Electra Atlantis: Digital Approaches to Antiquity

While dabbling in digital music software and technologies, I came across this interesting set of posts in The Halls of Valhalla blog. It turns out that the author, an audio software engineer, was originally trained as an archaeologist… “The study of ancient acoustics, or archaeoacoustics, covers a variety of sonic phenomena of the prehistoric world, from research into early musical instruments such as bone flutes and percussion instruments, to the possibility of whether grooves in pottery could have recorded sounds from thousands of years ago. … Iegor Reznikoff has studied the location of Paleolithic art in European caves, and has found a strong correlation between the presence of art or distinctive markings in a given location, and the quality of the resonance in those locations.”

At the major temple complex (900-600 BC) of the Peruvian archaeological site of Chavín de Huántar, John Rick (Stanford University) has “put forth a provocative theory: that the structures at Chavín were used in rituals where the dominant ‘priests’ (or whatever class was in power) relied on sensory manipulation, in combination with hallucinogenic drugs, to reinforce the perception that they had supernatural authority. … The stone passages known as galleries have very unique sonic characteristics, where sounds are difficult to localize. Within these galleries, Rick recently excavated a number of decorated trumpets, carved from the Strombus conch:”

“The ritual would have begun, most likely, by ingesting a hallucinogenic powder or a liquid extracted from the San Pedro cactus. As the Chavín subjects walked through the dark, cramped halls, the sound of Strombus trumpets echoed around them from some unseen source. Water roared through canals beneath their feet (or, strangely, overhead), producing a heavy percussion amplified by the drugs. Mirrors placed in ventilation ducts to reflect the sun poured brilliant shafts of light into the subterranean hallways, only to be ‘turned off,’ thrusting the occupant into blackness as dark as obsidian. By the time the subjects emerged from the chambers, staggering and stunned, their perspective had been altered forever. The unmistakable impression: somebody powerful was in charge.”

So where does this all link up with the digital world? Well, Stanford U’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics performed research at the archaeological site. They developed specialized equipment such as a “Configurable Microphone Array with Acoustically Transparent Omnidirectional Elements”:

“The reverb time increases as a function of the number of turns between the source and the receiver, with sources several gallery turns away from the receiver having a longer perceived reverb time. The reverberation in the Chavín galleries is characterized by dense and energetic early reflections, and low inter-aural cross-correlation. All 3 of the galleries have a quick onset, where the reverberation reaches Gaussian statistics within 20 milliseconds of the initial impulse. The quick build to Gaussian (i.e. random) statistics, and the low amount of cross-correlation between the left and right ears, is responsible for the strange sonic characteristics of the galleries, where it is difficult to localize where a signal is coming from in the absence of a direct signal.” You can read more about their findings at the Chavín de Huántar Archaeological Acoustics Project website. Finally, here’s a nice example of how the conch trumpets mentioned sound inside one of the galleries at the site:

Tito la Rosa performing in Chavin de Huantar, Peru 2008. from otoplasma on Vimeo.

Catalog der Texte der Hethiter (CTH)
Catalogue des textes hittites - Catalogue of Hittite Texts
in Fortführung der Arbeit von E. Laroche bearbeitet von S. Košak und G.G.W. Müller

Published online as a part of the Hethitologie Portal Mainz

Land is unlike any other form of commodity. In R. H. Tawney's words, it was "orgies of land speculation" that resulted in the displacement of peasants and the linking of capital to real estate. Land trade, rather than capitalism itself, has been behind some of the most lasting and damaging aspects of advanced capitalism: the clearance of black neighborhoods, the creation of segregated cities in South Africa, India, and the United States where property ownership was backed up by law; and the economic isolation of the poor.

Some of the reasons land ownership has been so linked to power in the modern era is the legal restrictions that accompany real estate but not other forms of property. As Avner Offer pointed out in his history of nineteenth-century land movements, land is slower to trade than other commodities; it is more hampered with legal restrictions and covenants. Many of these -- duties of road maintenance, the law of lights, restrictions on entail -- went back to medieval and Roman times. But even if we imagined away the laws of trade in land, the ownership of land still gives rise to other powers that other capitalists don't have. Land ownership means buying into the right to engineer the experience of other individuals. Even the mere owner of a shopfront in a city has purchased the right to interfere with the perceptions, rights, and choices of his fellows, through how he organizes that space, through accoutrements like benches or air conditioning or street trees with which he amends his property, through what he displays and refuses to display -- powers that the owner of a yacht or the mere dealer in corn at the market has not purchased. Land ownership is implicitly linked to the governance of others' experience, and so removing land ownership from the feudal system to the capitalist system created after effects too broad to be summed up by a study of abstract capital markets themselves.

I draw here on the writing of Elizabethan historian R. H. Tawney and his reflections on the massive turnover of land that transpired in Europe between roughly 1500 and 1700 with the draining of northern Europe and enclosure of its forest frontier. Everywhere, land exchange resulted in the rapid exchange of land and escalation of prices, with the result of rapid turnover of old feudal families to new gentry, typically defined by a new relationship with the peasantry characterized by enclosure, depopulation, riot, and suppression. In England, these patterns were intensified by an added factor: the breakup of monastic lands, which were turned over first to the crown and then to agents who sold them to the highest bidder. For these reasons, the turnover was greater, the gentry turned over more rapidly, their hold and rights to land were preserved more tenuously, and they had more to fear from an outright peasant rebellion of the kind embodied by the Levellers.

Based on his study of the English Civil War, Tawney reached the conclusion that land politics, rather than democratic ideas, were at the heart of the age of revolutions that created modern nations and the system of classes. Ownership in land, he reminded his readers, meant more than ownership in other forms of property. It presented political status -- the right to vote, the right to a title -- for the vote was linked to land ownership in England until 1867. It also gave social status. Land owners built country houses and began to participate in a world of political influence based on hospitality given to royalty and political office holders. Finally, ownership in alienable land meant unprecedented powers of social engineering rarely seen in Feudal systems. Land owners cleared villages and built new ones; they *had* to, in order to keep up with the increasingly extensive use of agriculture by their competitors. The regime of alienable property in land that emerged from the Civil War, buoyed by the theory of Thomas Hobbes, was in almost every sense -- the sense of creating a power elite, the sense of depriving the working class of economic and political access -- based on how it preserved the rights to property in land.

According to the subdiscipline of moral geography, this centrality of land ownership to modern liberalism in fact masks many of the most urgent issues of class, race, and gender participation in the modern era. We accept the built environment -- the separation of mother's house from father's work, the segregation of black and white neighborhoods -- as entirely natural. Looking backwards from the postwar twentieth century, the reform movements that receive the most press have been those dealing in abstract rights involving court and market. Yet the spatial structuration of our cities, farms, and nations conceals within it boundaries that demarcate access and inclusion. They are invisible to all except a radical tradition that has stressed the significance of land to the experience of contemporary governance.

Twenty-first century events threaten to again put the land at the center of analysis. Rapid turnovers in the foreclosure crisis, the devolution of state infrastructure, the spiraling cost of real estate, reverse white flight, and new back-to-the-land and utopian movements taking over the abandoned cities of Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, mean that land ownership issues have captured attention. In addition, new methodologies like collaborative mapping and GIS have offered the infrastructure for participatory efforts to make sense of these new forces that determine so much of contemporary inclusion in market and politics. Finally, the fabrication of the digital commons creates a plane of virtual real estate where the same issues of participation, visibility, social engineering, alienability and exclusion apply as with land. The enclosure of this virtual commons and its contestation through the Net Neutrality movement are among the most important political crises of our day. We could even point, with Eleanor Ostrom, to connections between death of the commons in traditional cultures and the increasing likelihood of exhausting natural resources linked to land -- which after all can be turned over at rapid rates.

So here is the hypothesis I draw: the problem with modernity isn't capitalism or government per se; the problem is land and the way capital and government have been tied to it. The land reform movement of the nineteenth century was the most courageous attempt to reform those dealings, and the crises of not having reformed them linger with us to this day.

Crossposted to Teaching Thursday.

This week the Chronicle of Higher Education's technology blog featured a short article on two faculty members who offered a course to the public for free and attracted over 2,000 non-credit earning students.  The article argues that, for some classes, opening the course to the public created a more diverse and dynamic classroom environment only really possible through online teaching.  In Profs. Downes' and Siemen's class, non-credit students and paying, for-credit students mingled in discussion forums, witnesses the same lectures, and engaged the same readings, but unlike efforts pioneered by places like MIT where the lectures and syllabi are made public, these non-credit students were invited to participate fully in the educational process as well by engaging with their fellow students and, presumably, the faculty member.  In short, their class emphasizes the interactive potential of online teaching over and above the internet's well-known ability to disseminate prepared content.

I couldn't help but also see this as an opportunity to democratize the university experience in a fairly radical way.  Not only would students have to consider how a particular class or material or problem solving exercise helps them to navigate the unpredictable shoals of a distant, abstract "real world", but they will be forced to confront the "real world", right there, in the classroom.  In other words, such a public course might help students overcome the separation between what happens in the classroom where students sometimes regard skills, methods, and knowledge as simply "course objectives" or tools to get an "A", and what happens in the real world where these skills, methods, and knowledge function in a far more ambiguous way and the rules followed to get an "A" rarely apply neatly.  Expanding the conversation by bringing the real world into the foyer of the Ivory Tower could have a revolutionary effect on how students understand the application of classroom skills.

I've just begun to discuss the possibility of running some classes like this at the University of North Dakota.  As part of my sounding out processes, I talked to my good buddy, online teacher extraordinaire, and frequent Teaching Thursday contributor, Mick Beltz, and he and I came up with some issues that will have to be considered before developing and deploying a class to the general public.  Both of us bring the perspective of teachers in the humanities with some online teaching experience.

So, five observations.

1. Technology. The first thing I thought of is how do we run a course like this.  It seems that the classes described in the Chronicle article ran through Moodle which is open source and, presumably, more flexible (or at least developable) than Blackboard in some ways.  The course will also have to be able to function with almost no live technical support.  I can't imagine any university who would want to commit large scale technical support to a class full of non-credit, non-paying students. So every aspect of online delivery would have to be iron-clad to work and very straight forward to access.

2. Scaleable content and exercises. Once one had assurances of a solid platform, then the content would have to be scaled in some way. For example, a course that relied on a $400 textbook would not be a very appealing class to open to the public because few public, non-credit students will be interested (it seems to me) in purchasing a $400 textbook.  Open source content and public domain texts would work better.  Multiple-guess type questions are more easily scaleable than essay tests and papers.  Currently I teach my online History 101 class as asynchronous - meaning all the content is available from the first day.  This may not scale well for a massive online course where a less-engaged public might not be inclined to complete weekly assignments in order and prefer to skip around defeating any pedagogical goals dependent upon the sequential engagement with content.

3. Access and Control. One key to managing the relationship between paying, for-credit students, and non-credit students is creating levels of access that, for example, prevent open discussion boards from turning into the worst kind of comment sections on a blog.  I initially thought that limiting the length of time a discussion board was accessible would limit the opportunities for crazy comments or spam.  Mick offered a better solution.  He suggested that discussion boards be controlled through "adaptive release" exercises.  In other words, to get access to a discussion, you have to score above a particular grade on a quiz based on the readings.  Of course, a clever instructor could develop a whole series of adaptive release access points; with achievement would come ever more intimate levels of access much in the same way that video games release bonus features at certain levels.  This adaptive release model would not only limit access to people with malicious intent (to some extent), but also create incentives to non-credit students to engage the material in the class.

4. Goals and Objectives. A public course - like any course - will need a clear sets of goals and objectives. There is no escaping that any course like this would have to be experimental at first.  And like any experiment, we would have to establish certain metrics to determine whether the class was successful or not.  The simple statistics, like number of students and length of time on-site (as a metric for engagement) would be useful, but we would also want to see if we could gather data on student engagement more broadly.  The goal, to my mind, would be to draw people into the subject matter.  Following the model of many video game creators, we'd want our course to create an immersive space, and we would have to monitor certain clear criteria to determine whether this was successful.  We might also borrow from are colleagues in marketing to understand better the various metrics used to determine the success or failure of a website or a viral or web-based marketing campaign.

5. Resources.  The biggest hurdle to implementing a class like this would be to determine whether the benefits of the course are worth the commitment of resources.  A public access course has the potential to break down barriers between "the academy" and the public, engage types of learners who might not be inclined to enroll for credit at a university, and expose students to ways of thinking, priorities, and experiences rare or impossible in the classroom.  On the other hand, how many hours per week does managing a potentially massive online class take, how robust of a cyber-infrastructure, and, even, what is necessarily to publicize the course and actually get non-credit students to "enroll".  As much as we'd like to say that we're teaching the world "for free" there is always some cost in time and resources.

Those are just my preliminary thoughts on the potential issues and rewards of teaching the world for free.

Help Preserve Archaeology in Greece: Join the AIA in writing to the Cultural Property Advisory Committee (CPAC)

August 30, 2010

On October 12, 2010, the State Department's Cultural Property Advisory Committee (CPAC) will consider establishing a Memorandum of Understanding with Greece (the Hellenic Republic) by which the United States would help preserve the country's rich archaeological heritage. CPAC has called for written comments and it is extremely important that archaeologists, students and the general public send in letters showing their support. The deadline for submitting a letter is September 22, 2010 so please act quickly! This page gives you information about CPAC, lets you download templates for letters, and gives a few suggestions for further reading.

Late last week, we confirmed our scholarship winners, sent out $2,000.00 in tuition checks, and two free copies of Logos Bible Software 4 Scholar's Library collections which should be arriving to the students any day now.

Our SeminaryScholarship.com winner was selected and confirmed right away, but because our varied attempts to reach the originally selected BibleCollegeScholarship.com winner were of no avail, everyone who applied had a second chance to win as we selected an alternate winner. So, without further ado, here are our winners:

SeminaryScholarship.com Winner: Mrs. Barbara W. of Raleigh, NC.

Barbara is currently an online student at Baptist Bible Graduate School and Seminary in Pennsylvania. She has been teaching Social Studies and MS Band and Choir at Friendship Christian School since 2002. After receiving a MA in Biblical Ministries she plans to continue teaching at FCS and begin work in women’s ministries through teaching and writing Bible studies.

BibleCollegeScholarship.com Winner: Joseph K. of Kenosha, WI.

Joseph attends LeTorurneau University in Longview, TX. Along with Bible courses, he is currently studying computer science with a focus in network security. Come to find out, while connecting with him and his family back home, Joseph is the grandson to well-known Christian apologist and philosopher Dr. Norman Geisler, who is author or co-author to some 70 books and hundreds of articles, many of which are available for Logos Bible Software.

Apply or Reapply for the new round!

Thank you to all who have applied for the scholarships. Whether you applied before or not, be sure to visit the sites as a new giveaway round has begun. Remember that you can enter once per round, but you can increase your chances of winning by telling friends and family to apply as well. Just make sure they enter your name in the "Other" box, when they're asked how they heard about the scholarship.

Seminary students, apply here:

Bible College students, apply here:

You should follow us on Twitter here.

Polish Archaeology in the Mediterranean. Reports
ISSN: 1234-5415

Polish Archaeology in the Mediterranean. Reports, appears annually, in English, presenting the full extent of archaeological, geophysical, restoration and study work carried out by expeditions from the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, University of Warsaw. The PCMA is present in the Near East and northeastern Africa (Egypt, Sudan, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Kuwait, formerly also in Iraq). Projects cover all periods from prehistory and protohistory through the Islamic age, emphasizing in particular broadly understood Greco-Roman culture and Early Christianity in the southern and eastern parts of the Mediterranean.

Reports 2006 (PAM XVIII)

Reports 2005 (PAM XVII)

Reports 2004 (PAM XVI)

Reports 2003 (PAM XV)

Reports 2002 (PAM XIV)

Reports 2001 (PAM XIII)

Reports 2000 (PAM XII)

Reports 1999 (PAM XI)

Reports 1998 (PAM X)

Reports 1997 (PAM IX)

Reports 1996 (PAM VIII)

Reports 1995 (PAM VII)

Reports 1994 (PAM VI)

Reports 1993 (PAM V)

Reports 1992 (PAM IV)

Reports 1991 (PAM III)

Reports 1990 (PAM II)

Reports 1988-1989 (PAM I)

List  of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies

Posted on behalf of Marcus Dohnicht.

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,
liebe Kolleginnen und Kollegen,

der 14. Internationale Kongress für Griechische und Lateinische Epigraphik wird auf Einladung der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in Verbindung mit dem Deutschen Archäologischen Institut vom 27. bis zum 31. August 2012 in Berlin stattfinden. Die Internetseite des Kongresses ist unter

http://www.congressus2012.de

zu erreichen. Über den jeweils neuesten Stand der Kongressvorbereitung wird mit einem Newsletter informiert werden. Bitte melden Sie uns unter

http://www.congressus2012.de/de/newsletter.html

dass Sie den Newsletter erhalten wollen; auf diese Weise erhalten wir auch ihre neueste E-Mail Adresse. Die Anmeldung für den Newsletter ist noch keine Anmeldung zum Kongress.

Wir wären Ihnen sehr dankbar, wenn Sie diese E-Mail an alle Interessenten und Institutionen weiterleiten würden, besonders an jüngere Kollegen und solche, die über keinen eigenen E-Mail-Anschluß verfügen. Falls diese uns entsprechend schreiben, werden wir ihnen die Informationen auf normalem postalischem Weg zusenden.

Wir bitten um Entschuldigung, falls Sie diese E-Mail mehrfach erhalten sollten.

In der Hoffnung, dass sehr viele von Ihnen unserer Einladung nachkommen, mit freundlichen Grüßen
Werner Eck

2010 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Directors Meeting
September 28, 2010

At
The National Endowment for the Humanities
Old Post Office Pavilion
1100 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, DC 20506
    Room M-09 (Ground Floor)

Please join us here at NEH headquarters on September 28 for the fourth annual Digital Humanities Start-up Grant Project Directors Meeting.  The meeting is open to the general public and we hope that digital humanities enthusiasts from the Washington, DC area will join us.  Some of the most exciting and cutting-edge projects in the humanities over the past few years had their start in this program.  This is your chance to learn, first-hand, about all the amazing 46 Start-up projects funded during 2010. 
 
During the meeting, each of the project directors will be doing lightning-round presentations about their projects.  So it is your chance to survey the future of the digital humanities in 46 quick bursts.  The projects range across nearly every conceivable discipline in the humanities and also involve a wide range of technologies.  Many also involve cultural institutions like museums, libraries, and archives.
 
We're also happy to say that as a lunchtime keynote speaker, we'll have Bryan Alexander, Director of Research from NITLE, giving a talk called “Thrilling Wonder Stories of Cyberculture.”
 
Admission is free.  You do not need to register in advance.
 
Agenda in Brief:
 
10:30am  Meeting Opens to the Public and the Media
      
10:45am  Welcome from Brett Bobley, Director, Office of Digital Humanities
  
10:50 – 12:00pm Project Lightning Round #1
Each Project Director will have two minutes and three PowerPoint slides to quickly introduce their project.  The first 23 projects will present.
  
12:00 – 12:30pm   Lunch Break and Opportunity to Network with Project Directors
Attendees can go downstairs to the food court to purchase lunch and bring it back to room M-09.
 
12:30 – 1:30pm Lunchtime Keynote Address from Bryan Alexander
 
1:30 – 2:30pm   Project Lightning Round #2
Each Project Director will have two minutes and three PowerPoint slides to quickly introduce their project.  The final 23 projects will present.
 
2:45—3:45pm  Getting the Word Out:  Outreach Strategies for Your Start-Up Project
A roundtable discussion
 
Other Important Links:
 
Detailed version of the agenda [PDF]
List of the 23 projects that will be presenting during round #1 [PDF]
List of the 23 projects that will be presenting during round #2 [PDF]
Directions to the NEH

Twitter Hashtag:  #SUG2010

I had the opportunity to attend the last session of the Digital Classicist 2010 seminars. Linda Spinazzè, a young scholar from the University of Venice, presented a very interesting project, entitled Musisque Deoque. The project deals with Latin literature and proposes to provide digital editions of a set of ancient texts.
The choice of texts goes from the 3th century BCE up to the 7th century CE. For each of them a Latin text is provided where the editorial variants are highlighted and explained in a separated apparatus criticus. For each of the elements given, precise indications are made to offer the readers an easier understanding of the often difficult and varying abbreviations in an apparatus.
Further a research option for metrical criteria is provided, where the texts are listed under different meters and can be approached from this point of view.
In the paper however Linda Spinazzè announced another aspect of the project, manuscripts tracing on the net. She is currently developing a tool which would help to find the digital images of the variants listed in the apparatus of the text. The apparatus created by these means would therefore become extremely valuable as it would help to fill the previously inevitable gap between the manuscripts, disseminated in the libraries all over the world, accessible to few and showing each only one stage of the transmission, and the printed editions, a reproducible and easily available summary of all the manuscripts where one version is given as main text and the other variants are summed up in the appartus.
This project is therefore based on another approach than for instance the Homer Multitext Project. Whereas the project on the Homeric text starts from the manuscripts and finds new ways of presenting the complex state of preservation of the text, the Musisque deoque approach is starting from the currently available editions and tries to go back to the manuscripts, if they are available. The approach is less revolutionary than the one of the Homer Multitext Project, but it has the advantage to be applicable to a corpus of diversified texts, with different histories of transmission.

I checked in, and at 2:30 went down to the book displays.  These were fairly limited, but since I was resolved not to buy any more academic books if I could help it, this was all to the good.  About 60 participants are listed.

The first session at 3:30 was a lecture by Caroline Humfress on Patristics and Roman law.  This began with the observation that lawfare (a favourite subject of Ezra Levant) — the use of the courts by special interest groups to extend their imperium — is on the increase in our day, and that where religion and law meet is therefore a subject of current interest.  The lecture proceeded to identify various ways in which the law has moved from being increasingly secular and secularising, through to the 1980’s when a reverse trend began to be noticed, to this decade when books on religion and law are being published all the time and the “deprivatisation” of religion is now on the table.  The lecture was delivered with great clarity, over an hour and a quarter, and was of great interest.  Unfortunately it did not stick in my memory!

This was followed by two sessions with three alternatives.  I chose Thomas Fedrick Illsley’s The defence of Eusebius of Caesarea in 17th century Anglicanism.  The Catholic writers Baronius and Petavius had listed the ways in which the fathers disagreed, in order to promote the idea that the church must be able to decide which is right, and exalted Athanasius.  Eusebius came in for criticism as a semi-Arian.  In response to this Bishop Bull in his Defence of the Nicene Creed and William Cave in a letter to someone (I couldn’t catch this) looked more at what the Nicene definition meant at the time.  They listed ways in which Eusebius definitely rejected the Arian propositions of Arius himself, the only ones around at the time.  Eusebius does frequently indicate that the Son is subordinate to the Father; but always in status, not in nature.  They pointed out that he signed the creed, they made use of the shorter form of his letter to the churches of Caesarea (the additional material in Theodoret they rejected as an addition), and they indicated that, while he may not have agreed with Athanasius, his views were indeed those of the Nicene council, reached after careful thought, agreed to in the case of peace, and should be judged accordingly and not by later invective in Jerome against Rufinus.  At the end of the session Timothy Barnes arose and suggested that the real case against Eusebius has to be found in the Eclogae propheticae, only discovered ca. 1840, where Christ is called “deuteros theos” repeatedly.  This Bull and Cave could not have read.  He then made the point that the same expression was found in the Praeparatio evangelica and enquired how they dealt with this.  The answer was as second in status, not in nature; Eusebius believed that the Father and Son were of the same substance.  The speaker also made the point that the unnatural concentration on the word “homoousios” was really Arian propaganda, to make the Nicene definition seem strange by concentrating on one unusual word, and that the whole creed should be considered.

The final paper (at 5:25) was by Sebastian Moll, Marcion after Harnack.  Dr Moll began by saying that he would far rather address an English audience than a German one, as the latter would tend to say “how dare you disagree with Harnack”!  He listed four things about Marcion which Harnack stated in 1921; and suggested that all were flawed.  Most interesting to me was when he quoted Harnack demanding that the Old Testament be dumped, and then suggested that actually nothing in Marcion himself corresponds to this (Apelles held this view, but not Marcion).  Rather, he suggested Marcion thought the Old Testament really did reveal the evil God, and, being a dualist, retained that for just that reason, like one of two eyes.  His revised ‘Gospel’ was likewise intended to portray the good God.  All this led me to think that I should revisit the Marcion testimonia, to see what they really say! 

During the coffee breaks I found myself talking to Richard Price, who has translated large wodges of the acts of the ecumenical councils for Liverpool University Press.  It was very interesting to hear about his work, and how many people are not even aware that there are acts available for these councils.

At dinner there was discussion of whether there will be a volume.  I hope both these papers will appear! I sat next to Andrew Maguire of earlychurchtexts.org, and was interested to hear that the letter of Theodoret on the death of Cyril of Alexandria was online at his site (here).  The letter may be spurious, but who knows?

Tomorrow has a very long list of papers I would like to hear, plus a tour of the cathedral led by one of the canons.  But there is relatively little on Friday, so if the weather is good I might duck that!

As classes start back up, I am reminded of some of the particular content organization challenges that college web sites face; and I’m reminded of this comic: There seems to be some consensus regarding the disconnect between the messages being sent and the information requested. I wonder if there is some kind of data - perhaps we could call them “analytics” - that could tell us which pages are accessed, and with what frequency, and for how long? It might do wonders for helping us generate web content that serves identifiable and actual needs.  

As classes start back up, I am reminded of some of the particular content organization challenges that college web sites face; and I’m reminded of this comic: There seems to be some consensus regarding the disconnect between the messages being sent and the information requested. I wonder if there is some kind of data - perhaps we could call them “analytics” - that could tell us which pages are accessed, and with what frequency, and for how long? It might do wonders for helping us generate web content that serves identifiable and actual needs. And I’m not talking about the W&J web designer here either - who actually does have analytical data. It still comes down to the folks who make decisions about content and whether those decisions are based on data or other inexplicable intuitions. Intuition can actually be valuable in terms of design - but content creation should be based upon data.  

Almost a year ago this month, the Great Move occurred as the administration rooted the Department of History from its long-standing and exceedingly-comfortable space in Merrifield hall and moved us across the quad to O'Kelly.  We are now settled into what I think most of us regard as equivalent, if not superior space, at least in the case of my office.

As I was reflecting on the events surrounding our move, I stumbled on a very recent article by John Schofield (whose work I am really coming to appreciate and notice) in the journal Archaeologies called "Office Cultures and Corporate Memory: Some Archaeological Perspectives".  He describes the archaeology of office culture and corporate memory through a study a move made by English Heritage in 2006.  The English Heritage office moved from a prestigious Savile Row address in London to a new "more modern" office space further from the city center.

The paper itself is a vivid - but not exceedingly detailed - account of the things left behind in the office of the English Heritage as well was the spaces, behaviors, and memories embedded for him the spaces so recently occupied by co-workers.  At the end of his article, he comments on the feelings associated with abandoned and empty places:

As an archaeologist I am fascinated by empty buildings and by the material culture of abandonment. One of my earliest lessons in archaeology concerned Skara Brae, a story of hurried desertion with precious objects left where they fell.  More recently I have studied and inspected military buildings forsaken at the end of the Cold War... In Malta I have studies former bars that closed abruptly with the Navy's withdrawal in the mid to late 1960s, bars that have remained firmly locked ever since. I like these empty places and do sometimes feel something as I wander about.

As I look back on some of my blog posts from the days of the move, I think the final line of the quote captures the experience of wandering through the abandoned offices in Merrifield.  I felt something even though I did not have a particularly long history history associated with Merrifield Hall, nor did I enjoy a particular luxurious or historically rich accommodation there.

I drove up to Durham yesterday — 277 miles — in glorious sunshine and got myself checked into the Durham East premier inn.  The conference arrangements have been somewhat haphazard, so I called St. Johns College and enquired about early arrival today.  They told me that I could have saved myself the hotel bill!  Memo: check such things with the people providing accomodation.

This morning is an equally beautiful day.  Central Durham is very lovely in the sunshine.  I got my room, got my car parked, and then spent the morning wandering around enjoying the weather.  The light and the sun reminded me of Rome.  I went into a BHS and had a roll and a glass of coke, in a restaurant with a view over the river.  The world was full of light, and a delight to wander around in.

Formal check-in for the conference is 13:30, at which point I hope to find out who is attending etc.  I’ve just found the computer room — I have been unable to get my laptop to communicate with the wifi network, for lack of the necessary instructions — and hope to blog throughout the conference.

Mind you, with the weather as it is, who wants to be indoors?  If all the papers tomorrow look boring, I might drive up to Hadrian’s Wall!  It’s within striking range from here.

There’s at least one paper today that I definitely want to hear.  There’s also a number of “plenary addresses” — anything lasting 75 minutes is suspect to my mind — but the first one, on the connection between the Fathers and Roman Law, might well be interesting.

Since I don’t formally arrive until 13:30, I need to shoot off and get some lunch first.  Fortunately there is a Tesco Metro nearby, and an M&S.

More updates later.

Available at Scribd & Lulu

I’ve been busy in August, and one of the things I’ve been working on has been out for a couple of weeks and I forgot to blog it. I’ve published a book.

I haven’t written a book, or edited it or anything requiring any academic input. I just worked on the publishing. The book is the first volume of the Proceedings from the GIREP-EPEC and PHEC 2009 conference. In English, it was a Physics Education conference. I had nothing to do with the conference, but my Head of Department mentioned to a colleague at McMaster University that he was going to publish a proceedings volume and she remembered I’d worked on the cover for the first Open Laboratory book, and so must be an expert in publishing.

I’m not, but as Shawn Graham has shown, the actual process of publishing a book via Lulu is easy and pain-free if you’re willing to make some compromises. The drawbacks are things like a lack of professional typesetting, but these days publishers often insist on camera-ready copy anyway. There’s also no marketing. For some conference volumes this will be a line in a catalogue and an email and, possibly a display at the next conference meeting of the previous proceedings. You do lose some help by bypassing a publisher, but you can potentially gain a lot more too.

Firstly we set the price. We went quite high. The print version of the book is £20. That’s about 6p a page so it’s a similar cost to photocopying the book. It’s not extravagantly high, but it’s higher than it strictly needs to be as we’ll also be making it available via Amazon. We decided to do that because people are familiar with buying a book from Amazon, they’re not so familiar with Lulu, even though it’s the same product. To release a book on Amazon we have to double the retail price, to allow their margin. Despite this a 365 page academic book could often be more than £50 so it’s a saving.

But we can do better.

The book is released with a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND licence and we’ve put the PDF up on Scribd. You can read and download it for free as a PDF. Print out the chapters you’re interested in and leave the rest.

After two weeks we have 900 views and a few sales. It’s likely that it’s not 900 unique views, but it’s still not a bad result for two weeks. In the Humanities print runs of 250 volumes are common. I don’t know about the Sciences, where the publication culture is different anyway, but we have something that I think will compete well in terms of readership in comparison to a similar volume released via a traditional publisher. It won’t be anything like as profitable as a book produced by a traditional publisher, but none of the academics would see that profit anyway so for us that’s not an issue.

It’s also a lot faster to get to publication. Cheryl Hurkett did all the LaTeX work on the file and when she was ready she called me in. I registered her with Lulu and we set up a new project. We tried uploading a PDF output Lulu, but that didn’t work. So we sent the output to a .ps file instead. That converted painlessly. The cover took a bit more mucking about as we went with a variation on the standard templates, but the whole thing went from LaTeX to book on one Thursday. The only gripe we had was that you have to choose to get the free ISBN number right at the start of the project, and once you have that number your title is set. The book on the Lulu page is listed with the working title, which is passable for a first attempt but not good enough for volume 2.

There will be a volume 2, as we could show how simple the publication process was.

It’s not a panacea for all academic publishing. There are plenty of publishers who do add value to a book. However, for conference proceedings the only reasons for choosing to publish via a specialist publisher rather than Lulu are social. The academic output is the same, it’s just that one is slower and more expensive and that’s the system we’re used to. The output can be traced directly back to Bora Zivkovic’s innovation with The Open Laboratory so his blogging is contributing to an observable difference in the scientific process.

Not many people can say they work for one of the best workplaces in their state, but the 200 or so Logos Bible Software employees can say that very thing.

After an extensive and rigorous process, which included the completion of surveys by nominee-company employees across the state, Logos has been recognized as a finalist for Puget Sound Business Journal's Washington's Best Workplaces. To celebrate this accomplishment, companies that were identified as Washington's best, based on various employee benefit offerings, leadership culture, and work/life balance philosophies were invited to a special awards event at Safeco Field, home of Major League Baseball's Seattle Mariners.

When asked about this recognition, here is what Bob Pritchett, President/CEO of Logos, had to say:

"I consider it a blessing to get to work with so many wonderful people at Logos Bible Software, and am glad to see our team recognized. Hopefully this will lead even more great people to join us!"

Bob generously offered to cover the costs for all employees and their spouses who wanted to attend. Once a final head-count was set, he announced that two limousines were set to take us down to Seattle for the event. [Thanks Bob!]

Once we entered the ballpark, we were greeted by Puget Sound Business Journal's staff and ushered toward tables and tables of food, drinks, and concession snacks. After all, we were at a baseball park! You can be sure we had our share of peanuts and crackerjacks, hotdogs, soda, popcorn, and so much more.

Awards were presented to finalists in the small, medium, large, extra large, and non-profit categories, with special recognition— including a custom Mariners jersey—going to the #1 company in each of the five categories. Although Logos was not selected as the top workplace in our category (large), it was a huge honor to be recognized amongst so many great companies who are doing great things for their employees.

Making the evening even better was the opportunity before and after the awards presentation for attendees to go onto the field to throw baseballs while being clocked for speed and to "walk the bases." But when presented with the opportunity to go onto a Major League baseball diamond, would you just walk, or would you run? Run!

Here is a short video of Adam Navarrete, from our marketing department doing just that.

Now doesn't that look fun? Why not check out our jobs page for current opportunities? Maybe next year that could be you!

You should follow us on Twitter here.

Here is a quote from John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy (1848):

It is hardly possible to overrate the value, in the present low state of human development, of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar. Such communication has always been one of the primary sources of progress.

Now, let's re-do the quote, substituting "archaeology" for "humans":

It is hardly possible to overrate the value, in the present low state of archaeological development, of placing archaeologists in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar. Such communication has always been one of the primary sources of progress.

I am often bored with the standard archaeology journals. Same old stuff, by the same old writers. I often find myself excited by new issues of journals in other fields, such as Urban Design International or Journal of World History, or perhaps Comparative Studies in Society and History, or Society and Natural Resources. I'm not trying to make the old point that theory and concepts in archaeology are borrowed from other fields. Some ideas are borrowed, but in my view, most of our theory and concepts are home grown.

Rather, my point is that interaction with diverse scholars in diverse fields generates scholarly and scientific progress. Insights from other fields help archaeologists develop creative and useful approaches to our subject matter, and insights from archaeology can help other scholars improve their own disciplines (although this latter point may require some extra persuasion, since it may be hard to convince, say, economists, that archaeologists have something interesting to say about economics).

Here are just a few recent interesting articles from the journals mentioned above. There are all sorts of interesting and relevant papers out there, one just has to take the time to find them (and read them.......).

Fargher, Lane F. and Richard E. Blanton  (2007)  Revenue, Voice, and Public Goods in three Pre-Modern States. Comparative Studies in Society and History 49:848-882.

Frank, Andre G. and William R. Thompson  (2005)  Afro-Eurasian Bronze Age Economic Expansion and Contraction Revisited. Journal of World History 16:115-172.

Hakim, Besim S.  (2007)  Generative Processes for Revitalizing Historic Towns or Heritage Districts. Urban Design International 12:87-99.

Janssen, Marco A., John M. Anderies and Elinor Ostrom  (2007)  Robustness of Social-Ecological Systems of Spatial and Temporal Variability. Society and Natural Resources 20:307-322.


PS - I got the quote from Mill, and some ideas about urbanism, from "Urban History for Planners": by Carl Abbott, Jr. Planning History 5(4), 2006, pp. 301-313.

While visiting my Aunt Kalliope in Athens, I noticed this autographed portrait of Angelos Tanagras (her dearly loved uncle) hanging in the living room. The lighting was low and I wasn't able to take a good photo. Next time, I hope to take it out of the frame and scan it. It's definitely the greatest photo of Tanagras I've ever seen. As the medals testify, he was an admiral and decorated for his

Jack Sasson draws my attention to the website of Factum Arte, an organization working with museums and other institutions on the production of 3D facsimiles of artifacts, structures, etc. that can be used for conservation and documentation purposes. They also prepare facsimiles for exhibitions. Especially interesting are their archaeological projects:

A facsimile of Princess Wallada’s Box Madrid 2010 Commission by The Conjunto Arqueológico Madinat al-Zahra	Work in the tomb of Tutankhamun Madrid 2009 Recorded in Luxor, Valley of the Kings pdf report available	Facsimile of a section of Burial chamber from the tomb of Seti I Madrid 2003 Recorded in Luxor, Valley of the Kings pdf report available 2nd pdf report available	Facsimile of Thutmose III´s tomb Madrid 2004 National Gallery of Art in Washington and other venues in USA & Europe
Facsimile of the Asurnasirpal II´s Throne Room. Madrid 2006 The British Museum, Pergamon Museum, Princeton Art Museum, Harvard Scakler Art Museum and Dresden Museum	Facsimile of the Dama de Elche Madrid 2004 Commission by Museo Arqueologico Nacional and MARQ pdf report available

One of the Neo-Assyrian winged lions from Nimrud at the British Museum assembled prior to moulding. The winged human headed lion is over 3 meters tall. It has been assembled with the carved carpet piece, also from the British museum.

Proceedings of the 25th International Congress of Papyrology

The 25th International Congress of Papyrology took place at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor from July 29 to August 4, 2007. This was the second time that the Congress convened in Ann Arbor (following the 12th Congress in 1968) and the third in North America (the 16th Congress in 1980 met in New York).


Of the approximately 150 papers delivered during the Congress, 80 fully-referreed articles are included in this publication.


This is the first time the Proceedings of the International Congress of Papyrology has been published primarily as an online edition. Individual articles are freely available to search, browse, and download. Additionally, the complete proceedings are available to purchase as a hardcover print on demand volume.


Editor: Traianos Gagos


Assistant Editor: Adam Hyatt
Additional Editors: Arthur Verhoogt, Terry Wilfong

• Purchase a Print Copy
• Download Entire Volume (.pdf 42 MB)

Table of Contents

Front Matter

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Dedication

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Table of Contents

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PrefaceTraianos Gagos, Adam Hyatt, Arthur Verhoogt, Terry Willfong

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Organization of the Congress

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List of Participants

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Congress Program

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List of Abbreviations

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Bureaucracy and Power in Diocletian's Egypt: The World of P.Panop.Beatty 1Colin E.P. Adams

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A Nun's Dispute with Her Mother in P.Lond. V 1731María Jesús Albarrán Martínez

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New Light on the katagraphé and its Pharaonic BackgroundSchafik Allam

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“Neither a Truant nor a Fugitive”: Some Remarks on the Sale of Slaves in Roman Egypt and Other ProvincesPeter Arzt-Grabner

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Vecchi e nuovi personaggi della famiglia degli Apioni nei documenti papiraceiGiuseppina Azzarello

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An Approach to the Papyrological Understanding of Paul's Labouring “Night and Day” (1Thess 2:9)Andreas Bammer

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The Syllabic Word-Lists in P.Bour. 1 ReconsideredNele Baplu, Marc Huys, Thomas Schmidt

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The Onomastic Evidence for the God HermanubisAmin Benaissa

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The Derveni Papyrus: Problems of Edition, Problems of InterpretationAlberto Bernabé

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Toponymie et cartographie du nome mendésien à l'époque romaineKatherine Blouin

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Per una ricostruzione del De vitiis di Filodemo Mario Capasso

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Soknopaiou Nesos 2004–2006Mario Capasso

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Aristoboulos and the Hieros Logos of the Egyptian JewsLivia Capponi

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Per una nuova edizione dell'Index Stoicorum di Filodemo (P.Herc. 1018)Maria Clara Cavalieri

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T.C. Skeat and the Problem of Fiber Orientation in Codicological ReconstructionS.D. Charlesworth

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The Customs Districts of Roman EgyptMichel Cottier

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Soknopaiou Nesos Project: the resume of the archaeological investigation: The settlement and its territoryPaola Davoli, Ivan Chiesi, Simone Occhi , Nicola Raimondi

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P.Herc. 1399: il primo libro del Περὶ ὁμιλίας di FilodemoGianluca Del Mastro

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Nouveaux textes coptes d'AntinoéAlain Delattre

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Du nouveau sur le P.Herc. Paris 2: la reconstruction des six dernières colonnes du rouleauDaniel Delattre

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La paraphylaké des villages dans les baux fonciers byzantins du nome HermopoliteMarie Drew-Bear

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Standard Koine Greek in Third Century BC PapyriT.V. Evans

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Greek Anthologies on Papyrus and their Readers in Early Ptolemaic EgyptMaria Rosaria Falivene

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Tholthis, sede dell'ufficio di LeodamasLorenzo Fati

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Topics and Models of School Exercises on Papyri and Ostraca from the Hellenistic Period: P.Berol. inv. 12318José-Antonio Fernández-Delgado, Francisca Pordomingo

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Ein Weg für ein besseres Verständnis von P.Mich. Inv. 6898Hans Förster

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Les tribulations d'un pétitionnaire égyptien à Constantinople. Révision de P.Cair.Masp. III 67352Jean-Luc Fournet

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Identity and Security in the Mediterranean World ca. AD 640 – ca. 1517Gladys Frantz-Murphy

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Una citazione del IV libro Sulla natura di Epicuro nel P.Herc. 807 (Filodemo, Περὶ θανάτου?)Laura Giuliano

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Information Packaging in Arabic Private and Business Letters (8th to 13th c. CE): Templates, Slots and a Cascade of Reduction and RearrangementEva Mira Grob

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Christian Jensen's and Wolfgang Schmid's Unpublished Herculanean Papers: A Preliminary Report on the Content and the Relevance of the MaterialJürgen Hammerstaedt

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An Arabic Will Written On a ShipAlia Hanafi

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Revisions for P.Mich. X 578 (Census List)Ann Ellis Hanson

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The Practice of Taxation in Three Late Ptolemaic PapyriFrancisca A.J. Hoogendijk

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Le colonne I – X 10 di P.Herc. 1008 (Filodemo, I vizi, libro X)Giovanni Indelli

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Kauf oder Darlehen? Lieferungskäufe über Wein aus dem römischen ÄgyptenEva Jakab

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Zur Flucht von LiturgenAndrea Jördens

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Identifying Hands: Same Book or Same Scribe? A Case Study of Some Plato PapyriMaria Konstantinidou

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The Meandering Identity of a Fayum Canal: The Henet of Moeris / Dioryx Kleonos / Bahr Wardan / Abdul WahbiBryan Kraemer

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Eingabe an einen Beamten (P. graec. mon. 146)Thomas Kruse

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Dorotheos Petitions for the Return of Philippa (P.Polit.Jud. 7): A Case Study in the Jews and their Law in Ptolemaic EgyptRob Kugler

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Antimisthosis in the Dioscorus ArchiveFlorence Lemaire

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ll P.Herc. 1010 (Epicuro, Sulla natura, libro II): anatomia del rotoloGiuliana Leone

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Seeing the Whole Picture: Why Reading Greek Texts from Soknopaiou Nesos is not EnoughSandra L. Lippert

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P.Mich. inv. 3443Nikos Litinas

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Su alcuni desiderata della Papirologia ErcolaneseFrancesca Longo Auricchio

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A Date for P.KRU 105?L.S.B. MacCoull

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P.Herc. 817 from Facsimiles to MSI: A Case for Practical VerificationRoger T. Macfarlane

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A Bilingual Account from the Aswan Quarries (O.Brookl.Dem. 180 / P.Brookl. 81)Rachel Mairs

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The Auditoria on Kom el-Dikka. A Glimpse of Late Antique Education in AlexandriaGrzegorz Majcherek

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Texts in Context: A Methodological Case Study in the Topography of TaleiMyrto Malouta

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Le Signalement des Auteurs et Oeuvres Dans les Papyrus Littéraires Grecs de MédecineMarie-Hélène Marganne

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75 ans de Bibliographie Papyrologique (1932–2007)Alain Martin

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Very Small ScriptsKathleen McNamee

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Seasons of Death for Donors and TestatorsMichael Meerson

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Crittografia greca in Egitto: un nuovo testoGiovanna Menci

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Count Ammonios and Paying Taxes in the Name of Somebody ElseMiroslava Mirković

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Writing and Writers in Antiquity: Two “Spectra” in Greek HandwritingAlan Mugridge

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A Late Ptolemaic Grapheion Archive in BerkeleyBrian Muhs

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The Palau Ribes Papyrological Collection Rediscovered (P.PalauRib.Lit. 9 Re-Edited)Alberto Nodar

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Per una nuova edizione dei papiri di TucidideNatascia Pellé

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A Patron and a Companion: Two Animal Epitaphs for Zenon of Caunos (P.Cair.Zen. IV 59532 = SH 977)Timothy W. Pepper

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Buried Linguistic Treasure in the Babatha ArchiveStanley E. Porter

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Crime and Punishment in Early Islamic Egypt: The Arabic Papyrological EvidenceLucian Reinfandt

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Picknick bei Asklepios? Ein griechisches Ostrakon aus Pergamon in der Berliner PapyrussammlungFabian Reiter

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Incubation at SaqqâraGil H. Renberg

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The Nile Waters, the Sun, and Capricorn: A Greek Prose Fragment in Ann ArborTimothy Renner

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Nuove letture nel cosiddetto secondo libro della Poetica di FilodemoGioia Maria Rispoli , Gianluca Del Mastro

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Conventions Governing the Formatting of Documentary Titles and Passages in Demosthenes' SpeechesMaroula Salemenou

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Fragment of a Report of Proceedings (?)Panagiota Sarischouli

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Book-Ends and Book-Layout in Papyri with Hexametric PoetryFrancesca Schironi

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Brief an einen BischofGeorg Schmelz

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The Evolving Shape of the Papyrus Collection in GenevaPaul Schubert

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Considerazioni Sull'anatomia del P.Herc. 163 (Filodemo, La Ricchezza)Elvira Scognamiglio

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A Tale of Two Tongues? The Myth of the Sun's Eye and Its Greek TranslationMonica Signoretti

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Application of Astronomical Imaging Techniques to P.Herc. 118Russell A. Stepp , Gene Ware

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Osservazioni bibliologiche sull'Athenaion Politeia di BerlinoMarco Stroppa

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Fictitious Loans and Novatio: IG VII 3172, UPZ II 190, and CPJ 24 ReconsideredGerhard Thür

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A Ptolemaic Lease Contract: P.Monts. Roca inv. no. 381 + 569 + 578 + 649S. Torallas Tovar , K.A. Worp

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Re-Mapping Karanis: Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Site AnalysisDrew Wilburn

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Subject Index

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 [First posted 1/16/09. Updated 8/31/10]

The Claremont Colleges Digital Library is serving some interesting open access material relating to antiquity:

Antiquities of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity

The artifacts in this collection represent part of the antiquities of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity. The items are mostly eastern Mediterranean in provenance, originating from ancient Greece, Cyprus, Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and neighboring regions. A fair proportion of the collection dates to the Bronze Age, but every period thereafter is represented up to the fourth century of the current era. Although the majority is earthenware, other artifacts include objects of glass, ceramic, stone, metal and Cypriote.

Bulletin of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity

The Institute for Antiquity and Christianity is a center for basic research on the origins and meaning of the cultural heritage of Western civilization. The Bulletin of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity is published periodically under the auspices of the Society for Antiquity and Christianity for the general information of persons interested in the research programs of the Institute.

Campi Phlegraei, Observations on the Volcanoes of the Two Sicilies

The two volumes of the Campi Phlegraei (1776) and the Supplement to the Campi Phlegraei (1779) provide a firsthand report from Sir William Hamilton which documents the late eighteenth century eruptions of Mount Vesuvius and are important to the science of volcanology due to the precise descriptions of the changes in the appearance of the volcano, the lava flows and other volcanic activity. Displayed here in their entirety, these books contain text in both English and French and 59 hand-colored plates with accompanying explanations.

Nag Hammadi Archive

The Nag Hammadi codices, thirteen ancient manuscripts containing over fifty religious and philosophical texts written in Coptic and hidden in an earthenware jar for 1,600 years, were accidentally discovered in upper Egypt in the year 1945. This immensely important discovery included a large number of primary Gnostic scriptures. These texts were once thought to have been entirely destroyed during the early Christian struggle to define "orthodoxy," scriptures such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Truth. The images in this collection were taken during the excavations and translation project of the 1970’s and record the environments surrounding excavations, visiting dignitaries, and the scholars working on the codices. The project has provided momentum to a major reassessment of early Christian history and the nature of Gnosticism.

Sacred Text Conference Archives

The First Annual Conference of Religions is a conversation and exploration of passages addressing relationships with insiders and outsiders, and points of inclusivity and exclusivity, within the Sacred Texts of six groups: Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, LDS/Mormonism, and Hinduism.

The Neugebauer Index of Cited Literature Online

Welcome to complete bibliographical Neugebauer Index. The database is organized in rolls. To get to a specific item choose the appropriate roll below. You then will find the exact file by leaving through the scanned files.
	Roll 1			Roll 5			Roll 9
	Roll 2			Roll 6			Roll 10
	Roll 3			Roll 7			Roll 11
	Roll 4			Roll 8

A press release (16.08.2010 ) from the Deutsches Archäologisches Institute reports:

Der komplette Bestand der Bibliothek Kairo ist ab sofort im ZENON recherchierbar!


Den Sammelschwerpunkt bildet die Ägyptologie mit ihren regionalen wie fachlichen Nachbarwissenschaften, ergänzt durch einen umfangreichen islamwissenschaftlichen Bestand sowie eine exquisite Kollektion an alter Reiseliteratur. Neben ca. 3.000 Sonderdrucken gehören hierzu auch Karten und Non-Book-Medien wie Mikrofiches, CD-ROMs etc. Den Grundstock bildet die Sammlung des Ägyptologen Ludwig Keimer (1892-1957), dessen Nachlass ebenfalls im Archiv des Instituts verwahrt wird.

Kairo ist neben Athen die zweite DAI-Bibliothek, deren Gesamtbestand über ZENON abrufbar ist.   

And see also: Open Access Bibiography: Zenon at the DAI

Zenon

Trypillian Civilization Journal
ISSN 2155-871X

T.C.J. - Volume 2010

• Introductory
• Archaeology
• Anthropology
• Linguistics
• Mythology

Editorial

• Call for Papers
• Editorial Board
• Participation

Resources

• Bibliography
• Books in English
• Books in Ukrainian
• Links
• Pictures
• Videos
• Archives

Encyclopedia

• Volume - І
• Volume - ІІ

List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies

[Originally posted 8/13/10 . Updated 8/30/10]

New from the Oriental Institute Research Archives:

As part of our University Of Chicago (Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations) Dissertations On-Line, the following dissertation is now available for downloading as an Adobe Portable Document Format (pdf).

• Mud Sealings And Fourth Dynasty Administration At Giza: A Dissertation Presented to The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations by John S. Nolan. The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, The University of Chicago, June 2010.

On August 27, 2010, the dissertation was supplemented with:

Pottery Mound Sealings and Sealing-Related Objects

Catalog of Sealings (1,128 Sealings)

• Impressed Sealings Only (1,036 Sealings)
• Incised Sealings Only (92 Sealings)

Catalog of Sealing-Related Objects (71 Objects)

 And see the full list of Open Access Publications at the Oriental Institute Research Archives

New Knowledge Environments 

New Knowledge Environments is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal and open community archive for those engaged in exploring and understanding the nature of text-oriented communication in the past, present, and future.

The journal's inaugural issue is Research Foundations for Understanding Books and Reading in the Digital Age, drawn from among the papers presented at INKE's October 2009 gathering of the same name.

Over the course of the intensive pedestrian survey at Pyla-Koutsopetria we collected a sample of the faunal material present on the surface of the ground (that is to say the animal bones visible in each unit).  Over the past month, David Reese, one of the leading specialists in faunal remains in an archaeological context examined the material from both our survey and excavation.

While I won't present all Dr. Reese's finds here on the blog (that will have to wait for the full, final report), I will give a brief preview of his finds.  The majority of the material from the site was Ovis/Capra (sheep/goat).  My understanding is that the bones of the two animals are basically indistinguishable (in fact, if one could distinguish the two, I am sure Dr. Reese would have!).  The goat and sheep bones likely reflect the more recent past activity at the site which almost certainly involved grazing.  At present the site is under cultivation with cereals - mostly for feed - but this might be the result of the region's appropriation by the British after independence in the 1950s.  At present our site has relatively restricted access because of the activities at various live-fire ranges in the area.  It is also possible that some grazing continues in the early spring, fall, or winter months when we are not present on the site.  A few of the bones show signs of being butchered and cooked, but it is difficult to know whether this occurred on site - in a possible domestic context - or if these bones represent lunches taken in the fields, rubbish thrown from passing travelers, or even bits of household trash carried out into the fields at some earlier time as composted fertilizer.  The presence of a few worn chicken bones from the fields almost certainly represents meals taken in the field or domestic rubbish.

More evidence for grazing comes from the presence of numerous bones from dogs (canis familiaris).  While we regularly see packs of hunting dogs training across the coastal ridges in the evening hours, the link between dogs and herds of sheep or goats is too close to ignore.

Aside from the dog and sheep/goat bones, there are two objects that really stood out.  First, Dr. Reese identified an eroded part of a bos taurus (cow!) bone on the site.  Since cattle have somewhat different grazing patterns than goats and sheep, this bone suggests that at some point our site may have seen grazing cattle and possible pasture land.

Finally (and most exciting!), Dr. Reese identified a fragment of human skull from one of survey units near the western most extent of our site.  As readers of this blog know, we've been struggling to identify the location of a cemetery that served the inhabitants of our diachronic settlements at Vigla and Pyla-Koutsopetria. Cesnola spent some time in the general vicinity of a site that could be ours (relating his description of the place to our side has proven to be almost impossible; for the description of Cesnola see the link below), as he passed back and forth to his summer home at Ormidhia.  His description of a place called Palaeocastro (which is one of the names for our site) included graves which he appears to have excavated.  The fragment of skull identified from our survey was not particularly close to the area that Cesnola appears to be describing.  So, the mystery of the Pyla-Koutsopetria burials continues with any tiny fragment of evidence suggesting that graves or even tombs are present near our site, but lie undiscovered.

 

This is a follow up to an older post where I made reference to something going on in Exodus 18. My topic today is the practice of orienting participants to a situation. For instance, I could be introduced or "anchored" as "the Logos scholar-in-residence," "Mike's friend," or "the owner of the white GMC truck." All of these relations are accurate, but not all are relevant for a given context. It might be relevant at a crash scene that I own a white truck (but it wasn't my fault), but not at the beginning of a Logos Lecture series, right? We use the most relevant anchoring expression for the given context. Most of the time, it is so routine that we don't give it a second thought when we read or hear one. But there are places where this general rule is broken, and paying attention to anchoring expressions can have a huge impact on your Bible study.

While reading Exodus 18, I noticed that Jethro, Moses' father-in-law is called father-in-law a lot, like almost twice as many times as he is called Jethro in the context. This is the story where Jethro teaches Moses about delegation following the exodus from Egypt. Why is he called father-in-law so often? Why not priest of Midian, since most commentators seem to think this is the more relevant anchoring expression? After all, this is a story of one priest teaching another priest about administration, right? This is true, but there is a bit more going on under the hood.

In all but one instance where Jethro is introduced in Exodus, he is anchored as "priest of Midian" (here is a link to the search in Logos 4). After Moses marries Zipporah, Jethro's daughter, he is also anchored as Moses' father-in-law (here is another search on the Hebrew lemma for father-in-law in Exodus). This means we have competing options available. One of the primary principles in my approach to discourse is this: "Choice implies meaning." If I chose option A instead of option B, then there is some meaning to be gleaned from the choice. What is the meaning here? Let's take a look at the opening details of the story.

If a biblical writer includes a detail in a story—e.g. that Esau was hairy, or that Sarai was beautiful, or that David was ruddy and handsome while Goliath was tall, dark and ugly—then chances are you need to know the tidbit to get the point of the story. We have a few such details like this in Exodus 18, ones that are often overlooked.

The first important detail is the location. Moses has returned to the same place where the Lord had appeared to him in the burning bush, just as the Lord had announced in Exodus 3:12. This is the same place where Moses had been herding sheep for Jethro (his father-in-law, remember?), probably fairly near Jethro's encampment. Detail One: after the exodus, Moses has returned to the very place he started, his old stomping grounds where he had herded for Jethro.

The second important detail is found in Exodus 18:2, where we learn that Jethro (Moses' father-in-law, remember?) is coming to see Moses, and is bringing along Zipporah, Moses' wife and their two boys After he had sent her away. Say what? When did Moses send Zipporah away? No matter how good the Logos 4 search engine is, you will not find reference to Moses sending Zipporah away in the OT, it ain't there, this is the only mention of it. So why mention it here? Remember, if its there its important, right? We must need to know it to get the point of the story.

Let's recap a bit so we can pull all these details together. The Lord has used Moses to deliver Israel from the Egyptians, and they have all returned to where Moses was first called by the Lord. Next, Moses has sent Zipporah and his sons away at some point before the trip. Even though Moses and Israel have been camping on Jethro's back 40 acres, so to speak, Moses hasn't taken the time to send for his wife and kids. Why not? What could be preventing him from doing so? Let's keep reading.

After Jethro (Moses' father-in-law, remember?) arrives with Moses' wife and kids (whom he'd sent away, remember?), he takes the time to re-establish rapport with Moses. He listens to all that the Lord has done for Moses and Israel (see Exodus 18:8, even though v. 1 makes it clear that he had already heard these things through the grapevine. Have you ever (re)listened to old news from someone just because you knew it was important to them? This seems to be what Jethro was doing, as a good father-in-law. Then they enjoy fellowship together along with Aaron and the elders, sharing a sacrifice together.

Finally, Jethro (Moses' father-in-law, remember?) goes to work with Moses the next day, and oh what a sight it must have been. Verse 13 tells us that the people stood around from morning to evening waiting to have their disputes resolved. What does Jethro do (Moses' father-in-law, remember?) He watches patiently. Then at some point he asks the same kind of "What are you doing?" question that my dad used to ask me when he saw me doing something the hard way. "What is this that you are doing for the people? Why do you sit alone, and all the people stand around you from morning till evening?” (Exo. 18:14, ESV). It is one of those questions that is not so much for Jethro's benefit as for Moses'. It requires him to look at things from a different perspective. And like a good father-in-law, Jethro highlights key details: Moses is doing it alone, and the people are standing around from morning to evening.

So why is Jethro called Moses' father-in-law so many times? Why is this anchoring expression more relevant priest of Midian, even though most commentators stress the priest role? It is to counter the very thing that the commentators focus on. Even though Jethro could have used his authority as priest to tell Moses to do things differently, he doesn't. Instead, the writer anchors him as father-in-law.

Stated differently, Jethro brings his daughter and his two grandsons to his son-in-law. Why bring them? Apparently because even though Moses had been so near for months, he had not taken the time to send for them. Why? Perhaps it had something to do with his day job consuming too much of his time. So what's needed? To get Moses to change how he does things so that doesn't wear out himself or the people (18:17-18). How does Jethro bring about the change? By coming as a father-in-law (who may have wanted to box the ears of the guy who didn't have time for his daughter!) who took the time to reestablish rapport (vv. 6-12), who hung out with Moses enough that the latter knew he understood the problem (vv. 13-16). Then instead of shoving the solution down his throat on the basis of his authority as priest or father-in-law, he offers it up for Moses' consideration (v. 19-23).

Anchoring expressions can play a big role in exegesis, and are one of the many kinds of things that you'll find annotated in the Lexham Discourse Hebrew BIble and Lexham High Definition Old Testament. If you found this commentary helpful, then you'll find more like it in the High Definition Commentary, a new series from Logos that helps you identify exegetical keys in the discourse, and understand the role they play. The Philippians volume is under way, to be followed by Romans.

If you'd like to read an article I wrote on this same topic of redundant anchoring expressions applied to Genesis 32, it is posted at my blog site.

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An earlier post briefly illustrated one way that the Homer Multitext project is using a dynamic image service to help editors inventorying the scholia in the Venetus A manuscript of the Iliad. A post last week illustrated one way that the project's Canonical Text Service is helping automate comparison of different texts of the Iliad. Taken together, image services and automated collation of editions are a potent combination for editors.

The initial note on comparing two manuscripts used the chart linked from this thumbnail: I updated the note to use the chart linked from this thumb: Why the dramatic difference in the report on Iliad 17?

The project's initial edition of the Venetus A was created by a dedicated team of undergraduate Fellows, who worked from the apparatus of T.W. Allen's critical edition to "reverse engineer" a text of the Venetus A, before the project was able to digitize the manuscript in 2007. In 2010, as the scholia are being inventoried, this edition is gradually being checked against the direct evidence of the digital images, but book 17 is still based on Allen's printed information. In his apparatus to 17.729 (vol. 3, p. 166), Allen notes tersely "729-761 om. A". The HMT Fellows correctly interpreted this to mean that Venetus A does not include the last 32 lines of book 17, and consequently struck them from our edition. This is the basis for the first chart above.

Now, with the digital images in hand, we see somthing more interesting. Folio 237 verso is written in the familiar tenth-century hand of most of the manuscript, and includes scholia. (See the zoomable image, including scholia, linked from this thumbnail: . Folios 238 recto and verso, however, are a replacement for a lost original, perhaps in the hand of Cardinal Bessarion himself. Compare the zoomable image linked here

Evidently, in this instance at least, Allen decided that "A" was to mean "the tenth-century A only". The HMT edition prefers instead to take "A" as the entire, continuous Iliadic text, since our electronic edition and indices can distinguish the folios added later from the tenth-century originals, and leave open for any particular application the question of whether to work with tenth-century text only, later text only, or the entire text.

Allen's apparatus has no way to communicate this. The ambiguously compressed note "omisit" would most naturally suggest that the last 32 lines of book 17 were never part of A (as the HMT Fellows took it to mean). There is no hint that the manuscript, as we have it, completes A through 17.761.

The most important point is not whether or not we take issue with Allen's phrasing, however. What is significant is rather that tools like automatic collation can call our attention to passages that stand out or appear unusual; automated associations with our image service then allow us to unravel a trail of evidence that has vanished from the app.crit. of Allen's "definitive" edition. Editors are now manually collating the text of the last 32 lines of Venetus A's book 17. Among the interesting questions we will be able to consider: what source did Bessarion use for filling out the missing folio? An automated comparison with the Venetus B might be revealing — perhaps a subject for a future blog post.

A final methodological observation — all the images in this post are created dynamically. References either to Google's Chart service, or the Homer Multitext project's image service return image data that can be used as you like, including embedding in a web page.

So today was the first day for my fall semeter at IUP. As usual, it was quite chaotic. As, is usual, I often find myself on the first day of a new semester thinking back to last semester. I had several people ask me about how my Digital History class went and to be honest I wasn't really sure. I feel better today though, one of the students from the class came up to me and told me that the skills she learned in the class got her a full-time job offer at her work. So, that was a nice way to start my semester.

I am going to give Read it Later a try. I ran across this site while looking for a good calendar program. I have installed it on my computer and on my phone. The program allows you to save webpages to read later at your leisure. It will be interesting to see if this helps me, I often see things I want to read and then never go back to see them.

 

RSM

I can recommend Patrik Svensson's article "The Landscape of Digital Humanities" in Digital Humanities Quarterly as a good read. My comments here are about the internals of handing DHQ's paragraph based citation scheme.

Quick intro to the issue: DHQ is an online journal. It doesn't have pages to provide a physical solution to the need to make references to specific points in an article. So the html version numbers each paragraph. So far so good. As a reader I can note the paragraph number and cite it in a future publication.

But I'm not sure DHQ has quite the right implementation of this good idea. I'm arbitrarily picking the paragraph numbered 118. The one that starts, "Information technology, or more broadly the digital, can be seen as affording objects of analysis for the humanities."

Note that I don't include a link directly to that paragraph. That's because I can't. Looking at the HTML source, I see:

<div class="counter">118</div><div class="ptext">Information technology, or more broadly the digital, can be seen as affording...

That's somewhat unfortunate. It would be great if the '<div class="ptext">' were changed to read '<div id="p118" class="ptext">. Then I could mint a URL of the form:

http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html#p118

It would be even cooler if the <div class="counter">118</div> also read:

<div class="counter"><a href="#p118">118</a></div>

I've wrapped the paragraph number in a link to the paragraph. That way a user can right/control-click on the link and copy-and-paste it into an e-mail or other work. Easy self-reference to an internal citation structure.

I'd also like to see the paragraph numbers represented in the XML source. Again, taking a snippet of that, the start of the paragraph numbered as 118 in the html, appears in the xml as:

<p>Information technology, or more broadly the digital, can be seen as affording objects of analysis for the humanities...

Unless I'm missing something, the published citation scheme isn't represented in the archival version. I think it should be. Even if DHQ considers the paragraph number ephemeral, I think there's a valid scholarly need for them to be persistent.

I'm a big fan of DHQ so this is constructive criticism. And I'm sort of hoping that I've mis-understood something and that those paragraph numbers are more meaningful than they seem after one looks under the hood.

Arachne

Arachne is the central Object database of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) and the Archaeological Institute of the University of Cologne, administrated by Reinhard Foertsch.

Arachne is intended to provide archaeologists and Classicists with a free internet research tool for quickly searching hundreds of thousands of records on objects and their attributes. This combines an ongoing process of digitizing traditional documentation (stored on media which are both threatened by decay and largely unexplored) with the production of new digital object and graphic data. Wherever possible, Arachne follows a paradigma of highly structurized object-metadata which is mapped onto the CIDOC-CRM, to adress machine-readable metadata strategies of the Semantic Web. This »structured world« of Arachne requires high efforts in time and money and therefore is only possible for privileged areas of data. While on the ever-increasing range of new, digital born data in reality only a small effort-per-object ratio can be applied. It therefore requires a “low-threshold” processing structure which is located in the »unstructured world« of Arachne. All digital (graphic and textual) information is secure on a Tivoli Storage System (featuring long-term multiple redundandancy) and distributed online through the Storage Area Network in Cologne via AFS...

Starting from week 38 of 2009, Arachne has about 3936 registered users who can access 503.580 scans and about 250.000 objects free of charge.

Access is free but registration is required.

Chogha Mish Fauna

This project uses the publicly available dataset of over 30,000 animal bone specimens from excavations at Chogha Mish, Iran during the 1960s and 1970s.The specimens were identified by Jane Wheeler Pires-Ferreira in the 1960s and though she never analyzed the data or produced a report, her identifications were saved and later transferred to punch cards and then to Excel. This 'orphan' dataset was made available on the web in 2008 by Abbas Alizadeh (University of Chicago) at the time of his publication of Chogha Mish, Volume II.

The site of Chogha Mish spans the time period from Archaic through Elamite periods, with also later Achaemenid occupation.  These phases subdived further into several subphases, and some of those chronological divisions are also represented in this dataset. Thus the timespan present begins at the mid-seventh millennium and continues into the third millennium B.C.E. In terms of cultural development in the region, these periods are key, spanning the later Neolithc (after the period of caprid and cattle domestication, but possibly during the eras in which pigs and horses were domesticated) through the development of truly settled life, cities, supra-regional trade and even the early empires or state societies of Mesopotamia and Iran...

Projects in Open Context

Project	Description	Primary People	Keywords
Chogha Mish Fauna	Zooarchaeological observations from Prehistoric and Achaemenid levels at Chogha Mish, Iran.	Levent Atici, Justin S.E. Lev-Tov, Sarah Whitcher Kansa	Zooarchaeology, subsistence, economy, Early Bronze Age, Iranian Plateau, Elamite
Khirbat al-Mudayna al-Aliya	Investigations of an Early Iron Age site in a semi-arid zone in west-central Jordan	Bruce Routledge, Benjamin Porter	pastoralism, economy, agriculture, Southern Levant, Semi-Arid, Kerak Plateau, Jordan, Iron I, Early Iron Age, subsistence
Dove Mountain Groundstone	Analysis of groundstone finds from the Dove Mountain Project in the Tucson Basin	Jenny Adams	Southwest, Pioneer Period, Sedentary Period, Hohokam, Early Agricultural, Groundstone, Arizona, Archaeology
Bade Museum	Tell en-Nasbeh Collection at the Badè Museum of Biblical Archaeology	Aaron Brody	Israel, Palestine, Southern Levant, Judah, Near East, Biblical Archaeology, Archaeology, Iron Age, 1st Millennium, 4th Millennium, Early Bronze, Town, Tomb, Babylonian, Persian, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine
San Diego Archaeological Center	Collections maintained by the San Diego Archaeological Center	San Diego Archaeological Center	historical archaeology, San Diego, California, Spanish colonial, Mexican, finds catalog, education, cultural resource management, archaeological collections
Presidio of San Francisco	Ongoing investigations of El Presidio de San Francisco and other archaeological resources at the Presidio of San Francisco	Presidio Archaeology Lab (Presidio Trust)	historical archaeology, presidio, San Francisco, California, Spanish colonial, Mexican, US Army, education
Aegean Archaeomalacology	Mollusk Shells in Troia, Yenibademli, and Ulucak: An Archaeomalacological Approach to Environment and Economy in the Aegean	Canan Çakırlar	Anatolia, Aegean, bronze age, chalcolithic, mollusks, Archaeomalacology, subsistence, economy, environment
Petra Great Temple Excavations	Brown University Excavations at the Great Temple of Petra, Jordan	Martha Sharp Joukowsky	Religion, Hellenistic, Jordan, Roman, Roman Empire, Archaeology, Architecture, Nabateans, Nabatean, Petra
Iraq Heritage Program	Overview of the Global Heritage Fund's conservation work in Iraq	Global Heritage Fund, Alexandria Archive Institute	Meopotamia, Cultural Heritage, Conservation, Assyria, Sumer, Babylonia, Documentation, Sumer, Archaeology, Iron Age, Early Bronze Age, Early Dynastic, World Heritage
Lake Carlos Beach Site, 1992 and 1996	Descriptions and provenience information for 7837 artifacts	State of Minnesota, Department of Natural Resources, Division of Parks and Recreation, Minnesota State Parks Cultural Resource Management Program staff, State of Minnesota, Department of Natural Resources, Division of Parks and Recreation
Corneal Ulceration in South East Asia	Epidemiology and Etiology of Corneal Ulcers in South India	Mathuiah Srinivasan, John P. Whitcher	ophthalmology, India, public health, infections disease, eye, public health, developing world
Harvard Peabody Mus. Zooarchaeology	Harvard Peabody Museum Zooarchaeology Laboratory Reference Collection	Richard Meadow, Levent Atici	archaeology, reference collection, zoology, zooarchaeology, archaeology, specimen, bone
Hazor: Zooarchaeology	Zooarchaeological observations for Late Bronze Age and Iron Age Hazor, Israel	Justin Lev-Tov	archaeology, Iron Age, Late Bronze Age, Near East, Excavations, Hazor, Biblical archaeology, subsistence
Hayonim: Micromorphology		Paul Goldberg	archaeology, Mousterian, geology, Middle Paleolithic, Kebaran, Epi-Paleolithic, Israel, Levant, Micromorphology, Geology, Cave, Deposition
Geissenklosterle: Micromorphology		Paul Goldberg	archaeology, Aurignation, geology, Upper Paleolithic, Europe, Germany
Pınarbaşı 1994: Animal Bones	Analysis of faunal remains from prehistoric contexts at Pınarbaşı in central Turkey	Denise Carruthers	archaeology, Epi-Paleolithic, Neolithic, Near East, Anatolia, Turkey, zooarchaeology, Pinarbasi, 9th millennium, agriculture, foraging, hunting
Domuztepe Excavations	Excavations of a Late Neolithic site in south-central Turkey	Stuart Campbell, Elizabeth Carter	Archaeology, Halaf, Neolithic, Near East, Excavations, Domuztepe, 7th millennium, Village

See also Open Access Projects: The Alexandria Archive Institute

Phil Snider has (somehow) been reading Ephrem’s Hymns against Julian the apostate.  His summary of what they say is fascinating, and may be very relevant to our world.

I’ve always been interested in these hymns, but as far as I knew, no translation existed in any modern language.  Does anyone know of one?

UPDATE: Apparently there is one, in Samuel Lieu, The emperor Julian: panegyric and polemic, Liverpool 2, 1996.  This contains a panegyric by Claudius Mamertinus; Chrysostom’s Homily on St. Babylas, against Julian and the pagans XIV-XIX (so presumably not complete); and Ephrem the Syrian’s Hymns against Julian.  The latter fills 24 pages of a TTH volume, so is not all that long.

The book also contains the following information on editions and translations:

The HcJul. were first published by J. Overbeck in his florilegium of Syriac writers: S. Ephraemi Syri, Rabulaei episcopi Edesseni, Balaei aliorumque opera selecta (Oxford, 1865) pp. 3-20. They were translated into German with brief notes by G. Bickell in his article: ‘Die Gedichte des hl. Ephräm gegen Julian den Apostaten’, Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie, II (1878) pp. 335-56. Bickell’s translation was republished with fuller introduction and notes by S. Euringer in Bibliothek der Kirchenvater, (Kempten and Munich, 1919) pp. 199-238. The most recent edition and the one on which the present translation is based is that of E. Beck, Des heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Paradiso und Contra Julianum, CSCO 175 (text) and 176 (trans.), (Louvain, 1957). There is an unpublished Oxford B. Litt, thesis on the poems (with translation) by P. C. Robson, A Study of Ephraem Syrus Hymns Against Julian the Apostate and the Jews (Ms. B. Litt. d. 1411, 1969). Hymn IV, 18-23 has been translated into English by Sebastian Brock in the appendix to his edition of the Syriac letter attributed to Cyril of Jerusalem on the rebuilding of the Temple (Brock, 1977,283-4).

I had forgotten that the BKV texts are online, thanks to Gregor Emmeneger, here, which includes the four hymns against Julian, starting here.

Dear MITH Community,

As another academic year begins, I have the happy opportunity of welcoming you all back to MITH for what promises to be another exciting, event-laden year. While I’m at it, I’ll review some of the highlights from last year and provide a few coming attractions. Don’t worry if this email seems long: you have a whole year to read it before I send out the next one!

Events and Conferences
Notable MITH events from last year included an October visit to campus from acclaimed science fiction author and futurist Bruce Sterling, one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement; a January advanced seminar in TEI encoding for manuscripts sponsored by the Brown University Women Writers Project and supported by NEH; and a May invitational symposium on “Computer Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections,” attended by experts from the cultural heritage sector and computer and information science, as well as practitioners in government, industry, and defense, which was funded by the Mellon Foundation. Finally, in July, MITH co-hosted in London a very successful international summit of digital humanities centers and funders, supported by NEH.

This year we look forward to an October visit from Alan Liu, one of the foremost theorists of digital humanities and new media; a November MITH-hosted Rosenzweig Forum featuring renowned digital archivist Jason Scott, and a screening of his new film “Get Lamp: The Text Adventure Documentary”; a January advanced seminar in TEI encoding, sponsored by NEH; a January workshop on professionalization in digital humanities centers, sponsored by NEH; a February workshop on developing Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for the digital humanities, sponsored by NEH; an April lecture by Richard Grusin, Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies (U Wisconsin-Milwaukee); a public symposium on the documentation and preservation of dance, co-hosted with the Kennedy Center, probably in April; and a June conference at the University of Toronto between centerNet (an international network of digital humanities centers) and CHCI (Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes) that we’ll be co-organizing.

Grants
MITH continues to be on a roll! During the past year we’ve worked on 11 significant grants, recently won two others, and are waiting to hear about a few more very exciting projects. Among these are projects funded by the Library of Congress, NEH, IMLS, and Mellon Foundation. Our projects continue to run a wide gamut: from computer forensics to the preservation of virtual worlds, performing arts, and born-digital material; to the building of digital tools; to the creation of multimodal editions; to the building of international community and cyberinfrastructure in digital humanities. Three new projects are worth special mention in this regard: (1) our collaboration with the Smithsonian and Microsoft on emerging interfaces for museums and libraries; (2) our work with the Library of Congress on the digitization and preservation of the Danny Kaye and Sylvia Fine Collection; and (3) our collaboration with the Kennedy Center, the New York Public Library, and Ohio State University on the documentation and preservation of dance. Each of these projects highlights our increasing focus on Public Humanities, the ways in which the digital humanities can address audiences beyond the academy. Other recent project partners include the Folger Shakespeare Library, the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Huntington Library the Harry Ransom Center, Emory University, Stanford University, the University of Illinois, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the Walters Art Gallery, and Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life. We are currently in discussions with Google about collaboration in an upcoming project that we hope to be able to announce by October.

Fellows
Continuing for a second year as a MITH Faculty Fellow is Frank Hildy, Professor of Theatre and Director of Shakespeare’s Globe (USA) Research Archive. Frank works as a theatre consultant for historic theatre preservation and reconstruction and is a member of the Architecture Research Group for Shakespeare’s Globe in London. As co-author with Oscar G. Brockett of The History of Theatre, a work generally known as the “bible of theatre history,” Frank is read world-wide by those interested in theatre architecture. He has been working with us on a prototype for a comprehensive global Digital Archive of Existing Historic Theatres, a collaboratively edited, peer-reviewed, online database of existing historic theatre buildings from the Greeks to the Romantics, covering all the still extant buildings from the Minoan “theatrical area” of c. 2000 BCE at Phaistos on the island of Crete, to the castle theatre of 1797 at Litomysl in Slovakia. A key component of this online database is the Collaborative, Ajax-Based, Modeling Platform (CAMP) being developed separately at MITH with funding from a NEH Level 2 Digital Humanities Startup Grant.

Joining Frank this year as a MITH Faculty Fellow is Leigh Smiley, Associate Professor in the School of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies, where she also serves as Director of the MFA in Performance. Leigh is an internationally known theatre artist, professional voice, dialect and acting coach, performer and director. She has just finished directing text and voice for Shakespeare & Company in Lenox Massachusetts this summer and is Director of Dialects for Ford’s Theatre’s Christmas Carol and Carpetbagger’s Children in the 2010-2011 Season. Her professional engagements have included Dialect/Text and Voice direction with The Shakespeare Theatre, Folger Shakespeare Library Theatre, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and Arena Stage. She will be working with us to create The Visual Accent/Dialect Archive (VADA), which will enable performers for the first time to research online authentic resources for hearing and seeing the gestural aspects of accent and dialect.

Our Winnemore Dissertation Fellow last Spring was Mirona Magearu, a student in the Comparative Literature Program of the Department of English, who is working on an ambitious and promising dissertation: “Comparative Textual Performances in Digital Poetry: Local Voices and Global Visions.”

Staffing
Last year, we made two stellar additions to MITH’s staff: Dave Lester, who joined us as Assistant Director, moving across town from George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, where he was legendary for his creativity, as well as his technical and organizational skills, and Elizabeth Kvernen, who joined us after completing her MFA at the University of Baltimore in Integrated Design, with special expertise in Arabic calligraphy. Adding further luster to our ranks is Dr. Tanya Clement, Associate Director of the Digital Cultures and Creativity Program, who has been appointed a MITH Research Associate. I’m delighted also to mention two much-deserved promotions: Doug Reside from Assistant to Associate Director and Chris Grogan from Business Coordinator to Business Manager. Joining Chris in our Business Office as of November 1 will be Meei-Ching Ma as Business Services Specialist. Two graduate student Program Associates who joined us in the middle of last year, Ketan Patil (iSchool) and Alex Quinn (Computer Science/HCIL), will be working with us again this year alongside of long-time Program Associates Rachel Donahue (iSchool) and Helen DeVinney (English). We were fortunate, also, this past year to have three terrific iSchool grad student interns: Diana Aram (U Maryland), Isabela Carvalho (U Michigan) and Walker Sampson (U Texas), supported by a three-year grant from the IMLS that is also supporting the internship this fall of James Neal (U Maryland). Charlie Pinnix, an undergraduate Art major, interned with us during the summer, and Jon Gilmour an undergraduate English major, will be interning with us in the Fall. We also greatly benefitted last year from the help of two undergraduate business majors, Becca Hale and Kristin Cesario; Tin Tin Nguyen, a computer science major, will continue to add his technical expertise to our staff this year. Finally, we bid a fond farewell this summer to Greg Lord, MITH’s longtime designer extraordinaire, who has taken a position as Lead Designer and Software Engineer for the Digital Humanities Initiative at Hamilton College.

Digital Cultures and Creativity
This past year saw the launch of the Digital Cultures and Creativity program, MITH’s first foray into the undergraduate curriculum, in partnership with the Department of Computer Science and the iSchool. DCC is an interdisciplinary living and learning program for first- and second-year students who will explore new media technologies through activities as varied as digital music and video production, digital art, creative electronic writing, virtual worlds, software development and entrepreneurship, and developing online communities. Directed by MITH’s Associate Director, Matt Kirschenbaum, with MITH Research Associate Tanya Clement as Associate Director, DCC’s first students are now in the process of arriving on campus. We are all looking forward to working with them over the course of the new academic year!

Digital Dialogues
There is, as I hope you’ve seen, much to be excited about in the coming year, including another slate of Digital Dialogues on Tuesdays from 12:30 – 1:45, beginning on September 14, with a presentation by Zeynep Tufekci (UMBC) and Nathan Jurgenson (U Maryland) on “The iPad: The “Jesus Tablet” and the Resurrection of Consumer Society.” This year’s Digital Dialogues will mix our traditional format with specialized workshops.

Last year’s Digital Dialogues frequently had standing room only crowds and we believe that this year’s program is every bit as compelling. Stay tuned for the announcement of the full Fall schedule!

Finally
Finally, I am delighted to say that our campus digital humanities community has been substantially enriched by the recent College of Arts and Humanities cluster hire in the field. We are extremely fortunate to have Hasan Elahi (Art), Jason Farman (American Studies), and Tara Rodgers (Women’s Studies) joining us this year.

You’ll have the opportunity to meet them all at MITH. We’re looking forward to seeing many of you during the coming year!

Best,
Neil

I’m off to Durham tomorrow to attend the patristics conference on Wednesday.  So I’ve been going through the emails, printing off copies, printing out a map of what and where.

One thing that strikes me strongly is that the conference is not being organised very well.   My experience has been quite negative. 

For instance, when I booked I found that the online payments did not work.  I booked anyway, but received no acknowledgement.  I sent off a cheque, but was not informed when it was received, nor cashed.  A provisional programme was sent out — but not to me.  When I asked about it, I was told it was on the website — but I still never got to see the email.  Emails were replied to late if at all.  Questions about check-in time have not been replied to.  If there is any question about my booking, when I arrive, with car in a restricted area, I have almost nothing in writing.

Staying away from home is a stressful experience.  Leaving these sorts of things in doubt makes it worse.   This is a great pity.

What I am going to do tomorrow — today is bank holiday so no-one will be around – is to telephone the college directly, and check what they have by way of a conference booking, car parking, etc.  I wish I’d thought of this last week, and I offer the suggestion to others.  Because I suspect the college will be better organized, and they, after all, do the hard work.

Still, the programme suggests it will be a good conference.  And if it isn’t, I have my car and will just go home.

After having received another bibliography in an unstructured format (.doc), I finally made up my mind to write a simple bibliographic script that allows me to import it into Zotero saving me quite a lot of manual editing.

Basically this script groups different calls to single software components (ParsCit, bibutils, Saxon) into a single pipeline.

The source code is hosted at GitHub and is likely to be quite buggy (particularly the XSLT transformation from ParsCit’s XML into MODS has not been thoroughly tested yet). So feel free to fork the repository and improve the code where needed.

In more detail what the script does is:

1. takes as input a plain text bibliography with one entry per line;
2. parses the input using a ParsCit engine;
3. outputs an intermediate mods encoding of the bibliography;
4. finally transforms the intermediate mods into a BibTeX file;
5. your bibliography is now ready to be imported in to Zotero!

A big CAVEAT about the accuracy of the BibTeX output: since the parsing of the plain text input is done automatically by ParsCit, some bibliographic fields might result to be incorrect and thus some manual editing may be needed.

The result won’t be perfect, but at least I don’t have to input everything manually from scratch.

Sino-Platonic Papers

Sino-Platonic Papers is an occasional series edited by Victor H. Mair of the University of Pennsylvania's Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. The purpose of the series is to make available to specialists and the interested public the results of research that, because of its unconventional or controversial nature, might otherwise go unpublished.
For the most recent issues, see the bottom of the list.

Since issue no. 171 (June 2006), Sino-Platonic Papers has been published electronically on the Web at no cost to readers, with older back issues also being released periodically for free in e-editions. Paper copies of issues nos. 1–170 will continue to be available for purchase until our stock runs out, at which point those issues too will be available for free on the Web.

What's New

July 2010

• brand-new SPP (no. 199): Other Laozi Parallels in the Hanfeizi: An Alternative Approach to the Textual History of the Laozi and Early Chinese Thought (1 MB PDF), by Tae Hyun KIM
• brand-new SPP (no. 203): How the Earth's Geology Determined Human History (3.1 MB PDF), by Donald F. Beaumont

May 2010

• brand-new SPP (no. 202): An "ABC" Exercise in Old Sinitic Lexical Statistics (800 KB PDF), by David McCraw
• brand-new SPP (no. 201): Notes on the Earliest Sanskrit Word Known in Chinese (420 KB PDF), by Hoong Teik TOH
• rerelease of SPP 76: The Evolution of the Symbolism of the Paradise of the Buddha of Infinite Life and Its Western Origins (2.9 MB PDF), by Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky
• rerelease of SPP 79: A Southeast Asian Voice in the Daodejing? (400 KB PDF), by Dennis Grafflin
• rerelease of SPP 101: The Viêt Peoples and the Origins of Nom (5.12 MB PDF), by C. Michele Thompson

April 2010

• brand-new SPP (no. 200): Arthur Schopenhauer and China: A Sino-Platonic Love Affair (8.3 MB PDF), by Urs App
• rerelease of SPP 21: Two Cross-Cultural Studies on Reading Theory (1.6 MB PDF), by Philippa Jane Benson
• rerelease of SPP 44: The Three Thousand Year Old Charchan Man Preserved at Zaghunluq (2 MB PDF), by Dolkun Kamberi
• rerelease of SPP 54: Introduction, Grammar, and Sample Sentences for Jegün Yogur (1.6 MB PDF), by Üjiyediin Chuluu (Chaolu Wu)
• rerelease of SPP 62: Reflections on the "Unity" of Spoken and Written Chinese and Academic Learning in China (550 KB PDF), by William C. Hannas
• rerelease of SPP 73: Blue Cloth and Pearl Deer; Yogur Folklore (4.6 MB PDF), by ZHANG Juan, Kevin Stuart, et al.
• rerelease of SPP 92: The Presbyterian Church in Taiwan and the Advocacy of Local Autonomy (8.6 PDF), by Christine Louise Lin

March 2010

• rerelease of SPP 68: New Research on the Origin of Cowries Used in Ancient China (1.2 MB PDF), by Ke Peng and Yanshi Zhu
• rerelease of SPP 72: The Life and Mentorship of Confucius (4.1 MB PDF), by E. Bruce Brooks
• rerelease of SPP 116: On the Problem of Chinese Lettered Words (700 KB PDF), by LIU Yongquan
• rerelease of SPP 126: A Southern Min Word in the Tsu-t'ang chi (700 KB PDF), by Tim Miller
• rerelease of SPP 138: Dogs and Cats: Lessons from Learning Chinese (1.2 MB PDF), by Julie Lee Wei
• rerelease of SPP 153: The Mysterious Origins of the Word "Marihuana" (1.3 MB PDF), by Alan Piper
• rerelease of SPP 166: Reviews XII (3.6 MB PDF), by Julie Lee Wei, Hodong Kim, David Selvia, and the Editor

Relegere

Relegere has been established to promote and disseminate academic research on reception history, broadly understood, both within and across religious traditions.

Relegere publishes studies of the transmission, reception, and effect of religion ideas, narratives, and images, within any medium - including but not limited to oral tradition, literature, drama, poetry, film, television, digital media, and the plastic arts - in relation to any group, sub-group, or individual in any religious tradition at any point in history.

The journal has been founded on the conviction that the study of reception and religion must not limit itself to a mere cataloguing of influence or a simple recounting of the trajectories of foundational religious texts across time. Beyond this basic research, reception history needs to be more thoroughly understood on a conceptual and theoretical level; reception history must actively interrogate the taken-for-granted idea that foundational texts are somehow fixed, that their essential natures can be distinguished from their subsequent reception.
In pursuit of this goal, Relegere actively encourages methodological, theoretical, and philosophical contributions relevant to reception history and religion, whether in relation to particular case studies or as stand-alone theoretical reflections.  Through the production of a coherent body of theoretical and practical reflection by and for scholars in very different fields and with very different interests, it is our hope that such an approach will facilitate a fruitful and ongoing discussion among scholars. 

List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies

One of the drawbacks of doing too much is that you tend to deal with emails a  bit too hastily.  One of those too hasty “yes that is fine” has come back to bite me.

Regular readers will remember that I commissioned a translation of all the fragments of Philip of Side.  Five of these are taken from a curious text, the Religionsgesprach am Hof der Sassaniden.  This is a fictional 6th century text, purporting to record a dialogue at the Sassanid Persian court between Christians and Jews.  It was edited by  Bratke, and reedited by Pauline Bringel in an amazingly erudite but unpublished(!) PhD thesis.  (All this I have discussed in previous posts tagged “Philip of Side”.)

Unfortunately I had a miscommunication with the translator, who had done some of the RGS for context, and he understood me to be commissioning a translation of the whole text.  It’s 45 pages of Bratke, 1007 lines of about 8.5 words per line, i.e. around 8,500 words.  Not small!  But he’s already done over half of it, and in fact the only question is whether the remaining portion is commissioned or not.  Since that will come out at around $200 — morally I must pay for the rest — I may as well bite the bullet.

Not that I really mind that much.  I suspect it might have been a long time before anyone ever translated the text otherwise!  So  it’s all for the good in the end.  I was hankering to translate it anyway, since I hate do excerpts of things.  But … I must learn to read more carefully.  “Always practice safe grammar” — one of  the rules of Count Yor.

When it is done, like the Philip of Side, I’ll put it in the public domain and make it available online.

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.

A Logos user recently contacted me with the observation that some books in the Logos library contain abbreviated titles. He wanted to see just those books in his personal library possessing such titles. Here's what I told him:

• Open the Library by clicking the Library icon on the toolbar (or pressing Alt + L)
• Click the View icon on the Library's toolbar so that a detailed spreadsheet view of the Library appears
• In the Library's Find box type this exact text: abbrev:*
  (Note: abbrev is the field name for Abbreviated Title and the * is a wild card representing any text. The instruction we're giving Logos is to display all resources with any text in the Abbreviated Title field.)

One of the most practical uses of an abbreviated title is typing it into the Command box to open the resource from there without having to go to the Library!

You should follow us on Twitter here.

3-5 March 2010 in Verona was held the third edition of the “Incontro di Filologia Digitale”, a three day meeting with more than 15 presentations totally organized by Adele Cipolla, Paola Cotticelli, Roberto Rosselli del Turco.

The asynchronous highlights from the conference here presented were selected according to my personal interests. For a complete overview please refer to the program and the full list of presentations.

A bunch of presentations was related to epigraphy: Anelli, Muscariello and Sarullo talked about “The Digital Edition of Epigraphic Texts as Research Tool: the ILA Project”; Farina presented an “Electronic Analysis and Organization of the Syro-Turkic Inscriptions of China and Central Asia” and finally …

Barbera (hand out not available) and Tomatis presented the advancements of the Corpus Taurinense project, a corpus of texts written in XIII century Italian. After Barbera’s brilliant introduction to the corpus, Tomatis focussed on the problem of disambiguating POS tagging.

My wife has recently stripped the doors in our house and has begun to repaint them.  Like most turn of the century homes in the area, they have wooden doors.  These doors are substantial, hang poorly (in most cases) and preserve the history of the house in through the marks in the door.

The archaeology of the house is preserved in the house itself.

This door shows at least four different lock and works on the door preserved under multiple coats of paint.

The evidence for an earlier latch:

In this detail you can see the outline of the earlier doorplate, cylinder, and lock.

An upstairs door show another set of interesting marks preserving tiny bits of the houses history. The elegant doorplate and crystal doorknob probably date to the earliest years of the house. While the floors upstairs in our house are fir as opposed to the floors downstairs which are a more luxurious maple, the doorknob and plate show certain concessions to display in the more private quarters of the house.  Of course, a nice doorknob and plate is an easy addition to a house at some later date, but the floors on the second floor are more or less permanent.

Evidence for the use of a simple latch on the inside of the door.  The door must have been pushed open a few times because it's clear that someone forced the door open, striping the simply threaded latch, and causing someone to drive the latch back into the door again in a slightly different place.

Patricia Baker, University of Kent, Canterbury

Fig 1. A surgeon treating a thigh wound. From the original fresco found at Pompeii. Wellcome Images Collection number M0008724. Wellcome Library, London, Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc 2.0 UK: England & Wales

In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder (25. 85) stated that the Cantabri, an indigenous group of people who lived in the Roman province of Hispania Tarraconensis, devised an elixir consisting of one-hundred herbs that they drank to maintain their health. Pliny’s story is one of a rare few comments in ancient literature that refers to localised traditions of medical practices in the Roman provinces. His statement was the initiating factor in undertaking a pilot study that asked how the native populations of the three provinces of Roman Spain responded to the introduction of Graeco-Roman medical philosophies and practices in contrast to their own healing traditions after the incorporation of Hispania into the empire (1st century BC). This paper gives a short overview of my preliminary findings and explains why it is necessary to consider provincial medical practices in historical examinations of Roman medicine from an archaeological perspective.

Since the Roman empire covered a vast geographical area, it has been easier for scholars to subsume the unique medical customs of different societies living within it under an over-generalised notion of Roman identity, which has led to postulations that medical practices were, for the most part, homogeneous. This idea has mainly developed from archaeological examinations of the remains of medical tools found in the provinces (Allason-Jones1999; Breitwieser 1998; Künzl 1996). Since there is little literary material for the provinces, scholars of medical texts have rarely contributed to this aspect of medical history. It is the archaeological evidence that provides the most information about medical practices in areas beyond Italy and the eastern Mediterranean, places where the medical texts were written.

Based on the premise that Roman-style medical instruments appear in the archaeological record after Roman occupation, archaeologists and medical historians have theorised that Graeco-Roman medical traditions were fully adopted into these different societies. Yet, this idea is in contrast to the textual exegeses that have shown that even amongst Greek and Roman medical writers there were many disagreements about how the body functioned, the nature of disease and appropriate treatments (King 2001). Since medical philosophies varied amongst these writers it is difficult to provide a precise definition of Greek or Roman medicine, therefore triggering the question, “if there were no ‘standard’ practices in Greece and Rome, what type of medical philosophies were those living in the provinces adopting?”

In order to examine provincial medicine a study of all the regions would be a near impossible undertaking, but focusing on a particular areas sheds light onto certain provincial practices and allows for easier comparisons with other provinces to be made in future research. Spain was mainly chosen because it has been overlooked outside Spanish scholarship. More focus has been given to instruments in Roman Britain, Gaul and Germany. Nonetheless, Spanish archaeologists have written reports on the medical tools found in Spain, and like those examined in the northwestern provinces, they were not only compared to objects from Italy, but the archaeologists determined the function of the tools by comparing them with extant medical literature (e.g. Borobia 1988).

The appearance of instruments does not automatically imply the same uses and adoption of practices, particularly when there were many societies living within the empire that would have had their own beliefs about the body and treatments. Medical anthropological studies demonstrate that medical practices are closely linked to a society’s philosophies and they are not easily dispensed with for new and seemingly more advanced practices (Kleinman 1980). Thus, this project seeks to rectify the limitations of earlier studies with a critical re-evaluation of the medical instruments that considers their design and archaeological context with a focus on Hispania.

Between 2008 and 2009 I undertook a pilot study that examined the published medical tools from Tarraconensis, Baetica and Lusitania. The instruments dated from the late first century BC to the fourth century AD. They were collated and studied according to type, archaeological context, design and associated artefacts. The remains were examined via critical and contextual archaeological methodologies rather than comparisons to medical literature. When the ancient writers mention medical tools they tend not to provide a physical description of them; they sometimes mention instruments that archaeologists have yet to identify and they mention varying uses for them, problems archaeologists rarely consider. These differences in tool functions are similar to the variations in descriptions of bodily functions and the nature of disease.

Fig 2. Map of the archaeological sites in the three provinces of Hispania that have published medical instruments.

Having chosen to re-evaluate medical instruments in Spain, the immediate outcome of the examination shows that Roman occupation helped facilitate the inculcation of medical instruments since a total of 19 published sites had the remains of medical tools: the province of Baetica had six, Tarraconensis 11 and Lusitania two (Fig. 2). The total number of identifiable instruments is 298 with 122 in Baetica, 131 in Tarraconensis and 45 in Lusitania. Overall the instruments are common types found throughout the empire: scalpels, forceps, spoon and spatula probes and ligulae, objects used to clean the ears. However, some interesting patterns emerged in the study that demonstrated Spain was not fully adopting ‘Roman’ practices.

A number of instruments, particularly the scalpels, have unusual designs, in comparison to those found in Italy and the published instruments in other provinces. Throughout the empire, scalpels are commonly found with rectangular handles (Fig. 2). In Spain eight out of 20 were not of this type: three had octagonal handles: one was found at Gerona: (Oliva Pratt 1949), one was from Mérida (Sáenz de Buruaga and García de Soto 1946) and a third was from Palencia (Molina 1981). One hexagonal handle was found at Ercávica (Fuentes Domínquez 1987). Another found at Zaragoza had a head thought to be Hercules on the handle itself rather than above the handle, which is a rare design found at Pompeii (Oritz Palomar 1998). Three at La Cañada Honda were decorated with silver inlay (Hibbs 1991: 129). Other types of instruments also showed design differences. Although rare outside Gaul, three oculist stamps, objects used to mark eye medicines, were found in Hispania. One from Caceres near Mérida was hexagonal, unlike their ubiquitously square and rectangular shapes (Floriano, A. C. 1940/41: 430-1). A spoon probe with a hook rather than the standard olivary end came from Ampurias (Oliva Prat 1945: 56) and a decorated ligula which has two “arms” protruding diagonally from the main handle of the object was also noted at Gerona (Oliva Prat 1949: 190).

Fig 3a. Oculist's Stamp, Roman, in the Guildhall Museum. Wellcome Images Collection number L0000813. Wellcome Library, London, Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc 2.0 UK: England & Wales

Fig 3b. Oculist stamp from Caceres. After Floriano 1941, 146. Drawing by Lloyd Bosworth.

These unusual instruments, although not great in number, are more concentrated in a particular area than noted with other provinces, the only notable exception being the preponderance of oculist stamps in Gaul (Voinot 1999). Preliminary suggestions for this are that the population of Hispania was not fully taking on new medical practices; rather they were adapting their medical tools to designs suited to local preference for a specific style or craftsmanship, which were either familiar to them, and/or were deemed appropriate to their healing practices. Such a suggestion for the maintenance of localised traditions finds support in the unusual design of instruments found at Stanway, Essex, Britain, a rare set of medical objects from the early occupation of Roman Britain (Jackson 1997).

Not only are localised practices suggested by the unique design of some instruments, but the archaeological context of the medical tools is most indicative of the continuation of regional traditions. Noting where objects were discarded, as archaeologists and anthropologists have demonstrated in numerous studies, shows that social beliefs can be found in the treatment of objects, beliefs that are often not recorded in writing. The treatment of medical instruments can elucidate conceptions of social taboos and attitudes towards disease and objects associated with the body and the ill (Baker 2004).

Thirteen of the 19 Spanish sites were properly recorded and ten of those had instruments found in burials. Some sites had high numbers of instruments, such as Ampurias with 58 and La Cañada Honda with 55. It was uncommon to find personal objects in Roman burials in Italy, which tend to have two artefacts: lamps and coins, thought necessary for the journey to the underworld. Spanish Iron Age burials did, however, contain grave offerings, indicating that the practices were maintained into the Roman period, but with the native population now offering Roman-style objects.

Thus, from the treatment and the design of instruments, it seems as if those in Spain were not fully adopting Roman objects, but making them conform to their own designs and practices, some of which might have carried over from earlier periods. This preliminary research is now being taken further with examinations of healing sanctuaries dedicated to syncretic deities, such as the god Salus Umeritana. Inscriptions mentioning doctors will also be examined to see if the evidence further suggests a meshing of Roman and indigenous practices, which is indicated by the published remains of medical tools.

Acknowledgements

'Thanks goes to the British Academy for a Small Grant to undertake preliminary library research.

Works Cited

Allason-Jones, L. 1999. ‘Health Care in the Roman North,’ Britannia 31, 131-46.

Baker, P. 2004. ‘Roman Medical Instruments: Archaeological Interpretations of their Possible “Non-functional uses”,’ Journal of the Social History of Medicine, 17, 3-21.

Borobia, E. L. 1988. Instrumental Medico-quirurgico en la Hispania Romana. Madrid: Impresos Numancia.

Breitwieser, R. 1998. Medizin im römischen Österreich. Linz: Linzer Archäologische Forschungen.

Floriano, A. C. 1940/41. ‘Aportaciones Arqueologicas a la Historia de la Medicina Romana,’ Archivo Español de Arqueologia, 14, 415-33.

Fuentes Domínquez, Ángel 1987. ‘Instrumentos Romanos de Medicina en el Museo de Cuenca,’ Archivo Español de Archaeologia, 60, 251-74.

Hibbs, V. A. 1991. ‘Roman surgical and medical instruments from La Cañada Honda (Gandul),’ Archivo Español de Arqueologia, 64, 111-34.

Jackson, R. 1997. ‘An ancient British medical Kit from Stanway, Essex,’ The Lancet, 350 (9089), 1471-3.

King, H. 2001. Greek and Roman Medicine. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press.

Kleinman, A. 1980. Patients and healers in the context of culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Künzl, E. 1996. ‘Forschungsbericht zu den antiken medizinischen Instrumenten.’ Aufstieg und Niedergang der romischen Welt II, 37. 3,(W. Hasse and H. Temporini, eds.). Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2433-639.

Molina, M. 1981. ‘Instrumental Medico de Epoca Romana en el Museo Arqueologico Nacional (Madrid),’ Archivo Español de Arqueologia, 55, 255-62.

Oliva Prat, M. 1945. ‘Los Instrumentos de Cirugia de Bronce Procedetí de Ampurias,’ Memoires de los Museos Arqueologicos Provinciales, 6, 54-7, p. 56.

Oliva Prat, M. 1949. ‘Bronces de Cirugia Ampuritanos en el Museo de Gerona,’ Anales del Instituto de Estudios Gerunenses, 4, 186-93.

Oritz Palomar, M. E. 1998. ‘Mangoen bronce de escalpelo con representación de Hécules,’ Buletin Museo Zaragoza, 14, 203-12.

Sáenz de Buruaga José y J. García de Soto 1946. Nuevas Aportacioines al Estudio de la Necrópolis Oriental de Mérida, 19, 70-85.

Voinot, J. 1999. Les cachets à collyres dans le monde romain (Instrumentum 7; Editions Monique Mergoil.

A digital multitext can make it easier for readers to compare different versions of the Iliad; it can also enable new kinds of systematic, machine-assisted comparisons. For example: since we now have complete texts of the Venetus A and Venetus B manuscripts of the Iliad in the Homer Multitext project's Canonical Text Service, we can use the service's knowledge about the citation of each version to find the vertical variation between Venetus A and Venetus B (that is, what lines are present or absent in the two manuscripts).

The chart linked to this thumbnail image summarizes the variation book by book. The number of "plus" and "minus" verses are counted for each of the 24 books of the Iliad (the x axis); the dark blue section of a bar represents the number of lines that appear in A but not B; the light blue section represents the number of lines that appear in B but not A. (Phrased differently, if we are taking A as a reference text, and comparing B to it, we could say that the dark blue section represents "plus verses," and the light blue section represents "minus verses.")

Even a simple example like this creates a view of two manuscripts that would be prohibitively tedious to construct from print editions — and since there is no complete print edition of either Venetus A or Venetus B, would be impossible in any case. As we think about how to read and compare material in a digital multitext, we will have to go beyond our experience with print editions to rethink what it means to read and compare texts.

I'll reserve the subject of horizontal variation for another blog post.

Update: I've posted a slightly geekier but related discussion here.

The Probable Inventors of the First Alphabet:
Semites Functioning as rather High Status Personnel in a Component of the Egyptian Apparatus

Christopher Rollston

Introduction:

For some time, there has been discussion about the social status of those that developed (“invented”) Alphabetic Writing (i.e., elites or non-elites). Therefore, the nuanced discussion between O. Goldwasser (2010 and BAS web site) and A. Rainey (BAS web site) is the continuation of an old (and important) debate. Rainey contends that the inventors of the alphabet were sophisticated Northwest Semites that knew the Egyptian writing system. Goldwasser argues that the “inventors of the alphabet could not read Egyptian, neither Hieroglyphic nor Hieratic.”

As an Ausgangspunkt for these comments of mine, and to facilitate understanding for those not familiar with the data, I should like to reiterate certain factors that have formed the basic contours of the entire discussion for some time: (1) Non-Alphabetic Writing (i.e., Mesopotamian Cuneiform and Egyptian) is first attested for the terminal chronological horizons of the fourth millennium BCE. (2) The alphabet was invented once and this arguably occurred during the early second millennium BCE. All alphabets derive, in some fashion, from this original alphabet. (3) The script of the Early Alphabetic inscriptions is modeled on (certain aspects of) the Egyptian script, as Egyptologists have noted for some time (e.g., from Gardiner to Darnell). (4) The language of the Early Alphabetic inscriptions is Northwest Semitic, *not* Egyptian (e.g., ba‘lat).

I. Some Salient Moments in the Early History of the Early Alphabet:

Serabit Inscription

Research on the Early Alphabet began in earnest during the first two decades of the 20th century. Sir Flinders Petrie had discovered, in a temple in Serabit el-Khadem (in the Sinai), various Hieroglyphic inscriptions. However, he also discovered some inscriptions that he considered enigmatic. He initially referred to these inscriptions as a “local barbarism” (Gardiner 1906, 129-32). However, Gardiner soon began to analyze this corpus of inscriptions and he became convinced that the script was alphabetic, not some “local barbarism.” He rapidly made major strides forward in the decipherment of these inscriptions (often referred to as “Proto-Sinaitic”), based on his assumption that “the acrophonic principle” was operative. Moreover, he also argued that the intellectual soil that facilitated the invention was (certain aspects of) the ancient Egyptian writing system (Gardiner 1916, 1-16), including various Egyptian signs that represented single consonants. In addition, he became convinced that although these Early Alphabetic inscriptions “are not in Egyptian Hieroglyphic…many of the signs are obviously borrowed from that source” (Gardiner 1916, 14). Ultimately, based on the date of some of the Hieroglyphic inscriptions in the region of Serabit el-Khadem as well as the morphological similarities between these Early Alphabetic signs and certain Hieroglyphic signs, Gardiner stated that he believed that it was tenable to assign the alphabetic inscriptions to the latter portion of the Egyptian Twelfth Dynasty (i.e., early eighteenth century BCE. I provide more details in Rollston 2010). Several decades later, W.F. Albright made some significant progress regarding the history of the Early Alphabet, building on Gardiner’s seminal analyses (Albright 1966).

el-Hol Inscription

Through the years, F. M. Cross has also made fundamental contributions to the discussion of the history of the Early Alphabet (see Cross’s collected writings, Cross 2003). Furthermore, P. K. McCarter’s contributions have been particularly important (e.g., 1975, 1996) as well. Moreover, both B. Sass (1988) and G. Hamilton (2006; this publication by Hamilton was based on his Harvard dissertation, 1985) have contributed to the discussion. More recently, two alphabetic inscriptions discovered at Wadi el-Hol (Egypt) were published (J. Darnell, F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, M. Lundberg, P. K. McCarter, B. Zuckerman 2005) and it has been argued that these can be dated to the same basic chronological horizon as the Early Alphabetic texts from Serabit el-Khadem (although perhaps from a later component of that horizon). Significantly, J. Darnell (the Egyptologist that was part of the team working on the Wadi el-Hol Inscriptions) has argued that the Early Alphabetic inscriptions from Wadi el-Hol were modeled on Egyptian signs (i.e., his assessment was analogous to Gardiner’s analysis of the Serabit el-Hadem Inscriptions). Note the following citation in this regard: “What is most striking about the alphabetic texts from the Wadi el-Hol is how so many of the signs appear to reflect features and peculiarities best known from the paleographic, orthographic, and lapidary hieratic traditions of the early Middle Kingdom” (Darnell, et al., 2005, 86). Also of substantial import in this connection is the content of some of the Hieratic inscriptions discovered in Wadi el-Hol, inscriptions found near the Early Alphabetic inscriptions. Here is Darnell’s translation of the first four lines of one of these inscriptions: “The General of the Asiatics, Bebi; his daughter Maatherankheni; the Royal Messenger Bebi; The Express Courier Hornebkhasutemsaf” (Darnell, et al., 2005, 88, 102-103). Of course, the term “Asisatic” in Egyptian is a term used in Egyptian for Semites (especially those from the Levant). Darnell believes that the writers of the Early Alphabetic inscriptions of Wadi el-Hol were “not slaves,” but “desert experts” who learned Egyptian from “military scribes” (Darnell, et al., 2005, 90). Note that within a second Egyptian inscription from Wadi el-Hol are references to various officials, including a reference to “The Scribe of the storehouse of the mayor, Sawepwaut” (Darnell, et al., 104).

NOTE: The inscriptions from Wadi el-Hol and Serabit el-Khadem are pictographic in nature and employ a principle often referred to as the acrophonic principle. So, for example, one of the letters attested has the appearance of a human head. The word for a human head in Semitic is r ’å. This pictographic letter stood for the phoneme “r.” That is, because the first sound of the word for head (r ’å) is “r,” a pictographic depiction of a head was intended to signify the “r” sound. Similarly, the word for water in Semitic is mym. Therefore, this pictographic letter (that has, in some respects, the appearance of flowing water) stood for the phoneme “m.” That is, because the first sound of the word for water (mym) is “m,” a graphic depiction of water was intended to signify the “m” sound.

It should be emphasized strongly here that Early Alphabetic inscriptions are attested not only in Egypt, but also in Palestine (but from later periods). For example, an inscribed potsherd from Gezer dating to the Middle Bronze Age II (ca. 1800-1630 BCE) contains three early alphabetic letters. The Lachish Ewer is written in the Early Alphabetic script and dates to some time around the thirteenth century BCE. (Regarding the transition from Early Alphabetic to Phoenician, see Naveh 1987; Cross 2003; McCarter 1975, Rollston 2008a, 2008b; 2010).

II. Literacy in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean

For the ancient Near Eastern cultural centers of Mesopotamia and Egypt, literacy rates are estimated to be low and confined to elites (e.g., scribes, government officials, priests). To be precise, for Egypt, literacy rates are often estimated to be at ca. one-percent or lower, and confined to elites (see Baines and Eyre,1983, 65-96; note that even at Deir el-Medina it is elites that are writing). For Mesopotamia, Larsen believes that one-percent is also a reasonable figure (see Larsen, 1989, 121-148, esp. 134). There is a fair amount of data from Mesopotamia and Egypt about the nature of scribal education (schools, school texts, buildings, etc.) and I discuss these data at some length in a volume on writing and literacy in the world of ancient Israel (Rollston 2010).

Some have suggested that with the invention of the alphabet, literacy rates rapidly became quite high, with both elites and non-elites writing and reading (note: these two skills are related, but quite different). For example, during the middle of the twentieth century, W.F. Albright stated that “since the forms of the letters are very simple, the 22-letter alphabet could be learned in a day or two by a bright student and in a week or two by the dullest.” And he proceeded to affirm that he did “not doubt for a moment that there were many urchins in various parts of Palestine who could read and write as early as the time of the Judges” (Albright 1960, 123). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, R. Hess made similar statements. For example, regarding ancient Israel, he states that there is “continually increasing evidence for a wide variety of people from all walks of life who could read and write.” In addition, he states that he believes “the whole picture is consistent with a variety of [literate] classes and groups, not merely a few elites” (Hess 2006, passim 342-345). However, based on a detailed analysis of the Old Hebrew epigraphic evidence for Iron Age Israel, I have argued (2006; 2010) that literacy in Iron Age Israel was confined primarily to elites (e.g., scribes, high military officials, priests). That is, I do not believe that the non-elite masses could write and read (at least not beyond the most remedial of levels…and when they did attempt to do so, it is painfully apparent). The epigraphic evidence in Old Hebrew (i.e., the meticulous execution of the script, the synchronic consistency of orthography, the use of complicated hieratic numerals, etc.) demonstrates that there was formal, standardized education in Iron II Israel. Moreover, there was a strong distinction between the educated and the non-educated, with the masses falling into the second category (something even Ben Sira noted centuries after the rise of alphabetic scripts, Sira 38:24-39:11; 51:23; Rollston 2001). In addition, I. Young’s cogent analyses (1998a; 1998b) of the biblical evidence suggest the same thing: elites were the writers in ancient Israel. Of import in this connection is the fact that Greek is an alphabetic script (derived from the Phoenician script), but there is no decisive evidence that literacy of the populace in ancient Greece was the norm. Moreover, Latin is an alphabetic script as well, but there is no decisive evidence that literacy was the norm for the populace in ancient Italy. Rather, the evidence suggests that the vast majority of the population was not literate. Note, for example, that W. Harris (1989, 114, 267, 22) has argued that literacy rates in Attica were probably ca. five percent to ten percent and those in Italy were probably below fifteen percent (note: within this volume [passim], Harris has cogently critiqued those that have proposed high(er) rates of literacy). Therefore, I contend that high levels of literacy are not a necessary correlative of the presence of an alphabetic writing system.

Goldwasser affirms (following in the footsteps of Albright) that “with the alphabet, writing broke out of the ‘golden cage’ of the professional scribal world,” and she contends that “alphabetic writing gave many more people control over their lives and enabled larger segments of the population to take a more active role in the cultural and administrative affairs of their respective societies” (Goldwasser 2010, 41). This is a marvelous notion, but I view it mostly a perpetuation of the older, romantic notions about literacy levels and the alphabet. Note that rather than positing rapid proficiency in alphabetic writing and literacy, recent empirical studies for modern languages have delineated developmental phases (“stages”) in the process of word-reading and word-spelling. Ehri summarizes these stages in broad terms as follows: (1) Prealphabetic; (2) Partial alphabetic; (3) Full alphabetic; (4) Consolidated alphabetic. The first stage applies to “prereaders who operate with nonalphabetic information because they know little about the alphabetic system.” The second stage applies to “novice beginners who operate with rudimentary knowledge of some letter-sound relations.” The third level applies to students who “possess more complete knowledge involving grapheme-phoneme units and how these units form words.” The fourth level “applies to more advanced students who have knowledge of letter patterns as well as grapheme-phoneme units” (Ehri 1997, 240; 253-256). Moreover, it has been argued on the basis of these empirical studies that for children to become proficient in a modern writing system (i.e., their first writing system) a few years are normally required, not a few days or weeks (Ehri 2002, 7-28; Henderson 1985). Of course, it is readily apparent that emergent writing is often attested within “initial” periods of instruction, but proficiency (e.g., capacity to produce “documents” with minimal orthographic errors, and with the letters reflecting accurate morphology and stance as well as standard relative size) requires substantial time (see also D. L. Share and I. Levin 1999; P. H. K. Seymour 2005). Arguably, literacy rates were higher in ancient societies using an alphabetic writing system than in those using a non-alphabetic writing system (because the non-alphabetic systems are more difficult). But my point is this: literacy of the masses is not a necessary correlative of the presence of alphabetic writing (regarding a definition of literacy, see Rollston 2010, 127-128 et passim). Basically, literacy continued to be something associated with elites, even after the rise of alphabetic writing. Therefore, I would contend that the inventors of the alphabet were also members of officialdom and literate (i.e., capable of writing and reading Egyptian texts) and that this literacy was a precipitating factor in their ability to invent the alphabet.

III. The Inventors of the Alphabet: Varia

O. Goldwasser (2010) contends that the inventors of the alphabet were illiterate. She focuses heavily on the Serabit el-Hadem inscriptions. Here are some of her statements. “The [Egyptian] turquoise expeditions to Serabit brought together high officials, scribes, priests, architects, physicians, magicians, scorpion charmers, interpreters, caravan leaders, donkey drivers, miners, builders, soldiers, and sailors” (Goldwasser 2010, 39). She also states that “some high officials who left inscriptions at the Serabit temple present themselves as Egyptians, yet they also mention that they are Asiatic in origin, or have an Asiatic mother.” In addition, she notes that “the expedition lists at Serabit also contain the names of many ‘interpreters’” (Goldwasser 2010, 40). She affirms that the bottom line is that “there were surely many more Canaanites at Serabit than are listed as such in the Hieroglyphic inscriptions at the site.” Furthermore, she notes that “Nowhere in the many inscriptions at the site is there a mention of slaves. Canaanites, yes; slaves, no” (Goldwasser 2010, 40). She believes that the inventors of the alphabet were Canaanite and even argues that we may even know the names of these inventors of the alphabet: “They apparently emerged from among the circle of one Khebeded. He is mentioned in several Egyptian Hieroglyphic inscriptions at the site and is referred to as the ‘Brother of the Ruler of Retenu’” (Goldwasser 2010, 45), with Retenu being a means of referring to the southern Levant. She also affirms that “It is clear that this ‘Khebeded, brother of the Ruler of Retenu’ is a Canaanite” (Goldwasser 2010, 45). She contends that “Khebeded was involved with Egyptian expeditions to Serabit for more than a decade” and she argues that “he is clearly the highest-ranking Canaanite who left a Hieroglyphic inscription in the Serabit temple. He was probably a leader of the Canaanite workforce.” She contends that “the quality of the Hieroglyphs in an inscription that Khebeded added on a stela…is very poor.” She also states that “his inscription on Stela 92 would have been an embarrassment for an educated Egyptian scribe….(his) Hieroglyphic signs [are of] different sizes and crammed next to each other, and vacant spaces appear at the end of the line. But the Hieroglyphic pictograms in Stela 92 bear a remarkable resemblance to the signs in the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions” (Goldwasser 2010, 46). She also states that “it may seem strange, but I believe the inventors of the alphabet were illiterate—that is, they could not read Egyptian with its hundreds of Hieroglpyic signs.” She then queries: “Why do I think so?” and then answers herself: “The letters in the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are very crude. They are not the same size. They are not written in a single direction….this suggests that the writers had mastered neither Egyptian Hieroglyphic nor any other complex, rule-governed script” (Goldwasser 2010, 44). An additional piece of her argument is her contention that the “Canaanite inventors of the alphabet ” unwittingly conflated two Egyptian signs for snakes into a single alphabetic sign for /n/ (Semitic: “nahash,” i.e., “snake”) and this “confirms their ignorance of the meaning of the Egyptian Hieroglyphs.”

At this juncture, a summary of Goldwasser’s argument is in order. She believes that at Serabit there were high officials, including scribes. She mentions that the names of many “interpreters” are present. She believes that there were Canaanites at Serabit el-Khadem. She does not believe that the Canaanites were slaves. She mentions that some of the high officials that left Egyptian inscriptions were Asiatic (i.e., Canaanite). She notes that among the Canaanites was one man named Khebeded and she notes that he was the “brother of the Ruler of Retenu.” She states that the “inventors of the alphabet….apparently emerged from among the circle of Khebeded.” She states that Khebeded was involved with Egyptian expeditions to Serabit for more than a decade. She states that he is a high ranking Canaanite and that he left a Hieroglyphic inscription in the Serabit temple. She indicates that the quality of his Egyptian penmanship is “very poor, an embarrassment for an educated Egyptian scribe.” She affirms that the letters in the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are very crude. She even contends that between Khebeded’s inscription on stela 92 and the signs in the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions there is a “remarkable resemblance.” But in spite of all of this, Goldwasser concludes that “I believe the inventors of the alphabet were illiterate—that is, they could not read Egyptian” (Goldwasser 2010, 43). Striking however, is the fact that she has actually made a good case for precisely the reverse. Namely, she has made a case for the fact that the inventors of the alphabet were Canaanite, that they were part of the circle associated with a high ranking Canaanite official named Khebeded, who was the brother of the Ruler of Retenu. Furthermore, she contends that he himself wrote a Hieroglyphic inscription and the poor penmanship of that inscription shows striking similarity to the script of the alphabetic inscriptions from Serabit. That is, basically she has made a case for contending that the inventor(s) of the alphabet were Canaanite, that this (or these) Canaanites functioned in official circles and that at least some of them were literate in Egyptian (even if not capable of writing the script with good penmanship!). Finally, regarding the presumed combination of two Egyptian signs for two different kinds of snakes into a single alphabetic sign (that signified the phoneme /n/, from “nahash” “snake”), I would simply state that this could just as readily be understood as a conscious decision (after all, through time, humans often combine two similar entities, for any number of reasons, especially within the realm of language).

Basically, I have thought for a number of years now that the cumulative weight of the evidence suggests that: (1) the Muttersprache of the inventors of the alphabet was a Northwest Semitic language, (2) and that the inventors of the alphabet functioned in a reasonably high status role within a component (or components) of the Egyptian administrative apparatus, that is, officialdom. (3) I believe that it is reasonable and tenable to argue that they learned Egyptian writing from Egyptian scribes. (4) I contend that it would be improbable that illiterate miners were capable of, or responsible for, the invention of the alphabet. (5) Ultimately, writing in antiquity was an elite venture and those that invented the alphabet were Northwest Semitic speakers, arguably they were officials in the Egyptian apparatus, quite capable with the complex Egyptian writing system. This, I believe, best accounts for the maximum amount of data.

Bibliography

Albright, W. F.

1960 Discussion. Pp. 94-123 in City Invincible: A Symposium on Urbanization and Cultural Development in the Ancient Near East, eds. C. H. Kraeling and R. M. Adams. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1966 The Proto-Sinaitic Inscriptions and their Decipherment. Harvard Theological Studies 22. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Baines, J., and Eyre, C. J.

1983 Four Notes on Literacy. Göttinger Miszellen 62: 65-96.

Cross, F. M.

2003 Leaves from An Epigrapher’s Notebook: Collected Papers in Hebrew and West Semitic Palaeography and Epigraphy. Harvard Semitic Studies 51. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns.

Darnell, J. C., Dobbs-Allsopp, F. W., Lundberg, M. J., McCarter, P. K., Zuckerman, B.

2005 Two Early Alphabetic Inscriptions from Wadi el-Hôl. Pp. 63-124 in The Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 59. Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research.

Ehri, L.

1997 Learning to Read and Learning to Spell are One and the Same, Almost. Pp. 237-69 in Learning to Spell: Research, Theory, and Practice across Languages, eds. C. A. Perfetti, L. Rieben, and M. Fayol. Mahway: Erlbaum.

2002 Phases of Acquisition in Learning to Read Words and Implications for Teaching. Pp. 7-28 in Learning and Teaching Reading, eds. R. Stainthorp and R. Thomlinson. British Journal of Educational Psychology: Monograph Series 1. Leicester: British Psychological Society.

Gardiner, A. H.

1906 Serabit. Pp. 129-32 in Researches in Sinai, ed. W. M. Flinders Petrie. London.

1916 The Egyptian Origin of the Semitic Alphabet. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 3: 1-16.
Goldwasser, O.

2010 How the Alphabet was Born from Hieroglyphs. Biblical Archaeology Review 36/2 (March-April): 36-50, 74.
Hamilton, G. J.

2006 Origins of the West Semitic Alphabet in Egyptian Scripts. Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series 40. Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association.

Harris, W. V.

1989 Ancient Literacy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Hess, R. S.

2006 Writing about Literacy: Abecedaries and Evidence for Literacy in Ancient Israel. Vetus Testamentum 56: 342-346.

Larsen, M. T.

1989 What They Wrote on Clay. Pp. 121-148 in Literacy and Society, eds. K. Schousboe and M. T. Larsen. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag.

McCarter, P. Kyle, Jr.

1975 The Antiquity of the Greek Alphabet. Harvard Semitic Monographs 9. Missoula, MT: Scholars Press.

1996 Ancient Inscriptions: Voices from the Biblical World. Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society.

Naveh, J.

1987 Early History of the Alphabet: An Introduction to West Semitic Epigraphy and Palaeography. 2nd ed. Jerusalem: Magnes.

Rollston, C. A.

2001 Ben Sira 38:24-39:11 and the Egyptian Satire of the Trades: A Reconsideration. Journal of Biblical Literature 120: 131-139.

2006 Scribal Education in Ancient Israel: The Old Hebrew Epigraphic Evidence. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 344: 47-74.

2008a The Pheonician Script of the Tel Zayit Abecedary and Putative Evidence for Israelite Literacy. Pp. 61-96 in Literature Culture and Tenth-Century Canaan: The Tel Zayit Abecedary in Context, eds. Ron E. Tappy and P. Kyle McCarter: Eisenbrauns.

2008b The Dating of the Early Royal Byblian (Phoenician): A Response to Benjamin Sass. Maarav 15: 57-93.

2010 Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel: Epigraphic Evidence from the Iron Age. Archaeology and Biblical Studies 11, Tammi Schneider, Editor. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.

Sass, B.

1988 The Genesis of the Alphabet and Its Development in the Second Millenium B.C. Ägypten und Altes Testament 13. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Seymour, P. H. K.

2005 Early Reading Development in European Orthographies. Pp. 296-315 in The Science of Reading: A Handbook, eds. M. J. Snowling and C. Hulme. Oxford: Blackwell.

Share, D. L., and Levin, I.

1999 Learning to Read and Write in Hebrew. Pp. 89-111 in Learning to Read and Write: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective, eds. M. Harris and G. Hatano. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Young, I. M.

1998a Israelite Literacy: Interpreting the Evidence Part I. Vetus Testamentum 48: 239-253.

1998b Israelite Literacy: Interpreting the Evidence, Part II. Vetus Testamentum 48: 408-422.

I’ve posted previously about my love for the new content-aware fill and healing brush features in Photoshop CS5. I’ve had some time now to work with them, and I have a bit more knowledge about what works well and what doesn’t. Of course, there are many tutorials online that have great examples; but what if you want to do something a bit more challenging? I’ve had an image I’ve wanted to improve for years now - since 2004. It’s a photo of Shiprock on the Navajo rez in NW New Mexico. Here it is: If you look closely, you’ll see the image is marred by a fencepost as well as a series of high-capacity power lines. (I admit, they are harder to see at this smaller resolution - but they are there if you look for them.) Anyway, I increased the resolution of the image and used the content-aware fill feature to address the power lines. I also did a bit of work on the fencing, but addressed that primarily through cropping and re-compositioning the image. Here’s the end result: The content-aware fill feature works remarkably well in some environments, but not necessarily with the dramatic gradations of these storm clouds. I was able to make it work though by selecting and filling smaller sections, and then using the healing brush tool to blend the modifications. In the end - and at a screen resolution - I think it works well. And, I think the content-aware feature is still amazing. But it doesn’t magically fix any photo as some Web content would have you believe : )

I’ve posted previously about my love for the new content-aware fill and healing brush features in Photoshop CS5. I’ve had some time now to work with them, and I have a bit more knowledge about what works well and what doesn’t. Of course, there are many tutorials online that have great examples; but what if you want to do something a bit more challenging? I’ve had an image I’ve wanted to improve for years now - since 2004. It’s a photo of Shiprock on the Navajo rez in NW New Mexico. Here it is: If you look closely, you’ll see the image is marred by a fencepost as well as a series of high-capacity power lines. (I admit, they are harder to see at this smaller resolution - but they are there if you look for them.) Anyway, I increased the resolution of the image and used the content-aware fill feature to address the power lines. I also did a bit of work on the fencing, but addressed that primarily through cropping and re-compositioning the image. Here’s the end result:   The content-aware fill feature works remarkably well in some environments, but not necessarily with the dramatic gradations of these storm clouds. I was able to make it work though by selecting and filling smaller sections, and then using the healing brush tool to blend the modifications. In the end - and at a screen resolution - I think it works well. And, I think the content-aware feature is still amazing. But it doesn’t magically fix any photo as some Web content would have you believe : ) I’ll add this image to my gallery collection which is now active and accessibly via my web site and this blog.

I came across an interesting claim online yesterday:

…[there] are 45 ancient sources of Jesus within 150 years of His death. Nobody even comes close to this. Tiberius who died just 4 years after Jesus did only had 9 sources within 150 years of his death.

This seems to be based on this:

Dr. Gary Habermas and Michael Licona write:

“What we have concerning Jesus actually is impressive. We can start with approximately nine traditional authors of the New Testament. If we consider the critical thesis that other authors wrote the pastoral letters and such letters as Ephesians and 2 Thessalonians, we’d have an even larger number. Another twenty early Christian authors and four heretical writings mention Jesus within 150 years of his death on the cross. Moreover, nine secular, non-Christian sources mention Jesus within the 150 years: Josephus, the Jewish historian; Tacitus, the Roman historian; Pliny the Younger, a politician of Rome; Phlegon, a freed slave who wrote histories; Lucian, the Greek satirist; Celsus, a Roman philosopher; and probably the historians Suetonius and Thallus, as well as the prisoner Mara Bar-Serapion. In all, at least forty-two authors, nine of them secular, mention Jesus within 150 years of his death.” 6

“…Let’s look at an even better example, a contemporary of Jesus. Tiberius Caesar was the Roman emperor at the time of Jesus’ ministry and execution. Tiberius is mentioned by ten sources within 150 years of his death: Tacitus, Suetonius, Velleius Paterculus, Plutarch, Pliny the Elder, Strabo, Seneca, Valerius Maximus, Josephus, and Luke. Compare that to Jesus’ forty-two total sources in the same length of time. That’s more than four times the number of total sources who mention the Roman emperor during roughly the same period. If we only considered the number of secular non-Christian sources who mention Jesus and Tiberius within 150 years of their lives, we arrive at a tie of nine each 7 .” 8

6. Gary R. Habermas and Michael Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids MI : Kregel Publications, 2004) 127.
7. Tiberius’s number reduces from ten to nine since Luke is a Christian source.
8. Gary R. Habermas and Michael Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids MI : Kregel Publications, 2004) 128.

By “sources” the authors mean “literary sources”, of course.  Emperors have their heads and names on coins and inscriptions.  Jesus, on the other hand, is known to us only from literary sources.  But unless we propose to take the position that there only people whose existence is certain are those important enough to appear in inscriptions, we must compare like with like, and ask, “If this person was known only from literary sources, how many such sources would there be?”

I admit I was astonished by the low number for Tiberius.  Can it be right? 

Cassius Dio, writing after 193 AD, is excluded by the 150 year window.  I presume the authors must also mean “sources that name Tiberius”, for Juvenal, in his 10th satire, refers to him, although not by name. 

I suspect that if we searched a bit further, we might find a few more.  In the great mass of Greek technical and medical literature, untranslated and inaccessible to most people, which makes up a much larger proportion of extant literature than most of us suppose, there is probably something.

But of course all the references to Jesus, however obscure, have been pulled into the light.  Jesus was probably the most important figure of antiquity to those in modern times.  Tiberius was only an emperor.

It is quite something when the master of the Roman world in the time when Jesus walked on earth is “only an emperor”, known from a handful of sources.  If it’s true, of course.

UPDATE:  Aulus Gellius, in book 5 of the Attic Nights, mentions Tiberius by name, so this list by Habermas etc is indeed not a complete one.  Indeed the list of authors seems lacking in second century sources.

UPDATE:   I’m looking at the old TLG E disk, using Diogenes, and doing a search on TIBERI (not checked dates on all these).  I get 1015 matches, but most are Byzantine and so much too late.

1. Athenaeus, Deipnosophists, book 2, paragraph 39, 20.
2. Philo, In Flaccum, in quite a few places.  Also Legatio ad Gaium.
3. Galen Medicus, De compositione medicamentorum per genera libri vii Volume 13, page 836, line 8
4. Lucianus Soph., Macrobii Section 21, line 10
5. Strabo Geogr., Testimonia Volume-Jacobyʹ-T 2a,91,T, fragment 1, line 1
6. Acta Alexandrinorum, Acta Alexandrinorum Chapter 5b, column or fragment 1, line 17  (I think we will accept this)
7. Flavius Josephus Hist., Antiquitates Judaicae Book 19, chapter 303, line 2, book 20, c. 159
8. Claudius Aelianus Soph., De natura animalium Book 2, section 11, line 28
9. Clemens Alexandrinus Theol., Stromata Book 1, chapter 21, section 145, subsection 2, line 3
10. Publius Aelius Phlegon Paradox., De mirabilibus Chapter 13, section 1, line 1, ch. 14, and in the fragments of his works.
11. Justin Martyr, Apologia c. 13
12. Vettius Valens Astrol., Anthologiarum libri ix  Page 32, line 25 – an astrologer d. 175 AD.  There is a translation project for him here.  Book 9 is here but incomplete.

I’m ignoring the ps.Clementine literature as too late.

UPDATE: Quintillian, Institutio Oratorica, book 3, mentions Tiberius.  Phaedrus, Aesop’s Fables, book 2, poem 5, mentions him.

Returning to blogging after my summer hiatus, I turn my attention to three people revolving around the constellation of paranormal archaeology: Bill Caraher's Dream Archaeology, my great uncle Tanagras and my colleague at F&M anthropologist Misty Bastian.If you remember, a couple of years ago Yannis Hamilakis wrote on the relationship between modern (objective) and premodern (less objective)

A post on an important subject:

For the first time in our Christian lives we experienced the total despair of essentially giving up and not going anywhere for almost six or seven months. And I didn’t miss it. I didn’t miss the clueless worship, lack of Bible, historical ignorance, Great Commission absence or lack of community. If your church has no community, then staying home on Sunday isn’t much different from going on Sunday morning except for the lack of driving and going through the motions in a service that grates on you from beginning to end as people ignore you on the way in and the way out. I can’t justify not going – I know the commandment and I know I was not keeping it, but I didn’t see any way to keep it and stay sane.

This is very well put.  I myself had that experience 25 years ago, after a serious illness.  I have never been a regular church-goer since, although I remain a committed Christian.  Not because I do not want to be; but because I could not afford the drain of strength from non-church any longer.  I would gladly support a church  that supported me.  As it is, my giving goes to St Andrew the Great in Cambridge, where I received the only help that I have received in all that time since.

This experience must be commonplace.  Is there some way, I wonder, for all us Christians who can’t face the non-churches, yet remain faithful, to link up somehow?

Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, has called for "raw data now"; in a TED talk this spring, he showed examples of what can happen when people have access to openly licensed and freely reusable data sets.

The American Philological Association thinks the internet is a gated community. The lead story on the APA's website is the continuing effort to raise funds for a "portal" that will help members find resources available only to subscribers.

Compare Berners-Lee's talk (freely licensed so I can legally embed it in this blog post), with the APA's video presentation of its campaign (from the APA website either in Quicktime or Windows Media format). Which vision of sharing scientific and scholarly data do you see as the future of Classics?

The sun is shining, the sky is blue, and in a minute I shall venture out!  It’s the holiday weekend. Time for us all to get away from the keyboard!

 

I’ve been really unwell this week, so all my projects are on hold.  Fortunately, for most of them, the ball is in someone else’s court.

One project has been abandoned.  The translation of the remains of Polychronius’ commentary on Daniel will not go ahead.  The translator has decided to write an academic article around what he found.  I am entirely in favour of academic publication, and I never had a strong attachment to this one anyway.

The translation of letters of Isidore of Pelusium is proceeding.  I still need to pass the translation of the first 14 letters in front of  a reviewer’s eyes, but this will happen when I feel somewhat better.

There’s a bit of confusion about how to handle one set of fragments of Philip of Side, coming from the Religionsgesprach text, a fictional dialogue set at the court of the Sassanids.  It turns out that more than half of it has been translated.  This raises the question of whether we may as well translate the lot anyway, and then make that available (plus excerpts to complete the Philip text).  I need to do some calculations to work out what that should cost, but I’m not fit to do so just yet.

The British Library Catalogue-in-Progress book block for the Eusebius book arrived today.  Also a note from the Coptic translator that corrections from that source will be delayed. 

Next week I am due to go to the Patristics Conference in Durham.  I’d like to meet potential customers for the book, and also potential translators for future projects.  But of course I need to be fit, which at the moment I’m not.  And after that, I do need to go and find a job that earns money.  Not for the first time, I could wish that I had been born wealthy. 

I just had a paper accepted by the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, and I want to mention the very insightful and helpful reviews of my paper. We all have horror stories of clueless reviewers: reviewers who are uniformed about the topic at hand, those who have a theoretical or other axe to grind and take it out on hapless authors, reviewers more interested in showing off their erudition than in addressing the paper, etc. etc. But all five of the reviews for this paper were useful and insightful. Several were quite long, with detailed discussions of ways to improve the paper, complete with bibliographies. I stick my neck out on a potentially polarizing theoretical issue. Most of the reviewers were in substantial agreement with my stand, but one took the opposite position. The latter reviewer, however, made some reasoned arguments and useful suggestions without getting bogged down in posturing or trying to prove a point.

 Reviewing manuscripts for journals takes a lot of time and effort. Although one is often tempted to turn down reviews when one is busy, active scholars should be reviewing lots of manuscripts for journals. I saw a quantitative analysis once (I think it was in the journal Nature) concluding that an active researcher should review each year six times the number of papers he or she publishes. If one assumes that each manuscript gets reviewed by three people, and that the overall acceptance rate in a field is 50%, then every published journal article requires six reviews. After reading that study I have found it harder to turn down requests to review for journals.

So hats off to Catherine Cameron and James Skibo, Co-Editors of JAMT. They found good reviewers, who wrote excellent reviews -- excellent meaning insightful and helpful, not laudatory. And hats off to the anonymous reviewers also.

This post is written under UK government restrictions on discussing homosexuality.

Premier Christian Radio reports today:

Preacher’s trial over homosexuality comments adjourned.  While standing as an independent election candidate in Colchester Paul Shaw distributed leaflets on which he stated homosexual acts should be made illegal.

Christian Quoter tells us:

Colchester Magistrates today agreed to adjourn the case of Christian brother, Paul Shaw, … [who] said:

“I believe for example that homosexual and lesbian acts are immoral and that the law should reflect that; by making them unlawful as they once were; and so acting as a deterrent to such behaviour. The concept of homophobia is nonsense and a play on words; it is not and has never been a phobia! A phobia is an un-natural fear; whereas a rejection of perverse behaviour; is a righteous godly fear; that fears to do wrong because it knows that there are consequences and punishment otherwise! This is the most pronounced example of a nation that has lost its way …”

It was the Crown Prosecutor who applied for an adjournment. This was in order, he said, to consider the case in the light of freedom of speech. The Magistrate, District Judge David Cooper, agreed.

A further article in Pink News (why is there no Christian comment on this?) says he was arrested on June 11th, and is known around the town as a street preacher.  eChurch Christian Blog tells us that Shaw was denounced to the police earlier in the year.  The Chelmsford Weekly News has the same story:

District judge David Cooper told him: “You said you were spreading God’s word and when interviewed you said children needed to be protected and basically, homosexuals and lesbians should repent and ask for God’s forgiveness.”

Mr Shaw claimed that there would be “terrible consequences” if homosexuality was not made illegal again soon and warned that God’s judgment was “not very far away”.

He refused to be bound over to keep the peace, which is a criminal conviction. Instead, he said: “In four years, I’ve only dealt with homosexuality about twice. I have to act in good conscience, I’m afraid, and I think [homosexuality] is a particularly significant thing for this nation at this time.” The case was dismissed as the prosecution could offer no written evidence from complainants and Mr Shaw argued his right to free speech.

Mr Cooper warned him that further complaints could land him back in court and said: “There are other sorts of ‘sins’. Do you think you could concentrate on those for a bit?”

Shaw is now due for trial on 23rd September. 

I suspect from all this that Mr Cooper is a sensible chap who finds himself wondering why on earth he is being asked to decide what people are allowed to say, and why people can’t just get along.   But of course this is the front-line of a political war, and not a court matter at all.  One side has managed to get a law passed, allowing it to lock up the other for expressing an opinion.  So it was in the days of the State Trials, of evil memory.

At the bottom of the Pink News article is another article on a preacher arrested in May 2010.  And on March 18th an American preacher in Glasgow was arrested.

I finish this account of religious persecution and interference with free speech with a link to a columnist for the Independent, one of the major UK national newspapers, on The Slow Whining Death of British Christianity, abusing Christians in the most hateful terms possible, for daring to complain of persecution.  It reads like something from Der Sturmer.

Let us pray for the United Kingdom, for God’s mercy upon it, and also upon the persecutors, maddened by their vice and swollen with the arrogance that comes from believing oneself powerful.  No good consequence comes of such things, except for the church itself.  We might also read what Tertullian wrote to Scapula, in time of persecution.

A nice article (also available as pdf) in the news section of the recently-revamped Archaeological Institute of America website introduces the Museum of Anthropology Online Artifact Database at Wake Forest University (Winston-Salem, NC).

“The Museum of Anthropology’s collections of approximately 28,000 archaeological and ethnographic objects represent ancient and contemporary traditional non-Western cultures from around the world. … The collections are used for teaching university and K–12 students, in public outreach, for long-term exhibits and loans to other institutions, and are the basis of scholarly publications and academic theses.”

“Three successive grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ Museums for America program funded the three phases of this digital database project. The purpose of Phase 1 was to create a new computerized database of the Museum of Anthropology’s collections of archaeological and ethnographic objects so that the staff and public could access useful and accurate records of all objects quickly and effectively.”

“In Phase 2 we updated the computerized database and integrated photos of objects so that staff and members of the public were able to access accurate records and images of all objects quickly and effectively though the web, using Visual Re:discovery for Internet software.”

“The overall goal of Phase 3 was to provide broad public access through the web to cataloguing information and digital images for the archival collection.”

At first sight, this database is easy to navigate. The entries have good photos, the descriptive text is to the point, short but complete. The browse function is a little odd, e.g., when using “Iraq” as a country, it shows the results for “Irian Jaya (Indonesia),” the next country category alphabetically after the absent Iraq… Overall though, a nice online database it is.

Some quick hits on a windy, but sunny Friday morning:

• Some really cool imaginings of what a new American currency could look like here.
• Tim Caromody is both really smart and increasingly ubiquitous.  Here are his thoughts on reading revolutions and here are his thoughts on the so-called Philadelphia blogging tax.
• This is a perfect page to look at while listening to the punk rock.  Great photos.
• Some thoughtful and careful research on why academics blog.
• 4Chan is pretty wild.
• Go and check out Teaching Thursday this week to find what OID will be to next year.  And while you're at it follow us on Twitter.
• What I am listening to: X, Los Angeles.
• What I am reading: Michael Azarrad, Our Band Could be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground.

I have quite a few academic books, mostly about Tertullian, which I know that I will never look at again.  I’d like to sell these off and get rid of them — they’re occupying space I require for other purposes — but how?

Suggestions welcome!