Translation queries: Ipatyevskaya letopis, 1184

[William Ryan]

Just returned from abroad to find this interesting exchange.

Comment: samostrel in Old Russian is usually a crossbow. A ballista is 
in effect a very large crossbow, which might well have required eight 
men to draw and load; when mounted on a carriage a ballista was called 
by the Romans a carroballista.

Sreznevskii, Materialy ..., s.v. samostrel'nyi quotes this incident 
directly from the Ipatevskaia letopis' , and s.v. samostrel says that 
the word is given as a marginal note in the Bible of 1499 to the word 
ballista in the Latin original of I Maccabees vi, 20, which suggests 
that the Greek/Latin word was unfamiliar to Russians at that time but 
that the weapon was not. 'Tuzi' I take to mean simply 'strong', the 
primary meaning given by Sreznevskii to this word.

J. R. Partington's classic work 'A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder' 
(1999 edn, p. 25) notes that Greek fire, in tubs, was launched by 
ballistas. The technology was known to both Byzantine and Muslim 
military engineers in Konchak's time.

Whatever the source of the text the description of the weapon in the 
chronicle, a ballista mounted on a cart, firing containers of Greek 
fire, is not a problem linguistically or historically.

Note 97 in Haney's commentary on the Slovo o polku igoreve on Dan 
Waugh's online text site states that Greek fire was occasionally used by 
the Polovtsy but gives no evidence for the assertion. Was it simply this 
chronicle entry?

Will Ryan

On 02/07/2010 20:05, Ralph Cleminson wrote:
> Aha!  I can't open the link below, but I can read "vasilii-tati6ev" in
> the URL, which gives the clue to the origin of the non-Hypatian
> material, namely V. N. Tatiščev's "История российская".  Notoriously,
> this contains a lot of material that is not to be found in the primary
> sources, and the question is whether he found it in documents that were
> still available to him, working in the 18th century, but are no longer
> extant, or whether he made it up.
>
> It appears that the creator of the document that this link is supposed
> to lead to also had difficulty with his sources. The "самострельные
> туги" are evidently a corruption of the "лоуци тоузи
> самострѣлнии" of the chronicle,
> which in Modern Russian would be "луки тугие самострельные", and are the
> antecedent of the pronoun, which should therefore be сими.
>
> The only way out of the translation difficulty, therefore, is to consult
> an actual copy of Tatiščev's history (not some garbled internet
> version), and cite what he says -- with the usual caveat regarding
> "Tatiščev's material".
>
> Incidentally, à propos of the original post, "Part of my confusion here
> lies in the use of a bow, which should not be able to propel a liquid."
> Indeed: the chronicle does not say that it could.  It says that Končak
> had a man who could shoot "living fire" AND he had ballistae, if that is
> what they were.  (Experts on mediaeval warfare may care to offer an
> opinion.)
>
>
>    
>>>> "Paul B. Gallagher"<paulbg at PBG-TRANSLATIONS.COM>  02/07/10 5:53 PM
>>>>
>>>>          
>
> I did find another modern translation that had a somewhat different
> version of this excerpt:
>
> <http://bookz.ru/authors/vasilii-tati6ev/istoria-_527/page-37-istoria-_527.html>
>
> 6693 (1185). Война половцев. Кончак кн. Стреляние огнем. Самострелы
> великие. Хорол р. Коварство половцев. Половцы побеждены. Безбожный и
> свирепый Кончак, князь половецкий, собрав войско великое, пошел на
> пределы русские, желая все города попленить и разорить, имея с собою
> мужа, умеющего стрелять огнем и зажигать грады, у коего были
> самострельные туги столь великие, что едва 8 человек могли натягивать, и
>
> каждый укреплен был на возу великом. Сим мог бросать каменья в средину
> града  подъем человеку и для метания огня имел приспособление особое,
> небольшое, но весьма хитро сделанное.
>
> Here I'm at a loss to understand the word "туги," but even if I could, I
>
> would still have to wait for the author's correction. I assume "сим" is
> a typo for "сам" = "тот, он" and not for "сий," but I would render all
> of these simply as "he" so it doesn't matter.
>
>    

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