We’re in mid- action scene:  the Trojans are besieging Ajax, one of the greatest of the Greek warriors, who nevertheless stands his ground and prevents his enemies from destroying the Greek ships.  Eurypylos, son of Euaemon, jumps in and wounds Apisaon son of Phausius, and is wounded in turn; he calls to the other Greeks for aid.  “So fought they like unto blazing fire” (transl. A. T. Murray, 1924).

The text of course is Homer’s Iliad  (Book 11, lines 556-613); it is written in Greek on papyri that now resides at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library.  The papyrus fragment is one of over 30,000 fragments found in the winter of 1899/1900 at the site of ancient Tebtunis in Egypt. The expedition to Tebtunis, which was led by the British papyrologists Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt, was financed for the University of California by Mrs. Phoebe Apperson Hearst.  The University established the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri in 2000 to support and promote new research, graduate student training and international collaboration in the decipherment of these largely unstudied collections, which form the largest collection of papyrus texts in the Americas.   

Some of the papyri were found in the town of Tebtunis itself; others were essentially recycled, used in the cartonnage of human mummies, or in the wrappings of crocodile mummies (Tebtunis was the home of a temple of the crocodile god Soknebtunis  - "Sobek, lord of Tebtunis").  Although there are some literary works, the majority of the texts are legal and economic documents: contracts, petitions, declarations, tax receipts, and other documents from the public village archives, mostly representing the late Ptolemaic period (second-first century BC).  As relatively few documents from this period have survived, the Tebtunis papyri are an important source for this time in Egyptian history.

The papyri were published by Oxford University  (OskiCat record) between 1902 – 1976 ( ) and many can be seen online at the Center for Tebtunis Papyri web site.  

The majority of the texts are in Greek, the official language of government administration from the time of Alexander the Great (332 BC) until after the Arabic conquest (AD 641); however, there are texts in Arabic, Coptic, Hieroglyphics, Demotic, Hieratic and Latin.  You may search the Center's database by language. 

For more information, see the following articles from the Bancroftiana newsletter:  June 1994 with updates in Spring 1998 and Spring 2000 .

Some of the crocodile mummies are at the UC Berkeley Hearst Museum; see images of some artifacts from the city, or search the web site for keyword:  Tebtunis.  Currently on view at the Museum is the exhibit:  “The Conservator’s Art:  Preserving Egypt’s Past”.

For the fuller translation of this text, see the Perseus Digital Library.   To see the Greek text side by side with the translation, go to the column on the right and click on load next to the word “Greek."

"Scientists estimate that of 7,000 languages in the world, half will be gone by the end of this century. On average, one language disappears every two weeks.

"THE LINGUISTS joins David Harrison and Gregory Anderson, scientists racing to document languages on the verge of extinction. David and Greg's 'round-the-world journey takes them deep into the heart of the cultures, knowledge, and communities at stake."

-- From the web page for The Linguists DVD

OskiCat record

Some of the nearly extinct languages Harrison and Anderson worked with include:

Kallawaya - a secret language used mostly in healing rituals by the Kallawaya people of the Andes.  The following page is from Pictografías poéticas = Poetical pictography by Raúl Carimán, who drew the pictographs and wrote the poetry, which he then translated into Kallawaya. The English translations are by Marjorie Agosín. Click on the image for a larger version

Chemehuevi is the language of a Native American tribe which originally spanned parts of California, Nevada and Arizona.  Today the reservation is in San Bernadino County.  Harrison and Anderson recorded one of the last three living speakers of the language. Linguists attempt to preserve and document endangered languages in works such as Chemehuevi : a grammar and lexicon , a page of which is pictured below. Click on the image for a larger version.

Sora is spoken by 280,000 - 300,000 native speakers in the eastern part of India.  This page is from a Sora-English dictionary.   Click on the image for a larger version.

These two pages each show the same text in the language sometimes known as Serbo-Croatian; one page uses the Cyrillic alphabet, one uses the Latin alphabet.  This work, Srpska pisma is a history of the Serbian language and the text on the pages depicted is from the passage in Genesis which describes Noah’s life after the flood.  

The language sometimes known as Serbo-Croatian is a pluricentric language – a language with several standard versions, including Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian.  The name “Serbo-Croatian” was mostly used during the existence of the Kingdom and Republic of Yugoslavia (1918 – 1991); which has been replaced by the successor states of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo (disputed), Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia.   

In the present day, there is some disagreement within the former Yugoslav republics as to whether there is or has ever been a unified Serbo-Croatian language, whether the various versions are separate languages, and what to call the language (s)   - Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, etc. although linguists in the rest of the world refer to one language with mutually intelligible dialects.  The dispute has serious political and cultural connotations.

A major difference between these versions of the language is in the writing systems; this is the only European language that is actively digraphic, which means more than one writing system is used. The Roman Catholic Croatians use Latin letters and the Orthodox Serbians write the language in Cyrillic, although most Serbians and Croatians can read and write both alphabetizations.  The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet was standardized by linguist Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic in 1818 and the Croatian Latin alphabet by Ljudevit Gaj in 1830.

Readers of the language have available to them a Serbian wikipedia, a Croatian wikipedia, a Bosnian wikipedia, and a Serbo-Croatian wikipedia - the latter is writen in both the Cyrillic and the Latin alphabets.

Special  thanks to Jean Dickinson, Slavic Cataloger

Edict on the Transfer of the Capital
(Chiếu dời đô in Vietnamese or 遷都詔 in Chinese)

This edict was issued by the Vietnamese Emperor Ly Thai To,
founder of the Ly Dynasty, who reigned from 1009 AD to 1028 AD.
It was issued in 1010 on the occasion of transferring the Dai Co Viet
imperial capital from Hoa Lu ancient capital to Dai La Citadel
(present day Hanoi) in North Vietnam.  This rare example of an
early written text from Vietnam is written in the Chinese script
used in Vietnam for official documents until the late 19^th century.

Translations may be found at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi%E1%BA%BFu_d%E1%BB%9Di_%C4%91%C3%B4

and

http://hanoi1000yrs.vietnam.gov.vn/Home/The-royal-edict-on-the-transfer-of-the-capital-of-Thang-Long-in-the-year-1010/20101/4721.vgp 

The image is of a facsimile of the edict, part of the collections of
the South/Southeast Asia Library.  The Library is the reference
center for South and Southeast Asian social sciences and
humanities, which includes materials from Afghanistan,
Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor, India,
Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Maldives, Myanmar/Burma,
Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand,
and Vietnam.  The rest of the South Asian and Southeast
Asian collections, numbering over 600,000 titles, is housed
in the Main Stacks and the subject specialty libraries
on the Berkeley campus.

--Virginia Shih, Librarian
Southeast Asian Collections

Goigs (which literally translates as “joys”) are religious lyric verse in Catalan, usually honoring an individual saint. They are often printed as broadsides (single-sheet publications) and decorated with woodcut illustrations and ornaments. This example honors Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, and was printed in Mataró, Spain in the early 18th century. Catalan is a Romance language. It is the official language of Andorra and a co-official language, along with Spanish, in Catalonia (an autonomous community in northeastern Spain whose capital city is Barcelona), Valencia, the Balearic Islands, and the Sardinian city of Alghero. It is also spoken in parts of Aragon, Murcia, and Rousillon in southern France.

Use the "Advanced Keyword" search in OskiCat to find other materials in Catalan in the UCB Libraries.

Use the "More Searches" link to search by Genre/Form:  goigs

OskiCat record for this item: http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b18536494~S1

--Randal Brandt
Principal Cataloger, Bancroft Library

Larger version of the black and white pages

View the entire book online

Mrs. Mouse has fallen from a ladder and hurt her head. She requires the services of Dr. Cranefly, who hurries to his laboratory to whip up a potion made of butter, milk, oil, cheese and flour. This potent potion is then applied to Mrs. Mouse's injury and restores her to health.

Sounds like a sweet, unobjectionable children’s story, but in 1945, the act of publishing this book, Dokter Langpootmug (Dr. Cranefly) by Bea Etty Polak-Biet, with illustrations by Lescha Schatz, could have had deadly consequences.  During the Nazi occupation of Holland members of the Dutch resistance secretly published approximately 1,000 pamphlets, books, broadsides, posters, prints and drawings in direct defiance of Nazi censorship.  The profits were used to finance underground resistance efforts, and Dr. Cranefly was the best-selling book of its kind, selling over 40,000 copies.  The risks were high:  approximately 700 people were executed for being involved in what is now known as Dutch clandestine printing.

The UC Berkeley Library has one of the largest and most complete collections of clandestinely published Dutch books and pamphlets from the period of the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. Curator Jim Spohrer, librarian for the Germanic collections, is continuing to add to the collection, which is a testament to the power of words to resist tyranny and to the enduring spirit of the Dutch people.  For more about the collection, read this article about a 2010 exhibit .

(with special thanks to Jim Spohrer, Librarian for the Germanic Collections)

slightly larger version

next two pages of poem

last two pages of poem

These are the first two pages of a poem in Polish by Czeslaw Milosz, who was a Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley from 1960-1978 and the recipient of the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature.  The translation on the facing page is by Robert Hass, Milosz' friend, colleague and frequent translator, who is a Distinguished Professor in Poetry and Poetics in the UC Berkeley Department of English.  Hass was Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995-1997 and a co-recipient of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his own poetry.  The poem and its translation appear in The Separate Notebooks (click on the link for library locations).  Search OskiCat, the UCB Library catalog, for works by either poet or for more of the translations they collaborated on together.

(with special thanks to Claude Potts, Romance Languages Librarian)

This is the 27 May 1854  issue of  Golden Hills News, thought to be the first Chinese language newspaper established in San Francisco. Other issues can be found in the UC Berkeley Libraries. Two pages are available via the Online Archive of California, which brings together primary sources and the finding aids to archival collections from many California institutions.

Bonus item:

This is the first page of the first issue of Chung Sai Yat Po, a Chinese American newspaper founded and managed by Chinese Americans and published in San Francisco from February 16, 1900 to 1951.  Several years of the newspaper are available online via the Online Archive of California.

Most of the remaining issues can be found in campus libraries.

To find other Chinese American newspapers, search Oskicat by keywords:

and pull down the "entire collection" menu to journals/magazines/newspapers.

For contemporary ethnic newspapers, try the Ethnic Newswatch database  (off campus access restricted to UCB students/staff/faculty).