Can one say 'Babylonian Encyclopedia' in Latin?
March 25, 2017 2:00 PM Subscribe
I want the meaning to be 'written by the Babylonians' rather than 'about the Babylonians', and google has left me thoroughly confused! (This is for a literary project rather than an historical one; the idea being that the Babylonians write a jolly good encyclopedia but have named it in Latin for some reason!)
Best answer: Sorry for if the world-building below is too pushy, but as a classicist with an enduring interest in medievalism, a lexicographer with a passion for the history of reference works, an ardent fan of manuscript transmission, and a clued-in Wikipedian, I found that all of this came to me in an instant. You might be the only person who could possibly be interested in hearing this, unless I'm telling you a bunch of stuff you already know.
Some considerations:
- Encyclopedias are a modern invention; the meaning of "alphabetical reference work" dates from the 1640s
- In the ancient world just as much as today, technology and history moved quickly, so a work like this would be constantly under revision in a manner comparable to Wikipedia, except with interesting Talmudic and text-revision features that could be fun to develop in your world-building;
- The OED was initially issued basically as a quarterly magazine, in the form of 'fascicles' mailed to its supporters to be bound by whoever they usually had bind their books;
- In the history of reference works, plagiarism is rampant, and authorial attribution may be absent or intentionally deceptive: on one hand, the Encyclopedie of Diderot and d'Alembert had unsigned articles (like the Federalist papers); on the other, every knock-off dictionary of the latter 19th and most of the 20th century called itself "Webster's";
- before Gutenberg, copying was done by hand, and each copyist would make mistakes or intentional emendations, so the editorial lineage of a given copy of a work had an influence on its content.
- Given the huge expense of making full copies of such an extensive work, it is entirely possible that there might be smaller, subject-focused abridgments for popular markets.
- the Talmud has a textual tradition of the original Babylonian text being surrounded by layers and layers of commentary by later authors.
So, while the Babylonians may have written a great encyclopedia over a period centuries, it would have been subject to constant revision, and the spread of its copies would be highly variable and possibly subject to hoarding,
misattribution, and abridgment. The situation might be comparable to people reading hard-to-get snapshots of Wikipedia — your revision from 2015 will say things that my 2012 revision knows nothing about.
This world-building is all to justify my choice of words: "codicilli babyloniaci": the (small) codexes from Babylon. Many ancient works were scrolls, but given the size of any jolly good-enough encyclopedia, a scroll's linear access format would be really annoying. Codex format would also make it easier to issue new articles (as fascicles), swap in new revisions (also fascicles), share individual articles without giving away your whole book, etc. etc. The diminutive "-illus" on the "codex" pushes my agenda that this encyclopedia is not so much a single, monolithic fixed source of knowledge in fat books, but a circulating, distributed, exhaustive-but-incomplete fount of data points in fasciculi that must be interpreted by its users in a living world. No individual, and perhaps not even any institutions, after the last burning of Alexandria, has a *copy* of the complete codicilli babyloniaci — but anybody who can afford to have books has parts of it, and they borrow and exchange and debate about its inconsistencies and the vagaries of the copyists.
posted by xueexueg at 3:07 PM on March 25, 2017 [52 favorites]
Some considerations:
- Encyclopedias are a modern invention; the meaning of "alphabetical reference work" dates from the 1640s
- In the ancient world just as much as today, technology and history moved quickly, so a work like this would be constantly under revision in a manner comparable to Wikipedia, except with interesting Talmudic and text-revision features that could be fun to develop in your world-building;
- The OED was initially issued basically as a quarterly magazine, in the form of 'fascicles' mailed to its supporters to be bound by whoever they usually had bind their books;
- In the history of reference works, plagiarism is rampant, and authorial attribution may be absent or intentionally deceptive: on one hand, the Encyclopedie of Diderot and d'Alembert had unsigned articles (like the Federalist papers); on the other, every knock-off dictionary of the latter 19th and most of the 20th century called itself "Webster's";
- before Gutenberg, copying was done by hand, and each copyist would make mistakes or intentional emendations, so the editorial lineage of a given copy of a work had an influence on its content.
- Given the huge expense of making full copies of such an extensive work, it is entirely possible that there might be smaller, subject-focused abridgments for popular markets.
- the Talmud has a textual tradition of the original Babylonian text being surrounded by layers and layers of commentary by later authors.
So, while the Babylonians may have written a great encyclopedia over a period centuries, it would have been subject to constant revision, and the spread of its copies would be highly variable and possibly subject to hoarding,
misattribution, and abridgment. The situation might be comparable to people reading hard-to-get snapshots of Wikipedia — your revision from 2015 will say things that my 2012 revision knows nothing about.
This world-building is all to justify my choice of words: "codicilli babyloniaci": the (small) codexes from Babylon. Many ancient works were scrolls, but given the size of any jolly good-enough encyclopedia, a scroll's linear access format would be really annoying. Codex format would also make it easier to issue new articles (as fascicles), swap in new revisions (also fascicles), share individual articles without giving away your whole book, etc. etc. The diminutive "-illus" on the "codex" pushes my agenda that this encyclopedia is not so much a single, monolithic fixed source of knowledge in fat books, but a circulating, distributed, exhaustive-but-incomplete fount of data points in fasciculi that must be interpreted by its users in a living world. No individual, and perhaps not even any institutions, after the last burning of Alexandria, has a *copy* of the complete codicilli babyloniaci — but anybody who can afford to have books has parts of it, and they borrow and exchange and debate about its inconsistencies and the vagaries of the copyists.
posted by xueexueg at 3:07 PM on March 25, 2017 [52 favorites]
Response by poster: That is incredible. Probably the best answer I've ever seen! I love the codex idea; would you like a thanks/credit if I ever publish?
posted by danteGideon at 3:49 PM on March 25, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by danteGideon at 3:49 PM on March 25, 2017 [3 favorites]
Best answer: Many ancient works were scrolls, but given the size of any jolly good-enough encyclopedia, a scroll's linear access format would be really annoying.
I hesitate to point this out to a classicist, but I don't think codices are even attested prior to the first century AD. Not sure what time period the OP has in mind.
posted by praemunire at 10:51 AM on March 26, 2017 [1 favorite]
I hesitate to point this out to a classicist, but I don't think codices are even attested prior to the first century AD. Not sure what time period the OP has in mind.
posted by praemunire at 10:51 AM on March 26, 2017 [1 favorite]
Best answer: Praemunire is right, and it does complicate the picture here a bit, depending on what time period OP is going for. Babylon doesn't really coexist with any sizeable Latin-speaking culture, so the idea of frequent updates from Babylon isn't really compatible with people talking about it in Latin. It also stands to question what language these texts are written in: Babylonian texts are in Akkadian on clay tablets, or later in Aramaic on papyrus; Greek was the language of learning in ancient Rome; by Medieval times it would have been Latin. Text dispersion, faulty attribution, or a sort of intellectual lineage are some easy ways to hand-wave around this: "they're called the Babylonian Booklets but of course they editorial offices are in Constantinople now", or perhaps "these works of 700 year-old knowledge are highly regarded but also highly suspect — where exactly did you find that article about alchemy that is written in an unaccountably modish hand?"
posted by xueexueg at 1:00 PM on March 26, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by xueexueg at 1:00 PM on March 26, 2017 [2 favorites]
xueexueg: "Encyclopedias are a modern invention; the meaning of "alphabetical reference work" dates from the 1640s"
Isn't St. Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae (which dates to the 7th century) considered an encyclopedia? It is for this work that he is regarded by some as the patron saint of the Internet.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 8:43 PM on March 26, 2017 [1 favorite]
Isn't St. Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae (which dates to the 7th century) considered an encyclopedia? It is for this work that he is regarded by some as the patron saint of the Internet.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 8:43 PM on March 26, 2017 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: I'm absolutely picking and mixing some of my favourite things from all over history; I like the idea of Babylon as a sort of adventurous scholar culture, and I like the 'Latin for the erudite' idea from the Middle Ages. I might have Romans around, who'd find the whole thing infuriating, I imagine. It's sort of set in the future so I'm just going to have fun, really! And I'm really enjoying everyone's contributions.
posted by danteGideon at 8:50 AM on April 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by danteGideon at 8:50 AM on April 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
But there are better Latinists on MeFi, I'm sure.
posted by dis_integration at 3:05 PM on March 25, 2017