Electra Atlantis: Digital Approaches to Antiquity

Dan Cohen's Digital Humanities Blog: Reading and Believing

Dan Cohen — 2012-02-07T18:30:56+00:00

Rather than focusing on a new technology or website in our year-end review on the Digital Campus podcast, I chose reading as the big story of 2011. Surely 2011 was the year that digital reading came of age, with iPad and Kindle sales skyrocketing, apps for reading flourishing, and sites for finding high-quality long-form writing proliferating. It was apropos that Alan Jacobs‘s wonderful book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction was published in 2011.

Indeed, the relationship between reading and distraction was one of the things that caught my eye reading Daniel Kahneman‘s essential Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman speaks of two systems in the mind—he eschews “intuition” and “reason” for the more neutral “System 1″ and “System 2″—with the first making quick, unconscious assessments and the second engaging in much more studious, and laborious, calculations. Since our minds (like our bodies) are naturally lazy, we prefer to stick with System 1′s judgments as much as possible, unless jarred out of it into the grumpier System 2.

In the fifth chapter of Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman addresses the act of reading, and the impulse—even in what is normally thought of as the most cerebral of human acts—to fall back on System 1, to associate the ease of reading with the truth of what is read:

How do you know that a statement is true? If it is strongly linked by logic or association to other beliefs or preferences you hold, or comes from a source you trust and like, you will feel a sense of cognitive ease. The trouble is that there may be other causes for your feeling of ease—including the quality of the font and the appealing rhythm of the prose—and you have no simple way of tracing your feelings to their source.

Thus the context writing exists in and other aspects unrelated to the actual content are critical to the reception that writing receives. In addition to studies on the effects of different fonts on credibility, Kahneman also cites experiments that show the importance of the quality of paper (for printed materials), of the contrast between a font and its background, and of the presence of distractions that reduce the cognitive ease of reading. In short, environments that make it easy to read also make it easy to believe what is being read. Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of this mixture of context and content is that is it extremely difficult for you to separate the two.

So legibility and the absence of distractions are not just design niceties; when a reader chooses to move an article into an app like Instapaper, they are strongly increasing the odds that they will like what they read and agree with it. And since readers often make that relocation at the recommendation of a trusted source, the written work is additionally “framed” as worthy even before the act of reading has begun.

Commercial publishers may not like the use of Instapaper or Readability, which strip the distractions otherwise known as ads from a cluttered website to focus solely on the text at hand, but they are an unalloyed good for writers.

Shawn Graham (Electric Archaeology): Artefacts as Nodes in a Network

Shawn — 2012-02-07T17:56:58+00:00

I’m working on a paper for a conference next month. In it, I consider artefact copresence at various sites as a means for generating networks, in an effort to get at some of the ideological or social frameworks underpinning the distribution of these networks. I’m looking at stamped brick from Constantinople. I create a list where each entry is a site and a single example of a stamped brick. These I can then visualize using Gephi, and using Sci2 I can convert the two mode network (brick – place) to two one mode networks (bricks – bricks, tied because they’re found at the same place; place – place, tied because they use the same bricks). When I have this data as 1-mode networks, I can then run network stats. Below is the one mode graph, showing places tied to other places, based on the distribution of over 2300 stamped bricks:

Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities: Extremely Visible and Incredibly Close Reading of Logos

Amanda Visconti — 2012-02-07T16:43:09+00:00

The Foreign Literatures in America (FLA) project’s intellectual goals present a graphic design challenge marked by a delicate balance. We’re creating an archive that will demonstrate how the idea of Americanness has been shaped by actors beyond those traditionally labelled “American”; how do we create a logo and other graphic properties that reflect this focus on Americanness, without also presenting symbols of the United States (the U.S. flag, the shape of our portion of the continent, etc.) as visually—and thus thematically—dominant?

We found design inspiration in images such as Edward Brewer’s dark, estranging presentation of the Statue of Liberty on the front of a 1908 Life magazine, book covers like Kafka’s Amerika, and the iconic photographs of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses. We researched estranged geographies: maps estranging the usual world placing of the United States by moving it from its usual central position or erasing it, showing the U.S. inscribed by bits of foreign textuality (e.g. by a grid of foreign flags or book covers). We thought about the Statue of Liberty in terms of its global history (images of the Statue being built in France or on the boat to the United States) and possible estrangement (perspectives aimed from behind the Statue and away from the U.S., or dividing the wrought-metal grid of the original “flame” into cells filled by flags of foreign nations). We even imagined a counterpart to Robert Buss’s “Dickens Dreaming” painting, with Uncle Sam or the Statue of Liberty dreaming of key figures from foreign literature (way too complex for a logo!).

Throughout our discussions of imagery representing our project, we struggled with ways to indicate focus without dominance, influence without appropriation. Imagery like the melting pot or Manifest-Destiny-era political cartoons, although demonstrating both planetarity and an American focus, was shot down because it carried obvious implications of an imperialist America dominating or improving the literatures of other countries. The current FLA image uses a global map with an only partially imagined America, but we’ll probably transition to using images of circulation or communication (to use Peter’s phrase, “capillary exchange”) for our final logo; imagery involving bloodlines, trade routes, or circulation all speak to global routes passing through American culture. The difficulty with such images is to imply circular movement rather than an omnidirectional power emanating from or draining into the United States; a logo with the effect of a two-headed arrow would help us show a pluralized and opened United States, while at the same time demonstrating the cultural influences flowing in.

A logo is admittedly a small thing, and only one item in a network of web design decisions that will frame how visitors interpret our project. At the same time, it’s the single most visible representative of the goals of our project; we’d be remiss if we didn’t port our close reading skills into our digital humanities design work. Follow us @FLAProject and @UMD_MITH to hear when the FLA’s official site is released and check out the results of our current design work!

Amanda Visconti is MITH Webmaster and a Ph.D. student in the English Department at the University of Maryland; she serves as both a member of the FLA’s founding executive editorial board and its digital liaison. Foreign Literatures in America is a project directed by MITH Faculty Fellow Peter Mallios. Read more about FLA in Dr. Mallios’ recent blog post.

ASOR Blog (American Schools of Oriental Research): ASOR Heritage Fellow works at Bronze Age site in Lebanon

kcooney — 2012-02-07T15:42:44+00:00

The 2011 excavation season at Kamid el-Loz, a site located in the central Beqa’a Valley of Lebanon, produced exciting and important results. It was only thanks to the Heritage Fellowship that I was able to participate in this campaign, conducted by the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität of Freiburg, and take part in these findings. This year, in fact, we excavated north of the Middle Bronze Age palace and discovered additional Late Bronze and Middle Bronze Age installations. Middle Bronze Age I ceramic vessels were recognized in the Administrative area and a burial pit was uncovered in the Residential quarter, adding to our knowledge on MBA funerary practices.

Kamid el-Loz is presently the only Middle Bronze Age site under excavation in the central Beqa’a Valley and there is a lack of information regarding the ceramic economy (production, distribution and circulation) of this area. A first phase of my doctoral dissertation aims to reconstruct the ceramic vessel production of the site, compile a ceramic typology of the Middle Bronze Age, identify the presence of imports and contextualize the ceramic assemblage found in the palace rooms. To this end, this summer, I was able to analyze the Middle Bronze Age ceramic assemblage from the 2010 and 2011 seasons and review the collection from 2008. Furthermore, several ceramic samples were exported and will be subjected to petrographic analysis. My hope is to be able to identify the sources that were used to produce some types of ceramic vessels found at Kamid el-Loz.

I wish to express my gratitude to the Heritage Fellowship and the donor for awarding me this grant. The information gathered this season is essential for the development of my PhD dissertation. I also wish to thank Prof. Dr. Marleis Heinz, the director of the excavation, and the entire team, for their warm welcome and hospitality.

-Antonietta Catanzariti, Heritage Fellow

Tom Elliott (Horothesia): Playing with PELAGIOS: Open Context and Labels

Tom Elliott — 2012-02-07T15:06:39+00:00

Latest in the Playing with PELAGIOS series.

I've just modified the tooling and re-run the Pleiades-oriented-view-of-the-GAWD report to include the RDF triples just published by Open Context and to exploit, when available, rdfs:label on the annotation target in order to produce more human-readable links in the HTML output. This required the addition of an OPTIONAL clause to the SPARQL query, as well as modifications to the results-processing XSLT. The new versions are indicated/linked on the report page.

You can see the results of these changes, for example, in the Antiochia/Theoupolis page.

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): Open Access Ancient Nubia and Sudan

Charles Jones — 2012-02-07T14:28:23+00:00

On the occasion of the 12th International Conference for Nubian Studies, The British Museum, 1 - 6 August 2010, I took the opportunity to gather links to open access materials relating to ancient Nubia and the Sudan. I have updated the list several times since then, most recently on 7 February 2012. I trust readers will use the comment function to point out errors and lacunae.

Mailing Lists

Sudan Dams Crisis

The last dam built on the Nile, at the Fourth Cataract, was completed in 2008, displacing more than 60,000 people and flooding 170 kilometers of the river valley and adjacent land. The entire non-desert habitat was lost along with a human heritage that included vast numbers of archaeological sites. This followed on the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960's that displaced 150,000, with even greater damage to the environment and heritage.

Now, eight or more dams are planned and two are under contract, at Kajbar at the Third Cataract and Shereik at the Fifth. The region of Mahas in the Third Cataract is especially populated, with a long and rich history is now directly threatened with destruction. The area upstream of Shereik is less populated, but very poorly known. It is a crisis that will be discussed at a brief conference at the British Museum on May 15, 2012. This forum is intended to disseminate news and ideas about the dams crises in Sudan and Egypt, past and present, to help develop means to mitigate and possibly even avert some of the worst consequences.

Egyptologists' Electronic Forum (EEF)

The Egyptologists' Electronic Forum (EEF) is a membership-wide e-mail list for conferencing on the culture and civilization of ancient Egypt c. 5000 BCE - 641 CE. The EEF serves as a nexus for dialog between academics working in Egyptology and other persons interested in ancient Egypt.

Open Access Journals

Der Antike Sudan. Mitteilungen der Sudanarchäologischen Gesellschaft zu Berlin e.V. (MittSAG)
ARKAMANI Sudan Journal of Archaeology and Anthropology: An Arabic/English Review on Archaeological and Anthropological Research in the Sudan [Now linking to the most recent archived version at the Internet Archive]
British Museum Studies in Ancient Egypt and Sudan (BMSAES)
Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston [Egypt and Nubia articles only]
Internet-Beitraege zur Aegyptologie und Sudanarchaeologie (IBAES)
The Meroitic Newsletter - A Digital Compilation. Version 1.0 (Issues 1-30)
Sudan and Nubia
Sudan notes and records

Oriental Institute publications relating to Nubia and the Sudan

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The Nubia Salvage Project. NUBIA - "Its glory and its people": 1987 Exhibition Brochure

The Nubia Salvage Project. Reports of The Nubia Salvage Project

The Nubia Salvage Project. VANISHED KINGDOMS OF THE NILE: The Rediscovery of Ancient Nubia: 1992 Exhibition Brochure

Websites of Organizations and Projects

ACACIA - Arid Climate Adaptation and Cultural Innovation in Africa
Ägypten-Forum
Archéologie du Nil Moyen (journal)
Archéo-Nil
Al Khandaq Project
The Dongola Reach Expedition
Gebel Barkal, Nubia [Three-dimensional model]
The Hamadab Expedition
Humbolt University Nubian Expedition
International Society for Nubian Studies
Kerma Mission archéologique suisse au Soudan
Leicester Research Archive: Mahas Survey Project
Mahas Survey Project
El-Meragh
Naga, Stadt in der Steppe
The Nubia Museum
El Salha Project
Sudan Archaeological Research Society (SARS)
Sudanarchäologische Gesellschaft zu Berlin
Sudan Studies Association
Zamani project: Musawwarat es-Sufra

The Merowe Dam Archaeological Salvage Project (MDASP) articles served online by the International Society of Nubian Studies

MDASP Articles
Published in 2007
Ginns, A.'Preliminary report on the second season of excavations conducted on Mis Island (AKSC) Sudan & Nubia, vol. 11 (2007), p. 20-25.
Kleinitz, C. Rock art and archaeology: The Hadiab survey, Sudan & Nubia, vol. 11 (2007), p. 34-42.
Welsby, D.A. The Merowe Dam Archaeological Salvage Project. Survey and excavations in the vicinity of ed-Doma (AKSE) and et-Tereif (AKSCW), 2006-2007, Sudan & Nubia, vol. 11 (2007), p. 15-19.
Wolf, P. and U. Nowotnick. The Fourth Season of the SARS Anglo-German Expedition to the Fourth Nile Cataract, Sudan & Nubia, vol. 11 (2007), p. 26-33.
---
Published in 2006
Ginns, A. Preliminary report on the excavations conducted on Mis Island (AKSC), 2005-2006, Sudan & Nubia, vol. 10 (2006), p. 13-19.
Kleinitz, C. and R. Koenitz. Fourth Cataract petroglyphs in context: the ed-Doma and Dirki rock-art survey, Sudan & Nubia, vol. 10 (2006), p. 34-42.
Welsby, D.A. The Merowe Dam Archaeological Survey. Excavations in the vicinity of ed-Doma (AKSE), 2005-2006, Sudan & Nubia, vol. 10 (2006), p. 8-12.
Wolf, P. and U. Nowotnick. The Third Season of the SARS Anglo-German Expedition to the Fourth Cataract of the Nile, Sudan & Nubia, vol. 10 (2006), p. 20-33.
---
Published in 2005
Carpio, G. and S. Guillen. Excavations at Site 3-J-23, et-Tereif, Sudan, Sudan & Nubia, vol. 9 (2005), p.14-15.
Kleinitz, C. and C. Olsson. Christian period rock art landscapes in the Fourth Cataract Region: the Dar el-Arab and et-Tereif rock art surveys, Sudan & Nubia, vol. 9 (2005), p. 31-38.
Payne, J. Excavations of the late Kushite and Medieval settlement on Umm Muri,Sudan & Nubia, vol. 9 (2005), p. 9-13.
Welsby, D.A. The Merowe Dam Archaeological Salvage Project survey in the vicinity of ed-Doma (AKSE), 2004-2005, Sudan & Nubia, vol. 9 (2005), p. 2-8.
Welsh, F. Architecture of the modern houses at the Fourth Cataract, Sudan & Nubia, vol. 9 (2005), p. 17-22.
Wolf, P. and U. Nowotnick. The Second Season of the SARS Anglo-German Expedition to the Fourth Cataract, Sudan & Nubia, vol. 9 (2005), p. 22-30.
---
Published in 2004
Fuller, D.Q. The Central Amri to Kirbekan Survey. A Preliminary Report on the Excavations and Survey 2003-04, Sudan & Nubia, vol. 8 (2004), p. 5-17.
Welsby, D.A. The Merowe Dam Archaeological Salvage Project. The SARS Amri to Kirbekan Survey. Excavations at the Pyramid Site 4-F-71, Sudan & Nubia, vol. 8 (2004), p. 2-3.
Wolf, P. The SARS Anglo-German Expedition at the Fourth Cataract of the Nile: the 2003/04 Season, Sudan & Nubia, vol. 8 (2004), p. 17-26.
---
Publisehd in 2003
Geus, F. and Y. Lecointe. Survey and Excavation at el-Multaga, a Resettlement Area Related to the Construction of the Merowe Dam: preliminary results, Sudan & Nubia, vol. 7 (2003), p. 33-37.
Kolsowska, E., Mahmoud el-Tayib and H. Paner. Old Kush in the Fourth Cataract Region, Sudan & Nubia, vol. 7 (2003), p. 21-25.
Paner, H. Archaeological Survey on the Right Bank of the Nile between Kareima and Abu Hamed: A Brief Overview, Sudan & Nubia, vol. 7 (2003), p. 15-20.
Salah Mohamed Ahmed. Merowe Dam Archaeological Salvage Project (MDASP), Sudan & Nubia, vol. 7 (2003),p. 11-14.
Welsby, D.A. The Amri to Kirbekan Survey: the 2002-2003 Season, Sudan & Nubia, vol. 7 (2003), p. 26-32.

Provisional Type Series of Monuments

An incomplete and quickly compiled list of digitized books relating to Nubia

Amélineau, Émile Clément, 1850-1915. Een feudale familie in Egypte De Aarde en haar Volken, 1907

Amélineau, Émile Clément, 1850-1915. Reis door Nubië De Aarde en haar Volken, 1907

Amélineau, Émile Clément, 1850-1915. Un voyage en Nubie

Ampère, Jean-Jacques (1800-1864). Voyage en Égypte et en Nubie

Anderson, Julie Renee. Spatial and temporal distribution of domestic and civil architecture in Christian Nubia Canadian theses = Thèses canadiennes

Anonymous. Reize in Taka (Opper-Nubië)

Barnard, Hans. Eastern desert ware : traces of the inhabitants of the eastern desert in Egypt and Sudan during the 4th-6th centuries CE: Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van Doctor aan de Universiteit Leiden, op gezag van Rector Magnificus prof.mr. P.F. van der Heijden, volgens besluit van het College voor Promoties te verdedigen op woensdag 4 juni 2008 klokke 16:15 uur door Hans Barnard geboren te Leiden in 1959

Belzoni, Giovanni Battista. Narrative of the operations and recent discoveries within the pyramids, temples, tombs and excavations in Egypt and Nubia, and of a journey to the coast of the Red Sea, in search of the ancient Berenice and another to the oasis of Jupiter Ammon, John Murray, London, 1820. XIX-533 pp.

Burckhardt, John Lewis. Travels in Nubia

Burckhardt,John Lewis. Johann Ludwig Burckhardt's Reisen in Nubien

Cailliaud, Frédéric. Voyage à Méroé, au Fleuve Blanc, au-delà de Fâzoql, dans le midi du royaume de Sennâr, à Syouah et dans cinq autres oasis; fait dans les années 1819, 1820, 1821 et 1822, Paris, 1826-27

Champollion, Jean-François. Monuments de l'Égypte et de la Nubie : notices descriptives conformes aux manuscrits autographes

Denon, Dominique Vivant; Tiedemann , Dieterich. Vivant Denon's Reise in Nieder- und Ober-Aegypten, waehrend der Feldzuege des Generals Bonaparte

English, George Bethune, 1787-1828. A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar Under the Command of His Excellence Ismael Pasha, undertaken by Order of His Highness Mehemmed Ali Pasha, Viceroy of Egypt, By An American In The Service Of The Viceroy

Judd, Margaret Ann. Trauma and interpersonal violence in ancient Nubia during the Kerma Period (ca. 2500-1500 BC) Canadian theses = Thèses canadiennes

Madden, Richard Robert. Travels in Turkey, Egypt, Nubia, and Palestine, in 1824, 1825, 1826, and 1827

Norden, Frederik Ludvig. Illustrations de Travels in Egypt and Nubia (1757)
Norden, Frederik Ludvig. The antiquities, natural history, ruins, and other curiosities of Egypt, Nubia and Thebes. Expemplified in near two hundred drawings taken on the spot Digitized images from the "The New York Public Library" [NYPL]

Norden, Frederik Ludvig. Travels in Egypt and Nubia Gallica

Prime, William Cowper, 1825-1905. Boat life in Egypt and Nubia Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA)

Rosellini, Ippolito. I monumenti dell'Egitto e della Nubia: disegnati dalla spedizione scientifico-letteraria toscana in Egitto Oxford Digital Library

Sartorius, Ernestine Isabella. Three months in the Soudan A Celebration of Woman Writers.

Les Temples immergés de la Nubia (at the Internet Archive)

Henri Gauthier, Le temple de Kalabchah, premier fascicule,Le Caire, 1911
Henri Gauthier, Le temple de Kalabchah, second fascicule,Le Caire, 1911
Henri Gauthier, Le temple de Kalabchah, tome second (planches)[= troisième fascicule], Le Caire, 1914. bound with:
Henri Gauthier, Le temple de Kalabchah, quatrième fascicule,Le Caire, 1927.
Günther Roeder, Debod bis Bab Kalabsche, Tome premier,Le Caire, 1911
Günther Roeder, Debod bis Bab Kalabsche, Tome second,Le Caire, 1911.
Gaston Maspero, Rapports relatifs à la consolidation des temples, 2 vols., Le Caire, 1911.
Friedrich Zucker, Debod bis Bab Kalabsche, Tome troisième,Le Caire, 1912.
Henri Gauthier, Le temple de Ouadi es-Sebouâ, Tomepremier (Texte), Le Caire, 1912.
Aylward M. Blackman, The Temple of Derr, Le Caire, 1913.
Henri Gauthier, Le temple d'Amada, premier fascicule,Le Caire, 1913.
Henri Gauthier, Le temple d'Amada, deuxième fascicule,Le Caire, 1926.
Aylward M. Blackman, The Temple of Bîgeh, Le Caire,1915.
Gaston Maspero, Documents sur l'état ancien des monuments,vol. 1, fascicle 2, Le Caire, 1920

Archival Archaeological Film: Gebel Moya Sudan 1912-1913

I trust readers will use the comment function to point out errors and omissions.

Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities: The DLC is Back!

MITH — 2012-02-07T14:27:18+00:00

The Deena Larsen Collection (DLC) is back up and running. Thank you for your patience while we fixed the website.

Juan Garcés (Digitised Manuscripts Blog): Love Letters at the British Library

Julian Harrison — 2012-02-07T14:06:14+00:00

What do Anne Boleyn, Horatio Nelson, Charlotte Brontë and Oscar Wilde have in common?

The answer is that love letters in their own hands survive at the British Library, which for the first time have been gathered together in a single volume, Love Letters: 2000 Years of Romance.

In the margin of this Book of Hours, made in Bruges c. 1500, is a note from Anne Boleyn to Henry VIII, reading 'Be daly prove you shall me fynde / To be to you bothe lovynge and kynde.' London, British Library, MS King's 9, f. 66v.

Edited by Andrea Clarke, Curator of Early Modern Historical Manuscripts at the British Library, Love Letters contains missives dating from 168 BC (Isaias to her husband, Hephaestion) to c. 1980 (a poem written by Ted Hughes to Sylvia Plath), and features images and transcriptions of each letter. Among them is the oldest Valentine, written by Margery Brews to John Paston III in February 1477. See these articles in The Daily Mail ("Charlotte Bronte's lost love letters to married professor were preserved by his wife") and The Daily Telegraph ("Charlotte Bronte's lost love letters revealed"), which focus on one letter in the collection.

On Saturday, 11 February, Dr Clarke will introduce some of these handwritten love letters in a special event at the British Library (14.30-16.00), where she will be joined by acclaimed biographer Anne Sebba.

Love Letters: 2000 Years of Romance (ISBN 9780712358255) is currently available on special offer from the British Library shop (£7.00, normally £10.00). Here is the full list of contents:

1: Letter from Isaias to her husband, Hephaestion, 29 August 168 BC

2: Margery Brews to John Paston III, February 1477

3: Prince Arthur to Katherine of Aragon, 5 October 1499

4: Pierre Sala, Petit Livre d’Amour (letter to Marguerite Bullioud), c.1500

5: Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII, love notes in a Book of Hours, c.1528

6: Katherine Parr to Henry VIII, July 1544

7: Earl of Essex to Elizabeth I, 18 October 1591

8: Sir Thomas Baskerville to his wife, Mary, 21 August 1595

9: Thomas Knyvett to his wife, Katherine, 26 November 1621

10: George Villiers to James I, 29 August 1623

11: Dorothy Osbourne to Sir William Temple, 15/16 October 1653

12: Sir John Fenwick to his wife, Mary, January 1697

13: Vanessa [Esther van Homrigh] to Jonathan Swift, 1714

14: Horatio Nelson’s last letter to Lady Emma Hamilton, 19 October 1805

15: Charles Dickens to his future wife, Catherine Hogarth, May 1835

16: Charlotte Brontë to Professor Constantin Héger, 18 November 1844

17: Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas, De Profundis, January 1897

18: Gordon Bottomley to Emily Burton, 17 October 1899

19: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnet 43 from Sonnets from the Portuguese, c. 1846

20: Christina Rossetti, Valentine poem to her mother, 1884

21: Rupert Brooke to Cathleen Nesbitt, 1913

22: Roger Keyes to his wife, Eva, 10 December 1914

23: Mervyn Peake to his wife, Maeve Gilmore, early 1940s

24: Ted Hughes, poem to Sylvia Plath, c.1980

25: Ralph Richardson to his wife, Meriel Forbes, 1964-70

John Hessler (Warping History)

John Hessler, — 2012-02-07T13:52:26+00:00

Fourier Finds Caesar: A Study in the Physical Evidence of Roman Agrarian Law and Land Usage Using Periodic Functions

Landscapes are dynamic constructions, with each community and each generation imposing its own cognitive map on an anthropogenic world of interconnected morphology, arrangement, and coherent meaning.

--Kurt Anschuetz, An Archaeology of Landscapes

Finding the physical and epigraphical remains of Roman surveying and centuriation throughout the Roman world remains an area of research that currently engages only a few historians of cartography. In the past the practice of Roman surveying was studied by many important Roman historians like Theodore Mommsen and Max Weber[1]. There remain however, many difficult and unanswered questions about Roman cartography, and the lack of actual extant maps has made me begin to look elsewhere for information that might shed light on its origins and methods. My current research on this problem employs GIS and image analysis to historical aerial photography and remote sensing imagery. It is my hope that in the near future it will produce the first complete map of North African sites that shows both the extent and orientation of Roman mapping. Several authors, such as Rita Compatangelo [2], J.W.M. Peterson [3], D.J. Bescoby [4] have pioneered the use of various mathematical transforms in the analysis of remote sensing imagery for the purpose of finding new sites and orientations. I have started to apply these methods in combination with edge detection algorithms in order to calculate the extent of Roman surveyng and the various types of orientations associated with the physical remains of limites.

The physical remains of Roman centuriation take on a number of sizes and orientations, but are typically discovered through the outlines of the limites that seperated the various regions from one another. Limites or Limes (singular) can be defined as a man-made boundary or balk, that is uncultivated and wide enough to form a road or pathway, which divided centuriae or other land division units from one another. These can take many forms from simple paths all the way to larger structures like the main roads of the decumanus and kardo maximus that were centrally located in a surveyed region. The feature that makes these remains discoverable through the use of transformational techniques is the fact that they appear on the landscape as periodic phenomena. This simply means that the pattern of centuration repeats itself over areas of the landscape, showing up as linear freatures that appear in remote sensing imagery as periodic pattern of grids over fixed distances. One of the most useful ways to study periodic phenomenon, at least from a mathematical perspective, is through the use of Fourier Series and transforms [5]. These transforms model any periodic phenomenon that we might be ineterested in as a infintie series of cosine and sine functions of varying frequencies.

This sum can be expressed more conviently through the use of complex exponentials which are easier to work with algebraically. Using a discrete and algorithmic version of the Fourier transform, known as the fast Fourier transform (FFT), Peterson and Compatangelo, in truely ground breaking papers, showed that one could calculate the most common period found in a group of periodic linear features found on more modern maps. I say the most common period, because many of the linear features found on the landscape today are subdivisions of modern and medieval origin, and it is sometimes extremely difficult to determine the date of the features whose period the transforms are measuring. As an illustrative example, one can think of the linear features found in the landscape as a more complex superposition of the images in the figure shown below. In the figure we see that there are linear features that repeat themselves and that in each of the figures they have different periods of repetition. One of the figures also has a different orientation than the other two. What we see in the landscape is typically a combination of all of these in the same region and on the same remotely sensed image. Peterson used the FFT to generate periodograms that produced the most common harmonics in a series of regions dislaying linear features that he took from 19th Century Ordnance Survey Maps of Scole-Dickleburgh area in South Norfolk. What the periodogram does is allow one to pick out the frequency of the linear features and the larger harmonics. An simple example of this is shown in the figure below. The periodograms not only show the most common distances between the linear features found on the map or on the satellite image, but they also yield a series of harmonics that might have the physical meaning. Larger harmonics beyond the most common one may show subdivisions in the original survey or different grid patterns from the type one is looking for. Because we are not only interested in the distances between linear features in the landscape buy also in their orientation, we have employed a second technique known as a Radon transform. This technique has been used by Bescoby to detect Roman boundaries in aerial photographs in Albania. The strength of this method is that it allows for the calculation of the angle and hence the orientation of the series of linear features. When combined with the two-dimensional version of the Fourier transform, this allows a complete characterization of the grid formed by the limites of Roman surveying. The Radon transform can be expressed by the equation below and its operation can be seen in the graph shown in the figure. Finding the size and orientation of linear features in a landscape lets us compare what we have calculated with known patterns of centriation found in literary and epigraphical evidence, such as that found in the 5th or 6th century Corpus Argimensorum. According to Hyginus, one of the authors found in this compilation of Roman surveying texts, the typical layout for an area of surveyed land is shown below. The letters and numbers define the parcel of land and very often appear as eppigraphic inscriptions on surviving boundary stones. The main intersection shown in the figure is that of the kardo and decumanus maximus which are the beginning points of any Roman survey. A typical kardo or decumanus can be seen in the photograph below that I took in a heavily centuriated area around Carthage just north of Tunis. The distances that the Romans typically used and their various names are shown in the schematic, with a century measuring 2400 Roman feet or about 705 meters. Many of these grids would however have been further subdivided in a variety of schemes that are not easily dated using physical evidence. The research that I have been doing has concentrated its efforts on the non-coastal regions of North Africa, taking in parts of Tunisia, Algeria and Libya. Below are two satellite images of the areas around Dougga and El Jem in Tunisia both of which are the sites of important Roman towns and ruins.

In both of these photographs one can see a variety of linear features that may or may not be associated with Roman activity.

It would be interesting to know the extent to which the Romans actually produced maps of these areas considering their overall importance to the history of Roman colonization and occupation in the region. El Jem for example contains one of the best preserved Roman colesseums in all of Africa.

To apply these algorithms to remote sensgin imagery it was necessary to clean them up and enhance the linear features using edge detection algorithms. An example of this is shown in the figure below.

Once this is accomplished and the various transforms have been applied we can begin to compare the results with known grids based on our knowledge of Roman practice derived from the epigraphic and literary evidence.

Using ArcGIS I have generated maps with overlays showing the orientation and extent of the surveyed region under study. The map below shows a single division into centuriae around Enfida, Tunisia.

The map below shows both a division into centuriae and into a second subdivison which probably dates from a later time. [1] There are many studies of Roman surveying. For a modern bibliography see Brian Campbell, The Writings of the Roman Land Surveyors, Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 2000.--
[2] Rita Compatangelo, Un Cadastre De Peirre Le Salento Romain, Annales Litteraires de l'Universite de Besancon, 1989.---

[3] John Peterson, Fourier Analysis of Field Boundaries, in G. Lock and J. Moffet, CAA91: Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology 1991. BAR International Series s577. Oxford, 149-156.

---

[4] D.J. Bescoby, Detecting Roman land Boundaries in aerial photgraphs using Randon transforms, Journal of Archaeological Science (2006) 33, 735-743. See also, J. S. Bailly et'al "Agarian Landscapes linear features detection: application to artificial drainage networks" International Journal of Remote Sensing 29 (2008) 3489-3508 and E. Magli, et.al. Pattern Recognotion by means of the Radon transofrm and the continuous wavelet transform, Signal Processing 73 (9990 277-289.

---

[5] See any of the recommended books on Fourier Analysis on this blog or for a good introduction to the subject see L. Solymar, Lectures on Fourier Series, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Roger Pearse (Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, and more): Are these really the words of Ignatius?

Roger Pearse — 2012-02-07T13:00:13+00:00

A splendid blog post at TrevinWax contains the following item:

Please pray for me,
that I may have both spiritual and physical strength to perform my duties;
that I may not only speak the truth but become the truth;
that I may not only be called a Christian, but also live like a Christian.
Yet I do not want people to look to me as an example,
for at best I can only be a pale reflection of Christ Jesus;
let people look away from the reflection and turn to the reality.
Christianity is not a matter of persuading people of particular ideas,
but of inviting them to share in the greatness of Christ.
So pray that I may never fall into the trap of impressing people with clever speech,
but instead I may learn to speak with humility,
desiring only to impress people with Christ himself.

- Ignatius of Antioch, 35-108 A. D.

These are interesting sentiments, although I have a feeling that “Christianity is not a matter of persuading people of particular ideas” is not what Ignatius would say. But the lack of a source is troubling. Where precisely does Ignatius say this?

So, where does this come from? Well, the direct source is probably Janice Grana, 2000 Years since Bethlehem: Images of Christ through the centuries, Upper Room Books, 1999. This contains these very words, but since I cannot access more than a snippet in Google books, I am none the wiser.

Does anyone recognise the words?

Bill Caraher (The New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World): Popular Byzantium: An Interview with Paul Kastenellos, Part 1

Bill Caraher — 2012-02-07T12:45:07+00:00

Right before Christmas, I was surprised and excited to receive an unsolicited copy of a novel set in Byzantium: Paul Kastenellos, Count No Man Happy. (New York 2011). I was even more surprised to discover that Paul Kastenellos was the pen name of Vincent O’Reilly who was a history major at the University of North Dakota in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Needless to say, the intersection between Byzantium and the University of North Dakota is exceedingly rare, so I contacted the author and struck up a conversation about Byzantium, popular culture, and life at UND.

I discovered that Vincent had more than just a casual interest in Byzantium. His book is richly textured (with pleasant edge) and historically vivid making it more than suitable for a fictional companion to an undergraduate Byzantine history course. For the uninitiated, Vincent has provided some companion material on his website including a lovely Illustrated History of Byzantium.

The following is a lightly edited version of our email correspondence which focuses on that often strange intersection between the academic community and passionately interested lay reader. As most Byzantinists realize, the past two decades have seen a growing popular interest in Byzantium which, so far, most Byzantinists have not successfully captured to our field’s advantage. Perhaps this interview with a participant in this popular revival can provide some new insights for us…

Bill Caraher: Thank you so much, Vincent, for taking the time to chat about your book and giving those of us on that academic side of the aisle a perspective on how you came to learn, to love, and to write about the Byzantine centuries, and why (and whether!) we are genuinely experiencing a “Byzantium boom” in the popular culture of the first decades of the 21st century.

Paul Kastenellos: I thought I might anticipate your questions with a little general background. I need not tell you how important that is to understanding. I entered UND in 1957. At that time TV was fairly new, most families not getting a set until about 1950. Educational TV was a bore – some college prof in a suit lecturing at a podium. What we learned in high school was mostly English history with a few asides to Charlemagne, Julius Caesar et c. My only recollection of anything Byzantine was the statement in some textbook, talking about the fall of the Roman empire, that “it maintained a shadowy existence in the east for another thousand years.” Now imagine my shock in Dr. [Felix] Vondracek’s class when he,, who saw history as a succession of battles. told us about Adrianople and stirrups, Belisarius and Antonina (Wow); and insisted that we memorize lists of popes and Byzantine emperors (Yawn!). Vondracek had his faults, no doubt about it; but his lectures were never dull.

*[Felix Vondracek was a popular and cantankerous history professor at the University of North Dakota.]

Fast forward fifty years. Students learn more. High school teachers are better prepared. Television is running out of things to tell people about. Perhaps most important, the comfortable parochialism of my youth is no longer acceptable. Black history was assumed not to exist in those days and we studied American history in a vacuum, ignoring anything south of the border after the conquistadors and never realizing that colonial history is intimately interlinked with European.

In my college years there were not more than four or five books on Byzantium in print at any time. We had Bury, Diehl, Pirenne, and Vasiliev; and Vondracek was anxiously awaiting a translation of Ostrogorsky. Once in a while Oxford University Press might kick out a new volume but they were pricey and would not long remain in print. But Praeger was creating expensive art books some of which were about Byzantine art.

To confirm what I just wrote I looked at my aging Viking Library “Portable Medieval Reader” (c 1949). In seven hundred pages the only Byzantine author is Anna Comnenaand that is her description of the western crusader knights. With such a dearth of information it should not be surprising that there was little interest even among the educated. We were still stuck in Gibbon’s negative view because no one was reexamining it at the high school level.

Today Americans have a broader outlook. Most educated people have traveled. TV has run out of fresh Hitler footage. Color images on videotape are much more vibrant than even color film, much less the black and white of 1950s television. Modern art may possibly have made people more willing to look at stuff other than the purely representational.

So there is nothing remarkable about the interest in Byzantium. There is also interest in Mongolia and substantially more interest in the Indian cultures of South America than when I was young. In grade school and high school my only knowledge of these peoples was which Spaniard had killed them. Our understanding of Persia was entirely through Greek eyes, and of Spain through British eyes. There was a definite prejudice against Byzantium inherited from Gibbon, just as there was against Spain which we viewed through the filter of Elizabethan English propaganda. One look at the Hearst papers leading up to the Spanish American War will show that.

We knew nothing of the Byzantines but then we knew nothing of Japan (see my essay on the Asian War on my website) and what little we knew of India was still through the eyes of Kipling. North Africa was to us Beau Geste and the French Foreign Legion, Africa was witch doctors and safaris, and Egypt was still “The Curse Of The Mummy’s Tomb.” Our parents had at best a high school education as did our newspaper reporters. China was seen through the eyes of “China watchers” who seem never to have left the bars of Hong Kong. Now all these states are intimately intertwined.

My point is that the interest in Byzantium can not be seen as something unique. It is not that somehow it has become interesting, but rather that my youth was a benighted pit from which internationalism and international travel and communication has raised us. We are looking for new interests.

But only so far. There is Byzantine stuff on TV but it doesn’t go much beyond pretty pictures of Hagia Sophia. The Orthodox church still remains outside the interest of most people. In fact religion generally is something modern secularists don’t want to discuss except in a negative way. I do think the Metropolitan exhibitions gave a boost to Byzantine art. I saw the first one and it definitely was broader than the expected bunch of old icons. Why not “Russia and Byzantium,” “Byzantium and the West,” The Crusades Through Byzantine Eyes,” and of course, “The Fall of Constantinople.”

I just checked Barnes and Noble and am amazed with the variety of material now available. There are many popular books on the Byzantines. I have one on their cuisine (and would readily pass on it.) There is even fiction though the two novels I’ve read were disappointing (Stock adventure stories with a cross thrown in here and there.) Alternative history is blessed with David Drake and Eric Flint’s “Belisarius series” which I enjoyed. Though it had little to do with Byzantium, I liked their take on the character of Belisarius. One might ask why these authors chose to write six books with Belisarius as the protagonist. I would answer that the motivation was not Byzantium, but alternative history which sells well. I wish it were the reverse.

BC: So, you became interested in Byzantine history through Prof. Vondracek’s classes, but surely not everyone in these classes has gone on to write novels on Byzantium. Was there any other thing that influenced your interest?

PK: Let me detail a bit of personal history… Vondracek threw a searchlight on my understanding of medieval history which up to then had been entirely western. In a way that was understandable if narrow. Our society does descend from western European. After graduation I had to earn a living. Although I pretended to be as interested in Byzantium as in my college years in truth it faded. I was going for a masters in library Science and working and drinking. (The last I gave up in 1979). When my daughter graduated from St John’s College in Annapolis she took a job with Bill Moyers and used her first paycheck to give me and my wife, Tamiko, tickets to Istanbul.

To my great surprise and delight my interest in Byzantium came flooding back as though it had never waned. Two characters in Vondrachek’s lectures had never really left me:

BC: Which two characters are those?

PK: Belisarius and Constantine VI.

BC: Why those two of all the memorable characters from Byzantium?

PK: Belisarius is obvious. How can it be that such a notable general went unmentioned in any history of great generals that I had read? Pure western ignorance and bias. That Antonina accompanied him touched the romantic in me and her infidelity to a man who loved her deeply made me curious. (These things I had learned from Vondracek who loved nothing better than to reveal the private lives of famous people.)

Vondacek also told us of poor Constantine VI and related how he was blinded by his mother and how Theodote, in his words, “followed him around like a puppy dog for the rest of his life.” He also told us that he had been infatuated with the daughter of Charlemagne whom he was betrothed to but never met. I have no idea why these things stuck in my mind when so many other things in Vondrachek’s lectures have faded out of memory, but they did. Unfortunately, while I remembered both these things about Constantine I somehow had a disconnect in my mind that they were the same person. Nonetheless they stayed in the back of my mind and came back with other things about Byzantium when I first visited Istanbul.

Now I had always wanted to write. In fact I entered the news business (United Press – Movietonews) in order to simplify and improve my writing style which I was aware had been damaged by too much reading of diverse authors in college. Why had I not gone into a field of history after college? Because my interest was in Byzantium and as the worst language student who ever lived I knew that I could never be a scholar in that subject. I had no interest in simply teaching high school.

Somewhere along the line I saw the movie Laura wherein a detective falls in love with the portrait of a (presumably) dead woman. I did not think the movie played out the idea all that well but was fascinated by the concept. So somewhere in the mid ’90s I started to write a bit of fluff that I jokingly referred to as Constantine VI meets Bettie Page. (It is amazing how many guys of all ages [and even gals] are familiar with Bettie, but one doesn’t know that until someone in the group dares to bring up the subject. I even joined the BettieScouts of America fan club.) Then I remembered that Constantine was the same guy whose mom blinded him.

Problem.

One can’t write fluff about someone whose Mom blinded him. I tried writing Beth (inspired by Bettie) out of the story but had come to like the character that I was developing too much. I needed such a character to boost an otherwise depressing tale of Constantine and his mother. I thought to have him dream of someone who’d lived before him. That would not have had to be fantasy but I couldn’t find anyone that I could use without totally changing her character. So Beth stayed. Of course it means a story that will turn off people with a serious interest in serious history; but whatthehell, to quote Mehitabel the poetic cockroach.

…

Check back tomorrow for Part 2 of the interview with Vincent O’Reilly author of Count No Man Happy.

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): Newly Open Access Journal: Argos: Revista de la Asociación Argentina de Estudios Clásicos

Charles Jones — 2012-02-06T23:28:14+00:00

Argos: Revista de la Asociación Argentina de Estudios Clásicos
ISSN 1853-6379

MisiónPublicar artículos, notas breves y reseñas sobre temas de filología, filosofía, historia y arte grecorromanos, producidos por investigadores argentinos y extranjeros.

Números disponibles*
Año
Volumen    Número
  2011
34 1
  2010
33 1 2
  2009
32 1 2

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

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): Emerging Open Access Journal: Antiguo Oriente

Charles Jones — 2012-02-06T21:26:25+00:00

Antiguo Oriente: Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Historia del Antiguo Oriente

The Centro de Estudios de Historia del Antiguo Oriente (CEHAO) and the Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina will post online all pastissues of Antiguo Oriente (except the last one) in the university's Digital Library (right now only Vol. 7, 2009, is fully available).With this considerable effort the CEHAO and the university continuetheir permanent commitment to the open sharing of knowledge.

Antiguo Oriente is the annual, peer-reviewed, scholarly journalpublished by the CEHAO. The journal publishes manuscripts related tothe history of societies of the Ancient Near East and the EasternMediterranean from the Paleolithic through the Roman-Hellenisticperiod. Antiguo Oriente publishes articles and book reviews inSpanish, English and French.

2009 vol. 7 [full text]
2010 vol. 8 [TOC/abstracts only]

2009 vol. 7
Peftjauawybast, king of Nen-nesut : genealogy, art history, and the chronology of late libyan Egypt
Autor: Morkot, Robert
Archaeometric evidence for the authenticity of the Jehoash inscription tablet
Autor: Rosenfeld, Amnon
Timna revisited : egyptian chronology and the copper mines of the southern Arabah
Autor: Bimson, John J.
Adbi'ilu : an arab at Babylon (BM 78912)
Autor: Nielsen, John P.
Local exchange in the southern levant during the early bronze age: a political economy viewpoint
Autor: Milevski, Ianir
Poner el cuerpo. Mujeres y política estatal en Mari (Siglo XVIII a.c.)
Autor: Rovira, Leticia
Bronze and iron weapons from Luristan
Autor: Moshtagh Khorasani, Manouchehr
Los manuscritos del Mar Muerto y el Nuevo Testamento. El nuevo Moisés : algunas prácticas de la ley
Autor: Puech, Émile
Toward a new synthesis of the god of Edom and Yahweh
Autor: Kelley, Justin
The MBA-LBA I period in the Kourion region : new evidences from Erimi- Laonin tou Porakou (Lemesos, Cyprus)
Autor: Bombardieri, Luca

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

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): Open Access Journal: Journal of Hebrew Scriptures

Charles Jones — 2012-02-06T21:10:06+00:00

[First posted in AWOL 23 October 2009. Updated 6 February 2012]

Journal of Hebrew Scriptures

The Journal of Hebrew Scriptures (JHS) is an international, peer-reviewed, open access, journal established in 1996 to foster scholarly research on the Hebrew Bible, Ancient Israel’s History and cognate fields of studies.

JHS articles are included in the ATLA Religion Database, RAMBI, and BiBIL. The full contents of the journal are archived by Library and Archives Canada and is accessible for consultation and research at the Electronic Collection site maintained by Library and Archives Canada. JHS volumes are published in hard-copy, with a year delay, by Gorgias Press as part of their series Perspectives on Hebrew Scriptures and its Contexts. Volumes 1-9 (1996-2009) are available.

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Author Title Volume Article Year

Bridge, Edward J. Female Slave vs Female Slave: אָמָה and שִׁפְחָה in the HB 12 2 2012
Wolters, Al, The Meaning of ṢANTĔRÔT (Zech 4:12) 12 1 2012
Stackert, Jeffrey, Compositional Strata in the Priestly Sabbath: Exodus 31:12-17 and 35:1-3 11 15 2011
Holmstedt, Robert D. The Typological Classification of the Hebrew of Genesis: Subject-Verb or Verb-Subject? 11 14 2011
Sutskover, Talia Lot and His Daughters (Gen 19:30–38). Further Literary and Stylistic Examinations 11 13 2011
Finkelstein,Israel, Ido Koch and Oded Lipschits The Mound on the Mount: A Possible Solution to the “Problem with Jerusalem” 11 12 2011
Shalom-Guy, Hava, The Call Narratives of Gideon and Moses: Literary Convention or More? 11 11 2011
Wallace, Robert E., The Narrative Effect of Psalms 84–89 11 10 2011
van Wolde, Ellen and Robert Rezetko, Semantics and the Semantics of ברא: A Rejoinder to the Arguments Advanced by B. Becking and M. Korpel 11 9 2011
Andrason, Alexander, Biblical Hebrew Wayyiqtol: A Dynamic Definition 11 8 2011
Frisch, Amos, Comparison With David as a Means of Evaluating Character in the Book of Kings 11 7 2011
Ganzel, Tova, The Shattered Dream. The Prophecies of Joel: A Bridge between Ezekiel and Haggai? 11 6 2011
Garsiel, Moshe, David’s Elite Warriors and Their Exploits in the Books of Samuel and Chronicles 11 5 2011
Bachmann, Veronika, The Book of The Watchers (1 Enoch 1–36): An Anti-Mosaic, Non-Mosaic, or Even Pro-Mosaic Writing? 11 4 2011
Campos, Martha E., Structure and Meaning in the Third Vision of Amos (7:7–17) 11 3 2011
Doak, Brian R., “Some Worthless and Reckless Fellows”: Landlessness and Parasocial Leadership in Judges 11 2 2011
Assis, Elie Zechariah 8 and its Allusions to Jeremiah 30–33 and Deutero-Isaiah 11 1 2011
Finkelstein, Israel, Archaeology as a High Court in Ancient Israelite History: A Reply to Nadav Na’aman 10 19 2010
Samet, Nili, “The Tallest Man Cannot Reach Heaven; the Broadest Man Cannot Cover Earth” – Reconsidering the Proverb and its Biblical Parallels 10 18 2010
Melvin, David P., Divine Mediation and the Rise of Civilization in Mesopotamian Literature and in Genesis 1–11 10 17 2010
Frankel, David, El as the Speaking Voice in Psalm 82:6–8 10 16 2010
Assis, Elie, Zechariah 8 As Revision and Digest of Zechariah 1–7 10 15 2010
Vermeulen, Karolien, Eeny Meeny Miny Moe. Who Is The Craftiest To Go? 10 14 2010
Miller, Marvin Lloyd, Nehemiah 5: A Response to Philippe Guillaume 10 13 2010
Hutzli, Jürg Tradition and Interpretation in Gen 1:1–2:4a 10 12 2010
Landy, Francis Three Sides of a Coin: In Conversation with Ben Zvi And Nogalski, Two Sides of a Coin 10 11 2010
Andrason, Alexander The Panchronic Yiqtol: Functionally Consistent and Cognitively Plausible 10 10 2010
Olyan, Saul M., (ed.) In Conversation With Joshua A. Berman, Created Equal: How the Bible Broke With Ancient Political Thought (Oxford University Press, 2008). 10 9 2010
Guillaume, Philippe, Nehemiah 5: No Economic Crisis 10 8 2010
Hobson, Russell, Jeremiah 41 and the Ammonite Alliance 10 7 2010
Shemesh, Yael, “And Many Beasts” (Jonah 4:11): The Function and Status of Animals in the Book of Jonah 10 6 2010
Garsiel, Moshe, The Book of Samuel: Its Composition, Structure and Significance as a Historiographical Source 10 5 2010
Kletter, Raz and Gideon Solimani Archaeology and Professional Ethical Codes in Israel in the mid 80s: The Case of the Association of Archaeologists in Israel and Its Code of Ethics 10 4 2010
Becking, Bob and Marjo C.A. Korpel To Create, to Separate or to Construct: An Alternative for a Recent Proposal as to the Interpretation of ברא in Gen 1:1–2:4a 10 3 2010
Broida, Marian Closure in Samson 10 2 2010
Amar Zohar, Ram Bouchnick and Guy Bar-Oz The Contribution of Archaeozoology to the Identification of the Ritually Clean Ungulates Mentioned in The Hebrew Bible 10 1 2010
Van Seters, John A Response to G. Aichelle, P. Miscall and R. Walsh, “An Elephant in the Room: Historical-Critical and the Postmodern Interpretations of the Bible” 9 26 2009
Savran, George Multivocality in Group Speech in Biblical Narrative 9 25 2009
Finkelstein, Israel Persian Period Jerusalem and Yehud: A Rejoinder 9 24 2009
Renz, Thomas A Perfectly Broken Acrostic in Nahum 1? 9 23 2009
Vermeulen, Karolien To See or Not To See. The Polysemy of the Word עין in the Isaac Narratives (Gen 17–35) 9 22 2009
Pinker, Aron Intrusion of Ptolemaic Reality on Cultic Practices in Qoh 4:17 9 21 2009
Lipschits, Oded Persian Period Finds from Jerusalem: Facts and Interpretations 9 20 2009
Holmstedt, Robert D. אני ולבי-The Syntactic Encoding of the Collaborative Nature of Qohelet's Experiment 9 19 2009
Knauf, Ernst Axel Observations on Judah's Social and Economic History and the Dating of the Laws in Deuteronomy 9 18 2009
Person Jr., Raymond F. (ed.) In Conversation With Thomas Römer, The So-Called Deuteronomistic History: A Sociological, Historical And Literary Introduction (London: T. & T. Clark, 2005). 9 17 2009
Guillaume, Philippe Lamentations 5: The Seventh Acrostic 9 16 2009
Becking, Bob God-Talk for a Disillusioned Pilgrim in Psalm 121 9 15 2009
Olyan, Saul M. The Ascription of Physical Disability as a Stigmatizing Strategy in Biblical Iconic Polemics 9 14 2003
Gow, Andrew C. The Contested History of a Book: The German Bible of the Later Middle Ages and Reformation in Legend, Ideology, and Scholarship 9 13 2009
Kennedy, James M. Psalm 29 as Semiotic System: A Linguistic Reading 9 12 2009
Boda, Mark J. (ed.) In Conversation with Steven Schweitzer, Reading Utopia in Chronicles (LHBOTS, 442; London: T. & T. Clark International, 2007) 9 11 2009
Gilmour, Rachelle Suspense and Anticipation in 1 Samuel 9:1–14 9 10 2009
Timmer, Daniel The Intertextual Israelite Jonah Face À L'empire: The Post-Colonial Significance of The Book's Cotexts and Purported Neo-Assyrian Context 9 9 2009
Spronk, Klaas Jonah, Nahum, and the Book of the Twelve: A Response to Jakob Wöhrle 9 8 2009
Wöhrle, Jakob A Prophetic Reflection on Divine Forgiveness: The Integration of the Book of Jonah into the Book of the Twelve 9 7 2009
Guillaume, Philippe Rhetorical Reading Redundant: A Response to Ehud Ben Zvi 9 6 2009
Ben Zvi, Ehud Jonah 4:11 and the Metaprophetic Character of the Book of Jonah 9 5 2009
Bolin, Thomas M. Eternal Delight and Deliciousness: The Book of Jonah After Ten Years 9 4 2009
Guillaume, Philippe Arguing under the Qiqayon: An Introduction to a Set of Articles on Jonah 9 3 2009
Athas, George In Search of the Seventy ‘Weeks’ of Daniel 9 9 2 2009
Christian, Mark A. Priestly Power that Empowers: Michel Foucault, Middle-tier Levites, and the Sociology of “Popular Religious Groups” in Israel 9 1 2009
Young, Ian Late Biblical Hebrew And The Qumran Pesher Habakkuk 8 25 2008
Na'aman, Nadav Shaaraim - The Gateway To The Kingdom Of Judah 8 24 2008
Steinmann, Andrew E. Letters of Kings about Votive Offerings, The God of Israel and the Aramaic Document in Ezra 4:8–6:18 8 23 2008
Garfinkel, Yosef and Saar Ganor Khirbet Qeiyafa: Sha`arayim 8 22 2008
Na'aman, Nadav In Search of the Ancient Name of Khirbet Qeiyafa 8 21 2008
Dobbs-Allsopp, F. W. Psalm 133: A (Close) Reading 8 20 2008
Assis, Elie The Temple in the Book of Haggai 8 19 2008
Avioz, Michael Saul as a Just Judge in Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews 8 18 2008
Kline, Moshe “The Editor was Nodding” A Reading of Leviticus 19 in Memory of Mary Douglas 8 17 2008
Jacobs, Jonathan Characterizing Esther from the Outset: The Contribution of the Story in Esther 2:1–20 8 16 2008
Römer, Thomas Moses Outside the Torah and the Construction of a Diaspora Identity 8 15 2008
Basser, Herb Did Rashi Notice a Janus Parallelism in Ezek 20:37? 8 14 2008
Scatolini Apóstolo, Silvio Sergio Imagining Ezekiel 8 13 2008
Wright, David P. Deciphering a Definition: The Syntagmatic Structural Analysis of Ritual in the Hebrew Bible 8 12 2008
Schmitt, Rüdiger The Problem of Magic and Monotheism in the Book of Leviticus 8 11 2008
Olyan, Saul M. Mary Douglas's Holiness/Wholeness Paradigm: Its Potential for Insight and its Limitations 8 10 2008
Marx, Alfred The Relationship between the Sacrificial Laws and the Other Laws in Leviticus 19 8 9 2008
Hendel, Ronald Mary Douglas and Anthropological Modernism 8 8 2008
Hendel, Ronald and Saul M. Olyan Beyond Purity and Danger: Mary Douglas and The Hebrew Bible 8 7 2008
Pinker, Aron The Doings of the Wicked in Qohelet 8:10 8 6 2008
Shemesh, Yael Elisha Stories as Saints' Legends 8 5 2008
Shemesh, Yael Elisha and The Miraculous Jug of Oil(2 Kgs 4:1–7) 8 4 2008
Cook, John A. The Vav-Prefixed Verb Forms in Elementary Hebrew Grammar 8 3 2008
Kletter, Raz The Friends of Antiquities (in Heb. נאמני עתיקות): The Story of an Israeli Volunteer Group and Comparative Remarks 8 2 2008
Stein, David E. S. The Noun אִישׁ ('îš) in Biblical Hebrew: A Term of Affiliation 8 1 2008
Guillaume, Philippe A Reconsideration of Manuscripts Classified as Scrolls of the Twelve Minor Prophets (XII) 7 16 2007
Guillaume, Philippe The Unlikely Malachi-Jonah Sequence (4QXII^a) 7 15 2007
Ben Zvi, Ehud (ed.) Rereading Oracles of God: Twenty Years After John Barton, Oracles of God: Perceptions of Prophecy in Israel after the Exile (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1986) 7 14 2007
Bodner, Keith Crime Scene Investigation: A Text-Critical Mystery and the Strange Death of Ishbosheth 7 13 2007
Knoppers, Gary N. (ed.) Revisiting the Composition of Ezra-Nehemiah: In Conversation with Jacob Wright's Rebuilding Identity: The Nehemiah Memoir and its Earliest Readers (BZAW, 348; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004) 7 12 2007
Assis, Elie Composition, Rhetoric and Theology in Haggai 1:1–11 7 11 2007
Leuchter, Mark (ed.) Scribes Before and After 587 BCE: A Conversation 7 10 2007
Van Seters, John Author or Redactor? 7 9 2007
Pinker, Aron A Goat to Go to Azazel 7 8 2007
Knoppers, Gary N. (ed.) Expatriates, Repatriates, and the Question of Zion's Status – In Conversation with Melody D. Knowles, Centrality Practiced: Jerusalem in the Religious Practices of Yehud and the Diaspora in the Persian Period (Atlanta, SBL, 2006). 7 7 2007
Boer, Roland Keeping It Literal: The Economy of the Song of Songs 7 6 2007
Sneed, Mark "White Trash” Wisdom: Proverbs 9 Deconstructed 7 5 2007
Noegel, Scott B. “Word Play” in Qoheleth 7 4 2007
Fried, Lisbeth S. Did Second Temple High Priests Possess the Urim and Thummim? 7 3 2007
Vanderhooft, David (ed.) In Conversation with Oded Lipschits, The Fall and Rise of Jerusalem (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2005) 7 2 2007
Henige, David Found But Not Lost: A Skeptical Note on the Document Discovered in the Temple Under Josiah 7 1 2007
Holmstedt, Robert D. Issues in the Linguistic Analysis of a Dead Language, with Particular Reference to Ancient Hebrew 6 11 2006
Wöhrle, Jakob The Formation and Intention of the Haggai-Zechariah Corpus 6 10 2006
Gilders, William K. Why Does Eleazar Sprinkle the Red Cow Blood? Making Sense of a Biblical Ritual 6 9 2006
Pinker, Aron Nahum and the Greek Tradition on Nineveh's Fall 6 8 2006
Scatolini Apóstolo, Silvio Sergio On The Elusiveness and Malleability of “Israel” 6 7 2006
Tebes, Juan Manuel “You Shall Not Abhor an Edomite, for He is Your Brother”: The Tradition of Esau and the Edomite Genealogies from an Anthropological Perspective 6 6 2006
Benun, Ronald Evil and the Disruption of Order: A Structural Analysis of the Acrostics in the First Book of Psalms 6 5 2006
Carr, David M. (ed.) The State of the Field of Hebrew Bible Study: In Conversation with John J. Collins, The Bible After Babel: Historical Criticism in a Postmodern Age (Eerdmans, 2005) 6 4 2006
Kim, Yung Suk Lex Talionis in Exod 21:22–25: Its Origin and Context 6 3 2006
Knoppers, Gary N. (ed.) Chronicles and the Chronicler: A Response to I. Kalimi, An Ancient Israelite Historian: Studies in the Chronicler, his Time, Place and Writing 6 2 2006
Pinker, Aron The Core Story in the Prologue-Epilogue of the Book of Job 6 1 2006
Knowles, Melody D. (ed.) New Studies in Chronicles: A Discussion of Two Recently-Published Commentaries 5 20 2005
Assis, Elie “The Hand of a Woman”: Deborah and Yael (Judges 4) 5 19 2005
Knoppers, Gary N. (ed.) In Conversation with W. M. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualization of Ancient Israel (Cambridge, 2003) 5 18 2005
Davies, Philip. R. The Origin of Biblical Israel 5 17 2005
Avioz, Michael Could Saul Rule Forever? A New Look at 1 Samuel 13:13–14 5 16 2005
Britt, Brian Death, Social Conflict, and the Barley Harvest in the Hebrew Bible 5 15 2005
Kummerow, David Job, Hopeful or Hopeless? The Significance of גם in Job 16:19 and Job's Changing Conceptions of Death 5 14 2005
Guillaume, Philippe Tracing the Origin of the Sabbatical Calendar in the Priestly Narrative (Genesis 1 to Joshua 5) 5 13 2005
Pinker, Aron On the meaning of קשת נחושה 5 12 2005
Landy, Francis A Rejoinder to A. Brenner, “Regulating ‘Sons’ and ‘Daughters’ in the Torah and in Proverbs: Some Preliminary Insights” 5 11 2005
Brenner, Athalya Regulating ‘Sons’ and ‘Daughters’ in the Torah and in Proverbs: Some Preliminary Insights 5 10 2005
Guillaume, Philippe New Light on the Nebiim from Alexandria: A Chronography to Replace the Deuteronomistic History 5 9 2004
Noegel, Scott Geminate Ballast and Clustering: An Unrecognized Literary Feature in Ancient Semitic Poetry 5 8 2004
Pinker, Aron The Hard "Sell” in Nah 3:4 5 7 2004
Schniedewind, William M. Prolegomena for the Sociolinguistics of Classical Hebrew 5 6 2004
Doudna, Greg Ostraca KhQ1 and KhQ2 from the Cemetary of Qumran: A New Edition 5 5 2004
Grayson, A. Kirk Shalmaneser III and the Levantine States: The Damascus Coalition Rebellion" 5 4 2004
Haase, Ingrid M. Uzzah's Rebellion 5 3 2004
Linville, James R. Letting the “Bi-word” “Rule” in Joel 2:17 5 2 2004
Najm, S. & Ph. Guillaume Jubilee Calendar Rescued from The Flood Narrative 5 1 2004
Malul, Meir L^edabbēr baššelî (2 Sam. 3:27) "to Talk Peace” 4 8 2002
Pinker, Aron Upon an Attack in Nahum 2:2 4 7 2002
Leuchter, Mark Something Old, Something Older: Reconsidering 1 Sam. 2:27–36 4 6 2002
Kletter, Raz A Very General Archaeologist - Moshe Dayan and Israeli Archaeology 4 5 2002
Liss, Hanna Undisclosed Speech: Patterns of Communication in the Book of Isaiah 4 4 2002
Mitchell, Christine Accession in Chronicles: Transformations in Meaning: Solomon's Accession in Chronicles 4 3 2002
Heard, R. Christopher Echoes of Genesis in 1 Chronicles 4:9–10: An Intertextual and Contextual Reading of Jabez's Prayer 4 2 2002
Lipschits, Oded “Jehoiakim Slept with His Fathers…” - Did He? 4 1 2002
Boda, Mark J. Oil, Crowns and Thrones: Prophet, Priest and Kingin Zechariah 1:7–6:15 3 10 2001
Cohn Eskenazi, Tamara Nehemiah 9–10: Structure and Significance 3 9 2001
Scatolini, Silvio Sergio Delimiting the Countours of Israel in Ezek 12:21–15 and 12:26–28 3 8 2001
Huddlestun, John R. Unveiling the Versions: The Tactics of Tamar in Genesis 38:15 3 7 2001
de Caën, Vincent Hebrew Linguistics and Biblical Criticism: A Minimalist Programme 3 6 2001
Bauer, Uwe F. W. A Metaphorical Etiology in Judges 18:12 3 5 2001
Knoppers, Gary N. “Great Among His Brothers,” but Who is He? Heterogeneity in the Composition of Judah? 3 4 2000
Jenkins, Allan K. Erasmus' Commentary on Psalm 2 3 3 2000
Wesselius, Jan-Wim Towards a New History of Israel 3 2 2000
Lemche, Niels Peter On the Problems of Reconstructing Pre-Hellenistic Israelite (Palestinian) History 3 1 2000
Rendsburg, Gary A. Confused Language as a Deliberate Literary Device in Biblical Hebrew Narrative 2 6 1999
Landy, Francis Leviticus, Deconstruction and the Body 2 5 1999
Bergen, David A. Bakhtin Revisits Deuteronomy: Narrative Theory and the Dialogical Event of Deut 31:2 and 34:7 2 4 1999
Linville, James R. On the Nature of Rethinking Prophetic Literature: Stirring a Neglected Stew (A Response to David L. Petersen) 2 3 1999
Bauer, Uwe F. W. Anti-Jewish Interpretations of Psalm 1 in Luther and in Modern German Protestantism 2 2 1998
Sweeney, Marvin A. A Form-Critical Rereading of Hosea 2 1 1998
Lee, Bernon A Specific Application of the Proverb in Ecclesiastes 1:15 1 6 1997
Davies, Philip R Loose Canons. Reflections on the Formation of the Hebrew Bible 1 5 1997
Fox, Michael V. What Happens in Qohelet 4:13–16? 1 4 1997
de Tillesse, Caetano Minette The Conquest of Power: Analysis of David and Solomon's Accession Histories 1 3 1997
Miller, Cynthia L., Kenneth M. Craig Jr. and Raymond F. Person Jr., Conversation Analysis and the Book of Jonah:A Conversation 1 2 1997
Utzschneider, Helmut Text - Reader - Author. Towards a Theory of Exegesis: Some European Views 1 1 1996

	Show Abstracts and Links to XML
Bridge, Edward J.	Female Slave vs Female Slave: אָמָה and שִׁפְחָה in the HB	12	2	2012
Wolters, Al,	The Meaning of ṢANTĔRÔT (Zech 4:12)	12	1	2012
Stackert, Jeffrey,	Compositional Strata in the Priestly Sabbath: Exodus 31:12-17 and 35:1-3	11	15	2011
Holmstedt, Robert D.	The Typological Classification of the Hebrew of Genesis: Subject-Verb or Verb-Subject?	11	14	2011
Sutskover, Talia	Lot and His Daughters (Gen 19:30–38). Further Literary and Stylistic Examinations	11	13	2011
Finkelstein,Israel, Ido Koch and Oded Lipschits	The Mound on the Mount: A Possible Solution to the “Problem with Jerusalem”	11	12	2011
Shalom-Guy, Hava,	The Call Narratives of Gideon and Moses: Literary Convention or More?	11	11	2011
Wallace, Robert E.,	The Narrative Effect of Psalms 84–89	11	10	2011
van Wolde, Ellen and Robert Rezetko,	Semantics and the Semantics of ברא: A Rejoinder to the Arguments Advanced by B. Becking and M. Korpel	11	9	2011
Andrason, Alexander,	Biblical Hebrew Wayyiqtol: A Dynamic Definition	11	8	2011
Frisch, Amos,	Comparison With David as a Means of Evaluating Character in the Book of Kings	11	7	2011
Ganzel, Tova,	The Shattered Dream. The Prophecies of Joel: A Bridge between Ezekiel and Haggai?	11	6	2011
Garsiel, Moshe,	David’s Elite Warriors and Their Exploits in the Books of Samuel and Chronicles	11	5	2011
Bachmann, Veronika,	The Book of The Watchers (1 Enoch 1–36): An Anti-Mosaic, Non-Mosaic, or Even Pro-Mosaic Writing?	11	4	2011
Campos, Martha E.,	Structure and Meaning in the Third Vision of Amos (7:7–17)	11	3	2011
Doak, Brian R.,	“Some Worthless and Reckless Fellows”: Landlessness and Parasocial Leadership in Judges	11	2	2011
Assis, Elie	Zechariah 8 and its Allusions to Jeremiah 30–33 and Deutero-Isaiah	11	1	2011
Finkelstein, Israel,	Archaeology as a High Court in Ancient Israelite History: A Reply to Nadav Na’aman	10	19	2010
Samet, Nili,	“The Tallest Man Cannot Reach Heaven; the Broadest Man Cannot Cover Earth” – Reconsidering the Proverb and its Biblical Parallels	10	18	2010
Melvin, David P.,	Divine Mediation and the Rise of Civilization in Mesopotamian Literature and in Genesis 1–11	10	17	2010
Frankel, David,	El as the Speaking Voice in Psalm 82:6–8	10	16	2010
Assis, Elie,	Zechariah 8 As Revision and Digest of Zechariah 1–7	10	15	2010
Vermeulen, Karolien,	Eeny Meeny Miny Moe. Who Is The Craftiest To Go?	10	14	2010
Miller, Marvin Lloyd,	Nehemiah 5: A Response to Philippe Guillaume	10	13	2010
Hutzli, Jürg	Tradition and Interpretation in Gen 1:1–2:4a	10	12	2010
Landy, Francis	Three Sides of a Coin: In Conversation with Ben Zvi And Nogalski, Two Sides of a Coin	10	11	2010
Andrason, Alexander	The Panchronic Yiqtol: Functionally Consistent and Cognitively Plausible	10	10	2010
Olyan, Saul M., (ed.)	In Conversation With Joshua A. Berman, Created Equal: How the Bible Broke With Ancient Political Thought (Oxford University Press, 2008).	10	9	2010
Guillaume, Philippe,	Nehemiah 5: No Economic Crisis	10	8	2010
Hobson, Russell,	Jeremiah 41 and the Ammonite Alliance	10	7	2010
Shemesh, Yael,	“And Many Beasts” (Jonah 4:11): The Function and Status of Animals in the Book of Jonah	10	6	2010
Garsiel, Moshe,	The Book of Samuel: Its Composition, Structure and Significance as a Historiographical Source	10	5	2010
Kletter, Raz and Gideon Solimani	Archaeology and Professional Ethical Codes in Israel in the mid 80s: The Case of the Association of Archaeologists in Israel and Its Code of Ethics	10	4	2010
Becking, Bob and Marjo C.A. Korpel	To Create, to Separate or to Construct: An Alternative for a Recent Proposal as to the Interpretation of ברא in Gen 1:1–2:4a	10	3	2010
Broida, Marian	Closure in Samson	10	2	2010
Amar Zohar, Ram Bouchnick and Guy Bar-Oz	The Contribution of Archaeozoology to the Identification of the Ritually Clean Ungulates Mentioned in The Hebrew Bible	10	1	2010
Van Seters, John	A Response to G. Aichelle, P. Miscall and R. Walsh, “An Elephant in the Room: Historical-Critical and the Postmodern Interpretations of the Bible”	9	26	2009
Savran, George	Multivocality in Group Speech in Biblical Narrative	9	25	2009
Finkelstein, Israel	Persian Period Jerusalem and Yehud: A Rejoinder	9	24	2009
Renz, Thomas	A Perfectly Broken Acrostic in Nahum 1?	9	23	2009
Vermeulen, Karolien	To See or Not To See. The Polysemy of the Word עין in the Isaac Narratives (Gen 17–35)	9	22	2009
Pinker, Aron	Intrusion of Ptolemaic Reality on Cultic Practices in Qoh 4:17	9	21	2009
Lipschits, Oded	Persian Period Finds from Jerusalem: Facts and Interpretations	9	20	2009
Holmstedt, Robert D.	אני ולבי-The Syntactic Encoding of the Collaborative Nature of Qohelet's Experiment	9	19	2009
Knauf, Ernst Axel	Observations on Judah's Social and Economic History and the Dating of the Laws in Deuteronomy	9	18	2009
Person Jr., Raymond F. (ed.)	In Conversation With Thomas Römer, The So-Called Deuteronomistic History: A Sociological, Historical And Literary Introduction (London: T. & T. Clark, 2005).	9	17	2009
Guillaume, Philippe	Lamentations 5: The Seventh Acrostic	9	16	2009
Becking, Bob	God-Talk for a Disillusioned Pilgrim in Psalm 121	9	15	2009
Olyan, Saul M.	The Ascription of Physical Disability as a Stigmatizing Strategy in Biblical Iconic Polemics	9	14	2003
Gow, Andrew C.	The Contested History of a Book: The German Bible of the Later Middle Ages and Reformation in Legend, Ideology, and Scholarship	9	13	2009
Kennedy, James M.	Psalm 29 as Semiotic System: A Linguistic Reading	9	12	2009
Boda, Mark J. (ed.)	In Conversation with Steven Schweitzer, Reading Utopia in Chronicles (LHBOTS, 442; London: T. & T. Clark International, 2007)	9	11	2009
Gilmour, Rachelle	Suspense and Anticipation in 1 Samuel 9:1–14	9	10	2009
Timmer, Daniel	The Intertextual Israelite Jonah Face À L'empire: The Post-Colonial Significance of The Book's Cotexts and Purported Neo-Assyrian Context	9	9	2009
Spronk, Klaas	Jonah, Nahum, and the Book of the Twelve: A Response to Jakob Wöhrle	9	8	2009
Wöhrle, Jakob	A Prophetic Reflection on Divine Forgiveness: The Integration of the Book of Jonah into the Book of the Twelve	9	7	2009
Guillaume, Philippe	Rhetorical Reading Redundant: A Response to Ehud Ben Zvi	9	6	2009
Ben Zvi, Ehud	Jonah 4:11 and the Metaprophetic Character of the Book of Jonah	9	5	2009
Bolin, Thomas M.	Eternal Delight and Deliciousness: The Book of Jonah After Ten Years	9	4	2009
Guillaume, Philippe	Arguing under the Qiqayon: An Introduction to a Set of Articles on Jonah	9	3	2009
Athas, George	In Search of the Seventy ‘Weeks’ of Daniel 9	9	2	2009
Christian, Mark A.	Priestly Power that Empowers: Michel Foucault, Middle-tier Levites, and the Sociology of “Popular Religious Groups” in Israel	9	1	2009
Young, Ian	Late Biblical Hebrew And The Qumran Pesher Habakkuk	8	25	2008
Na'aman, Nadav	Shaaraim - The Gateway To The Kingdom Of Judah	8	24	2008
Steinmann, Andrew E.	Letters of Kings about Votive Offerings, The God of Israel and the Aramaic Document in Ezra 4:8–6:18	8	23	2008
Garfinkel, Yosef and Saar Ganor	Khirbet Qeiyafa: Sha`arayim	8	22	2008
Na'aman, Nadav	In Search of the Ancient Name of Khirbet Qeiyafa	8	21	2008
Dobbs-Allsopp, F. W.	Psalm 133: A (Close) Reading	8	20	2008
Assis, Elie	The Temple in the Book of Haggai	8	19	2008
Avioz, Michael	Saul as a Just Judge in Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews	8	18	2008
Kline, Moshe	“The Editor was Nodding” A Reading of Leviticus 19 in Memory of Mary Douglas	8	17	2008
Jacobs, Jonathan	Characterizing Esther from the Outset: The Contribution of the Story in Esther 2:1–20	8	16	2008
Römer, Thomas	Moses Outside the Torah and the Construction of a Diaspora Identity	8	15	2008
Basser, Herb	Did Rashi Notice a Janus Parallelism in Ezek 20:37?	8	14	2008
Scatolini Apóstolo, Silvio Sergio	Imagining Ezekiel	8	13	2008
Wright, David P.	Deciphering a Definition: The Syntagmatic Structural Analysis of Ritual in the Hebrew Bible	8	12	2008
Schmitt, Rüdiger	The Problem of Magic and Monotheism in the Book of Leviticus	8	11	2008
Olyan, Saul M.	Mary Douglas's Holiness/Wholeness Paradigm: Its Potential for Insight and its Limitations	8	10	2008
Marx, Alfred	The Relationship between the Sacrificial Laws and the Other Laws in Leviticus 19	8	9	2008
Hendel, Ronald	Mary Douglas and Anthropological Modernism	8	8	2008
Hendel, Ronald and Saul M. Olyan	Beyond Purity and Danger: Mary Douglas and The Hebrew Bible	8	7	2008
Pinker, Aron	The Doings of the Wicked in Qohelet 8:10	8	6	2008
Shemesh, Yael	Elisha Stories as Saints' Legends	8	5	2008
Shemesh, Yael	Elisha and The Miraculous Jug of Oil(2 Kgs 4:1–7)	8	4	2008
Cook, John A.	The Vav-Prefixed Verb Forms in Elementary Hebrew Grammar	8	3	2008
Kletter, Raz	The Friends of Antiquities (in Heb. נאמני עתיקות): The Story of an Israeli Volunteer Group and Comparative Remarks	8	2	2008
Stein, David E. S.	The Noun אִישׁ ('îš) in Biblical Hebrew: A Term of Affiliation	8	1	2008
Guillaume, Philippe	A Reconsideration of Manuscripts Classified as Scrolls of the Twelve Minor Prophets (XII)	7	16	2007
Guillaume, Philippe	The Unlikely Malachi-Jonah Sequence (4QXII^a)	7	15	2007
Ben Zvi, Ehud (ed.)	Rereading Oracles of God: Twenty Years After John Barton, Oracles of God: Perceptions of Prophecy in Israel after the Exile (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1986)	7	14	2007
Bodner, Keith	Crime Scene Investigation: A Text-Critical Mystery and the Strange Death of Ishbosheth	7	13	2007
Knoppers, Gary N. (ed.)	Revisiting the Composition of Ezra-Nehemiah: In Conversation with Jacob Wright's Rebuilding Identity: The Nehemiah Memoir and its Earliest Readers (BZAW, 348; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004)	7	12	2007
Assis, Elie	Composition, Rhetoric and Theology in Haggai 1:1–11	7	11	2007
Leuchter, Mark (ed.)	Scribes Before and After 587 BCE: A Conversation	7	10	2007
Van Seters, John	Author or Redactor?	7	9	2007
Pinker, Aron	A Goat to Go to Azazel	7	8	2007
Knoppers, Gary N. (ed.)	Expatriates, Repatriates, and the Question of Zion's Status – In Conversation with Melody D. Knowles, Centrality Practiced: Jerusalem in the Religious Practices of Yehud and the Diaspora in the Persian Period (Atlanta, SBL, 2006).	7	7	2007
Boer, Roland	Keeping It Literal: The Economy of the Song of Songs	7	6	2007
Sneed, Mark	"White Trash” Wisdom: Proverbs 9 Deconstructed	7	5	2007
Noegel, Scott B.	“Word Play” in Qoheleth	7	4	2007
Fried, Lisbeth S.	Did Second Temple High Priests Possess the Urim and Thummim?	7	3	2007
Vanderhooft, David (ed.)	In Conversation with Oded Lipschits, The Fall and Rise of Jerusalem (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2005)	7	2	2007
Henige, David	Found But Not Lost: A Skeptical Note on the Document Discovered in the Temple Under Josiah	7	1	2007
Holmstedt, Robert D.	Issues in the Linguistic Analysis of a Dead Language, with Particular Reference to Ancient Hebrew	6	11	2006
Wöhrle, Jakob	The Formation and Intention of the Haggai-Zechariah Corpus	6	10	2006
Gilders, William K.	Why Does Eleazar Sprinkle the Red Cow Blood? Making Sense of a Biblical Ritual	6	9	2006
Pinker, Aron	Nahum and the Greek Tradition on Nineveh's Fall	6	8	2006
Scatolini Apóstolo, Silvio Sergio	On The Elusiveness and Malleability of “Israel”	6	7	2006
Tebes, Juan Manuel	“You Shall Not Abhor an Edomite, for He is Your Brother”: The Tradition of Esau and the Edomite Genealogies from an Anthropological Perspective	6	6	2006
Benun, Ronald	Evil and the Disruption of Order: A Structural Analysis of the Acrostics in the First Book of Psalms	6	5	2006
Carr, David M. (ed.)	The State of the Field of Hebrew Bible Study: In Conversation with John J. Collins, The Bible After Babel: Historical Criticism in a Postmodern Age (Eerdmans, 2005)	6	4	2006
Kim, Yung Suk	Lex Talionis in Exod 21:22–25: Its Origin and Context	6	3	2006
Knoppers, Gary N. (ed.)	Chronicles and the Chronicler: A Response to I. Kalimi, An Ancient Israelite Historian: Studies in the Chronicler, his Time, Place and Writing	6	2	2006
Pinker, Aron	The Core Story in the Prologue-Epilogue of the Book of Job	6	1	2006
Knowles, Melody D. (ed.)	New Studies in Chronicles: A Discussion of Two Recently-Published Commentaries	5	20	2005
Assis, Elie	“The Hand of a Woman”: Deborah and Yael (Judges 4)	5	19	2005
Knoppers, Gary N. (ed.)	In Conversation with W. M. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualization of Ancient Israel (Cambridge, 2003)	5	18	2005
Davies, Philip. R.	The Origin of Biblical Israel	5	17	2005
Avioz, Michael	Could Saul Rule Forever? A New Look at 1 Samuel 13:13–14	5	16	2005
Britt, Brian	Death, Social Conflict, and the Barley Harvest in the Hebrew Bible	5	15	2005
Kummerow, David	Job, Hopeful or Hopeless? The Significance of גם in Job 16:19 and Job's Changing Conceptions of Death	5	14	2005
Guillaume, Philippe	Tracing the Origin of the Sabbatical Calendar in the Priestly Narrative (Genesis 1 to Joshua 5)	5	13	2005
Pinker, Aron	On the meaning of קשת נחושה	5	12	2005
Landy, Francis	A Rejoinder to A. Brenner, “Regulating ‘Sons’ and ‘Daughters’ in the Torah and in Proverbs: Some Preliminary Insights”	5	11	2005
Brenner, Athalya	Regulating ‘Sons’ and ‘Daughters’ in the Torah and in Proverbs: Some Preliminary Insights	5	10	2005
Guillaume, Philippe	New Light on the Nebiim from Alexandria: A Chronography to Replace the Deuteronomistic History	5	9	2004
Noegel, Scott	Geminate Ballast and Clustering: An Unrecognized Literary Feature in Ancient Semitic Poetry	5	8	2004
Pinker, Aron	The Hard "Sell” in Nah 3:4	5	7	2004
Schniedewind, William M.	Prolegomena for the Sociolinguistics of Classical Hebrew	5	6	2004
Doudna, Greg	Ostraca KhQ1 and KhQ2 from the Cemetary of Qumran: A New Edition	5	5	2004
Grayson, A. Kirk	Shalmaneser III and the Levantine States: The Damascus Coalition Rebellion"	5	4	2004
Haase, Ingrid M.	Uzzah's Rebellion	5	3	2004
Linville, James R.	Letting the “Bi-word” “Rule” in Joel 2:17	5	2	2004
Najm, S. & Ph. Guillaume	Jubilee Calendar Rescued from The Flood Narrative	5	1	2004
Malul, Meir	L^edabbēr baššelî (2 Sam. 3:27) "to Talk Peace”	4	8	2002
Pinker, Aron	Upon an Attack in Nahum 2:2	4	7	2002
Leuchter, Mark	Something Old, Something Older: Reconsidering 1 Sam. 2:27–36	4	6	2002
Kletter, Raz	A Very General Archaeologist - Moshe Dayan and Israeli Archaeology	4	5	2002
Liss, Hanna	Undisclosed Speech: Patterns of Communication in the Book of Isaiah	4	4	2002
Mitchell, Christine	Accession in Chronicles: Transformations in Meaning: Solomon's Accession in Chronicles	4	3	2002
Heard, R. Christopher	Echoes of Genesis in 1 Chronicles 4:9–10: An Intertextual and Contextual Reading of Jabez's Prayer	4	2	2002
Lipschits, Oded	“Jehoiakim Slept with His Fathers…” - Did He?	4	1	2002
Boda, Mark J.	Oil, Crowns and Thrones: Prophet, Priest and Kingin Zechariah 1:7–6:15	3	10	2001
Cohn Eskenazi, Tamara	Nehemiah 9–10: Structure and Significance	3	9	2001
Scatolini, Silvio Sergio	Delimiting the Countours of Israel in Ezek 12:21–15 and 12:26–28	3	8	2001
Huddlestun, John R.	Unveiling the Versions: The Tactics of Tamar in Genesis 38:15	3	7	2001
de Caën, Vincent	Hebrew Linguistics and Biblical Criticism: A Minimalist Programme	3	6	2001
Bauer, Uwe F. W.	A Metaphorical Etiology in Judges 18:12	3	5	2001
Knoppers, Gary N.	“Great Among His Brothers,” but Who is He? Heterogeneity in the Composition of Judah?	3	4	2000
Jenkins, Allan K.	Erasmus' Commentary on Psalm 2	3	3	2000
Wesselius, Jan-Wim	Towards a New History of Israel	3	2	2000
Lemche, Niels Peter	On the Problems of Reconstructing Pre-Hellenistic Israelite (Palestinian) History	3	1	2000
Rendsburg, Gary A.	Confused Language as a Deliberate Literary Device in Biblical Hebrew Narrative	2	6	1999
Landy, Francis	Leviticus, Deconstruction and the Body	2	5	1999
Bergen, David A.	Bakhtin Revisits Deuteronomy: Narrative Theory and the Dialogical Event of Deut 31:2 and 34:7	2	4	1999
Linville, James R.	On the Nature of Rethinking Prophetic Literature: Stirring a Neglected Stew (A Response to David L. Petersen)	2	3	1999
Bauer, Uwe F. W.	Anti-Jewish Interpretations of Psalm 1 in Luther and in Modern German Protestantism	2	2	1998
Sweeney, Marvin A.	A Form-Critical Rereading of Hosea	2	1	1998
Lee, Bernon	A Specific Application of the Proverb in Ecclesiastes 1:15	1	6	1997
Davies, Philip R	Loose Canons. Reflections on the Formation of the Hebrew Bible	1	5	1997
Fox, Michael V.	What Happens in Qohelet 4:13–16?	1	4	1997
de Tillesse, Caetano Minette	The Conquest of Power: Analysis of David and Solomon's Accession Histories	1	3	1997
Miller, Cynthia L., Kenneth M. Craig Jr. and Raymond F. Person Jr.,	Conversation Analysis and the Book of Jonah:A Conversation	1	2	1997
Utzschneider, Helmut	Text - Reader - Author. Towards a Theory of Exegesis: Some European Views	1	1	1996

List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies

Mia Ridge (Open Objects): Can you capture visitors with a steampunk arm?

Mia Ridge — 2012-02-06T20:30:26+00:00

Credits: Science Museum

This may be familiar to you if you've worked on a museum website: an object will capture the imagination of someone who starts to spread the link around, there's a flurry of tweets and tumblrs and links (that hopefully you'll notice in time because you've previously set up alerts for keywords or URLs on various media), others like it too and it starts to go viral and 50,000 people look at that one page in a day, 20,000 the next, furious discussions break out on social media and other sites... then they're gone, onto the next random link on someone else's site. It's hugely exciting, but it can also feel like a missed opportunity to show these visitors other cool things you have in your collection, to address some of the issues raised and to give them more information about the object.

There are three key aspects to riding these waves of interest: the ability to spot content that's suddenly getting a lot of hits; the ability to respond with interesting, relevant content while the link is still hot (i.e. within anything from a couple of hours to a couple of days); and the ability to put that relevant content on the page where fly-by-night visitors will see it.

For many museums, caught between a templated CMS and layers of sign-off for new content , it's not as easy as it sounds. When the Science Museum's 'steampunk artificial arm' started circulating on twitter and then made boingboing, I was able to work with curators to get a post on the collections blog about it the next day, but then there was no way of adding that link to the Brought to Life page that was all most people saw.

In his post on “The Guardian’s Facebook app”, Martin Belam discusses how their Facebook app has helped archived content live again:

Someone shares an old article with their friends, some of their friends either already use or install the app, and the viral effect begins to take hold. ... We’ve got over 1.3 million articles live on the website, so that is a lot of content to be discovered, and the app means that suddenly any page, languishing unloved in our database, can become a new landing page. When an article becomes popular in the app, we sometimes package it with content. Because we know the attention has come at a specific time from a specific place, we can add related links that are appropriate to the audience rather than to the original content. ...when you’ve got the audience there, you need to optimise for them

As a content company with great technical and user experience teams, the Guardian is better placed to put together existing content around a viral article, but still, I'm curious: are any museums currently managing to respond to sudden waves of interest in random objects? And if so, how?

The Signal: Digital Preservation: Designing Preservable Websites, Redux

Butch Lazorchak — 2012-02-06T19:55:51+00:00

The following is a guest post by Nicholas Taylor, Information Technology Specialist for the Repository Development Group at the Library of Congress.

As much as we can do to preserve archived websites once we have them, the challenges we encounter are always already determined by how those websites were originally constructed. In the interest of giving us and others the best possible chance of preserving your online content, I wanted to follow on an excellent blog post by Robin Davis (previously) of the Smithsonian Institution Archives on the topic of designing preservable websites. Here are some best practices to keep in mind:

1) Follow web standards and accessibility guidelines.

Following web standards and accessibility guidelines is useful for reasons beyond web archiving, namely, (universal) usability and SEO. It also facilitates better website archiving and replay. Because web crawlers, including the archival Heritrix crawler, access websites in a manner similar to a text browser, accessible websites are friendlier to web crawlers. Adherence to web standards makes for fewer cumulative idiosyncrasies that the Wayback Machine must accommodate over time in rendering archived websites.

Lascaux cave painting by Flickr user goforchris

2) Be careful with robots.txt exclusions.

Certain types of instructions entered into robots.txt may at once be fine for search engine crawlers but prevent archival crawlers from capturing content that is crucial for a faithful reproduction of the website. For example, instructing crawlers to stay out of a website’s CSS and JavaScript directories wouldn’t detract significantly from the quality of a search engine index, but it would make a big difference in the quality of an archival capture.

3) Use a site map, transparent links, and contiguous navigation.

A crawler can only capture webpages that it knows about. It discovers webpages by traversing links, meaning that it can ultimately only ever capture pages that are accessible by following links alone. A corollary is that a user browsing an archived website can only navigate by following links, because server-side functionalities like search don’t work in the archive. Avoid relying on Flash, JavaScript, or other techniques that tend to obfuscate links as the sole means of navigating to any specific page, and consider creating a comprehensive site map to ensure that the crawler doesn’t miss anything.

4) Maintain stable URIs and redirect when necessary.

The stability of the Library of Congress’ URI over time makes it possible to view website captures from 1997 to present in a single unbroken timeline in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. It also means that any individual bookmarks saved or inbound links published and circulated continue to work as they always have. Link rot on the web generally is, by unfortunate contrast, altogether common.

When a URI changes and a redirect to the new resource location isn’t put in place, it decreases the likelihood that the new URI will be archived and almost assures that access to the website archives from prior to the URI change will be disassociated from those following. Web archiving tools’ sensitivity to URI stability also means that URIs containing session IDs may be similarly dissociated from earlier captures of the same resource.

5) Consider using a Creative Commons license.

Pending changes to the U.S. copyright statute to address digital preservation needs, we must request permission from most website owners to re-display their crawled website outside of the Library of Congress and/or to even crawl their website in the first place. The Library of Congress is but one of a number of web archiving institutions that must solicit permissions. A website published under a Creative Commons license provides an affirmative permission to be crawled and preserved.

Rosetta Stone_British Museum_2475 by Flickr user KitLKat

6) Use sustainable data formats.

Though a webpage is presented as a unified experience, it consists of many different files and file types. A commitment to preserving that experience therefore implies a commitment to managing the potentially distinct preservation risks of all the component file types. When deciding what types of code and file formats to use in building a website, open standards and open file formats are generally the best choices for preservation. The exception is when the open format is either poorly-documented or allows for vendor-specific extensions – these may well be worse than well-documented proprietary formats that are widely-implemented in a uniform way. The Sustainability of Digital Formats website outlines a number of criteria that make for a truly “sustainable” format besides ostensible “openness.”

7) Embed metadata, especially the character encoding.

Since web servers don’t reliably report character encoding, it is important that pages do so. Use an HTML meta tag or XML doctype declaration to indicate what encoding should be used to render the page. Additional embedded metadata is useful both for SEO and for curated collections of web archives, such as those maintained by the Library of Congress which draw upon site-provided metadata for access points.

8) Use archiving-friendly platform providers and content management systems.

While platform providers have incentives to permit commercial search indexers to access at least some of the content they host, they are not always so accommodating of archival crawlers. If the archivability of your website is important, examine the company’s robots.txt or inquire about their policies before committing to their platform. Also, even if a company doesn’t block archival crawlers outright, the website templates or content management systems they utilize may not archive well. Look at how other websites built on the same platform replay in Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and, if you’re using an open source content management system, be sure review the configuration of any bundled robots.txt.

While adhering to these recommendations won’t guarantee a high-quality archival capture and subsequent flawless preservation of your website, not following them will ensure additional archiving and preservation challenges.

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): ICOM Emergency Red List of Egyptian Cultural Objects at Risk

Charles Jones — 2012-02-06T19:20:10+00:00

ICOM publishes a new Emergency Red List: the Emergency Red List of Egyptian Cultural Objects at Risk

One year on from the events that took place in Egypt in 2011, ICOM’s actions to protect the country’s cultural heritage from the ensuing thefts of non‐inventoried objects from archaeological sites and museums have led to the publication of the Emergency Red List of Egyptian Cultural Objects at Risk.
English Arabic

Eventually the Egypt data will be integrated into the

Red Lists Database

Afghanistan

Africa

Cambodia

Central America and Mexico

China

Colombia

Haiti

Iraq

Latin America

Peru

Mia Ridge (Open Objects): Usability: the key that unlocks geeky goodness

Mia Ridge — 2012-02-06T18:05:25+00:00

This is a quick pointer to three posts about some usability work I did for the JISC-funded Pelagios project, and a reflection on the process. Pelagios aims to 'help introduce Linked Open Data goodness into online resources that refer to places in the Ancient World'. The project has already done lots of great work with the various partners to bring lots of different data sources together, but they wanted to find out whether the various visualisations (particularly the graph explorer) let users discover the full potential of the linked data sets.

I posted on the project blog about how I worked out a testing plan to encourage user-centred design and set up the usability sessions in Evaluating Pelagios' usability, set out how a test session runs (with sample scripts and tasks) in Evaluating usability: what happens in a user testing session? and finally I posted some early Pelagios usability testing results. The results are from a very small sample of potential users but they were consistent in the issues and positive results uncovered.

The wider lesson for LOD-LAM (linked open data in library, archives, museums) projects is that user testing (and/or a strong user-centred design process) helps general audiences (including subject specialists) appreciate the full potential of a technically-led project - without thoughtful design, the results of all those hours of code may go unloved by the people they were written for. In other words, user experience design is the key that unlocks the geeky goodness that drives these projects. It's old news, but the joy of user testing is that it reminds you of what's really important...

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): John S. Latsis Public Benefit Foundation Digital Library

Charles Jones — 2012-02-06T18:03:26+00:00

[First published in AWOL 3/27/09; updated 4/18/2010; updated 12/2/2010; updated 2/2/2012]

Since 1997, the John S. Latsis Public Benefit Foundation has produced each year a volume devoted to a single archaeological museum, aiming to create a series whose scholarly prestige and aesthetic approach contribute to a deeper knowledge and further understanding of the various aspects of the history of Greek civilisation. These volumes are distributed free of charge to those who are on the foundation's mailing list, and to others who request them.

The foundation also issues them in open access digital format. The volume on Τhe Archaeological Museum of Pella is the most recent to appear. Thirteen volumes are now available:

Aravantinos, Vassilios. Τhe Archaeological Museum of Thebes [Thebes in Pleiades http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/541138/]
Colonia, Rosina. The Archaeological Museum of Delphi [Delphi in Pleiades http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/540726]
Dimopoulou - Rethemiotaki, Nota. The Archaeological Museum of Herakleion [Herakleion in Pleiadeshttp://pleiades.stoa.org/places/589802]
Fotopoulos, Dionissis; Delivorrias, Angelos. Greece at the Benaki Museum
Grammenos, D.V. The Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki
Hadjidakis, P. J. Delos [Delos in Pleiades http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/599587]
Hatzi, Georgia E. The Archaeological Museum of Olympia [Olympia in Pleiades http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/570531]
Kaltsas, Nikolaos. The National Archaeological Museum [Athens in Pleiades http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/579885]
Lilibaki-Akamati, Maria, Ioannis M. Akamatis, Anastasia Chrysostomou, Pavlos Chrysostomou Τhe Archaeological Museum of Pella [Pella in Pleiades http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/491688]
Papaggeli, Kalliopi. Elefsis: The Archaeological Site and the Museum [Elefsis in Pleiades http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/579920]
Steinhauer, George. The Archaeological Museum of Piraeus
Steinhauer, George. Marathon and the Archaeological Museum [Marathon in Pleiades http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/580021]
Trianti, Ismini. The Acropolis Museum

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): Les inscriptions grecques de Thespies Online

Charles Jones — 2012-02-06T17:58:12+00:00

Les inscriptions grecques de Thespies : Recueil des inscriptions grecques de Thespies (Béotie), tel qu’il avait été préparé par Paul Roesch (†), directeur de recherche au CNRS, et mis au net par Albert Schachter, Gilbert Argoud et Guy Vottero. Une seconde livraison concernera les inscriptions funéraires.

Paul ROESCH, directeur de recherches au CNRS, membre de l'Institut Fernand-Courby au sein de la Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée Jean-Pouilloux à Lyon, est décédé en 1990 en laissant inachevé ce qui devait être son grand œuvre, le corpus de la cité béotienne de Thespies, soit un peu plus de 1400 inscriptions, ce qui en fait le plus important ensemble épigraphique de la région.

Durant de nombreuses années, Paul Roesch avait rassemblé une documentation impressionnante, faite en particulier de photographies et d'estampages, préparé nombre de lemmes, établi les textes et les apparats critiques, rédigé un certain nombre de traductions et de commentaires. Après sa disparition, la famille de Paul Roesch confia les archives de notre collègue à l'Institut Courby, devenu depuis l'UMR HiSoMA, à charge pour notre équipe de mettre cette documentation à la disposition du public savant.

Trois collègues et amis de Paul Roesch, Gilbert ARGOUD, Professeur émérite à l'Université Jean-Monnet de Saint-Étienne, membre de l'Institut Courby, Albert SCHACHTER, Professeur émérite à l'Université McGill à Montréal et Guy VOTTÉRO, Professeur à l'Université de Nancy 2, ont, à partir de 2000, entrepris de mettre au net le manuscrit de Thespies sans dénaturer le travail déjà réalisé.

C'est le résultat de cette entreprise que l'on trouvera ici, sur le site de l'UMR HiSoMA, sous l'égide de laquelle elle fut lancée. Il nous a semblé que l'outil informatique était le moyen le plus approprié et le plus rapide de faire connaître le travail de Paul Roesch sur les inscriptions de Thespies et de rendre ainsi l'hommage qu'il mérite à un savant dont les travaux sur la Béotie font toujours référence. Les recherches sur la Béotie et sur Thespies vont se poursuivre, puisqu'il reste les inscriptions funéraires à présenter et qu'il nous faudra donner accès à une documentation photographique particulièrement précieuse et à la collection des estampages.

Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp) fascicule I. Avant-propos
IThesp 1 - 43 (Décrets de proxénie. Décrets honorifiques. Documents économiques et financiers)

Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp) fascicule II
IThesp 44 - 87 (Baux. Fondations. Bornes. Listes de magistrats)

Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp) fascicule III
IThesp 88 - 135 (Catalogues militaires. Listes de noms: première partie)

Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp) fascicule IV
IThesp 136 - 212 (Listes de noms: suite. Concours: Les Mouseia. Les Erotideia. Concours indéterminé. Concours: Dédicaces de vainqueurs)

Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp) fascicule V
IThesp 213 - 272 (Actes d'affranchissement. Dédicaces à des divinités: première partie)

Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp) fascicule VI
IThesp 273 - 340 (dédicaces à des divinités: suite)

Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp) fascicule VII
IThesp 341 - 419 (Inscriptions honorifiques: première partie)

Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp) fascicule VIII
IThesp 420 - 483 (Inscriptions honorifiques: suite. Signatures. Fragments de dédicaces ou d'inscriptions honorifiques. Addenda)

Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp) fascicule IX
IThesp 484 - 682 (Épitaphes: Polyandria, Épitaphes archaiques)
Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp) fascicule X
IThesp 683 - 916 (Épitaphes: classiques-hellenistiques)
Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp) fascicule XI
IThesp 917 - 1100 (Épitaphes: classiques-hellenistiques)
Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp) fascicule XII
IThesp 1101 - 1303 (Épitaphes: Hellenistiques-romaines)
Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp)
Concordances; Liste des textes inédits; Liste des monuments remployés

Pour connaître les ressources documentaires sur la Béotie, cliquer ici.

Paul ROESCH, directeur de recherches au CNRS, membre de l'Institut Fernand-Courby au sein de la Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée Jean-Pouilloux à Lyon, est décédé en 1990 en laissant inachevé ce qui devait être son grand œuvre, le corpus de la cité béotienne de Thespies, soit un peu plus de 1400 inscriptions, ce qui en fait le plus important ensemble épigraphique de la région. Durant de nombreuses années, Paul Roesch avait rassemblé une documentation impressionnante, faite en particulier de photographies et d'estampages, préparé nombre de lemmes, établi les textes et les apparats critiques, rédigé un certain nombre de traductions et de commentaires. Après sa disparition, la famille de Paul Roesch confia les archives de notre collègue à l'Institut Courby, devenu depuis l'UMR HiSoMA, à charge pour notre équipe de mettre cette documentation à la disposition du public savant. Trois collègues et amis de Paul Roesch, Gilbert ARGOUD, Professeur émérite à l'Université Jean-Monnet de Saint-Étienne, membre de l'Institut Courby, Albert SCHACHTER, Professeur émérite à l'Université McGill à Montréal et Guy VOTTÉRO, Professeur à l'Université de Nancy 2, ont, à partir de 2000, entrepris de mettre au net le manuscrit de Thespies sans dénaturer le travail déjà réalisé. C'est le résultat de cette entreprise que l'on trouvera ici, sur le site de l'UMR HiSoMA, sous l'égide de laquelle elle fut lancée. Il nous a semblé que l'outil informatique était le moyen le plus approprié et le plus rapide de faire connaître le travail de Paul Roesch sur les inscriptions de Thespies et de rendre ainsi l'hommage qu'il mérite à un savant dont les travaux sur la Béotie font toujours référence. Les recherches sur la Béotie et sur Thespies vont se poursuivre, puisqu'il reste les inscriptions funéraires à présenter et qu'il nous faudra donner accès à une documentation photographique particulièrement précieuse et à la collection des estampages.
	Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp) fascicule I. Avant-propos IThesp 1 - 43 (Décrets de proxénie. Décrets honorifiques. Documents économiques et financiers)
	Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp) fascicule II IThesp 44 - 87 (Baux. Fondations. Bornes. Listes de magistrats)
	Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp) fascicule III IThesp 88 - 135 (Catalogues militaires. Listes de noms: première partie)
	Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp) fascicule IV IThesp 136 - 212 (Listes de noms: suite. Concours: Les Mouseia. Les Erotideia. Concours indéterminé. Concours: Dédicaces de vainqueurs)
	Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp) fascicule V IThesp 213 - 272 (Actes d'affranchissement. Dédicaces à des divinités: première partie)
	Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp) fascicule VI IThesp 273 - 340 (dédicaces à des divinités: suite)
	Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp) fascicule VII IThesp 341 - 419 (Inscriptions honorifiques: première partie)
	Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp) fascicule VIII IThesp 420 - 483 (Inscriptions honorifiques: suite. Signatures. Fragments de dédicaces ou d'inscriptions honorifiques. Addenda)
	Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp) fascicule IX IThesp 484 - 682 (Épitaphes: Polyandria, Épitaphes archaiques)
	Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp) fascicule X IThesp 683 - 916 (Épitaphes: classiques-hellenistiques)
	Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp) fascicule XI IThesp 917 - 1100 (Épitaphes: classiques-hellenistiques)
	Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp) fascicule XII IThesp 1101 - 1303 (Épitaphes: Hellenistiques-romaines)
	Les Inscriptions de Thespies (IThesp) Concordances; Liste des textes inédits; Liste des monuments remployés
Pour connaître les ressources documentaires sur la Béotie, cliquer ici.

Thespiai in Pleiades http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/541141

Tom Elliott (Horothesia): Playing with PELAGIOS: The GAWD is Live

Tom Elliott — 2012-02-06T16:56:07+00:00

The is the lastest in an on-going series chronicling my dalliances with data published by the PELAGIOS project partners.

I think it's safe to say that, thanks to the PELAGIOS partner institutions, that we do have a Graph of Ancient World Data (GAWD) on the web. It's still in early stages, and one has to do some downloading, unzipping, and so forth to engage with it at the moment, but indeed the long-awaited day has dawned.

Here's the perspective, as of last Friday, from the vantage point of Pleiades. I've used SPARQL to query the GAWD for all information resources that the partners claim (via their RDF data dumps) are related to Pleiades information resources. I.e., I'm pulling out a list of information resources about texts, pictures, objects, grouped by their relationships to what Pleiades knows about ancient places (findspot, original location, etc.). I've sorted that view of the graph by the titles Pleiades gives to its place-related information resources and generated an HTML view of the result. It's here for your browsing pleasure.

Next Steps and Desiderata

For various technical reasons, I'm not yet touching the data of a couple of PELAGIOS partners (CLAROS and SPQR), but the will hopefully be resolved soon. I still need to dig into figuring out what Open Context is doing on this front. Other key resources -- especially those emanating from ISAW -- are not yet ready to produce RDF (but we're working on it).

There are a few things I'd like the PELAGIOS partners to consider/discuss adding to their data:

Titles/labels for the information resources (using rdfs:label?). This would make it possible for me to produce more intuitive/helpful labels for users of my HTML index. Descriptions would be cool too. As would some indication of the type of thing(s) a given resource addresses (e.g., place, statue, inscription, text)
Categorization of the relationships between their information resources and Pleaides information resources. Perhaps some variation of the terms originally explored by Concordia (whence the GAWD moniker), as someone on the PELAGIOS list has already suggested.

What would you like to see added to the GAWD? What would you do with it?

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): Inédits de la MOM

Charles Jones — 2012-02-06T16:20:32+00:00

Inédits de la MOM

Fondée en 1975 à partir d’instituts universitaires lyonnais à l’histoire déjà longue, la MOM a conservé dans ses archives nombre de documents scientifiques. Certains d’entre eux, tels les estampages (Thessalie, Liban, Syrie, etc.) ou les archives de fouilles (Ras Shamra-Ougarit), font déjà l’objet de programmes de numérisation et sont mis en ligne au fur et à mesure de leur prise en compte. Parallèlement, des archives de chercheurs sont en cours de traitement (Paul Roesch, Jacques Besançon…), afin de les rendre accessibles à la communauté scientifique.

Il nous a semblé important de donner également accès à une autre catégorie de documents scientifiques, trop souvent oubliés ou négligés, et donc restés inédits. Il s’agit d’une part d’anciennes thèses secondaires, rarement publiées, et qui pourtant présentent le plus souvent un réel intérêt scientifique. Il s’agit d’autre part de thèses d’Habilitation à diriger des recherches (HDR), qui proposent un état récent d’une recherche, synthèses précieuses autant pour les chercheurs que pour les étudiants. Il pourrait s’agir aussi de chapitres de thèses d’État, ou de parties lorsque ces thèses ont été soutenues sur travaux.

Une banlieue du Caire : Héliopolis, Jacques Besançon, Thèse annexe, 1955, 89p.
Consulter l'ouvrage
Télécharger l'ouvrage

Aridité et sociétés au Proche-Orient : une problématique géo-archéologique, Bernard Geyer, Habilitation à diriger des recherches, Lyon - septembre 1999, 168p.
Consulter l'ouvrage
Télécharger l'ouvrage

Paléoenvironnements littoraux dans la région de Kition-Bamboula, Chypre, Jean-Philippe Goiran, Mémoire de DEA, Université Aix-Marseille, 1998, 176p.
Consulter l'ouvrage
Télécharger l'ouvrage

The Signal: Digital Preservation: Email is Where Knowledge Goes to Die–Or is it?

Bill LeFurgy — 2012-02-06T16:17:56+00:00

Like a comedian from yesteryear, email gets no respect. What it does get is plenty of ire. I’m always hearing about how email is “out of control” and that we waste too much time dealing with it. Or that we don’t have enough time to deal with it.

RIP Sideways Smiley, by heatherhosely, on Flickr

One writer proclaims 10 Reasons I Don’t Answer Your Email. A popular tech commentator pleads that We Have to Fix Email. Another writer gets right to the point with I Hate Email–in two parts, no less.

There is even an idea offered that Email is Where Knowledge Goes to Die. Specifically: “Everyone agrees – email is a knowledge cul-de-sac – a dead end for valuable ideas – a graveyard of potential. Email is where corporate IQ kicks back and has a brewski. Email also contributes to corporate amnesia; forgetfulness that costs businesses millions – perhaps billions in repeated mistakes every year.”

I have plenty of sympathy for all these sentiments. I know the nagging guilt of hundreds of unread messages, often backed up over the course of weeks. My head spins knowing that, between work and private accounts, I have a collection of close to 100,000 messages stretching back into the previous century. Every day I devote more time than I like dealing with a torrential flow into my inbox, and am guilty of increasing the torrent for others.

And yet. Email is a fantastic resource for documenting and remembering. I regularly depend on my own email collection to retrieve details that otherwise never would have been captured. All that volume provides rich information for answering questions about the past—assuming, of course, that a halfway decent search functionality is available. And assuming that some glitch doesn’t wipe out the entire corpus. Journalist James Fallows tells a marvelous story about the impact of losing a big personal collection of email due to a malfunction and makes clear just how meaningful all those messages are in their entirety.

Collecting institutions are also coming to the conclusion that email has important documentary value. The Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media project of the Universities of Oxford and Manchester identified email “as one of the most interesting types of historical record being created in our times,” as “It contains records of business transactions (that might have been undertaken via an exchange of correspondence on headed notepaper previously) as well as informal exchanges (previously the stuff of telephone conversations).”

Email collections from famous people are arriving in libraries and archives. The Salman Rushdie “papers” at Emory University include the author’s email, and the British Library acquired Wendy Cope’s email as part of the poet’s archive.

I think all the griping we do about email leads us to discount its value. It lacks the order and formality of hard copy correspondence, and is typically regarded as less official, less “real.” In days gone by, offices–and individuals–diligently kept copies of letters in well-managed files. This practice is now much less common with email, which has, of course, supplanted hard copy.

We can chose for our email to live on rather than die through neglect, error or mindless deletion. Given all the time and effort we put into our messaging, and the wealth of information it contains, it makes sense to think about what should be saved. Sadly, it’s true that the technology for saving messages can be cumbersome and imperfect, and that is yet another reason to bad-mouth email.

In the spirit of offering help to individuals and families for keeping their digital memories, we offer some simple steps for keeping their personal messages. Check them out before your email–and the important information in it–departs this life.

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): Open Access Journal: Eruditio Antiqua

Charles Jones — 2012-02-06T16:16:35+00:00

[First posted in AWOL 17 February 2010. Updated 6 February 2012]

Eruditio Antiqua, revue électronique de l'érudition gréco-latine

Eruditio Antiqua est une revue électronique thématique, à comité de lecture international, dont l'objectif est de publier des travaux inédits dans les différents domaines de l'érudition gréco-latine, depuis les origines jusqu'à la période byzantine.
Elle accueille des études sur les exégèses littéraires, la lexicographie, la grammaire, le droit, la religion, la géographie, l'historiographie, la médecine, l'astronomie, la musique, les mathématiques, les sciences naturelles...
Outre ces domaines précis, des problématiques transversales s'intègrent également dans le cadre de la revue: stratifications des savoirs, transmission, enrichissement, mais aussi polémiques scientifiques ou encore problèmes d'édition de texte.
Cette revue s'insère dans les axes de recherches de l'UMR 5189 HiSoMA; elle est publiée avec la collaboration des services informatiques de la MOM.

La revue publiera trois formes de travaux:
- des articles proprement dits
- des actes de journées d'études ou de tables rondes
- des comptes rendus

Volume 1 (2009)
© Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Résumé des articles

Articles ci-dessous à télécharger (format pdf)
Jean-Yves Guillaumin - L’érudition des gromatiques romains

Pascal Luccioni - Aspasie, une gynécologue d’époque impériale ?

Aline Canellis - L’érudition dans le livre 1 du Commentaire sur Amos de saint Jérôme

Jean Schneider - Une correspondance érudite, les lettres de Maxime Planude

Michèle Béjuis-Vallat - Servius et la tradition des fata Troiana

Évelyne Prioux - Lycophron et les errances d’Énée : mythes ‘locaux’, érudition ethnographique et poétique des griphes

Florence Garambois-Vasquez - La constellation de la Vierge, ou l’amplification d’un savoir : Aratos, Germanicus, Avienus

Laurence Dalmon - Le pape Zosime et la tradition juridique romaine

Daniel Vallat - Le commentaire de Tibère Claude Donat au Chant 1 de l’Énéide, sa place dans les débats virgiliens et ses relations avec Servius

Volume 2 (2010)

© Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Résumé des articles

Articles ci-dessous à télécharger (format pdf)

Emmanuel Plantade - Apud nos uero breuissima ratio (IO 1, 5, 29) : Hypothèses sur la grammatisation de l’accent latin et sur la formation de la loi de la pénultième longue accentuée

Eugenio Amato - Procopio di Gaza e il dies rosarum : eros platonico, agape cristiana e spettacoli pantomimici nella Gaza tardo antica

Florence Garambois-Vasquez - De la source à l'objet : le planétaire d'Archimède

Daniel Vallat - Un Virgile pour débutants : les gloses du Parisinus Latinus 11308 (Énéide 1)

Michèle Biraud - Les Lithika de Posidippe de Pella : une pratique sophistiquée des échos de mélodies accentuelles

Isabelle Boehm - Le poids des mots, l’aura des noms. Les choix de Galien dans le traité des Facultés naturelles

Jacques Elfassi - Chronique isidorienne

Jacqueline Assaël – Elian Cuvillier - À propos de la traduction de l’Épître de Jacques chapitre 1, verset 1: Ἰάκωβος θεοῦ καὶ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ δοῦλος

Comptes rendus

Jacques Elfassi, Magali Coumert, Origines des peuples. Les récits du Haut Moyen Âge occidental (550-850), Paris (Institut d’études augustiniennes), 2007. 659 p.

Daniel Vallat, Jan M. Ziolkowski – Michael C. J. Putnam, The Virgilian Tradition. The First Fifteen Hundred Years. New Haven & London (Yale University Press), 2008. xxxix + 1082 p.

Volume 3 (2011)

© Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Résumé des articles

Articles ci-dessous à télécharger (.pdf)

Sodalitas. Séminaire international d’Histoire de la Linguistique Antique.
Textes réunis par Alessandro Garcea

Alessandro Garcea - Introduction
Lara Pagani - Le projet Lessico dei Grammatici Greci Antichi (LGGA). Une histoire prosopographique de l’érudition ancienne
Julie Damaggio - Un corpus des premiers fragments grammaticaux à Rome
Javier Uria Varela / Ramon Gutierez Gonzalez - Vague boundaries: delimiting grammatical fragments in Charisius
Séverine Issaeva - Le « nous » des grammairiens latins de la tradition de Charisius
Daniel Vallat - Quelle grammaire dans le Servius de Daniel ? L’exemple du chant 1 de l’Énéide
Franck Cinato - Perspectives offertes par un corpus électronique de gloses sur Priscien

Varia

Gianluca Ventrella - Afrodite « Gloria del Libano » ? Nota esegetica a Giorgio Grammatico, Anacr. 1,61-64
Daniel Vallat - Olga Monno, IUVENALIS DOCET. Le citazioni di Giovenale nel commento di Servio, Bari, 2009
Guillaume Bady - P. Augustin et J.-H. Sautel, Codices Chrysostomici Graeci, VII : Codicum Parisinorum pars prior (Collection Documents, études, répertoires 80), CNRS éditions, Paris, 2011, ISBN 978-2-271-07209-2, 312 p.

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

Praxis Program at the Scholars' Lab: teaching prism how to speak spanish and french

elotroalex — 2012-02-06T15:48:10+00:00

Well, it looks like me and Annie will go on different development branches for a few weeks. I have been assigned the noble task of teaching Prism how to speak Spanish and French. The goal is to give the tool the largest possible reach on day one. Internationalization has always been one of my hot-button issues for a while, given that I hail from and engage with the global south, where the digital divide and the digital humanities divide is more visible.

So far the tool I’m working with is the I18n gem which comes bundled with rails. The tool will make it easy for us to translate the interface. I18n so far seems very straightforward. I am creating YAML documents for each language. The YAML documents assign keys or placeholder names (kind of like variables) to all the strings that need to be translated in the views. Instead of writing strings directly in the views, we will write the placeholders. Depending on the locale that is selected, the placeholders will fetch the appropriate strings from the YAML files. Pretty simple! [crosses fingers nervously]. Besides the ability to abstract strings from their context, I18n also takes care of date and currency formats. Not that we will need the latter, though it’s nice to know we could make it all about the pesos if we wanted to.

Adding sample texts in French and Spanish remains a decision for the future, given our time constraints. I’m working as fast as I can to develop the i18n functionality, so that we do have time, but there is no guarantee. Stay tuned!

Roger Pearse (Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, and more): eChurch blog threatened with legal action for a post

Roger Pearse — 2012-02-06T14:21:11+00:00

On January 28th 2012 eChurch blog included this post:

I Tweeted earlier:

“I sincerely believe that it is easier to publicly proclaim your sexuality than it is to declare mental illness and personality disorders.”

This was met with a small chorus of agreement.

This thought derived from an incident on a prominent Christian forum in which a gay atheist activist took exception to the fact that the moderators had requested he change his provocative avatar. The avatar was of two naked men in an implicit homoerotic embrace. Given the history of this particular guy on the forum, which is typified by aggression – bordering on the threatening – vileness, rudeness, bullying, accusatory sentiment, ad hominem, Christian hatred, and so forth, it was plainly obvious to many that the avatar was designed to provoke.

This guy decided not to comply with the request of the moderator and subsequently was forced to do so. …

The forum in question is the Premier Radio forum. I read the article, which seems very mild and points out how dreadful these people have become.

Today I learn from Lisa Graas that apparently these mild remarks have led the odious individual in question to threaten legal action!

My friend Stuart James has a reader whose brain has apparently hit the rainbow wall very hard. Apparently, Stuart is getting sued by a commenter on his blog because of something he wrote about “gay rights” and mental illness.

A commenter calling himself Charles Bishop today gave me notice of his intention to pursue me legally for this blog post, under the laws of libel / slander. I await correspondence from his legal advisors.

Stuart, tell him I guess he needs to sue me, too, because I wrote an agreeable post about what you wrote.

I haven’t been able to work out precisely what is supposed to be libellous (!) or I’d post it here.

In truth I rather doubt the troll in question has any intention of spending a halfpenny himself: the purpose is simply intimidation.

Bill Caraher (The New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World): A New Mycenaean Center in the Corinthia

Bill Caraher — 2012-02-06T13:19:18+00:00

I just finished reading the T. Tartaron, D. Pullen, R. Dunn, L. Tzortsoulou-Gregory, A. Dill, and J. Boyce, “The Saronic Harbors Research Project (SHARP): Investigations at Mycenaean Kalamianos, 2007-2009,” Hesperia 80 (2011), 559-634. I rarely get excited about the Bronze Age, but it’s hard not to get excited about a major new site. Extending for over 7 ha and including over 50 buildings, the site of Kalamianos represented a major harbor on the Saronic coast. Constructed primarily of the grey Corinthian limestone, the outlines of the site remained visible on the surface allowing the SHARP team to outline the site and its buildings without excavating. Using the techniques of intensive pedestrian survey they produced a significant ceramic assemblage of material from the site which they feel grounds the site chronologically in the Late Bronze Age. A larger regional survey of the region north and west of the coastal village of Korphos has indicated that the area also had significant activity in the Early Bronze Age and rather little activity thereafter. Extensive survey of the hills and valleys surrounding Korphos has produced additional evidence for a vital Bronze Age landscape suggesting that the region was a particularly prosperous and well-developed corner of the busy Saronic world.

On a personal level, the documentation of activities in this area is interesting because the site of Lakka Skoutara where David Pettegrew and I have worked for close to a decade is just a few kilometers (as the crow flies) from their study area. The publication of the ancient, medieval, and modern landscape of Kalamianos and surrounding regions will form a key anchor to our analysis of Lakka Skoutara.

The most interesting thing to me is the methods used to document the site and the extraordinary transparency of the authors in describing their procedures. The integration of architectural, extensive, and intensive survey in a methodologically consistent treatment of a single area. The use of kite and balloon photography to assist in documenting the visible architecture produced some rather striking images that were effective in conveying both the methods and the character of the preserved architecture.

Over the course of intensive survey, the SHARP collected ceramic material using the chronotype system from both specific rooms within clearly defined buildings and across survey style transects. Using a gridded system for the most part, their work follows a similar approach our large site in Cyprus, and this is unsurprising since both David Pettegrew and myself learned the craft of survey from Tom Tartaron, Daniel Pullen, and Tim Gregory over the course of the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey. When the final results are published, the survey work at Korphos will represent another good example of the “4th Wave” intensive survey in Greece which tends to focus intensively on single sites or microregions of a few square kilometers rather than the large areas typical of “Third Wave” regional survey in Greece.

Figure 40. Satellite image of the Korphos region with the locations of small elliptical stone enclosures indicated by open white ovals, and two larger Mycenaean enclosures indicated by filled ovals.

I was gratified to see that their systematic extensive survey produced a preliminary map (above) of the strange round enclosures found on numerous height in the area. In his preliminary study of these enclosures, M. Dixon argued that they were Classical or Hellenistic in date and represented a series of ad hoc fortifications designed defend a vulnerable landscape from the historically documented threat of the Athenian fleet (in the Classical Age) and the more persistent threat of local raiding during the unstable Hellenistic centuries. The SHARP team found little to support a Classical or Hellenistic date for these enclosures and, noting the absence of any substantial quantity of ceramic material, preferred an Early Bronze Age date on the basis of a few sherds found wedged in the walls.

I had the opportunity to look at some of these strange little “fortifications” first hand about a decade ago while documenting the site of Lakka Skoutara. The absence of ceramic material from these sites is, indeed, vexing. And a few Early Bronze Age sherds do little more, at present, than provide a terminus post quem for these rough enclosures.

There were any number of interesting tidbits from their preliminary publication, but a few really stood out to me:

First, I was pretty interested to see that they used the absence of later pottery collected by the survey to argue for the absence of later activity at the site. To my mind, this is an important step for the field of survey archaeology. We are often relatively confident in arguing from the presence of activity based on the presence of ceramics, but we rarely have taken the next step. The vagaries of site formation and the differential visibility of various periods in the surface record have usually led us to stop short of making arguments ex silentio. But, I suppose the extraordinary geomorphological stability of the landscape around Korphos provided them with the confidence to make this claim.

Next, it is remarkable, however, that there is very little discussion of Byzantine material. The site of Stiri features a significant Middle Byzantine church dedicated to the Panayia. It was the katholikon of a monastery that may have been visited by Os. Loukas and is attested in census records as late as the 18th century. It probably functioned in some capacity into the 19th century. Remarkably, the area around the church which is strewn with important Early Bronze Age remains seems to have produced almost no Medieval pottery (according to their admittedly preliminary report). This may be the result of local geomorphological activity – the church site in a polje filled with sediment that may have covered the Byzantine surface – or perhaps a preference of non-cermaic material at the site during the Byzantine period (although this seems a bit unlikely).

Finally, it is a bit troubling, however, to imagine a Byzantine church leaving almost no trace in the local ceramic assemblage and, then, using that same assemblage to date walls visible on the surface. I have no reason to doubt their confidence in assigning Late Bronze Age or Early Bronze Age dates to features in the landscape, but I anxiously await a more systematic treatment of their results to understand the complexities of site formation in this area.

In my informal visits to the area over the years, I’ve seen significant evidence for Late Antique activity in the area including some Early Christian mullions at the church of Ay. Pantes in the village of Korphos itself. It was interesting to note that the SHARP team found a Late Roman kiln site amidst the ruins. Their suggestion that the center of habitation in the region moved to the location of Korphos town during antiquity seems plausible.

One last thing: the color photographs and illustrations in the article are fantastic!

Archaeolog: Archaeology of a fugitive: the cave of “El Castrin”, a deserter who became an outlaw

Luca Pisoni — 2012-02-06T13:06:45+00:00

Luca Pisoni PhD
pisoni.gaetano@gmail.com

Introduction

The use of different sources in the archaeology of the contemporary past allows us to obtain interdisciplinary perspectives on similar issues and to verify hypotheses by comparing different kinds of evidence; thus, helping us to discover conflicts between data (Rathje 1992; (Buchli, Lucas 2001; Harrison, Schofield 2010). The aim of this entry is to connect the historical-biographical reconstruction of an Italian bandit, Abramo Zeni (better known as "El Castrin"), with related archaeological evidence, which was uncovered in the cave where he hid during World War II (fig. 1; fig. 3; fig. 4).

Fig.1. Southern Trentino (Italy) and some of the places frequented by Abramo Zeni

The research

This research rests upon three lines of inquiry: 1) archival work focused upon news related to the bandit in newspapers of the period; 2) ethnographic interviews with witnesses regarding the life of the bandit; and 3) an archaeological-stratigraphical survey of the cave where he lived.

1) Born in 1912, Abramo Zeni described himself as a peaceful man in two interviews (18/07/1973) that he gave to the local newspapers "L'Adige" and "L'Alto Adige" (fig. 2). He added that, before going to prison (he was sentenced to 29 years for desertion and theft), he sustained himself with different jobs, most notably as a shoe mender. He said that he deserted for the first time in 1939 and the second time from 1941 to 1944. The latter occurred after a violent quarrel, which resulted in his admittance to the hospital of Arco (Trento, northern Italy). There, he was arrested by the Nazis.

Fig.2. On the right Abramo (Gino Zeni), welcomed back by the Major and his fellows countrymen when he was released from jail; on the left, Zeni with a friend in the village bar (“L’Adige, July, the 18th, 1973).

During his desertion years, which he spent in his birthplace (Cavedine and Sarca Valleys), he confessed to have stolen food, which he hid in what he simply referred to as “a refuge". He often shared the food with his impoverished fellow countrymen.

2) Between 2004 and 2009, I conducted together with Ivan Montagni 15 interviews, focusing on information about Zeni’s "refuge" and on the objects found there (Pisoni 2012, in press). An informer (RC) led us near the place known today as "Bus del Castrin" (Castrin’s Hole), a hanging cave on the road to Le Sarche (Trento), in the north of Riva del Garda. The informer told us that as a child (in the early 1940s), when he took the sheep out to pasture, he would pass under the cave reluctantly and with fear. He would quicken his steps, sensing the presence of someone and even seeing the barrel of a rifle sticking out from the cave. According to RC, the entrance to the cave was from the top, by means of a wooden step ladder (not found) at the peak of the cliff. The informant told us that, after the capture of El Castrin, the refuge was stripped bare of the wooden boards that lined the inside of the cave. This fact was also confirmed by another informant (LP), who said that during the 1950s he found the remains of a badly damaged wooden structure in the cave. Last but not least, RC told us about a big theft of leather in Le Sarche, which was attributed to Castrin by the people of the village. From other interviews, it emerged how “el Castrin” was not actively looked for, even though many knew where he was hiding. This was both because of the fear he inspired in them (and in the local police) and because of the "social approach" that characterized his actions, by which he gained respect. Many informants testify that he gave food to poor families.

Fig.3. The gorge made by the river Sarca and the Bus del Castrin. Inset above: one of the two entrances, which is located above the street (Photo: L. Pisoni).

3) The archaeological survey in the cave, which I undertook on the 11 May 2009 in accordance with Soprintendenza ai Beni Librari e Archeologici di Trento, has allowed me to single out (fig. 3; fig. 4) the remains of a shelter built with wooden beams, metal sheets, glass, tiles and tar; not far from the shelter it is possible to distinguish two hearths constructed with a few stones. The discovery of dishes (fig. 5, 1), a knife (fig. 5, 4), a ‘pitar’ (used for keeping food; fig. 5, 3), and a small food box (fig. 5, 2), indicates that the cave was regularly inhabited.

Fig.4. The inside of the Bus del Castrin (Photo: L. Pisoni)

The main points of interest were the discovery of a leather cutting (which can be related with Castrin’s trade as a shoe mender and the subsequent theft that took place in the town of Le Sarche; fig. 5, 7) and the finding of a small bottle of French perfume “Grenoville” (fig. 5, 6). According to the studies of the Museo del Profumo (Milan), this particular perfume was produced between the 1920s and 1940s and almost certainly contained the lotion “Oeillet Fané.” It was most likely a gift from one of the bandit’s lovers, as it is known that he had many. The presence of the heel of a shoe of the “ARBITER” brand (fig. 5, 9), produced since 1954 (http://www.calzaturificioarbiter.it/home.asp), indicates that the cave was visited, although infrequently, in subsequent decades.

Fig.5. The objects found in the Bus del Castrin (Photo: L. Pisoni).

Conclusion

The inaccessibility of the cave and the elements that show the convergence between the historical-biographical reconstruction and the archaeological research (the wooden shelter, the perfume bottle and the leather cutting) suggest that these findings are evidence of the presence of the bandit El Castrin. The heel from an “ARBITER” shoe indicates that there were later “visits” to the cave, although sporadic. The most interesting result is perhaps of a methodological nature, as the study makes evident how microhistory (Ginzburg 1980; Muir and Ruggiero 1991) and archaeology can work together towards the reconstruction of the life of a single person. Archaeology, through the study of material culture, can offer relevant data, which are often inaccessible to other disciplines.

References

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

Ginzburg, C. (eds) 1980, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Harrison, R., Schofield, J. (eds) 2010, After Modernity: Archaeological Approaches to the Contemporary Past, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

Muir E. and Ruggiero, G. (eds) 1991, Microhistory and the Lost People of Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Pisoni, L. 2012 (in Press). Places and exploits of the bandit “Castrin”: material results, events perception and memory building. Proceedings of the 5th Convegno

Internazionale di Etnoarcheologia, Roma 2010, Oxford: British Archaeological Reports
Rathje, W. and Murphy, C. 1992, Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage New York: HarperCollins.

Tom Brughmans (Archaeological Network Analysis): Visit and presentation @ eTraces Leipzig

tombrughmans — 2012-02-06T08:46:52+00:00

Last week Matteo Romanello and myself visited Marco Büchler and his colleagues in the eTraces project, based in Leipzig. We were introduced to the fascinating work on the interface between computer science and the Humanities done by the eTraces team and also got the opportunity to present our own work. The slides of my presentation can be found on my bibliography page or on Scribd.

Matteo Romanello presenting his work

Here some info about the eTraces project:

Be it science or the everyday life – our language contains numerous trails of our cultural legacy in the form of winged words and quotations. Scientists now created new software tools for making this cultural legacy available in digital libraries. With the help of those programs the origin and dissemination of text passages, quotes and common phrases can be reconstructed in a quick and easy manner.

The eTraces team hard at work

The main focus of “eTRACES” (which is the name of the project) lies on temporal traces and interconnecting relations of text passages in German language novels from between 1500 and 1900, as well as social science texts created since 1909. Project partners are the chair for Natural Language Processing at the University of Leipzig (ASV), the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities (GCDH), as well as the GESIS – Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences in Bonn.

Funding of about 1.2 Mio € is granted by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), covering a period of three years. “The cooperation of computer science experts with the specialists from the humanities and the social sciences bears great potential for the advancement of all three disciplines” explains State Secretary Cornelia Quennet-Thielen from the BMBF. Further, she emphasized, how eTRACES did exemplarily implement the “Recommendations on Research Infrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences” that were recently issued by the science council.

Harnessing the latest methods in text mining, new methods should be developed and tested to determine the demarcation of the intentional re-use of a text passage and and its utilization as a commonly used text block or boilerplate. Further attention lies on analyzing and visualizing the geographical, temporal and semantic cross-linking of citations.

In the application in the literary studies (partner Göttingen) the central question is, which practices of text passage re-use did coin the history of german novels. The initial subject of the research interests is the Luther Bible. The pivotal question posed by the partner GESIS is the examination of a textual differentiation of qualitative and quantitative social research. The application of informatics (ASV Leipzig) is to utilize the information on text re-use to build a search engine that also considers the citation frequency of a text or text fragment to determine its relevancy.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Pelagios: Enable Linked Ancient Geodata In Open Systems: PELAGIOS Overview Presentation

aboutgeo — 2012-02-06T08:41:08+00:00

We've recently presented the slides embedded below at an event at the German Archaeological Institute. Since they contain a compact overview of the project so far, we thought we'd post them at our blog as well! The original presentation (.pptx format) is available here.

PELAGIOS Project Overview

View more PowerPoint from aboutgeo

Kristina Killgrove (Powered by Osteons): The Forensics of Temperance Brennan

Kristina Killgrove — 2012-02-05T22:09:59+00:00

In the December issue of American Anthropologist, forensic anthropologist Heather Walsh-Haney published an interesting review article on the forensics in Kathy Reichs' series of Temperance Brennan novels (which have, of course, been further fictionalized as the FOX television show Bones - reviewed here by me).

Walsh-Haney appreciates Reichs' popular press books, noting that they do much to counter the "public's misguided and exaggerated expectations regarding the infallibility, ubiquity, and timelessness of forensic science" (p. 650). The novels in fact "comprehensively and correctly educate the public about forensic anthropology, including its limitations and challenges" (p. 651).

Another laudatory aspect of Reichs' books, according to Walsh-Haney, is the inclusion of participant-observation and ethnography. Most examples that I can think of from the books (and, yes, I have read every single one, cover-to-cover, mostly on airplanes), though, are more about Brennan interviewing suspects and witnesses and not what I'd consider Reichs' highlighting "both the holistic nature of anthropology and how those elements might be brought to bear by current [forensic] practitioners" (p. 651).

I do like that Walsh-Haney criticizes Reichs for her outdated use of race/ancestry: "Brennan uses the antiquated terms Caucasoid and Mongoloid to describe human diversity... the public's understanding of the practice of forensic anthropology would be further clarified on this point if Reichs were to use her fictional narrative to introduce the history behind the terms and current usage" (p. 651). One of the things that always annoys me in Reichs' books - aside from the un-complicated assessment of "race" - is that she (or her editor) always uses "phalange" instead of "phalanx" for each of the finger bones. I swear that word appears at least once in every book, and it just makes me cringe.

After reading Walsh-Haney's brief review article, I was a bit surprised by the high praise. Granted, Reichs' books are the best and most accurate of any forensic-true-crime series I've read (ahem, looking at you, Patricia Cornwell... ugh). But they can be readily critiqued. In the past, I have required all my undergraduates in Intro to Forensic Anthropology to read and review Reichs' Bare Bones in comparison with the information presented in Byers' Introduction to Forensic Anthropology text. (The guidelines for the review assignment are here for anyone who's interested). Unfortunately, I don't have notes or copies of students' papers, but we found plenty of fodder for a lively discussion of the realities of forensic anthropology and the liberties taken when writing a popular novel.

At any rate, now that I know it's possible to get published in American Anthropologist by writing about Temperance Brennan, I gotta put together an essay on Season 6 of Bones. (I'm only half joking.) The TV show is most definitely not as accurate as the book series, but it's entertaining and often informative. That counts for a lot.

Reference:

Walsh-Haney, H. (2011). Can Grave Secrets Be Revealed via Analysis of Bare Bones? How Kathy Reichs's Fiction Novels Feed the Public Perception of Forensic Anthropology American Anthropologist, 113 (4), 650-652 DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2011.01379.x.

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): A New Mailing List: Sudan Dams Crisis

Charles Jones — 2012-02-05T17:03:29+00:00

A New Mailing List: Sudan Dams Crisis

New Dams on the Nile and Atbara and their effects on human rights, environment, and heritage.

The last dam built on the Nile, at the Fourth Cataract, was completed in 2008, displacing more than 60,000 people and flooding 170 kilometers of the river valley and adjacent land. The entire non-desert habitat was lost along with a human heritage that included vast numbers of archaeological sites. This followed on the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960's that displaced 150,000, with even greater damage to the environment and heritage.

Now, eight or more dams are planned and two are under contract, at Kajbar at the Third Cataract and Shereik at the Fifth. The region of Mahas in the Third Cataract is especially populated, with a long and rich history is now directly threatened with destruction. The area upstream of Shereik is less populated, but very poorly known. It is a crisis that will be discussed at a brief conference at the British Museum on May 15, 2012.

This forum is intended to disseminate news and ideas about the dams crises in Sudan and Egypt, past and present, to help develop means to mitigate and possibly even avert some of the worst consequences.

To subscribe, go to: https://lists.uchicago.edu/web/info/sudandamscrisis

Sean Gillies Blog: Geoprocessing for humans: pygp

Sean Gillies — 2012-02-05T16:45:23+00:00

I'm not the only one simplifying terrible Python APIs in the geospatial world. Yesterday, I ran across a blog post about software named pygp. Very much about ArcGIS records and fields, it models data differently than Fiona does but similarly eliminates a lot of boilerplate and provides simple access to all coordinates of a record's shape field.

def example_geometry(path):
    """
    Example showing use of Geometry helper class that does the heavy lifting
    on the geometry object and returns something quite similar to WKT/GeoJSON

    Structure is simple, a tuple of tuple of Point objects, very similar to
    Avenue days of geometry and WKT MultiLineString etc.
    (((0, 498266, 6100519, None, None), (0, 499775, 6100281, None, None),
      (0, 500224, 6098694, None, None), (0, 499616, 6097662, None, None),
      (0, 498346, 6096789, None, None)))

    :param path: Workspace Path
    :type path: str
    """
    feature_class = FeatureClass(osjoin(path, POLYGON))
    for srow in feature_class.search():
        print srow.get_value(
            feature_class.shape_field_name).as_tuple()

# End example_geometry function

I don't know whether pygp has eliminated the need to count references to cursors and records or just omitted

del feature_class

from the example. I'd have looked in the code, but I couldn't find a link. I bet a lot of people would love to see it on GitHub.

Gavin Robinson (Investigations of a Dog): Random news

Gavin Robinson — 2012-02-05T09:18:46+00:00

I’m planning to finish my Winter in Windsor series of posts while it’s still winter, but in the meantime here are some links:

Skulking in Holes and Corners is a relatively new blog by Jamel Ostwald, who has written a book about Vauban and is writing another about Marlborough. The blog ‘hopes to facilitate communication between the rarest of beasts, early modern European military historians (EMEMHians – but please give me a better idea for a name)’. He’s made a very good start, so go and read it, comment on it and link to it.
My book is going to be published on 21 August 2012, and you can already read the blurb. Just proofreading and indexing to go.
Andrew Hickey has written a brilliant short story about Shakespeare which skewers the snobbery of Oxfordian conspiracy theories.
Ben Brumfield reports on the 2012 American Historical Association conference from a software developer’s perspective.
History SPOT has a podcast of Ben Worthy’s IHR seminar paper on the impact of the Freedom of Information Act.
Zotero 3.0 has been released. It can now run as a standalone program as well as a Firefox extension and has lots of new features. I couldn’t have written my book as quickly (or at all?) without Zotero to manage my bibliography and citations.
The latest version of the Spotify client crashes whenever I search for Kim Carnes. Bug or feature?

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): Open Access Journals: Association of Ancient Historians Newsletter

Charles Jones — 2012-02-04T19:21:10+00:00

[First posted in AWOL 1 October 2009. Updated 4 February 2012]

Association of Ancient Historians Newsletter

The Association of Ancient Historians was founded with two essential objectives. The first of these is to foster a regular forum for scholarly interaction among historians of the Ancient Mediterranean--especially among those who study the Greeks and Romans--and secondly, to do so in a manner that emphasizes collegiality and social interaction.
2011 Spring Fall Winter
2010 Spring Fall Winter
2009 Spring Fall Winter
2008 Spring Fall Winter
2007 Spring Fall Winter
2006 Spring Fall Winter
2005 Spring Fall Winter
2004 Spring Fall Winter
2003 Spring Fall Winter
2002 Spring Fall Winter
2001 Spring Fall Winter
2000 Spring Fall Winter
1999 Spring Fall Winter
1998 Spring Fall Winter
1997 Spring Fall Winter
1996 Spring Fall Winter
1995 Spring Fall Winter
1994 Spring Fall Winter
1993 Spring Fall Winter

2011	Spring	Fall	Winter
2010	Spring	Fall	Winter
2009	Spring	Fall	Winter
2008	Spring	Fall	Winter
2007	Spring	Fall	Winter
2006	Spring	Fall	Winter
2005	Spring	Fall	Winter
2004	Spring	Fall	Winter
2003	Spring	Fall	Winter
2002	Spring	Fall	Winter
2001	Spring	Fall	Winter
2000	Spring	Fall	Winter
1999	Spring	Fall	Winter
1998	Spring	Fall	Winter
1997	Spring	Fall	Winter
1996	Spring	Fall	Winter
1995	Spring	Fall	Winter
1994	Spring	Fall	Winter
1993	Spring	Fall	Winter

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

The Homer Multitext: Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush now on-line

Casey Dué — 2012-02-04T18:03:57+00:00

An on-line version of Parts I and III of Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush: A Multitext Edition with Essays and Commentary is now available from the Center for Hellenic Studies. Hard copies may be purchased from Harvard University Press. Part II (texts and text commentaries) will be added soon.

UPDATE 2/4/12: Part II is now available as well.

Neel Smith (Vitruvian Design): Ancient Greek is broken

Neel Smith — 2012-02-04T17:18:59+00:00

It is 2012, and it is not possible to edit an original document from archaic or classical Greece digitally.

The inscriptions recording the construction of the Parthenon cannot be edited digitally; the Athenian Tribute Lists reflecting the annual payments members of the Delian League made to Athens in the fifth century B.C.E. cannot be edited digitally; votive offerings to Apollo at Delphi, dipinti on classical Greek pottery, graffiti scratched by Greek mercenaries on the colossal statues at Abu Simbel in Egypt — none can be edited digitally.

We are prevented from fully and accurately editing archaic and classical Greek by inadequate or erroneous technical standards defining the representation of languages, writing systems and digital character encodings. Unlike Claude Rains’ famously pretended reaction in Casablanca, I am genuinely shocked that most of the standards keeping us from editing classical Greek have been adopted unmodified from recommendations by professional classicists. (Think about that the next time you want to evaluate the state of digital scholarship in the humanities.)

Each of these three shortcomings is worth discussing separately, so I plan to post more detailed comments on them individually, but here is a brief summary of the problem.

1. Language

A text must identify what languages its content represents. We do that with International Standards Organizations (ISO) codes for language. The registration authority for the ongoing work to develop a comprehensive set of three-letter codes for languages is SIL
International.

While some languages codes are organized in families (so that related dialects or languages can be recognized by software to process the contents appropriately), archaic and classical Greek are lumped under a single grc code. (This at least is an improvement on the previous iso639–2 list of codes where Mycenaean Greek written in Linear B could not be distinguished from classical Greek!)

We tell students reading Plato that the text is in the Attic dialect, and would not ask them to consider interpretations that are only possible in other dialects. The string τό, for example, might be a form of the relative pronoun in Ionic Greek, but in Attic it can only be the definite article (“the”).

We should treat our software equally kindly, by encoding explicitly the dialectical variant of ancient Greek used in a text.

2. Writing system

If we are editing an ancient Greek document, we must identify the document’s writing system, since archaic and classical Greek city states used a variety of distinct alphabets. In 403 BC, the Athenians voted to adopt a as their official writing system the alphabet used in Ionia, replacing the Attic alphabet they had used up to that time. The language spoken in Athens did not change, but the writing system did.

The Ionian alphabet is the direct ancestor of the modern Greek alphabet. In this alphabet, the letter epsilon represents a short vowel that is contrasted with a long vowel represented by the letter eta. In the classic Attic alphabet, on the other hand, the two sounds that were distinct in the Ionian alphabet were represented by the single letter epsilon. A glyph essentially identical in appearance to the Ionic eta instead represented a consonant, pronounced like a modern English H (or like the “rough breathing” in modern writing of ancient Attic). Any reader (or any computer program) that tries to interpret a text written in the “old Attic” alphabet as though it were written in the modern, Ionic alphabet will fail spectacularly, even though the language is unchanged.

ISO standard 15924 defines codes to identify the writing system of a text. The current version includes no way to distinguish archaic and classical Greek alphabets from the alphabet of modern printed texts.

3. Digital character set

Once we have identified the language and the writing system of our text, we have to record its contents. The Unicode consortium defines the standard that is by far the most comprehensive and widely supported digital character set today.

Of the sections of the Unicode specification that I have looked at closely, few are as misconceived as the ancient Greek section. I’ll save a fuller catalog of its problems for a separate post, but can briefly contrast one example of the clean design of the Arabic section of Unicode.

In Arabic, a single letter might have distinct forms when written separately, initially, medially or finally. A free-standing letter kaf ك looks quite different from the first letter of the word “book”

كتاب

for example. Software following the Unicode specification can represent all instances of kaf with the same code point: the different letter forms are treated as presentational variants depending on the position of the letter in relation to other letters.

Now use this tool to search the Unicode specification for the term “sigma”. We have two distinct upper-case sigmas, and no fewer than three lower case sigmas, with a lunate form and a terminal sigma being given distinct code points.

While medial and terminal sigma are, like the different forms of Arabic kaf, contextually determined variant glyphs, lunate sigma is simply a font choice used by editors who do not wish to distinguish a final form of sigma from other forms (often because they are editing fragmentary texts like papyri where it might be difficult to decide where word breaks occur in a handful of isolated letters). In all cases, an editor should be able to encode a simple sigma, and searching or parsing of the digital text would work on any form of sigma, while publishers who preferred the papyrologists’ lunate form of the letter could use a font with that glyph for sigma; publishers preferring a text with the two traditional print forms could use a font with a variant form of
terminal sigma.

Because of the false definition of lunate sigma as a distinct character, however, you now have to check manually for lunate forms of sigma versus other forms of sigma if you want to parse or search a text encoded in Unicode Greek. Do you want to do that? Do you want to rely on the authors of your software having to do that?

Solutions?

International standards processes are slow. While it’s reasonable for standards bodies like ISO to rely on the recommendations of professional organizations with expertise in a specific domain, in a field like classics this can be problematic. The American Philological Association is a professional organization often thought to represent the field of classics, but its role in recommendations to international standards like the Unicode consortium, and its complete
absence from discussion like the ongoing revision of international language codes suggest that, because of the what I’ve called the recursive arithmetic of tenure, it institutionalizes conventional wisdom and obsolete assumptions, and helps sustain cargo-cult scholarship.

But in recent months we’ve seen example after example of traditional institutions that have been overtaken by motivated groups using the internet to organize. Can we form enough of an on-line community to move better standards through ISO and the Unicode Consoritum, in alliance with or independent from existing professional groups?

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): Online Library: PLGO: Bibliotheca Pretiosa.

Charles Jones — 2012-02-04T17:18:50+00:00

PLGO: Bibliotheca Pretiosa

The PLGO Community is adding some contents to the Bibliotheca Pretiosa.

Our goal is provide, through our own server & domain, all the contents available in the Scribd account. At this time, the items available through the Scribd service count 4,287, between books and articles, in the future, we hope all of them will be available too in the Bibliotheca Pretiosa.
Analecta Bollandiana. [1882-1908]. Directory 29/09/2011 03:00:00 p.m.
Annales de philosophie chrétienne : Augustin Bonnetty. Directory 01/02/2012 03:43:52 a.m.
Catenae Graecorum Patrum in Novum Testamentum [1844]: J. A. Cramer. Directory 01/02/2012 12:57:52 a.m.
Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum [1828-1877]: Bockh.. Directory 24/09/2010 03:55:00 a.m.
CSEL: Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum. Kommission zur Herausgabe des Corpus der lateinischen Kirchenväter. Directory 06/11/2010 04:06:00 p.m.
CSHB: Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae. Directory 23/10/2010 03:31:00 a.m.
Dizionario di erudizione storico-ecclesiastica da San Pietro sino ai nostri giorni. Gaetano Moroni. Directory 01/02/2012 7:09:43 a.m.
FC Directory 11/12/2010 07:29:00 p.m.
GCS Directory 06/11/2010 04:01:00 p.m.
JSTOR Patristic/Patrological contents before 1923 year. Directory 11/09/2011 7:23:28 p.m.
Patrologia Orientalis: René Graffin & François Nau. Directory 24/10/2010 12:58:00 a.m.
John Duns Scotus Directory 09/09/2010 12:00:00 a.m.
Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina, & Series Graeca: [Migne]. Directory 13/03/2011 05:05:00 a.m.
Novae Patrum Bibliotheca [Angelo Mai]. Directory 13/03/2011 05:05:00 a.m.
OriensChristianus Directory 24/10/2010 12:47:00 a.m.
Philo: Opera Omnia [1828] Directory 24/10/2010 01:46:00 a.m.
REB-Revue des études byzantines Directory 07/11/2011 04:48:00 a.m.
ROC-RevueDeL'OrientChretien Directory 23/10/2010 05:42:00 a.m.
ROL-RevueDeL'OrientLatin Directory 24/10/2010 12:43:00 a.m.
SMSR Directory 22/11/2010 06:45:00 p.m.
Textus Receptus Directory 02/04/2011 20:45:00 p.m.
Tomas Aquinas Directory 09/09/2010 1

Bill Caraher (The New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World): Lovely Winter Scenes

Bill Caraher — 2012-02-04T16:42:33+00:00

Some lovely photos by my lovely wife of our hoar frost this morning.

Neel Smith (Vitruvian Design): The humanities-that-must-not-be-named

Neel Smith — 2012-02-04T15:13:19+00:00

I’m not thrilled with the term “digital humanities.” When people refer to the “humanities,” I think I know what they mean: those disciplines that are concerned with human activity and everything it produces, and take as their task both to preserve and transmit that culture on the one hand, and to understand and interpret it on the other. But what is the sense of qualifying that noun with the adjective “digital”?

In the twenty-first century, the phrase can’t really stand in opposition to an implied “analog humanities”: no such thing exists. (When was the last time anyone submitted a hand-written or manually typed manuscript to be edited with grease pencil before being manually typeset with hot lead?) “Digital humanities” refers instead to scholarship in the humanities that consciously takes account of the fact that we all work digitally now.

What troubles me is that our use of the marked term “digital humanities” implies that the unmarked term, “humanities,” is being used to refer to scholarship that does not reflect on the media we all work in (a usage that is sadly accurate in the academy today). I am particularly disturbed because I would like to imagine that an education in the humanities encourages the kind of critical self-awareness that would enable us to think more meaningfully about our relation to the environment we live and work in, including our technological environment and the ways it is interwoven with our institutions and values.

By using “digital humanities,” we’re allowing the term “humanities” to stand for an uncritical scholarly practice that is at odds with the goals of a humanistic education.

I can understand why there is not a spontaneous groundswell of support in academic departments around the world for a term meaning “work that unthinkingly perpetuates obsolete forms of scholarly practice,” or “scholarship that is oblivious to the media we use today,” but rather than accept without reservation the marginalizing label “digital humanities,” I’ll offer my own suggestion. We could extend Richard Feynman’s “cargo-cult science” to “cargo-cult scholarship” more generally, and refer to the “cargo-cult humanities.”

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): Open Access Journal: Revista Atlántica-Mediterránea de Prehistoria y Arqueología Social

Charles Jones — 2012-02-04T15:10:48+00:00

[First posted in AWOL 25 January 2010, updated 4 February 2012]

Revista Atlántica-Mediterránea de Prehistoria y Arqueología Social
ISSN: 1138-9435

Revista Atlántica-Mediterránea de Prehistoria y Arqueología Social es una publicación de periodicidad anual. Es una revistaq que, desde un encuadre posicional en la "Arqueología Social", está abierta a trabajos que potencien el debate intelectual.

No 12 (2010): Revista Atlántica-Mediterránea de Prehistoria y Arqueología Social
No 11 (2009): Revista Atlántica-Mediterránea de Prehistoria y Arqueología Social
No 10 (2008): Revista Atlántica-Mediterránea de Prehistoria y Arqueología Social
No 9 (2007): Revista Atlántica-Mediterránea de Prehistoria y Arqueología Social
No 8 (2006): Revista Atlántica-Mediterránea de Prehistoria y Arqueología Social
No 7 (2004): Revista Atlántica-Mediterránea de Prehistoria y Arqueología Social
No 6 (2003): Revista Atlántica-Mediterránea de Prehistoria y Arqueología Social
No 5 (2002): Revista Atlántica-Mediterránea de Prehistoria y Arqueología Social
No 4 (2001): Revista Atlántica-Mediterránea de Prehistoria y Arqueología Social
No 3 (2000): Revista Atlántica-Mediterránea de Prehistoria y Arqueología Social
No 2 (1999): Revista Atlántica-Mediterránea de Prehistoria y Arqueología Social
No 1 (1998): Revista Atlántica-Mediterránea de Prehistoria y Arqueología Social

List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies

Roger Pearse (Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, and more): Egypt kisses tourist industry good-bye — starvation to follow

Roger Pearse — 2012-02-04T12:52:40+00:00

As I understand it, Egyptian president Mubarak — a relatively mild ruler – fell from power because many Egyptians could not afford to buy bread. It was as simple as that.

But the unrest has been very bad for the tourism industry, which is a major part of the money flowing into Egypt. That income dropped 30% last year. The possibility of an Islamist government will not precisely encourage the US government to keep up its donations, which form another huge part of Egyptian national income.

The tourist industry is vital. In Luxor, when the tourists stopped coming after the Islamist massacres of a few years ago, it provoked street demonstrations in support of Mubarak! So closely are the incomes of local people connected with the dollars-on-legs arriving at the airport.

I have not felt any special urge to travel there at the moment, but I didn’t feel that trips to Luxor, or Sharm el Sheikh, or the Red Sea Resorts were particularly dangerous. Until today.

Today I read in the Daily Mail a story that crosses Egypt off the list of places that I would feel safe in visiting.

Security officials secured the release of two female American tourists and their guide, hours after they were kidnapped at gunpoint while vacationing in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula yesterday. …

Three other tourists in the convoy were robbed of their cell phones and wallets as the kidnappers took the guns away from their police escort.

The kidnappers demanded the release or retrial of several of their tribesmen being detained by the Egyptian government. The demands are similar to those of the Bedouins who kidnapped 25 Chinese workers earlier this week.

The tourist group that was attacked was traveling back to the Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh after visiting St Catherine’s Monastery in the southern part of the region.

I think that’s pretty much “game over” for Egypt’s tourism industry. Sharm el Sheikh is a tourist farm, where tourists are farmed for money in return for sunshine and day excursions. I’d always thought of it as entirely safe.

The consequence of this must be yet further unrest. The reason Mubarak was ousted was poverty — and now the poverty must be getting worse, as the supply of money is cut off.

This is sad, sad news for Egypt.

Año	Volumen	Número
2011	34	1
2010	33	1	2
2009	32	1	2

Electra Atlantis: Digital Approaches to Antiquity

Dan Cohen's Digital Humanities Blog: Reading and Believing

Shawn Graham (Electric Archaeology): Artefacts as Nodes in a Network

Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities: Extremely Visible and Incredibly Close Reading of Logos

ASOR Blog (American Schools of Oriental Research): ASOR Heritage Fellow works at Bronze Age site in Lebanon

Tom Elliott (Horothesia): Playing with PELAGIOS: Open Context and Labels

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): Open Access Ancient Nubia and Sudan

MDASP Articles

Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities: The DLC is Back!

Juan Garcés (Digitised Manuscripts Blog): Love Letters at the British Library

John Hessler (Warping History)

Roger Pearse (Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, and more): Are these really the words of Ignatius?

Bill Caraher (The New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World): Popular Byzantium: An Interview with Paul Kastenellos, Part 1

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): Newly Open Access Journal: Argos: Revista de la Asociación Argentina de Estudios Clásicos

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): Emerging Open Access Journal: Antiguo Oriente

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): Open Access Journal: Journal of Hebrew Scriptures

Mia Ridge (Open Objects): Can you capture visitors with a steampunk arm?

The Signal: Digital Preservation: Designing Preservable Websites, Redux

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): ICOM Emergency Red List of Egyptian Cultural Objects at Risk

Mia Ridge (Open Objects): Usability: the key that unlocks geeky goodness

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): John S. Latsis Public Benefit Foundation Digital Library

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): Les inscriptions grecques de Thespies Online

Tom Elliott (Horothesia): Playing with PELAGIOS: The GAWD is Live

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): Inédits de la MOM

The Signal: Digital Preservation: Email is Where Knowledge Goes to Die–Or is it?

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): Open Access Journal: Eruditio Antiqua

Praxis Program at the Scholars' Lab: teaching prism how to speak spanish and french

Roger Pearse (Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, and more): eChurch blog threatened with legal action for a post

Bill Caraher (The New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World): A New Mycenaean Center in the Corinthia

Archaeolog: Archaeology of a fugitive: the cave of “El Castrin”, a deserter who became an outlaw

Tom Brughmans (Archaeological Network Analysis): Visit and presentation @ eTraces Leipzig

Pelagios: Enable Linked Ancient Geodata In Open Systems: PELAGIOS Overview Presentation

Kristina Killgrove (Powered by Osteons): The Forensics of Temperance Brennan

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): A New Mailing List: Sudan Dams Crisis

Sean Gillies Blog: Geoprocessing for humans: pygp

Gavin Robinson (Investigations of a Dog): Random news

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): Open Access Journals: Association of Ancient Historians Newsletter

The Homer Multitext: Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush now on-line

Neel Smith (Vitruvian Design): Ancient Greek is broken

1. Language

2. Writing system

3. Digital character set

Solutions?

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): Online Library: PLGO: Bibliotheca Pretiosa.

Bill Caraher (The New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World): Lovely Winter Scenes

Neel Smith (Vitruvian Design): The humanities-that-must-not-be-named

Charles Ellwood Jones (AWOL: The Ancient World Online): Open Access Journal: Revista Atlántica-Mediterránea de Prehistoria y Arqueología Social

Roger Pearse (Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, and more): Egypt kisses tourist industry good-bye — starvation to follow