F. Naether, Die Sortes Astrampsychi

FRANZISKA NAETHER

Die Sortes Astrampsychi

Problemlösungsstrategien durch Orakel im römischen Ägypten

"Du wirst deine Geliebte heiraten, aber es wird dir leid tun"; "Du wirst von deiner Frau erben, aber nicht als Alleinerbe". So spricht ein dem Pythagoras zugeschriebenes Orakel, das schon Alexander zur Weltherrschaft verholfen haben soll. Das Losbuch "Sortes Astrampsychi" ist auf römerzeitlichen Papyri und mittelalterlichen Handschriften in griechischer Sprache überliefert. Mit 92 vorformulierten Fragen und 1030 Antworten aus fast allen Lebensbereichen liegt eine ergiebige Quelle zur Sozialgeschichte Ägyptens vor - vom Überleben von Krankheiten über Geschäftsbeteiligungen hin zu Verhandlungstaktiken vor Gericht. Wichtige Fragestellungen dieses Kommentars zu den Sortes Astrampsychi zielen auf den Anwendungskontext und die Einordnung des Werks innerhalb der religiösen, divinatorischen und magischen Praktiken Ägyptens unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der "Ticket-Orakel" in demotischer, griechischer und koptischer Sprache.

NAETHER, FRANZISKA  Die Sortes Astrampsychi. Problemlösungsstrategien durch Orakel im römischen Ägypten
2010. XVIII, 491 pages.ORA 3

ISBN 978-3-16-150250-7

cloth € 109.00

English blurb

"You will marry your girlfriend, but you will be sorry." "You will inherit from your wife, but you will not be the sole heir." These are the words of an oracle attributed to Pythagoras which supposedly also helped Alexander gain world supremacy. The "Sortes Astrampsychi" were transmitted on papyri from the Roman period and medieval manuscripts in Greek. Consisting of 92 pre-formulated questions and 1030 matching answers from nearly all areas of daily life, the oracle represents an important source for the social history of Egypt, for example its demography, economy and jurisdiction. In this commentary on the "Sortes Astrampsychi," the author focuses on the background of its use in antiquity and the contextualization among the religious, divinatory and magical practices of Egypt, in particular the "ticket" oracles in Demotic, Greek and Coptic.


BMCR review
Franziska Naether, Die Sortes Astrampsychi: Problemlosungsstrategien durch Orakel im römischen Ägypten. Orientalische Religionen in der Antike 3.   Tübingen:  Mohr Siebeck, 2010.  Pp. 550.  ISBN 9783161502507.  $195.00.   

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Reviewed by Pieter W. van der Horst, Utrecht, The Netherlands (pwvdh@xs4all.nl)

Even though the text of the ancient lot oracle known as Sortes Astrampsychi is not one of central concern to classical scholarship, it has had its share of attention in recent years. The Teubner edition of the shorter version by G. M. Browne appeared in 1983, and in 2001 R. Stewart’s Teubner text of the longer version (the so-called ‘ecdosis altera’) came out;1 both scholars also published a series of valuable articles on this document. Stewart’s English translation of the text appeared in W. Hansen (ed.), Anthology of Ancient Greek Popular Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998) 285-324. In 2006 an edition of the Greek text with a German translation was published by K. Brodersen, Astrampsychos: Das Pythagoras-Orakel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft). And now we have the monumental and exhaustive study of the Sortes Astrampsychi by Franziska Naether, an immensely learned work that the author completed when she was only 29 years. The book is so densely packed with information on all possible aspects of the study of the Sortes Astrampsychi (and many related documents) that it is impossible to do justice to its contents in this short review. The book can best be characterized as a comprehensive contextualization of the Sortes Astrampsychi.

 etc. at BMCR

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43. Ständige Ägyptologenkonferenz (SÄK), Leipzig, 22.-24. Juli, 2011

Registration information here

Freitag, 22.07. 2011

ab 12:00 Uhr Registration im Tagungsbüro (Seminargebäude, Raum S 204)

ab 13:00 Uhr Gelegenheit zur Besichtigung des 2010 neu eröffneten Ägyptischen Museums

14-16:00 Uhr Treffen der Studiengangsverantwortlichen (Thema: Flexibilisierung von BA und MA, Seminargebäude, Raum S 420)

14-16:00 Uhr „StudierendenSÄK“ (Thema: Studium – und danach?, Seminargebäude, Raum S 202)

16:00 Uhr Begrüßung in Hörsaal 9

Prof. Dr. Beate Schücking (Rektorin der Universität Leipzig)

Prof. Dr. Hans-W. Fischer-Elfert Prof. Dr. Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer (Präsident der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig)

Dr. Volker Rodekamp (Direktor des Stadtgeschichtlichen Museums Leipzig und Präsident des Deutschen Museumsbundes)

Dr. Mamdouh el-Damaty (Botschaft der Arabischen Republik Ägypten, Berlin)

16:30-max. 17:45 Uhr Berichte aus den Institutionen (über das INFO online hinausgehende Informationen)

Pause 

18:15-19:15 Uhr Festvortrag von Prof. Dr. Stefan Rebenich (Bern): 

Zwischen Verweigerung und Anpassung. Die Altertumswissenschaften im „Dritten Reich“

19:30-22:00 Uhr Empfang im Grassimuseum am Johannisplatz 

Samstag, 23.07. 2011

09:00-09:15 Uhr Einführende Worte

09:15-09:45 Die Ägyptologie im Nationalsozialismus: Umriss eines Forschungsgebietes

Thomas Schneider (Toronto; gelesen von Claus Jurman)

09:45-10:15 Das Deutsche Haus in Theben 1904 bis 1958 – ein Spiegel deutscher Politik in der ägyptischen Provinz

Daniel Polz (Kairo)

10:15-10:45 Ludwig Stern – ein Ägyptologe zwischen Keltologie und Bibliothek

Barbara Magen (Hildesheim)

10:45-11:15 KAFFEEPAUSE

11:15-11:45 Der lange Arm des Nationalsozialismus: Die politischen Einflüsse auf die Abteilung Kairo des DAI während der Amtszeit Hermann Junkers von 1929-1949

Susanne Voß (Kairo/Köln)

11:45-12:15 Hermann Junker – Ein deutsch-österreichisches Forscherleben zwischen Pyramiden, Kreuz und Hakenkreuz

Julia Budka (Berlin/Wien); Claus Jurman (Wien)

12:15-12:45 Das Institut für Ägyptologie der LMU München im Nationalsozialismus

Thomas Beckh (München)

12:45-14:45 MITTAGSPAUSE

14:45-15:15 Ludwig Borchardt und sein „Institut für ägyptische Bauforschung und Altertumskunde“ in Kairo – Ein Beitrag zur Urgeschichte des Schweizer Instituts Kairo

Cornelius von Pilgrim (Kairo)

15:15-15:45 Bissing – Küthmann – Hölscher: Ägyptologie und Bauforschung zwischen Den Haag, Hannover und Ägypten 1922-1951

Christian E. Loeben (Hannover)

15:45-16:15 Ein Ägyptologe in Königsberg. Zum Leben und Wirken Walter Wreszinskis

Alexander Schütze (Leipzig/München)

16:15-16:45 KAFFEEPAUSE

16:45-17:15 Erich Lüddeckens – ein Pfarrerssohn auf Abwegen

Heinz-Josef Thissen (Erftstadt)

17:15-17:45 Die deutsche Ägyptologie zwischen 1945 und 1949 im Spiegel der Autorenkorrespondenz des Leipziger Verlages J.C. Hinrichs

Anke Weber; Henning Franzmeier (Berlin)

17:45-18:15 Hedwig Fechheimers Plastik der Ägypter – Ägyptologie, Kunstwissenschaft und jüdisches Schicksal

Sylvia Peuckert (Berlin)

18:15-18:45 Steindorffs Brief an Wilson

Dietrich Raue (Leipzig)

18:45-19:15 Uhr Abschließende Diskussion

ab 19:30 Abendveranstaltung in der Moritzbastei Leipzig, Universitätsstraße 20:00 Uhr Eröffnung des Buffets

ab 22:30 Uhr nicht mehr geschlossene Veranstaltung (Discobetrieb „All you can dance“, freier Eintritt für SÄK-Besucher), www.moritzbastei.de

Sonntag, 24.07. 2011

09:30- 10:00 Bericht des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Abt. Kairo (DAI)

Ulrike Fauerbach

10:00- 10:30 Bericht des Österreichischen Archäologischen Instituts, Zweigstelle Kairo (ÖAI)

Irene Forstner-Müller

10:30- 10:45 Bericht des Schweizerischen Instituts für Ägyptische Bauforschung und Altertumskunde in Kairo

Cornelius von Pilgrim

10:45- 11:00 KAFFEEPAUSE

11:00- 11:30 Bericht des Internationalen Ägyptologenverbands (IAE)

Ursula Verhoeven

11:30- 12:00 Bericht des Sondersammelgebiets Ägyptologie der UB Heidelberg, Propylaeum, INFO online

Nicole Kloth

12:00- 12:15 Situation ägyptischer Museen in kommunaler Trägerschaft

Katja Lembke, Christian E. Loeben

12:15- 12:30 Bericht des Treffens der Studiengangsverantwortlichen

Hans-W. Fischer-Elfert

12:30- 12:45 Bericht der Studierenden SÄK 

Juliane Seemann, Marc Brose

12:45- 13:00

Festlegung des nächsten Austragungsorts

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Horace Judson (1931 - 2011)

Horace Freeland Judson died on May 6, 2011. He is best known as the author of The Eighth Day of Creation first published in 1979 and later re-published in an expanded edition in 1996. This is a "must-read" book for all students of biochemistry and molecular biology.

Mark Ptashne has published an obituary in PLoS Biology [Horace Judson (1931 - 2011)]. Ptashne raises an issue that should be of concern to all biological scientists; namely, the fact that modern molecular biologists seem to be completely unaware of the history of their field and of all the fundamental work done with bacteria and bacteriophage. This was a problem that Judson tried hard to rectify before it was too late but it's beginning to look like he was not successful.

Here's Ptashne's take on it.

The Eighth Day, first published in 1979, is a gift that keeps on giving. It is not the completeness of his history, nor even the vivid prose that imparts its lasting effect. Rather, Judson had the drive and wit to probe until he understood not just who did what, and with what quirks of personality, but why they did it, and how they did it. At each stage he reveals what was at stake, what the crucial alternatives were, and how the problems were solved (or not, as the case may be). Who cares about this past, you might ask, we scientists being neither artists nor composers?

Could it be that—for scientists as well as composers and artists—the past can be a source of inspiration, and that we ignore it at our peril? Consider the question of how states of gene expression are conveyed from mother to daughters as cells divide. Are instructions passed along by regulatory proteins present in the cytoplasm (so-called “cytoplasmic determinants”), or is the information somehow built into, or attached to, the DNA and transferred along with it? Experiments performed by Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod and their colleagues at the Institut Pasteur in the 1960s distinguish between the models, strikingly supporting the first of these possibilities. These experiments (including the famous “zygotic induction” and “PaJaMa” experiments—see Judson's book) were, of course, performed with bacteria.

I recently spoke with an editor of a major journal that regularly publishes sensational papers on the question as it applies to higher organisms, and learned that s/he, like many of the journal's authors, had never heard of these bacterial experiments! You realize, reading Judson's book, that the challenge is to engage the thought processes of these French scientists, ponder their approaches and results, and design experiments of comparable power and clarity to confirm or refute their conclusions in a different setting. Without that engagement, the new answers are apt to be (and in my opinion usually are) baloney.

Shortly after I read this obituary I was browsing Biology News Net and came across this remarkable opening statement in a press release from Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.

Look up “transcription”—the copying of a gene’s DNA into RNA intermediaries—in any old molecular biology text book, and it all seems very simple: RNA polymerase II, the enzyme that catalyzes the reaction, assembles at the start site and starts motoring down the strand, cranking out the RNA ribbon used to construct proteins. But researchers now know that RNA polymerase II often stalls on DNA strands where it was once assumed to just barrel down.

A report from the Conaway lab at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in the July 8, 2011, edition of the journal Cell identifies a switch that allows RNA polymerase to shift gears from neutral into drive and start transcribing. This work sheds light on a process fundamental to all plant or animal cells and suggests how transcriptional anomalies could give rise to tumors.

This is a very misleading statement. Back in 1989 I wrote an extensive section on "RNA Polymerase Pauses While Transcribing Some Sequences" in my first textbook. I described the effects of sequence and secondary structure on the rate of elongation and explained how a protein component of the the transcription complex (NusA) promotes pausing in order to enhance transcription termination. The idea that rates of elongation were NOT constant was an important part of most molecular biology textbooks.

But this was in bacteria (E. coli), where most of these fundamental discoveries were first made. The press release refers specifically to eukaryotic RNA polymerase II. In the second edition of my textbook (1994) I talked about RNA polymerase II elongation factors (eukaryotes) and specifically mentioned that "TFIIS may play a role in pausing and transcription termination that is similar to the role of NusA in bacteria." The point is that older molecular biology textbooks were well aware of the fact that even the eukaryotic transcription elongation complexes did not move at a constant rate. The press release is quite incorrect.

The actual paper is not about transcription elongation but transcription initiation and how various factors assist in the transfer from the initiation complex to the elongation complex. All this was known for transcription in E. coli back in the 1970s. The old molecular biology textbooks explain abortive initiation and how RNA polymerase can stall at initiation sites until sigma factors are replaced by elongation factors. None of that is new in spite of what the press release implies.

How does this happen? I think it's because modern researchers are completely unaware of the history of their field. That's partly because the work on bacteria and bacteriophage—where the basic concepts were often discovered—is no longer taught in biochemistry and molecular biology courses. This leads to the false idea, as expressed in the press release, that all new discoveries in eukaryotes are truly new concepts that nobody ever thought of before.

The solution to this problem is to make all students read The Eighth Day of Creation.

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Insulting Religion by Pat Condell

The accommodationists aren't gonna like this ...

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Evolution According to the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution

The National (USA) Center for Science Education (NCSE) has just endorsed a four-year-old statement on teaching evolution from the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution [Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution adds its voice for evolution]. Here's the text from the CSEE website [CSEE/SCEE President's Forum].

There is overwhelming evidence that life has evolved over thousands of millions of years. The ancestors of modern organisms, as well as whole groups that are now completely extinct, have been found in great abundance as fossils. The main processes responsible for evolutionary change, such as variation and natural selection, have been repeatedly observed and verified in natural populations and in laboratory experiments. All the features of living organisms, including those discovered in the recent advances in molecular biology, are readily explained by the principles of evolution. Any scientific theory that provides a clear mechanism, offers a broad explanation of natural phenomena, receives strong support from observation and experiment and that is never refuted by careful investigation is usually called a “fact”. The cell theory of organisms, the germ theory of infection, the gene theory of inheritance and the theory of evolution are all facts. Teaching alternative theories as though they had equivalent scientific status is a perversion of education that damages children’s ability to understand the natural world. In particular, creationism is a religious doctrine long since known to be a fallacious account of Earth history that has no scientific standing and cannot be represented as a credible alternative to evolution. Evolution is the single most important principle of modern biology and the foundation of any sound biology curriculum.

Graham Bell
President, Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution

I don't like this statement because: (1) it implies that the "theory of evolution" is only about variation and natural selection, (2) it confuses evolutionary theory with the facts of evolution, and (3) it confuses creationism with Young Earth Creationism.

If you are going to claim that your version of evolutionary theory is correct then you would be well-advised to define it. And if you are going to claim that it's a fact then what's the point of calling it "evolutionary theory"? The "theory" part of evolution is an explanatory model that's used to understand and interpret various facts about the history of life.

With respect to point #3, one of the main threats to science these days comes from Intelligent Design Creationism and there are many IDiots who do not subscribe to an obviously "fallacious account of Earth's history."

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C. KUEHN, The Poetry of Dioscorus of Aphrodite in English Translation

These are the oldest surviving poems written by the hand of a known poet. Dioscorus’s sixth-century manuscripts, with revisions and corrections, were discovered on papyrus in 1905 beneath the village of Kom Ashkaw, Egypt (ancient Aphrodito). The manuscripts are now held in museums and libraries around the world. Although Dioscorus was an Egyptian, he composed his poetry in Greek, the cultural language of the Byzantine Era. This critical edition begins with one of Dioscorus’s masterpieces: Hymn to St. Theodosius. Once considered obscure, its meaning becomes clear when seen through the lens of Byzantine spirituality.