Education in Ancient Egypt

Following a link in What is new in Abzu, I discovered an interesting website about
Education in Ancient Egypt, A K-12 Resource of the University of Michigan Papyrus Collection.

The site contains the followning subpages; Background, Curriculum, The Schoolhouse, Teachers & Students, Apprenticeships, Artifacts, The Gymnasium. Its a k-12 source, but it might nevertheless be informative for other students too.

Yet another interesting educational page-set on the same main site is this one on
Writing in Greco-Roman Egypt.

Bibliography on children

I discovered in another blog, a reference to a very comprehensive bibliography, available on the Web, on Children in Ancient World. A Bibliograaphy, made by Ville Vuolanto, University of Tampere, Finland,
3rd February 2006 (Fifth revised version), containing as much as 981 entries.

The bibliography does not contain any references to works on Philo; I might nevertheless (or just because of the lack), at least refer to an article by Adele Reinhartz located on my website: Adele Reinhartz, 'Philo’s Exposition of the Law and Social History: Methodological Considerations.'First printed in Eugene H. Lovering Jr. (ed.), SBL Annual Meeting 1993 Seminar Papers (Scholars Press, Atlanta, Georgia, 1993), pp. 6-21. Here scanned and made accessible as a .pdf file.
Another item lacking in the bibliography mentioned above, is a work of one of may own collegues here at The School of Mission & Theology, namely Odd Magne Bakke, When Children Became People. The Birth of Childhood in Early Christianity (Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2005). 348pp.

Studia Philonica Annual 18 2006

Studia Philonica Annual XVIII
David T. Runia, Gregory E. Sterling, Hindy Najman
ISBN 1589832531
Price: $39.95
Binding Cloth

You who are lucky enough to get to the SBL Annual Meeting will probably have a chance to buy it; I hope to get hold of it in January.

Surviving?

Mark Goodacre has some relevant comments on an issue raised by an other blogger on Surviving SBL, that is, on how to survive during the conference. I know the problems very well, not at least how to survive all the temptations of buying too many books,and the problems of too many sessions to attend in too little time.

But this year I have no problems surviving at the SBL, but how to survive without attending the SBL. I am getting more and more in a condition of having abstinence symptoms. Have I been addicted to this annual event? I have to stay at home, for several reasons, being jealous of those attending.

However, I have strong hopes of being able to attend the meeting in San Diego next year! That's my carrot for the time being. :)

Two reviews

On the SBL Bookreviews site two reviews were published yesterday that is of relevance for students of Philo and diaspora Judaism:

James R. Davila
The Provenance of the Pseudepigrapha: Jewish, Christian, or Other?
Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism, 105
Leiden: Brill, 2005. pp. vi + 278. $142.00
Reviewed by Sabrina Inowlocki

Logos Bible Software
The Works of Philo: Greek Text with Morphology. Bellingham, Wash.: Logos Bible Software, 2005. CD-ROM.

RGG

Most biblical scholars will know what the three abovementioned letters RGG stand for; the great German multivolume lexicon Religion im Geschichte und Gegenwart. Handwörterbuch für Theologie und Religionswissenschaft.

Some 'belated' news about this lexicon:
1) Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft now offers a CD version of the 3rd edition of this lexicon for the very acceptable price of 99 Euro. The price is, as usual, for members of the WBG, but membership is cheap, and the WBG has lots of books of interest to scholars and other students of the Bible and Judaism.

2) The 4th edition of this Lexicon is out, and has its own webpage; you can have a look at it here.

3) An English 10 volume translation of this large 4th edition is now also in the process of being published by Brill as Religion Past and Present. Encyclopedia of Theology and Religion. Further information about this edition can be found here.

New book and new series on Peter Lang

Peter Lang publishers has just established a new series, interesting for students of Philo: Early Christianity in the Context of Antiquity (ECCA). The editors of the series are from Germany - Ulrich Jörg, USA - David Brakke and the Danish scholar Anders-Christian Jacobsen.

The first volume of the series is a result of a conference in Aarhus in January (2005). The volume is called Beyond Reception. Mutual Influences between Antique Religion, Judaism, and Early Christianity.

I participated myself at the conference, so that is also why I might seem a little eager to tell about it. I have been reporting from the conference earlier and explained my ideas in my own article: I am arguing in favor of prof. Roald Skarsten's thesis that De Aeterniate Mundi cannot be Philonic. In one way my title is misleading, since I mention Philo's Aet. One should perhaps write "Aet. - often claimed to belong to Philo", but that is too long for a metonymic title. Here are all the titles:




Contents: David Brakke/Jörg Ulrich/Anders-Christian Jacobsen: Introduction to Early Christianity in the Context of Antiquity (ECCA) - David Brakke/Jörg Ulrich/Anders-Christian Jacobsen: Preface to Beyond Reception (ECCA 1) - Christoph Markschies: Antiquity and Christianity or: The Unavoidability of False Problems - Maren R. Niehoff: Philo's Contribution to Contemporary Alexandrian Metaphysics - Kåre Fuglseth: The Reception of Aristotelian Features in Philo and the Authorship Problem of Philo's De Aeternitate Mundi - Troels Engberg-Pedersen: Paul's Necessity: A Bourdieuesque Reading of the Pauline Project - Niels Willert: The Reception of Biblical and Greco-Roman Ethics in the Apologetics of the Early Church - Martin Vahrenhorst: Greek Religious and Cultic Terminology in the LXX Pentateuch - Einar Thomassen: The Reception of Greco-Roman Religious and Cultic Terminology in Judaism and Christianity, with Special Reference to Sacrificial Terminology - Gary B. Ferngren: The Early Christian Reception of Greek Medicine - David Brakke: Origins and Authenticity: Studying the Reception of Greek and Roman Spiritual Traditions in Early Christian Monasticism - Samuel Rubenson: Antony and Pythagoras: A Reappraisal of the Appropriation of Classical Biography in Athanasius' Vita Antonii - Aage Pilgaard: The Classical Biography as Model for the Gospels - Marie Verdoner: Cultural Negotiations in the Psychomachia of Prudentius.

Rambi!

At the SBL international meeting last summer I met one of the scholars that are working with Rambi, a bibliographic index of articles on Jewish studies. I promised him to take a closer look. I see that it was mentioned by Torrey in April, 2005, but I haven't had time to use it before now. This autumn I have been struggling with a lot of teaching affairs on subjects far away from Philo or Biblical studies, and haven't had time to do any research (alas), not to mention help Torrey to blog. Now things are more calm, so here you are:

Rambi is a very promising project, we realy need topic-based lists like this. Nothing can be compared to such databases if they become more or less complete.

A little bit confusing perhaps to know where to start, but you have to click on the "Rambi web" to find the search window, it will take you to the the main research window.

A search on "Philo of Alexandria" returns 584 posts. A more limited search on a specific topic or name is also possible, t.d. a search on "Torrey Seland" gave me 7 posts :-)