Electra Atlantis: Digital Approaches to Antiquity

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

Filed under: Uncategorized

AP has this excellent news:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You should follow us on Twitter here.

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

RSM

Alpheios

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

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

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

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

Alpheios Enhanced Texts

Latin

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

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

Greek

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

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

    Grammar required:

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

    Verbs: present tense, active and middle; present imperatives

    Pronouns: personal pronouns, interrogatives

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

    Grammar required:

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

    Pronouns: relative pronoun

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

    Grammar required:

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

    Adjectives: comparison of adjectives

    Participles: genitive absolute

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

    Grammar required:

    Verbs: subjunctive mood; future and aorist passive

    Indirect Statement

• Homer
  • Odyssey - Book 1

Other Texts

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

• Perseus at Alpheios
• The Latin Library
• Bibliotheca Augustana

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Indian Epigraphy

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

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

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

COLLECTIONS OF SANSKRIT EPIGRAPHY

ORISSA- ANDHRA INSCRIPTIONS

COLLECTIONS OF EARLY INSCRIPTIONS SYSTEMATISED BY FINDPLACES

USEFULL PUBLICATIONS

INSCRIPTIONS OF ASHOKA

Start: 2010-07-15

End: 2010-07-16

Timezone: Europe/Rome

Start: 2010-07-15

End: 2010-07-16

Timezone: Europe/Rome

Location: 

International Digital Laboratory, University of Warwick, UK

Reference URL: 

http://www.interface2010.org.uk/

InterFace is a new type of annual non-profit event. Based on the format of last year's successful forum at the University of Southampton, this year follows in the same footsteps: part conference, part forum, part networking opportunity. The conference aims to bring PhD students, early postdocs and other early researchers together from the fields of Technologies and the Humanities in order to foster cutting-edge collaboration. Delegates can also expect to receive illuminating talks from experts, presentations on successful interdisciplinary projects and on how to succeed as academics.

For further information, please visit the conference website: http://www.interface2010.org.uk

CHNM’s Omeka team is reaching for the clouds. After more than a year of planning and development, we are very pleased to announce the impending arrival of Omeka.net, a hosted web service that will bring standards-based online collections and exhibitions to the internet cloud. Be first in line for an invitation to try the free Omeka.net Alpha, including a special bundle of plugins, themes, and storage, when it launches in April.

Omeka.net will expand Omeka’s current offerings with a completely web-based service. No server or programming experience required. Similar to services offered by WordPress, the popular open-source blogging software, with the launch of Omeka.net users will be able to sign up for a free hosted Omeka site. Just create a username and password, and your online collection or exhibition is up and running.

This new hosted web service will further the Omeka project’s mission to make collections-based online publishing more accessible to small cultural heritage institutions, individual scholars, enthusiasts, educators, and students.

With Omeka.net, your online exhibit is one click away.

Sign up today.

Cross-posted at http://omeka.net

An oldish article in Wired on Niall Ferguson:

What if the great events in history had turned out differently? How would the world today be changed?

Niall Ferguson wonders about this a lot. He’s a well-known economic historian at Harvard, and a champion of “counterfactual thinking,” or the re-imagining of major historical events, with the variables slightly tweaked. In a 1999 book Virtual Histories, Ferguson edited a collection of delightfully weird counterfactual hypotheses. One essay argued that if Mikhail Gorbachev had never existed, the USSR would still exist today. Another posited an alternative 18th century in which Britain allows its colonies to develop their own parliaments — so the Americans never revolt, and the USA never exists.

The essays were fun, but Ferguson really craved a more holodeck-like experience. He wanted to have a computer simulation that would let him set up historical counterfactuals — based on real-world facts — and then sit back to see what happens. “I was always thinking that one day the right technology would come into my life,” he told me.

Last year, it finally did. Ferguson was approached by Muzzy Lane, a game company that had created Making History — a game where players run World War II scenarios based on exhaustively researched economic realities of the period.

Read More http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/commentary/games/2007/05/gamefrontiers_0521#ixzz0hmpiMi5W

Ferguson’s own thoughts on the game were published in the New York Magazine:

To say that I’m interested in World War II would be an understatement. For the past few years, I have been toiling to write its history, skulking in my study and neglecting my children in the process. In theory, games like Medal of Honor ought to have helped our family to reconnect when I finally emerged from my books. But no. Unfortunately—and to the disappointment of my sons—I hate them. And that’s despite the fact that I sincerely believe computer games have a potentially revolutionary role to play in the teaching of history.

I’ll go further. There’s never been a more important time for people to play World War II games. For the last five years, politicians from the president down have been recycling the rhetoric of that conflict. September 11 was “a day of infamy.” Saddam/Ahmadinejad/Kim Jong Il is the new Hitler. And yet few of these politicians seem to have any real understanding of the strategic risks involved in global conflict

Read more: What World War II Video Games Could Teach Us About North Korea and Iran — New York Magazine http://nymag.com/news/features/22787/#ixzz0hmqZKVDw

It’s not fashionable to claim to learn lessons from history, but….?

I think I’ve posted on this article before, but maybe not. With my upcoming talk, it seemed appropriate to post it again if I did.

I keep thinking about abandonment in both modern and ancient contexts and wondering why (and to a lesser extent whether) there seems to be a recent upswing in public interest in abandonment. I've written elsewhere about the work of such photographers as Yves Marchand and Romain Meffree, Camio Jose Vergara (via Kostis Kourelis) and James D. Griffioen (we can now add (thanks to Ryan Stander, Jeff Brouws, and thanks to Aaron Barth, Brian Herbel), and from closer to home the folks at Ghosts of North Dakota and the haunting 2008 Nation Geographic article "The Emptied Prairie"). I've contributed my own fuel to the fire by co-chairing a panel at the 2007 Archaeological Institute of America which focused on abandonment in the archaeological record.

In a forthcoming article (yes, I know...) in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology, I argue, among other things, that abandonment, in its many guises, served as a chronological marker for the end of something. Typically, the something was the abandoned building or object or space, and since archaeology tends to plot the rise and fall of civilizations (in its crudest forms) according to the life history of objects, buildings, and spaces, the abandonment of such things typically serve to mark out the end of a particular culture or period of time. Thus, abandonments are central to the way in which we create historical and chronological periods from the events of the past. Abandonment helps us organize time.

There is an inevitability to abandonment which evokes tragedy. Despite the best intentions of humanity, time (as an active agent) inevitably takes its toll on human constructions and brings them down. In these formulations, abandonment brings to the fore both the power of nature and the folly of human ambition. What I am more interested in, however, is whether our current focus on abandonment is meant to bring about and mark out the end of some era. For as long as history has existed, people have declared history to be at an end. Since the Enlightenment, this call has most frequently been triumphant (see, for example, Fukuyama's End of History and the Last Man), but in our current fixation on abandonment, it seems to be tragic. The focus of abandonment -- monumental hotels, bustling factories, middle class suburbs, rural towns -- cut across American and Western society and suggests a kind of all encompassing futility.

Of course, the celebration of the futility of human works could point to an interpretation that is not simply apocalyptic. The end of one era of achievement whether inevitable or calculated (was the Roman Republic assassinated?) typically ushers in the dawn of a new age. If we see abandonment as a critique of past folly, and it seems that some works that celebrate the return of nature to abandoned places see abandonment as the first step toward a return to a more environmentally conscious and humane world. A post-American landscape sees the collapse of the densely packed urban world and the sprawling suburbs as marking the beginning of a new time.

In fact, it may be necessary to mark or even promote the end of an era in order to take credit for building something new. It was common for ancient rulers to celebrate renewal or return to past glories. They took particular pride in the Early and Middle Byzantine periods for the reconstruction, rebuilding, or refounding of institutions or buildings long abandoned. In these narratives, abandonment continued to mark the folly of the past, but also placed hope in new beginnings.  

The postman brought a guidebook to Syria yesterday, the first to reach me.  The first question I had was “What currency should I take with me?”  Because, of course, if I need to obtain some Venezualan bolivars or Swiss Francs or whatever, some warning would be helpful!

The answer seems to be a mixture of US dollars and Euros and British pounds is preferred.  Travellers’ cheques are useless apparently.  Credit cards may be used in high-end hotels (which I certainly hope to be staying in — my sense of adventure evapourates at 5pm).

Only a few weeks to go now.  I’m just starting to feel the first incipient twinges of the “I wish I hadn’t given myself all this trouble” feeling that I get before I go anywhere!   Of course that feeling has to be overcome, or I would never go anywhere.  These days I expect it, and don’t get worried about it.  Still wish I didn’t get that, tho.

Archaeologies of Placemaking is the outcome of a WAC-5 session at Washington, D.C. in 2003. The following review of this volume is divided into two parts. The first part provides a summary of the nine chapters, and the second offers critical commentary on its content.

Archaeologies of Placemaking contains an introduction and eight case studies written by different contributors. Overall, these nine chapters share a concern with the authenticity of place histories, with a deeper focus on memory-work, and its material manifestation in monuments. The concept of place that the authors present is one of diverse meanings, which are ascribed by different communities, and manifested in practices of remembrance and materialisation. The European-American voice, which tends to envelop place, has emerged out of a broader discussion that is colonial in character. While in some cases these narratives have negatively portrayed Native American places, others have identified the significance of place in terms of the symbolic and ritual associated with Native American culture and history. This volume largely takes issue with the dominant European-American voice in site-specific cases that detail the ways that these places have been created, reified and communicated the Native American voices. As the contributors illustrate, the meaning of place has several interpretations; these multiple, and often conflicting interpretations create tensions between those communities with a vested interest in a place. One of the volume’s intentions is to resolve these tensions. Rather than hold them as a productive force, the discussions aim to create a balance or harmony between the different associations that Native Americans and European-Americans have with the same places.

Part I

Archaeologies of Placemaking will be of great interest to historic preservationists and heritage managers, as well as to archaeologists who are interested in following the way in which multiple interpretations of places have been documented. However, the specific North American histories and geographies of the case studies, as well as their theoretical position, make the volume quite specific in outlook and scope.

The volume opens with an introduction (Chapter One), and follows with four sections that compose its structure: senses of place, senses of history (Chapters Two and Three); placemaking and reinvented pasts (Chapters Four and Five); colonial monuments, indigenous memory keeping (Six and Seven); monuments, public celebrations, and community engagement (Eight and Nine). The geographic spread of the eight case studies are confined to North America, ranging from California to Virginia and from the Southwest to New England and the Canadian Maritimes. As the editor, Rubertone, notes, these chapters “raise critical questions about the very complicated and uncertain intersections of history and memory, place and displacement, public spectacle and private engagement, and reconciliation and reappropriation that resonate loudly all across the Indigenous world” (p. 16).

Chapter Two concerns the efforts to protect and present places associated with Mi’Kmaw identity in Debery and Belmont, Novia Scotia, Canada. The authors, Julien, Bernard, and Rosenmeier, highlight the difficulties in separating the past from the present as are often constructed in the linear temporalities (from 11,000 years ago according to c14 dating) that archaeologists write in their narratives. These, they argue, are devoid of the important emotional and spiritual connections that exist to a place regardless of their antiquity. This is highlighted by the title of the paper Paleo is not our word.

In Chapter Three, Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Ferguson, and Anyon discuss the Reeve Ruin and Davis sites in San Pedro Valley, Arizona and community identities over 13,000 years associated with the Pueblo, Hopi, Zuni, Western Apache and Tohono O’odham. It is argued that by appreciating the complexity of their contested histories it is possible to create an archaeologically-sensitive narrative that accommodates the senses of belonging that groups have to particular places. This is connected to a temporality which considers the ways in which these attachments might endure in an archaeology that does not arrest it diachronically.

Chapter Four examines the way in which Edgar Lee Hewett combined archaeological research with historic preservation in creating a distinctive New Mexican identity. Investigating the issue of invention, Preucel and Matero, suggest that the Coronado State Monument resolves the tensions and contradictions between the Pueblo people, the historical event of the Coronado entrada and its status as a monument. Highlighting the selective qualities of presenting history to reinforce the emerging political and cultural ‘hegemonies’ of the present day, the authors suggest that Hewett, in the early twentieth century, inadvertently produced an example of Foucault’s heterotopia (1986): a place containing simultaneous ironies in ‘represented, contested and inverted’ histories. Another, but not final irony also exists: while the site was reconstructed on a site without archaeological evidence, the importance of the place and its reconstruction serves as both an authentic and a contrived memory for the Pueblo and New Mexican identities. This nonetheless maintains its cultural and historical significance by being subject to further interpretations, one of which is presented in this book.

Chapter Five follows the sequences of meanings embedded at Fort Apache in terms of its life history or biography. Welch follows the life history process of Fort Apache (from 1870) from its Apache name Tl’óghagaii (before 1870) to its sedimentation as the White Mountain Apache tribe cultural center and historic park. The chapter goes on to examine the ways in which tensions, as well as their resolutions, interact with one another in the remembrance of the cultures involved in their production.

In Chapter Six, White attends to the Timbisha Shoshone presence in Death Valley and their history, which involved disputes over land ownership from the late nineteenth century to their forced relocation by European Americans in 1933. Rather than looking at the places of commemoration, this chapter focuses on the visible sites of resistance, as a way in which the Timbisha Shoshone have been remembered.

In Chapter Seven, Handsman examines the ‘monumented’ landscape in the Wampanoag Indian Country of southeastern Massachusetts, not from a perspective of specific places, but rather from its locales (sites of activity) where quotidian tasks were performed. As a consequence of this orientation, place is not presented as such. Rather, the ways in which colonial histories were and are entangled with Native American histories made conspicuous by archaeology (itself a result of quotidian tasks - to add as Ingold suggests, ‘the practice of archaeology is itself a form of dwelling’ (1993: 152)), and by written accounts of the Pilgrims’ experiences in the seventeenth century are emphasized.

Chapter Eight presents the history of two memorials raised by European Americans to the memory of the Narragansetts following their detribalization: Memorial Rock and the Canonicus Monument. Here, Rubertone elaborates further on the complex histories associated with community survival, cultural persistence and change, and resistant accommodations. Rubertone also raises an interesting paradox concerning the Narrangansett people, and presumably other extant indigenous communities, who continue to “struggle with the memorialisation of their own extinction” (p. 212-4). Such a paradox leads one to question the underlying authenticity concerning the sense of place one often associates with memorial sites of living populations.

Finally, in Chapter Nine, Hantman focuses on the Jamestown and the understanding of its 400th anniversary, which was embroiled in the Nationalistic narratives which enshroud it, but often contradicted by archaeological and environmental evidence. The chapter details the way in which Jamestown has been ‘sanctified, simply noted (designated), or obliterated’ in comparing the 1907 with the 2007 commemorations.

Part II

I am not a specialist in Native North American archaeology. Therefore it is not my intention to comment at length on the individual case studies within this volume. My own archaeology is focused on the research and theoretical focus related to landscape and placemaking in Iceland, particularly concerning the colonization of a landscape in the ninth century AD devoid of any previous cultural history. From here, I am concerned with the way by which societal structures are gradually formed and developed over time. I am also interested in an archaeology of movement (from place to place) and the way in which residual forms continue to structure and anchor movement over time. I use this second part of the review to address what I believe are some fundamental theoretical flaws in the volume. The fact that they are present from the onset of Archaeologies of Placemaking, undermines the value and overall impact that this study has on the archaeology of place. The volume misses an orienting theoretical discussion on the following important and foundational questions:

* What constitutes place’s involvement in archaeology?

* What are the varying responses of the ‘other’ multiple and less dominant voices; is this a ‘universal’ voice?

* Why is place portrayed as creating a distance between past and present? Would a closer temporal resolution of place challenge this assertion?

First, a general point. There are already several books on the topic of place: among them we may list Steven Feld and Keith Basso’s (eds.) Senses of place (1996), Edward Casey’s Getting back into place (1993) and The fate of place (1998), Tim Creswell’s Place. A short introduction (2004), and Yi-Fi Tuan’s Space and place: the perspectives of experience (1977). One could argue that the debates on place in Archaeologies of Placemaking are already well-situated, and therefore do not need further discussion at this level. Unfortunately place is one of those slippery and ambiguous terms which needs clarification by being situated within its specific discourse, or, in this instance, sets of case studies (cf. Tilley 2004: 24-6). While there is a certain amount of ambiguity as to what is meant by ‘place’, which reveals a greater openness and fluidity than is often present in other books — I am unsure if this was fully intended. Whatever the reason, the fact that the concept of place is thoroughly under-theorized leaves some serious gaps. Furthermore, it is hard to give credence to a position and a theoretical argument which seeks a dialectical ‘middle’ position (Olsen 2003; 2007). What follows is a short commentary on some aspects that I think would have benefited the book: an alternative concept of place; the relationalities and multiplicities of place; a critique on the value of ‘middle ground’; and the use of time and memory.

Contrary to overall current of the book, place is not a bounded and fixed entity in either space or time. Place, to the contrary, exists in a continual state of alteration and perpetual transformation (Massey 1993). One could say that it is in a constant state of becoming. Place is a bundle of relations, locales or sites where – metaphorically – things become sticky, slow down and become stuck. These relations are not fixed; they are decidedly slower in the movements that pass through them. Places are paradoxically hyperactive while being materially located. Part of its character is because place is recursively constituted – or made by people – who perform and engage with the physicality and material presence of place, giving it its identity, and, in the process, becoming also identified by it. As Casey reminds us, place is the same as self: there is no place without self; and there is no self with place (2001: 206). Places not only are, they happen and are as mutable as the people who make them.

What I mean is that the ‘real’ character of place is not seen or experienced from the outside, as many of the case studies have emphasized in their tendency to define place from privileged positions. Place is constituted through the involvement and engagements that take place on the inside; definition of exterior and interior is relative, but in the sense of Casey’s suggestion, place is part of the self identity in such a way that it cannot be separated, or perhaps even established in the first instance, unless one already has the sense of attachment. In this way, the book focuses on presenting the external and internal relations to place as a divided notion, each making its investment towards a single proposition of the place, pitted one against the other. This is not to say that one can have a single proposition or perspective on place, but only that ‘real’ places need to be experienced, but that also one needs to be ready to become involved: as Basso reminds us in this sense that he was not ready to visit particular sites as one had to wise to them, expressing the sense of ‘wisdom sits in places’ (1996).

In this book, place should have retained more of its experienced qualities that engagement with any kind of people and their things provides. This arguably would have retained the multiple tensions that go hand in hand with the many collisions which are all in constant motion in providing unique perspectives of place. All of the bodies or participants involved in placemaking bring with them particular causes and means that articulate their own attachments and meanings in places’ construction and in the construction of themselves. In this respect, much more emphasis to the actual voices could have been given to the Native American communities involved, for example. To be fair, a few chapters do present this sense, such as Chapter Four and Chapter Eight, but the majority fall short. The inclusion of a broader scope of Native American voices alone would have given more emphasis to the idea that places resonate to the condition and fabric brought by the individuals and collectives that contextualize them.

Place is also used in many different ways in the book, and comes across as something that can denote a monument, a landscape, space, or locale. This elasticity to the notion of place reduces the specificity of what place is. It can mean all of these things, but it needs clarification and more argument, and most importantly consistency in the way that it is used. Part of this meandering arises because there is more of a focus in some chapters on the history of place rather than its archaeology per se. This results in the archaeologies of placemaking being lost to its histories (e.g. Chapter Six). What appears in the book is a rather more universal and holistic usage of place that both disrupts and unites it with space and landscape (Cresswell 2004: 10). An archaeology of placemaking, rather than establishing itself in terms of the history of things done at a place, should perhaps have considered place as a result of its relational qualities; in effect to decenter it and instead focus on the relations that circulate, rather than on the place, or thing, itself. These are places revealed through practices and meanings, which is a reminder of the activities that occurred (c.f. Thomas 2001: 172-4). As a result, issues of residuality, resilience and endurance relating to place establish a coherent archaeological framework on which to hang other concerns (Lucas 2008).

This brings me to my third point concerning the issue of ‘middle ground’. Place, it is stated in the opening chapter, is personal and political, and does not necessarily require special skills in its making (p. 13). This is a fair statement, which is further elaborated by the suggestion that places lurk everywhere and are produced by everyone, and in their making are never made by simple processes. But … if they are created by everyone, which is a perspective I agree with and would have liked to have see more of in the book, how is a ‘middle ground’ maintained or even produced without it being contrived? I find this usage / juxtaposition more than a little inconsistent and flawed.

While the meanings of place are always in some way negotiated (both at a personal and collective level) there is a problem in creating single propositions. For example, the introduction argues that the idea of ‘middle ground’ does not involve a notion of compromise (p. 16). I find this position to be a bit naïve (p. 16), particularly because place is constituted by the violence involved in its production, which is always, to some degree, contested (González-Ruibal 2006). Not acknowledging the conflict by suggesting the proposition of a middle ground elides the important activities involved in negotiating ‘place’. I am of the opinion that archaeologists should express these complexities and sites of attachment, rather than sealing them in a fate of complicity, so that the acknowledgement of what lies behind multiple meanings can be critically assessed and presented. In doing so, one not only ensures the transparency in the meanings that are produced, but they are left open to further negotiation, adding, in theory, to the mobility of places as gatherings, or things, not as fixed, immobile entities. Places flow. Creating place as a ‘be all and end all’ is problematic. This is an act that seems to me to be more like evading an important and fundamental issue: the multiplicities inherent in place and the problems that this brings.

One important concern, that in many ways is present in the book but not explicitly, is about the situatedness of place in terms of its temporality – as an issue concerned with the affects that time and its gathering bring to place (Lucas 2005; 2008; Witmore 2007). Temporality is discussed only in a few chapters, and for such a fundamental issue concerning place, it is woefully underrepresented in the book as a whole. Where it is considered, there is a view of time in a segmented fashion, in which layers accumulate, like a palimpsest. But time and place intersect in a wholly relational way that endures (cf Chapter Three). This occurs not in segmented units that lie somehow outside of place – the stop and start of place histories – but in the connections that flow and eddy (Serres and Latour 1995) through the practices and engagements that are irrational and irregular, transformative, as well as paradoxical in the material disclosures of presence and absence. And related to this issue of duration, is the fallibility of memory in the lost and occasionally renegotiated memories in the memorialization of place.

As the book rightly suggests, how memory makes place is an important issue but this unfortunately is a little too vaguely presented. Personal memory, as Walter Benjamin (1999) and Marcel Proust (1925) eloquently remind us, can be triggered by the sensual experience of mnemonics (memories embedded in things), of events and objects that may have been forgotten. But what of collective memory, the subject matter of this book? As Paul Connerton (1989) suggests, collective memory is activated through practical engagement. So far, fine, as these are present in the book. However, the processes of performance through bodily practices, either in habit or commemoration, and through the inscription or incorporation of practices that embed memory into memorials or specific locales, are only rarely explored (cf. Pearson and Shanks 2001; Pearson and Thomas 1994).

Furthermore, as the book acknowledges and tries to develop, memory is intertwined with two types of places: with places of memorial, such as a pilgrimage or a place-name, and at the locus of memory, such as a house or a street (Connerton 2009; and 1989). While the book is concerned with both of these ‘sites of memory’ it fails to consider the different memory processes that occur at each (the locale or activity area, and the monument). The difference is clearly more than simply building to commemorate at a locale, or establishing a locale in the creation of a monument through habitual practices that are in the future commemorated. The book discusses more examples of events of remembrance rather than the ways in which memory is actively made through practices of construction and through performance. Although there is great diversity in the ways in which places are actively remembered and represented, it is suggested that ‘middle ground’ provides “a useful concept for thinking about monuments in relation to ideas of shared versus segregated or mutually exclusive” histories (p. 28). This presents a problem, insofar as there will always be multiple meanings concerning place, and various senses of attachment, which will invariably both compete and complement. The point being made, is that there should not be a reliance on a single dominant discourse of place, that it should rather be an evaluation of place meanings (as many as is feasible). But I fear that the using ‘middle ground’ elides something of the uniqueness of these meanings by reducing the diversity that constitutes place as place. Rather than being reduced and fragmented, places should be represented in a way that maintains and holds onto their multiplicities.

We must also remember that the material presence of place cannot be substituted only by its meaning as well as how this is represented: The meaning of place stands in for, rather than stands for, material processes and forms (Witmore forthcoming). This perspective acknowledges that the one place can have many different meanings, any of which is an authentic portrayal. This occurs individually as well as collectively, and although the experiences will differ between individuals and groups, the contact with the same physical environment produces a shared sense of place. To further labor the point, which is missing in most of the papers, place then becomes a hub, or a gathering, in which sets of material entanglements and relations between different people, or between cosmologies, become clearer and dramatized.

A fundamental issue of placemaking and its meaning is not so much based on whether or not interpretations disagree or complement, or the way in which they are in a compromise, but rather understanding the way in which a placemaking is derived from multiple sources; demonstrating how place is an entangled mess and a sticky bundle of relations. As a result of this messiness, the processes of representation and the malleability of interpretations in creating authentic pasts would retain a much more critical appraisal than is expressed in this book, particularly one taking on board the slippery and ambiguous terms such as place, or landscape.

Important in this appraisal, contrary to the introduction, is the politics of place. While several of the papers explicitly point towards the political contexts of the placemaking process (e.g. Chapter Four), many do not. And this again seems to be fundamental but is not explicitly illustrated: The very fact that these texts have been written in a particular way, as a volume in the WAC One World Archaeology Series, and presented thematically as a study on Native American archaeology, suggests to me, at the very least, a specific status and authority a.k.a. politics. While simply resigning to an argument that politics is a reduction of a place’s specific complexity by suggesting that it creates only misinterpretations and misunderstandings is, again, a little naive. To be aware of the politics involved in both meanings and interpretations and to present them allows critical assessment, even though the experiences and presentations of place may radically differ. Place is negotiated through participation and experience which spreads itself differentially between individuals and groups. “Bridging the middle ground of monuments” (p. 31) does not hold promise to my mind but results in further misinterpretation and misrepresentation more than an approach which attempts to hold them productively simply because place is never a stable entity; it is constantly mutable, and depends on the sets of relations that come into contact with it. What emerges is different each time it is negotiated; just as would this book if it were written again in 50 years time.

References

Benjamin, W. 1999 The storyteller, in Illuminations. London: Pimlico. Pp. 83-107.

Casey, E. 1993 Getting back into Place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Casey, E. 1997 The fate of place. A philosophical history. Berkley: University of California Press.

Casey, E. 2001 Body, self and landscape, in P. C. Adams, S.Hodscher and K. E. Till (eds.) Textures of place: exploring humanist geographies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pp. 403-25.

Connerton, P. 1989 How society remembers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Connerton, P. 2009 How Modernity forgets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Creswell, T. 2004 Place. A short introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.

Feld, S. and Basso, K. (eds.) 1996 Senses of place. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

Foucault, M. 1986 Of other spaces, Diacritics 16: 22-7.

González-Ruibal, A. 2006 An Archaeology of the Spanish Civil War, Archaeolog [http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/2006/02/an_archaeology_of_the_spanish.html]

Ingold, T. 1993 The temporality of the landscape, World archaeology 25.2: 152-174.

Lucas, G. 2005 An archaeology of time. London: Routledge.

Lucas, G. 2008 Time and archaeological event, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 18.1, 59-65.

Massey, D. 1993 Power geometry and progressive sense of place, in J. Bird (ed.) Mapping the futures: local cultures, global change. London: Routledge.

Olsen, B. 2003 Material culture after text: re-membering things, Norwegian archaeological Review 36.2: 87–104.

Olsen, B. 2007 Keeping things at arm’s length: a genealogy of asymmetry. World Archaeology 39.4, 579-588.

Pearson, M. and Shanks, M. 2001 Theatre/Archaeology. London: Routledge.

Pearson, M. and Thomas, J. 1994 Theatre/Archaeology, The Drama Review 38.4: 133-161.

Proust M. 1925 Remembrance of Things Past. Volume 1: Swann's Way: Within a Budding Grove. Translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. New York: Vintage.

Serres, M. and Latour B. 1995 Conversations on science, culture, and time. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Thomas, J. 2001 Archaeologies of place and landscape, in Hodder, I. (ed.) Archaeological Theory Today. Cambridge: Polity Press. Pp. 165-186

Tilley, C. 2004 The materiality of stone. Explorations in landscape phenomenology. Oxford: Berg.

Tuan, Yi-Fi 1977 Space and place: the perspectives of experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Witmore, C. forthcoming A politics of the past present: four quandaries for archaeology, in J. Dixon (ed.) Fragmenting Archaeology, or Taking a Leaf Out of Shanks and Tilley’s Book. British Archaeological Reports.

Witmore, C. 2007 Landscape, time, topology: an archaeological account of the Southern Argolid, Greece, in D. Hicks, L. McAtackney, and G. Fairclough (eds.) Envisioning landscapes. Situations and standpoints in archaeology and heritage. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Pp. 194-225.

Heritage Key have unleashed their second Bloggers’ Challenge. This time they’d like to know what the most important site in London is. Once again I’m not entering because of Rule 19, but it’s still an interesting question. This time around it won’t go live till after the event. I think I’ve gone for an obvious answer and I don’t want ruin it for anyone else who’s come up with the same idea. The only twist is that some of the most important site in London isn’t even on the same continent anymore.

London Bridge, Lake Havasu AZ. Photo (cc) Larry Page

It has to be London Bridge. All the other major sites of interest to tourists like the Tower of London, Buckingham Palace or the Oxford Circus branch of McDonalds, only exist because of where the bridge was built. Even somewhere like Greenwich Observatory, where the world is told what the time is, ultimately exists where it does because of the bridge.

Finding the original bridge over the Thames sounds quite difficult. There’s the usual archaeological problem that wood leaves little trace in the soil. Added to that are the problems that the soil is underwater and, in succeeding years, people have built massive bridges over the site. That’s an effective way of obliterating any earlier traces. One reason for thinking that the bridge was built at this site isn’t any remains of the bridge itself. It’s the things that people have thrown off it. Roman coins were found in the gravels under the bridge when later bridges were built. This could be wash of materials into the river from wherever they were lost, but the concentration under the bridge marks this out as a special site. The original location was chosen as a convenient site, but its revival was as a deliberately inconvenient site.

The bridge seems to have gone out of use in the 4th century AD. After this period crossing of the river would have been by ferry. This would not really have been odd. At this time rover transport was cheaper than road transport and so rivers would have been the highways of the ancient and medieval world. The river was navigable to sea-going vessels, moved by free windpower rather than expensive grain-fed animal power. That makes building a bridge across the river, blocking the movement of vessels, a very controlling act and that’s why the bridge was rebuilt in the 990s [PDF]. Building a bridge across the Thames acted as a barrier to Viking incursions upstream.

Once it was built you not only had a barrier to military vessels, it also became the end of the river for large merchant ships. The docks downstream of the bridge became the economic fulcrum of the city and its hinterland. London controlled the trader for everything travelling by river from as far away as Oxford. Wherever the lowest bridgeable point on the river was, that was where the city would be.

Other sites became important partly due to their location in London. The only exception is the bridge, which set the location for London. When McCulloch bought London bridge for his new city at Lake Havasu, and not Tower Bridge, he was buying the bridge that mattered.

Related Posts:

• Bow Bridge
• Local Archaeology at the river Trent
• Inca Bridges
• Will the Okhta Center make or destroy a skyline?
• Time Team Conclusion
• Powered by Contextual Related Posts

Do you read Finnish? Or do you know someone who does? Or do you just like free books, even if you can’t read them? :)

We’ve recently released the Logos edition of Raamattu—a Bible from the Finnish Bible Society. Best of all, we’re able to offer it for free.

The first Finnish translation of the Bible appeared in 1548 by Mikael Agricola. He used Luther’s German Bible as the translation base. In 1632, the Bible was again translated into Finnish, but this time using the original language texts. The complete version appeared in 1642, and new editions were issued in 1685, 1758, and 1776. In the early twentieth century, the need for an updated translation of the Bible into Finnish had become apparent. Work on the new translation was begun in 1911 at the initiative of the Finnish Bible Society and the Finnish Lutheran Church. The first translation work was finished in 1933, and the completed version was published in 1938.

Here’s how to add this translation to your library for free:

Logos 4 Users:

If you have Logos Bible Software 4, adding resources to your library is easy.

Go the product page. Click Add to Cart (or just add it straight to your cart from here). Proceed through the checkout process and click “Submit Order.” If you don’t have a credit card on file, you’ll still need to enter your credit card information. Don’t worry, you won’t be charged anything. It’s the only way to finish the checkout process in our current system.

In Logos 4, type “Update Now” into the Command Bar. Logos 4 will find and begin downloading new resources, and the Logos icon will appear in your system tray while this is happening. When it’s finished, you’ll be asked to restart Logos 4.

After you restart Logos 4, you’ll be able to access your new Finnish Bible. If you have a Logos 4 base package, you can also access it on your iPhone or iPod Touch using the Logos iPhone app!

If you’re not a Logos 4 user yet, be sure to visit the custom upgrade discount calculator to see what discounts you qualify for on an upgrade to a brand new Logos 4 base package.

Logos 3 / Libronix Users:

If you’re still using Libronix, here are the steps to follow to get your free book:

Step 1: Log in to your logos.com account. If you don’t have one, you’ll need to create one.

Step 2: Make sure that your Libronix Customer ID is associated with your Logos.com account. Go to My Account, enter your Libronix Customer ID, and click "Confirm." If it's already there, no need to do anything. (If you don’t know your Libronix Customer ID, you can find it in Libronix by going to Help | About Libronix DLS.)

Step 3: Go the product page. Click Add to Cart (or just add it straight to your cart from here). Proceed through the checkout process and click “Submit Order.” If you don’t have a credit card on file, you’ll still need to enter your credit card information. Don’t worry, you won’t be charged anything. It’s the only way to finish the checkout process in our current system.

Step 4: Unlock and download your new book. If you're on a Windows machine, just click the orange "Unlock & Download" button. If you're on a Mac, just synchronize your licenses (Tools | Library Management | Synchronize Licenses) and manually put the book file in your resources folder (Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/Libronix DLS/Resources on the startup volume).

Step 5: Start using your new book! Open Libronix, open My Library, then type Raamattu to find it.

Spread the word! If you have Finnish-speaking friends, let them know that they can get a Finnish Bible for free.

You should follow us on Twitter here.

In the last post, I showed that the slang.gr coinage γαμαοδέρνουλας made an odd choice in its first stem, using /ɣama-/ instead of /ɣam-/ as the stem—although Modern Greek speakers would typically interpret /-a-/ as part of the verb inflection. You can interpret /-a-/ as part of the stem, but the interpretation is novel and restricted enough that the compound looks wrong.

But people don't just do random stuff in their morphology, even on slang.gr. There is a reason why the coiner of the word chose to use that odd stem. To explain it, I'm going to write about the verb–noun and verb–verb compounds of Modern Greek.

Language advisory still applies.

I've written about verb–verb compounds elsewhere with Brian Joseph, in what may be my last linguistics paper; it has a response by Paul Kiparsky which makes historical sense of why this linguistic innovation happened, and (I've just googled) seems to have provoked another paper by Angela Ralli. The verb–verb compounds are dvandvas; the V₁V₂ compound can be paraphrased as "V₁ and V₂".

The phenomenon needs to be explained, because verb dvandvas, such as μπαινοβγαίνω "enter–exit = go in and out" are very unusual by European standards; in fact, Modern Greek's the only place they turn up. English arguably has them as well, as in freeze–dry; then again, typologically English is a lot closer to Chinese anyway...

I've written about the history of the construction there, and Kiparsky has written more, but for this post, we're going to concentrate on two features of the dvandvas: the tense they use, and the form of the first stem.

Verb dvandvas are often antonyms, and they refer to the alternation of V₁ and V₂: μπαινοβγαίνω "go in and go out", αναβοσβήνω "light up and extinguish = flicker". Even when they don't, they still refer to repetitive action: στριφογυρίζω "twist and turn". That means they always turn up in imperfective aspect—corresponding to the present stem: the V₁ will never appear in the aorist stem, which has perfective aspect. So αναβοσβήνω "I am lighting up and extinguishing", not *αναψοσβήνω "I have lit up and am existinguishing" or αναψοέσβησα "I have lit up and exstinguished". (George Chortatzis uses εμπαινοβγήκα in the aorist for "I went in and out"; that's not allowed in the contemporary standard, and its V₁ stem is still in the present tense form.) The one exception I could find was λυσοδένω "untie–and–tie", rather than λυνοδένω; and that was clearly influenced by the similar αλυσοδένω "bind in chains".

This is in contrast with Verb–Noun compounds, which are a bit older in Greek, and are a particular feature of Greek slang. In those compounds, the verb is typically in the perfective (aorist), ever since Demosthenes' φυγόδικος "flee-trial = fugitive". Thus, σπασαρχίδης "ball-buster", κλαψομούρης "cry-face". It is in the perfective even when the verb clearly refers to habitual activity, as in χασοδίκης "lawyer who keeps losing trials", αλλαξοκωλιά "ongoing exchange of arses = being a switch sexually; intimate friendship". The present stem can be used, but is rarer: σπαζοκεφαλιά "bust-head-ness = brain-teaser".

However, both VN and V₁V₂ compounds are unusual to being with, because they start with a verb. Compounding in Greek, as in most languages, normally starts with a noun. As a result, there is a tendency in V₁V₂ and VN compounds to make those V₁ verbs look more like nouns. The first way of doing that is stripping tense suffixes from the verb, if you can get away with it. What's left behind will look like a noun—and often enough actually is a noun, if noun and verb share the same root.

You can get away with stripping the tense suffix if the tense suffix has a vowel in it. If the tense is formed by just appending a consonant, or by changing the root vowel, you leave it alone. So:

• Present μπαιν-, Aorist μπηκ-: nothing to strip, so μπαινοβγαίνω "go in and out"
  
• Present παιζ- (*παιγ-j-), Aorist παιξ- (*παιγ-σ-): no vowel in suffix, so παιζογελώ "play and laugh"
  
• Present χαν- , Aorist χασ-: no vowel in suffix, so χασοδίκης "lose-trial, incompetent lawyer"
  
• Present γελ-(άω), Aorist γελ-ασ-: no vowel in present suffix (we're discounting the γαμαοδέρνουλας form), so γελοκλαίω "laugh and cry"

But:

• Present σκοτ-ων- (*σκοτ-ο-), Aorist σκοτ-ωσ-, Noun σκοτ-: σκοτοψώμης "killbread, one so hungry he hunts down and kills loaves of bread"
  
• Present ζυμ-ων-, Aorist ζυμ-ωσ-, Noun ζυμ-: ζυμοφουρνίζω "knead and bake"
  
• Present ανεβ-αιν-, Aorist ανεβ-ηκ-: ανεβοκατεβαίνω "go up and down"

Even more compelling, some verbs have been distorted to forms they never have in isolation, to look more like nouns:

• στρίβω + γυρίζω: στριφογυρίζω "twist and turn", cf. noun στροφή "turn"
  
• κλέβω + κότα: κλεφτοκοτάς "thieve-chicken, chicken thief", cf. noun κλέφτης "thief"
  
• σκάβω + κλαδεύω: σκαφοκλαδεύω "dig and prune", cf. noun σκαφή "digging"

(However, στρίβω does have a variant στρέφω, and κλεφτοκοτάς does alternate with κοτοκλέφτης, so these examples may not be that compelling.)

Equipped with all that, we come back to γαμαοδέρνουλας. The coinage is V+V+noun suffix: it first coins a verb dvandva, γαμαοδέρνω "fuck and bash", summarising the phrase γαμάω και δέρνω, and then it attaches the augmentative ουλας, "someone big who fucks and bashes". The coinage is *not* VN, like αλλαξοκωλιά or χασοδίκης. So the V₁ could not appear in its aorist form, as *γαμησοδέρνουλας. It couldn't appear like that anyway, since the aorist suffix -ησ- contains a vowel, and so is too obtrusively verblike.

Which means the dvandva should be the imperfective γαμοδέρνω, just like other dvandvas whose V₁ is an -αω verb: γελοκλαίω, γεννοσπέρνω, γεννοβολώ, τσιμποφιλώ. The V₁ should look like a noun.

The thing is, it does look like a noun, because the related noun already exists: γάμος "wedding". (Γαμέω "marry" was just the denominative verb derived from γάμος.) But unusually, the noun and verb have diverged appreciably in meaning, so the verb looking like the noun can be confusing. We could conclude that γαμαοδέρνω was coined instead, to avoid a confusing ambiguity with "wedding-bashing", especially when NV compounds are much more prevalent than VV compounds.

We could say that; after all the compound was coined by a single person, and they may well have consciously thought: "γαμοδέρνω. Hm. Sounds like weddings. Better drag it out to γαμαοδέρνω just to make sure I'm understood." If I say αυτός γαμοδέρνει "he XXX", it does indeed sound like it shouldn't be referring to coitus.

But ambiguity is not as effective a driver of language phenomena as we might expect. There is a much more real ambiguity in γαμοτράγουδα between "weddings songs" and its actual meaning, "songs about fucking". But that hasn't prevented γαμο- being understood as the verb in the compound: noone has felt the need to use *γαμαοτράγουδα.

There is a second reason why you would say γαμαοδέρνω: γαμαο- /ɣama-o-/ sounds identical to γαμάω /ɣama-o/, the inflected 1st singular form in γαμάω και δέρνω. We wouldn't expect the first half of a compound to be inflected, of course; in fact Hatzidakis expended some ink in refuting spellings like μπαινωβγαίνω, and arguing that this really was just a compound with a linking /-o-/ —the second person is μπαινοβγαίνεις and not *μπαινεισβγαίνεις, so the vowel isn't doing any inflecting.

We wouldn't want to go back to the bad old days of 1840s spelling with *γαμαωδέρνω; but the colloquial flavour of γαμάω would have encouraged the coiner to echo it in γαμαοδέρνω. The compound isn't actually quoting the original phrase literally: it isn't «γαμάω και δέρνω»-ουλας /ɣamaokeðernoulas/ "Lord Master 'I fuck and bash'", and the connecting "and" and the second verb inflection have been dropped. But the phonology of the verb in the phrase would have influenced the coiner's phonology in the compound, especially if they hesitated over the ambiguity of γαμοδέρνω.

Those of you that have made it that far may well be rolling your eyes by now. "Surely people don't go through this amount of geometry whenever they make up some crappy little joke compound." They don't do it consciously and deliberatively, certainly; the whole thing may have been a second of hesitation, and driven by intuition rather than ratiocination. But the intuition itself is based on rules and structures: the understanding of how Modern Greek compound works is not divine revelation, it's picked up from patterns, and it's followed quite diligently.

In fact, that's the real reason why γαμαοδέρνουλας sounds odd. Not because the analysis of /ɣama/ as a stem is impossible: people wouldn't be saying γαμάω if it was. But because stems ending in /a/ haven't made it to compounds yet: people's linguistic intuition is based on precedent, and without precedent for stems ending in /a/, they've never seen an /ao/ cluster in a compound before. So the /ao/ cluster in γαμαοδέρνουλας is jarring.

Which may well be the point of the compound. If you know the rules (intuitively), you also know when to break them, to greater effect. And γαμαοδέρνουλας is certainly effective.

It got two blog posts of morphological argumentation out of me, for one...

DCS, The Digital Corpus of Sanskrit

DCS, the Digital Corpus of Sanskrit, is a searchable collection of lemmatized Sanskrit texts. It offers free internet access to a part of the database of the linguistic program SanskritTagger, which has been under constant development since 1999.

More

DCS is designed for research in Sanskrit linguistics and philology. Its interfaces make it possible to search for lexical units and their collocations in a corpus of more than 2.500.000 manually tagged words. In addition, DCS generates distributional key values and performs statistical tests that can be used to assess the distribution of lexical units from a chronological or user defined perspective. The digital corpus offers two points of entry for the philological research:

1. Lexical units can be retrieved from the dictionary via a query interface or a dictionary page. For each lexical unit contained in the corpus, DCS offers the complete set of references and a statistical evaluation based on historical principles.

   More about the query interface, the dictionary and the detail evaluation of lexical units

2. As an alternative, philological research can start from the interlinear lexical analysis that accompanies each text contained in the database. This analysis offers easy access to the dictionary, which, in turn, leads to the philological details about a lexical unit.

   More

DCS is based on a strictly relational database, whose structure reflects the requirements of philological research. The technical overview of the database design may be helpful for understanding the results obtained using this corpus.

As a first step, it is recommended to use either the query or the dictionary page to search for lexical units or to have a look at the text collection. These pages can also be accessed using the main menu at the top of this page. The help center gives a structured and detailed introduction in the functions of the DCS.

Wikimedia@MW2010 is a workshop to be held in Denver in April, just before the Museums and the Web 2010 conference.  The goal is to develop 'policies that will enable museums to better contribute to and use Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons, and for the Wikimedia community to benefit from the expertise in museums'.

If you've got stuff you want to say, you can dive right into the conversation - there's a whole bunch of conversations at http://conference.archimuse.com/forums/wikimediamw2010, including 'Legal and Business Model Barriers to Collaboration, 'Notability Criteria' and 'Metrics for Museums on Wikipedia'.

I'm going to be at the workshop and will do my best to represent any issues raised at the meeting.  I think it's particularly important that we avoid 'Feeling glum after GLAM-WIKI' if we possibly can, so I'd like to go there with a really good understanding of the possible points of resistance, clashes in organisational culture or world view, incompatible requirements or wishlists so that they can be raised and hopefully dealt with during the in-person workshop.  I'd love to hear from you if there are messages you want to pass on.

I'm also thinking about an informal meetup in London to help cultural heritage people articulate some of the issues that might help or hinder collaboration so they can be represented at the workshop - if you're a museum, gallery, archive, library or general cultural heritage bod, would that be useful for you?

I’m headed of to the Niagara peninsula next month, for Playing With Technology in History.

Here’s what I thought I’d talk about :

Shawn Graham, “Rolling your own: On Modding Commercial Games for Educational Goals”

Making modifications to existing commercial games is a strong and vibrant sub-culture in modern video gaming. Many publishers now provide tools to make this easier, as part of their marketing strategy. In this paper, I look at the nature and quality of the discussions that occur on the fan mod sites as a form of participatory history. I also reflect on some of my own forays into modding commercial games in my teaching of ancient history: what works, what hasn’t, and where I want to take things next.

I’m looking at a lot of the literature on online learning right now, about how to assess the educational value of formal discussion fora (usually in the context of learning management systems), but I’m thinking it’s equally applicable to the fansites. Hmmm. Kevin’s also asked me to take everyone through the process of developing a mod or scenario in Civilization, ideally having something built at the end of the day. Again I say, hmmm. It’ll be fun, but I need to think how best to do that in a useful way that says something interesting and intelligent about history. Here’s Rob’s thoughts about the same conference and the idea that the ‘funnest’ narrative is going to be the one that wins. Civilization as a game is certainly about crafting narratives through play.

I need to dust off my copy of Civ. With one thing or another (including a small fire in the power supply of my computer yesterday!) I haven’t had a solid block of time to play/craft in what feels like ages.

Oriental Institute Museum Photo Archives Database [Enter as "guest"]

The Oriental Institute Museum Archives Photographic Database is now available for public access. As of February 2010, there are more than 70,000 entries from our photo catalogue in the database, 35,000 of which have an image scanned and attached.

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For a complete and up to date list of all Oriental Institute publications available online, including born digital resources and the ca. two hundred and sixty five volumes of Oriental Institute publications which aso apear on paper see AWOL - The Ancient World Online - 2: The Oriental Institute Electronic Publications Initiative.

Future issues of AWOL have moved to a new home

AWOL - The Ancient World Online

The Oriental Institute Electronic Publications Initiative. Originally posted April 9, 2008. Updated April 30, 2007 with the addition of more CAD and CHD volumes; updated September 16, 2008 with the addition of OIP 130; updated January 6, 2009 with the addition of OIP 135; Updated January 27, 2009 with the addition of OIMP 29. Updated March 16, 2009 with the addition of OIS 5. Updated April 28, 2009 with the addition of a suite of older OI volumes on Egyptian subjects. Updated May 1, 2009 with the addition of a suite of older OI volumes on Egyptian subjects. Updated May 12, 2009 with the addition of a suite of older OI volumes on Egyptian subjects. Updated May 14, 2009 with the addition of two recent Annual Reports. Updated through February 18, 2010. Updated March 1, 2010. Updated March 6, 2010. Updated March 9, 2010]

Starting in 2004, the Oriental Institute committed to digitizing all of its publications and making them available online, without charge. The minimum for each volume, old and new, current and forthcoming, will be a Portable Document Format (PDF) version following current resolution standards. New publications appear online at or near the time they appear in print. Older publications will be processed as time and funding permits. About than two hundred and sixty five volumes are now online.

Assyriological Studies (AS) | List of volumes in print

• AS 27. Studies Presented to Robert D. Biggs, June 4, 2004 From the Workshop of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, Volume 2. Martha T. Roth, Walter Farber, Matthew W. Stolper and Paula von Bechtolsheim, eds. 2007.


• AS 22. Old Babylonian Letters from Tell Asmar. R. M. Whiting, Jr. 1987.


• AS 17. Cuneiform Texts from Nippur: The Eighth and Ninth Seasons. Giorgio Buccellati and Robert D. Biggs. 1969.


• AS 5. Historical Prism Inscriptions of Ashurbanipal I: Editions E, B1-5, D, and K. Arthur Carl Piepkorn. 1933.

The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CAD) | List of volumes in print

• Volume 1:1, A:1. 1964.


• Volume 1:2, A:2. 1968.


• Volume 3, B. 1965.


• Volume 4, D. 1959.


• Volume 5, E. 1958.


• Volume 6, H [het]. 1956.


• Volume 7, I/J. 1960.


• Volume 8, K. 1971.


• Volume 9, L. 1973.


• Volume 10:1, M:1. 1977.


• Volume 10:2, M:2. 1977.


• Volume 11:1, N:1. 1980.


• Volume 11:2, N:2. 1980.


• Volume 12, P. 2005.


• Volume 13, Q. 1982.


• Volume 14, R. 1999.


• Volume 15, S. 1984.


• Volume 16, S [tsade]. 1962.


• Volume 17:1, S [shin]:1. 1989.


• Volume 17:2, S [shin]:2. 1992.


• Volume 17:3, S [shin]:3. 1992.


• Volume 18, T. 2006.


• Volume 19, T [Tet]. 2006.


• Volume 21, Z. 1961.

The Chicago Demotic Dictionary (CDD) [Born digital publication]

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Problematic Entries	Download PDF
Problematic Entries 2	Download PDF

The Hittite Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CHD) | List of volumes in print

• L-N 1980-1989.


• P, fascicles 1-3 1997.


• S, fascicle 1 2002.


• S, fascicle 2 2005.


• See also The Electronic Chicago Hittite Dictionary (e-CHD). The P Volume, Theo van den Hout and Harry A. Hoffner, ed.

Materials for the Assyrian Dictionary (MAD)

• MAD 5. Sargonic Texts in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. I. J. Gelb., 1970.


• MAD 4. Sargonic Texts in the Louvre Museum. I. J. Gelb., 1970.


• MAD 3. Glossary of Old Akkadian. I. J. Gelb., 1957.


• MAD 2. Old Akkadian Writing and Grammar I. J. Gelb., 1952


• MAD 1. Sargonic Texts from the Diyala Region I. J. Gelb., 1952.

Oriental Institute Communications (OIC) | List of volumes in print

• OIC 30. The Alphabet: Its Rise and Development from the Sinai Inscriptions. By Martin Sprengling. Originally published in 1931.


• OIC 29. Catalog of Demotic Texts in the Brooklyn Museum. George R. Hughes. 2005.


• OIC 28. Bir Umm Fawakhir Survey Project 1993: A Byzantine Gold-Mining Town in Egypt. C. Meyer, L.A. Heidorn, W.E. Kaegi, and T. Wilfong. 2000.


• OIC 27. The Registry of the Photographic Archives of the Epigraphic Survey, with Plates from Key Plans Showing Locations of Theban Temple Decorations (H. H. Nelson). The Epigraphic Survey. 1995.


• OIC 23. Excavations at Nippur: Twelfth Season. McGuire Gibson, Judith A. Franke, Miguel Civil, Michael L. Bates, Joachim Boessneck, Karl W. Butzer and Ted A. Rathbun, and Elizabeth Frick Mallin. 1978.


• OIC 22. Excavations at Nippur: Eleventh Season. McG. Gibson, with appendices by M. Civil. J. H. Johnson, and S. A. Kaufman. 1976.


• OIC 21. The Treasury of Persepolis and Other Discoveries in the Homeland of the Achaemenians. Erich F. Schmidt. 1939.


• OIC 20. Progress of the Work of the Oriental Institute in Iraq, 1934/35: Fifth Preliminary Report of the Iraq Expedition. Henri Frankfort. 1936.


• OIC 19. Oriental Institute Discoveries in Iraq, 1933/34: Fourth Preliminary Report of the Iraq Expedition. Henri Frankfort, with a chapter by Thorkild Jacobsen. 1935.


• OIC 18. Work in Western Thebes, 1931-33. By Harold H. Nelson and Uvo Hölscher with a Chapter by Siegfried Schott. 1934.


• OIC 17. Iraq Excavations of the Oriental Institute 1932/33: Third Preliminary Report of the Iraq Expedition. Henri Frankfort. 1934.


• OIC 16. Tell Asmar, Khafaje and Khorsabad: Second Preliminary Report of the Iraq Expedition. Henri Frankfort. 1933.


• OIC 15. Excavations at Ancient Thebes, 1930/31. Uvo Hölscher. 1932.


• OIC 13. Tell Asmar and Khafaje: The First Season’s Work in Eshnunna 1930/31. Henri Frankfort, Thorkild Jacobsen, and Conrad Preusser. 1932.


• OIC 12. The Alphabet: Its Rise and Development from the Sinai Inscriptions. Martin Sprengling. 1931.


• OIC 10. Medinet Habu Reports, Part 1. The Epigraphic Survey, 1992-31, by Harold H. Nelson; Part 2. The Architectural Survey, 1929/30. 1931.


• OIC 7. Medinet Habu Studies 1928/29, Part 1. The Architectural Survey, by Uvo Hölscher; Part 2. The Language of the Historical Texts Commemorating Ramses III
  John A. Wilson. 1930.


• OIC 5. Medinet Habu 1924-28 Part 1: The Epigraphic Survey of the Great Temple of Medinet Habu (Seasons 1924-25 To 1927-28, By Harold H. Nelson; Part 2: The Architectural Survey of the Great Temple and Palace of Medinet Habu (Season 1927-28), By Uvo Hölscher. 1929.

Oriental Institute Digital Archives (OIDA) | [Online only]

• OIDA 1, OIDA 1, Letters from James Henry Breasted to His Family, August 1919 - July 1920. Edited by John A. Larson, 2010.

Oriental Institute Museum Publications (OIMP) | List of volumes in print

• OIMP 30. Pioneers to the Past: American Archaeologists in the Middle East, 1919-1920. Edited by Geoff Emberling, 2010.


• OIMP 29. The Life of Meresamun: A Temple Singer in Ancient Egypt. Edited by Emily Teeter and Janet H. Johnson, 2009


• OIMP 28. Catastrophe! The Looting and Destruction of Iraq’s Past. Edited by Geoff Emberling and Katharyn Hanson, 2008


• OIMP 27. European Cartographers and the Ottoman World, 1500–1750: Maps from the Collection of O. J. Sopranos. Ian Manners. 2007.


• OIMP 26. Daily Life Ornamented: The Medieval Persian City of Rayy. Tanya Treptow.


• OIMP 25. Embroidering Identities: A Century of Palestinian Clothing. Iman Saca. 2006


• OIMP 24. Lost Nubia: A Centennial Exhibit of Photographs from the 1905-1907 Egyptian Expedition of the University of Chicago. John A. Larson. 2006.


• OIMP 23. Ancient Egypt: Treasures from the Collection of the Oriental Institute. By Emily Teeter. Originally published in 2003.

Oriental Institute Nubian Expedition (OINE) | List of volumes in print

• OINE 10. Excavations at Serra East, Parts 1-5: A-Group, C-Group, Pan Grave, New Kingdom, and X-Group Remains from Cemeteries A-G and Rock Shelters. By B. B. Williams. Originally published in 1993.


• OINE 9. Excavations Between Abu Simbel and the Sudan Frontier, Part 9: Noubadian X-Group Remains from Royal Complexes in Cemeteries Q and 219 and Private Cemeteries Q, R, V, W, B, J, and M at Qustul and Ballana. By B. B. Williams. Originally published in 1991.


• OINE 8. Excavations Between Abu Simbel and the Sudan Frontier, Part 8: Meroitic Remains from Qustul Cemetery Q, Ballana Cemetery B, and a Ballana Settlement. By B. B. Williams, et. al. Originally published in 1991.


• OINE 7. Excavations Between Abu Simbel and the Sudan Frontier, Part 7: Twenty-Fifth Dynasty and Napatan Remains at Qustul Cemeteries W and V. By B. B. Williams. Originally published in 1990.


• OINE 6. Excavations Between Abu Simbel and the Sudan Frontier, Part 6: New Kingdom Remains from Cemeteries R, V, S, and W at Qustul and Cemetery K at Adindan. Bruce B. Williams. 1992.


• OINE 5. Excavations Between Abu Simbel and the Sudan Frontier, Part 5: C-Group, Pan Grave, and Kerma Remains at Adindan Cemeteries T, K, U, and J. By B. B. Williams. Originally published in 1983.


• OINE 4. Excavations Between Abu Simbel and the Sudan Frontier, Parts 2, 3, and 4: Neolithic, A-Group, and Post A-Group Remains from Cemeteries W, V, S, Q, T, and a Cave East of Cemetery K. By B. B. Williams. Originally published in 1989.


• OINE 3. Excavations Between Abu Simbel and the Sudan Frontier, Part 1: The A-Group Royal Cemetery at Qustul, Cemetery L. By B. B. Williams. Originally published in 1986.


• OINE 2. Ausgrabungen von Khor-Dehmit bis Bet El-Wali. H. Ricke. Originally published in 1967.


• OINE 1. The Beit el-Wali Temple of Ramesses II. By Herbert Ricke, George R. Hughes, and Edward F. Wente. Originally published in 1967.

Oriental Institute Publications (OIP) | List of volumes in print

• OIP 136. Medinet Habu IX. The Eighteenth Dynasty Temple, Part I: The Inner Sanctuaries. With Translations of Texts, Commentary, and Glossary. By The Epigraphic Survey. 2009.


• OIP 135. Kerkenes Special Studies 1: Sculpture and Inscriptions from the Monumental Entrance to the Palatial Complex at Kerkenes Dag, Turkey. Catherine M. Draycott and Geoffrey D. Summers, with contribution by Claude Brixhe and Turkish summary translated by G. Bike Yazıcıoğlu. 2008.


• OIP 134. The Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies, Volume 1: The Foundations of Research and Regional Survey in the Tsaghkahovit Plain, Armenia. Adam T. Smith, Ruben S. Badalyan, Pavel Avetisyan. With contributions by Alan Greene and Leah Minc. 2009.

• OIP 132. The Egyptian Coffin Texts, Volume 8. Middle Kingdom Copies of Pyramid Texts. James P. Allen. 2006.


• OIP 131. The Amuq Valley Regional Projects, Volume 1 - Surveys in the Plain of Antioch and Orontes Delta, Turkey, 1995-2002. Kutlu Aslihan Yener. 2005.


• OIP 130. Chogha Mish, Volume II. The Development of a Prehistoric Regional Center in Lowland Susiana, Southwestern Iran: Final Report on the Last Six Seasons of Excavations, 1972–1978. Abbas Alizadeh. 2008.


• OIP 129. The Early Dynastic To Akkadian Transistion: The Area WF Sounding At Nippur. Augusta McMahon. 2006.


• OIP 128. The Origins of State Organizations in Prehistoric Highland Fars, Southern Iran: Excavations at Tall-e Bakun. Abbas Alizadeh. 2006


• OIP 127. Megiddo 3: Final Report on the Stratum VI Excavations. Timothy P. Harrison, with contributions by Douglas L. Esse, Andrew Graham, Ronald G. V. Hancock, and Patricia Paice. 2004.


• OIP 126. Taxes, Taxpayers, And Tax Receipts In Early Ptolemaic Thebes - Demotic and Greek Ostraca from the Oriental Institute Museum, Chicago. Brian P. Muhs. 2005.


• OIP 125. Excavations at Tell es-Sweyhat, Syria, Volume 2: Archaeology of the Bronze Age, Hellenistic, and Roman Remains at an Ancient Town on the Euphrates River. Thomas A. Holland. 2006.


• OIP 124. Excavations at Tell Es-Sweyhat, Syria, Volume 1: On the Margin of the Euphrates: Settlement and Land Use at Tell Es-Sweyhat and in the Upper Lake Assad Area, Syria. Tony J. Wilkinson. 2004.


• OIP 123. Temple of Khonsu, Volume 3. The Graffiti on the Khonsu Temple Roof at Karnak: A Manifestation of Personal Piety. Helen Jacquet-Gordon. 2003.


• OIP 122. Neo-Babylonian Texts in the Oriental Institute Collection. David B. Weisberg. 2003.


• OIP 121. Cuneiform Texts from the Ur III Period in the Oriental Institute, Volume 2: Drehem Administrative Documents from the Reign of Amar-Suena. Markus Hilgert. 2003.


• OIP 120. Excavations at the Prehistoric Mound of Chogha Bonut, Khuzestan, Iran, Seasons 1976/77, 1977/78, and 1996. Abbas Alizadeh. 2003.


• OIP 119. Theban Desert Road Survey in the Egyptian Western Desert, Volume 1: Gebel Tjauti Rock Inscriptions 1-45 and Wadi el-Hôl Rock Inscriptions 1-45. J. C. Darnell, with the assistance of D. Darnell. 2002.


• OIP 118. Scarabs, Scaraboids, Seals, and Seal Impressions from Medinet Habu. Emily Teeter. 2003.


• OIP 117. Seals on the Persepolis Fortification Tablets, Volume I: Images of Heroic Encounter. Mark B. Garrison and Margaret Cool Root, with seal inscription readings by Charles E. Jones. 2001.


• OIP 116. Reliefs and Inscriptions at Luxor Temple, Volume 2: The Facade, Portals, Upper Register Scenes, Columns, Marginalia, and Statuary in the Colonnade Hall. The Epigraphic Survey. Originally published in 1998.


• OIP 115. Cuneiform Texts from the Ur III Period in the Oriental Institute, Volume 1: Drehem Administrative Documents from the Reign of Shulgi. M. Hilgert. 1998


• OIP 114. Nippur, Volume 4: The Early Neo-Babylonian Governor's Archive from Nippur. S. W. Cole. 1996.


• OIP 113. The Oriental Institute Hawara Papyri: Demotic and Greek Texts from an Egyptian Family Archive in the Fayum (Fourth to Third Century B.C.). G. R. Hughes and R. Jasnow. 1997.


• OIP 112. Reliefs and Inscriptions at Luxor Temple, Volume 1: The Festival Procession of Opet in the Colonnade Hall. The Epigraphic Survey. Originally published in 1994.


• OIP 111. Nippur, Volume 3: Kassite Buildings in Area WC-1. R. L. Zettler. 1993.


• OIP 107. Reliefs and Inscriptions at Karnak, Volume IV: The Battle Reliefs of King Sety I. The Epigraphic Survey. Originally published in 1986.


• OIP 106. The Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak, Volume 1, Part 1: The Wall Reliefs. By Harold Hayden Nelson. Edited by William J. Murnane. Originally published in 1981
• OIP 105. Prehistoric Archeology Along the Zagros Flanks. L. S. Braidwood, et. al. 1983.


• OIP 104. Earliest Land Tenure Systems in the Near East: Ancient Kudurrus. I. J. Gelb, et. al. 1989, 1991.


• OIP 103. The Temple of Khonsu, Volume 2: Scenes and Inscriptions in the Court and the First Hypostyle Hall. The Epigraphic Survey. Originally published in 1981.


• OIP 102. The Tomb of Kheruef: Theban Tomb 192. The Epigraphic Survey. 1980.


• OIP 101. Chogha Mish, Volume 1: The First Five Seasons, 1961-1971. Helene Kantor and P. Delougaz. 1996.


• OIP 100. The Temple of Khonsu, Volume I: Scenes of King Herihor in the Court. By the Epigraphic Survey. Originally published in 1979.


• OIP 99. Inscriptions from Tell Abu Salabikh. R. D. Biggs. 1974.


• OIP 98. Old Babylonian Public Buildings in the Diyala Region. Part One: Excavations at Ishchali, Part Two: Khafajah Mounds B, C, and D. H. D. Hill, et. al. 1990.


• OIP 97. Nippur, Volume 2. The North Temple and Sounding E: Excavations of the Joint Expedition to Nippur of the American Schools of Oriental Research and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. D. E. McCown, et. al. 1978.


• OIP 94. Medinet Habu, Vol. VIII: The Eastern High Gate with Translations of Texts. The Epigraphic Survey. Originally published in 1970.


• OIP 93. Medinet Habu, Vol. VII: The Temple Proper, Pt. III: The Third Hypostyle Hall and All Rooms Accessible from It with Friezes of Scenes from the Roof Terraces and Exterior Walls of the Temple. The Epigraphic Survey. Originally published in 1964.


• OIP 92. Persepolis Fortification Tablets. R. T. Hallock. 1969.


• OIP 91. Aramaic Ritual Texts from Persepolis. R. A. Bowman. 1970.


• OIP 88. Private Houses and Graves in the Diyala Region. Pinhas Delougaz, Harold D. Hill, and Seton Lloyd. 1967.


• OIP 87. The Egyptian Coffin Texts 7, Texts of Spells 787-1185. By Adriaan de Buck. Originally published in 1961,


• OIP 86. The Tomb of Tjanefer at Thebes. By Keith C. Seele. Originally published in 1959.


• OIP 83. Medinet Habu, Volume V. The Temple Proper, Part I: The Portico, the Treasury, and Chapels Adjoining the First Hypostyle Hall with Marginal Material from the Forecourts. By the Epigraphic Survey. Originally published in 1957.


• OIP 84. Medinet Habu, Volume IV. The Temple Proper, Part II: The Re Chapel, the Royal Mortuary Complex, and Adjacent Rooms with Miscellaneous Material from the Pylons, the Forecourts, and the First Hypostyle Hall. By The Epigraphic Survey. Originally published in 1963.


• OIP 82. The Egyptian Book of the Dead: Documents in the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago. Edited by Thomas George Allen. Originally published in 1960.


• OIP 81. The Egyptian Coffin Texts, Volume 6: Texts of Spells 472-787. Adriaan De Buck. 1956.


• OIP 80. Demotic Ostraca from Medinet Habu. Miriam Lichtheim. 1957.


• OIP 79. Soundings at Tell Fakhariyah. C. W. McEwan, et. al. 1957.


• OIP 78. Nippur I, Temple of Enlil, Scribal Quarter, and Soundings: Excavations of the Joint Expedition to Nippur of the University Museum of Philadelphia and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Donald E. McCown and Richard C. Haines, assisted by Donald P. Hansen. 1967.


• OIP 74. Reliefs and Inscriptions at Karnak, Volume III. The Bubastite Portal. By the Epigraphic Survey. Originally published in 1954.


• OIP 73. The Egyptian Coffin Texts 5: Texts of Spells 355-471. Adriaan de Buck. 1954.


• OIP 72. Stratified Cylinder Seals from the Diyala Region. Henri Frankfort with a chapter by Thorkild Jacobsen. 1955.


• OIP 71. Coptic Ostraca from Medinet Habu. By Elizabeth Stefanski and Miriam Lichtheim. Originally published in 1952.


• OIP 70. Persepolis III: The Royal Tombs and Other Monuments. E. F. Schmidt. 1970.


• OIP 69. Persepolis II: Contents of the Treasury and Other Discoveries. Erich F. Schmidt with contributions by Sydney P. Noe et al., Frederick R. Matson, Lawrence J. Howell, and Louisa Bellinger. 1957


• OIP 68. Persepolis I: Structures, Reliefs, Inscriptions. Erich F. Schmidt with contribution by F. R. Matson. 1953.


• OIP 67. The Egyptian Coffin Texts 4, Texts of Spells 268-354. Adriaan de Buck. 1951.


• OIP 66. Post-Ramessid Remains. The Excavation of Medinet Habu, Volume 5. By Uvo Hölscher. Originally published in 1954.


• OIP 65. Persepolis Treasury Tablets. George G. Cameron. 1948.


• OIP 64. The Egyptian Coffin Texts 3: Texts of Spells 164-267. By Adriaan de Buck. Originally published in 1947.


• OIP 63. Pottery from the Diyala Region. Pinhas Delougaz. 1952.


• OIP 60. More Sculpture from the Diyala Region. Henri Frankfort. 1943.


• OIP 59. Tall-i-Bakun A: Season of 1932. Alexander Langsdorff and Donald E. McCown. 1942.


• OIP 58. Pre-Sargonid Temples in the Diyala Region. Pinhas Delougaz and Seton Lloyd with chapters by Henri Frankfort and Thorkild Jacobsen. 1942.


• OIP 56. Key Plans Showing Locations of Theban Temple Decorations. By Harold Hayden Nelson. Originally published in 1941.


• OIP 55. The Excavation of Medinet Habu, Volume VI. The Mortuary Temple of Ramses III, Part II. By Uvo Hölscher. With contributions by Rudolf Anthes. Originally published in 1951.


• OIP 54. The Mortuary Temple of Ramses III, Part 1. The Excavation of Medinet Habu, Volume 3. By Uvo Hölscher. Originally published in 1941.


• OIP 53. The Temple Oval at Khafajah. Pinhas Delougaz, with a chapter by Thorkild Jacobsen. 1940.


• OIP 51. Medinet Habu, Volume 4. Festival Scenes of Ramses III. By the Epigraphic Survey. Originally published in 1940.


• OIP 49. The Egyptian Coffin Texts, Volume 2: Texts of Spells 76-163. Adriaan De Buck. 1938.


• OIP 46. Paleolithic Man and the Nile Valley in Lower Egypt with Some Notes upon a Part of the Red Sea Littoral: A Study of the Regions during Pliocene and Pleistocene Times. K. S. Sandford and W. J. Arkell. Prehistoric Survey of Egypt and Western Asia, Volume IV. 1939.


• OIP 44. Sculpture of the Third Millennium B.C. from Tell Asmar and Khafajah. Henri Frankfort. 1939.


• OIP 43. The Gimilsin Temple and the Palace of the Rulers at Tell Asmar. Henri Frankfort, Seton Lloyd, and Thorkild Jacobsen, with a chapter by Günter Martiny. 1940.


• OIP 42. Megiddo 1. Seasons of 1925-34: Strata I-V. Robert S. Lamon and Geoffrey M. Shipton. 1939.


• OIP 41. The Excavation of Medinet Habu, Volume 2: The Temples of the Eighteenth Dynasty. By Uvo Hölscher. Originally published in 1939.


• OIP 40. Khorsabad, Part 2: The Citadel and the Town. Gordon Loud and Charles B. Altman. 1938.


• OIP 39. The Mastaba of Mereruka, Part II: Chamber A 11-13, Doorjambs and Inscriptions of Chambers A 1-21, Tomb Chamber, and Exterior. By the Sakkarah Expedition. Originally published in 1938.


• OIP 38. Khorsabad, Part 1: Excavations in the Palace and at a City Gate. Gordon Loud. 1936.


• OIP 36. Medinet Habu Graffiti: Facsimiles. Edited by William F. Edgerton. Originally published in 1937.


• OIP 35. Reliefs and Inscriptions at Karnak, Volume II. Ramses III's Temple within the Great Inclosure of Amon, Part II; and Ramses III's Temple in the Precinct of Mut. By The Epigraphic Survey. Originally published in 1936.


• OIP 34. The Egyptian Coffin Texts 1: Texts of Spells 1-75. By Adriaan De Buck. Originally published in 1935.


• OIP 31. The Mastaba of Mereruka, Part I. Chambers A 1-10. By The Sakkara Expedition. Originally published in 1938.


• OIP 25. Reliefs and Inscriptions at Karnak, Volume I. Ramses III's Temple with the Great Inclosure of Amon, Part I. The Epigraphic Survey. Originally published in 1936.


• OIP 24. Sennacherib's Aqueduct at Jerwan. Thorkild Jacobsen and Seton Lloyd. 1935.


• OIP 23. Medinet Habu, Volume III. The Calendar, the “Slaughterhouse,” and Minor Records of Ramses III. By the Epigraphic Survey. Originally published in 1934.


• OIP 21. The Excavation of Medinet Habu, Volume 1: General Plans and Views. Uvo Hölscher. 1934.


• OIP 18. Paleolithic Man and the Nile Valley in Upper and Middle Egypt: A Study of the Region during Pliocene and Pleistocene Times. K. S. Sandford. Prehistoric Survey of Egypt and Western Asia, Volume III. 1934.


• OIP 17. Paleolithic Man and the Nile-Faiyum Divide in Nubia and Upper Egypt: A Study of the Region during Pliocene and Pleistocene Times. By K. S. Sandford and W. J. Arkell. Originally published in 1933.


• OIP 16. Cuneiform Series, Volume IV: Sumerian Texts of Varied Contents. Edward Chiera. 1934.


• OIP 15. Cuneiform Series, Volume III: Sumerian Epics and Myths. Edward Chiera. 1934.


• OIP 14. Cuneiform Series, Vol. II: Inscriptions from from Adab. Daniel David Luckenbill. 1930.


• OIP 11. Cuneiform Series, Volume I: Sumerian Lexical Texts from the Temple School of Nippur. Edward Chiera. 1929.


• OIP 10. Prehistoric Survey of Egypt and Western Asia, Vol. I: Paleolithic Man and the Nile-Faiyum Divide: A Study of the Region During Pliocene and Pleistocene Times. K. S. Sandford and W. J. Arkell. 1929.


• OIP 9. Medinet Habu, Volume II. The Later Historical Records of Ramses III. The Epigraphic Survey. Originally published in 1932.


• OIP 8. Medinet Habu, Volume I. Earlier Historical Records of Ramses III. By the Epigraphic Survey. Originally published in 1930.


• OIP 4. The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, Volume 2: Facsimile Plates and Line for Line Hieroglyphic Transliteration. J. H. Breasted. Originally published in 1930, revised in 1991.


• OIP 3. The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, Volume 1: Hieroglyphic Transliteration, Translation, and Commentary. J. H. Breasted. Originally published in 1930, revised in 1991.

Oriental Institute Seminars (OIS) | List of volumes in print

• OIS 6. Divination and Interpretation of Signs in the Ancient World, Edited by Amar Annus. 2010


• OIS 5. Nomads, Tribes, and the State in the Ancient Near East: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives, Edited by Jeffrey Szuchman. 2009.


• OIS 4. Religion and Power: Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond, Nicole Brisch, ed.


• OIS 3. Performing Death: Social Analyses of Funerary Traditions in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Nicola Laneri, ed. 2007.


• OIS 2. Margins of Writing, Origins of Cultures. Seth L. Sanders, ed. 2006, 2007.


• OIS 1. Changing Social Identity with the Spread of Islam: Archaeological Perspectives. Donald Whitcomb, ed. 2004.

Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization (SAOC) | List of volumes in print

• SAOC 62. Proceedings of the 51st Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Held at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, July 18–22, 2005. 2008.


• SAOC 61. Sacred Space and Sacred Function in Ancient Thebes. Peter F. Dorman and Betsy M. Bryan, ed. 2007.


• SAOC 60. Studies in Semitic and Afroasiatic Linguistics Presented to Gene B. Gragg. Cynthia L. Miller, ed.


• SAOC 59. Studies in the Archaeology of Israel and Neighboring Lands in Memory of Douglas L. Esse. Samuel R. Wolff, ed. 2001.


• SAOC 58. Gold of Praise: Studies on Ancient Egypt in Honor of Edward F. Wente. E. Teeter and J. A. Larson, eds.. Originally published in 2000.


• SAOC 57. The Presentation of Maat: Ritual and Legitimacy in Ancient Egypt. By Emily Teeter. Originally published in 1997.


• SAOC 56. Portrait Mummies from Roman Egypt (I-IV Centuries A.D.) with a Catalog of Portrait Mummies in Egyptian Museums. By Lorelei H. Corcoran. Originally published in 1995.


• SAOC 55. For His Ka: Essays Offered in Memory of Klaus Baer. D. P. Silverman, ed. Originally published in 1994.


• SAOC 54. The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice. R. K. Ritner. Originally published in 1993.


• SAOC 54, 4th Printing. The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, 4th Printing. R. K. Ritner. Originally published in 2008.


• SAOC 53. Glass from Quseir al-Qadim and the Indian Ocean Trade. By Carol Meyer. Originally published in 1992.


• SAOC 52. A Late Period Hieratic Wisdom Text (P. Brooklyn 47.218.135). R. Jasnow. Originally published in 1992.


• SAOC 51. Life in a Multi-Cultural Society: Egypt from Cambyses to Constantine and Beyond. Janet Johnson. ed. 1992.


• SAOC 48. Egyptian Phyles in the Old Kingdom: The Evolution of a System of Social Organization. By Ann Macy Roth. Originally published in 1991.


• SAOC 47. Essays in Ancient Civilization Presented to Helene J. Kantor. A. Leonard, Jr. and B. B. Williams, eds. Originally published in 1989.


• SAOC 45. Thus Wrote ‘Onchsheshonqy - An Introductory Grammar of Demotic (Third Edition). Janet H. Johnson. Third edition, 2000.


• SAOC 44. Nippur Neighborhoods. E. C. Stone. 1987.


• SAOC 42. The Road to Kadesh: A Historical Interpretation of the Battle Reliefs of King Sety I at Karnak. W. J. Murnane. Originally published in 1985.


• SAOC 42, 2nd Edition. The Road to Kadesh: A Historical Interpretation of the Battle Reliefs of King Sety I at Karnak, 2nd Edition. W. J. Murnane. Originally published in 1990.


• SAOC 40. Ancient Egyptian Coregencies. By William J. Murnane. Originally published in 1977.


• SAOC 39. Studies in Honor of George R. Hughes, January 12, 1977. J. H. Johnson and E. F. Wente, eds. Originally published in 1976.


• SAOC 38. The Demotic Verbal System. Janet H. Johnson. Second printing, with corrections, 2004.


• SAOC 37. The Book of the Dead or Going Forth by Day: Ideas of the Ancient Egyptians Concerning the Hereafter as Expressed in Their Own Terms. Translated by Thomas George Allen. Originally published in 1974.


• SAOC 35. Studies in Honor of John A. Wilson. E. B. Hauser, ed.. Originally published in 1969.


• SAOC 34. A Study of the Ba Concept in Ancient Egyptian Texts. By Louis V. Zabkar. Originally published in 1968.


• SAOC 33. Late Ramesside Letters. By Edward F. Wente. Originally published in 1967.


• SAOC 31. Prehistoric Investigations in Iraqi Kurdistan. R. J. Braidwood and B. Howe. 1960.


• SAOC 30. Wall Scenes from the Mortuary Chapel of the Mayor Paser at Medinet Habu. Siegfried Schott. Translated By Elizabeth B. Hauser. 1957.


• SAOC 28. Saite Demotic Land Leases. George Robert Hughes. 1952.


• SAOC 27. Occurrences of Pyramid Texts with Cross Indexes of These and Other Egyptian Mortuary Texts. Thomas George Allen. 1950.


• SAOC 26. The Calendars of Ancient Egypt. Richard A. Parker. 1950.


• SAOC 20. Animal Remains from Tell Asmar. Max Hilzheimer. 1941.


• SAOC 19. The Coregency of Ramses II with Seti I and the Date of the Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak. Keith C. Seele. 1940.


• SAOC 16. The Monasteries of the Fayyum. Nabia Abbott. 1937.


• SAOC 12. Historical Records of Ramses III: The Texts in Medinet Habu Volumes 1 and 2, Translated With Explanatory Notes. William F. Edgerton and John A. Wilson. 1936.


• SAOC 8. The Thutmosid Succession. William F. Edgerton. 1933.


• SAOC 5. A New Inscription of Xerxes from Persepolis. Ernst E. Herzfeld. 1932.


• SAOC 1. Notes on Egyptian Marriage Chiefly in the Ptolemaic Period. William F. Edgerton. 1931.

Miscellaneous Publications | List of volumes in print

• The Temple of King Sethos I at Abydos, Volume I: The Chapels of Osiris, Isis and Horus. Copied by Amice M. Calverley, with the assistance of Myrtle F. Broome, and edited by Alan H. Gardiner. Originally published in 1933.


• The Temple of King Sethos I at Abydos, Volume II: The Chapels of Amen-Re', Re'-Harakhti, Ptah, and King Sethos. Copied by Amice M. Calverley, with the assistance of Myrtle F. Broome, and edited by Alan H. Gardiner. Originally published in 1935.


• The Temple of King Sethos I at Abydos, Volume III: The Osiris Complex. Copied by Amice M. Calverley, with the assistance of Myrtle F. Broome, and edited by Alan H. Gardiner. Originally published in 1938.


• The Temple of King Sethos I at Abydos, Volume IV: The Second Hypostyle Hall. Copied by Amice M. Calverley, with the assistance of Myrtle F. Broome, and edited by Alan H. Gardiner. Originally published in 1958.


• Letters from Egypt and Iraq, 1954. Margaret Bell Cameron. 2001.


• Uch Tepe II: Technical Reports. McG. Gibson, ed. 1990.


• Uch Tepe I: Tell Razuk, Tell Ahmed Al-Mughir, Tell Ajamat. McG. Gibson, ed. 1987.


• Egyptology at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. 1984.


• Persepolis and Ancient Iran. 1976.


• Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt: A Study in Cultural Ecology. Karl W. Butzer. 1976.


• United with Eternity: A Concise Guide to the Monuments of Medinet Habu. William J. Murnane. With a foreword by Kent R. Week. 1976.


• The 1905–1907 Breasted Expeditions to Egypt and The Sudan. 1975.


• The Uruk Countryside: The Natural Setting of Urban Societies. Robert McC. Adams and Hans J. Nissen. 1972.


• Signs and Wonders upon Pharaoh: A History of American Egyptology. John A. Wilson. 1964.


• Flights Over Ancient Cities of Iran. Erich F. Schmidt. 1940.


• Quseir Al-Qadim 1978: Preliminary Report. By D. S. Whitcomb and J. H. Johnson. Originally published in 1979.


• Ancient Textiles from Nubia: Meroitic, X-Group, and Christian Fabrics from Ballana and Qustul. By Christa C. Mayer Thurman and Bruce Williams. Originally published in 1979.


• Most Ancient Egypt. By William C. Hayes. Originally published in 1965.


• When Egypt Ruled the East. By George Steindorff and Keith C. Seele, Revised by Keith C. Seele. Originally published as second edition in 1957.


• The Culture of Egypt. By John A. Wilson. Originally published in 1956.


• Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as the Integration of Society and Nature. By Henri Frankfort. Originally published in 1948.


• Ancient Egyptian Paintings Selected, Copied, and Described. Volume I: Descriptive Text. By Nina M. Davies with the Editorial Assistance of Alan H. Gardiner. Originally published in 1936.


• Ancient Egyptian Paintings Selected, Copied, and Described. Volume II: Descriptive Text. By Nina M. Davies with the Editorial Assistance of Alan H. Gardiner. Originally published in 1936.


• Ancient Egyptian Paintings Selected, Copied, and Described. Volume III: Descriptive Text. By Nina M. Davies with the Editorial Assistance of Alan H. Gardiner. Originally published in 1936.


• The Burden of Egypt: An Interpretation of Ancient Egyptian Culture. By John A. Wilson. Originally published in 1951.


• Quseir al-Qadim 1980: Preliminary Report. By Donald S. Whitcomb and Janet H. Johnson. Originally published in 1982.


• Egyptology at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. The Oriental Institute. Originally published in 1983.


• Lost Egypt, Volumes I. A Limited Edition Portfolio Series of Photographic Images from Egypt’s Past. The Epigraphic Survey of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Originally published in 1992.


• Lost Egypt, Volumes II. A Limited Edition Portfolio Series of Photographic Images from Egypt’s Past. The Epigraphic Survey of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Originally published in 1992.


• Lost Egypt, Volumes III. A Limited Edition Portfolio Series of Photographic Images from Egypt’s Past. The Epigraphic Survey of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Originally published in 1992.


• Mesopotamian Directory 2009.


• Database of Late Old Babylonian personal names derived from cuneiform texts chiefly dating to the reigns of the last three kings of the First Dynasty of Babylon, 1683-1595 B.C.


• Pioneer to the Past: The Story of James Henry Breasted, Archaeologist, Told by His Son Charles Breasted. By Charles Breasted. Reprint of the Charles Scribner's Sons 1943 Edition with New Foreword and Photographs. Published in 2009.


• Oriental Institute Museum Photo Archives Database [Enter as "guest"]

Oriental Institute Annual Reports

• 1991-1992 Annual Report - 2008-2009 Annual Report.

AWOL - The Ancient World Online - 1
AWOL - The Ancient World Online - 2
AWOL - The Ancient World Online - 3
AWOL - The Ancient World Online - 4
AWOL - The Ancient World Online - 5
AWOL - The Ancient World Online - 6
AWOL - The Ancient World Online - 7

Future issues of AWOL have moved to a new home

AWOL - The Ancient World Online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The American Numismatic Society (ANS) annually hosts the Eric P. Newman Graduate Seminar in Numismatics. This year, the ANS hopes to admit nine or ten students, but the endowment has not been so productive in light of the current economic situation. The ANS is appealing to ANS seminar alumni for support:

The ANS has received an excellent crop of applications for the 2010 Seminar, including some outstanding Islamicists (which we encouraged this year). We will have Islamic numismatic scholars Stefan Heidemann, Jere Bachrach, and Michael Bates lecturing and advising the students, and Romanist Berhard Woytek of Vienna as our Visiting Scholar. It promises to be an outstanding Seminar, and we hope to admit nine or ten students, but due to our endowment performance we find we will only be able to underwrite four stipends ($4000 each). A number of the applicants have indicated that they are willing to attend even without financial support, but we would like to offer at least one additional stipend, and are therefore appealing to this group for assistance. If you can make even a small contribution to help underwrite a student it would be very much appreciated.
(via the Friends of Numismatics list)

I urge anyone who has benefited from the ANS Graduate Seminar to contribute to this most worthy cause. The contact persons for the seminar are the co-directors, Peter van Alfen (vanalfen@numismatics.org) and Rick Witschonke (rickwitschonke@yahoo.com).

Last week I made my first 2010 trip to the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University for a workshop with researchers and programmers from the University of Heidelberg's Epigraphische Datenbank Heidelberg. The stuff I work on daily is only a fraction of ISAW's digital projects, which are in turn only a fraction of ISAW's business. I had a day before the workshop to catch up with what's going on in the ISAW library and exhibition groups.

But first I had to fly across the Atlantic in this A380, which flies as smoothly and quietly as advertised.

I shared a row with a retiree from Avignon. His US-based kids were flying him to NYC and then Aspen for his 60th birthday. We talked about the food and geography of France and the Southwest US ? Mexican cuisine in particular, which I've been craving and he'd discovered on a previous trip to Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. I heard French on the street in New York, and among visiting scholars at ISAW, but that would be the last French I'd speak for a week.

Next is a crappy mobile phone photo of one of the fine banners ISAW put up on the Museum Mile (ISAW is just half a block east of 5th Ave on 84th Street) to advertise the Old Europe exhibit.

In this context, "Old Europe" refers to a largely forgotten Neolithic and Copper Age culture established along the Danube River during a wave of emigration from Anatolia that also settled the Aegean islands and what are now Macedonia and Greece (see also Cucuteni-Trypillian culture). The objects in the exhibition are from museums in Bulgaria, Moldova, and Bulgaria, and are being shown in the US for the first time. Here's a nice Flickr photo set made by an exhibit visitor:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has nothing from this culture, but does have a collection of almost contemporary Early Cycladic objects.

The exhibit is very well done, widely reported and well reviewed in the local media, and well attended. Chapeau to Jennifer Chi and the exhibition team. There's a nice catalog book edited by David W. Anthony with chapters that dive deeper into the archaeology and history of the culture. The exhibits and digital projects groups have a bunch of ideas of how to improve the integration of physical, print, and web materials for upcoming exhibits as we roll out the new ISAW website. The catalog has some great maps by Brian Turner from UNC's Ancient World Mapping Center (where I worked previously) but I think a KML application could take the geography to another level. The exhibit runs through April 26 after which you'll have to travel to Southeastern Europe to see these objects.

I met ISAW's newest technical people, Michael Edgcumbe (who keeps the wheels on office computing) and Christopher Warner (lead on the new website), in person for the first time. The workshop went well, too. More about that later after I push new code up to our site.

While packing for the return trip, I heard that I'd be coming back to snow. Indeed: when we descended below the clouds I saw Montpellier and much of the Hérault department covered with snow. We got about 10 cm in the neighborhood, some of which remains to be seen in the photo below:

The Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project

The Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project was founded at the University of Washington in September 1996 to promote the study, edition and publication of twenty‐seven unique birch‐bark scrolls, written in the Kharoṣṭhī script and the Gāndhārī language, that had been acquired by the British Library in 1994. Further discoveries have greatly increased the number of known Gāndhārī manuscripts, and the EBMP is currently involved in the study of seventy‐six birch‐bark scrolls (primarily in the British Library, the Senior Collection, the University of Washington Libraries and the Library of Congress) as well as numerous smaller manuscript fragments (in the Schøyen Collection, the Hirayama Collection, the Hayashidera Collection and the Bibliothèque nationale de France). These manuscripts date from the first century BCE to the third century CE, and as such are the oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts as well as the oldest manuscripts from South Asia. They provide unprecedented insights into the early history of Buddhism in South Asia as well as its transmission to Central Asia and China. The Gāndhārī Dictionary Project supports the work of the EBMP through its comprehensive database of Gāndhārī material (including inscriptions, administrative documents and coin legends in addition to the birch‐bark manuscripts) and by compiling the first dictionary and grammar of the Gāndhārī language. The research results of the EBMP and GDP and translations of the manuscripts are published by the University of Washington Press.

Gāndhārī Dictionary Project

• Gāndhārī Word Index
• Monier Monier‐Williams, A Sanskrit‐English Dictionary
• Franklin Edgerton, Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Dictionary
• Boris Oguibénine, “Materials for the Lexicography of Buddhist Sanskrit of the Mahāsāṃghika-Lokottaravādins”
• Ernst Waldschmidt, Sanskrit‐Wörterbuch der buddhistischen Texte aus den Turfan‐Funden
• Staff and Support

Gāndhārī Texts and Tools

• Catalog of Kharoṣṭhī Manuscripts
  
• Catalog of Kharoṣṭhī Inscriptions
• Catalog of Kharoṣṭhī Coin Legends
• Catalog of Niya Documents
• List of Abbreviations
• Bibliography of Gāndhārī Studies
• Transcription System

Today and this week are going to be huge, and I mean that in the most generic, non-specific way possible.

1. The University of North Dakota's Graduate School Scholarly Forum is today and tomorrow. At noon today Richard Kahn (who has blogged for us at Teaching Thursday!) will present in the Dean's Lecture Series a talk entitled "Education as the Avatar of Sustainability". He teaches in our department of Educational Foundations and Research and has just released a book called Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis: The Ecopedagogy Movement (Peter Lang, 2010).

Here are some more interesting sessions and papers:

Session 12: Department of History
Memorial Room, Tuesday 9 March, 2:20pm
"Words of Death: A Theology of Death in the Alexandrian Sayings of the Desert Fathers," Paul A. Ferderer (Faculty Sponsor, Dr. William Caraher) Department of History
"Women’s Associations and Employment: Succor and Impediment of Married Women, 1920-1933," Thomas Harlow (Faculty Sponsor, Dr. Kimberley Porter) Department of History
"Independence in Cape Palmas: The Contentious Path For Autonomy in Maryland in Liberia," Matthew Helm (Faculty Sponsor, Dr. Eric Burin) Department of History
"What Are You Afraid Of? How Governments Have Reacted to Real (or unreal) Threats," Mark Herrmann (Faculty Sponsor, Dr. Kimberley Porter) Department of History

Session 21: Social Sciences Writing Panel Memorial Room, Wednesday 10 March, 1:00pm
Scholarly Writing Planning and Finding Success in Writing for Publications, Dr. J. Sagini Keengwe, Dr. Travis Heggie and Dr. Cynthia Prescott.

and at the same time:

Session 20: Tutorial Badlands Room, Wednesday 10 March, 1:00pm
Python and Scientific Computing in Open-Source, Gökhan Sever, Department of Atmospheric Sciences

Python has become the programing language of choice across the Digital Humanities. Check out William J. Turkel, Adam Crymble and Alan MacEachern, The Programing Historian for more on Python.

2. Be sure to check out a fantastic guest blogger over at Teaching Thursday. Deena Larsen, on the premier English Language E-Lit writers, has offered the second in a series of posts on using Electronic Literature in the classroom called Teaching the Writers Conference. As the title suggests, these posts appear in conjunction with the 41st Annual University of North Dakota's Writers Conference, which this year will focus on digital and new media.  

3. If you still haven't had enough excitement you should be sure to check out Dan Reetz talk on Thursday in the Arts and Sciences Interdisciplinary Speaker Series:

Reetz hit it big last year when his DIY book scanner went viral in the blogosphere. He was featured in a substantial article in the December 2009 Wired Magazine. He's a new kind of hometown, digital folk hero. Be sure to check out his talk.

This post is about an obscene compound of Modern Greek, made up on slang.gr, and how it clearly violates a rule of compounding, by including what looks like a piece of inflection in the first half of the compound. The follow-up post is on how verb–verb and verb–noun compounds work in Modern Greek, and why the coiner of the compound had no choice but to break the rules.

Again, it's not that I'm making a point of posting about obscenities; but obscenities do tend to have interesting linguistic stuff go on with them.

The compound is: γαμαοδέρνουλας.

If you know Modern Greek, have a stare at it. It's not quite right, is it? If you know Ancient Greek, pretend instead it's βινεδέραξ. Which isn't quite right either.

Story beneath the fold.

So, the background to the story is, Language Hat was kind enough to post on my repost of the slang.gr taxonomy of linguistic attitudes. The apotheosis of that taxonomy was "slang.gr FTW". The original had something similar to FTW, Το slang.gr γαμεί, "slang.gr fucks!" Language Hat was amused by this semantic extension of γαμώ.

As I followed up in comments there, this use of γαμεί is a truncation of the old expression γαμά και δέρνει, "he fucks and bashes". (I'll come to the alternation between γαμεί and γαμά in a bit). The sense of the expression I knew was "he is in command of a situation"; the allusion is to the use of penetrative sex and violence as the privilege of the powerful. There is regrettably no shortage of instances where this has happened; the explication I've seen (in Zahos' slang dictionary Το Λεξικό της Πιάτσας) was to tradesmen, and how they used to enforce obedience on their apprentices.

slang.gr does not list this meaning under its entry for γαμά και δέρνει; it gives instead the related meaning "(s)he exercises great skill". If the derivation from masters and apprentices is correct, this extension makes senses; but it is plausible even without it. The original sense is however recoverable in the noun someone has derived from it there, γαμαοδέρνουλας, a sarcastic term for a he-man, "Lord Master Fuck-And-Bash". γαμαοδέρνουλας is derived from the verb γαμάω (Ancient γαμέω), the verb δέρνω (Ancient δέρω), and the augmentative suffix -ουλας, which echoes μπαμπούλας "bogeyman".

Modern Greek can form compounds starting with a verb, and even compounds of two verbs; that's an oddity in Indo-European which will get a separate post. But such compounds still follow the rules of Greek morphology: stem₁ + /o/ + stem₂ + inflection. Having the inflection on the end is normal in compounding: the stems are combined to form a new stem, and that new stem is what gets declined and conjugated as a unit.

• άνθρωπ-ος "human", μορφ-ή "form", ανθρωπ-ό-μορφ-ος "human-shaped".
• έ-χασ-α "I lost", δίκ-η "trial", χασ-ο-δίκ-ης "lose-trial, incompetent lawyer".

The linking -o- is only dropped in Modern Greek when the second term starts with /a/, following the Modern hierarchy for vowel deletion:

• παλι-ός "old", άνθρωπ-ος "human", παλι-άνθρωπ-ος "ol' human = scoundrel"
• έ-σπασ-α "I broke", αρχίδι "testicle", σπασ-αρχίδ-ης "ball-buster"

Now, Ancient Greek verb roots could end in vowels: /aɡapa-/ "love", /ɡame-/ "marry". The inflections following those roots in the present tense typically started with vowels (the thematic vowel): /-ɔː -eis -ei/.

That meant that a vowel went next to another vowel in those proto-Greek verbs: /aɡapa-ɔː/, /ɡame-eis/. But most vowel–vowel combinations in proto-Greek ended up coalescing into a single contracted vowel. You can tell it's contracted, because contracted vowels got circumflexes· /aɡapɔ̂ː/, /ɡameîs/ (ἀγαπῶ, γαμεῖς). So the proto-Greek (and Homeric) ἀγαπάω "I love" (column 1) was contracted by Attic into ἀγαπῶ. The way contraction works, this meant that the thematic vowel, which alternates between /e/ and /o/, turned into an alternation of /aː/ and /ɔː/.

Proto-Greek	Attic	Modern Pronunciation
aɡapá-ɔː	aɡap-ɔ̂ː	aɣap-ˈo
aɡapá-eis	aɡap-âːis	aɣap-ˈa
aɡapá-ei	aɡap-âːi	aɣap-ˈa
aɡapá-omen	aɡap-ɔ̂ːmen	aɣap-ˈomen
aɡapá-ete	aɡap-âːite	aɣap-ˈate
aɡapá-onsi	aɡap-ɔ̂ːsi	aɣap-ˈosi

In fact contraction meant that there are few verbs in Ancient Greek whose stems ended in a vowel intact next to the thematic vowel. Stems ending in /a/, /e/ and /o/ all contracted, and stems ending in /ɛː/ and /ɔː/ were absent from Attic. That left /i/ and /y/, and the Modern Greek vernacular has got rid of many of even those exceptions by analogy: λύω "loosen", the standard example verb, is now λύνω.

Koine gradually merged -αω verbs and -εω verbs. In fact that happened with γαμέω "marry", which in its modern guise "fuck" can be conjugated identically to ἀγαπάω. The merger did not happen in all variants of Greek with the same verbs, which is why it is possible for γαμεί and γαμά to coexist in the Modern language.

The merger generated the Early Modern Greek forms in column 1: the alternation is now between /a/ and /u/. Modern Greek then got rid of the alternation between /a/ and /u/, giving the paradigm in column 2.

Early Modern Greek	Modern Greek
aɣap-ˈo	aɣap-ˈo
aɣap-ˈas	aɣap-ˈas
aɣap-ˈa	aɣap-ˈa
aɣap-ˈume	aɣap-ˈame
aɣap-ˈate	aɣap-ˈate
aɣap-ˈusi	aɣap-ˈane

The thing to note is that since Attic, the inflection on the present tense is not /-ɔː -eis -ei/ > /-o -is -i/, but /-ɔː -âːis -âːi/ > /-ˈo -ˈas -ˈa/. So the -a- is not part of the stem, it is part of the inflection, and it does not belong on compounds starting with such a verb:

• ɣen-ˈo, -ˈas, -ˈa "I give birth", vol-ˈo, -ˈas, -ˈa "I do repeatedly", γεννοβολώ ɣen-o-vol-ˈo "I keep giving birth"
• ɣam-ˈo, -ˈas, -ˈa "I fuck", traɣuði "song", γαμοτράγουδο ɣam-o-traɣuð-o "fuck song, obscene song sung during carnival"

And so we come to γαμαοδέρνουλας, ɣama-o-ðern-ulas. The compound is formed as if the stem of "fuck" is /ɣama-/, not /ɣam-/. That conflicts with compounds like /ɣam-o-traɣuð-o/. Why was this done?

What made this possible is a reanalysis of /-ˈo, -ˈas, -ˈa/ verbs in some variants of Modern Greek, which in the standard is confined to colloquial usage. Unlike normal (uncontracted) verbs, these verbs are accented on the ultima (the final syllable) in the singular. This is odd, and those variants have repaired the discrepancy by adding the normal endings to /-a-/:

Modern Greek		Colloquial Modern Greek
ˈlin-o	aɣap-ˈo	aɣap-ˈa-o
ˈlin-is	aɣap-ˈas	aɣap-ˈa-is
ˈlin-i	aɣap-ˈa	aɣap-ˈa-i
ˈlin-ume	aɣap-ˈame	aɣap-ˈame
ˈlin-ete	aɣap-ˈate	aɣap-ˈate
ˈlin-une	aɣap-ˈane	aɣap-ˈane

This has been called at least once a linguistic atavism: Colloquial Modern Greek has accidentally rediscovered the Homeric forms /aɡapá-ɔː, aɡapá-eis, aɡapá-ei/ (whose modern pronunciation would indeed be /aɣap-ˈa-o, aɣap-ˈa-is, aɣap-ˈa-i/). That's not the reason it's happened of course—someone who says /aɡapá-ɔː/ is unlikely to be stereotyped as an Homeric scholar, and the atavism hasn't extended to the plural */aɣap-ˈaume aɣap-ˈaete aɣap-ˈaune/, whose accent is unexceptionally on the penult (second last syllable).

In conjugation tables, and indeed in people's grammatical intuition, /-ao -ais -ai/ are still treated as inflections; but the whole point of the analogical change was to make /-o -is -i/ the inflections, attaching to a stem ending in /-a-/, so the stress would be more normal. Under that analysis, the stem of /ɣamˈao/ is indeed /ɣama-/. And notice that the expression is cited in slang.gr in the first person as γαμάω και δέρνω, not γαμώ και δέρνω: being colloquial, it is supposed to have the colloquial innovative form of the verb.

So whoever coined a noun γαμαοδέρνουλας, based on the phrase γαμάω και δέρνω, could access an analysis of the verb where the verb stem is /ɣama/ not /ɣam/, and combines as /ɣama-o-ðern-ulas/. But that still looks decidedly odd. /ao/ is an infrequent cluster in Standard Modern Greek in general, routinely occurring only in this colloquial inflection, and in verbs historical ending in /aɡɔː/ (e.g. /pʰaɡɔː/ > /fao/ "that I eat"). Stems ending in /a/ are rarer still: in fact, they shouldn't be there at all; so we are surprised to see one in a stem boundary in a compound. And that's why this form just looks wrong.

So why *did* the coiner of γαμαοδέρνουλας use that odd stem variant, instead of the expected γαμοδέρνουλας? Speakers of Modern Greek can probably guess what I'm guessing the reasons are (γάμος, and echoing the phrase explicitly). But to explain that through, I'm going to discuss the strange history of Greek verb–noun and verb–verb compounds, in the next post.

The "real" When on Google Earth 86!
Following the attempted usurpation of WOGE86, here is something REALLY old!

Here are the rules:

Q: What is When on Google Earth? A: It’s a game for archaeologists, or anybody else willing to have a go!

Q: How do you play it? A: Simple, you try to identify the site in the picture.

Q: Who wins? A: The first person to correctly identify the site, including its major period of occupation, wins the game.

Q: What does the winner get? A: The winner gets bragging rights and the chance to host the next When on Google Earth on his/her own blog!

Be the first to correctly identify the site below and its major period of occupation in the comments below and you can host your own!

Juan Garces is inviting suggestions for manuscripts to be digitised here.

The obvious answer to this question is: all of them! We all want access to free digital resources, but creating them is tempered by a series of practical considerations. How can we best deliver digitised manuscripts to your desktops? One answer is to secure funding for independent digitisation projects with achievable goals. Such a series of projects has to be placed squarely within a vision and strategy. At the start of each one we have to ask ourselves: which manuscripts should we digitise next? …

It is, however, crucial that we also engage you. Here’s how. Contact me to answer the following question: which particular Greek manuscripts held by the British Library would you like to see digitised and why? I cannot promise that your favourite manuscript will be in the next phase, but I can assure you that your feedback will inform our decision.

Basically Juan has to go out and bid for money.  So if you have an idea for some manageable-size “project” that would attract funding easily, tell him.  If you have a bunch of manuscripts in mind, tell him.

I notice that the Stavros Niarchus Foundation is funding the first tranche.  We have, perhaps, overlooked the “wealthy Greek shipowner” angle on all this.  The manuscripts — the physical books — are the remains of Greek culture as it was in the middle ages, and record that culture from still earlier stages.  Why shouldn’t this Greek culture be online? 

I was flipping through the Esther volume of the Göttingen Septuagint and saw something unusual:

If you examine this page carefully, you'll see that the top section contains Greek text of a portion of Esther. Under that is a critical apparatus - a shorthand method of documenting manuscript evidence, showing which manuscripts agree with the text above and which manuscripts disagree, and how they disagree.

Then under the apparatus there is second section of Greek text (market by an L in the margin) followed by a second apparatus. We've seen something like this before. The ancient Greek book of Daniel, for example, exists in both the Old Greek and the Theodotion versions, and other editions of the LXX, such as Rahlfs and Swete, have presented both versions of that text either on facing pages or with one version on top of the other. Similar parallel texts are presented for the shorter and longer versions of Tobit and those parts of Joshua and Judges where codices Alexandrinus and Vaticanus disagree. But I've never seen this phenomenon in a printed edition of Esther before.

The marginal 'L' indicates that the text is thought by some scholars to be a Lucianic recension, or revision, of the Septuagint. Lucian was a Christian martyr who died in 312 AD and was famous for comparing the various Greek translations with the Hebrew Scriptures and preparing new Greek texts that were in greater agreement with the Hebrew originals.

However, the L-Text of Esther is different from the Septuagint text in some surprising ways that seem, to some scholars, inconsistent with the Lucianic reforms. The LXX and the L-Text both contain the so-called 'Additions to Esther' not found in the Hebrew Massoretic Text (MT), and the L-Text and LXX are significantly similar for those Additions. But in places where the L-Text and the LXX are clearly translating the same Hebrew, there is very little word for word correspondence. And at several junctures, it seems that the L-Text must be translating a different Hebrew source all-together. Carey Moore in his Anchor Bible volume on Esther, and elsewhere, has argued that the L-Text of Esther is really a fresh translation from a Hebrew original that is, at points, very different from the Hebrew (MT) that we have today. Followers of this line of reasoning usually refer to this as the Alpha-Text or A-Text of Esther, rather than the L-Text. If Moore is right, then the A-Text of Esther isn't so much useful for determining the original text of the Massoretic version of Esther, but is rather more valuable for illuminating a version of Esther that no longer exists in any Hebrew manuscript known today.

Right now the Göttingen Septuagint is gathering interest on our prepublication program, listed at less than 1/10th of the retail price of the print volumes! The prepub has been well received, but we still need a few more orders to confirm that there is enough interest in getting the best Septuagint available into Logos Bible Software. So if you were sitting on the fence with this one wondering what you'd get that isn't already in Rahlfs' or Swete's LXX, the A-Text of Esther is one example of the cool, useful things you'll only see in Göttingen.

P.S. If you're interested in the Septuagint, you might take a peek at Biblical Languages: Reference Grammars and Introductions (19 Vols.), which contains three volumes on the Septuagint: Swete's classic Introduction (which examines the Lucianic recension on pages 80-86), the introductory grammar and chrestomathy by Conybeare and Stock and the reference grammar by Thackeray. If you want to lock in the early bird price, now is the time.

There has been a bunch of writing around the web, on anthropology blogs, about how to reach a broader readership. Now Daniel Lende, at Neuroanthropology, has synthesized the diverse accounts in his post, On Reaching a Broader Public: Five Ideas for Anthropologists.

He starts out:

How can anthropologists reach a wider audience? Good debate on that question has sprung up in recent weeks at Savage Minds, Culture Matters, and Ethnografix. We’ve also written about this question here. Now it’s time for a synthesis.

Five Ideas for Reaching a Wider Audience

-Write about something specific
-Make our work relevant to readers
-Build appeal
-Move beyond critique
-Provide alternatives and how-to ideas

These are good pointers for archaeologists too. Check it out.

[This is a rough transcript of my TEDxNYED talk, delivered on March 6, 2010, in New York City at the Collegiate School. TEDxNYED was an all-day conference "examining the role of new media and technology in shaping the future of education." For a meta-post about the experience of giving a TED(x) talk, please read "Academic Theater (Reflections on TED & TEDxNYED)." What I actually said and did at TEDxNYED deviated from this transcript; I engaged the audience directly a couple of times, once for fun and once to get their ideas about the subject. I'll post the video when it's available.]

I want to tell you a story about a forgotten realm of education and knowledge. It is a cautionary tale, a parable of what happens when the world changes, when tradition is challenged.

Until relatively recently in human history, pi was the much sought-after solution to what was long called the “rectification” or “quadrature” of the circle, fancy words more easily symbolized by the diagram in this slide. How can you transform that circle into the overlaid square? One side of the square would be one-quarter of pi if the diameter of the circle is 1.

Pi was a coveted number for thousands of years, imbued with magical properties. Generations of scholars pursued it doggedly, often considering it the be-all and end-all of geometry.

This is a different pi—pi as we moderns know it:

Well, not all of it, as I’m sure you know. It’s just the first 200 or so digits. The number stretches on forever. I hope you weren’t expecting me to reveal the actual last digit of pi. Because there isn’t one. Strange, no?

Pi wasn’t always this strange. The ancient Egyptians knew better, pegging the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle at 4 over 3 to the 4th power. That’s considerably more definite, and thus much more sensible.

Archimedes knew better, homing in on the value of pi between a couple of very close fractions.

If you are a biblical literalist, pi would seem to be 3, since the Bible clearly describes 30 cubits as encompassing a circle of 10 cubit diameter.

And the solutions kept coming. From ancient mathematicians and philosophers, to medieval scholars, to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Everyone seemed capable of finding—with enough effort—the exact value for pi. Squaring the circle was an effort of genius in an ancient science perfectly described centuries ago by Euclid.

But something changed radically in the eighteenth century, just after that book on the right by Joubert de la Rue. A few mathematicians started to take more seriously the nagging feeling that pi didn’t have a perfect solution as a magical fraction. It might not have a last digit after all. This critical number at the center of mathematics might, in fact, be irrational. One mathematician began to reconceptualize pi.

And there he is: the dapper Swiss German mathematician Johann Heinrich Lambert:

He was the son of a tailor, obviously, and was mostly self-taught in mathematics. His brilliant work in the 1760s showed that π/4 could not be a rational number—you could never exactly figure out the value of one side of that square—and thus that pi too was irrational. After Lambert, math textbooks declared the matter solved.

That’s right, problem solved…

Except….circle-squaring kept on going. The world of mathematics had changed with the discoveries of the eighteenth century but somehow the message didn’t get through to many people. John Parker, on the left, came up with my personal favorite solution: pi is precisely 20612/6561. Some circle-squarers, like James Smith on the right, mocked Lambert’s proof as the work of a dilettante.

Things then got testy between the new mathematicians and those who clung to the prior vision of pi. The record of this warfare is as informative as it is humorous. In the 1860s and 70s, James Smith took on Augustus De Morgan, a math professor in London, in a series of short pamphlets, which were the Victorian equivalent of Twitter.

But unsurprisingly, the castigations of professors of mathematics didn’t stop the circle-squarers. Their solutions kept on coming, even in the face of criticism, even after pi had been shown to be transcendental, meaning it couldn’t even be the root of some other number or equation. My favorite book from the turn of the twentieth century had this subtitle on the cover: “The great problem which has baffled the greatest philosophers and the brightest minds of ancient and modern times has now been solved by a humble American citizen of the city of Brooklyn.”

Now, it’s easy to laugh at these misguided circle squarers, especially when they’re from Brooklyn. But if you read circle-squarers seriously, and stop to think about it, they are not so different from you or me. Even in our knowing times, we all persist in doing things that others have long since abandoned as absurd or passé.

History tells us that people are, alas, not very good at seeing the new, and instead are very good at maintaining the past at all costs. This is particularly true in education: Euclid’s Elements, written over 2,000 years ago, was still a standard math textbook well into the 19th century, despite major mathematical advances.

So it’s worth pausing to think about the last digit of pi. Why did so many continue to pursue pi as it was traditionally conceived, and why did they resist the new math?

Think for a moment about the distinction between the old and the new pi. The old was perfect, simple, ordered, divine; the new, seemingly imprecise, prosaic, chaotic, human. So the story of pi is the story, and the psychology, of what happens when the complex and new tries to overtake the simple and traditional.

It’s happening all around us in the digital age. We’re replacing what has been perceived as perfect and ordered with the seemingly imprecise and chaotic.

Look at what has happened, for instance, in the last decade with Wikipedia and the angst about the fate of the traditional Encyclopedia.

Or newspapers in the face of new forms of journalism, such as blogging. A former baseball statistician, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, can brazenly decide to analyze elections and economy better than most newspapers? Yes indeed.

Now this audience, hip to the right side of these screens, may want to be as mean as Augustus De Morgan to those still on the left. We may want to leave modern circle-squarers behind, and undoubtedly some of them will be left behind. But for the majority who are unsettled and are caught between the old and the new, we need other methods to convince them and to change the status quo. History tells us it’s not enough to say that people are blind to the future. We have to show precisely what the weaknesses of the old are…

…and we have to show how the new works better than the old.

Knowing pi correctly to the 10th digit is enormously helpful when accurately predicting the movements of heavenly bodies; try using James Smith’s 3 1/8 when tracing the arc of a planet or moon. For some physics, knowing pi accurately to the 40th digit is critical.

Moreover, this modern pi may be strange, but its very strangeness opened up new avenues of research and thought that were just as intellectually challenging and rewarding as squaring the circle. The transcendental nature of pi led mathematicians to ponder infinite sequences of fractions and had an impact on chaos theory. In computer science, coming up with algorithms to reach a billion or trillion digits of pi as quickly as possible advanced the field. And, if you still want an unsolved problem to crack, see if you can figure out if pi is what is called a “normal number,” where the distribution of the digits 0-9 is uniform…

…or is there instead a preponderance of eights. Now that’s a tough problem, related to real issues in modern math. So there are still problems to be solved, more advanced problems. Math didn’t end with the end of the old pi—it just moved in new, more interesting directions.

But to get to that point, mathematicians had to show in a comprehensible way how the new pi created a new order.

John Chrysostom delivered eight sermons against the Jews.  All are of about the same length, except for sermon two, which is about a third of the length of the others.  The 18th century editor Montfaucon signalled a lacuna (reprinted by Migne), i.e. that part of the sermon was lost. German scholar Wendy Pradels conducted a search of collections of manuscripts, and finally found a complete copy on the island of Lesbos.  The new material was printed, with a German translation, ten years ago.  But no English translation exists.

I have today received a first draft of a translation of this material, which I commissioned a while back.  It looks very good.  Once it is finished, I will place it in the public domain.  I will also try to make sure it is added to the end of whatever copies of the English are online.  Let’s hope website owners — some of rather different politics to myself – are willing to cooperate in reuniting the pieces of this work of Chrysostom.

I was browsing through Quasten vol. 3 and noticed several short anti-Jewish pieces.  I am rather tempted to commission translations of these while I’m dealing with Chrysostom’s anti-Jewish work as well.  Quasten says that Williams’ book is a guide to all these works.  It is rather curious tho — it isn’t online, and no copies are available for sale!  It shows how much I miss having PDF’s of things!

But I can manage without, anyhow.  I also notice several short works by Chrysostom which it would be useful to have online, such as two Christmas sermons, and his In Kalendas, on New Year, and one on the circus games being held on Good Friday (which emptied his church).

I just landed in Rome, and I've learned from the news that Alberto Ronchey passed away some days ago. He was ministry of Cultural Heritage during the 1990s with 2 different Italian Governments, but that's only the most known thing he did in a long career as a journalist and writer. His name is strongly tied to a bill that still brings his name (Legge Ronchey), about the introduction of private commercial activities in State-owned museums and archaeological areas. While disputed for some years, this bill is nevertheless of paramount importance for the whole Italian heritage ecosystem, and played a key role in the development of cultural heritage into a commercially exploitable field (albeit an oligopoly, one might dare to say), even though the role of the State is still vital.

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This past weekend’s TEDxNYED event in New York took place in the theater of a school just off Broadway. I couldn’t help thinking about the symbolism of that location during the day’s proceedings. TEDx, a spinoff regional program of the billionaires-and-brains edutainment summit in California, TED, pushes speakers like me towards theatrics.

TEDxNYED was enjoyable and I greatly appreciated the opportunity to rub elbows with some digital luminaries and some very smart educators who are doing all the hard work in the trenches while I sit here in the ivory tower blogging. Whatever criticisms may be leveled, TEDxNYED was incredibly well-run and engaging. Before you read my thoughts below, you should first read the wrap-up from Dave Bill, the TEDxNYED “curator,” who gets it exactly right. I’m enormously appreciative of Dave’s hard work and the hard work of his TEDxNYED colleagues.

Back to Broadway: among other things, TEDxNYED gave me a chance to think more about the academic lecture as theater. (It also gave me a welcome chance to summon the vaudevillian genes of my New York Jewish heritage, the effectiveness of which you will be able to assess when the video is posted to the TEDx channel on YouTube in a couple of weeks.)

Take Larry Lessig, the de facto headliner of TEDxNYED. He’s clearly a first-rate legal scholar and influential activist. But after viewing him live, I realized more than ever that he’s also a rather talented performance artist, with crack comedic timing. (Here’s his talk; judge for yourself.)

We professors don’t like to admit it, but comedy and performance are important ingredients in most successful academic lectures, and can spur the pursuit of knowledge and action far better than serious monograph or article. When I was in college nearly everyone interested in history—from any era or place—took Stephen Cohen’s class on Soviet history, mostly because he was entertaining. He even had one lecture consisting entirely of jokes. Sure, it was gimmicky. But I also know several of my classmates who went into careers in diplomacy and history because of the inspiration.

Of course, academic theater can also lead to problems. TED talks are limited to 18 minutes, inevitably leading to reductionism. As I quipped in my talk on the 6,000 year history of π, “Portions have been condensed.” The humanities particularly suffer from this condensation. For instance, as hugely entertaining as Lessig’s talk was, if you watch it I’m sure you’ll pick up that it conflates, quite problematically, two kinds of conservatism: religious conservatism and libertarianism. Just because the Cato Institute can imagine a role for remixes doesn’t mean that those who attend free church potlucks can. Modern conservatism is an extraordinarily complex mix; one need only look at the tension between libertarian and evangelical views of homosexuality. Gina Bianchini, the CEO of Ning, a network of social networks, presented her work as “the joy of connecting optimists from around the world,” leaving out the fact that the history of Ning is far more interesting: it started out as an engine for making web apps, only later turning toward social networking. That’s actually a fascinating, complex business history that I would have liked to hear more about.

TED’s tagline is the catchy “Ideas Worth Spreading.” I’m an intellectual historian and appreciate the emphasis on ideas; as an educator I’m in favor of spreading knowledge. But in my later years I’ve also come to realize that while ideas are important, execution is probably more important. Lessig and Bianchini also know this—Lessig is now working on methods of more effective lobbying and Bianchini is obviously a talented CEO—and it would have helped TEDxNYED if they had explained to the audience the nitty-gritty details of making real change and progress. It doesn’t come from clever sound bites.

The TED spotlight-on-the-stage format also encourages the audience to perceive the speakers as isolated geniuses, coming out to impart wisdom. The host who introduced me credited me as being the solitary creator of several projects and works, all of which were actually broad collaborations. Again, collaboration is more complex than the format allows. Jeff Jarvis decided to blow up the format by getting up on stage with the lights on and ranting about the insanities and inanities of modern education. This was effective in a Lenny Bruce sort of way, but like Bruce, it was the exception that proved the rule that we speakers were bound to a certain form of academic theater. Inspired by Jarvis, I broke the fourth wall and interacted with the audience a couple of times during my talk, but it was perhaps a little superficial.

Regardless of these criticisms—which I give, again, entirely in recognition of the success of the event and with an eye toward improvement for next year—I enjoyed the challenge of doing a TED talk. I’m working on a much more formal Big Lecture at Cambridge University, and TEDxNYED helpfully made me think about the problems with that format as well. Indeed, I’m not blaming TED for the problems of academic theater. I actually believe the fault lies with academics themselves, who have ceded the ground of public intellectualism in the past generation or two, leaving a vacuum that TED and TEDx are happy to fill.

Hopefully—and judging by the tweets and blog posts this is true—the attendees took away more of the advantages than the disadvantages of the format, and will go on from thought to action.

[photo credit: Kevin Jarrett]

HESTIA: the Herodotus Encoded Space-Text-Imaging Archive

What is it?

• HESTIA provides a new approach towards conceptions of space in the ancient world, supported by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
• Combining a variety of different methods, it examines the ways in which space is represented in Herodotus' History, in terms of places mentioned and geographic features described
• It develops visual tools to capture the 'deep' topological structures of the text, extending beyond the usual two-dimensional Cartesian maps of the ancient world

Who are we?

• Elton Barker (Principal Investigator) - Lecturer in Classical Studies, The Open University
• Stefan Buzar (Co-Investigator) - Lecturer in Geography, University of Birmingham
• Chris Pelling (Co-Investigator) - Regius Professor of Greek, University of Oxford
• Leif Isaksen (IT consultant) - Doctoral Researcher, University of Southampton

What do we hope to show?

• We are looking into ways in which Herodotus' History potentially represents a decentred or multicentred understanding of the Mediterranean world based on relational flow and connectivity
• A further part of this investigation considers whether different actors within the History have different conceptions of space...

Herodotus Narrative Timeline

Developed in conjunction with Nick Rabinowitz, The Narrative Timeline allows users to visualise locations referred to in the text by scrolling along a 'timeline' representing each chapter. Points appear as the 'reader' comes across them, then 'fade from memory'. It is possible both to search by chapter and filter locations by type. Clicking on location in the map, gives information about it, while selecting it in the timeline will display the chapter text and highlight any references to the location.

You can try it out here.

GoogleEarth (KML)

If you have GoogleEarth installed on your computer you can access a KML file with an embedded network link here.

This will create an overlay of red squares that shows all the locations referred to by Herodotus. When zooming in low, the squares become clickable points that give information

GIS (WFS)

If you have GIS system capable of reading Web Feature Service(WFS) data (we recommend the Open Source application Quantum GIS), there is a feed here (use the HESTIA/google_earth layer). This will allow you to perform your own queries and analyses of the data as well as create maps. If you want to include WMS satellite imagery, you can get from NASA here.

This past weekend’s TEDxNYED event in New York took place in the theater of a school just off Broadway. I couldn’t help thinking about the symbolism of that location during the day’s proceedings. TEDx, a spinoff regional program of the billionaires-and-brains edutainment summit in California, TED, pushes speakers like me towards theatrics.

TEDxNYED was great fun and I greatly appreciated the opportunity to rub elbows with some digital luminaries and some very smart educators who are doing all the hard work in the trenches while I sit here in the ivory tower blogging. Whatever criticisms may be leveled, TEDxNYED was incredibly well-run and engaging. Before you read my thoughts below, you should first read the wrap-up from Dave Bill, TEDxNYED. I’m enormously appreciative of Dave’s hard work and the hard work of his TEDxNYED.

Back to Broadway: among other things, TEDxNYED gave me a chance to think more about the academic lecture as theater. (It also gave me a welcome chance to summon the vaudevillian genes of my New York Jewish heritage, the effectiveness of which you will be able to assess yourself when the video is posted to the TEDx channel on YouTube in a couple of weeks.)

Take Larry Lessig, the de facto headliner of TEDxNYED. He’s clearly a first-rate legal scholar and influential activist. But after viewing him live, I realized more than ever that he’s also a rather talented performance artist, with crack comedic timing.

<embed src=”http://blip.tv/play/lG2By5c_Ag” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”480″ height=”318″ allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true”></embed>

We professors don’t like to admit it, but comedy and performance are important ingredients most successful academic lectures, and can spur the pursuit of knowledge and action far better than serious monograph or article. When I was in college nearly everyone interested in history–from any era or place–took Stephen Cohen’s class on Soviet history, mostly because he was entertaining. He even had one lecture consisting entirely of jokes. Sure, it was gimmicky. But I also know several of my classmates who went into careers in diplomacy and history because of the inspiration.

Of course, academic theater can also lead to problems. TED talks are limited to . As I joked that my talk on the 6000 year history of As I joked in my talk-but it was closehumanities doesn’t fit well. often can’t be reduced to simple takeaways or soundbites. . Historians will feel particularly slighted. History often moves in strange ways. Gina Bianchini spoke of a passion for connecting optimists. But I wanted to ask, “So then why did Ning start as an app engine?”

It also encourages us to perceive the presenters as solitary geniuses. The introduction to my talk I was credited with several project that were actually large-scale collaborations.

I did my best to break out of the form – broke the fourth wall – brought in complexity. But I also felt the similar pain of some of the others in the front row that we were doing something odd.

But I’m not blaming TED for the problems of academic theater. I actually believe the fault lies with academics themselves, who have ceded the ground of public intellectualism in the past generation or two, leaving a vacuum that TED and TEDx are happy to fill.

TED’s tagline is the catchy “Ideas Worth Spreading.” I’m an intellectual historian and appreciate the emphasis on ideas; as an educator I’m in favor of spreading knowledge. But for the past decade I’ve been working in . In my later years I’ve also become less enamored of ideas and more interested in execution. But as , from chnm, importance of ruthless pragmatism and the importance of execution.

Interestingly, the TEDsters are aware of this weakness. In a break, I spoke to a couple of emissaries from the mothership, and gently prodded them on this point, that perhaps the 18 minute theatrical lecture wasn’t the best format for them. TEDx for kids coming 11/20.

10:00am - PARTICIPATION

Andy Carvin – The New Volunteers – in 1995 the Internet wasn’t yet a place to help as a community for the Kobe earthquake. 9/11 – created a discussion list – September 11 info (on Yahoo groups) – they hashed out exactly what was happening (e.g., White House was not on fire). 2005 Tsunami – now there was blogspot and wikis (tsunamihelp.blogspot.com held a lot of info). CrisisCamp created so that this process of creating from scratch doesn’t have to repeat itself. No budget; CrisisCamp has expanded to 12 citiesCreole-English iPhone app created in one weekend. Missing persons Google App. OpenStreetMaps + 1K volunteers = incredibly detailed live map of devastation in Haiti.

Michael Wesch – well-known video maker, explaining new media – learned about new media for Papua New Guinea, a place unmediated – world where they focus on direct relationships – no CVs. First media there were books – maps, census. society recast by the media. led to serious struggles – loss of old society. the media uses us, not vice versa. no opting out of new media – we’re all part of these changes. So Wesch has tried to engage students into rethinking the syllabus and classwork so that they can aggressively think about the nature of new media and shape it. (almost) fully living in public.

Henry Jenkins – “participatory culture” – “with great power comes great responsibility” – Peter Parket/Spiderman – change to the comic book: old Parker worked at a newspaper, now he has a computer and gets his info via the internet. Also, he lives in a world where adults and children are considered equals. “Feral children of the internet, raised by Web 2.0″ – that can’t be the outcome – we have to teach children to use this media well. World of Warcraft is NOT bowling alone, despite the critiques. Games have become a platform for protest in China – action that couldn’t take place in the real world. Play with media important in our age – can, if done right, can engage ethical values and the world. Use of Avatar as a form of protest. But schools are locking down many of these media sites – if media can mobilize political movments, how can we leave it out of schools.

BREAK

11:30am - OPENNESS

David Wiley – on openness in education – reuse, remixing – sharing and being generous – law and policy enable us to say “mine!” like a 2 year old. And whispering in our ears: “It’s OK to be selfish.” But education is inherently a open, sharing process. It’s part of the definition. Best educators are those who share the most completely with the most students. Will we use tech to be more open in education?

Neeru Khosla – “Never let schooling interfere with your education” – Mark Twain. Why are we subjecting our kids to the backpack full of traditional textbooks. How do we move away from textbooks – flexbooks instead = flexible textbooks. They can be kept current and they don’t have to cost as much. [me: but do we need textbooks at all?] Her project: CK-12 (ck12.org)

Lawrence Lessig – Was a leader in the Young Republicans – youngest leader of YR at the convention of 1980. changed the entry for Phil English, whose entry says he was the youngest. Conservatives do lots of things for free: at church, etc. and they are the same conservatives who fight against the free. they are strong believers in the market in SOME contexts but not in other places, where we are free to enjoy the fellowship of others. Freedom needs both the success of the commercial entity and for the innovative reuse of that culture. Commercial and sharing culture. All the great Disney works under the Republican Disney were based on public domain stories. Star Wars mashups: Lucas owns all rights to the mashups. Our lives are sharing activities – thus we need far use and ecology in which we’re free to create, without permission. CC is thus a simple way to share -> some rights reserved world from all rights reserved. YouTube statement of Good Faith that you have to type out. So how to change the system toward an ecology of openness, when the democrats are in the pocket of Hollywood and the strongest advocates for harsh copyright regime. Openness is commitment to a set of values: community, freedom, respect for the creator. We may have to borrow those values from the right?

LUNCH

2:00pm - MEDIA

TED Talk

Jay Rosen – Open source journalism – “I’m an introvert who has learned to fake conviviality.” “Intellectually, I’m a pragmatist.” Failing costs to find each other, leading to new things that turn the business model around, like journalism. One way to reenvision journalism is to look at how these falling costs might be able to produce new things. We can have the global reach and global responsibility when we crowdsource, say, the prices of drugs from around the world. “The winner in the gift economy is her or she who gives the most away.” Gift economy. Jane’s Intelligence – 1999 – writer from Jane’s posted draft of article to Slashdot–that community helped to completely fine turn and re-write it. Daily Kos in 2004 crowdsourced a dossier on Sinclair Broadcasting, which was slamming the Dems. 2007: Jay launches Assignment Zero. Worry about coordination costs. It succeeded when they posted the 35 interviews they needed to do. Simple, clear instructions for simple, clear assignments work. 2007 TPM calls for help with going through massive email file. 2010: Guardian’s open call to figuring out how Tony Blair was making so much money? Readers helped w/ understanding the consulting biz Blair is in. Brian Lehrer: buy milk, lettuce, and a six pack of Bud in each part of NYC – lots of people can help, and lots of people want to know the answer. Key then is: “Audience atomization overcome.”

Jeff Jarvis – “This is bullshit.” This format reminds us of the classroom – lecture to the audience. Also should remind us of the newspaper. There’s never a negative tweet about a TED talk. But lo and behold TEDchris wrote a negative tweet about Sarah Silverman, which he then retracted. “TED gives us validation.” So do schools – they validate and repeat. News, similarly, repeat things. We instead need to come up with unique value. Curators rather than creators. “Do what you do best, and link to the rest.” “Fuck the SATs – why do we need memorization in an age of Google. Schools should adopt Google’s 20% time; end product of schooling should be a portfolio. Schools should be incubators, not factories.

BREAK

3:10pm - NETWORKS

TED Talk

Gina Bianchini – Ning – connecting optimists – no better time to be an optimist because they can get together online and move against – too pithy – empty

George Siemens – When we reduce education to the wrong point of focus we run into trouble – shouldn’t reduce it to corporate elements. Designed courses that challenge models.

BREAK

4:30pm - ACTION

Dan Cohen

Amy Bruckman – Ga Tech – it’s amazing what you can find on web – Amy Bruckman’s Rules of Twitter: don’t brag and don’t whine

Dan Meyer – real K12 educator -  how lame math education is – problems are just stamped out of particular models w/ diff numbers – “A water tank — how long will it take to fill it up” even w/ video of a tank slowly filling. Important to discuss the problem of errors. Lack of initiative, perserverance, retention; aversion to word problems. Use multimedia; encourage intuition; ask the shortest question you can; let students do things; be less helpful. And we have the tools to make and distribute these new math problems redone. blog.mrmeyer.com

Chris Lehmann – Science Leadership Academy – critique of standardized testing – lamest kind of learning – plus, we’ll never agree on history or science . Shoot for creating a citizen, not a workforce member. Teach kids, not subjects. Involve the community. “Teach kids to learn how to think for themselves.”

I have been experimenting with the trial download of desktop publishing package QuarkXpress.  What a curious thing it is!  I have been quite unable, for instance, to import a Word .doc file with footnotes and get footnotes.  This — surely elementary — ambition has cost me an hour or so of my life.

Off to try Adobe InDesign.  Just getting the download is rather horrible — I hope the program is better!

In a recent article, by John Bintliff ("The Implications of a Phenomenology of Landscape," in E. Olshausen and V. Sauer, Die Landschaft und die Religion. (Stuttgart 2009), 27-45) offers (another) harsh critique of Christopher Tilley's efforts toward a phenomenology of ancient landscapes. Bintliff, in particular, takes issue with Tilley's efforts to produce an landscape rooted in its "emotional and symbolic significance" to the exclusion of a more holistic view that includes an emphasis on the landscape as economically productive space. He argues that Tilley's view of the landscape as "really just about feelings, and symbolic behaviors..." represents a distinctly British reaction to historical phenomenon of the last century or two: namely the gradual abandonment of the countryside by a large part of the population who moved to cities and the consequent inability of most of the population to understand the countryside as productive space. Instead, the countryside has become a kind of "enormous themepark for the urban millions".

Reading this and contemplating my own walks home made me question the authenticity of my own experience. After all, I don't need to walk home or even be outside in the cold. I don't walk home for environmental reasons - my wife happily drives to and from campus in the relative warmth of our relatively inefficient little Honda. I do not even do it for convenience, bowing to our more than hectic schedules my wife and I indulged in the ultimate symbol of middle class affluence, when we purchases a second car. I always thought that I walked home because the outdoors offered an experience that was common not only to members of my community today, but also to historical members of this community who would braved the brisk walks across the exposed prairie for over a century. In short, I was imitating, in my own hopelessly local way, Tilley's call for phenomenological approach to the local landscape.

At the end of the day, I suppose my walks home did lack the kind of authenticity necessary to allow me to engage with the past in anything but the most superficial way. The cold, bracing, North Dakota evenings existed only in contrast to the forced-air warmth of my home and office. Our knowledge of space and place can only ever be relative to our historical engagement. Bintliff's holistic view of the past, of course, is just as easily subsumed into this paradigm. His call for a holistic view of the landscape is clearly fed by the modern roots of archaeological practice and the political drive to document exhaustively the natural, cultural, social, political, and economic resources of a place. So, if the critique of Tilley's methods for understanding the landscape derives exclusively from its unabashedly urban, 20th century, bourgeois position, then Bintliff's calls for a holistic view of the landscape must certainly have roots in the modern or even colonial dream of documenting the entire world.  

An email tells me of this volume, which on the face of it is a translation by S.C.Malan of Russian meditations on some material by Ephrem Syrus.  But it’s actually much more interesting than it appears; because at the back is a translation of Chrysostom’s Sermon on Passion Week, Severian’s sermon on the same, and a couple of pieces by Ephrem Syrus. 

The whole book is dedicated to Charles Marriot, the self-effacing editor and translator of much of the Oxford Movement Library of the Fathers.  The translations of Chrysostom made at that time have never been superceded.

The only annoying thing is the old-fashioned typography.  Using the long-s in 1859?!

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.

When I studied with print books I had an old, well-used Bible on my desk. This Bible’s sole purpose was to look up Bible cross references. Because it was “broken in,” I could quickly turn the pages to a desired location. My new Bible always stayed open to the passage I was studying and then it would go to the pulpit with me. With Logos 4 you can designate a “cross reference look-up” Bible while staying in the same location in another Bible. Here’s how it works:

Scattered throughout your Logos resources are hyperlinked Bible cross references. Normally when you click a link your Preferred Bible will look up the passage. You can override that default by designating a “target Bible.”

• Click the panel menu in your secondary Bible. It can be another copy of your Preferred Bible or a completely different Bible.
• From the panel menu select Send hyperlinks here. Notice a target image appears on the panel menu.

Now when you click a Bible cross reference in any resource, this Bible will jump to that location!

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

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The West Bank and East Jerusalem Searchable Map

This collection includes lists of archaeological sites that have been surveyed or excavated since Israel occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967. Since that time, the oversight of the antiquities of the area has devolved on two government bodies: the military administration's Staff Officer for Archaeology (SOA) in Judea and Samaria and the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). The IAA, which is responsible for East Jerusalem, is a civil branch of government and its records are open for inspection. Some of the records of the Staff Officer for Archaeology in Judea and Samaria are being accessed in full for the first time as a result of the joint Israeli-Palestinian Archaeology Working Group. This involved a team of Israeli and a team of Palestinian archaeologists and cultural heritage professionals working in concert to create new data resources that document the single, unitary archaeological landscape of the southern Levant, which is now bisected by the modern borders.

View the searchable map interface

View the kml data in Google Maps

Download full database file

Download the Archaeological Sourcebook (2009)

This site is the winner of the ASOR Open Archaeology First Prize 2009

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is proud to announce the launch of the prototype of Music Theatre Online (MTO), a freely accessible web-based archive of musical and music theatre. Funded by a Digital Humanities Startup grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, MTO provides a model for online scholarly archives of the exceptionally multimodal art form of music theatre. “Under the inspired leadership of Doug Reside,” comments MITH Director Neil Fraistat, “MTO promises to revolutionize the study of musical theatre, and adds to an increasing number of MITH projects involving the performing arts.”

The MTO prototype makes available, with the generous permission of creators James Gardiner and Nick Blaemire, audio and video files, photographs, and seventeen TEI encoded drafts of the 2008 Broadway musical, Glory Days charting the development of the show from early sketches through regional productions to opening night. For several versions of the show, the lyrics have been linked to audio transcriptions of related performances, allowing a reader to closely study both text and music simultaneously.

Glory Days is the first in what we hope will be a continuing series of musicals added to the collection in the coming years. Upcoming titles under development include the 1866 melodrama The Black Crook and the 1920 Jerome Kern musical, Sally. The prototype is available at http://mith.umd.edu/mto.

International Journal of Conservation Science
ISSN: 2067-533X

The International Journal of Conservation Science (IJCS) is a high quality peer-reviewed journal devoted to the publication of original research papers in applied conservation science and its broad range of applications.

The topics cover all disciplines and branches of modern scientific conservation, including different aspects on general conservation theory, scientific investigation of works of art, authentication, determination of conservation state, compatibility studies for preservation and restoration procedures and monitoring of interventions effectiveness, etiopathology of historic and natural monuments, studies on the mechanisms of deterioration and degradation for different materials as structural and ornamental elements, impact of the environmental factors or agents on monuments and ecosystems, obtaining and characterization of new materials and procedures for preservation and restoration, new methodologies for scientific investigation, cross-related problems concerning research applied to conservation science.

Review articles in selected areas are published from time to time.

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

8th March is International Women’s Day, and March is National Women’s History Month in the US (it would be nice if there were more of them in a year, otherwise we have 11 men’s history months and 364 men’s days by default, but you can’t have everything, especially if you’re a woman…). The theme of this year’s Women’s History Month is Writing Women Back Into History. I’ll probably write some posts about women’s and gender history later in the month. But right now seems like a good time to announce a new website/blog:

They Really Do Exist “aims to be a directory of women who are active in traditionally male arenas”, “for all those people who are sick of hearing ‘But there ARE no women in that sector!’ when they ask why the media or other publicity downplays the role played by women in any given area”. The site was the idea of Jennie Rigg, a female political blogger who is, in her own very apt words, “FUCKING SICK” of being told that there are no female political bloggers. What I find most striking about this situation is that many male political bloggers (even liberal ones) try to delegitimize feminism by claiming that it isn’t really politics. In contrast, anti-feminist academics are more likely to delegitimize feminist history by asserting that it is political and therefore doesn’t meet their standards of (false) neutrality. This double standard gives patriarchy the best of both worlds and makes things even more difficult for feminists. Maybe part of the problem of patriarchal equilibrium is that feminists are intellectually honest and abhor hypocrisy, whereas patriarchy thrives on it. Anyway, if you know of a woman who should be included in the list, leave a comment at the submit page.

Inspired by Jennie’s example, I’ve expanded the scope of the War and Gender Zotero group to include works on any aspect of military history written by women. There are now two sub-collections in the group library: one called “About Gender” which includes any works about the intersections of gender and sexuality with war written by anyone (which is what the group was originally limited to), and one called “By Women” which includes anything relating to wars and armed forces written by women. The new collection is still in its early stages. So far it only contains works by women that were already in the group library. There are lots more items in my personal library which need to be added. I’ve almost certainly made some embarrassingly wrong assumptions about people’s gender based only on their forenames, despite being trained by the Cambridge Population Group not to do that.

And finally, here’s a photo of a nurse and some “munitions girls” from the First World War:

I’m starting to prepare for my upcoming holiday.  I’m off to Syria and Lebanon on a package tour for 8 nights.  It starts in Damascus, tours around places like Palmyra (left) and Aleppo, and then darts across into Lebanon to Beirut, the Bekaa valley, and Baalbek.

My main reason for going is to see the Roman remains.  I shan’t mind someone else taking care of the travel arrangements one bit!   Neither country is mainstream tourism material because of the slightly dodgy political situation.  I may be mistaken, but all the troubles in that region seem as quiet as they have ever been, and are ever likely to be.

I’m not much of a traveller.  My interest in the exotic departs around 5pm, and unless a hotel has room service I am pretty reluctant to stay there!  The tour company promise 5* accomodation all the way.  In the East, that tends to mean “best available” and “international chains where possible”, rather than the standards that one might expect in an American 5* hotel.  I’ve never been to either country before, but in Egypt there are really only two grades of hotel.  The first grade is labelled 5*, and means “reasonable”.  The other grade is labelled 3*, and means “not reasonable.”  In the 5* establishments, all sorts of things go wrong but the staff are apologetic.  In the 3* they look at you and shrug as if to say “what do you expect in a dump like this?”  It may be the same in Syria and Lebanon, in which case I have done my best; if it is better, that will be good.

I ordered the Lonely Planet Syria-Lebanon guide today (US version here), which Amazon promise will arrive in the next three weeks — a curiously slow delivery.  I’ve also remembered that I ought to check that my tetanus (etc) shots are up to date.  I don’t know what currency will be best to take.  Probably US dollars will do!  Also I needed to  book some parking at the airport — an area in which UK airports excelling in overcharging — and a place in the executive lounge there; essential unless waiting in deep discomfort for a flight is your idea of the best way to start a holiday.  I’ll have to take my camera as well, of course.  But I shall NOT be taking a laptop.  Let the evil machines take a rest!

Package holidays of this type tend to be booked by people in their 50’s and 60’s.  I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to be the youngest person on the tour.  (Where all the hot chicks go on holiday I don’t know, but perhaps nowhere I’d want to go!)

The Liverpool Daily Post reports a curious incident:

A MILITANT atheist was found guilty of leaving grossly offensive religious images in a prayer room at Liverpool’s John Lennon airport.

Jurors took just 15 minutes to convict Harry Taylor, 59, of leaving obscene material depicting figures from Christianity and Islam, often in sexual poses, in the multi-faith room with the intention of causing harassment and alarm.

Taylor, who labelled himself a “militant atheist” admitted placing the items in the prayer room on three separate occasions, but insisted he was simply practising his own religion of “reason and rationality”.

And:

But he insisted people would only be offended if their faith was “weak” and that the images were meant as satire.

They had heard from airport chaplain Nicky Lees who told of her alarm after finding the images.

She said: “I was insulted, deeply offended and I was alarmed.”

As the unanimous verdicts were delivered, smartly-dressed Taylor simply raised an eye-brow, but showed no other emotion.

Taylor, of Griffin Street, Salford, Greater Manchester, declined to comment after his conviction on all three counts of religiously aggravated intentional harassment, alarm or distress from November 2, 26, and December 12, 2008. Earlier in the day he had posed for a photographer outside court.

Neville Biddle, prosecuting …  revealed Taylor already has two convictions from May 18, 2006 for using abusive, insulting words or behaviour. He told how on that occasion Taylor had left similar offensive material in St Anne’s Church in the centre of Manchester. A postcard he left featured a picture of a monk with his middle finger raised and the words ‘Father f*****’. When he was arrested sexual cartoons were found in his possession.

Sentence is to be given on April 23.

The comments on the article tend to fall into familiar lines.  All the atheists claim that the chap is a martyr to free speech and that the trial is a joke, which shows how oppressive religion is (although they say that about any religious activity).  Almost everyone else thinks he is a jerk.  Few people seem to respect the chaplainess’ complaint of “being offended”.

We can’t quite rely on the reporting, unfortunately.  The United Kingdom now has laws which make it a criminal offence to insult Moslems, and are designed to chill any criticism of them.  As a result, reporting can be quite strange.  BBC news reports frequently report Moslem attacks on Christians in Africa as “clashes between Christians and Moslems”.  This particular report smells a bit, in that it refers to insults to Islam very briefly, yet there is no indication of the defendant being charged for insulting Moslems.  It’s clear that any attack on Islam was at best incidental.

But, on the facts as given, what do we make of this? 

Few of us have a problem with Christians being insulted (if only because it is commonplace).  Let people speak their minds, by all means.  If someone gets up on a soapbox and yells lying abuse at us, let them.  And indeed this is the state of affairs.  The same should apply to Islam (although in fact it does not in modern Britain).  All this is what we mean by free speech.

We do have a problem when Christians are insulted endlessly by those controlling the mass media, without right of reply.  That is very like bullying.  Not that the insults are objectionable; but the one-sidedness is.  Similarly if Christians may be insulted everywhere, but not permitted to reply, that is not free speech, but bullying.

But do we feel that it is OK to bomb churches (or mosques, or whatever) with material calculated to give the grossest insult to those who worship there?  Surely few of us do.  I’m not sure whether most of us could articulate why.  But I think the point is, not the content, but the place in which it is delivered.  The issue is not one of free speech, but the old-fashioned offence of behaviour calculated to provoke a breach of the peace.  A charge of harassment does not seem unreasonable.

It seems to be that the atheist was rightly prosecuted, but for the wrong reasons.  It is certainly his right to give offence.  Everyone should have this right.  But not in such a manner as is calculated to lead to public disorder. 

If he had displayed this material on his website, in my view he should have been protected by the right to free speech present in every free country.  But to shove it in the faces of worshippers in a place of prayer … that is a different matter altogether.  It’s not what you do, it’s when and where you do it.

The whole idea that an offence can be “religiously aggravated” is wrong and immoral.  This is designed to give certain religions the right to punish their enemies.  We all know that Christians are not intended here, of course; on the contrary, this was designed to give Moslems power.  It is an extension of the evil “racially aggravated” category, where a crime against me will be punished mildly if at all, but the same crime against an Asian savagely. 

This is the element that is unsavoury; the idea that certain privileged groups have the right not to feel offended.  The law should not concern itself with feelings, but with facts.  It should treat everyone equally, not privilege certain classes of victims.  This is the real offence in this story.  Punish the guy for what he did, but not for his reasons for doing it.

The same would apply online: stalking someone is objectionable; merely insulting his religion is not.

Hunting around the web for Sickenberger’s publications on the catenas in Luke, I stumbled across a review of one of them — on the remains of the homilies of Titus of Bostra in the catenas – in the Catholic University Bulletin here.  The review does great credit to the periodical; but it also tells us about another publication in 1901.

Titus von Bostra, Studien zu dessen Lukashomelien, von Dr. Joseph Sickenberger. Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1901. 8vo., pp. vii + 267.

Die Kirchengeschichte des Eusebius aus dem Syrischen uebersetzt von Eberhard Nestle. Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1901. 8vo., pp.
x+296.

1. With much scholarly labor, critical acumen, and excellent method Dr. Sickenberger reconstructs what is practically an “editio princeps” of the extant fragments of the “Homilies” of Titus of Bostra on the Gospel of Saint Luke. This ancient bishop who flourished in the days of Julian the Apostate, is noted in the history of the time for his dignified answer to charges of sedition and disloyalty made against him by that emperor; also for four books against the Manichaeans that Saint Jerome (De vir., inl. c. 102) thought excellent: “fortes adversum Manichaeos scripsit libros.” Dr. Sickenberger has collected from the printed editions of the “Catenae Patrum,” and from many mannscript sources a great number of remnants of “Homilies” on St. Luke, that in all probability are the work of this bishop of Bostra. A compiler of such materials in the eleventh century got together as many as 3300 of them. Unless a Milan palimpsest, discovered by Mercati in 1898, contains some fragments of the original discourses, we have no other tradition of them than such as has come down to us through the collection of excerpts that mediaeval Greek theologians were wont to make of older patristic commentaries, notes, and expositions of a scriptural character. Most of the lengthy introduction of Dr. Sickenberger (pp. 1-145) is taken up with the study of several such collections or “Catenae” as they are usually called. In them he finds genuine remnants of the “Homilies” of this father, though not without a lengthy critical sifting and comparison of such scattered and disordered materials. These pages, that the author rightly calls a “schwierige Arbeit,” are no mean contribution to the growing literature on the “Catenae” themselves, and are an evidence of the genuine scholarly training to be had in the theological faculty of the University of Munich. Dr. Sickenberger has added to our knowledge of Titus of Bostra, by increasing his scientific usefulness, and by emphasizing the fact that these “Homilies” on Saint Luke, written after the work against the Manichaeans, have a decided anti-Manichaean air and trend, such as one might expect from a bishop of the Syrian borderland at this period. The sober, literal, objective character of his discourses shows him to be an Antiochene in his principles of scriptural interpretation. The material at hand is too disconnected to gather from it any conclusions concerning the canon and the authority of the scriptures in farther Syria toward the end of the fourth century, or to establish which recension of the gospels was used by Titus. His “Homilies” on Saint Luke were much used by later commentators on the Gospels, though his own compositions were, seemingly, quite original and independent. He is an Aristotelian, and opposes cold and severe logic to the fantastic allegorizing of the Manichaeans. Taken in connection with Lagarde’s edition (Berlin, 1859) of the complete text (in Syriac translation) of the four books against the Manichaeans, the treatise of Dr. Sickenberger and his edition of the homily-fragments on Luke give us the best assured texts of a writer concerning whom Saint Jerome says elsewhere (ep. 70) that one knew not which to admire most in him, “eruditionem saeculi an scientiam scripturarum.” Is it not rather bold to advance the death of Titus of Bostra to a possible 378, when the “sub Juliano et Joviano principibus” of Saint Jerome seems to indicate that his literary activity did not extend beyond 364, the date of Jovian’s death ? The phrase “moritur sub Valente” would, in this light, seem to indicate the death of Titus in the early part of the reign of Valens, i. e. between 365 and 370.

2. The oldest Greek manuscript of the Church History of Eusebius belongs, it is said, to the tenth century. In the Syriac version, first edited by Bedjan (1897) and then by Wright and McLean (1898), we have a very faithful rendering of the Greek original. Some think that the Syriac version was prepared by the order, or under the eye, of Eusebius himself. It was certainly in common use before the end of the fourth century. The manuscript tradition of this text is far older than that of the Greek original—the best of the three oldest Syriac manuscripts, that of Saint Petersburg, belongs to the year A. D. 462, and an Armenian translation of the same represents a Syriac text still a century older than that of Saint Petersburg. As the Kirchenvater-Commission proposes to publish a new edition of the Church History, it seemed desirable that a strictly literal translation into German of the Syriac version should be first prepared, as one of the necessary “subsidia” for that important enterprise. This has been done for the “Texte und Untersuchungen” by the distinguished Syriac scholar, Dr. Eberhard Nestle, of whose competency there can be no doubt. In the preface to his work he brings out, from more than one view-point, the possible utilities of the Syriac translation whose complete edition has been awaited from 1864, when Wright first made known a chapter of it in “Ancient Syriac Documents,” down to 1897 and 1898, when, simultaneously, Bedjan at Paris, and Wright-MacLean at London, gave to the world this very ancient specimen of learning and piety.

The existence of a very literal German translation of the Syriac version of Eusebius’ Church history was unknown to me until this point.  I wonder if it is online?

UPDATE: And it is, here.

I’ve been translating extracts relating to Eusebius and the Gospels from R. Devreesse’s magisterial article Chaines exegetiques grecques in Dictionaire de la Bible — Supplement 1 (1928) on this blog.  Here is what he has to say about catenas on Luke.

IX.  THE CATENAS ON LUKE. — 1. OVERVIEW. — Printed and manuscript catenas. — The first catena edited consisted of a translation made by the Jesuit Peltanus:  Victoris Antiocheni commentarii in Marcum et Titi Bostrorum episcopi in evangelium Lucae commentarii antehac quidem nunquam in lucem editi, nunc vero studio et operi Theod. PELTANI luce simul et latinitate editi, Ingolstadt. 1580. p. 321-509.

In 1624 Fronton du Duc published the Greek text and his translation in volume 2 of the Auctuarium of the Bibl. Patrum. p. 762-836.  This is followed by numerous reprints of the Latin text of Peltanus: Sacr. Bibl. Vet. Patr. of Margarin de la Bigne, 2nd ed. Paris, 1589, vol. 1, column 1090-1158; Magna bibl. Patr. vol. 4, Cologne, 1618, p. 337-364; Bibl. Patr. Paris, 1644, vol. 13, col. 762-836.  Cf. J. Sickenberger, Titus von Bostra, in Texte und Untersuchungen, N. F. vol. 6, 1, Leipzig, 1901, p. 16-41.

The TU volume of Sickenberger is online here.  But Devreesse goes on to discuss the types of catena that exist.  Here’s what he says about the first type, where Titus of Bostra is mentioned:

These few bibliographic notes demand a quick explanation.  Long ago Richard Simon (Histoire critique, vol. 3, c. 30) remarked that the name of Titus must be a pseudepigraph.  In a Paris manuscript (Reg. gr. 2330, today 703, 12th century), the commentary edited by Peltanus is preceded by a title which leaves no doubt about the originality of its content: … [By the holy father Titus bishop of Bostra and other holy fathers on the holy Gospel of Luke].  These other holy Fathers are the two Gregories, Chrysostom, Isidore of Pelusium and Cyril of Alexandria, whose names appear sporadically.

From some partial analyses which we have attempted, it seems like this to us: there must have existed, at a very recent period, probably around the end of the 9th century, a collection of anonymous scholia mostly made up of extracts from the commentaries by Cyril of Alexandria, Origen, and Titus of Bostra on St. Luke, and the commentary of Chrysostom on St. Matthew; in a second line  some extracts derived from Athanasius, Isidore, and Photius; in some copies, such as Barberini 562, the Photius material is extensive.  This state of the catena has come down to us in many manuscripts.  This is what gives us the commentaries placed under the name of Titus of Bostra by Peltanus and Fronton du Duc (see the list of Italian mss. given by Sickenburger on p. 17-20). … [An abbreviated version also exists and was published by Mai in Scholia Vetera, reprinted PG 106, cols. 1177-1218].

A second version of the same catena includes this material or pseudo-commentary, and adds material.  This is what was published by Cramer in Catenae Graecorum Patrum in Novum Testamentum, vol. 2, p. 3-174, which is certainly online at Google Books. 

Then there is a second catena, this time under the name of Peter of Laodicea.

In almost all the major libraries of Greek manuscripts there exists an explanation of the Gospel under the name of Peter of Laodicea. … [Henrici has demonstrated that in fact the material derives from other known authors, and the name must have been attached to an anonymous catena.  Usually the author names have disappeared; some mss, however, such as Vatican 758, still have them]…

The third catena is that of Nicetas:

The catena of Nicetas. — This catena is represented by three groups of manuscripts.  Each of them has been studied with great care by Sickenberger, Die Lukaskatena des Nicetas von Herakleia in Texte und Untersuchungen vol. 7, 4, Leipzig, 1902.  The first group, which he calls the Italian group, is made up of Vatican gr. 1611 (1176 AD), plus two other incomplete mss.  The first, Vatican 1642 (12th c.) contains scholia which cover up to Luke 6:6; the other, Monacensis  473 (14th c.), from Luke 5:17 to 11:26. 

The second group distinguishes itself from the first by the addition of anonymous citations which seem probably to come from Hesychius, according to Sickenburger.

The third group is in fact an abbreviated version of the preceding groups.  This is the form presented by a series of recent manuscripts.  To this category belongs the Marcianus  494 (14th c.), the text of which was translated by Cordier in Catena sexaginta quinque Graecorum Patrum in s. Lucam, Anvers, 1628.  On this edition see Richard Simon, op. cit., p. 429.  Kollar, Petri Lambecii Hamburgensis Commentariorum de Augustissima Bibliotheca caesarea Vindobonensi editio altera …, vol. 3, p. 163 f., remarks that the Caes. XLII [=Vindob. 71] is more complete than the Venetian ms. used by Cordier because it mentions Africanus Alexander the Archimandrite, and Antipater of Bostra, who are not found in the catena of 65 fathers.  Also to this group belong the Vatican gr. 759 (15th c.), from which Mai took scholia of Eusebius (1st ed. of Scriptorum Veterum nova collectio, 1825).  We must also include the fragments which fill the margins of Palatinus gr. 20.  (The middles of the folios of that ms. are filled by material from another source).  It is among these extracts or abridgements that we must look for the sources of the Catena aurea of Thomas Aquinas, and the catena of Macarius Chrysocephalus; on the latter see the judgement of Sickenberger in Karo-Lietzmann, op. cit., fol. 582.

Among the partial editions of this catena of Nicetas, we must include that of Cardinal Mai, Scriptorum Veterum nova collectio, vol. 9, 1837, p. 626-724, where will be found a series of extracts, from Vatican gr. 1611, which cover the whole of the third gospel.

Was this chain an original work exclusively by Nicetas of Heraclea?  It could be so, but we must not forget that two other catenas already existed in his day, the one represented by the catenas of Poussines and Cramer, and the one under the name of Peter of Laodicea.  Our three catenas do not lack overlaps.  Those of Peter and Nicetas offer the greatest number of points of contact.

And we’re still not done. There is a fourth type of catena:

The Vatican Palatinus graecus 20 and its copy, Vat. gr. 1933, form a fourth group of catenas.  Cf. Karo-Lietzmann, op. cit., p. 546-577. … In the margins of the first 33 folios there are extracts of the chain of Nicetas.  As well as these two mss, which contain scholia on the whole of Luke, there are some folios inserted into a collection of Ps.Peter of Laodicea in Reg. gr. 3 fol. 10-15 and 112-119…

Devreesse then  begins to list authors mentioned in these catenas, starting with Philo, who is quoted seven times in the catena of Nicetas, between Luke 12:17 – 19:22.  Nicetas also uses Ignatius of Antioch, Josephus (on Luke 6:3), Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus, and many, many others.

I can’t help feeling that an edition of the catena of Nicetas would be of wide use.  Many catenas are mostly comprised of Chrysostom, but this does not seem to be the case here.

On March 5, 2010, The Oriental Institute published digital editions of four more volumes of Egyptological scholarship. The full Egyptological backlist is now available:

As part of its Electronic Publications Initiative and with the generous support of Misty and Lewis Gruber, the Oriental Institute Publications Office announces the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) publication of:

• The Temple of King Sethos I at Abydos, Volume I: The Chapels of Osiris, Isis and Horus. Copied by Amice M. Calverley, with the assistance of Myrtle F. Broome, and edited by Alan H. Gardiner. Originally published in 1933.
• The Temple of King Sethos I at Abydos, Volume II: The Chapels of Amen-Re', Re'-Harakhti, Ptah, and King Sethos. Copied by Amice M. Calverley, with the assistance of Myrtle F. Broome, and edited by Alan H. Gardiner. Originally published in 1935.
• The Temple of King Sethos I at Abydos, Volume III: The Osiris Complex. Copied by Amice M. Calverley, with the assistance of Myrtle F. Broome, and edited by Alan H. Gardiner. Originally published in 1938.
• The Temple of King Sethos I at Abydos, Volume IV: The Second Hypostyle Hall. Copied by Amice M. Calverley, with the assistance of Myrtle F. Broome, and edited by Alan H. Gardiner. Originally published in 1958.

For a complete and up to date list of all of the ca. two hundred and sixty five volumes of Oriental Institute publications available online see AWOL - The Ancient World Online - 2: The Oriental Institute Electronic Publications Initiative.

I had an email today enquiring about editions of the works of Severian of Gabala.  This chap was a bishop from Syria who became well-known as a preacher in Constantinople at the end of the 4th century AD, despite a heavy Syrian accent.  Unfortunately he fell out with John Chrysostom, and became involved in the evil proceedings that led up to the deposition of the latter.  He belonged to the Antiochene school of biblical exegesis, and took a  very literal approach to everything, sometimes to the point of absurdity.

A bunch of his sermons are extant, mostly in Greek, but some in Armenian, Syriac and Coptic.  In addition fragments of his work appear in the catenas.  Writers who treat the text literally inevitably tend to be useful to people compiling catenas and other forms of commentary.

I have been unable to discover any edition of his works more recent than Migne in the Patrologia Graeca 66.  This itself is a reprint of an edition by the 18th century French Benedictine editor Montfaucon, the man who invented Greek paleography.  It looks as if there is an edition by a certain Savile which is also around, but again elderly and not mentioned by Quasten (although it is noted by the Clavis Patrum Graecorum — and why is that essential list of patristic texts not online?).  I’ll also ask in LT-ANTIQ whether anyone is working on an edition.

The query related to a possible interesting quotation from Mark in the homily de sigillis librorum.  A while ago someone wrote to me offering their services for translation, and I declined, being fully busy right now!  But I see that the homily is only 15 columns of Migne — 531-544 — or rather 7-8 once we ignore the parallel Latin translation.  So I have offered a commission on it to her, and we’ll see if (a) she accepts and (b) can deliver a good translation.  Why not?  I’ll give it away free online, of course. 

It will be the first translation of any of the Migne collection of sermons.  The Migne covers cols. 411-590 or around 200 columns; 100 columns of Greek, or about $2,000 at  my usual rate for such things.  How little money that is, to any institution!  But it’s more than I have kicking around at the moment!

UPDATE: An email has pointed out that ‘Savile’ must be the 17th century editor of the 8-volume complete works of Chrysostom, Henry Savile.  A meeting room at Merton College Oxford commemorates his name even now, although when I was there I certainly didn’t associate “the Savile Room” with 17th century editors!

In the Ancient World Bloggers Group blog (AWBL), an interesting discussion was brought to my attention on the impact (or lack thereof) of anthropological blogs on the discipline. The Savage Minds blog features prominently as it was quoted in the title of a recent American Anthropologist article by David H. Price. Savage Minds has a blog post on the AA article, with comments. AWBL contributor Michael E. Smith notes:

“I haven’t seen anything remotely similar in archaeology. AWBG occasionally gets some interesting discussion going, and I’ve seen a few interesting discussions on other blogs here and there. I often post things on Publishing Archaeology that are deliberately provocative, hoping to generate discussion. But almost all of the interesting responses I’ve gotten have come in the form of emails to me, NOT comments on the blog. People want to respond, but evidently don’t feel comfortable doing that in a public venue. I don’t have any grand conclusions, just a sense of disappointment that archaeology doesn’t yet seem to have a vibrant and exciting intellectual venue on the internet. But anthropology sure does – check out Savage Minds, its great.”

Full Name: The British School at Rome Library and Archive Digital Collections

URL: http://www.bsrdigitalcollections.it/

Content: Photographic prints and negatives (120,000+) relating to the history of Italy and the Roman world

Authorship: Project leaders Valerie Scott and Alessandra Giovenco (both BSR); individual database entries do not have authors

entry page

Host/Maintenance: BSR; BSR; the frequency of updates is unclear

Permanence/Archiving: No information

Licensing: “All low resolution images on the BSR Library and Archive Digital Collections website may be downloaded and freely used for educational and scholarly purposes” (Reproductions page); individual entries have licensing info; there is a site copyright page explaining the different licensing formats

photographic section main page

Usefulness: Uncomplicated access to historic photographs of the art, architecture and excavated or ruined remains is very useful to show earlier or original conditions; the database coverage is of course stronger in some areas than others; esp. interesting is the documentation of the end-of-World-War-II efforts to safeguard Italian heritage by the Allies

Ease of Use: The interface is easy to grasp and one can easily locate groups and entries

Appeal: The system is well designed with a pleasant, calm layout

example of a photograph entry

Accessibility: The site is second in the results for the Google search for “British School at Rome Library and Archive Digital Collections ” and third for “BSR Library and Archive Digital Collections”; the entries, however, are not indexed by Google

Credibility: The site conveys a sober, scholarly vibe; there are plenty of references to the database all over the web; however, the phrase “British School at Rome Library and Archive Digital Collections” yields no results in Google Scholar (the simple search using all the same words has many results but hardly any relevant ones)

Reuse: Database entries can be exported in XML format

photos can be “zoomed”

Part of the BSR collection is available only through the separate URBS system (Unione Romana Biblioteche Scientifiche) shared with other foreign scholarly institutes in Rome. Funding is being sought for digitizing more materials: maps, documents, postcards, drawings, prints, paintings and manuscripts.

URBS entry page

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Working in the media is a demanding and competitive career choice. Confidence, knowledge and first class presentation skills are vital to success in this field. The best proven formula for success is through a professionally produced showreel. Past Preservers, having extensive media experience, has identified the need for professional training and production services aimed specifically at historians, anthropologists and archaeologists to enable them to get the best from their skills, knowledge and experience.

Past Preservers is pleased to announce that we will be offering regular training weekends, covering a range of professional training and development skills. The presenters will be known professionals with extensive experience in the media. The sessions will focus on your needs as a presenter, researcher and or media/heritage specialist.

The first of these will be held this spring at a venue in the beautiful Lake District. The instructors will include Fiona Armstrong, the well-known broadcaster and author, and Jim Mower, a producer of the extremely popular TV series 'Time Team'.

In addition to her work in television, Fiona is an experienced heritage professional who runs her own company, 'Border Heritage' and has been involved as a director and manager of heritage projects. Jim Mower has worked on numerous historical and archaeological documentaries for international broadcasters and is also an experienced field and research archaeologist. Now a senior producer on the Channel 4 series Time Team, Jim’s work includes programme development, production and directing.

Together, with other specialists, our instructors will provide a first class team to develop your skills as a professional presenter. At the end of the weekend, every attendee will have his or her own professionally produced showreel.

Places will be EXTREMELY limited and so we would suggest that if you would like to attend, please make a statement of interest as soon as possible. Please email nigel@pastpreservers.com

Best wishes, from the Past Preservers Team

http://www.pastpreservers.com/

Virtual worlds are not all about stunning immersive 3d graphics. No, to riff on the old Infocom advertisement, it’s your brain that matters most.  That’s right folks, the text adventure. Long time readers of this blog will know that I have experimented with this kind of immersive virtual world building for archaeological and historical purposes. But, with one thing and another, that all got put on a back shelf.

Today, I discover via Jeremiah McCall’s Historical Simulations / Serious Games in the Classroom site Interactive Fiction (text adventure) games about Viking Sagas – part of Christopher Fee’s English 401 course at Gettysburg College.

Yes, complete interactive fictions about various parts of the Viking world! (see the list below). I’m downloading these to my netbook to play on my next plane journey.

Now, interactive fiction can be quite complex, with interactions and artificial intelligence as compelling as anything generated in 3d – see the work of Emily Short. And while creating immersive 3d can be quite complex and costly in hardware/software, Inform 7 allows its generation quite easily (AND as a bonus teaches a lot about effective world building!)

Explore the Sites and Sagas of the Ancient and Medieval North Atlantic through one of Settings of The Secret of Otter’s Ransom IF Adventure Game:The earliest version of the Otter’s Ransom game was designed to be extremely simple, and to illustrate the pedagogical aims of the project as well as the ease of composing with Inform 7 software: In this iteration the game contains no graphics or links, utilizes very little in the way of software functions, tricks, or “bells and whistles,” and contains a number of rooms in each of sixteen different game settings; as the project progresses, more rooms, objects and situations will be added by the students and instructor of English 401, as well as appropriate “bells and whistles” and relevant links to pertinent multimedia objects from the Medieval North Atlantic project.

Using simple, plain English commands such as “go east,” “take spear-head,” “look at sign” and “open door” to navigate, the player may move through each game setting; moreover, as a by-product of playing the game successfully, a player concurrently may learn a great deal about a number of specific historical sites, as well as about such overarching themes as the history of Viking raids on monasteries, the character of several of the main Norse gods, and the volatile mix of paganism and Christianity in Viking Britain. The earliest form of the game is open-ended in each of the sixteen settings, but eventually the complete “meta-game” of The Secret of Otter’s Ransom will end when the player gathers the necessary magical knowledge to break an ancient curse, which concurrently will require that player to piece together enough historical and cultural information to pass an exit quiz.

Play all-text versions of the site games from The Secret of Otter’s Ransom using the Frotz game-playing software.

Play versions of the site games which include relevant images using the Windows Glulxe game-playing software.

In order to view images the player must “take” them, as in “take inscription;” very large images may come up as “[MORE]” which indicates that text will scroll off the screen when the image is displayed. Simply hit the return key once or twice and the image will be displayed.

We hope that you will enjoy engaging in adventure-style exploration of Viking sites and objects from the Ancient and Medieval North Atlantic!

Start by saving one of the following modules onto your desktop; next click the above game-playing software. When you try to open the Frotz software (you may have to click “Run” twice) your computer will ask you to select which game you’d like to play; simply select the module on your desktop to begin your adventure; you may have to search for “All Files.” Each game setting includes a short paragraph describing tips, traps, and techniques of playing:

Andreas Ragnarok Cross

Balladoole Ship Burial

Braaid Farmstead

Broch of Gurness

Brough of Birsay Settlement

Brussels Cross

Chesters Roman Fort

Cronk ny Merriu Fortlet

Cunningsburgh Quarry

Helgafell Settlement

Hvamm Settlement

Hadrian’s Wall

Jarlshof Settlement

Knock y Doonee Ship Burial

Laugar Hot Spring

Lindisfarne Priory

Maes Howe Chambered Cairn

Maughold – Go for a Wild Ride

Maughold- Look for the Sign of the Boar’s Head

Maughold – The Secret of the Otter Stone

Mousa Broch

Ring of Brodgar

Rushen Abbey Christian Lady

Ruthwell Cross

Shetland Magical Adventure

Skara Brae

Stones of Stenness

Sullom Voe Portage

Tap O’Noth Hillfort

Temple of Mithras at Carrawburgh

Ting Wall Holm Assembly Place

Tynwald Assembly Place

Yell Boat Burial

Stop reading this blog post and hurry over the Memorial Union on the beautiful campus of the University of North Dakota to check out the Red River Valley History Conference today.

Go here for the program and don't miss Robin Jensen's talk this late afternoon. Here's a link to that talk.

Have a great weekend!

Egyptology News gives us this link (PDF) to some gorgeous photographs of the pyramids of Meroe in Nubia.  You want to look at these, believe me you do.

When Roy Rosenzweig and I finished writing a full draft of our book Digital History, we sat down at a table and looked at the stack of printouts.

“So, what now?” I said to Roy naively. “Couldn’t we just publish what we have on the web with the click of a button? What value does the gap between this stack and the finished product have? Isn’t it 95% done? What’s the last five percent for?”

We stared at the stack some more.

Roy finally broke the silence, explaining the magic of the last stage of scholarly production between the final draft and the published book: “What happens now is the creation of the social contract between the authors and the readers. We agree to spend considerable time ridding the manuscript of minor errors, and the press spends additional time on other corrections and layout, and readers respond to these signals—a lack of typos, nicely formatted footnotes, a bibliography, specialized fonts, and a high-quality physical presentation—by agreeing to give the book a serious read.”

I have frequently replayed that conversation in my mind, wondering about the constitution of this social contract in scholarly publishing, which is deeply related to questions of academic value and reward.

For the ease of conversation, let’s call the two sides of the social contract of scholarly publishing the supply side and the demand side. The supply side is the creation of scholarly works, including writing, peer review, editing, and the form of publication. The demand side is much more elusive—the mental state of the audience that leads them to “buy” what the supply side has produced. In order for the social contract to work, for engaged reading to happen and for credit to be given to the author (or editor of a scholarly collection), both sides need to be aligned properly.

The social contract of the book is profoundly entrenched and powerful—almost mythological—especially in the humanities. As John Updike put it in his diatribe against the digital (and most humanities scholars and tenure committees would still agree), “The printed, bound and paid-for book was—still is, for the moment—more exacting, more demanding, of its producer and consumer both. It is the site of an encounter, in silence, of two minds, one following in the other’s steps but invited to imagine, to argue, to concur on a level of reflection beyond that of personal encounter, with all its merely social conventions, its merciful padding of blather and mutual forgiveness.”

As academic projects have experimented with the web over the past two decades we have seen intense thinking about the supply side. Robust academic work has been reenvisioned in many ways: as topical portals, interactive maps, deep textual databases, new kinds of presses, primary source collections, and even software. Most of these projects strive to reproduce the magic of the traditional social contract of the book, even as they experiment with form.

The demand side, however, has languished. Far fewer efforts have been made to influence the mental state of the scholarly audience. The unspoken assumption is that the reader is more or less unchangeable in this respect, only able to respond to, and validate, works that have the traditional marks of the social contract: having survived a strong filtering process, near-perfect copyediting, the imprimatur of a press.

We need to work much more on the demand side if we want to move the social contract forward into the digital age. Despite Updike’s ode to the book, there are social conventions surrounding print that are worth challenging. Much of the reputational analysis that occurs in the professional humanities relies on cues beyond the scholarly content itself. The act of scanning a CV is an act fraught with these conventions.

Can we change the views of humanities scholars so that they may accept, as some legal scholars already do, the great blog post as being as influential as the great law review article? Can we get humanities faculty, as many tenured economists already do, to publish more in open access journals? Can we accomplish the humanities equivalent of FiveThirtyEight.com, which provides as good, if not better, in-depth political analysis than most newspapers, earning the grudging respect of journalists and political theorists? Can we get our colleagues to recognize outstanding academic work wherever and however it is published?

I believe that to do so, we may have to think less like humanities scholars and more like social scientists. Behavioral economists know that although the perception of value can come from the intrinsic worth of the good itself (e.g., the quality of a wine, already rather subjective), it is often influenced by many other factors, such as price and packaging (the wine bottle, how the wine is presented for tasting). These elements trigger a reaction based on stereotypes—if it’s expensive and looks well-wrapped, it must be valuable. The book and article have an abundance of these value triggers from generations of use, but we are just beginning to understand equivalent value triggers online—thus the critical importance of web design, and why the logo of a trusted institution or a university press can still matter greatly, even if it appears on a website rather than a book.

Social psychologists have also thought deeply about the potent grip of these idols of our tribe. They are aware of how cultural norms establish and propagate themselves, and tell us how the imposition of limits creates hierarchies of recognition. Thinking in their way, along with the way the web works, one potential solution on the demand side might come not from the scarcity of production, as it did in a print world, but from the scarcity of attention. That is, value will be perceived in any community-accepted process that narrows the seemingly limitless texts to read or websites to view. Curation becomes more important than publication once publication ceases to be limited.

[image credit: Priki]

This weekend I’ll be one of the speakers at TEDxNYED, a conference examining the role of new media and technology in shaping the future of education. Other speakers include Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard legal scholar who has written on—and more importantly, acted on—the impact of digital technology on copyright; Jay Rosen, NYU journalism professor who is a powerful critic of traditional “savvy” journalism and advocate for decentralized citizen journalism (and who, in my opinion, is the academic currently using Twitter most effectively);  Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do? and professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism; Gina Bianchini, CEO of the social network app Ning; USC media scholar Henry Jenkins; KSU cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch, who is well-known for making new media comprehensible through sharp videos; and others working in digital education I’ve wanted to meet.

You can watch the proceedings live on the conference website from 10a-6p EST on Saturday, March 6, 2010. I’ll be on at 4:30p. The title of my talk is “The Last Digit of Pi.” (No, there is no last digit of pi. It’s what they call a “teaser.”)