Electra Atlantis: Digital Approaches to Antiquity

I was not created!

– Were you found in a doorway instead?

UPDATE:

No, I was found in some bull-rushes!

– Well, if you think you’re Moses, you should start taking tablets.

Today I received an email from a Romanian gentleman, asking about the translation of the lost passage by John Chrysostom from Oratio 2 adversus Judaeos, which I commissioned and then gave away recently.  He wanted to make a translation into Romanian.  So he asked what I paid the journal, in which Wendy Pradels published the Greek text with notes and German translation, for permission to have that English translation made.  I replied that I paid them nothing; there was no money in all this, and any claim to own a text by a man dead 16 centuries might be valid in some benighted lands but hardly in the USA. 

But it led me to muse on the likelihood that any academic publisher would try to sue out a claim to copyright in such a case.  It would hardly be sensible, in my opinion; why sue over what has no commercial value?  

While in bath, tho, my sense of humour took hold, and I took to wondering what questions one could ask in court.  Copyright only vests in “original, creative works.”  So…

“M’Lud, can the plaintiff tell us which specifically which words in the first line are NOT by John Chrysostom?”

“Would you give us a list of the differences between the text printed and the text composed in 400 AD by John Chrysostom?  If you cannot list the portions which are an original creative work by yourselves, on what possible grounds can you claim that any of it is by you?”

“Would you tell us what the commercial value of this item was, when you purchased — as you believed — the copyright from the scholarly author?  Did you pay any money at all for it?”

And so on.

I suspect, sadly, that courts are unimpressed by rhetoric  unless it involves clever points of law.   The layman who ventures into these waters does so at his peril, and indeed few of us ever do so unless cornered.  As Auberon Waugh remarked, from bitter experience, “He who goes to court places himself in the hands of a ring of grinning rascals who will all run up costs as fast as they can until somebody has to pay.” 

It’s probably easier and safer just to meet the plaintiff, shake hands with him, and then pitch him head first out of his office window, “accidental-like”.  Would the fines for so doing be at all likely to reach the charges that any law firm would demand?

The serious point behind all this is that the relentless march of commercial interests taking a yard where the law granted an inch has reached the point of absurdity.  Only the common sense exercised by publishers in the anglophone world is restraining them from foolishness of the sort feared by our Romanian friend; and outside that sunlit circle of generosity and mutual respect, there have been many examples of insane greed.  We need to push back. 

Genuine creative work should be protected by copyright, for the benefit of us all.  Attempts to own the work of the ancients, by one subterfuge or another, should not exist in a civilised land.

The Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, has written a classicising poem in praise of England's wounded footballing star. Duffy was interviewed on BBC Radio 4: David Beckham "is almost a mythical figure himself, in popular culture".

The last couple of postings on punk archaeology have produced some wonderful comments on Facebook that I cannot resist from sharing. Thanks to my supportive friends. You make blogging a satisfying endeavor (one always wonder if anyone is reading out there).STEPHENNIE MULDER"Kostis, hard to put into words the emotions this evoked for me, especially since I spent my teenage years running around

Archaeology is about context, about understanding relationships, about looking at the spaces between datapoints, as much as it is about the points themselves.

I’ve been experimenting with VUE, mostly as a way of organizing my Zotero libraries, and to help in the planning of a digital history course I really would like to teach next year. So far, it’s been great. But this morning, while watching some of the how-to videos, I started thinking about how VUE could be used to represent archaeological data.

Here’s the video:

So: import data from an RSS feed, along with its metadata…. Hmmm. I tried it with the atom feed from OpenContext.org, regarding the Presidio of San Francisco feed.

I’ve goofed it a bit – missed an important step – but I think there’s real potential here… further bulletins as events warrant; I’ve got a couple of training sessions to lead, so I’m off to class.

One of the texts that is not online and really should be is the legal compedium assembled in the reign of Theodosius II in 450 AD and known as the Theodosian code or Codex Theodosianus. 

The work was compiled from earlier collections of imperial edicts, or rescripts as they were known.  These took the form of a letter from the emperor to some official, usually a proconsul or prefect.  The compilation provided a systematic list of things proscribed or permitted.

The work was translated by a certain Clyde Pharr back in 1954 for Princeton University Press.  That means that it could be out of copyright in the US; unfortunately it is not.

The most interesting portion of the code is the last book.   This consists of the rescripts on religious matters issued by Constantine and his successors, which progressively made Christianity a privileged religion, then the state religion, and then prohibited other religions aside from Judaism.  The tone of these rescripts is often violent, as is often the case with the edicts of later emperors.  Pharr’s introduction points out rescripts which indicate the powerlessness of these emperors, and their repeated and futile attempts by ever heavier penalties to get their will enacted by the imperial bureaucracy.

Such interesting material is always likely to find its way online in unauthorised form.  Today I found a site with a substantial chunk of that book 15 here.  I’m not sure whether it is complete, tho.

Over the past two semesters, I've been teaching a revised version of our department's required undergraduate methods course -- the historian's craft.  I split the course into two parts: the first part is a historiographical survey of the development of the discipline. The class time is divided between a formal lecture and readings of primary sources central to the development of history.  Fortunately, most of these primary sources are easily found on the interwebs.  In fact, I've been able to teach the class without requiring a textbook or a primary source reader.

Here's the basic reading list:

Homer, Iliad, Book 1-2
Herodotus, Book 1
Thucydides, Book 1
Plutarch, Life of Alexander, excerpts
Euseubus, Life of Constantine, excerpts
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of England, Book 1, excerpts
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, excerpts
L. Valla, Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine, excerpts
L. von Ranke, History of the Reformation, excerpts
T. Mommsen, "Rectoral Address," University of Berlin (1874).
J. Michelet, The People (1846), excerpts
J.B. Bury, "The Science of History" (1903).
E. Emerton, "The Requirements for the Historical Doctorate in America," American Historical Association Annual Report 1893
H.B. Adams, "Special Methods for the Study of History," in G. Stanley Hall ed., Methods of Teaching History. 2nd ed. (1902), 113-148.
C. Beard, "That Noble Dream," AHR 41 (1935), 74-87.
F. Braudel, The Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II, excerpts.
E. Said, Orientalism, "Introduction" (New York 1978).
H. K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, excerpt.

This past semester, however, I detected some fatigue with the sources.  Some were too long and the students did not read them carefully.  Others were too difficult to digest during a busy semester.  One of the key points of emphasis in our recent revisions of this class is to make it easier for students and more like other 200 level classes.  Students were enrolling in the class, finding it difficult, and dropping it and this made it difficult to move our majors through this course in a timely and efficient manner.  So, while the subject matter is demanding, we have discovered that the course itself cannot be.  As an added benefit to this more "realistic" approach to the course, I've discovered the more non-majors have enrolled and some of these are students who like history, but have been attracted into other majors. In other words, keeping this course accessible has the potential to attract prodigal students who have wandered from their one true love.

So, as I look ahead to teaching it next fall and spring, I am wondering whether there are some classics in the European or American historical tradition that are (1) accessible online and (2) easily excerpted into a 10-15 page section appropriate for a lower level history course.  The goal of the readings is to spur discussion of principles central to history as a discipline in either the past or present or to show some particular watershed in the development of history as a professional, academic, and intellectual pursuit. Any thoughts?

Numerous studies have focused on modernity’s destructive effect on traditional life- worlds, the desertion of villages and the ruination of rural areas. However, the fact that the modern condition also produces its own ruined materialities, its own marginalized pasts, is less spoken about. Since the 19th century, mass-production, consumerism and thus cycles of material replacement have accelerated; increasingly larger amounts of things are increasingly rapidly victimized and made redundant. At the same time processes of destruction have immensely intensified, although largely overlooked when compared to the research and social significance devoted to consumption and production (González-Ruibal 2006, 2008). The outcome is a ruined landscape of derelict factories, closed shopping malls, overgrown bunkers and redundant mining towns; a ghostly world of decaying modern debris normally left out of academic concerns and conventional histories.(1)

This ruin-landscape is the topic of the current research project. Based on selected case studies of industrial ruins, abandoned fishing villages and war remains in Norway, Russia, Iceland and Spain we want to explore how the ruins of modernity are conceived and assigned cultural value in contemporary academic and public discourses. Our research will cover three main themes: the aesthetics of waste and heritage, the materiality of memory, and the significance of things. Through these themes we want to develop theoretical arguments that help to understand why the derelict materiality of the modern to such an extent has been devalued and marginalized, but also to suggest possible means for reaffirming its cultural and historic significance.

The aesthetics of waste and heritage

One outcome of the modern attitude towards things and materiality is an oppositional hierarchy between, on the one hand, functional and/or aesthetically pleasing things and, on the other, waste – all rubbish supposed to be eradicated by increasingly more effective systems of disposal and recycling (Lucas 2002, Shanks et.al. 2004, Scanlan 2005). Heritage practices may at first be seen to be mediating this opposition, reflecting a care for and attentiveness to the useless and stranded. Heritage, however, contains its own regimes of cultural valuing and othering. In the dominant conception ruins are old, they have an “age-value” which is imperative to their legal and cultural-historical appreciation. Judged by this criterion, modern ruins become ambiguous, even anachronistic. In their hybrid or uncanny state they become antonyms of the modern and blur established cultural categories of purity and dirt; in short, they become matter out of place – and out of time.

Of central importance to this project is the study of how these processes of othering reflect aesthetic preferences and values; preferences also articulated by the way “proper” (ancient) ruins are treated and conceived. The “heritage ruin” is often staged, neat and picturesque; providing visitors with a disciplined and purified space (Edensor 2005). Extraneous materials – plants, fauna, debris, modern materials – all pollutants, are to be expunged. Seemingly frozen in time, further decay is staved off through restoration and preservation. Arresting decay, of course, has always been the imperative of modern museums and heritage management. Modern ruins, in contrast, are withering and crumbling; walls and concrete decompose, nature intrudes, mingles and reclaims. They become untimely reminders of ambiguity, death, and decay—conditions conspicuously at odds with the common cultural tropes of purity, sustainability and conservation (Lucas 2002, Shanks et.al. 2004). However, precisely through their alteration and decomposition these remains may be seen as uttering their own resistance and cultural critique. Thus, an important objective of this project is to explore how the ruins of the recent past may fuel a critical discourse on the aesthetics of heritage and materiality. Do the recent claims of a “thing agency” (Gell 1998, Latour 2005) extend to the aesthetic field as well?

The materiality of memory

In cultural and social studies much attention has been devoted to how memory crystallizes into sites or places of memory, locales of collective remembering (Nora 1984, Assman 1992, Eriksen 1999). Memory is here associated with a “re-collective” conception, in other words, with memory as a conscious and willful human process of recalling the past. The materiality of the place is not considered to be decisive (despite the presence of inscribed monuments and memorials); the crucial issue is the past event, a gone past, and the will to remember it through site embodiments. This project, however, is mostly concerned with different kinds of sites, which might be called “places of abjection”—“a no-man’s land too recent, conflicting and repulsive to be shaped as collective memory” (Gonzáles-Ruibal 2008: 256). Such places still contain the material causation for their abjection, and are haunted by a present past too grim or uncanny to be embraced (Domanska 2005). There is, of course, no ontological stability to such places. New historical circumstances and public attention might transform places of abjection into sites of commemoration and collective memory (cf. Runia 2006) —a point which adds a layer of irony to our own investigations.

Places of abjection also relate materially (although ambiguously so) to another type of memory, a habit memory. While re-collective memory implies a conscious gaze directed towards a particular past, habit memory is an implicit act of re-membering embedded in our bodily routines and ways of dealing with things: “it no longer represents our past to us, it acts it” (Bergson 1896/2004:93, cf. Casey 1984, Connerton 1989). In Bergson’s formative conception, habit memory was largely a function of adaptive value: only those aspects of the past that are useful or compatible with our present conducts are habitually remembered. The ruins dealt with here were once useful, and thus embedded in repetitious practice and infused with habit memory. When discarded and outmoded, their habitual mnemonic significance is lost while their physical presence, albeit ruined, continues. As such they survive and gather as the material antonyms to the habitually useful, creating a tension-filled constellation that carries the potential of triggering a particular kind of involuntary memory (Benjamin 1999). Reverberating against the taken- for-granted materiality of habit memory, these ruins become potential agents of disruption and “actualisation”. Precisely by being redundant and discarded they reveal the gaps in the construction of history as progress, as a continuous narrative; they bring forth the abject memories that both the recollective and the habitual have displaced.

The significance of things

A closely related third theme of this project is the significance of things. Our everyday dealings with things mostly take place in a mode of inconspicuous familiarity; unless broken, interrupted or missing, ordinary things often exhibit a kind of shyness. Also in the study of society things seem to have escaped the scholars’ attention, being largely ignored or confined to the margins when the “real” spectacles of life are accounted for in political narratives or sociological analyses.2 What is inevitably also neglected by this omission is the wordless experience of people and the life unfolding outside talkative history and social discourses.

The fate of things (and the disciplines concerned with them) may well exemplify how the assignment of cultural values has caused processes of marginalization which deeply influence even scholarly work. While the causes of this neglect must be scrutinized further (cf. Olsen 2003, 2007), a central concern here is to develop the emerging but still largely unexplored awareness of things’ potential for informing studies of contemporary and recent society. This, of course, is not to dismiss the profound importance of textual or other accounts, but rather to work out how such an archaeology of the recent past may provide alternative stories and alternative modes of historical engagement. Crucial here is, of course, a concern with the way things can mediate or express the “unsayable”, the “ineffable” experience which lies outside, or is neglected in, discourse.

This reassessment includes a consideration of things in their ruination. Decay is usually understood in a negative way; things are degraded and humiliated through material alteration, while the information, knowledge and memory embedded in them becomes lost along the way (DeSilvey 2006). We suggest that things actually may release some of their meaning or generate a different kind of knowledge precisely through processes of decay and ruination (Benjamin 1999, Andersson 2001). In the destruction process new layers of meaning are revealed, meanings that are only possible to grasp at second hand when no longer immersed in their withdrawn and useful reality. Ruination can thus be seen also as a recovery of memory (DeSilvey 2006); a “slow-motion archaeology” that exposes the formerly hidden and black-boxed; it unveils the masked object, inside is turned out, privacy revealed (Edensor 2005).

Aims and objectives

The overall aims of this project are twofold. Firstly, to critically scrutinize the normative categorization of modern ruins and the discourses and practices that may have led to their academic and historical marginalization; secondly, to reassess the cultural and historical value of this “prehistory” and of the role things play in expressing the ineffable. Each of these aims involves more specific objectives (further contextualised in relation to the specific case studies): (i) to investigate to what extent the cultural reception of modern ruins reflects aesthetic preferences that also impinge on academic and public conceptions of heritage; (ii) to identify “effective-historical” traditions and values responsible for their marginalization as well for the silencing of things more generally in social discourses; (iii) to explore how these othered materialities may contribute to a critical aesthetics of things and heritage; (iv) to examine the role things play in upholding the past and thus in enabling various forms of memory; (v) to explore the significance of ruins and things in informing social and historical inquiries; (vi) to explore alternative means of disseminating this significance.

Project Collaborators

Dag Andersson

Elin Andreassen

Hein Bjerck

Caitlin Desilvey

Alfredo Gonzáles-Ruibal

Gavin Lucas

Bjørnar Olsen

and Timothy Webmoor

For more information about the project visit www.ruinmemories.org or email admin@ruinmemories.org.

Notes

1. See, however, studies by Buchli and Lucas (2001), Neville and Villeneuve (2002), Shanks (2004), Elíasson and Sigurðsson (2004), Edensor (2005), Schofield (2005), DeSilvey (2006), Burström (2007), Eikemo (2008), Gonzáles- Ruibal (2008).

2. For criticism of the “thing amnesia” in social science see Miller (1987), Latour (2005), Olsen (2007).

3. This includes a number of studies such as Rathje (1996), Buchli and Lucas (2001), Lucas (2002, 2004), Shanks (2004), Shanks et.al. (2004); Gonzáles-Ruibal (2006, 2008), Burström (2007).

4. See works by Coles and Dion (1999), Pearson and Shanks (2001), Renfrew et.al. (2004); Bailey (2009).

5. Most of these originate from the cities of Tula and Donjetsk, however, a small number of former residents are still working in the only remaining Russian town at Svalbard, Barentsburg.

6. Despite its seven post-Soviet years Piramida is first and foremost a Soviet site. Little was changed after 1991 apart from its economic rationale. The fact that Lenin’s collected works is still on shelf in the director’s office in the administrative building is a little but telling sign of its postponed Soviet identity.

References

Andersson, D.T. (2001) Tingenes taushet, tingenes tale. Oslo: Solum. Andreassen, E.,

Bjerck, H. and Olsen, B. (2009) Persistent memories. Trondheim: Tapir Akademisk

Forlag (in press). Assmann, J. (1992) Das Kulturelle Gedächtniss. Munich: C. H. Beck.

Bailey, D. (2009) Art to archaeology to archaeology to art. In I. Russel (ed), Archaologies of Art (Papers from the Sixt World Archaeology Congress). UCDScholarcast series. (/http://www.ucd.ie/scholarcast/series2.html)

Benjamin, W. (1999) The Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Bergson, H. (1896/2004) Matter and memory. Dover Philosophical Classics. New York: Courier Dover Publications.

Buchli, V. and Lucas, G. (2001) Archaeologies of the contemporary past. London and New York: Routledge.

Burström, M. (2007) Samtidsarkeologi. Introduktion till et forskningsfält. Stockholm: Studentlitteratur.

Casey, E.S. (1984) Habitual body and memory in Merleau-Ponty. Man and World 17, pp. 279-297.

Coles, A. and Dion, M. (eds) (1999) Mark Dion Archaeology. London: Black Dog.

Connerton, P. (1989) How societies remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

DeSilvey, C. (2006) Observed decay: Telling stories with mutable things. Journal of Material Culture, 11:3, pp. 318-338.

Domanska, E. (2005) Toward the archaeontology of the dead body. Rethinking History, 9, pp. 389-413.

Edensor, T. (2005) Industrial ruins. Space, aesthetics and materiality. Oxford and New York: Berg.

Eikemo, M. (2008) Samtidsruinar. Oslo: Spartacus. Elíasson, N. and Sigurðsson, A. Á. (2004) Abandoned farms. Reykjavík: Edda útgáfa.

Eriksen, A. (1999) Historie, minne og myte. Oslo: Pax forlag.

Fløgstad, K. 2006. Pyramiden. Portrett av ein forlaten utopi. Oslo: Spartacus.

Gell, A. (1998) Art and agency. An anthropological theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Gnilorybov, N. A. (1979) Советский угольный рудник ”Пирамида” на архипелаге Шпицберген. Москва: ЦНИЭИуголь. (The Soviet Coal Mine “Pyramiden” in the Spitsbergen Archipelago).

González-Ruibal, A. (2006) The dream of reason: An archaeology of the failures of modernity in Ethiopia. Journal of Social Archaeology, 6, pp. 175-201.

González-Ruibal, A. (2008) Time to destroy: An archaeology of supermodernity. Current Anthropology, 49:2 (april 2008), pp. 247-279.

Gumbrecht, H.U. (2004) Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Latour (2005) Reassembling the social. An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lucas, G. (2002) Disposability and dispossession in the twentieth century. Journal of material culture, 7, pp. 5-22.

Lucas, G. (2004) Modern Disturbances. On the Ambiguities of Archaeology. Modernism/modernity, 11, pp. 109-20.

Miller, D. (1987) Material culture and mass consumption. Oxford: Blackwell.

Neville, B. and Villeneuve, J eds (2002). Waste-site Stories: The Recycling of Memory. New York: SUNY Press.

Nora, P. (1984) Entre mémoire et histoire: La problématique des lieux. In Les lieux de mémoire, Vol. 1, La République, Pierre Nora (ed.), xv-xlii. Paris: Gallimard.

Olivier, L. (2008) Le sombre abîme du temps. Mémoire et archéologie. Paris: Seuil.

Olsen (2003) Material culture after text: Re-Membering things. Norwegian Archaeological Review, 36:2, pp. 87-104.

Olsen, B. (2007) Keeping things at arm’s length. A genealogy of asymmetry. World Archaeology, 39:4, pp. 579-588.

Pearson, M. and Shanks, M. (2001) Theatre/archaeology. London and New York: Routledge

Rathje, W.L. (1996) The archaeology of us. Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Yearbook of Science and the Future 1997, pp. 158-177.

Renfrew, C., Gosden, C. and DeMarrais, E. (eds) (2004) Substance, Memory, Display: Archaeology and Art. Cambridge: McDonald Institute.

Runia (2006) Presence. In History and Theory, 45:1, pp. 1-29.

Scanlan, J. (2005) On garbage. London: Reaktion Books.

Shanks, M. (1997) Photography and Archaeology. In Leigh Molyneaux, B. (ed.) The Cultural Life of Images: Visual Representations in Archaeology. London: Routledge.

Shanks, M. (2004) Three rooms: archaeology and performance. In Journal of Social Archaeology, 4:2, pp. 147–80.

Shanks, M., Platt, D. and Rathje, W.L. (2004) The perfume of garbage. In Modernity/Modernism, 11:1, pp. 68-83.

Schofield, J. (2005) Combat archaeology: Material culture and modern conflict. London: Duckworth.

Þorkelsson, M. (1996) Stöðin í Viðey – heimildir í hættu? In Landnám Ingólfs 5, pp. 148- 156.

On Saturday, March 13, 2010, the CHNM’s Bracero History Archive <http://braceroarchive.org> received the National Council on Public History’s award for “Outstanding Public History Project.”

The award recognizes excellence in work completed within the previous two calendar years that contributes to a broader public reflection and appreciation of the past or that serves as a model of professional public history practice. Sharon Leon and other project staff, including Peter Liebhold (NMAH), Kristine Navaro (UTEP), Mireya Loza (Brown), and Alma Carillo (Brown), were on hand to accept the honor from NCPH President Marianne Babal at the annual awards luncheon.

The Bracero History Archive is a landmark venture in collaborative documentation. With major partners at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, the Institute of Oral History at the University of Texas at El Paso, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University, and dozens of other small cultural heritage and community organizations around the country, the project has worked to collect and make available the oral histories and artifacts pertaining to the Bracero program, a guest worker initiative that spanned the years 1942-1964. Millions of Mexican agricultural workers crossed the border under the program to work in more than half of the states in America.

The Bracero History Archive is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities through the Preservation and Access division.

Yes, the wait is finally over. Yesterday's announcement of Logos Bible Software 4.0b mentioned what many have been waiting for: Support for importing LDLS3 user-created content.

Specifically, Logos 4.0b now supports importing notes, highlighting, favorites, and prayer lists. Along with this release, regardless if you are importing from LDLS3 or not, Notes now allow for user-editable titles, as well as creating Notes for a reference range, not just a single verse.

So without further ado, let's get your notes from Logos 3 to Logos 4.

Since resources have changed over the years because we’ve corrected typos, added new hyperlinks, and made other edits, in certain cases, these changes can prevent Logos 4 from importing notes from Libronix DLS 3 correctly. In order to minimize the likelihood of notes not being transferred, we highly recommend you download the Custom Toolbar for LDLS3 that prepares your notes for importing into Logos 4.

Getting the toolbar:

• Download the Custom Toolbar from http://downloads.logos.com/LBS4/LDLS3Import/UpdateNotes.lbxctb and save it to your [MyDocuments]\Libronix DLS\CustomToolbars folder. (See the Special Folder Locations article for OS-specific locations.)
• Run LDLS3, and click the newly added Update Notes Now button.
• When Update Notes Now finishes, return to Logos 4.

Now are you ready for this? In Logos 4 type Import All into the Command bar, hit enter, and sit back. You'll then see the “Importing…” status message in the upper-right corner of the main window. That's it.

Content imported into Logos 4 “remembers” that it was imported such that consecutive imports can be run in Logos 4, without adverse effects. Changes to imported content in Logos 4 will clear the link between Logos 4 and LDLS3, so if you edit an imported item in Logos 4, and then re-import, you will see the original item from LDLS3 along with the edited item in Logos 4.This is intentional in order to recover an original note without over writing the new content.

If you no longer want to use some of your user-created content from LDLS3, but want other parts, like your extensive Prayer Lists, there are commands for a more targeted import.

Additional Commands:

Import Notes
Imports only notes from LDLS3

Import Highlighting
Imports only highlighting from LDLS3

Import Favorites
Imports only favorites from LDLS3

Import Prayer Lists
Imports only prayers lists from LDLS3

Import delete (All|Notes|Highlighting|Favorites|Prayer Lists)
Deletes all imported content of the specified type

If you were on the fence about upgrading to Logos 4 because you couldn't transfer your Notes, Highlighting, Favorites, or Prayer Lists, now is a great time to upgrade to Logos 4. Logos 4 is now better than ever, and you can be sure we're already working to add additional features.

You should follow us on Twitter here.

So much for all that free time... here's a brief rundown of some things that have accumulated lately.

First of all, I've been extremely remiss in neglecting to mention my friend Ross Cowan's blog. Ross is the author of, among others, The Roman Conquests: Italy, and he's been blogging about related topics. Ross has also got an article in the latest issue of the magazine Ancient Warfare, which issue (table of contents) is dedicated to "A multitude of peoples: Before Rome ruled Italy" (you know you've always wanted a two-page spread painting of the Battle of Bovianum!). I also learn that Cambridge will be republishing Salmon's Samnium and the Samnites come April -- mirabile dictu!

Big news this month is the discovery at Gabii of an Archaic tripartite building identified as a regia [La Repubblica - photos; MiBAC].

Twenty Etruscan fossa tombs were discovered at Marina Velka near Tarquinia, two of which were hit by tombaroli, along with Roman habitation [Viterbo Oggi; Viterbo Notizie].

Artifacts from three museums in Castiglion Fiorentino (Arezzo) are on display at Castel Sant' Angelo until April 11.

The Pontecagnano museum has supposedly reopened.

There's a call for papers for an Accordia conference on Etruscan Literacy in its Social Context (22-23 September 2010), deadline April 30.

The X Incontro di Studi su Preistoria e Protostoria in Etruria (10-12 September 2010) has as its theme "L’Etruria dal Paleolitico al Primo Ferro. Lo stato delle ricerche". (more)


The latest Journal of Field Archaeology (Vol. 34, issue 4) includes "Remote Sensing and Archaeological Prospection in Apulia , Italy", by S.A. Ross, A. Sobotkova and G.-J. Burgers (pp. 423-438).

Greece and Rome (Vol. 57, issue 1: April 1, 2010):
E. Bragg, "Roman Seaborne Raids During the Mid - Republic : Sideshow or Headline Feature ?" (pp. 47-64)

The Classical Review (New Series), Volume 60, Issue 01, April 2010:
• Witcher on Isayev, Inside Ancient Lucania (2007)
• Mattingly on Revell, Roman Imperialism and Local Identities (2009)
• Roth on Wallace-Hadrill, Rome's Cultural Revolution (2008)
• Perfigli on Clark, Divine Qualities. Cult and Community in Republican Rome (2007)
• Bücher on Jehne & Pfeilschifter (eds.), Herrschaft ohne Integration? Rom und Italien in Republikanischer Zeit (2006)
• Hogg on Briquel, Mythe et révolution. La Fabrication d'un récit: la naissance de la république à Rome (2007)

Bryn Mawr Classical Review:
• I. Edlund-Berry on Daniele Federico Maras, Il dono votivo: Gli dei e il sacro nelle iscrizioni etrusche di culto.
• eadem on Laura Maniscalco (ed.), Il santuario dei Palici: un centro di culto nella Valle del Margi. Collana d'Area. Quaderno n. 11.
• C. Bailey on Harriet Flower, Roman Republics
• C. Smith on Sinclair Bell & Helen Nagy (eds.), New Perspectives on Etruria and Early Rome: In Honor of Richard Daniel De Puma
• N. Carayon on Castagnino Berlinghieri, Elena Flavia, Carmelo Monaco, Il sistema portuale di Catania antica: studi interdisciplinari di geo-archeologia marittima.
• G. van Heems on Enrico Benelli (ed.), Thesaurus Linguae Etruscae. I. Indice lessicale. Seconda edizione...

For the last week I've been following Daf Yomi, the 7 year cycle by which Orthodox Jews read the entire Talmud. It's part of my "Echoes of Late Antiquity" hobby and so far I'm having fun. Take this translated quote from Sanhedrin 31a

If one witness attests [the loan of] a barrel of wine, and the other, of a barrel of oil: — such a case happened, and it was brought before R. Ammi, who ordered him [the defendant] to repay a barrel of
wine out of [the value of] the barrel of oil.

So a "barrel" of oil is worth more than the same of wine. That's nice to know. Of course, I'm relying on the translation from halakhah.com and that's always a worry.

FWIW, the legal principle here is that you need two witnesses. Since the value of the oil is higher, there are only two witnesses to the loan of the value of the barrel of wine.

Dacia - Revue d'Archeologie et d'Histoire Ancienne
Digitalised Collection 1924-1948

1924

1925

1933

1938

1941

1945

1948

See the full List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies.

From archaeologist Rodolfo Amedeo Lanciani, The destruction of ancient Rome: a sketch of the history of the monuments, p. 36 f. (here):

To what use the temples were put immediately after the expulsion of their gods, we do not know; but it is certain that they were not occupied by Christians, nor turned into places of Christian worship. This change was only to take place two centuries later, when the scruples about the propriety of worshipping the true God in heathen temples had been overcome. In the year 600, Pope Boniface IV asked the Emperor Phocas for the temple which was called Pantheon, and turned it into a church of Mary the Virgin ever blessed.” Two periods, then, may be distinguished in the converting of pagan edifices into places of Christian worship, one anterior to the year 609, the other following that date. During the first, civil edifices alone were transformed, partially or completely, into churches; such were the Record Office, which became the church of SS. Cosmas and Damian, and the round market on the Caelian Hill, now S. Stefano Rotondo. After 609 almost every available building, whether secular or sacred, was made into a church or chapel, until the places of worship seemed to outnumber the houses.

This view, expressed by a 19th century archaeologist, is interesting.  But is it true?

Analecta Romana Instituti Danici

The journal Analecta Romana Instituti Danici (ARID) publicerer studier indenfor Instituttets hovedforskningsområder: humanistiske studier (f. eks. antikhistorie, arkæologi kunsthistorie, historie, litteratur, filologi), billedkunst og arkitektur.

ANALECTA ONLINE
Det er besluttet, at ANALECTA fra efteråret 2007 skal udkomme som online-tidsskrift. I første omgang tilgængeligt på institutets hjemmeside og senere i en eller flere af de store, internationale tidsskrift-databaser, som findes på Internettet.
Ved udgangen af hvert kalenderår fremstilles en papir-udgave af de i året indkomne og godkendte artikler, kopieret eller trykt alt efter instituttets økonomiske formåen. Hermed kan man opretholde den særlige tidsskrift-bytteordning, som findes forskningsbibliotekerne imellem til fælles fordel og til fordel for bidragyderne.

The journal Analecta Romana Instituti Danici (ARID) publishes studies within the main range of the Academy’s research activities: the humanities (for instance ancient history, archaeology, art history, history, literature, philology), the fine arts and architecture.

ANALECTA ONLINE
From the autumn 2007 you will find ANALECTA published as an online periodical. The first step will be online at the homepage of the Danish institute, but as soon as possible we will try to enter ANALECTA in one of the worldwide periodical-databases.
At the end of every year we will print or copy in a simple book-form the articles from the actual year for the benefit of the authors, and for the free exchange of periodicals between the research-libraries.

2008

XXXIII

2009

XXXIV

See the full List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies.

ADIAS Newsletter: Abu Dhabi Islands Archaeological Survey

The Abu Dhabi Islands Archaeological Survey (ADIAS) was established in 1992 on the instruction of the late President His Highness Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, under the patronage of His Highness General Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, now Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces and Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi. ADIAS was charged with surveying for, recording and, where appropriate, excavating archaeological sites on the coast and islands of Abu Dhabi. In the years that have followed, ADIAS has identified over a thousand sites or groups of sites on the coast and islands of Abu Dhabi, as well as deep in the deserts of the interior. Among the sites are several of international importance, including the oldest-known settlement in the Emirates, on Marawah island,and major sites in the south-eastern deserts of Abu Dhabi, near Umm az-Zamul, these all being of Late Stone Age date, and the only pre-Islamic Christian monastery yet identified in south-eastern Arabia, on the island of Sir Bani Yas. ADIAS teams have also identified numerous sites of palaeontological importance, with vertebrate fossils from the Late Miocene period, around 6-8 million years ago.

2005-2006 season:

ADIAS Newsletter no,1 - November 2005 * NEW ! *
[ ADIAS to become part of new Abu Dhabi Culture and Heritage Authority - Official Inauguration of ADIAS Fossil Exhibition - Environmental Achievement of the Year Award 2005 - ADIAS website hits - New archaeological work on Sadiyat - More archaeological work planned for Umm az-Zamul and Marawah - Lectures - ADIAS to participate in World Heritage Meeting - Review of ADIAS publication - New Books - Other New Publications ]

---

2004-2005 season:

ADIAS Newsletter no.3 - May 2005
[ "Abu Dhabi 8 million years ago" Exhibition Opens - ADIAS website again has record number of visitors - Visit to GCC team - More work at Umm az-Zamul - OSL dating - New archaeological work at Abu Dhabi Airport - ADIAS Visit to Kuwait - ADIAS to participate in Symposium on Integrated Coastal Zone Management - Lectures - Review of ADIAS publication - New Publications - Forthcoming Publications ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.2 - February 2005
[ DNA, Flints and Fossils - DNA from UAE's First Man - ADIAS website has record number of visitors - 2nd season at Umm az-Zamul - New site at Gabat Rukhna - ADIAS Visit to Kuwait - Fossil Display - Lectures - New Publications - Forthcoming Publication ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.1 - November 2004
[ ADIAS new season underway - Interesting news about radiocarbon dating of Marawah settlement - Oldest archaeological site in the UAE - Abu Dhabi Police help identify UAE's oldest man - Sabkha experts visit Abu Dhabi- BP helps studies of UAE heritage - ADIAS team visits Dalma - Dilmun Civilisation Celebration in Bahrain - Fossil Display - New fossil site discovered at Ruwais - Shells and Archaeology - Mosques of Abu Dhabi - Lectures - Forthcoming Publications ]

---

2003-2004 season:

ADIAS Newsletter no.4 - May 2004
[ 7000 year old settlement discovered on Marawah Island - New ADIAS book published - Sabkha Workshop - 2nd Archaeology Symposium - Visit to Kuwait - Oman conference - Fossil Display - Help on other Exhibitions - Coastal Survey - Lectures - Forthcoming Papers ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.3 - March 2004
[ Neolithic settlements discovered in SE desert of Abu Dhabi - Bazm al-Gharbi: a first report - Marawah season begins - Visit to Qatar - Zayed Private Academy Talk - Peter Whybrow 1942 to 2004 - Al Ain History Symposium - More support from ADIAS sponsors - NBAD helps ADIAS technology - ABC Recruitment ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.2 - January 2004
[ 7,000 year-old houses discovered on Marawah - New archaeological work planned at Umm az-Zamul - Update on fossils exhibition - Launch of new ADIAS book - Visit to Rumaitha and Ruwais fossil sites - Visit to Jebel Dhanna sulphur mines - Survey carried out on Bazm al-Gharbi - New sponsors of ADIAS ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.1 - November 2003
[ Survey, Fossils, Lectures and Publications - a busy start to the new season - Surveys of coastal areas in western Abu Dhabi - Success for Mohammed - More help from TAKREER - More work on fossil finds - Lectures and Outreach - Visit to Sultanate of Oman - Books and Publications ]

---

2002-2003 season:

ADIAS Newsletter no.3 - June 2003
[ Dolphin support Fujairah work - Training UAE national - Rachael's find - Zayed University - ADIAS pottery expert receives award - London Seminar for Arabian Studies - New archaeology book - ADIAS website statistics - Support from NBAD ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.2 - March 2003
[ Al Ain Seminar - ERWDA - Jebel Dhanna - Karen Cooper - Marawah - Ruwais ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.1 - December 2002
[ Abu Al-Abyadh - Abu Dhabi airport - Mark Beech - Kuwait - Ruwais - Training UAE nationals ]

---

2001-2002 season:

ADIAS Newsletter no.3 - June 2002
[ Abu Dhabi airport - Dalma - Mark Beech - Mleisa - Ruwais - Sir Bani Yas ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.2 - February 2002
[ Dalma - Database - Jebel Dhanna - Marawah Marine Protected Area - Mleisa - Niqqa - Rumaitha - Umm al-Khaber ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.1 - November 2001
[ Dalma - Dan Hull - Database - Futaisi - Website ]

---

2000-2001 season:

ADIAS Newsletter no.3 - May 2001
[ Al Aryam - Database - Futaisi - Jebel Dhanna - Mleisa - Ra's Ghumeis - UAE archaeology conference ]

Please note that all newsletters prior to May 2001 are saved as Acrobat pdf files. You will need the Acrobat viewer program to view these files, which you can download from the Adobe Acrobat viewer. If you do not have this please visit the Adobe website to obtain this program.

ADIAS Newsletter no.2 - February 2001
[ Conference - ERWDA EDB - Jebel Dhanna - Ras Bilyaryar - Rufayq ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.1 - November 2000
[ Abu Al-Abyadh - ADIAS publication in arabic - Ancient Hearths - Archaeology Conference for Al Ain - Charlotte Stokes wins prize - Coastal Sensitivity Maps and ERWDA - Dalma - Halat Hail - Jebel Dhanna - Khor Al Bazm - Rumaitha ]

---

1999-2000 season:

ADIAS Newsletter no.4 - June 2000
[ Abu Dhabi Golf and Equestrian Club - Medieval occupation of Abu Dhabi - Hamim, Liwa - Marawah radiocarbon dates ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.3 - 2000

ADIAS Newsletter no.2 - January 2000
[ Al-Aryam (Bu Khushaishah) - Bahrani - Dabb'iya - Emirates archaeology 2001 Conference - Habshan - Hearths in Qatar - Oldest evidence for eating dugongs - Old shorelines ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.1 - October 1999
[ ADIAS publication in arabic - Ancient FIshing - Ghagha - Jebel Dhanna - London Seminar - Marawah - Operation Ghazal - Qarnein - Ra's Bilyaryar - Yasat al-Ulya ]

---

1998-1999 season:

ADIAS Newsletter no.3 - May 1999
[ Dalma - geology - Ghagha' - Lime kilns - Marawah - water catchment system ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.2 - February 1999
[ Bab - Balghelam - Bu Sharah - Dabb'iya - Marawah - Ostrich eggshell - Qusabi - Rufayq ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.1 - November 1998
[ Abu Al Abyadh - ADCO oilfields - Dabb'ya - Mantiqa al-Sirra - Marawah - Ras Farda - Rumaitha - Shanayel ]

---

1997-1998 season:

ADIAS Newsletter no.4 - May 1998
[ Dalma - Geology - Marawah - Publications - Qarnein ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.3 - February 1998
[ Dalma - ERWDA - Lisbon EXPO - Marawah ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.2 - December 1997
[ Dabb'iya - Fish study - GIS - Marawah ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.1 - September 1997
[ Qarnein - Ras Sadr - Taweela - Tawi Beduwa Shwaiba ]

---

1996-1997 season:

ADIAS Newsletter no.4 - June 1997
[ Sharjah Symposium - Shuweihat ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.3 - April 1997
[ Balghelam - Fish study - Mantiqa As'sirra - Marawah ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.2 - December 1996
[ Balghelam - Sir Bani Yas ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.1 - November 1996
[ Abu Dhabi airport - Sir Bani Yas ]

---

1995-1996 season:

ADIAS Newsletter no.7 - June 1996
[ Sheikh Shakhbut house - Sir Bani Yas ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.6 - April 1996
[ Al F'zaiyyah - Bida al Mutawa - Futaisi - Ghagha' - Jebel Dhanna - Sir Bani Yas - Yasat al Ulya - Yasat Sufla ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.5 - March 1996
[ Abu Dhabi airport - Sir Bani Yas ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.4 - February 1996
[ Balghelam - Sir Bani Yas ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.3 - December 1995
[ Balghelam - Qusabi - Sheleala ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.2 - October 1995
[ Abu Dhabi airport - Environmental - Geology ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.1 - July 1995
[ Abu Dhabi airport ]

---

1994-1995 season:

ADIAS Newsletter no.6 - June 1995
[ Abu Dhabi airport - Sheleala - Sir Bani Yas - Umm Amim ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.5 - April 1995
[ Al F'zaiyyah - Ghagha' - Hamr - Sir Bani Yas ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.4 - March 1995
[ Abu Dhabi airport - Abu Dhabi island - Jubayl - Ras Bilyaryar - Sila - Sir Bani Yas ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.3 - February 1995
[ Arzanah - Jubayl - Marawah - South Muhayimat - Zirku ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.2 - January 1995
[ Balghelam - Bu Khushaisah - Fiyya - Marawah ]

ADIAS Newsletter no.1 - December 1994
[ Balghelam - Fiyya - Marawah ]

See the full List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies.

Nouvelles de Jérusalem, École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem (EBAF)

Publication annuelle, paraissant en début d’année en anglais et en français, rappelant tous les grands et petits événements, donnant des nouvelles des anciens, listant les publications, elle constitue comme la mémoire de l’École.

Année 1997
Année 1998
Année 1999
Année 2000
Année 2001
Année 2002
Année 2003
Année 2004
Année 2005
Année 2006 : actuellement manquante, disponible en version anglaise
Année 2007 : actuellement manquante, disponible en version anglaise
Année 2008
Année 2009
Année 2010

See the full List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies.

I've been surveying the longest words of Modern Greek, thanks to a thread at the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos' blog. But that's not the only place long words of Modern Greek can be reported from.

I've made mention previously of Hellas-L mailing list, which is available publicly as Usenet group bit.listserv.hellas. I dropped off the list in April 2008, and the last live post seems to be from March 2008: the group's Usenet feed has now gently passed into the Internetic night, like much of Usenet itself has; and the list itself was certainly winding down when I last saw it.

But Hellas-L had a glorious history behind it. In the late '80s and early '90s, when there was no substantial Internet presence in Greece, and the Web did not yet exist, this raucous mailing list of Greeks studying and working overseas was the main presence of Greek in the Internet. Given the times, it was an exclusively Greeklish medium, with all the anarchy of competing informal romanisations. Several of the erstwhile regulars of the list, as Internet oldtimers, are now in the community around the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos' Blog—including Nikos himsef.

By the time I started archiving the list in late 1996, it was starting to lose its preeminence; but I kept archives up to October 2007. (I missed three months in 1999.) Because it was a ready corpus of Greek—albeit idiosyncratic, self-conscious, English-tinged Greek—I used it as a resource in a few papers I wrote. That has led to at least one surprise to list members egosurfing.

The list cultivated a particular linguistic culture, like internet communities do. Playful use of Greeklish to roundtrip English, for example. Because some whoreson putz Wikipedian has just deleted my own paragraph on the topic from the Greeklish page, here it is for posterity:

Not withstanding the loaded politics of Greeklish, jocular use of English, transcribed into Greek and then transliterated into Greeklish, shows how users can manipulate the use of script to ironic effect: if a user, in the middle of a Greeklish conversation, types "dis iz xarnt tou rint" for "this is hard to read" (transliterated via δις ιζ χαρντ του ριντ), they are ironically distancing themselves from their code-switching to English, doubly ironic since the script is Roman but the orthography effectively Greek. (One might retort that this is aesthetically displeasing—but of course that is the point.) This artifice is particularly widespread on the Hellas mailing list.

Another particularity was a penchant for long compounds, especially during flamewars. Since we've been hunting down long words, I cranked up my grep engine, scrolled past the MIME attachments and spam email addresses, and came up with the following list from my archives of the list. Of course, these are not Aristophanes, and the compounds confirm that long words in Greek aren't that startling a thing. But several of them have linguistic interest, including where the compounding goes wrong.

Hellas-L already came up in previous discussion, with πολυμαθουφοχριστιανοπεοκρουστόπαιδο, "polymath UFO Christian penis stroking lad" (35 chars). There turn out to be 13 words 40 characters or longer in the corpus, and four 50 characters or longer.

Compounds breaking apart: #1

The words are long enough though, that they're starting to break apart. Two of the thirteen words are problematic as compounds.

The first is not really a word at all, but a run-in phrase:

Αριστεροαναρχοκαταολωνσαςγραφωσταπαλιάμου Aristeroanarxokataolwnsasgrafwstapaliamou "Leftist, Anarchist, Against Everybody, 'I-Don't-Give-A-Damn-About-You'", coined on Hellas-L by Kostas Yannakopoulos, 1997-02-04 (41 chars)

The word starts as a compound: Arister-o-anarch-o-. But then it drops in two quoted phrases, which don't belong in compounds because they're not pure stems, but inflections-and-all words: κατά όλων "against everybody" and σας γράφω στα παλιά μου [τα παπούτσια] "I write you on my old [shoes]" (common saying: I have so much contempt for you, I write your name on my old shoes' sole, so I can tread on it.)

Compounds breaking apart: #2

The second coinage is *almost* a proper compound, but goes awry with one connecting vowel:

Χανουμισσαδικομαυροφορεμενηπροσφυγομάνας Xanoumissadikomayroforemenhprosfygomanas "Harem Lady, unjustly dressed in black [= bereaved] mother of refugees", coined on Hellas-L by Sotiris Skevoulis, 2000-09-18 (40 chars)

This is a reference to AEK soccer team (Athletic Union of Constantinople), reestablished in Athens by refugees from Turkey. Skevoulis combines an uncomplimentary epithet for the team, "Harem Ladies", with a complimentary: "Mother of the Refugees". Skevoulis wants to trowel on the sentimentality of "Mother of the Refugees", so he amplifies it with a word picture: the Mother of the Refugees as mournful lady in black.

Here Skevoulis runs into a problem: he is combining the participle μαυροφορέμενη "dressed in black" with the noun προσφυγομάνα "Mother of the Refugees" (both are compounds). This is not a good idea, and there are safer alternatives: μαυροφόρ-α has an inflection straight on the root, and μαυροφορ-ο-προσφυγομάνα would be morphologically unexceptional. The noun μαυροφορούσ-α is another alternative: it is of course merely the ancient active feminine participle "wearing black"; but in Modern Greek the active participle is no longer productive as an adjective, so that μαυροφορούσα looks like any other feminine noun, and μαυροφορουσ-ο-προσφυγομάνα is no more exceptional than χανουμισσ- is in a compound.

But Skevoulis has used the passive participle, which is very much productive in Modern Greek. Again, you can do this in a compound, since participles correspond to adjectives; but it's a lot less usual. Because it's unusual, the participle ending -εμεν- calls attention to itself. Even if μαυροφορ-εμεν-ο- is possible in a compound, its unusualness in that context makes hearers think of the more usual context, as the ending of an inflected participle.

The thing is, -εμεν-ο- in that inflected context is masculine: μαυροφορ-εμέν-ος "man dressed in black", μαυροφορ-εμέν-η "woman dressed in black". So μαυροφορεμεν-ο-προσφυγομάνα, while supposedly a single compound, sounds like the ungrammatical phrase *μαυροφορεμένο (masc) προσφυγομάνα (fem). To patch this up, Skevoulis gives "dressed in black" the feminine ending -η. But now with μαυροφορεμεν-η-προσφυγομάνα, he's introduced an unambiguous inflection between the two stems.

That makes the compound breaks apart: participial -εμέν- cannot stick to a feminine noun in compounding. Not because it is impossible, but because the participle ending makes it unusual, and therefore calls to mind the two halves of the compound as separate words. Those separate words would disagree in gender, so the attempted compound sounds wrong. Again, had he used a more conventional first half of the compound, like μαυροφορ-ο-προσφυγομάνα, he wouldn't have had to tinker with the connecting vowel.

Compounds breaking apart: #3

A third coinage just misses the 40 character limit, but is even more problematic than the previous two:

in εντελαμαγκεντεΒοτανικωχαμανεχωμερακλώσει-mode in evtelamagkevteBotavikwxamavexwmeraklwsei-mode "in 'Ente la mangé de Votanik—woah, I'm feeling funky now' mode" (coined on Hellas-L by "The Marsist", 1997-01-26) (39 chars)

This refers to the pseudo-French (?) lyrics of a Rebetiko song by Spyros Zagoraios—see YouTube: "I'm the tough guy of Votaniko". The coinage follows them with the phrase ωχ αμάν, έχω μερακλώσει "ah, alas, I am in the ecstatic mood brought on by bouzouki music". (The translation above is less scrupulous.)

The whole thing is in another linguistic particularity of Hellas-L: posters signing off their posts with their name, followed by in/σε [pertinent Greek phrase]-mode. Normally the mode phrase is spaced as normal, or hyphenated:

• σε-αμάν-πια-αυτή-η-Νέα-Ορλεάνη–mode se-aman-pia-auth-h-nea-orleanh-mode "in Enough-of-New-Orleans-Already–mode" (Lida Anestidou, 1997-11-06)
  
• in–ο έρωτας κι ο βήχας δεν κρύβονται–mode in- o erwtas ki o bhxas den krybontai- mode "in 'you can't hide love or a cough'–mode" (Lamprini Thoma, 1997-11-04)
  

As the hyphens give away, the mode phrase is treated as a single unit, because the expression parodies the English use of in [single word]–mode: in sleep mode, in alert mode. I assume The Marsist has gone further, and mooshed the mode phrase together, because of the opaqueness of the song lyrics. People posting the lyrics often enough run έντε λα μαγκέ ντε Βοτανίκ together as εντελαμαγκέ ντε Βοτανίκ. Once he started running words together, he just kept going; after all, the mode phrase is meant to be a single unit.

What The Marsist did is not that unusual; online English often enough does that kind of thing using CamelCase, and if anything it's a surprise this is the only instance of that kind of thing I've found on Hellas-L. But just taking spaces out of a phrase doesn't turn it into a single word linguistically.

Compounds breaking apart: O RLY?

I'm being rather absolute about this "no internal morphology" rules, and—as I conceded in the discussion of γαμαοδέρνουλας—you can have a phrase turned into a single word, or stem, as a quotation. That's happened with the Forget-Me-Not flower in English; and it's happened with μη μου άπτου "Touch-Me-Not" (John 20:17) in Modern Greek, used as an indeclinable adjective to mean "aloof". (slang.gr: "Excessively sensitive, hypochondriac bothered by everything to the point of hysteria".)

I note that Sarantakos, unlike slang.gr, spells it as a single word, without spaces: μημουάπτου. It does help that the phrase is in Ancient Greek of course, so harder to take apart. And I still don't think it is useful to call εντελαμαγκεντεΒοτανικωχαμανεχωμερακλώσει as a single word: it doesn't look to be intended to used anywhere μημουάπτου can, like an adjective.

That's kind of an unfair burden to impose on nonce coinages, I admit. But the rarity of CamelCase in Greek gives away the game anyway: "Votanik" is not so integrated into the word that it has the same lowercase as the rest. In fact we saw another giveaway in the word I rejected as a compound from Sarantakos' thread, Ελληνοαποτηνπρωηνγιουγκοσλαβικηδημοκρατιατηςμακεδονιασόπουλο. If that was a real compound, there would be no need to spell -της- with a final sigma.

(In Greek typography of yore, you would in fact find final sigma in the middle of a word, at a morpheme boundary: προςλαμβάνω = προς + λαμβάνω. I'll daresay that's not the precedent Lefteris Dikeos had in mind when he spelled his word like that.)

Compounds not as much breaking apart

Back to Hellas-L. Here's the remaining eleven compounds from the period I have access to:

οικονομικοπολιτικοκοινωνικογεοστρατηγικές oikovomikopolitikokoivwvikogeostratngikes "economical, politicial, social and geostrategic" coined on Hellas-L by Christos Papadas, 2002-11-26 (40 chars)
οικο[νο]μικοκαταναλωτικοϋγειονομικοεργασιακοτεχνολογικό oikomikokatanalotikoygionomikoergasiakotexnologiko "economical, consumerist, sanitary, workplace and technological [paradise]", coined on Hellas-L by Pelopas@acn.gr, 2004-01-22 (53 chars)

We've seen similar coinages on Sarantakos' thread, all of them parodying the journalistic cliché of socio-politico- compounds: sonorous context-setting adjectives that don't end up saying that much.

φεμινιστοβιολογικοτουρκοφασιστομπλεξίματα feministobiologikotourkofasistomple3imata "feminist, biological, Turkish, Fascist complications", coined on Hellas-L by Lida Anestidou, 1997-05-08 (41 chars)

A summary of the various perennial topics of flamewars on the list, that the poster is trying to avoid. The humour is in the incongruous and lengthly lumping together of the disparate topics.

ινδοκινεζοουζυμβυριανοαβοριγινοκεντριστών indokinezoouzumburianoaboriginokentristwn "Indochinese, Uzymbyrian (?) and Aboriginal-centrists" coined on Hellas-L by Myron Kaisides, 1998-07-26 (41 chars)
αφροασιατοαμερικανοαυστραλιανοανταρκτικοκεντριστές afroasiatoamerikanoaystralianoantarktikokentristes, "Afro-Asian-American-Australian-Antractican-centricists", coined on Hellas-L by Myron Kaisides, 1998-07-26(50 chars)

Both coinages deride Afro-centrist approaches to history, by concocting absurd combinations of ethnicities as other biases. The point here once again is the length of the compound, as much as the incongruity of the ethnicities.

Νταϊφαδοσαλιαρεληδοκοσκωταδοκοκκαλιστανούς Ntaifadosaliarelhdokoskwtadokokkalistanous "Daifas, Saliarelis, Koskotas, and Kokkalis-istanis", coined on Hellas-L by "Asteras Amaliadas", 1998-02-11 (42 chars)

Referring to scandal-ridden presidents of soccer teams. Notice that the surnames are suffixed with -δ-, which is used in the plural of the names (Νταϊφάδ-ες, Σαλιαρέληδ-ες, Κοσκωτάδ-ες). Asteras is intending the plural proper names as a genericising description, the same way Ancient Greek used Ἀριστοφάνεις and Πλάτωνες. So, "inhabitants of a Third World country characterised by people such as Daifas, Saliarelis, Koskotas, and Kokkalis"

ΠαπαδοπουλοΠατακοΜακαρεζοΧουντοΪωαννιδικών PapadopouloPatakoMakarezoXouvtoIwavvidikwv "followers of Papadopoulos, Patakos, Makarezos, the Junta, and Ioannidis" coined on Hellas-L by Andreas Dakanalis, 2000-11-17 (42 chars)

Reference to the leaders of the 1967–74 dictatorship. Note the English-derived CamelCase: useful for clarity of the compound, particularly as proper names are involved, but not really necessary, and not part of conventional Greek (or English) orthography: the preceding compound of proper names did without it.

ΠαρασκευοΣαββατοΚυριακοΔευτεροΤριτοΤετάρτη ParaskeuoSabbatoKyriakoDeyteroTritoTetarth "Friday–Saturday–Sunday–Monday–Tuesday–Wednesday" coined on Hellas-L by Sotiris Skevoulis, 2006-02-02 (42 chars)

Expansion of Σαββατοκύριακο "Saturday–Sunday = weekend": by enumerating four more days, Skevoulis is saying he has gone to London for a six-day–long weekend. Again, this uses CamelCase.

ποντικοηρακλειωτικοownerιλιτικομπινελικωμάτων pontikohrakleiotikoownerilitikompinelikomatwn "Pontikas, Irakliotis, and Owner-ly flame wars", coined on Hellas-L by Nick Venedict Economides, 1996-12-21 (45 chars)

An example of the fluidity of Greeklish, allowing English and Greek terms to be combined relatively inobtrustively. Pontikas and Irakliotis were list personalities of yore, and Economides is harking back to the flamewars they were involved in.
Greeklish is that fluid, but Greek morphology is not. If I've understood the morphology correctly, Economides can't just drop the English [List]Owner in the compound without some sort of connective suffix: ποντικοηρακλειωτικο-owner-ο-μπινελικωμάτων, with a purely English owner root in the compound, would sound like broken Greek. So owner is nativised through the adjective derivation -ίτικ-ος "-itic", in combination (I think) with the Turkish-derived -λής -li "one characterised by", and an extra /i/ echoing -ίτικ- for good measure, to connect owner to -λ-ίτικος.
I think. Economides clearly had to attach *something* to owner to get it to fit in a Greek compound. I'm surprised he went as far as attaching something as long as the adjectival -ιλίτικο-. Then again, the point is to make a long compound.
No CamelCase here; the two proper name compounds using Camel Case are later than the two that do not, which may suggest increasing influence from English.

αναρχοκομουνιστοσυνδικαλιστοφασιστοαντιδημοκρατική, avarxokomouvistikosuvdikalistikofasistikoavtidnmokratikn, "anarcho-communist-syndicalist-fascist-antidemocratic", coined on Hellas-L by "The Marsist", 1997-01-22 (50 chars)

Parodying the only slightly less longwinded invective from the right against communists, as already seen in the preceding post: αναρχοληστοκομμουνιστοσυμμορίτες, Εαμοβουλγαροκομμουνιστοσυμμορίτης.

The longest word, like, ever

So we've seen several compounds long enough, and composed of heterogeneous enough material, to strain the morphology of Modern Greek: three compounds outright collapsing, and at least one more teetering. It should still be said, most of the compounds have been in good faith linguistically: they haven't had the outright fakery of the winning entries on the Longest Word In English blog, which don't count as words by any notion of wordness. You don't just take all the spaces out of a War-And-Peace–length book and call it a word. Unless you're a prat. Or a conceptual artist, which is the same thing.

That said, the longest word of Greek I now know of, Ancient or Modern, does not fall apart, and obeys the simple rules of root compounding.

Ουγγροτουρκομογγολοϊνδιανοπερσοβουλγαροαλβανοσλαβοϊταλοφραγκο­γερμανοαγγλοϊσπανοαβαροτσιγγανοαραβοαιγυπτιακοσυριακο­ασσυριακοϊρακινο­σουηδορωσσο­σερβοκροατομουσουλμανοβουδιστοϊεχωβαδο­μιθραϊστο­σιντοϊστοϊνδουιστο­έλληνες, Ouggrotourkomoggoloindianopersovoulgaroalvanoslavoitalofragkogermanoaggloispano-avarotsigganoaravoaiguptiakosuriakoassyriakoirakinoevraikosouhdorwssoservokroato-mousoulmanovoudistoiecwvadomi9raistosintoistoindouistoellhnes, "Hungarian, Turkish, Mongol, Indian, Persian, Bulgarian, Slav, Italian, French, German, English, Spanish, Avar, Gypsy, Arab, Egyptian, Syrian, Assyrian, Iraqi, Swedish, Russian, Serb, Croat, Muslim, Buddhist, Jehovah's Witness, Mithraist, Shinto, Hindu Greeks" coined on Hellas-L by Myron Kaisides, 2001-08-18 (204 213 chars)
[EDIT: transcription error: I left out "Assyrian" after "Syrian"]

Coined as an indignant retort to someone questioning the genetic continuity of Greeks: "From what I gather, you believe that we are in fact..."

This word did not break Greek morphology, the way Χανουμισσαδικο­μαυροφορεμενη­προσφυγομάνας or Αριστεροαναρχοκαταολωνσας­γραφωσταπαλιάμου did. But even with its ASCII hyphens, it clearly broke Usenet, as you can see from the randomly interspersed spaces on the Google Groups citation linked.

… Was that it?

Two concluding remarks after all that.

Are you let down by the word that dislodged Aristophanes? Are you thinking, "any random Internet poster can chain together thirty ethnicities and creeds and beat that"? Why yes, so one can. But I already discussed as much in the end of the preceding post. There's no special genius to producing really long compounds—although as the linguistics I've gone through this post shows, it's harder than it looks. What it takes is chutzpah, and perseverance.

The other thing to note is something I also noted in the previous post: while we have a well-defined canon from antiquity, in which the Comic authors' long coinages stand out, now everyone gets to be an author, and there's much more of a sample base for long coinages. And if you look back at the Byzantine instances I gave of long words, where the corpus is already substantially widened, you'll see Hellas-L is not doing that much new. ΠαπαδοπουλοΠατακοΜακαρεζοΧουντοΪωαννιδικών "followers of Papadopoulos, Patakos, Makarezos, the Junta, and Ioannidis" is not that different from Ἡρακλειανοκυροσεργιοπυρροπαυλοπετρῖται "followers of Heracleus, Cyrus, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul and Peter". φεμινιστοβιολογικοτουρκοφασιστομπλεξίματα "feminist, biological, Turkish, Fascist complications" is not that different from ἀκτινοχρυσοφαιδροβροντολαμπροφεγγοφωτοστόλιστος "dressed in golden-shining, thundering and incandescent clothes". Kaisides' melange of 29 30 ethnicities and creeds is not that different from Aristophanes' lopado-temacho-thing of 17 dishes. And "Pelopas@acn.gr" is not more obscure than "Gregory, hegumen of Oxia".

And if that's all left a sour taste in your pursuit of longest words, well, maybe it's given you some linguistic edification as well...

Wieland Wilker kindly sent me a copy of Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams, Christianity and the transformation of the book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea.  This arrived on Friday, and I read through it over the weekend.

The first thing to strike me was the absence of footnotes.  That’s because they had all been banished to the end.  This habit of American publishers is a nuisance to the reader.  It necessitates flipping to and fro the end of the book.  Doing so is weary; consequently it is impossible to glance at the note while reading more than once or two.

The book also places two further difficulties in the way of the critical reader. 

Firstly the numbering of the endnotes is broken up by chapter.  In order to find a note, therefore, I have to memorise both the endnote number (23) and the page on which it appears (15). 

Secondly, once you have found your note, it will not infrequently have a reference in the form “BLOGGS, 1997, p.123″.  Now unless you have memorised the bibliography, this may not take you further forward.  To get an idea of which book is being referred to — a study?  an edition? a paper? — you must then locate the bibliography, hunt through that, then return to the note, reread that now you know what the book is, and then return to your place in the book.

It’s obvious why the book is so arranged; it is very convenient and concise for the author and publisher.  But it is rather a problem for the reader.  I wish that publishers in the US would avoid these habits.

But on to the book.  Grafton’s prose style is a fluid as ever and the book slips down easily.  The view expressed is that we all owe rather more to the innovations in book design required for the Hexapla of Origen and the Chronicle of Eusebius than is generally realised.  The argument is made well, and is one that I have long wished to hear made.  The description of the Hexapla is very clear, and I read it with deep attention, while cursing my inability to glance at the bottom of the page to see the footnotes and assess the data behind the claims.

The authors  also make the valuable point that Eusebius’ innovation of verbatim quotation was itself a useful innovation.  The links that Grafton makes with the activity of renaissance scholars are also useful and interesting.

Another very useful aspect of the book was how G&W related the activity of Origen, supported by the private sponsorship of Ambrose, to the way in which freelance teachers of philosophy operated in the period.  This must be the right approach to take, and such links must be illuminating.  A letter of Origen in which he describes how Ambrose kept Origen’s nose to the grindstone in his enthusiasm was new to me, and most interesting!

The plates are good, although the quality of images supplied by some of the institutions is risibly poor.  The book came out in 2006, at which time many manuscript libraries were waging a die-hard campaign to prevent access to their collections. I think really the page images need to be in colour, and there seems no reason technically not to do this now. 

The content of the book is mainly an essay of interpretation.  To cover the ground, the authors reply mainly on the secondary literature and reflect the consensus of US-based scholarship without too much discussion.  The breadth of the topic necessitates some such approach, indeed.  This is handled well, and there is certainly a need for such books.  The translations that are given of some texts are fresh and readable.  

But the approach also means that sometimes a view is expressed without any backing other than a scanty reference, if that.  Some of the views so skipped over are very controversial, as anything to do with christian origins tends to be.  Do we wish to be told, as fact, that the gnostics were Christians, for instance?  The apostles did not think so, the Christians did not think so, modern Christians do not think so.  This idea seems to me to reflect more the desire of the Selfish Generation to evade the moral teaching of Christianity than anything in the historical record.  But doubtless Dr. G and W just picked this nonsense up from their sources.  In view of the tendency of said Generation to promote daft ideas by incessant reiteration, we must always check whether some agenda is being promoted when we read stuff from US sources. 

Another bit struck me as unintentionally funny.  At one point the book offers as fact the theory that Demetrius, the enemy of Origen, was in fact the first Bishop of Alexandria.  This contradicts the sources, which tell us of an episcopate beginning with St. Mark.  The idea that in fact Mark created some form of presbyterate, or whatever, is of course possible; but our sources do not say so.  But G&W treat this theory as fact, with the odd result that they are forced to describe the statement of Eusebius as “the conjectures of Eusebius”.  That is, the primary source written a century later around 100 miles away is “conjectures”, while a theory contradicted by the data written 2,000 years later by someone in a culture which possesses no more than 1% of the ancient literature is fact.   Really?  That seems quite unlikely to me! 

When nonsense is offered as fact, and fact is described as conjecture, there is always a reason. To debunk the idea of a succession of bishops is a standard of anti-Catholic literature.  The agenda of those who control university appointments peeks through again.

We mustn’t pillory G&W for this sort of thing, tho.  This is what happens to any of us when we don’t stick close enough to the data, and spend too much time with the secondary literature.  Doubtless the authors repeated the stuff in good faith.

Overall verdict?  A useful book.  I imagine it is aimed at undergraduates.  It must raise the reputation of Origen and Eusebius in that audience, and also connect these authors with their late antique milieu.  Both objectives are praiseworthy.

In September, I began a series of posts in which I thought out loud about the survey data from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.  The posts mainly focused on overall ceramic densities across the entire study area.  Over the last two or three weeks, I've begun working on the final analysis of the period data from the survey.  To do this, I take the finds data produced by R. Scott Moore and Mara Horowitz and plot is against the survey maps produced in the field by David Pettegrew and myself.  In most cases, this work has confirmed our long held (and argued) perspectives on the distribution of material at our site, but sometimes, bringing finds data together with our survey maps shows patterns that were not entirely apparent on the ground.

While we have dedicated much of our attention to activities along the Pyla-Koutsopetria coastal plain or in the area of the known Bronze Age site of Kokkinokremos, it may be that some important activity is taking place on the coastal ridge running north of the Koutsopetria plain and the very prominent coast height of Vigla.  The main concentration of activity in what we call Zone 4 sits along its southern edge.  The site in this area first appears during the Iron Age.

 

This image shows the site from the Iron Age to the Hellenistic period.  The blue dots are Iron Age material (1050-475 BC).  The assemblage in the red circle included everything from Classical era terracota figurines to fine wares and kitchen wares and utility wares (amphoras, medium coarse and coarse wares).  The material is highly localized in an area of 25 units or so and does not appear to extend further north. The assemblage from these periods on Vigla (the concentration of material to the southwest of the red circle) is contemporary, but far less robust and diverse.  The activity at this area appears to persist into the later Hellenistic and Early Roman period as well.

In this map, the triangles are Early Roman material, the pentagons are Hellenistic-Early Roman material and the green dots date to the more generic Roman period.  While there is evidence that the activities at the site begin to extend further to the north along the plateau, the main concentration of material is still in the southern most units of along our north to south transect.  Like for earlier periods, the assemblage is reasonably diverse including fine wares, lamp fragments, and a full range of utility wares. 

The most remarkable thing about the site is that it suddenly, within the limits of our chronological resolutions, stops in the Late Roman period.

In this map, the different colored dots are all Late Roman material and, as you can see, there is not much Late Roman activity in the area of the earlier site.  So, the question is what kind of site of sees consistent activity for close to 1200 years and then is suddenly abandoned.  To my mind, there are three options.  First, Late Roman activity does not decline over the study area as a whole.  In fact, the coastal plain becomes the center of unprecedented activity during this period. It may be that the center of settlement shifted from the more protected top of the coastal plateau to the more convenient coastal plain during the relatively peace epoch of Late Antiquity.  Second, the area on the plateau could be a religious sanctuary of some description.  The scholar of Late Antique Christianity in me is drawn to the idea that the site is a long-standing pagan sanctuary abandoned with the growing prominence of Christianity on the island.  Perhaps the very fabric of the sanctuary was quarried for the building of the excavated Early Christian basilica on the plain below.  Finally, it may be that this coastal height served as the local cemetery.  While the diversity of the assemblage at the site hints at habitation or even religious uses (which could include the same material signature as domestic activity), it may be that the main settlement was on the fortified height of Vigla (as our excavations at least hints) and they buried their dead outside the city walls to the north.  The abandonment of burial in this area occurred in Late Antiquity where (I can't resist) Christian conventions gently resisted burial among pagan ancestors.  At the same time, the persistent sanctity of the long-standing burial ground made it impolitic or even impious to use the space for more mundane activities.  As a result, the area was largely abandoned even as activity along the northern part of the plateau continued.

We do not have any definitive evidence for any of these hypothesis, although ground-penetrating radar transects recorded in 2009 might provide us with some hints once they are analyzed.  At the same time, the clear shift in activity away from this site stands out as one of the most definitive changes in the distribution of material across our site.

My readers are probably aware of the OGC's Sensor Web initiatives, but there's another, different vision of a "Web of Things" using the architecture and infrastructure of the actual web we have now (URIs, HTTP, Atom, JSON, HTML, Javascript) that's well articulated in this SXSW presentation by Vlad Trifa and Dominique Guinard (and also in their blog, via This week in REST) and in an associated technical report (PDF).

Today's post is from Morris Proctor, certified and authorized trainer for Logos Bible Software. Morris has trained thousands of Logos users at his two-day Camp Logos training seminars.

The older I get, the more I appreciate the features in Logos 4 that allow me to adjust the display of the program and resources. Here are few reminders so that you can make Logos easy on the eyes:

To adjust the text size of an open panel:

• Choose the panel menu on an open panel
• Move the slide bar at the top of the menu to adjust the text size in that panel

To change the default text size of resources:

• Choose Tools | Program Settings
• In the Fonts section select a different Default Text Size from the drop down list

To change the default font in resources:

• Choose Tools | Program Settings
• In the Fonts section select a different Default Font from the drop down list

To change the background color in resource panels:

• Choose Tools | Program Settings
• In the Accessibility section select a different color from the Resource Panel Background drop down list

To change the default size of the entire program:

• Choose Tools | Program Settings
• In the Accessibility section select a different Program Scaling percentage from the drop down list

Already a Logos Bible Software user?
Visit our custom upgrade discount calculator to see what discounts you qualify for on an upgrade to a brand new Logos 4 base package.

Want to be a Logos Bible Software user?
New customers should visit http://www.logos.com/4 to learn more and see what discounts are currently available.

You should follow us on Twitter here.

A new version of Logos 4 will be available later today as a free download to all Logos 4 users. Version 4.0b adds a plethora of new features and improvements and squashes lots of little bugs. If you have automatic updating enabled (screenshot), which is the default setting, Logos 4 will notify you that updates are ready to be installed.

When you see the balloon tooltip window, right-click on the Logos icon in your system tray and choose to “Install update” (screenshot). If Logos 4 hasn’t downloaded the update by the end of the day and you just can’t wait any longer to get your hands on the latest release, just type Update Now into the command bar (screenshot). This will force Logos 4 to check for any available updates (screenshot) and begin downloading them.

What’s New in 4.0b?

There are hundreds of new features, improvements, and bug fixes in 4.0b, but here are some of the most significant ones:

• Import your notes, highlighting, favorites, and prayer lists from Libronix 3. Tomorrow’s blog post will deal with importing in detail. In the meantime, check out “Importing from LDLS 3” and “Importing Notes from LDLS 3.”
• A new Prayer List document type in the File menu allows you to manage your prayer lists.
• Create and edit your highlighting palettes and styles.
• Export a bibliography from a collection or group of clippings for use in a paper, sermon, etc.
• Customize the Information Panel with the new settings option.
• A Parallel Resources drop-down menu lets you quickly jump to similar resources.
• Resources support navigating by data type levels, highlighting, and search results.
• Choose to “Search (while typing)” for Bible searches (similar to Bible Speed Search in LDLS 3).
• Replace a saved layout with the current layout using the new “Update to current snapshot” context menu option.

To see a complete list, check out the 4.0b article on the Logos wiki.

If you’re like me, you’d rather see it in action than just read about it. Courtesy of user and Logos video creator extraordinaire Mark Barnes comes this nice Logos 4.0b overview video.

Time to Upgrade to Logos 4?

Many of you have been cautiously watching from the sidelines, waiting for the right opportunity to make the switch to Logos 4. As you can see, Logos 4 is now better than ever. It’s had more than four months of extensive testing by thousands of users, and our team of developers has been fixing bugs, listening to user feedback, and adding some really cool new features.

But development isn’t stopping with 4.0b. The next version is already underway, and work on some really cool new features is coming along nicely. We’re in the process of adding these additional features, as well as many others that we can’t tell you about yet.

There’s never been a better time to upgrade to Logos 4. It’s a powerful, stable, cutting-edge piece of software that just keeps getting better all the time. And best of all, these updates come to you free of charge.

What’s Your Favorite New Feature?

After you’ve updated to 4.0b, drop a note in the comments and tell us what your favorite new feature is. I think I’m most excited about importing and the parallel resources menu. What’s your favorite?

What about Logos 4 for Mac?

The Mac version of Logos 4 continues to make good progress with a new build coming out about every week or two. The latest release, Alpha 15, is looking good. If you’re ready to help up test it, you can either upgrade your base package or download core engine and head on over to the Logos 4 for Mac forum.

You should follow us on Twitter here.

When I posted about the longest words of Greek, I didn't include Modern Greek, because I don't have ready access to the resources that would give me an answer. A blessing on his house (not for the first time): Nikos Sarantakos put up a post asking for suggestions from his readers. Given how arbitrary word compounding is, and how fragile the authority for words is, Nikos asked for contributions in three classes:

1. Words in dictionaries
2. Words found in texts, or derived from a word in texts
3. Made up words

Sarantakos is leaving out chemical and numerical words, "which are no fun" (που δεν έχουν γούστο).

I've promised to reproduce the results here "for the Franks" :-) , and the thread has now died down enough that I will. Remember, the longest words of pre-Modern Greek are Aristophanes' monsterpiece, 171 letters long, and then, leaving out numericals, the thunderclap word from the Magical papyri, κεραυνομεγακλονοζηνπερατοκοσμολαμπροβελοπλουτοδότα, at 50 letters. I've also cast around a couple of other online threads, but not found anything longer. To keep things manageable, I'm cutting off at 25 letters for made up words.

I do of course know that this proves little, because compounding is productive in Greek, and many other languages. In fact the WordReference.com thread on longest words discussed discounting compounds from the listing, and with good reason. I'll say more on that in a followup post, after the letdown of the actual longest word found online.

It is still significant that Greek compounds more productively in general than English say, and that words 15 letters long are not that uncommon. But Greek is not in the running with actual agglutinative languages like Inuit or Turkish; and impressionalistically, German still beats Greek for commonplace usage of very long words.

1. In a dictionary

This wasn't as rich a harvest as we expected: as I noted in comments previously, Modern Greek lexicography shy away from the literary hapax (one-off word).

• Nikos Sarantakos himself suggested κοινωνιογλωσσολογικούς (22 chars), accusative plural of κοινωνιογλωσσολογικός "sociolinguistic".
  
• The longest I could find in the ispell spelling dictionary is ηλεκτροεγκεφαλογραφήματος "of an electroencephalogram" (24 chars—better known in English as EEG)
  
• δεσοξυριβοζονουκλεϊνικό "deoxyribonucleic: DNA" (24 chars, P..Konidiaris)
  
• αλληλοεξουδετερωνόμασταν "we were neutralising each other" (25 chars, P..Konidiaris and Diver of Sinks). That verb isn't in the dictionaries, as Sarantakos notes, though αλληλοεξυπηρετούμαι "we are serviceable to each other" is in Triantafyllidis, and αλληλοσυμπληρώνομαι "complete each other" in Babiniotis, so αλληλοεξυπηρετόντουσαν "they were serviceable ...", αλληλοσυμπληρωνόντουσαν "they were completing ..." (22 chars)
  
• αρεταμαρτωλιδεοπαθοφθέγματος "of an utterance of the passion of the idea of virtue and sin (?)" (28 chars, TAK, from Anastasiadi-Symeonidi's reverse dictionary) No idea why it's in there, and noone's quite sure what it's even supposed to mean.

I'm suspicious of that last word, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was made up. The fact that dictionaries aren't as prepared to go there makes sense, given that Modern Greek dictionaries are all about words in actual use. Greek thinks a six-syllable word is relatively short, as we'll see further down; but ten syllables is about the limit of practicality.

Kriaras' dictionary of Early Modern Greek is more sympathetic to hapaxes, being a dictionary of a literary canon. It has three words of 26–28 letters, which I didn't include in the previous post, because they just missed the 29-letter barrier I set there:

• εκατοστοτεσσαρακοστοτέταρτον "1/144" (28 chars: the 14th century Rechenbuch [Arithmetic textbook] published by K. Vogel)
  
• ανακουρκουδοκλανομούστακος "squatting fart moustached" (26 chars: from the Mass of the Beardless Man. Of course.)
  
• εντεροκαρδιοσυκωτοφλέγμονα "entrails, heart, liver, and lungs" (26 chars: from the Mass of the Beardless Man. Of course bis.)

2. Made up

There were the inevitable joke non-words here, such as:

• "The longest word of Greek is whatever follows, on TV panel interviews, the phrase 'I'll just say one more word'. Said word usually lasts three to five minutes." (lots of chars, Alfred E. Newman)
  
• Τελειώνωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωωω "I'm cumming!" (50 chars, Kostas)
  
• "With the help of some ακετυλοσαλικυλικού (acetylosalicylic) acid—an aspirin, get it?—I hope to manage to read through your posts. … I think I win: the longest word in the smallest package!!!" (18 chars, Misirlou)

More wordlike coinages, though not necessarily less jocular:

• οικονομικοπολιτικοκοινωνικούς "economical/political/social" (29 chars, P..Konidaris)
  
• χαζοκουτομουνογαμόσταυρος "dumb stupid cunt fuck Cross = particularly stupid individual" (25 chars, Alfred E. Newman)
  
• χαζοκουτομουνογαμοσταυρίζουμε "we say 'dumb stupid cunt fuck Cross'" (29 chars, Alfred E. Newman)
  
• ψυχοσεξανωμαλοπορνοδιαστροφικός "psycho-sexual perverted debauched deviant" (30 chars, Nikiplos)
  
• τσαχπινομπιρμπιλογαργαλογκαβλιαροσιγανοπαπαδιά "coquettish, lively-eyed, tickling, sexy quiet–priest's-daughter [cf. stereotype of librarian]", (46 chars, Epicharmus, gradually built up over a series of comments between him and Voulagx)
  
• ιστορικοκοινωνικοοικονομικοπεριβαλλοντολογικός "historical/sociological/economical/environmental" (46 chars, Thrax Vlax and Kornilios)
  
• Αυστρογερμανοελβετογαλλοϊταλομονεγασκικός "Austrian, German, Swiss, French, Italian, Monegasque" (41 chars, Kornilios)
  
• Ελληνοαποτηνπρωηνγιουγκοσλαβικηδημοκρατιατηςμακεδονιασ­όπουλο "offspring of a Greek and a Former-Yugoslav-Republic-of-Macedonia-n" (58 chars, Lefteris Dikeos and Nikos Sarantakos)

The final coinage makes its point—that the name of FYROM acceptable to Greece makes for awkward morphology; but it's so awkward as to be disqualified as a real word: it is chock full of internal inflections, and accusative and genitive articles have no business inside a word.

The other coinages fit into Greek morphology just fine, and the economico-politico- coinages parody extant journalistic cliches.

3. In texts

These lists won't be exhaustive of course, but I think they're indicative.

• σκουληκομερμηγκότρυπες "worm- and ant-holes = convolutions" (23 chars, Nikos Sarantakos) (6 hits on Google excluding Sarantakos' and this)
  
• υποδηματοεπιδιορθωτήριον "shoe repair shop" (24 chars, Nikos Sarantakos, recorded by linguist Manolis Triantafyllidis in Tripoli)
  
• οικονομικοπεριβαλλοντικούς "economical/environmental" (26 chars, Nikos Sarantakos) (no Google hits, but I'll take his word for it)
  
• αναρχοληστοκομμουνιστοσυμμορίτες "anarchist, brigand, communist gang members" (32 chars, Epicharmus, frequent official condemnation of the Communists during the Greek Civil war) (1 google hit)
  
• Εαμοβουλγαροκομμουνιστοσυμμορίτης "National-Liberation-Front (EAM) Bulgarian Communist gang member" (33 chars, Vermeer, ditto) (2 google hits in the plural)
  
• πανεξυπνοτετραπερατοσοφομεγαλοφυΐα "all-smart ingenious wise genius" (34 chars, Dokiskaki: "I'm sure I remember it from a comic book, but which one? Mickey Mouse? Asterix? Iznogoud?" Sarantakos put this under "made up words", but the hint of a citation makes me move it here)
  
• αλκοολικοσαταναρχαιολογικοψευτομεγαλοφυές "alcoholic satanic archaeological pseudo-ingenious" (41 chars, SOphia; translation of the book title Der satanarchäolügenialkohöllische Wunschpunsch. Yes, it's German.)
  
• υπηρετομαγεροσιδεροζυμωσφουγκαροκαμαριεροκηπουροαμαξο­γραμματο­γλωσσομαθής "servant, cook, ironing, baking, cleaning, chambermaid, gardener, carriage driving, secretary and linguist" (72 chars, Paliouras; a word remembered from a Karagiozis play, probably second grade primary school, 1982)

How serious are these words? Less so the longer you get of course. Linguistic polemic is one of the reasons they can get so long: Learnèd Greek liked long compounds, and people mocking them would make them exaggeratedly longer still:

• ελαδιοξιδιοαλατολαχανοκαρύκευμα "oil–vinegar–salt–lettuce–concoction", i.e. Greek salad (31 chars, TAK: Iakovos Rizos Neroulos, Korakistika [PDF], p. 42)
  
• εδωδιμολεσχοποικιλοβρωματοπωλείον "hall of edibles and shop selling various foodstuffs" (33 chars, TAK: Dimitrios Vyzantios, Babylonia [PDF])
  
• Τηλε-τηλεοπτικοδιαυλοεπιλογή or τηλετηλοψιοδιαυλοεπιλογή "remote televisual channel choice = TV remote control" (27, 24 chars, Diver of Sinks: blog post by Yannis Harris)

Neroulos' and Vyzantios' plays are early 19th century parodies of Greek sociolinguistics, and they target the long (and serious-minded) compounds of learnèd Greek in particular: the learnèd hero chokes on pronouncing "oil–vinegar–salt–lettuce–concoction", and is cured when he is forced to say the rather more vernacular λαχανοσαλάτα "lettuce salad". Though 6 syllables is a lot less than 17, λαχανοσαλάτα is still a leviathan by many languages' norms, it should be said. TAK reports there are many other such coinages in the plays; you can discover them at your leisure.

In a similar vein, Yannis Haris is satirising Vyron Polydoras learnèd construction of διαυλοεπιλογή "channel selection" for the common less Hellenic τηλεκοντρόλ "remote control". By prefixing τηλε- "remote" and τηλεοπτικο- "televisual", and then Atticising τηλεοπτικο- to τηλοψιο-, Haris is upping Polydoras' ante.

Another source of long words is tongue-twisters: yes, these are hardly intended for productive communication—and neither are the linguistic parodies above. But to be learnable, they do at least have to make sense semantically as words.

• μολυβοκοντυλοπελεκητούς "carved with a lead stylus" (24 chars, Nikos Sarantakos); Cypriot variant, μολυβοσι(δ)εροκαντζελλοπελετζημένη "carved with a lead and iron railing" (31 chars, Dimitris)
  
• ποτηροκαλαθοσκαρβελοσωμαρογαϊδουρολειβαδοποταμίσουμε "let's [put] the glass on the basket on the saddle post on the saddle on the donkey on the meadow on the river" (52 chars, Immortalité)

So where are we? Ten syllables seems to be the limit of a practical long word, which is why dictionaries peter out at around 20 letters length. The Greek constitution has 22,939 words, and the following word length frequencies:

1:	1416	11:	1251
2:	2211	12:	639
3:	5255	13:	239
4:	1784	14:	103
5:	1844	15:	60
6:	1678	16:	27
7:	1723	17:	4
8:	1618	18:	0
9:	1546	19:	1
10:	1538	20:	2

Once we go above that limit, words aren't practical any more, and the point of using them is almost always that they're overlong. They're satires of long (but not *that* long) learnèd coinages, or tongue-twisters, or literary flourishes—compounds so long just because the author can. The annoyance with the 72 letters of the longest word of all so far, the Karagiozis play's υπηρετο­μαγερο­σιδερο­ζυμω­σφουγκαρο­καμαριερο­κηπουρο­αμαξο­γραμματο­γλωσσομαθής, is that there's no incandescent literary genius to it. We'll be even more disappointed next post, when I divulge an online coinage even longer than Aristophanes'.

But Aristophanes' genius has blinded us to what long coinages are about. Aristophanes was among the first to coin such a monster, presumably; and such coinages are artifices of the written word, they're hard to sustain in an oral medium. (Not impossible, as the tongue-twisters show.) But now that everyone is an author, everyone can coin that kind of word, should the need come up.

Aristophanes' genius with his lopado-temacho-thing wasn't that he was able to compound a 171-letter long word; that's the Greek language making it possible. His genius was that he had the chutzpah to do it. And chutzpah is not the exclusive preserve of canonical literary authors.

As England prepares for the 2012 Olympics, a group of workers who were excavating a road near Weymouth uncovered a mass grave that contained the skeletons of 51 individuals. Examination of the skeletons show that the bodies had been decapitated, and radiocarbon dating dates the remains to between 890 and 1030 AD. Isotope analysis of the teeth indicates that the men were from Sweden and Norway. It will be interesting to see what future analysis of the bones uncovers.

RSM

In October of last year, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) organized a forum entitled “An Age of Discovery: Distinctive Collections in the Digital Age.” The proceedings are online. You can listen to the presentations or read the papers. A few speakers included actual physical artifacts in their collections, e.g., Kenneth Hamma with “Integrating Special Collections into the Enterprise: A Case Study of the Yale Center for British Art” (pdf). I had the pleasure of hearing him present at the “UCLA/Getty Storage Symposium. Preservation and Access to Archaeological Materials” in 2008 when he still worked for the Getty Trust (see my post in IW&A).

“As part of a Princeton archaeological expedition to Cyprus that started in 1983 I lead a small team cataloging the pottery finds – not every fragment, just those things that were sufficiently interesting or intact to qualify. But, in fact, after a few short summer seasons the pottery stores looked more like this. Wouldn’t it be nice, … to have access to related finds as well as unpublished field notes at other excavations, to collections of pottery and related works at museums and at other special collections tucked away here and there around the world. Twenty-five years later, I can say with confidence that it is easier imagined than done. … this experience helped define the goal of access to collections for me as something more comprehensive than simply access to what my undergraduate mentor used to refer to as the purple passages.  Any solutions we imagine for integrating special collections into the enterprise have to be aware that the enterprise has other interests and other collections – not all as difficult as this – but collections nevertheless that have to be part of a solution before it is meaningful for a simple archaeologist like myself.”

“There are four parts to this [Yale] project, … Technology, Data, People, and Policy.” “We discussed the incentives to explore digital asset management as a shared venture initially with the Yale University Art Gallery and with the Peabody Museum, …” “… the Center for British Art did not want to have or develop a large information technology burden …” “Let’s turn to Data. Strawberry Hill is an exhibition on the collection of Horace Walpole …” “Out of the work on the Strawberry Hill exhibition came an ideal and very extensive addition to subject indexing from the Walpole Library for all collections in the Center for British art.” “… the Walpole’s subject index … was created by Mrs. Lewis herself and not surprisingly fits hand-in-glove the knowledge domain of British art and culture.  Where else could one imagine a well-used entry like: ‘hedgehogs comma magicians’?”

“It is also useful to consider standing the usual management model on its head and then get out of the way.  The Digital Coffee group at Yale is representative of the campus.  It is self-organizing.  It reports to and is responsible to its membership.  And among its members, Digital Coffee knows everything there is to know about the production, management and dissemination of visual surrogates. They don’t need to be told what to do, just given a seat at the table.” Is it just me or did this group plagiarize the old Lucent logo? I sure always thought that one looked like a coffee stain… Anyway, Alcatel-Lucent is no longer using it so the Yale caffeine addicts probably don’t have to worry about a cease-and-desist letter…

In the post on the longest words of Greek, I mentioned the fact that Sanskrit, as reported in the Guinness Book of Records, has produced a word over twice as long as Aristophanes' monsterpiece.

If any non-agglutinative language was going to best Greek in that regard, it would of course be Sanskrit: a language of comparable pedantry, and of much more prodigious compounding. Remember how Sir William Jones discovered it: "The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either". Copious alright; because of its compounding, the 1880s Monier dictionary of Sanskrit (updated version online) has 180,000 lemmata, as opposed to LSJ's ca. 120,000.

Sanskrit's very own monsterpiece comes in the Varadambika Parinaya by Tirumalamba. This blog post has cost me 30 bucks, but I have bought the edition of the poem:

• Suryakanta. 1970. Varadāmbikā Pariṇaya Campū of Tirumalāmbā. Volume 79 of Chowkhamba Sanskrit studies. Varanasi: Caukhambā Saṃskṛta Sīrīj Āphis.

Tirumalamba is one of the few women writers in Sanskrit, writing in the early 16th century; the work is a Campu, a mixture of prose and verse, on the marriage of her contemporary king Achyuta Deva Raya. On the literary merits of Tirumalamba's work, I'm not competent to speak, so I won't; if anyone from Karnataka finds this and wants to chime in, they're welcome to. If you do go googling for the text, btw, look for Tirumalamba, and not Varadambika Parinaya: there are lots of little annoying spelling variations for the book title.

Our word comes in pp. 18–19, in the chapter on the Tuṇḍīra country (aka Thondaimandalam in Tamil Nadu, of which the capital is Kanchi). The chapter reads:

On the way, he passed through the Tuṇḍīra country.

The chapter takes up 130 lines of English translation.

The reason it takes up 130 lines is, "the Tuṇḍīra country" is preceded by 25 accusative adjectives, and followed by three more.

Those adjectives, in turn, take up several lines, and correspond to one or two sentences each in English. One or two LONG sentences.

The monsterpiece, which is only first among equals, is adjective #12. It's full of hyphens, so to my disappointment, I'm not going to destroy all the browsers in the world after all. I have taught myself enough Devanagari to type the word in, along with its translation and commentary.

I'm attaching a gif just in case, but after some initial confusion I think I did OK. The bad typography of the original was in fact helpful: the little gaps left between the vowels and consonants meant I could actually eyeball where the vowels were. The Unicode tables are missing one ligature of the edition (ङ्ग, which should look like a dotted ड्ग).

So, the Tuṇḍīra country is, among other things:



निरन्तरान्धकारिता-दिगन्तर-कन्दलदमन्द-सुधारस-बिन्दु-सान्द्रतर-घनाघन-वृन्द-सन्देहकर-रयन्दमान-मकरन्द-बिन्दु-बन्धुरतर-माकन्द-तरु-फुल-तल्प-फल्प-मृदुल-सिकता-जाल-जटिल-मूल-तल-मरुत्रक-मिलदलघु-लघु-लय-कलित-रमणोय-पानोय-शालिका-बालिका-करार-विन्द-गलन्तिका-गलदेला-लवङ्ग-पाटल-घनसार-करुतूरिकातिसौरथ-मेदुर-लघुतर-मधुर-शोतलतर-सलिलधारा-निराकरिष्णु-तदोय-विमल-विलोचन-मयू-रव-रेरवापसारित-पिपासायास-पथिक-लोकान्

nirantarāndhakāritā-digantara-kandaladamanda-sudhārasa-bindu-sāndratara-ghanāghana-vr̥nda-sandehakara-rayandamāna-makaranda-bindu-bandhuratara-mākanda-taru-phula-talpa-phalpa-mr̥dula-sikatā-jāla-jaṭila-mūla-tala-marutraka-miladalaghu-laghu-laya-kalita-ramaṇoya-pānoya-śālikā-bālikā-karāra-vinda-galantikā-galadelā-lavaṅga-pāṭala-ghanasāra-karutūrikātisauratha-medura-laghutara-madhura-śotalatara-saliladhārā-nirākariṣṇu-tadoya-vimala-vilocana-mayū-rava-reravāpasārita-pipāsāyāsa-pathika-lokān

[EDIT: restored the inherent /a/ before hyphens in the transliteration, per shreevatsa's comment. Check out his post on translating Sanskrit verse—and not just because it links here. :) ]

"It was, as if celebrating 134 the (important and) great festival of the marriage of the most suitable couple of the Goddess or Fortune and the Country, encouraged by the lovely lady in the form of the orange creeper, and the house-holder, the large garden, attractive with heaps of ripe yellow fruits, charming like numerous pellets of turmeric paste 135, set off in the silver cups of the buds of (her) bright flowers. It was admirable on account of thousands of groves of the coco-nut trees, that were richly laden with fruits and were, as if the hand of the earth, raised up to bestow the desired object on Indra's heaven, (which was) longing for her (of the Tuṇḍīra country) enviable 136 fortune. In it the beauty of the parting of the hair, filled with red-lead 137, of the young woman in the form of the earth was manifested 138 by the lovely path made 139 by the pollen to be seen in between the tall and densely grown trees that marked the lower limit of the range 140 of the rippling 141 rays of the sun. In it, the distress, caused by thirst, to travellers was alleviated by clusters of rays of the bright eyes of the girls 142; the rays that were shaming the currents of light, sweet 143 and cold water charged with the strong fragrance of cardamom, clove, saffron 144, camphor and musk and flowing out of the pitchers 145 (held in) the lotus-like hands of maidens (seated in) the beautiful water-sheds, made of the thick roots of Andropogon muricatus 146 mixed with marjoram, (and built near) the foot, covered with heaps of couch-like soft sand, of the clusters of newly sprouting 147 mango trees, which constantly darkened the intermediate space of the quarters, and which looked all the more charming on account of the trickling drops of the floral juice, which thus caused the delusion of a row of thick rainy clouds, densely filled with abundant nectar."

134. कन्दलत् —Lit. 'was producing'. 135. Lit. 'morsals of turmeric mud'. 136. Lit. 'longing' 'generating'. 137. This practice still exists in India. It is a sign of सुहाग (Skt. सौथाग्य), i.e. the husband being alive (or auspicious state of wifehood). 138. Lit. 'reminded'. 139. Lit. 'indicated'. 140. The trees were growing so very densely that the sun-beams could not penetrate through their branches. It seemed, as if the trees were the lower boundary of the field of activity of the rays of the sun. 141. Read वोचिक instead of विचिक. 142. Lit. 'their'; in the Skt. passage the noun बालिका has already occurred. 143. Lec. var. मधु-रस-शोतल for मधुर-शोतल. 144. पाटल also means the trumpet flower, but as a rule, saffron is the companion of camphor and musk in Sanskrit literature. 145. Galantikā means a pitcher and is so called because water flows out of it (गलत्यम्थोऽरुयाः गलन्तिका). 146. लवुलय —roots of Andropogon muricatus, commonly known as khas. Huts made of the sweet scented roots of Andropogon muricatus (khas ki taṭṭis) are a regular luxury in the summer season throughout India. 147. कन्दलत् in the fourth line goes with माकन्द-तरु in line 6. This custom of spreading cloth in front for a distinguished personage to treads upon still exists in India and is practiced on both formal and informal occasions. But now-a-days the colour of this cloth is not white but red. It starts from the entrance gate of a hall or a canopy and leads right up to the dais. पाकारि Lit. 'the enemy of Pāka', i.e. Indra.

GCI Bulletin (Getty Conservation Institute)

The GCI Bulletin, a free bimonthly e-bulletin, provides timely information to professional colleagues around the world on the activities of the Getty Conservation Institute.

See the latest issue.

Browse past issues:

February 2010
December 2009
October 2009
August 2009
June 2009
April 2009
February 2009
December 2008
October 2008

GCI Newsletter (Getty Conservation Institute)

See the full List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies.

Free PDF Publications

		Afshar, Mahasti, ed. Landmarks of a New Generation: User's Manual. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1997. (96pp., 5.2MB) [Getty Conservation Institute (Los Angeles, California, United States) / historic preservation / manuals (instructional materials) / photodocumentation / teaching]

		Agnew, Neville, ed. Conservation of Ancient Sites on the Silk Road: Proceedings of an International Conference on the Conservation of Grotto Sites. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1997. Downloadable in eight separate sections. [China (Dunhuang) / conferences / grottoes / mural paintings / sculpture]

" border="0" height="1" vspace="4" width="1">		Agnew, Neville, and Martha Demas, eds. Principles for the Conservation of Heritage Sites in China: English language translation, with Chinese text, of the document issued by China ICOMOS. 2nd Printing with revision. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2004. Downloadable in two parts:
		PART I, Chinese-language text (49pp., 7.6MB)
		PART II, English-language text (51pp., 6MB) [conservation policy / historic sites / site management / site protection]

		Avrami, Erica, Kathleen Dardes, Marta de la Torre, Samuel Y. Harris, Michael Henry, and Wendy Claire Jessup, contributors. "The Conservation Assessment: A Proposed Model for Evaluating Museum Environmental Management Needs." 1999. (39pp., 104KB) [environmental monitoring / museology / collections management / risk assessment / security]
		Avrami, Erica, Kathleen Dardes, Marta de la Torre, Samuel Y. Harris, Michael Henry, and Wendy Claire Jessup, contributors. "Evaluación Para la Conservación: Modelo Propuesto Para Evaluar las Necesidades de Control del Entorno Museístico." 1999. (Spanish version of the above) (40pp., 150KB) [environmental monitoring / museology / collections management / risk assessment / security]
		Avrami, Erica, Hubert Guillaud, and Mary Hardy, eds. Terra Literature Review: An Overview of Earthen Architecture Conservation. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2008. (174 pp., 1.7MB) [archaeological sites / building materials / documentation (function) / earthen architecture / structural analysis]
		Avrami, Erica, Randall Mason, and Marta de la Torre. Values and Heritage Conservation: Research Report. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2000. (100pp., 771KB) [cultural property / historic preservation / evaluation]
		Cass, Glen R., James R. Druzik, Daniel Grosjean, William W. Nazaroff, Paul M. Whitmore, and Cynthia L. Whittman. Protection of Works of Art From Atmospheric Ozone. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1989. (97pp., 904 K) [fading / air pollution / pigment / watercolor]
		Castellanos, Carolina, and Françoise Descamps. Archaeological Sites in the Maya Area: A Conservation Challenge. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2009. Abstracts of presentations and summary of discussions from panel presented at the XXII Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas in Guatemala City. (32pp., 1.1MB). [archaeological sites / decision making / Guatemala / heritage management / landscape protection / Maya / symposia / site management / site presentation / site protection]
		Castellanos, Carolina, and Françoise Descamps. Conservation Management Planning: Putting Theory into Practice. The Case of Joya de Cerén, El Salvador. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2009. Downloadable in two separate sections. [archaeological sites / collaborating / El Salvador (Joya de Cerén) / documentation (function) / heritage management / Maya / planning / significance / site management / stakeholders / values]
		Castellanos, Carolina, and Françoise Descamps. Sitios Arqueológicos en el Área Maya: Un Reto para la Conservación. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2009. Full-length presentations in their original Spanish-language form and summary of discussions from panel presented at the XXII Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas in Guatemala City. (92pp., 6.1MB). [archaeological sites / decision making / Guatemala / heritage management / landscape protection / Maya / symposia / site management / site presentation / site protection]
		Castellanos, Carolina, Françoise Descamps, and María Isaura Aráuz. Executive Summary for the Management Plan of Joya de Cerén, El Salvador. Los Angeles: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y el Arte de El Salvador, and the Getty Conservation Institute, 2007. (25pp., 1.4MB) [site management / archaeological sites / El Salvador]
		Castellanos, Carolina, Françoise Descamps, and María Isaura Aráuz. Résume Exécutif du Plan de Gestion de Joya de Cerén, Le Salvador. Los Angeles: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y el Arte de El Salvador, and the Getty Conservation Institute, 2007. (French version of the above) (25pp., 1.4MB) [site management / archaeological sites / El Salvador]
		Castellanos, Carolina, Françoise Descamps, and María Isaura Aráuz. Resumen Ejecutivo del Plan de Manejo Joya de Cerén, El Salvador. Los Angeles: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y el Arte de El Salvador, and the Getty Conservation Institute, 2002. (Spanish version of the above) (25pp., 1.4MB) [site management / archaeological sites / El Salvador]
		Castellanos, Carolina, Françoise Descamps, and María Isaura Aráuz, eds. Management Plan for Joya de Cerén. Los Angeles: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y el Arte de El Salvador, and the Getty Conservation Institute, 2002. This plan, in Spanish only, has introductions in English and French and can be downloaded in PDF format in 7 separate sections. [site management / archaeological sites / El Salvador]
		Cather, Sharon, ed. The Conservation of Wall Paintings: Proceedings of a Symposium Organized by the Courtauld Institute of Art and The Getty Conservation Institute. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1991. (181 pp., 6.3 MB) [mural paintings / environmental monitoring / frescoes / soluble salt / treatment / cleaning / consolidation]
		Corzo, Miguel Angel, ed. The Future of Asia's Past: Preservation of the Architectural Heritage of Asia. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1995. (75pp., 854KB) [historic sites / archaeological sites / cultural tourism / conservation policy / conferences]
		Corzo, Miguel Angel, and Mahasti Afshar, eds. Art and Eternity: The Nefertari Wall Paintings Conservation Project, 1986-1992. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1993. Downloadable in three separate sections. [Egypt (Valley of the Queens) / Getty Conservation Institute (Los Angeles, United States) / Tomb of Nefertari (Valley of the Queens, Egypt) / wall paintings]
		Dardes, Kathleen, and Andrea Rothe, eds. The Structural Conservation of Panel Paintings: Proceedings of a Symposium at the J. Paul Getty Museum, April 1995. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1998. Downloadable in four separate sections. A bound copy is available for purchase at the Getty Bookstore [panel paintings / wood / reinforcement / previous interventions / relative humidity / primary sources / preventive conservation]
		Demas, Martha, compiler. "GCI Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites Bibliography." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2003. (125 pp., 800KB)
		Derrick, Michele R., Dusan Stulik, and James M. Landry. Infrared Spectroscopy in Conservation Science. Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 1999. (252 pp., 6MB) A bound copy is available for purchase at the Getty Bookstore [archaeological objects / Dead Sea Scrolls / infrared spectroscopy / paintings / sculpture]
		Dorge, Valerie, and F. Carey Howlett, eds. Painted Wood: History and Conservation. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1998. Downloadable in six separate sections. [furniture / painting techniques / pigment / polychrome / sculpture / wood]
		Dorge, Valerie, and Sharon L. Jones, compilers. Building an Emergency Plan: A Guide for Museums and Other Cultural Institutions. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1999. (281pp., 3.4MB) [disaster planning / manuals] Bound copies in Spanish and French are also available for purchase at the Getty Bookstore.
		Drescher, Timothy W. "Priorities in Conserving Community Murals." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. Paper presented at the Getty symposium "Mural Painting and Conservation in the Americas," Los Angeles, CA, May 16-17, 2003. (14pp., 347KB) [mural paintings / conservation policy / stakeholders / artist's intent / funding / public art]
		Eppich, Rand, and Amel Chabbi, eds. Recording, Documentation, and Information Management for the Conservation of Heritage Places: Illustrated Examples. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2007. Downloadable in seven separate sections. [condition assessment / documentation (function) / historic buildings / monitoring / recording]
		Faulk, Wilbur, and Laurie Sowd."Collections Theft Response Procedures." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. Guidelines from The J. Paul Getty Trust and The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, 2001. (17pp., 246KB) [preventive conservation / collections management / manuals / security / museums / archives]
		Feller, R. L., and M. Wilt. Evaluation of Cellulose Ethers for Conservation. The J. Paul Getty Trust, 1990. (165pp., 2.1 MB) [polymerization / stability]
		Feller, Robert L. Accelerated Aging: Photochemical and Thermal Aspects. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1994. (292pp., 1.5MB) [photochemistry / thermal analysis]
		Florian, Mary-Lou E., Dale Paul Kronkright, and Ruth E. Norton, The Conservation of Artifacts Made from Plant Materials.bound copy is available for purchase at the Getty Bookstore. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1990. (352pp., 7.2MB) A [anatomy / climate / deterioration / ethnographic objects / fabrication / Getty Conservation Institute (Los Angeles, United States) / identification / plant materials / storage]
		Garfinkle, Ann. "The Legal and Ethical Consideration of Mural Conservation: Issues and Debates." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. Paper presented at the Getty symposium "Mural Painting and Conservation in the Americas," Los Angeles, CA, May 16-17, 2003. (22pp., 141KB). [conservation policy / public art / ethics (concept) / artists' rights / owner-contractor agreements / legislation]
		The Getty Conservation Institute."GCI Lime Mortars and Plasters Bibliography: Sorted by Author." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2003. (100 pp., 939KB)
		The Getty Conservation Institute. "GCI Lime Mortars and Plasters Bibliography: Sorted by General Category." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2003. (195 pp., 1.6MB)
		The Getty Conservation Institute. "GCI Project Terra Bibliography: Sorted by Author." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2002. (63 pp., 380KB)
		The Getty Conservation Institute. "GCI Project Terra Bibliography: Sorted by General Category." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2002. (106 pp., 603KB)
		The Getty Conservation Institute. Incentives for the Preservation and Rehabilitation of Historic Homes in the City of Los Angeles. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2004. (70pp., 3.5 MB) [USA / California / historic preservation / historic buildings / economics]
		The Getty Conservation Institute and the American Institute for Conservation. "Professional Development for Conservators in the United States: Report of the Directors' Retreat for the Advancement of Conservation Education." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. Report of meeting held in Warrenton, VA, October 10-12, 2002. (21pp., 316KB) [education / training / USA]
		The Getty Conservation Institute and Institut National du Patrimoine, Tunisia. "Formation de techniciens à l'entretien des mosaïques in situ." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2008. (133pp., 7.1MB)
		The Getty Conservation Institute and Institut National du Patrimoine, Tunisia. "Technician Training for the Maintenance of In Situ Mosaics." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2008. (133pp., 7.6MB) (English version of the above)
		The Getty Conservation Institute and Institut National du Patrimoine, Tunisia. "Technician Training for the Maintenance of In Situ Mosaics." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2008. (132pp., 7MB) (Arabic version of the above)
		The Getty Conservation Institute and Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia. The Hieroglyphic Stairway of Copán, Honduras: Study Results and Conservation Proposals. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute and Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia, 2006. Downloadable in seven separate sections. [archaeological sites / biodeterioration / building stone / Honduras (Copán) / rhyolite / tuff / weathering]
		The Getty Conservation Institute and Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia. La Escalinata Jeroglífica de Copán, Honduras: Resultados de los Estudios y Propuestas de Conservación. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute and Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia, 2006. (Spanish version of the above) (212pp., 5.2MB) [archaeological sites / biodeterioration / building stone / Honduras (Copán) / rhyolite / tuff / weathering]
		The Getty Conservation Institute and the Israel Antiquities Authority. "Illustrated Glossary: Mosaics In Situ Project." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2003. (17pp., 1.8 MB)
		The Getty Conservation Institute and Junta de Andalucía, Consejería de Cultura, eds. Methodology for the Conservation of Polychromed Wooden Altarpieces. Los Angeles: Junta de Andalucía, Consejería de Cultura and the J. Paul Getty Trust, 2006. (241pp., 7.2MB) [wood / polychrome / retablos]
		The Getty Conservation Institute and Junta de Andalucía, Consejería de Cultura, eds. Methodología para la Conservación de Retablos de Madera Policromada. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2006. (Spanish version of the above) (242pp., 7.6MB) [wood / polychrome / retablos]
		The Getty Conservation Institute and Junta de Andalucía, Consejería de Cultura, eds. "Methodology for the Conservation of Polychromed Wooden Altarpieces: Bibliography/Methodología para la Conservación de Retablos de Madera Policromada: Corpus Bibliográfico." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2006. (With introductions in Spanish and English.) (51pp., 216KB) [wood / polychrome / retablos]
		The Getty Conservation Institute and Junta Andalucía Conserjería de Cultura, eds. Workshop on Methodology for the Conservation of Polychromed Wooden Altarpieces: Document on Retablos 2002. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2004. (17 pp., 502KB) [wood / polychrome / retablos]
		The Getty Conservation Institute and Junta Andalucía Conserjería de Cultura, eds. Taller sobre Metodología para la Conservación de Retablos de Madera Policromada: El Documento de Retablos 2002. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2004. (Spanish version of the above) (17 pp., 508KB) [wood / polychrome / retablos]
		The Getty Conservation Institute and Junta Andalucía Conserjería de Cultura, eds. Journées d'Étude sur la Méthodologie pour la Conservation des Retables en Bois Polychromes: Document des Retables 2002. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2004. (French version of the above) (17 pp., 513KB) [wood / polychrome / retablos]
		Hardy, Mary, Claudia Cancino, and Gail Ostergren, eds. Proceedings of the Getty Seismic Adobe Project 2006 Colloquium. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2009. Downloadable in 23 sections or as one PDF.
		Golden, Mark. "Mural Paints: Current and Future Formulations." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. Paper presented at the Getty symposium "Mural Painting and Conservation in the Americas," Los Angeles, CA, May 16-17, 2003. (14pp., 290KB) [public art / acrylic paint / supports (artists' materials) / fading / blistering / cracking / mural paintings]
		Koestler, Robert J., and E.D. Santoro. Assessment of the Susceptibility to Biodeterioration of Selected Polymers and Resins: Final Report Submitted to the Getty Conservation Institute. GCI Scientific Program Report. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1988. (118pp., 8.6MB) [biodeterioration / deterioration / fungi / polymers / resin (organic material) / stone]
		Kumar, Rakesh, and Anuradha V. Kumar. Biodeterioration of Stone in Tropical Environments: An Overview. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1999. (95pp., 624KB) A bound copy is available for purchase at the Getty Bookstore [tropical climate]
		Letellier, Robin. "RecorDIM 2002 Activities Report." 2003. (83pp., 728KB) [recording / documentation (function) / information management / historic sites]
		Letellier, Robin, Werner Schmid, and François LeBlanc. Recording, Documentation, and Information Management for the Conservation of Heritage Places: Guiding Principles. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2007. (174pp., 13.1MB) [data processing / documentation (function) / guidelines / heritage management / recording]
		Maekawa, Shin, and Franciza Toledo. "A Climate Control System for Hollybourne Cottage, Jekyll Island Historic District, Georgia." Paper presented at conference of American Society of Heating Refrigeration Air-conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), IAQ 2001 - Moisture, Microbes, and Health Effects: Indoor Air Quality and Moisture in Buildings in San Francisco, CA, November 4-7, 2001. (17pp., 620KB) [USA / environmental control / historic houses / tropical climate / HVAC / relative humidity]
		MacLean, Margaret G.H., and David Myers. Grosse Île and the Irish Memorial National Historic Site: A Case Study.Heritage Values in Site Management for purchase at the Getty Bookstore. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2003. (49pp., 1.6MB) A book publication of the case study is available in [Canada / Québec / values / conservation policy / site management / stakeholders / citizen participation]
		Maekawa, Shin, and Franciza Toledo. "Controlled Ventilation and Heating to Preserve Collections in Historic Buildings in Hot and Humid Regions." Paper presented at the ICOM-CC 13th Triennial Meeting in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, September 22-27, 2002. (17pp., 236KB) [environmental monitoring / tropical climate / HVAC / preventive conservation / relative humidity]
		Maekawa, Shin. Oxygen-Free Museum Cases. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1998. (76 pp., 1.6MB) A bound copy is available for purchase at the Getty Bookstore [collections care / exhibit cases / anoxia]
		Maekawa, Shin, and Franciza Toledo. "Sustainable Climate Control for Historic Buildings in Hot and Humid Regions," Management of Environmental Quality: An International Journal Vol. 14, No. 3 (2003). [Also presented at the 18th International Conference on Passive Low Energy Architectures (PLEA) Conference, November 2001, Florianópolis, Brazil.](7pp., 412KB) [tropical climate / environmental control / energy conservation / HVAC]
		Martinez, Juan Manuel, Françoise Descamps, Kathleen Louw, eds. Proceedings 9th World Congress of the Organization of World Heritage Cities, Kazan, 19-23 June, 2007. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2008. (88pp., 972KB). [historic towns / cities / heritage management / conferences / sustainable development / values / economics / urban planning |adaptive reuse / cultural tourism / conservation policy / stakeholders |social issues / funding / decision making]
		Martinez, Juan Manuel, Françoise Descamps, Kathleen Louw, eds. Actes 9e Congrès Mondial des Villes du Patrimoine Mondial, Kazan, 19-23 juin 2007. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2008. (French version of the above) (88pp., 1MB). [historic towns / cities / heritage management / conferences / sustainable development / values / economics / urban planning |adaptive reuse / cultural tourism / conservation policy / stakeholders |social issues / funding / decision making]
		Martinez, Juan Manuel, Françoise Descamps, Kathleen Louw, eds. Actas 9° Congreso Mundial de la Organización de las Ciudades Patrimonio Mundial, Kazan, 19-23 junio 2007. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2008. (Spanish version of the above) (88pp, 1MB). [historic towns / cities / heritage management / conferences / sustainable development / values / economics / urban planning |adaptive reuse / cultural tourism / conservation policy / stakeholders |social issues / funding / decision making]
		Randy Mason, ed. Economics and Heritage Conservation: A Meeting Organized by the Getty Conservation Institute, December 1998. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 1999. (67pp., 351KB) [historic preservation / conferences / cultural property]
		Mason, Randall, Margaret G. H. MacLean, and Marta de la Torre. Hadrian's Wall World Heritage Site: A Case Study. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2003. (53pp., 1.3MB) A book publication of the case study is available in Heritage Values in Site Management for purchase at the Getty Bookstore. [England / values / partnership / sustainability / site management]
		Mason, Randall, David Myers, and Marta de la Torre. Port Arthur Historic Site: A Case Study. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2003. (76pp., 1.4MB) A book publication of the case study is available in Heritage Values in Site Management for purchase at the Getty Bookstore. [Australia / Tasmania / values / memory / site management / funding / interpretation / partnership]
		McDonald, John K. House of Eternity: The Tomb of Nefertari. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1996. Downloadable in four separate sections. [Tomb of Nefertari (Valley of the Queens, Egypt) / tombs / wall paintings]
		Nazaroff, William W., Mary P. Ligocki, Lynn G. Salmon, Glen R. Cass, Theresa Fall, Michael C. Jones, Harvey I.H. Liu, and Timothy Ma. Airborne Particles in Museums. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1993. (145 pp., 1.5MB) [indoor air pollution]
		Oliver, Anne. Fort Selden Adobe Test Wall Project, Phase I, Final Report. The Getty Conservation Institute and Museum of New Mexico State Monuments, 2000. (108pp., 1MB) [USA / New Mexico / environmental monitoring / site analysis / erosion / protective coating]
		Pounds, Jon. "The Gift of Absence: Mural Restoration in a Policy Void." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. Paper presented at the Getty symposium "Mural Painting and Conservation in the Americas," Los Angeles, CA, May 16-17, 2003. (10pp., 91KB) [conservation policy / public art / mural paintings / repainting / USA / Illinois / Chicago]
		Price, C.A. Stone Conservation: An Overview of Current Research. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1996. (79pp., 468KB) [building stone]
		Reedy, Terry J., and Chandra L. Reedy. Principles of Experimental Design for Art Conservation Research. GCI Scientific Program Report. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1992 (123pp., 1.6MB) Preface to the Electronic Edition, 2008. (3pp., 19KB) [scientific analysis / statistical analysis]
		Reedy, Terry J., and Chandra L. Reedy. Statistical Analysis in Art Conservation Research. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1988. (110pp., 872 K) [statistics]
		Rust, Michael K., and Janice M. Kennedy. The Feasibility of Using Modified Atmospheres to Control Insect Pests in Museums. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1993. (131pp., 2.8 MB) [anoxia / pest control / insect damage]
		Scott, David A. Metallography and microstructure of ancient and historic metals. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1991. (185pp., 9.3MB) [brass / bronze / gold / iron / metallography / silver / steel]
		Scott, David A., Jerry Podany, and Brian B. Considine, eds. Ancient & Historic Metals: Conservation and Scientific Research. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1994. Downloadable in three separate sections. [bronze / casting / cleaning / copper / corrosion / gold / metal / sculpture / weathering / zinc]
		Selwitz, Charles. Cellulose Nitrate in Conservation. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1988. (71pp., 556KB) A bound copy is available for purchase at the Getty Bookstore [adhesive / ceramics / coating (material) / conservation materials / metal / stability]
		Selwitz, Charles. Epoxy Resins in Stone Conservation. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1992. (117pp., 1.8 MB) [discoloration / mechanical strength]
		Selwitz, Charles, and Shin Maekawa. Inert Gases in the Control of Museum Insect Pests. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1998. (113pp., 1.5MB) [collections care / pest control]
		Shank, Will. "Before the Paint Hits the Wall." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. Paper presented at the Getty symposium "Mural Painting and Conservation in the Americas," Los Angeles, CA, May 16-17, 2003. (8pp., 102KB) [mural paintings / supports (artists' materials) / public art / conservation policy]
		Stanley Price, Nicholas, ed. The Conservation of the Orpheus Mosaic at Paphos, Cyprus. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1991. (88pp., 9.5MB) [cleaning / consolidation / detaching / environmental monitoring / glass / mosaics / photodocumentation / site protection / stone / training]
		Striegel, Mary F. and Jo Hill. Thin-Layer Chromatography for Binding Media Analysis. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1996. (186pp., 3.9MB) A bound copy is available for purchase at the Getty Bookstore. [binder (material) / thin layer chromatography / training]
		"Summary Report, Project Terra Research Meeting." Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. Report of meeting held in Torquay, England, May 14, 2000. (21pp., 83KB) [earthen archtecture]
		"Terra Consortium: Guidelines for Institutional Collaboration." Guidelines for program of Project Terra and the UNESCO Chair on Earthen Architecture, Constructive Cultures, and Sustainable Development, 2000. (9pp., 56KB) [earthen architecture / sustainable development / collaborating / partnership]
		Tolles, E. Leroy, Edna E. Kimbro, and William S. Ginell. Planning and Engineering Guidelines for the Seismic Retrofitting of Historic Adobe Structures. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2002. (154pp., 4.3MB) A bound copy is available for purchase at the Getty Bookstore [adobe / earthquakes / historic buildings / historic preservation / seismic design / structural analysis / USA (Southwest)]
		Tolles, E. Leroy, Edna E. Kimbro, and William S. Ginell. Guías de planeamiento e ingeniería para la estabilización sismorresistente de estructuras históricas de adobe. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2002. (Spanish version of the above) (160pp., 4.8MB) [adobe / earthquakes / historic buildings / historic preservation / seismic design / structural analysis / USA (Southwest)]
		Tolles, E. Leroy, Edna E. Kimbro, Frederick A. Webster, and William S. Ginell. Seismic Stabilization of Historic Adobe Structures: Final Report of the Getty Seismic Adobe Project. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2000. (174 pp., 3.2MB) A bound copy is available for purchase at the Getty Bookstore [historic buildings / retrofitting / seismic design / stabilizing]
		Tolles, E. Leroy, Edna E. Kimbro, Frederick A. Webster, and William S. Ginell. Survey of Damage to Historic Adobe Buildings after the January 1994 Northridge Earthquake. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1996. (171 pp., 7.2MB) [historic buildings / retrofitting / seismic design / stabilizing]
		Torraca, Giorgio. Lectures on Materials Science for Architectural Conservation. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2009. (205 pp., 5.4MB) [architectural conservation / materials science / building materials / physical properties / mechanical properties / chemical properties / brick / mortar / concrete / porosity / cleaning / consolidation / preventive conservation / protective coating / surfaces OR surface layers / iron (metal) / polymer / ethyl silicate / silicone]
		de la Torre, Marta, ed. Assessing the Values of Cultural Heritage: Research Report. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2002. (123pp., 750KB) [cultural property / evaluation / economics / historic preservation]
		de la Torre, Marta, Margaret G.H. MacLean, and David Myers. Chaco Culture National Historical Park: A Case Study. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, June 2003. (66pp., 1.7MB) A book publication of the case study is available in Heritage Values in Site Management for purchase at the Getty Bookstore. [New Mexico / Chaco Canyon / archaeological sites / Anasazi / compliance archaeology / legislation / Native American]
		Ward, Philip. The Nature of Conservation: A Race Against Time.Downloadable in two separate sections. Foreword to the Electronic Edition, 2010. (1p., 36KB) Marina del Rey: Getty Conservation Institute, 1986. [conservators / education / history of conservation / museums]
		Ward, Philip. La conservación del patrimonio: carrera contra reloj.Prólogo a la edición electrónica, 2010. (1p., 40KB) Marina del Rey: Getty Conservation Institute, 1986. Calif. (Spanish version of the above) (83pp., 9.8MB) [conservators / education / history of conservation / museums]
		Weber, John Pitman. "Politics and Practice of Community Public Art: Whose Murals Get Saved?" Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. Paper presented at the Getty symposium "Mural Painting and Conservation in the Americas," Los Angeles, CA, May 16-17, 2003. (16pp., 348KB) [conservation policy / mural paintings / repainting / USA / Illinois / Chicago]
		Welch Howe, Kathryn, preparer. Los Angeles Historic Resource Survey Assessment Project: Summary Report. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2001. (34pp., 119KB) [USA / California / historic buildings / historic preservation / historic districts]
		Welch Howe, Kathryn, preparer. The Los Angeles Historic Resource Survey Report: A Framework for a Citywide Historic Resource Survey. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2008. (120pp., 6.4MB) [USA / California / historic buildings / historic preservation / historic districts]
		Wheeler, George. "Alkoxysilanes color photo supplement," containing full-color images of black and white figures from Alkoxysilanes and the Consolidation of Stone. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2005. (4pp., 1.1MB) A bound copy is available for purchase at the Getty Bookstore. [stone / consolidation]

Website Attica

Website Attica complements and enhances the published volumes of Persons of Ancient Athens. The addenda et corrigenda to the published volumes, which are issued as a supplement to PAA periodically, are regularly updated at this web site. Searches may be made 10,000 names of the ATHENIANS database in beta, gamma, and delta (second half of volume 4, the whole of volume 5, and the first third of volume 6). The possible searches range from selecting every person in a particular deme or of a specified profession to more sophisticated searches, e.g. to find all Athenians who lived between specified years and/or are related to a certain person and/or are attested in a class of document, etc.

The results of searches give an up-to-date version of the data in the printed volume (the 'formatted version'), now with transliterated Greek texts. The search form is divided into fields similar to those in the computer database; these do not always correspond exactly to the position in which the information appears in the formatted version. The fields shown in the search form are detailed below, with a summary of the database information from the 'Description of Entries' appearing in each of the printed volumes, together with additional information about the contents of each field to help in the defining of search terms. Access to the printed volumes of PAA is desirable, both for understanding this section and for the formulation of search requests.

addenda et corrigenda database search printed volumes

This evening the length of Hadrian's Wall will be illuminated by Beacons. For more about the project click here.

Illuminating Hadrian’s Wall aims to capture the imagination and highlight the immense scale and beauty of Hadrian’s Wall and the countryside, villages, towns and cities that it passes through. 2010 is also the 1600th anniversary of the end of Roman Britain in AD410 – one of the greatest turning points in our history. So as well as celebrating a truly iconic piece of world heritage the line of light will help to mark this hugely significant anniversary.

Electronic texts are wonderful things.  But you always wonder how accurate they are.  I now have the Greek portions of Eusebius Gospel Problems and Solutions in unicode in Word format.  But I can already see errors.

I’ve advertised for someone to read through it, and correct it against the printed editions.  It will be interesting to see what the response is like.

At the occasion of the spat between Google and the Chinese government, Reuters reports: “More than three-quarters of scientists in China use the search engine Google as a primary research tool and say their work would be significantly hampered if they were to lose it, a survey showed on Wednesday.” Just in case anyone still doubted how much today’s scholars rely on Google and the cornucopia of research and information available on the web, esp. in developing countries. “… asked by the Nature journal how much they rely on Google said it was vital for finding academic papers, information about discoveries or other research programs and finding scholarly literature.” “… science in China would not come to a halt without Google, but the search engine had ‘has transformed information-seeking behaviors in academic communities.’”

I’ve just spent a busy couple of hours writing emails to people who host copies of Chrysostom’s Sermons against the Jews online, asking them to update the page with the extra material I’ve had translated.  Paul Halsall is going to update the Fordham site, which is probably the parent of many of the others.  No replies back yet, but I am hopeful.  In some cases the material had been posted to fora, and all I had to do was register and reply to the post.

Menwhile I’ve been making progress with the Greek text of Eusebius Gospel problems and solutions.  Now I have this all in unicode, it’s a much better proposition to deal with.  I need to spend some time working it over, tho.

One nice bit of email today: from a medievalist interested in Porphyry’s Isagogue who discovered the reference to it in Abu’l Barakat’s catalogue of Arabic Christian literature.  He found the latter on my site, because I’d had it translated and put online.  It’s nice when my endeavours visibly help others!

I've fooled around with Jython, but this, via @erilem, is the first I've seen of it in real live GIS software:

>>> from geoserver import Catalog
>>> cat = Catalog('topp')
>>> print cat.stores()
[]
>>> st = cat['states_shapefile']
>>> print st.layers()
[]
>>> l = st['states']
>>> print l.count()
49
print l.bounds()
...

A little bit of its Java-ness leaks through, but at least one is spared the getters and setters. Cool, but then what's this smell at the end?

The following is the wish list based on feedback from teh community:

• add a new output format
• add a transaction listener
• add a dispatcher callback
• add a WPS process
• add a datastore
• a restful endpoint

Restful endpoint? Oh, for crying out loud. Head. Desk.

Ever since the eight sermons against the Jews by the 4th century writer John Chrysostom were published, men have noticed that sermon 2 is only a third of the length of the others, and speculated that some of it is missing.  The missing portion was discovered in a manuscript on Lesbos a decade ago and published, but no English translation has ever been made of it.

One now exists, and it is here.  I commissioned it and own the copyright, but I make the translation public domain.  Do whatever you like with it, personal, educational or commercial. 

Now to communicate with the owners of copies of the Eight Sermons online, and try to persuade them to host the missing chunk as well!

Dan Reetz spoke on campus yesterday and amazed us with not only his DIY Book Scanner, but perhaps more importantly the DIY Book Scanner community. Dan estimated that his $250 scanner could easily produce high-resolution scans of 500 page an hour. And the scanner is portable, and the plans exist online and could be customized.

The applications for this kind of thing for small archaeological projects is patently obvious.   A site like Isthmia, for example, which has, at most, 40,000 pages of notebooks (that is 160, 250 page notebooks). Using a scanner like the one Dan designed would allow a project like Isthmia to digitize all of its notebooks over, conservatively, three weeks. And that's just with one scanner. The relatively low cost of the scanners (of course better cameras could increase the cost of each scanner quickly) could allow us to run two scanners and cut the time on site to less than two weeks.

Post-processing and mark up, of course, is another issue. But I think that the Omeka interface, if tweaked appropriately could provide the foundation for presenting the scanned notebook pages. This would could all be done without radically expanding the current digital and physical infrastructure (i.e. expensive equipment, et c.).

The development of a relatively portable, efficient, and affordable device would be a pretty remarkable breakthrough for the imposing task of digitizing the archives of a small to mid-sized project.

  

Google Street View has rolled out across the UK.  I’ve just found a curious inconsistency between the Street View images and the Satellite maps.  Here is King Edward VI School (as was) in Stafford, originally founded as a grammar school, and the satellite shows the school, and to the left, the school playing fields, surrounded by mature trees.

 

But the road and the item in the middle of the playing fields tells the story: “Tesco Stores”.  Looking on Street View down that road, across the playing fields, I see this:

The local authority has sold the playing fields to the supermarket developer, leaving the Gothic school perched incongruously on the corner.  

But … Google has recorded this piece of history.

Everyone knows (or should know) about the longest word of Greek ever—the word that broke the title bar of Wikipedia, Aristophanes' fantastical dish of 17 ingredients at the end of the Ecclesiazusae, that lopado-temacho-thing:

λοπαδοτεμαχοσελαχογαλεοκρανιολειψανοδριμυποτριμματοσιλφιολιπαρομελιτοκατακεχυμενοκιχλεπικοσσυφοφαττοπεριστεραλεκτρυονοπτοπιφαλλιδοκιγκλοπελειολαγῳοσιραιοβαφητραγανοπτερυγών (172 chars)

Ah. It breaks blogspot too. :-)

λοπαδοτεμαχοσελαχογαλεοκρανιολειψανοδριμυποτριμματοσιλφιο­λιπαρομελιτοκατακεχυμενοκιχλεπικοσσυφοφαττοπεριστεραλεκτρυονοπτο­πιφαλλιδοκιγκλοπελειολαγῳοσιραιοβαφητραγανοπτερυγών (172 chars)

Have you ever wondered what the next longest words of Greek are? No? Well, you'll find out anyway. With the necessary provisos as usual:

• I'm basing this on the word forms in the current TLG, and the lexica I have access to—LSJ, LSJ Supplement, Lampe, Trapp, Kriaras.
  
• This doesn't prove much of anything, since the point is that Greek compounding is agglutinative and productive, so you can keep stringing words up. We're just happening to go through the long words turning up in Ancient and Mediaeval Greek literature.
  
• Do not even think of coming away with the impression that Greek literature makes the longest words in the world—although few if any seem to get anywhere near Aristophanes' monster. The Guinness Book of Records did unearth a word in the Varadambika Parinaya by Tirumalamba in Sanskrit adding up to 428 letters in Roman transliteration. I can't find it (I think this is the Google Books snippet); which is a shame, I wanted to break Blogspot some more...
  
• For other languages, have a Facebook thread and a Wikipedia laundry list.
  
• I'm sure there's plenty of compounding happening in Modern Greek; I cited in the Quadrupeds (p. 150) the Hellas-L coinage πολυμαθουφοχριστιανοπεοκρουστόπαιδο "polymath UFO Christian penis-stroking lad" (35 chars), which maker poster Constantine Thomas coiner of the sixth longest real Greek word I know of. That… doesn't prove that much either.

What it shows is, there was a Byzantine fad for long compounds, in a couple of genres, though possibly ultimately indebted to Aristophanes; and Aristophanes himself went there more than once.

I'm going to count down the top 40-odd words in length I can find, down to a length of 29 characters, and I'll give their dictionary definitions (where available) and who has used them.

The longest words in English, long enough to be cheating, are protein names. The longest words in Greek outside of Aristophanes, long enough to be cheating, are fractions. They're so boring, dictionaries don't bother to list them at all. So I'm putting them separately:

1. τριακοντατρισμυριοστοχιλιοστοεπτακοσιοστοεβδομηκοστόεκτα (56 chars), "1/331776", Scholia on Diophantus, 135
   
2. μυριοστοεπτακισχιλιοστοπεντακοσιοστοτεσσαρακοστόπεμπτα (54 chars), Trapp: "1/17545", Nicholas Artabasdos "Rhabdas", Letters 34.
   
3. μυριοστοτετρακισχιλιοστοεξακοσιοστοτεσσαρακοστόπρωτα (52 chars), Trapp: "1/14641", Scholia on Diophantus, 128
   
4. τρισκαιδεκακισμυριοστοτριακοσιοστοεικοστοπρώτων (47 chars), τρισκαιδεκακισμυριοστοτριακοσιοστοεικοστόπρωτα (46 chars), "1/130321", Scholia on Diophantus, 130
   
5. τετρακισμυριοστοχιλιοστοεξακοσιοστοεξκαιδέκατον (47 chars), "1/41616", Isaac Argyrus, Περὶ εὑρέσεως τῶν τετραγωνικῶν πλευρῶν τῶν μὴ ῥητῶν τετραγώνων ἀριθμῶν, p. 23
   
6. τετρακισμυριοστοτετρακισχιλιοστοοκτακοσιοστόν (45 chars), "1/44800", John Pediasimus (aka John Galenus), Geometry p. 19
   
7. τρισχιλιοστοδιακοσιοστοτεσσαρακοστοέννατον (42 chars), "1/3249", Scholia on Diophantus 140
   
8. δισμυριοστοδισχιλιοστοτετρακοσιοστόν (36 chars), "1/22400", John Pediasimus, Geometry p. 19
   
9. ὀκτακισχιλιοστοεκατοστοεικοστόγδοον (35 chars), "1/8128", Pseudo-David & Pseudo-Elias, Lectures on Porphyry's isagoge, praxis 8 p. 3
   
10. ἐννεακαιεικοσικαιεπτακοσιοπλασιάκις (35 chars), LSJ: "seven-hundred-and-twenty-nine times", Plato, Republic 587e.
    
11. τετταρακοντακαιπεντακισχιλιοστόν (32 chars), LSJ: "forty-five thousandth" (or: 1/5040), Plato, Laws 877d
    
12. τετρακισχιλιοστοεξηκοστοτέταρτον (32 chars), "1/4064", Pseudo-David & Pseudo-Elias, Lectures on Porphyry's isagoge, praxis 8 p. 3
    
13. ἐπιτετρακοσιοστοκαιτεσσαρακοστῷ (31 chars), "ratio of 441:440", George Pachymeres, Quadrivium 2.45
    
14. χιλιοκτακοσιογδοηκονταπλασίονα (30 chars), LSJ: "eighteen hundred and eighty times as great", Theon of Smyrna De utilitate mathematicae p. 197, citing Hipparchus
    
15. τετρακισχιλιοστοενενηκοστόεκτα (30 chars), "1/4096", Scholia on Diophantus 138
    
16. διακοσιοστοτεσσαρακοστοτρίτοις (30 chars), Trapp: "1/243", Proclus, Commentary on Plato's Timaeus, Vol. 2 p. 180

And now, the "real" words. Words not (yet) in the TLG are asterisked.

1. κεραυνομεγακλονοζηνπερατοκοσμολαμπροβελοπλουτοδότα (50 chars), (Luis Muñoz Delgado, Léxico de Magia y Religiòn en los Papiros Mágicos Griegos, 2001) "making great noise with a thunderclap, bounded by the sky, shining rays in the cosmos, and giver of wealth", Magical Papyri 12. The magical papyri have even longer strings of nonsense characters, but this really does count as a word. It's worth taking it apart:
   
   • κεραυνο "thunder"
   • μεγα "big"
   • κλονο "turmoil"
   • ζην "Zeus"
   • περατο "boundary"
   • κοσμο "cosmos"
   • λαμπρο "shining"
   • βελο "ray"
   • πλουτο "wealth"
   • δότα "giver"
   It's positively Sanskrit...
   
2. *ἀκτινοχρυσοφαιδροβροντολαμπροφεγγοφωτοστόλιστος (47 chars), Trapp: "dressed in golden-shining, thundering and incandescent clothes", Codices graeci Chisiani e Borgiani (ed. P. Franchi de' Cavalieri), 124; Bibliotheca Coisliana (ed. Montfaucon), 59. What astonishes me is that someone chose to use this word a second time…
   
   • ἀκτινο "ray"
   • χρυσο "gold"
   • φαιδρο "beaming"
   • βροντο "thunder"
   • λαμπρο "bright"
   • φεγγο "shining"
   • φωτο "light"
   • στόλιστος "dressed"
3. *Ἡρακλειανοκυροσεργιοπυρροπαυλοπετρῖται (38 chars), Trapp: "followers of Heracleus, Cyrus, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul and Peter", Scripta saeculi VII vitam Maximi Confessoris illustrantia (ed. P. Allen & B. Neil) 223,378. (Hey, I know them! And the "Heracleus" is in brackets, so some scribe may have decided five leaders were already enough.)
   
4. *παναξιοκτηνοπτηναστροφωστηροκοσμοποιία (38 chars), Trapp: "quite worthy creation of animals, birds, stars, celestial bodies and the world", Dioscorus of Aphrodito (ed. Fournier), 40,6
   
5. ὀρθροφοιτοσυκοφαντοδικοταλαιπώρων (33 chars), LSJ: "early-prowling base-informing sad-litigious plaguy", Aristophanes Wasps 505. Misquoted by Suda (omicron 581, epsilon iota 68) as ὀρθοφοιτοσυκοφαντοδικοταλαιπώρων (32 chars), "upright-prowling..."
   
6. ἀστραποβροντοχαλαζορειθροδαμάστου (33 chars), Lampe: "overcome by lightning, thunder, hail, and flood", Basil of Caesarea, Letters 365
   
7. στρογγυλοφιλοσοφογραμματογράφου (31 chars), (not yet in a dictionary) "writer of round philosophical letters", Theodore II Ducas Lascaris, 218 Letters, 128.
   
8. σπερμαγοραιολεκιθολαχανοπώλιδες (31 chars), LSJ: "green-grocery-market-woman", Aristophanes Lysistrata 457
   
9. *πανυπερπρωτοπανσεβαστοϋπέρτατος (31 chars), Trapp: "above all else and first of all, most highly honoured", Gregory hegumen of Oxia 225,126.
   
10. Βρυσωνοθρασυμαχειοληψικερμάτων (30 chars), LSJ: "taking coin like Bryso and Thrasymachus", Ephippus of Athens fr. 14 Kock, cited in Athenaeus 11.120
    
11. ἀκτινολαμπροφεγγοφωτοστόλιστος (30 chars), Trapp: "sparkling with shining light beams", Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopoleos, May 9 section 2
    
12. τοξαισελαιοξανθεπιπαγκαπύρωτος (30 chars), "bow-???-oil-blond-on-all-airdried" (ref. to a kind of cake), Philoxenus of Cythera fr. e, cited in Athenaeus 14.50; the edition of Philoxenus by Page marks the word as corrupt
    
13. κομπορηματοχρηματομετεωροφέναξ (30 chars), Trapp: "boasting cheat puffed up with words and treasures", John Tzetzes, Letters 4 p. 6
    
14. *πανσεβαστοκοσμοποθοπροσκύνητος (30 chars), Trapp: "highly honored and welcomed by the world with longing", Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum Graecorum (ed. Beniševič), I 332
    
15. ἀκτιστοσυμπλαστουργοσύνθρονον (29 chars), Lampe: "uncreated fellow worker sharing the throne", Gregory Pardus, Exegesis in canonem iambicum de festo die Spiritus Sancti, 25; ἀκτιστοσυμπλαστουργοσύνθρονε (28 chars), Vita of Nicephorus the Doctor 22.
    
16. σκοροδοπανδοκευτριαρτοπώλιδες (29 chars), LSJ: "garlic-bread-selling hostess", Aristophanes Lysistrata 458
    
17. λογαριαστοπνευματικοοικονόμος (29 chars), Trapp: "invoice controller and religious manager", John Apocaucus, Letters (ed. Bees) 60

Special separate mention goes to Constantine of Rhodes, who wrote a couple of pages of train-carriage–length epithets; I have cited an excerpt elsewhere:

1. *πρεσβευτοκερδοσυγχυτοσπονδοφθόρος (33 chars), Trapp: "who interferes with the profits of intermediaries and destroys contracts", Constantine of Rhodes (ed. Matranga), 625,25.
   
2. *πλαστιγγοζυγοκαμπανοσφαιρωστάτης (32 chars), Trapp: "one who sets the round weight on the steelyard balance with the gold bearing scales and balance beam", ibid. 624,8.
   
3. *βαρβιτοναβλοπλινθοκυμβαλοκτύπος (31 chars), Trapp: "playing the barbiton, the nabla, the plinthos (hydraulic organ?), and the cymbals", ibid. 625,21.
   
4. *Ἑλληνοθρησοχριστοβλασφημότροπος (31 chars), Trapp: "a character who worshiped the pagan and sinned against Christ", ibid. 624,15.
   
5. *κασαλβοπορνομαχλοπρωκτεπεμβάτης (31 chars), Trapp: "one who mounts the arses of whores, prostitutes and courtesans", ibid. 624,11.
   
6. *λακτεντοχοιροκριοβουτραγοσφάγος (31 chars), Trapp: "butcher of piglets, pigs, sheep, cattle, and goats", ibid. 624,7.
   
7. *ὀλεθριοβιβλοφαλσογραμματοφθόρος (31 chars), Trapp: "ruinous counterfitter of books and destroyer of writing", ibid., 624,12.
   
8. *λαρυγγογλασκοξεστοχανδοεκπότης (30 chars), Trapp: "one who gulps down bottles and glasses with an open throat", ibid. 624,10.
   
9. *κορνουτοπαρθενοτριβοψυχοφθόρος (30 chars), Trapp: "horned abuser of virgins and destroyer of souls",ibid. 624,10.
   
10. *ἀλλαντοχορδοκοιλιεντεροπλύτης (29 chars), Trapp: "washer of entrails [sausage, intestines, bellies, entrails]", ibid., 624,5.
    
11. *κλεπτοτυμβονυκτεροσκοτεργάτης (29 chars), Trapp: "one who operates in the dark of night as a grave robber", ibid. 626,25.
    
12. *μοιχοπαιδοδουλοσκανδαλεργάτης (29 chars), Trapp: "one who arouses a scandal through lewdness with underage slaves", ibid. 625,24.

I’ve just come across this site which allows you to type in ASCII — A)\ etc — and converts what you type on the fly into unicode Greek.  It’s fast, neat and effective.

And better yet — it’s all done in Javascript, which means if you save the .htm page locally, your local copy will work too!

The Social Sciences began experimenting with visualization as early as the 1910s, when Franz Boas applied Kwakiutl place-names to an ordinary map to help him better explain the Kwakiutl world view. In the 1940s, scholars of folklore began abstracting these geographical diagrams into "synoptic diagrams" that showed concepts in relationship to each other. Since that time, scholars around a range of disciplines have used mental maps and synoptic diagrams for their powers at synthesizing a range of information from diverse fields.

James A. Notopoulos, “The Symbolism of the Sun and Light in the Republic of Plato. II,” Classical Philology 39, no. 4 (October 1944): 223-240.

Briefly, visualizations do two things to rational argument that text is very bad at doing.

Synoptic diagrams are excellent at getting people on the same page. For this reason, anthropologists in the 1960s used them to synthesize everything known about cultural binaries, making sure that divergent scholars came to a consensus about the shape of world view. For this reason, too, "visual journalists" were hired in Silicon Valley from the 1970s forward to draw synoptic diagrams of a discussion, live. When everything everyone has said in a meeting appears on the wall, visually organized by the proximity of arguments, the meeting tends towards agreement. With a visual record, it's more difficult to suddenly disagree, reposition oneself from the outside or challenge the record. Visual diagrams lend permanence to thoughts and help to establish universal, structural arrangements, organizing all intellectual manifestations.

Visual diagrams are also particularly useful for ability to pan out. In a text document, it's often hard to get an overview without relying on an arbitrary abstraction like a table of contents. When reading a map, however, the scholar bends over to see more clearly the detail around a particular city, or steps back to see the nation as a whole. Just so, a visual diagram of an argument allows the reader to very quickly slip between the finite details and the big picture -- making sure that the argument fits exactly where it's supposed to.

For both of these reasons, I've found, as a scholar who produces text, that visual diagramming aids both my ability to recall large numbers of facts -- and to organize them into a larger picture without repeating myself.

There's much to be said here, but I'll confine myself to mentioning two of my favorite tools and their uses.

1) PersonalBrain

Key uses:
- Notetaking at conferences/lectures when facts may be needed for later recall
- Organizing facts related to an overview of a broader field
- Brainstorming in a relatively new subject area
- Keeping track of large numbers of dates, characters, and places when these items are new

PersonalBrain is a sovereign organizer of images, notes, and web links -- it allows you to drag and drop URL's, jpg's, and text from your daily reading program into a map. A few keystrokes allow you to type "thoughts," quickly linking "up" to "parent thoughts" -- overarching categories (History of Chicago < History of Cities) -- and "down" to "child thoughts" (History of Chicago > Ship and Sanitary Canal).



PersonalBrain is amazing at making million-thought outlines at conferences. Using it to take notes allows you to, over time, create an extended map of your entire knowledge of things-people-have-told-you-about-the-periphery-of-your-field.

Say I'm listening to presentations at the Anglo-American Conference, and one of them includes a colleague lecturing on balloon housing in the history of Chicago. When I begin taking notes on "Balloon Housing," I link it to the "History of Chicago." PersonalBrain remembers that I have other notes on the History of Chicago, and suddenly, my two sets of ideas are connected. Everything the colleague now tells me about housing and construction is now linked, however distantly, to the larger thoughts, The History of Chicago and the History of Cities. Should I ever need to locate those thoughts again, there they are, linked up with their related subjects.



Over time, these expanding larger categories ("history", "modernity", and "landscape" are key ones in my case) come to be enriched with detailed information garnered from sitting in conferences, job talks, and other lectures.



Five years from now, when I'm suddenly called upon to teach an introduction to Western Civilization, there will be my lecture notes: matching my colleague, his references to Chicago, all the notes I took, and any other notes I happen to take on Chicago after now. Say I'm planning that lecture, and want to recall how Chicago fits into everything else I know about modernity. PersonalBrain allows me to pan back from the single-thought view. It creates a map -- weighting thoughts related to each other so that they float near each other. On a big screen, entire branches of knowledge become clear.

This flexibility and permanence become rapidly useful when you're juggling large numbers of concepts whose relationship to each other is still unclear to you.

A perfect example: rewriting a syllabus. I recently sat down to reconsider the syllabus for a graduate course in Digital History, which I teach at the University of Chicago in Winter 2010-11. The course I teach has three parts -- one, a history of information revolutions since Gutenberg (with readings by Bob Darnton, Adrian Johns, and Ray Kurzweil). Two, an overview of contemporary issues like privacy and copyright (readings by Larry Lessig and Dan Cohen). Three, an introduction to new methods like GIS, network analysis, and collaborative writing.

That's a lot of information to teach. The class only goes clearly if one divides up the syllabus nicely into classes where each meeting offers a small dose of each subject. How to make sure I'm covering my bases? Brainstorming with PersonalBrain helped: I outlined issues and grouped texts together before creating time-oriented thoughts like "Week 1" and dividing them. Take it for a whirl:

Digital History Syllabus
(Hint: the "+" in the menu expands to a more elaborate view; the spider-icon allows you to switch from normal view to expanded view where you start to see the big picture.)

Personal Brain's one weakness for my purposes is that it's not designed to allow you to write in paragraphs. Your "idea" is only allowed to be about 40 or so characters long.

The program is therefore not ideal for writing essays. Thus, the thousand notes on railways i took at the Huntington Library last year: not so great. They're a beautiful outline. They're wonderful to lecture from. I can rearrange them, elaborate them in the "notes" view, and then export them as a text outline. It's very difficult, however, to work sentence-by-sentence through my notes, to make sure that every thought goes in an explanatory order, and that conclusions follow after facts.

Since that visit to the Huntington, I've figured out that a better piece of
software for outlining notes that go into essays is MindManager, a mind-mapping program designed to fit seamlessly into Word.

2) MindManager

Key uses:
- taking notes on a historiography
- taking notes for an essay while moving towards the ultimate structure of the essay

Mindmanager allows you to take notes on a project and move them around in a 3d map
until they make sense. Because the essay view is synoptic, the writer's eye can constantly move back up the tree hierarchy -- to make sure that this thought is in the right place -- and down the tree hierarchy -- to make sure that every statement is thoroughly supported with adequate evidence.

The essay is written as a branching tree. Each sentence and paragraph can be dragged-and-dropped into place; entire sections can be rearranged, with their entire structure intact, into the linear flow of the essay. In this way, the essay's structure is constantly being reorganized for clearer flow.




The writer has the ability to easily zoom in and out of a particular view. As one zooms out, viewing the entire essay as a map, blank spaces of insufficient support become visually clear. That ability alone decreases the chances of convincing oneself that one has adequately supported a point only to remember, when printing the essay out, that insufficient evidence has been cited.

Such tools increase the writer's chances of catching redundancies early, and decrease the likelihood of writing and rewriting the same essay over and over again. A few weeks' work suggests that Mindmanager doubles the writing speed of an average essay, at least.

Once the thoughts are organized in what seems to be their proper shape, sufficiently elaborated, the writer exports to a text document. The visual, hierarchical mindmap instantly becomes a linear essay.



However: MindManager doesn't allow you to make the million-point 3d
map of your own brain. It's marvelous for moving from a visual brainstorming diagram of main points down to support; it's less good at creating permanent ideas in a branching tree of knowledge, giving large ideas permanence, and making connections where none previously existed. For brilliant note-taking at conferences where people are throwing you information you might need to find again in 5 years -- much better to
use Personal Brain.

For my own purposes, I've chosen to adopt both tools for different uses. I use PersonalBrain for taking notes in other people's lectures -- for organizing my knowledge of things of general interest -- and mindmanager for taking notes specific to your own project -- for turning note cards into essays.

Credit where credit is due: Thanks to Jerry Michalski and Cathrine Dam for plugging me in!

On 18 March I will present my recent work on archaeological network analysis at the University of Southampton in the Computer Applications in Archaeology seminar series. Read the announcement here. This discussion session will focus on understanding pottery distributions by using network analysis, using the ICRATES database of table ware sherds from the Roman East. I will present networks of co-present ceramic forms on sites, and I will test a geographical hypothesis on Mediterranean trade routes using distance-based networks. Moreover, I will reveal a completely new network type that draws on the results of the previous two and emphasises the chronological aspect. This third network type will explore the gradual adoption of table wares in sites and look for factors that influenced this adoption.
You can read up on these network types in my dissertation, available from the bibliography page. The presentation itself will be available next week.
For those in the vicinity of Southampton on 18 March: its in the archaeology department from 12 to 1

Filed under: Uncategorized

Published in Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 34/1 (2010) 117-118 You can download the PDF-file here.

I often take a volume of Quasten’s Patrology to bed with me.  In times past I tended to turn down leaves where English translations that were not online were marked.  These days I find myself looking at texts and wondering whether a translation of them would be worth commissioning.  Short, obscure, interesting texts are the sort of things I look at.

So I looked, and I browsed.  There are several works by Chrysostom that seem interesting.  I’ve mentioned the missing portion of his Adversus Judaeos — but that was just housekeeping.  It costs $20 to get a translation of a column of Migne’s Patrologia Graeca Greek text, and at that rate there are a number of possible texts of historical interest.

On p. 453 Quasten mentions a discourse In kalendas (PG 48, 953-962, i.e. 9 columns, or 4.5 columns of Greek, i.e. $90) — On the kalends [of January] — in which he discusses and condemns the pagan celebration of the New Year.  That ought to contain quite a bit of historical material.

Also mentioned is his Contra circenses ludos et theatra (PG 56, 263-270, i.e. 7 columns or $70) — Against the circus games and theatre — which he preached on July 3, 399, on finding the church half-empty because everyone had gone off to see the show.  He mentions chariot racing on Good Friday, for instance.  Again, this must give insights into the popular entertainments at the end of the 4th century.

The temptations of the theatre are addressed in Homiliae 3 de diabolo (PG 49, 241-276, i.e. $350, so quite a bit more) — Three sermons on the devil — which must, therefore, describe these events.  At that price, tho, I can probably resist.  The nine homilies on penitence (one in fact by Severian of Gabala) are 80-odd columns, and a bit long for my purse.

Equally interesting are some of the sermons delivered for church festivals.  His In diem natalem Dominus Noster Jesu Christi, (PG 49, 351-362, i.e. $110) was given on Christmas Day 386 and calls Christ Sol Iustitiae, the Sun of Justice.  It is important for the history of Christmas.  A partner sermon (PG 56, 385-396, i.e. $110) is probably spurious, but also interesting historically for what it tells us about the rivalry in that period between the pagan solar cults and the Christians.  None of the other festal homilies grab my eye.

The first sermon that Chrysostom ever delivered (PG 48, 693-700, i.e. $70) ought to be in English, if only as a curiosity.

Two sermons, before and after his first exile (PG 52, 427-430, i.e. $30; and PG 52, 443-8, i.e. $50) are probably just waffle, but it would be good to have them.

One very interesting work is De S. Babyla contra Julianum et Gentiles (PG 50, 533-572, i.e. $390) — On St. Babylas against Julian and the pagans.  When the emperor Julian the Apostate attempted to restore the oracle at Daphne in Antioch in 362 AD, the priests told him that the Christian shrine of St. Babylas — interred at the sacred grove — was interfering with the voice of the god.  Julian ordered the remains removed; but soon after the temple burned down, and then Julian himself was killed in battle.  Chrysostom treats both events as evidence of the power of the saint, and responds to the lament of Libanius on the temple of Apollo by describing it as drivelling nonsense.  I could wish the work was shorter.

Another text of interest is Contra Judaeos et Gentiles quod Christus sit Deus (PG 48, 813-838, i.e. $200) — Against Jews and Gentiles that Christ is God.  I had originally seen this as a natural complement to the Eight Homilies Against the Jews, but it is only so to a limited extent.  Apparently it does mention the attempted rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem under Julian, when the Jewish workers were driven back by subterranean gas explosions.  Again, this seems interesting.

I could carry on.  But what is noteworthy is how little it would cost to translate some of these, and that almost none have ever been translated.  I might commission translations of some of these, just to make them available.

For years, The Expositor's Bible Commentary has been one of our most requested commentary sets. Now, we’re pleased to announce that it will be available in Logos Bible Software in just a few days.

The Gold Medallion Award-winning Expositor’s Bible Commentary, published by Zondervan, is a major contribution to the study and understanding of the Scriptures. Providing pastors and Bible students with a comprehensive and scholarly tool for the exposition of the Scriptures and the teaching and proclamation of their message, this 12-volume reference work has become a staple of seminary and college libraries and pastors’ studies worldwide.

Some of the leading evangelical biblical scholars of the past half-century have contributed to The Expositor's Bible Commentary, including:

• F. F. Bruce
• Bruce M. Metzger
• Walter C. Kaiser, Jr.
• Gordon D. Fee
• I. Howard Marshall
• D. A. Carson
• James Montgomery Boice
• Richard N. Longenecker
• Lots of others. Head on over to the product page to see the complete list.

Each volume in The Expositor's Bible Commentary contains an introduction to authorship and historical issues, outlines of each book of the Bible, exposition and notes on the entire Bible, detailed bibliographies on every book of the Bible, and more. It also covers textual issues, and transliteration and translation of Semitic and Greek words make the more technical notes accessible to readers unacquainted with the biblical languages. In short, this is the premiere evangelical commentary on the Bible, and it will be available in Logos Bible Software in just a few days. Head on over to the product page to place your pre-order before it ships on Monday.

Are You a Pradis User?

If you’re a Pradis user, we want to make your transition to Logos Bible Software as smooth as possible. We realize that you might have spent years building up the titles in your Pradis library, and you’ve made a significant financial investment in buying those titles.

For registered Pradis users only, Zondervan has authorized a special discount on The Expositor's Bible Commentary in addition to the Pre-Pub discount. The discount is designed to help you transition to Logos Bible Software. If you’re a registered Pradis user, this is your chance to get your books in Logos Bible Software at rock-bottom prices. Remember, the discount applies only for Pradis users. To learn how to get your discount, read the previous blog post for all the details.

You should follow us on Twitter here.

(Language advisory yet again. Since, on the one hand I will be linking to slang.gr a lot, and on the other I'm guessing some of my readership would rather not see this kind of language, I'm open to suggestions on a more succinct rating system. Extra alert: there's a reference to blasphemy in this post as well.)

Following up from the preceding post on obscene compounds starting with verbs, I'm linking to the slang.gr entry for the use of γαμο- as a prefix, for two reasons.

The first reason is, the entry identifies other instances in the slang.gr dictionary of /ɣam/ as the first part of a compound, and it highlights its linguistic oddity. The first oddity is, these compounds are unusual as forming a verb-initial compound class. Verb–noun compounds in Modern Greek are probably as productive as the Early Modern English equivalent John Cowan pointed to in comments (tosspot, scofflaw), but they're still not all that common, and they're restricted to the colloquial register.

The second oddity is that /ɣam/ can be used as a productive expletive attaching to any noun, without actually referring to the act of copulation. As in γαμοσταυρόλεξο "fucking crossword".

That's sort of news to me, but slang.gr does not lie. My ossified Greek is familiar with σκατο- "shitty" in that usage instead (like German Scheiß-). I'm guessing this use of is γαμο- is recent, and is transparently a borrowing from English—just like the expletive I actually have heard recently, γαμημένος "fucked".

Hence the incredulous slogan once Greece started to look likely to win the 2004 European UEFA championship: σήκωσέ το το γαμημένο, δεν μπορώ, δεν μπορώ να περιμένω, "lift it up, the fucking thing [the trophy], I can't wait any more". Subsequently coopted by the mass media, where it was necessarily bowdlerised to τιμημένο, "the honoured thing".

But then, slang calques, as the Balkans richly attests: today it's English, yesterday it was other hegemoniacal languages. You don't think τρώω ξύλο "eat wood" for "get beaten up" comes straight from Homer, do you?

I'd add that a quotative use of γαμώ (as in, the word used in a compound actually quotes its use in full as a verb in a phrase) is possible some times, as vikar posits in his post on γαμο-, and indeed has been conventional in spelling. Compounds like γαμωσταυρίδι "I-fuck-cross-thing = blasphemous swearing" is a reference to the oath γαμώ το σταυρό σου "I fuck your cross", and can be interpreted as the embedded quotation «γαμώ-[το-]σταυρ-»ίδι. In that case, the omega ("I-fuck-cross-thing") can be justified, it really is an inflection. That kind of quotation in compound does come up elsewhere in slang, as in ωχαδελφισμός "'Come-On-Brother'-ism = systematic indifference".

(There was a pretty decent English Wikipedia article on ωχαδελφισμός once, but it's been whittled down. Yes, it's not encyclopaedic, but it is lexicological...)

You could argue the same for γαμαοδέρνουλας, as I did in passing: that γαμαο- is quoting the first verb of γαμάω και δέρνω, so it should be spelled like an inflected verb. But that's highly unusual for Greek in general—and γαμαωδέρνουλας "Lord Master 'I-Fuck-and-Bash'" looks even stranger than γαμαοδέρνουλας "Lord Master Fuck-and-Bash" already looks.

But internal inflection is still a barrier to a compound being linguistically acceptable: it violates the sense of the compound being a single linguistic unit. French-inspired compounds like παιδιά-θαύματα "child[ren]-wonders", λέξεις-κλειδιά "key-words", like English singers-cum-songwriters, don't comply with that notion, admittedly. Τhen again, without the linking /-o-/, and precisely because the two halves inflect independently, they shouldn't really be considered compounds at all. They're more a coordinated phrase, minus the and coordinator.

The test for whether to use an omega or an omicron in such compounds as γαμαοδέρνουλας or γαμοσπέρνω, as vikar rightly says, is whether you could conceivably have another inflection on the first half of the compound. Can you use expressions like χεσε-μεσ-όβιος (imperative), έγραψες-ατζής (aorist), κλαφ-τα-Χαραλαμπ-άκιας (imperative)? Well, nothing's really impossible in language, but only the last one sounds plausible to me. (I could argue why, but I've detoured enough in this post already.)

The other reason for this post is that vikar has given me a shout out in his own post. I am very, very far from being above that kind of thing.

I return the favour by retracting my definition of slang.gr, as the Greek equivalent of Urban Dictionary. The Urban Dictionary *wishes* it was both as entertaining and as erudite as slang.gr. Seriously, for all the shaggy dog stories and obscenity and made up words over there, slang.gr has some serious linguistic analysis going on. There are reasons why slang.gr has done better than Urban Dictionary: its format encourages longer definitions, and it has a much smaller and more focussed community behind it. It's sort of a blog vs a microblog approach to online lexicography.

Looking at the summary of information on catenas on the gospels in Di Berardino’s latest volume of Quasten’s Patrology, I notice an intriguing couple of entries:

E. J. Caubet Iturbe, La Cadena arabe del Evangelio de san Mateo,1 Texto; 2 Version, Vatican City 1969-1970.

and

E. J. Caubet Iturbe, “La Cadena copto-arabe de los Evangelios y Severo de Antioquia”, Homenaje a J. Prado. Miscelanea de estudios biblicos y hebraicos, ed. L.Alvarez Verdes, E.J. Alonso Hernandez, Madrid 1975,421-432.

Now I recall from Graf’s Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur 1, p. 318, n.1 and p.481-2, that the Coptic catena on the gospels published by Paul de Lagarde also exists in an Arabic version in the Vatican.  I came across this reference while searching for material by Eusebius of Caesarea in Arabic.  He’s listed in Abu’l Barakat’s catalogue:

Eusebius of Caesarea: He has explanations on passages of the holy Gospels and other separate religious treatises.

which Graf discusses, referring to a catena with 6 passages from Eusebius on Matthew and material from Severus of Antioch on Luke.  Page 481f discusses an “anonymous gospel catena”, which turns out to be that of Paul de Lagarde.  I’m not sure I’ve read the entry before.  Written in Bohairic, and almost certainly based on a Greek catena now unknown, H. Achelis dates the catena before 888 AD.  The manuscript used by de Lagarde is incomplete, however.   The manuscript turns out to be Vatican Arab 452, and most of the scholia are at least under the name of Eusebius.  A long quotation from Luke, and five chunks on Matthew, are ascribed to Eusebius, or so Graf says.

It is an interesting sight, therefore, to see this in the modern bibliography, and no mention of de Lagarde’s publication.

Is it possible that Iturbe published a critical text of the Arabic version of the catena?  It looks very much like it.  I wish I could obtain the article and see what he says.

UPDATE: After typing those words, I started searching for the book in Google.  Slightly amazing to find my site listed, and this article listed, less than a minute after I pressed save.  Is Google really watching these words that intently!?

I find in COPAC more details of the book:

A compilation of patristic commentaries, with the text of the Gospel, in the Arabic of Codex Vaticanus ar. 452 and in a Spanish version.

which also aligns with my understanding.  Another states:

Studi e testi 254-5.  Half title: Cod. vat. ar. 452, ff. 6-135. Originally presented as the editor’s thesis, Pontificia Commissio Biblica. Based on a Coptic version entitled: Ermēnia n̄te pieuangelion ethouab kata Matheon. cf. the editor’s introd., v.1, p. [li]-liv; H. Achelis. Hippolytsudien. 1897. p. 163-169. Originally presented as the editor’s thesis, Pontificia Commissio Biblica. Arabic text; Spanish introduction, notes and translation.

So there we have it.  This is indeed a critical edition of the Arabic catena.  The next question is whether I obtain this and include it in the Eusebius!  For there is a copy available for sale online…

UPDATE 2: I cannot resist.  It would be cheaper to order the books by ILL, and copy them, etc; but it is far easier to just buy the things. 

Here is some advice for grad students and beginning academics. When you publish an article in a major journal, don't assume people will start falling over themselves to congratulate you, or to comment on your paper, or even to acknowledge that they have seen it (much less read the paper). This is one of the big disappointments of starting out in academic publishing, and I don't think I am alone in feeling this way. When I email someone about one of their recent publications, I sometimes get a reply like "its nice to know that at least someone has read the paper." I recall my disappointment as a grad student when my first publications seemed to elicit no reaction. Then Robert Santley told me at an SAA meeting that his grad seminar had read my first major article. I felt great for about 5 seconds, until he told me that they critiqued the hell out of it. Well, at least it got some reads and reactions.

In 2003 and 2005 I published two critiques of research that purports to show that Classic Maya cities were built as cosmological models of the universe (these can be downloaded on my webpage).

2003 Can We Read Cosmology in Ancient Maya City Plans? Comment on Ashmore and Sabloff. Latin American Antiquity 14:221-228.

2005 Did the Maya Build Architectural Cosmograms? Latin American Antiquity 16:217-224.

I thought these were pretty strong critiques, and I anticipated a lively debate with Mayanists and others. These papers were deliberately polemic in tone, a device I used to try and elicit response and critique. I think it is likely that there may have been cosmological influence on Maya city planning, but the published arguments were based on poor methods and speculation. I had hoped that these papers might lead to improved methods and more rigorous work in this area.

But apart from one long email and a serious response from Anthony Aveni (see below), I got virtually no response to these papers. They are among my most infrequently-cited papers today. Why is that? I really don't know, but a few possibilities come to mind.

1. My arguments were so overwhelming and convincing that no one would even think of taking a contrary perspective now. Yeah, right. As if.
2. My arguments were so poor, based on faulty methods, assumptions, and data, that no serious scholar would take them seriously. They are beneath contempt, not worthy of reply by serious scholars. Well, I suppose this is possible, but I think I would have heard at least some indication of this at some point. A friend might have pointed this out to me, or perhaps someone who shares my views might have complained at what a lousy job I did in my critiques of the cosmology interpretations. Or the journal would not have accepted the papers.
   
3. Well, I can't really think of a third alternative. I find this very puzzling.

Tony Aveni did take my arguments seriously. I heard him speak at some conferences, in which he said that I had raised some important points, and that Mayanists should use my critique to improve their methods and arguments. Hear, hear. That is just what I intended. Tony even went so far as to reprint these paper in a reader on archaeoastronomy and native astronomy:

Aveni, Anthony F. (editor)
2008 Foundations of New World Cultural Astronomy: A Reader with Commentary. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.

So these papers are in the strange position of having been reprinted in a reader (usually a sign of good, influential papers), while remaining among my most infrequently cited papers.

I was reminded of this situation by two recent works. First, I was reviewing David Henige's work on pre-European New World demography. Henige mentions critiques that he and others made of the "high-count" school of historical demography, and notes that their various methodological criticisms have never been answered. The high counters keep making old arguments, while ignoring criticisms of their work. As someone who follows this research, I find this frustrating; Henige must find it VERY frustrating.

Henige, David P.
1998 Numbers From Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.

2008 Recent Work and Prospects in American Indian Contact Population. History Compass 6(1):183-206.

And today, I was reminded of these papers again in a book review by David Nicholas on Keith Lilley's new book on the role of cosmology in the design of medieval cities. Nicholas is very critical of Lilley's data and interpretations, and his arguments are very similar to mine. The empirical evidence for using a geometric/cosmological model of Jerusalem to lay out cities is extremely weak (a few possible cases out of hundreds of cities); and even if this argument were granted, such a feature would make almost no difference in the lives of the people who lived in the cities. Needless to say, I fired off an email to Nicholas telling him how brilliant his review is!

Lilley, Keith D.
2009 City and Cosmos: The Medieval World in Urban Form. Reaktion, London.

Nicholas, David
2010 Review of City and Cosmos by Lilley. H-Urban, H-Net Reviews (online). .

I apologize for rambling at such length about a minor peeve of mine. But the larger issue, which I still find puzzling after more than two decades in the trenches, is the lack of citation and acknowledgment of published papers in archaeology. And I don't think it is just me.

Lost Heritage

The following publications were designed to aid in the recovery of antiquities stolen from Iraq's regional museums during the insurrection following the Gulf War, 1991. Museums in Amara, Basra, Kufa, Dirwaniya, Suleimaniya, Dohuk, Kirkuk and Wasit were vandalized, cases were smashed, and records were scattered. The antiquities published here are stolen goods, are not legally held, and can be recovered by police action. Anyone who encounters any of the objects published in Lost Heritage, or any other items that are recognizable as from Iraq's museums, should contact the appropriate authorities.

Gibson, McGuire; McMahon, Augusta. Lost Heritage: Antiquities Stolen from Iraq's Regional Museums, Fascicle 1. Chicago: American Association for Research in Baghdad; 1992. 1 volume (xii + 54 pages [illustrated]): American Associaton for Research in Baghdad, 1155 E. 58th St., Chicago IL 60637, USA.

4.1 MB PDF (suitable for viewing online) | 19.1 MB PDF (suitable for printing)

Baker, H. D.; Matthews, R. J.; Postgate, J. N. Lost Heritage: Antiquities Stolen from Iraq's Regional Museums. Fascicle 2. London: British School of Archaeology in Iraq; 1993. 1 volume (viii + 153 pages [illustrated]). ISBN: 0-903472-14-7.

11.7 MB PDF (suitable for viewing online) | 55.3 MB PDF (suitable for printing)

Fujii, Hideo; Oguchi, Kazumi. Lost Heritage: Antiquities Stolen from Iraq's Regional Museums. Fascicle 3. Tokyo: Institute for Cultural Studies of Ancient Iraq, Kokushikan University; 1996. 1 volume (xxi + 43 pages [illustrated]).

4.9 MB PDF (suitable for viewing online) | 20.9 MB PDF (suitable for printing)

"List of Stolen Manuscripts" = pages 16-43 of: Fujii, Hideo; Oguchi, Kazumi. Lost Heritage: Antiquities Stolen from Iraq's Regional Museums. Fascicle 3. Tokyo: Institute for Cultural Studies of Ancient Iraq, Kokushikan University; 1996. 1 volume (xxi + 43 pages [illustrated]).

1.9 MB PDF (suitable for viewing online) | 7.5 MB PDF (suitable for printing)

[Available online since August 2004 as a part of the work of the Oriental Institute's Iraq Working Group, this resource has just been updated. To the best of my knowledge none of the objects listed in these publcations has been recovered.]

It’s been a while since I wrote about the 13th century Arabic Christian history once ascribed to Abu Salih the Armenian and today to Abu’l Makarim.  But a friend has sent me a new article on the subject, by Mouton and Papescu-Belis, in Arabica 53, p. (2006), which discusses the unique manuscript.

B.T.A.Evetts in 1895 published part of this text from Paris Arabe 307 with an English translation.  Coptic monk and bishop Fr. Samuel published the rest in 1984 in four volumes.  His manuscript is now Munich Arabicus 2570, in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.  An English translation of the new material, undertaken by a collaborator, is apparently not that reliable.  But Fr. Samuel’s own corrections are in the main sound.

The combined manuscript was originally 365 folios in length, disposed into 37 quires.  The first 21 quires are in the Munich ms, and the last 16 in the Paris ms.  The two quires 21 and 22, where the manuscript was broken in half, are mostly missing as the leaves became detached.  The manuscript seems to have been written in 1338 AD (explicitly stated in the Paris ms.); the work itself refers to no event later than 1220.  It is possible that later events were written by a continuator.

The Munich ms. contains descriptions of monasteries and churches in the north of Egypt, as far as Cairo; then those of the Near-East.  The Paris ms. contains the same material for Egypt south of Cairo, into Nubia, and the rest of Africa.

The remainder of the article discusses the description of the monastery of Mt. Sinai and its environs at the period of composition.

With funding from the NEH program Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, the University of South Carolina’s Center for Digital Humanities invites applications for a summer institute, held June 7-25 2010 in Columbia, SC. 

More...

Early China

Welcome to the Early China Website, the internet home of the Society for the Study of Early China (SSEC), hosted by the University of Chicago Library. The overall mission of this site is to foster scholarly exchange and communication among all people interested in the culture and civilization of China from earliest times down to and including the period of the Han dynasty (A.D. 220). We hope that the site will be more than just a place to publicize the activities and publications of the SSEC, but that it can be a home to various types of research projects small and large that are more suitable to online rather than traditional print publication. We also hope to publicize the news, events, and scholarly activities and interests of people in the field, much as the Society’s newsletter, Early China News, once did before it ceased publication in 1998.

Database of Early Chinese Manuscripts

By Enno Giele (Copyright, 2001)

Last update: 09.01.2000

The Database of Early Chinese Manuscripts consists of two HTML files, one a list of 158 SITES that have yielded manuscript materials, the other a list of 287 MANUSCRIPTS (mss.htm). When you enter the database, you will first see SITES. Clicking on a serial number in SITES will bring you to the manuscript(s) associated with that site in MANUSCRIPTS. All manuscripts from a given site bear the same serial number as the site itself. Clicking on a serial number in MANUSCRIPTS will take you back to the corresponding site in SITES.

Bibliographies

• A Bibliography of Materials Pertaining to the Kuo-tien and Shanghai Museum Manuscripts, compiled by Paul R. Goldin.
  
• Ancient Chinese Civilization: Bibliography of Materials in Western Languages, compiled by Paul R. Goldin.
  
• Early China 30 (2005) annual bibliography, compiled by Margaret Wee-Siang Ng
• Early China 29 (2004) annual bibliography, compiled by Kuan-yun Huang.
• Early China 28 (2003) annual bibliography, compiled by Paul Fischer.
• Early China 26-27 (2001-02) annual bibliography, compiled by Paul Fischer.

Once I signed an agreement with the Cerf to use their Greek text of Eusebius Gospel Problems and Solutions, I asked and received a copy of the text in electronic form.  This turned out to be a word file, with an attached font: greek.ttf. 

How I cursed that file name!  Because it was clear that this was not a unicode font.  To use the file, I was going to have to convert the text to unicode.  It would help a lot if I knew which font that was!  I hunted around for that file name, and found (as you might expect) several candidates, none of which were the same.

This evening I had a stroke of luck.  I was preparing to write a program that would open the font and display all the characters, so I could see what was what.  But in Vista, when you open a font, you get a Properties option; and under Details there was information!

 

This was gold!  The name of the author, Peter J. Gentry and Andre…, a version 1.0, and a date 1993.  A google search turned up a page of old fonts by Eric Pement.  There it was:

Ancient Greek (57 KB). GREEK.TTF, Greek, ver 1.000, © 1993 by Peter J. Gentry and Andrew M. Fountain. Requires this keyboard utility: KeyMan32 (381 KB)

A search on the author names reveals that they were the authors of WinGreek.  I wonder if, perhaps, this font is an early version of that?  With the same keyboard mapping?  If so, I am in great good luck, for WinGreek is widely known.

Installing the font creates “Greek regular” in my fonts directory.  This TLG Wingreek test page reveals that it is exactly the correct mapping. 

The next stage is to try to find a converter utility.  And GreekTranscoder seems to fit the bill!  The commercial Antioch program can also import the stuff, and indeed this utility.  I’ll have to see if it works, but I feel very pleased with myself to have got so far!

UPDATE: GreekTranscoder worked brilliantly!  You had to copy the .dot files to the ~\startup, and make sure you had no WINWORD running silently in background, but it then converted everything with just one error.  The Jiffycomp utility did not do as well, and lost all formatting (italics etc).  I have made a donation to Greektranscoder.

Once we have a final version of the missing portion of Chrysostom against the Jews, I need to make sure that it is added to the copies of the defective text that are around online.  Of course that means I need to know where they are.  A google search provided quite a few links:

• www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/chrysostom-jews6.html
• http://www.todayscatholicworld.com/homily-ii.htm
• www.kalleres.com/doc/Chrysostom.doc
• www.preteristarchive.com/…/0386_chrysostom_adversus-judeaus.html
• http://www.ccjr.us/dialogika-resources/primary-texts-from-the-history-of-the-relationship/247-chrysostom
• www.wrongplanet.net/postt14836.html
• www.stormfront.org/forum/sitemap/index.php/t-624341.html
• www.catholicapologetics.info/apologetics/judaism/jchrsos.htm
• www.scribd.com/…/wwwfordhamedu-halsall-source-chrysostomjews6html-svcsbbin
• www.shoahrose.com/adversos.html
• http://holywar.org/txt/Riferime.nti/poster1997.htm

The first is undoubtedly the most important; many of the others derive from it.   But I have yet to visit most of these.

Some of the more unusual sites in this list — and there are a few — can be difficult to communicate with, as their authors are either very eccentric or have developed a well-grounded fear of entrapment by their political enemies.   I cannot say that I am looking forward to the task of writing to all these sites and asking them to add the missing passage to sermon 2.  Doubtless some will ignore my email.

But unless we do this, unless we reunite the lost portion of the text with all the copies we can find, we may be wasting our time.  We cannot be certain which copy of the text will be the ancestor of all the copies to reach the year 3,000 AD.  In so many cases, we know that a single copy ca. 800 AD is the ancestor of all our current copies of a text.  To fail to reunite the severed texts may be tantamount to wasting the rediscovery.

Our duty to the future dictates that the effort must be made.  Once I have the final version, I will make that effort.  Not because I agree or disagree with the sites above; but because we cannot tell which of them may provide the future with the text of Chrysostom.

I just finished grading two stacks of midterm essays for lower division courses (in the interest of full disclosure my graduate assistant also graded a third stack). I noticed certain trends that were so pronounced and consistent across almost all of the essays in these stacks that they are worthy of remark.

First, the students will not articulate a specific thesis. They might offer a number of closely related specific and focused arguments over the course of the paper, but they will not tie themselves down with a specific thesis. I ask them to do this. I provide myriad examples in class, and I have critiqued earlier works from these same students pointing out how a vague thesis undermines the overall structure of a paper and argument. All of this is to no avail. And it's not like these are bad students. In fact, they are good students who can write good arguments. The main concern about writing a strong, focused thesis may be that these students feel like they are going to give alway their "good material" too early in the paper. In other words, they may be following a narrative style more common to the "popular" media like television where arguments are revealed slowly, layer-by-layer, over the course of the program.

On Wednesday, Richard Kahn gave a fantastic talk entitled "Education as the Avatar of Sustainability". While I'll leave you to suss out the specifics of the talk, one thing that I came away from is the role of education is fomenting resistance. In Kahn's talk education provided a way to resist "Big Coal", but this was clearly meant as a metaphor for any source of oppression or iniquity in the world. After the talk, I pointed out that universities, generally speaking, were in league with Big Coal. Universities oppress as much as they liberate when it comes to the production of knowledge. I've blogged before about the industrial roots of the system of disciplines that continue to form the foundation of the university system. If at least part of the institutional goal of universities is to create the kind of docile bodies that serve modern, industrialized society, then how do we understand the steadfast refusal of our students to follow certain simple procedures in their work.

Here's an example: I tell my students not to use contractions in formal writing. I even tell them that the so-called "word processors" can be set up to automatically convert contractions to proper, complete words. No matter how many times I tell students not to use contractions, they use contractions flagrantly throughout their papers. Is it possible to regard this practice as a kind of resistance not only to my expectations, but to the institution that supports such formal diction.

I have my doubts about any one episode or manifestation, but when the pattern of resistance appears consistently across so many student behaviors (and we should not fall into the easy route of just condemning students as "lazy". There is no reason to expect students are any more lazy than faculty to enforce rules and procedures in an uncritical way), I find myself wonder whether students have successfully framed me as the oppressor.

I just added a link to download my presentation at CAA UK 2010 on the bibliography page. The text to accompany the presentation is the article in Oxford Journal of Archaeology.

Filed under: Uncategorized

AP has this excellent news:

Google says it will scan up to 1 million old books in national libraries in Rome and Florence, including works by astronomer Galileo Galilei, in what’s being described as the first deal of its kind. …

Culture Ministry official Mario Resca says the deal will help save the books’ content forever.

Resca said the 1966 Florence flood ruined thousands of books in the Tuscan city’s library. He said digitizing books from before 1868 will help spread Italian culture throughout the world.

Google will cover the costs of the scanning of the books, all of them out-of-copyright Italian works, including 19th-century literature and 18th-century scientific volumes.

Well done, the Italians.  Suddenly we will all be able to read a whole load of material that no-one could ever see.

The first thing you see when you open up Logos 4 is the Homepage. Your Logos 4 Homepage is an attractive and intuitive jumping off point for all your Bible study needs. From there you can do your daily reading, access your resource library, or do topic, passage, and word searches. You can also access Passage, Exegetical, and Bible Word Study Guides or go to Tools to make notes, highlights, adjust settings in Logos 4, as well a number of other important features. Familiarizing yourself with the Homepage is the first step towards truly making Logos 4 an extension of your personal Bible study method.

Today we want to feature a couple short videos intended to walk you through the features Homepage. These two videos combined are about four minutes in length and—after you have watched them—you should be able to give someone else a guided tour of the Logos 4 Homepage yourself!

In the first video Morris Proctor will help us get acquainted with the various parts of the Logos 4 Homepage.

In the second video we will take a closer look at some of the content found on the Homepage. We will learn to find the Ribbon, familiarize ourselves with the main page, or use Customize to adjust the settings on our Homepage.

Remember that you can access and watch tutorial videos anytime. You will be surprised at just how much more productive your Bible study can be by just investing time in these training tidbits.

You should follow us on Twitter here.

Google has reached agreement with the Italian government to digitize the contents of 2 national Italian libraries and make them available to the public online. These two libraries contain nearly 1 million old works that were published before 1868 and therefore there will be no copyright issues - issues that have resulted in lawsuits against Google.

RSM

Alpheios

The goal of the Alpheios project is to help people learn how to learn languages as efficiently and enjoyably as possible, and in a way that best helps them understand their own literary heritage and culture, and the literary heritage and culture of other peoples throughout history.

Our initial focus will be on classical literature in languages no longer spoken, such as Latin and ancient Greek. The influence of these classics, like the river Alpheios, still runs like a subterranean stream deep beneath the contemporary world, as artists and thinkers continue to draw inspiration from them.

We hope that Alpheios will eventually include a wide variety of languages, ancient and modern. By utilizing contemporary technology that is both flexible and adaptive, Alpheios should make language learning both easier and more immediately rewarding. By sharing these tools and the source code in which they are written freely on the Web, the Alpheios Project also hopes to encourage their collaborative development.

The software is currently in Beta release, with all the caveats normally associated with that level of development.

Alpheios Enhanced Texts

Latin

Prior to reading these texts, activate the Alpheios functionality in your browser by installing the latest versions of Alpheios Latin Tools

• Sextus Propertius
  • Elegies - Book 1, Poem 1
  • Elegies - Book 1, Poem 2

Greek

Prior to reading these texts, activate the Alpheios functionality in your browser by installing the latest versions of Alpheios Greek Tools

• Babrius: Fables from Aesop
  
  (Grading and grammatical requirements per Cornell College)
  • Level 1 - Easiest
    • The Fox and The Grapes
    • Heracles and The Ox-Driver
    • The Lion and The Mouse

    Grammar required:

    Nouns: all cases, first declension, second declension, third declension, masc & fem, neuter

    Verbs: present tense, active and middle; present imperatives

    Pronouns: personal pronouns, interrogatives

• Apollodorus: Myths from Library and Epitome
  
  (Grading and grammatical requirements per Cornell College)
  • Level 2 - Pretty Easy
    • Prometheus and the gift of fire

    Grammar required:

    Verbs: present, imperfect, and aorist tenses; present and aorist participles

    Pronouns: relative pronoun

  • Level 3 - Not Difficult
    • Deucalion and Pyrrha and the Flood

    Grammar required:

    Verbs: future tense, mi-verbs, verbs with irregular 2nd aorists (e.g. baino, gignosko, histemi)

    Adjectives: comparison of adjectives

    Participles: genitive absolute

  • Level 4 - Very Do-able
    • Demeter searches for her daughter Persephone
    • Demeter gives Triptolemos the gift of wheat
    • Persephone eats the pomegranate

    Grammar required:

    Verbs: subjunctive mood; future and aorist passive

    Indirect Statement

• Homer
  • Odyssey - Book 1

Other Texts

You can use the Alpheios Beta Release with any HTML and Unicode compliant texts, including texts you create yourself. See Enabling Alpheios for instructions. We recommend the following sites, for which the tools are automatically enabled:

• Perseus at Alpheios
• The Latin Library
• Bibliotheca Augustana

Indian Epigraphy

The basic purpose of the present site is the creation of a compact, systematic and critical repository of Indian epigrahical sources. The material will be 'critical' in the sense that it registers variants in decipherment and alternate readings, with the exception of obvious mistakes. It aims to make these sources accessible to all scholars, even those who have only minimal expertise in computers. Moreover, it requires no special software or hardware to utilize the materials being made available here.

All that is necessary for viewing our collection of inscriptions is the the installation of a special font, called ttf-font (for IBM), which you can download here as a zip. file. A Macintosh compatible version of the same font is also available here in hqs file, due to kindness of Dr. Volker Thewalt (http://www.bamiyan.de, http://www.thewalt.de), converted the font.

The importance of epigraphy for the study of pre-modern South Asia should be obvious. So too should the necessity for a data base in which, over time, it may be possible to begin to make accessible some of the fruits of generations of epigraphists and scholars who have studied these inscriptions, but whose works are often very difficult to find even for those with access to the best libraries...

COLLECTIONS OF SANSKRIT EPIGRAPHY

ORISSA- ANDHRA INSCRIPTIONS

COLLECTIONS OF EARLY INSCRIPTIONS SYSTEMATISED BY FINDPLACES

USEFULL PUBLICATIONS

INSCRIPTIONS OF ASHOKA