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Originally Posted by Icelander
I make no demands that all commentary be from informed specialists. In any case, this is modern day Earth, knowledge about which is more Current Affairs and less academic speciality. And if you are the wrong nationality; so are me and my players. We try not to let it get in the way. ;)
I welcome any speculation; informed or otherwise.
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The trouble is that I try to ignore our royalty, so I can't help much with their lives and contacts. Following Canadian, US, and academic politics is dizzying enough :)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander
Did they indeed?
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Yes, its down the hall in the department library. I don't read Italian yet, and I don't study ancient magic so it isn't much help to me.
The Brywn Mawr Classical Review is a good place to search for recent books on ancient history. The one on that translation is
here.
I have seen it suggested that the seventeen-document
Corpus is the result of medieval editors purging out the more actively magical texts on theological grounds. I am told that a lot of continental libraries work on the “have I had dinner with him?” method of access control, at least for anything mis-filed or obscure (although right now the French and some German libraries are trying to digitize everything in their collections). And there are a lot of miscellaneous manuscripts that have been ignored since a cataloguer flipped through them a century ago. You would have to stretch to find anything much older than 300 CE that way (the people who classified those manuscripts were very eager to find ancient texts) but there is plenty of room for a cache of medieval texts to turn up.
One more tidbit: OCR software hates scholarly editions of complicated ancient documents like papyri or lead tablets. The combination of different scripts, different languages, and all sorts of specialized markup such as dots under the letters tends to produce gibberish.