Mana burn from heaven

2005-09-01

Mana burn from heaven

I was searching for information about IHARA Saikaku's Nippon Eitaigura when I found most of an extremely old copy high-res scanned and put online.

Turns out that Kyoto University has given this treatment to all kinds of old documents. A goodly proportion of them are Japanese (and in cursive hands largely or completely unintelligible to me), but there's also the Collection de Documents Relatifs a l'Architecture et a la Topographie en France, Siebold's Fauna Japonica, an Ethiopian scroll in Ge'ez, a book from Sumatra in Batak, a picture of SANTOU Kyouden, a bunch of maps, Islam-related stuff in Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish, all kinds of documents in Qing-period Chinese, etchings by SHIBA Koukan, some kind of illustrated mini-newspaper...

Some of this stuff is accessible through the English page, but not all.

Wow.

Popularity factor: 6

Anonymous:

I swear I think this is the first time I've seen you misspell anything in years of reading this blog. It's manna.

Ali:

Hey, thanks. I love old maps, and that illustrated "newspaper" is great for art...

(Mispelling... not necessarily, if he was playing with this: http://baptism.co.nz/gram24.html )

Anonymous:

There's at least one other possibility with one n, but I'm not thinking too straight right now with the distraction of New Orleans.

Matt:

I'd like to pretend I was making a witty allusion to Maori culture, but sadly I was alluding to this.

The guilt is extreme.

Anonymous:

The interesting thing is, «mana» as a term in games meaning «the resource required to power magic» ultimately derives, via the theological writings of Richard Codrington and a story by Larry Niven, from mana in Melanesian religion, which is presumably cognate with the Māori word. Maybe everyone knows this, but I only found out today - I'd always thought it did come from the Biblical manna.

2005-09-01