Sunday, October 27, 2013

Claremont Colleges Digital Library

 [First posted 1/16/09. Updated 27 October 2013]

The Claremont Colleges Digital Library is serving some interesting open access material relating to antiquity:

The artifacts in this collection represent part of the antiquities of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity. The items are mostly eastern Mediterranean in provenance, originating from ancient Greece, Cyprus, Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and neighboring regions. A fair proportion of the collection dates to the Bronze Age, but every period thereafter is represented up to the fourth century of the current era. Although the majority is earthenware, other artifacts include objects of glass, ceramic, stone, metal and Cypriote.


The Institute for Antiquity and Christianity is a center for basic research on the origins and meaning of the cultural heritage of Western civilization. The Bulletin of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity is published periodically under the auspices of the Society for Antiquity and Christianity for the general information of persons interested in the research programs of the Institute.
The two volumes of the Campi Phlegraei (1776) and the Supplement to the Campi Phlegraei (1779) provide a firsthand report from Sir William Hamilton which documents the late eighteenth century eruptions of Mount Vesuvius and are important to the science of volcanology due to the precise descriptions of the changes in the appearance of the volcano, the lava flows and other volcanic activity. Displayed here in their entirety, these books contain text in both English and French and 59 hand-colored plates with accompanying explanations.

The Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia (CCE) will initially include approximately 2800 articles published in The Coptic Encyclopedia (Aziz S. Atiya, ed. NY: Macmillan, 1991). The CCE will continuously add updates and new topics from the growing body of scholarship in Coptic studies at institutions worldwide. The scope of articles includes Coptic language and literature; Copto-Arabic literature; Coptic art, architecture, archaeology, history, music, liturgy, theology, spirituality, monasticism; and biblical, apocryphal, social, and legal texts.
The Nag Hammadi codices, thirteen ancient manuscripts containing over fifty religious and philosophical texts written in Coptic and hidden in an earthenware jar for 1,600 years, were accidentally discovered in upper Egypt in the year 1945. This immensely important discovery included a large number of primary Gnostic scriptures. These texts were once thought to have been entirely destroyed during the early Christian struggle to define "orthodoxy," scriptures such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Truth. The images in this collection were taken during the excavations and translation project of the 1970’s and record the environments surrounding excavations, visiting dignitaries, and the scholars working on the codices. The project has provided momentum to a major reassessment of early Christian history and the nature of Gnosticism.
The First Annual Conference of Religions is a conversation and exploration of passages addressing relationships with insiders and outsiders, and points of inclusivity and exclusivity, within the Sacred Texts of six groups: Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, LDS/Mormonism, and Hinduism.

1 comment:

  1. I truly didn't know that such deep papers existed within the Claremont Library, but it's good that they are slowly being made available to more people for whatever reasons they may have for doing research on these!

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