The great thing about this release is that there is a beautiful online edition by Denis Sullivan in PDF with an English translation, including a list of the images to explain them.
One of the handbook's most remarkable ideas faithfully transcribed from antiquity and perhaps never put into effect, was to use inflatable leather ladders to climb enemy walls. As a veteran battler with children's paddling pools (often frustrated as well by those silly little soft-plastic stoppers), I rather wonder who were the big-lunged persons who were supposed to inflate the ladders. The inflatable leather ladder is shown on fol 9v:
Also of interest is the flame-thrower on fol 36r, which is more of a Byzantine idea. The operator had to balance on top of a high tower and apparently had to be lightly clad because of the heat generated:
This codex, the anonymous author of which is given the sobriquet Heron of Byzantium, is a key source on first-millennium siegecraft, and can be compared to another Byzantine military manual, Vat.gr.1164, which has similar engines of war and was discussed on this blog a year ago.
In all, 32 manuscripts arrived online in the latest batch, most of them Greek. Here is my unofficial list:
- Barb.gr.14,
- Barb.gr.16, astronomy with moon phases
- Barb.gr.17, Emperor Maurice
- Barb.gr.22, Aristotle and Polybius
- Barb.gr.28, Julius Pollox, Onomasticon
- Barb.gr.41, Dorotheus of Gaza, Greek classics
- Barb.gr.43, Hesiod and Aratus Soleus. Pinakes
- Barb.gr.60,
- Barb.gr.64, Georgius Codinus
- Barb.gr.66,
- Barb.gr.123, Maximum Planudes, Epigrammata
- Barb.gr.235,
- Barb.gr.237, philosophers, extracts
- Borgh.205, Cyril of Alexandria, in Latin translation
- Ott.gr.150,
- Ott.gr.163,
- Ott.gr.185,
- Ott.gr.255,
- Pal.lat.910,
- Urb.gr.105,
- Vat.gr.354, A remarkable handbook to the gospels, with list and indices in canon format, discussed by Nordenfalk and Wallraff. Aland S.028 See Pinakes
- Vat.gr.462,Gregory Nazianz and others, Pinakes
- Vat.gr.749.pt.2, Septuagint Book of Job with catenae, made in the 9th century. Here are Job's three perfect daughters (fol 249v) as named only in the Septuagint, not the Hebrew text: He called the first Day, and the second Cassia and the third Horn of Amaltheia, and there were no more beautiful women under heaven than Job's daughters (LXX Job 42:17e).
- Vat.gr.756, Four Gospels
- Vat.gr.835, records of second Nicaean Council
- Vat.gr.1523, gospel lectionary
- Vat.gr.1605, Military Handbook by Heron of Byzantium, 11th-century copy (above)
- Vat.gr.1627, a 15th-century text of Homer's Odyssey, not illuminated
- Vat.gr.1947, Gregory Nazianz
- Vat.gr.2197, 9th century, Proclus Atheniensis etc
- Vat.gr.2200, 8th-9th century, theological texts
- Vat.lat.124, glossed gospels of Matthew and John
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