Robert Kreich Ritner Jr. (1953-2021)

I just learned that Robert Kriech Ritner, Jr. passed away yesterday. Professor Ritner served as my dissertation advisor until Yale University removed him from the position. [This was not at my request.] An official obituary has been posted. This is very sad.

I do not think I ever held Professor Ritner in the contempt or disdain in which he came to hold me. Still, I will share some positive memories of Professor Ritner.

I met Professor Ritner for the first time at my first international conference. It was devoted to magic in the ancient world and was held in August 1992 in Kansas. I had already been accepted to study under him at Yale. 

One of the essentials I learned from Professor Ritner was demotic paleography. When he was a graduate student, Ritner worked on the Chicago Demotic Dictionary. One of his jobs was to take an exacto knife to photographs of papyri and to separate every demotic word. From that, he learned to account for every speck of ink on the papyrus and he taught us to do the same.

I appreciated how he tried to integrate the archaeology, texts, and art of Egypt. Too many disciplines fail to do so, and Egyptology is not as good as it once was in doing so.

Professor Ritner was an engaging lecturer. He knew how to entertain an audience. Professor Ritner was very skilled at turning a phrase. While this mostly came out in his more vituperative passages, he occasionally turned it with felicitous results into his translations. [Some of us have some measure of appreciation for well-crafted vituperation.]

Professor Ritner was very ambitious. Twenty-five to thirty years ago he intended to publish a number of unpublished texts, such as OIC 25389 and another manuscript of the Bentresh Stele, along with the definitive study of tribalism in the Libyan period and a demotic paleography. [I do not know what the publication status is, but one can always be hopeful that the manuscript is waiting at the editors.]

[It was always an informative experience to read a demotic text with Professor Ritner. I had previously had a class in demotic but not from someone who did paleography; there was a huge difference. The readings of the text would be accompanied with an erudite commentary on secondary literature related to the passage in the text. He also generously shared with the class Edgerton's Chicago House copies of the Setna I text, which were generally easier to read than photocopies of the photographs in Spiegelberg's edition.]

My condolences to his family.

[Updates in brackets]

The Tomb of Aratus

A news report discusses how the tomb of the astronomer Aratus was discovered at Zımbıllı Tepe in Turkey. Why is this important?

Aratus was an astronomer who wrote about astronomy in poetry. His most famous work is the Phaenomena. 

Astronomical poetry is out of fashion these days. Most people live in places in the world where light pollution blots out most of the stars in the night sky so they do not feel the need to wax poetic about the view.

Most of what makes Aratus important, at least to Christians, is that the apostle Paul quoted him in his discourse on Mars Hill (Acts 17:28). At the beginning of the Phaenomena (line 5 to be precise), Aratus says:

Τοῦ γὰρ καὶ γένος ἐσμέν.

For we are his [God's] γένος.

The term γένος can mean "offspring," or "descendants" in the biological sense. It can also be used metaphorically as "household." It can also mean "species," which is also a biological sense, and the modern biological term genus is related to it. 

The context of this statement in Aratus is this:

ἐκ Διὸς ἀρχώμεσθα, τὸν οὐδέποτ᾽ ἄνδρες ἐῶμεν 

ἄρρητον: μεσταὶ δέ Διὸς πᾶσαι μὲν ἀγυιαί, 

πᾶσαι δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἀγοραί, μεστὴ δὲ θάλασσα 

καὶ λιμένες: πάντη δὲ Διὸς κεχρήμεθα πάντες. 

τοῦ γάρ καὶ γένος εἰμέν:

We will start from God (Zeus), who, since we are men, should never go unmentioned. All roads, all marketplaces of men, are filled with God, all seas and lakes. We proclaim God always in all ways, for we are his γένος.

Aratus's expression takes a definite side on the relationship between humans and God and Paul cites it approvingly. It is not clear that Paul's thought corresponds well with the general view of post-Nicean Christianity. It does, however, work fairly well with Latter-day Saint thought.