah.....looks ok, but if its the real thing, why isn't there a record of who owned it before?

*sigh* What the heck is all the Secrecy around Secret Mark!! It's really frustrating. We've got black and white, low quality images from Smith. Then we have images which came from who? Some guys who went to Mar Saba, jacked the book out of the Library, and then it got cut up to take the photos....and somehow forgot to tell anybody about the trip? We only learned out after they died by reading the notes from his nachlass?

Something is really rotten here.

[Peter Kirby]

I just want to cite Paananen and Viklund again because it seems they also think it's a sigma

Yes, that's what they wrote. I like Panaanen and Viklund, and they made some good points, which I have quoted. If nothing else, however, this thread justifies moving beyond just citing this claim. Viklund or Paananen may have additional thoughts not represented in their paper, which represent their thought process for making this particular declaration, but they need to come out in the open and be discussed.

[RandyHelzerman]

Hi Ken & gang,

I made a few animated gifs to better illustrate what I'm talking about when I say we can recover the angle at which the scribe held his nib. I've analyzed these to letters, from our gymnastic example:

nib_movie.gif (968.11 KiB) Viewed 104 times

the picture shows the original image of the two letters. The left-bottom rectangle shows the *darkest* pixels from the original image. You can see, it kinda looks like something that could be written by a pen, but it's still pretty noisy. The bottom right shows the darkest pixels after image processing.

Lets zoom in on that last picture.

cropped_path_of_nib.gif (773.1 KiB) Viewed 104 times

The red lines are all the same length and at the same angle to horizontal. *That is the angle which the scribe held his pen.* As the red lines appear, they reveal the path that the scribe used. Notice, *both* letters were drawn with the same pen at the same angle.

As the ink diffused out from the path of the nib, it grew randomly in different directions, in a "halo" around the path, to create the glyphs we see in the original image. As a sanity check, if you look carefully at the first image (you may have to zoom in) you will see this same red line tracing both the processed characters--and the darkest pixels from the original image. This illustrates that the glyph we probably *was* written by a scribe in exactly the way described.

As I said before, this is as close as you are going to get to looking over the shoulder of the scribe *as he wrote this letter.*

[Ken Olson]

A bit of the oral history of the images:

I noticed something disturbing in one of the images Ken sent me---I don't know if this is in your repo or not, Peter. But if you zoom in on the letters you will notice that image has been doctored such that there is an array of light blue rectangles over the letters;

blue_rectangles.png

Very weird. These sorts of images are sometimes layered over an image of something you want to measure carefully--the rectangles are a known size, and are spaced a known spacing apart. Counting the number of rectangles covered by the ink gives you a way to measure the area covered by the ink, etc.

[snip]

Something is really rotten here.

Is the image in question the lower quality (54 KiB) file I initially sent before the higher quality image I sent of the same character? If so, it's a screenshot from a reduced jpeg file of the 1200 dpi bitmap I got from Roger Viklund. The blue rectangles may be a byproduct of reducing the bitmap image to a jpeg of a size that can be sent by email (the bitmaps are 300+ MB files). If the rectangles are in the original bitmap, they should be in all the images we've been using. If they are a byproduct of taking a screenshot on my Mac, they should be in all the screenshots I've posted.

Best,

Ken

[Peter Kirby]

Randy: I have also noticed a grid of dots in the bitmap image that I am unable to see in The Fourth R pdf, which I have also shared with you and Ken. I don't know when and how it was introduced, but I agree that it's not original.

[RandyHelzerman]

The blue rectangles may be a byproduct of reducing the bitmap image to a jpeg of a size that can be sent by email (the bitmaps are 300+ MB files).

Argh. That's a good point.

Randy: I have also noticed a grid of dots in the bitmap image that I am unable to see in The Fourth R pdf, which I have also shared with you and Ken. I don't know when and how it was introduced, but I agree that it's not original.

Argh.

Thanks, I'll try working from the files in the shared drive...I kind of suspect that even these aren't the highest-quality images. This is like the dead sea scrolls, where all the scholars just refused to release them until they died off one by one....