Eric writes:
| > I don't want to do that myself, you understand; just curious, because it
| > was such a very long time that they weren't available.
|
| On the other hand, I'm sure the copyright has expired by now....
Part of the fun of this story was that the original "owners" tried to
make a copyright claim. I think the courts just sorta snickered.
I suppose the idea isn't totally ludicrous, considering how copyright
is being stretched these days. The lawyers probably figured that they
could say that they were only claiming copyright on the photos, and
photos can be copyrighted, right? Still, I think this was beyond the
credulence of the legal system, and the folks who put it online seem
to have gotten away with it.
The NPR reports that I heard made it pretty obvious that their news
folks thought this was a rather outrageous concept of "ownership",
and more of a thinly-disguised case of censorship. The original
holders of the Scrolls wanted to be the ones to do the interpreting,
and didn't at all like the idea of random religious riff-raff getting
their hands on the raw text.
The idea that the Scrolls might have contained music is enticing and
not all that unlikely. Alphabetic musical notation isn't at all new.
Chris Walshaw wasn't nearly the first one to come up with the idea.
(He was likely the first one to program it, but MusicTeX was already
around, so it was just a matter of time.) Vaguely similar text-based
musical notation was in use in China and India many centuries ago,
and I've seen claims that the ancient Greeks did something similar.
Their numbers were, like the Hebrew numbers, based on using letters
to represent numbers, with alpha=1, beta=2 and so on. Supposedly some
of the old Greek texts had "nonsense words" written below song text,
and those letters were really numbers representing notes in a scale.
The oriental systems were similar. It's not all that different
conceptually from ABC.
Consider how the religious folks have tried to interpret the Book of
Solomon as deeply religious text rather than the erotic poetry that
it really is. It wouldn't be at all far-fetched for such people to
interpret an Aramaic version of ABC-like notation as religious text.
And one of the properties of Hebrew/Aramaic is that usually only the
consonants are written. It turns out that nearly every string of 3 or
4 consonants is a word, so you can "read" most sequences of random
letters. Whether this is sensible is another question.
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