Sharing Ancient Wisdoms: The SAWS Dynamic Library of Wisdom Literatures

Welcome to the website of the Sharing Ancient Wisdoms project, and the SAWS Dynamic Library of Wisdom Literatures.

This project was funded by Humanities in the European Research Area, as part of their first Joint Research Programme. We are very grateful to them, and to our home institutions: King’s College London, The Newman Institute Uppsala, and the University of Vienna.

The SAWS Dynamic Library contains five main groups of texts. Elvira Wakelnig and colleagues in Vienna have made available two collections, Gnomological Material in Arabic and in Arabic-Spanish transmission, and Arabic Philosophical Compendia and Excerpts of Arabic and Latin Philosophical Texts; these include, among others, transcriptions of two abridgements of the ?iw?n al-?ikma, Ps.-??mir?’s Kit?b al-Sa??da, the first editions of three unpublished Arabic compilations of philosophical material, together with further excerpts from relevant texts, from Greek sources and from the Spanish Bocados di Oro whch drew on this tradition. Apophthegmata et gnomae secundum alphabetum comprises the first full edition of an important tradition of Greek gnomologia, arranged in alphabetical order, and edited from 16 manuscripts by Denis Searby and colleagues in Uppsala. A collection of Greek florilegia: Pinakes, prepared by Roueché and Searby, presents the tables of contents from three previously published Greek gnomologia, to give a further sense of the concerns characteristic of such assemblages. Kekaumenos, Consilia et Narrationes, is a new edition, by Charlotte Roueché, of an 11th century Greek text which is profoundly influenced by the tradtion of gnomologia. See a map of the manuscripts which we are publishing.

The documents in the Dynamic Library can be consulted through the SAWS Folioscope. New users should take the Tour which the Folioscope offers, in order to ensure that they make the fullest possible use of all its features. The texts may be read separately or together. They can also be explored through the Indices in the Folioscope, and through the various visualisations. The XML of all the texts can be downloaded from the repository, and the schema for that XML is also available; the tools which have made this all possible, can be found under Methodology. To link to a particular document see How to cite, at the bottom of the Folioscope page; to link to a particular passage or line, use http://www.ancientwisdoms.ac.uk/folioscope/ followed by the Link ID. The full collection of machine readable citations can be found in the CTS inventory.

All our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License: see Creative Commons. All reuse or distribution of this work must contain somewhere a link back to the URL: http://ancientwisdoms.ac.uk/.

This publication is open to all readers, who will use it for many reasons, with widely different expectations. We have attempted to make it as accessible as possible, particularly through the use of links to other resources, where readers can find further information if they choose to. In this we have been dependent on the reliable sources of information which are available online at the time of publication (summer 2013); we hope that the majority of such resources will remain available, and that many more will become accessible.