Sometimes it’s just too easy … I’m sitting here idly catching up on emails etc. (we’re in the midst of report cards) and enjoying @SaveRome’s photos of snowfall in the forum (via Twitter/Instagram), when suddenly I’m confronted with the Daily Mail‘s headline on the snowfall:

• Colosseum closes and drivers abandon cars as snow falls on Rome for the first time in 26 YEARS

… er, let’s look back a couple of years (almost to the day) when we had some nice photos of snow falling on the Colosseum:

• Snow Closes Sites in Rome

… which later was supplemented with Max Nelson’s (UWindsor) photos of snow falling through the oculus in the Pantheon (remember: these photos are a couple of years old …):

• Snow in Rome Redux

The Sun and Daily Mail should probably get together and have a review of how calendars and other assorted methods of reckoning time works …

The current land grab that Historic Scotland is making for the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) should keep anyone involved in archaeology, indeed the heritage industry in Scotland, awake at night.

Ministers of the Scottish parliament announced an “options appraisal” in November last year, the clear agenda of which is that RCAHMS will find itself folded into Historic Scotland in the next few years.

There is no doubt that this is a takeover attempt. Fair enough. Historic Scotland is desperate to justify its own existence. Scottish finance secretary John Swinney announced eye-watering and humiliating cuts to the agency’s funding from £47 million to £35.7m in 2014-15. Not an indication of any kind of interest in culture and history.

The problem is that Historic Scotland is anything other than a beacon of excellence. Over the past week it has become clear even to the most casual observer that Historic Scotland isn’t remotely up to the job. Five of the most senior members of the government agency have left over the past 18 months since the appointment of hapless chief executive Ruth Parsons, and 53 cases of bullying were reported in October alone last year.

The screams from RCAHMS are getting louder. "[A merger] is not something we relish having a 100 year history of working without government interference. They are a terrible organisation to work with and they care little for the sector and less for the archaeology," said one insider.

It is easy to see their point, the merger of English Heritage and the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME) at the end of 1990s has not been a happy marriage. "It wasn’t quite the grand idea that some thought it might be. RCHME was never fully integrated into the work of English Heritage, with the National Monuments Record separate from the other English Heritage archives. Its research and recording programme lost emphasis in favour of other priorities," writes Peter Drummond, national chairman of the Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland.

On top of that, unless it fits its own crude political agenda (£8.9 million for Bannockburn) the disinterest that the Scottish parliament has in managing the country’s heritage is palpable. Culture minister Fiona Hyslop's rejection of a plea to open a national tourism centre in Perthshire to celebrate its Roman heritage in October last year, as just one example, was as depressing as it was short sighted.

Aside from the fact that it is never a good idea for goverment to intefere in archaeological research, indeed any kind of scientific or academic research, it is hard to see how a merger between these two institutions can possibly be a good idea. All it does is prop up Historic Scotland.

Download HS_article Times

Don’t like to start the day with a bit of pedantry, but when the Sun engages in pot-calling-the-kettle-blackery, I simply can’t resist … the incipit of a piece therein:

A QUARTER of clueless Brit holidaymakers claim to have visited historic Wonders of the World … which don’t even exist.

Top porkies include sightseeing at the Colossus of Rhodes, which was destroyed in 226 BC, and the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, ordered to be destroyed by Roman Emperor Caligula in the Fifth Century.

• via Brits’ seven blunders of the world (Sun)

… I guess for rags like the Sun, Caligula will live on and on in their hearts forever … or maybe someone just read the Wikipedia article a bit too quickly …

[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

In the episode “The Underwater Menace,” the Doctor, Ben, Polly, and Jamie arrive in the lost underwater city of Atlantis. The situation they find their combines the worst of both religion and science. Soon after arriving, the travelers are nearly sacrificed to the “living goddess Ando” who is depicted as part human, part fish. They are rescued when the Doctor sends a note (which he signs “Dr. W”!!!) to a professor he has figured out is there, Professor Zaroff, saying that an important secret will die with him. Zaroff turns out to be quite mad, having promised to raise Atlantis from beneath the sea, when in fact his plan is to lower the sea in a way that will split the planet, destroying the world. We thus have what is depicted as superstitious and primitive religiosity on the one hand, and the stereotypical mad scientist on the other.

The Doctor remains throughout a man of science. As one could have predicted, the Doctor and his friends manage to stop Zaroff. Because he had worked both to stop Zaroff and also save the Atlanteans, when they think the Doctor may have died in the process, the Atlanteans consider how to honor him appropriately, one suggests a monument in a rebuilt temple. But their leader rejects this idea, saying that it was gods and superstitions that allowed them to be manipulated as they were, and so he suggests that rebuilding Atlantis without temples or gods would be a more fitting tribute.

Here, then, we see the Doctor as more like the enlightened crew of the starship Enterprise than ever before. He does not merely see through superstition, but undermines it, working even if indirectly towards the elimination of gods and temples. This is a facet we will see revisited in a similar way in other episodes in the show’s history, such as “Planet of Fire” in the Peter Davison era. And in later times we will find that the Doctor did such things in a manner at odds with the time lords’ equivalent of the “Prime Directive.”

Of course, one should not oversimplify the matter. In the very act of traveling through time and space in a seemingly magical police box, and visiting a city that is myth rather than reality, the lines between magic and science, and between religious and scientific forms of delusion and madness, are once again transgressed.

This is one of the lost episodes of which a part was recently rediscovered, and so here is a clip:

Click here to view the embedded video.

This story was reported by The Portugal News back in November 2011, but seems to have been picked up only recently by other media.

Bikya Masr

An international research team in Lisbon has diagnosed the oldest case of prostate cancer in ancient Egypt and the second oldest case in the world.

Using high-resolution computerized tomography (CT) scanners, the researchers identified the cancer in a mummy subject known as M1.

“Cancer is such a hot topic these days; experts are constantly trying to probe in hopes of answering the one question- when and how did the ailment really evolve?” said Salima Ikram; member of the research team and professor of Egyptology at The American University in Cairo (AUC).

“Findings such as these bring us one step closer to finding the cause of cancer, and, ultimately, the cure to a disease that has besieged mankind for so long.”

MSNBC

A professor from American University in Cairo says discovery of prostate cancer in a 2,200-year-old mummy indicates the disease was caused by genetics, not environment.

The genetics-environment question is key to understanding cancer.

AUC professor Salima Ikram, a member of the team that studied the mummy in Portugal for two years, said Sunday the mummy was of a man who died in his forties.

She said this was the second oldest known case of prostate cancer.

"Living conditions in ancient times were very different; there were no pollutants or modified foods, which leads us to believe that the disease is not necessarily only linked to industrial factors," she said.

The Medical Daily (Christine Hsu)

The mummy was that of an adult male with a height of five feet and five inches who lived between 285BC to 230 BC and died when he was between the ages of 51 to 60-years-old, according to researchers.

Images also showed that the mummified man suffered from lumbosacral osteoarthritis and that there were several post-mortem fractures that were probably produced when the mummy was shipped to Europe.

Digital X-ray scans revealed that the mummy had been buried with crossed arms, a common pose in Ptolemaic mummies, which in the New Kingdom was often associated with royals.

M1 was buried with a cartonnage mask and bib, and had a decoratively painted veil.

Prostate cancer develops in the prostate, a walnut-sized gland in the male reproductive system, and may spread to other pelvic regions like the lumbar spine, upper arm and leg bones, the ribs, and can ultimately spread to most of the skeleton. Problems with urinating, sexual intercourse or erectile dysfunction are all likely symptoms of the disease.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

If you are not already signed up to the Amara West blog I do sincerely recommend it - they still have a couple of weeks of the season left and update the blog regularly. Here are a sample of recent posts, all with lovely photographs.

British Museum -nice objects among archaeological puzzles

With, amongst others, a photograph of a gorgeous faience scarab base showing a beautifully etched image of the Pharaoh Menkheperra as a sphinx.

Every house in the town has so far contained a central room for domestic activity and often a separate room for making bread and grinding cereals.

Less common are fine faience artefacts, an example of which turned up this week – we recovered a small but very finely carved scarab which depicts a representation of the king as a sphinx, a classic symbol of pharaonic power, with the name Menkheperra before it. This was one of the names of Thutmose III (1479-1425 BC), popular on amulets and scarabs long after his death.

British Museum - The Town Site - half way through the season

With some really good photos

With three weeks digging left, it’s a good time to reflect on the key discoveries of the season so far in the town of Amara West. Though these have included objects, from the spectacular to the mundane, the combination of stratigraphy and architecture unearthed has allowed us to interpret the purpose of buildings – and one of our key challenges has been to work out which walls belong to which structures, and in what order they were built.

British Museum - Excavating the cemeteries

I’m currently excavating a grave (317) in Cemetery D. It extends east-west and is around 2.5 metres in length, with a rather small shaft (only about 90cm long) leading to a small burial chamber around 1.2m wide. There are no remnants of a superstructure, and the roof of the chamber has been removed by surface erosion, where a scatter of schist stones suggests the grave was looted in ancient times.

We unearthed skeletal remains and some faience and shell beads scattered in windblown sand in the burial chamber, but below this we found another skeleton, undisturbed and intact. Among the most interesting things about this burial are the plant remains found associated with it, which when studied will tell us more about how the bodies were treated for burial.

British Museum - More on the hieroglyph inscription

With photos

All this work is providing us with a better understanding of the settlement of Amara West, and helps us date and interpret the buildings, features and objects we encounter.

For example, Elisabeth’s drawings have helped confirm the reading of the royal name at the end of the eroded inscription on a sandstone doorjamb (F990) found exposed on the surface east of the town wall. The signs written in the cartouche were not readable until seen in a variety of different lights, but also with a torch during the dark hours of the early morning. We are now confident it bears the name of Ramesses II.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Saqqara.nl

Week 31 January - 2 February 2012

There we are again in Cairo, after an absence of two years due to the revolution in Egypt which made work in 2011 impossible. Field director Maarten Raven and his deputy Christian Greco arrived on the 31st, and the next day visited the offices of the Ministry of Antiquities in order to sign the contract for a continuation of our work at Saqqara. We were helped very efficiently by the new head of the department of foreign missions, and spent the rest of the day in talks with Kim Duistermaat, the director of the Dutch-Flemish Institute in Cairo (always our base while we are staying in Cairo), and with the architect Nicholas Warner, who has been responsible for the overall consolidation of our site over the past ten years. Bit by bit we received the news of everything that has happened here during (and after) the revolution, a process that is still going on and will take many more years to come to a new balance. Not all news is pleasant, and Egypt has clearly become a different country.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Aeraweb

The AERA (Ancient Egypt Research Associates) blog for the 2012 Field Season has been running for some weeks at the Giza Plateau, with four posts to date. Here's the most recent of the posts:

With two photos.

Posted by Rabee Eissa, SCA archaeologist

One of the most interesting things that I noticed in my excavation, in what seems to be a storage building that dates to the Old Kingdom in Giza, is a concentration of ash. This ash surrounded circular mud brick silos that had been constructed beside each other forming an L. The ash itself was very dark, dense and soft. Thinking about the silos and the ash, I remembered my mother and her storage methods for the butter. She put the butter in a big aluminum jar and surrounded the jar with a layer of soft ash to prevent the ants from reaching the butter. My colleague Hussein Rekaby, an excavation supervisor, told me that the people in his village near Aswan still use the same idea in their construction of storage silos. They start by spreading ash horizontally, then they put clay to make the base of the silo before building the silo itself. Hanan Mahmoud, hearing Hussein’s story, told me that she exposed a layer of ash deposit under a sequence of round mud brick silos when she excavated House E to the East of Queen Khentkawes tomb at Giza. We follow some of our ancestors’ daily life behaviors and customs.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Diario Djehuty

The Djehuty dig diary is in full swing for those of you speak Spanish, or are prepared to use a translation engine. Daily posts in January and February are accompanied by lovely photos.

There's also a summary, in English, of the 2011 season:
www.excavacionegipto.com/campana/nota_prensa11_ing.jsp.htm

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Ahram Online (Nevine El-Aref)

Following almost six years of construction the long-awaited Suez National Museum had its official inauguration while the city was marking one year of Egypt’s Revolution.

While some of Suez inhabitants were protesting before the Suez governorate building, there were others at the city’s national museum celebrating its official opening.

Stretching over 6,800 square metres on the bank of the Suez Canal stands the two-story pyramid shaped building of the Suez National museum, relating the story of the city throughout the ages.

In a gala opening on Sunday evening, Minister of State for Antiquities Mohamed Ibrahim officially inaugurated the museum. On display are 1500 artefacts from the prehistoric era to modern times.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Ahram Online (Nevine El-aref)

Overlooking the Aswan Nile shore, neighbouring the ancient Egyptian temple of Kom Ombo, the first ever crocodile museum in Egypt is scheduled to be opened on Tuesday.

The museum, which is dedicated to the ancient Egyptian god Sobek, displays forty mummified crocodiles, ranging from two to five metres long, as well as crocodile foetuses and eggs. Also on show is a collection of wooden and granite crocodile statues and replicas of crocodile holes in rocks.

A visitor’s centre adorned with posters will screen a documentary before entrance to the museum, as an introduction to Sobek and crocodiles in Egypt.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Manchester Museum (Campbell Price)

A really good piece, putting the label into its Abydos context. With photos and illustrations.

This small (1.8 x 1.9 cm) piece of incised bone doesn’t look like much, but it comes from one of Pharaonic Egypt’s most hallowed places. The Umm el-Qaab (Arabic for ‘Mother of Pots’) area of Abydos was the burial place of the first kings of Egypt. Abydos was sacred to later Egyptians as the cult centre of the Osiris, the god of the dead and of rebirth. Many hoped to make a pilgrimage to the site and those that did left offerings, evidenced by millions of pottery vessels – giving the area its modern Arabic name.

From as early as the Middle Kingdom (c. 2055-1650 BC), one of the early royal tombs was believed to be the actual burial place of Osiris.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

The Bolton News ()

ANCIENT Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen holds as much fascination for us as Madonna or Angelina Jolie, according to egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley.

The Bolton-based academic, who is regarded as a leading authority in the field, has just published her latest book on the famous pharaoh, Tutankhamen’s Curse, and is now starting work on a text about Nefertiti.

She said: “I’m interested in what makes people celebrities and why we are interested in them — people like Tutankhamen and Nefertiti were the celebrities of the ancient world.”

Dozens of conspiracy theories surround the death of the pharaoh, but Dr Tyldesley says she doubted that Tutankhamen was assassinated, as some believe. “It would have been an odd thing to do,” she said. “He had been on the throne for nearly 10 years when he died, and seemed to be doing a good job.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Greek Reporter (by Zdravka Mihaylova)

Interview with Alexandros Tsakos and Henriette Hafsaas-Tsakos. With photos.

Last October the Benaki Museum of Islamic Art inaugurated the photo exhibition ‘From Nubia to Sudan through the Eyes of the Greek-Norwegian Archaeological Mission’ (6 October 2011-19 February 2012). The photographs have been taken by Alexandros Tsakos and Henriette Hafsaas-Tsakos during the periods they were working as an archaeological team, traveling and living in Sudan. Their subjects concern the history of Sudan and its people, their religious cults, from the ancient and medieval civilizations of Nubia to modern Islamic Sudan.

Between 2003 and 2008, Alexandros has worked for the Merowe Dam Archaeological Salvage Project, at Jebel Barkal, and at Akad. He has organized the Greek Community of Khartoum Cultural Center “Ergamenis”. He has led the renovation of the Museum at Jebel Barkal, and was the contractor of UNESCO for the rehabilitation of the Permanent Exhibition of Medieval Antiquities in the Sudan National Museum. During 2007-2008 he worked extensively on the Medieval collection stored in the Sudan National Museum. He has published several articles on Medieval inscriptions from Nubia, the latest of which concerns the Christian inscriptions from the island of Sai.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

The Warsaw Voice

A bowl retrieved from a tomb in Thebes, scarabs and other treasures of ancient Egypt unearthed during archeological digs are on show at an exhibition at the Archeological Museum in Warsaw until the end of May.

The exhibition is entitled Papyri, Mummies, Gold… Michał Tyszkiewicz and the 150th Anniversary of Polish and Lithuanian Excavations in Egypt. Count Michał Tyszkiewicz was the first Polish explorer who focused on ancient Egypt. A century and a half ago, he found gold, papyri and mummies by the River Nile. A part of his collection was lost, while 125 of the most interesting artifacts that have survived can be now seen in Warsaw.

Tyszkiewicz’s excavations took place in Karnak, Western Thebes, the Esna area, Wadi es-Sebua (Nubia) and in Saqqara. Tyszkiewicz had astonishing success. His collection of around 800 items was added to the collection of the Louvre Museum and laid the foundations for Egyptian collections at several museums in Lithuania.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Luxor Times

Photos on the above page.

After our report of the state of the Sphinx Avenue and how it was used as a rubbish dump (Read Here) and the follow up in the last printed issue of Luxor Times (Here) and the latest announcements concerning the Avenue and the partial opening in March 2012 (More details Here), There was a slow work has been going on lately in one section of the avenue which the Minister State of Antiquities, Dr. Mohammed Ibrahim said it will be excavated and not included in the opening ceremony in March.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Al Ahram Weekly (Gamal Nkrumah)

Agnieszka Dobrowolska, a conservation architect, travels, often alone or in the company of her co-worker and architectural partner, her husband Jaroslaw Dobrowolski -- author of The Living Stones of Cairo -- to bring back intriguing tales of magnificent buildings that she often restores to a semblance of their original sublimity and resplendence. Together, they authored numerous works including Heliopolis: Rebirth of the City of the Sun.

The couple is off to Dongola, Sudan, later in February. Convivial and not averse to a witticism, with a light touch and a clear ear, she had spent at least 15 years in chronicling, conserving and restoring the architectural treasures of Egypt. As an architect, she never planned for a career in conservation. Ever since her Egyptian sojourn, her work and the rich architectural heritage of Egypt have moved in tandem with her life.

Moreover, she has a fine ear for conversation and a taste for the historical, and in particular constructions constituting or chronicling history.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

The Ramesseum

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

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.

Censer lid with portrait of a King One of 12 ceramic lids to a censer, or incense burner, that features portraits of Copan kings. Dated to circa 695 CE, it originally sat atop a large clay vessel used for burning incense. (27” tall x 16” wide x 15” diameter) Photo courtesy: Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History.

Did the Maya believe the world would end in December 2012? With MAYA 2012: Lords of Time – opening on the 5 May – the Penn Museum confronts the current fascination with the year 2012, comparing predictions of a world-transforming apocalypse with their supposed origins in the ancient Maya civilization.

Figurine of Maize God This jade figurine (2” x 4.25” x 1”), circa 541-42 CE, is from Copan, Honduras. The figurine rises from a shell, and represents the rebirth of the god of maize (corn). The story of the Maize God mirrors the cyclical planting and harvesting of maize, an essential food within Maya society. Photo courtesy: Kenneth Garrett.

MAYA 2012 leads visitors on a journey through the Maya’s time-ordered universe, expressed through their intricate calendar systems, and the power wielded by their divine kings, the astounding “lords of time.” Visitors explore the Maya world through a range of interactive experiences and walk among sculptures and full-sized replicas of major monuments while uncovering the truth behind these apocalyptic predictions.

The exhibition is presented in partnership with the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia of the Republic of Honduras. MAYA 2012 features more than 100 remarkable objects, including artefacts recently excavated by Penn Museum archaeologists at the site of Copan, Honduras, and on loan from the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia. Visitors follow the rise and fall of Copan, moving across the centuries to discover how Maya ideas about time and the calendar have changed up to the present day. Contemporary Maya speak of their own heritage and concerns for the future.

“MAYA 2012 offers visitors a rare opportunity to view spectacular examples of Classic Maya art—some of which have never before been seen outside Honduras—and delve into the Maya people’s extraordinary, layered, and shifting concepts about time,” noted Exhibition Curator Dr. Loa Traxler. “MAYA 2012: Lords of Time uncovers a history and culture far richer and more surprising than commonly supposed.”

Deer effigy vessel This ceramic vessel, circa 437 CE from the Hunal Tomb, Copan, Honduras, once held a food offering made with cacao beans, the main ingredient in chocolate. (15.5” x 18” x 10.25”) Photo courtesy: Kenneth Garrett.

Dr. Traxler, Mellon Associate Deputy Director of the Penn Museum and co-author of The Ancient Maya, (Sixth Edition, 2006), is an archaeologist who excavated at the site of Copan with Penn Museum’s Early Copan Acropolis Program (1989 through 2003). Simon Martin, Associate Curator of the Museum’s American Section and a leading Maya epigrapher, is co-curator of the exhibition.

What is the 2012 Phenomenon?

In recent years, the media have been filled with claims that the ancient Maya predicted a cataclysmic event at the end of their calendar. Some believe that a celestial alignment will bring a series of devastating natural disasters. Others argue that this event will bring enlightenment and a new age of peace. As December 2012 draws closer, new predictions continue to emerge. But what did the Maya really believe?

The Maya and their Calendar

The ancient Maya civilization has long fascinated scholars and the public alike. For 2,000 years, the Maya flourished in southern Mexico and parts of Central America, their grand cities featuring temple pyramids, palaces, ball courts, and intricately carved stone monuments bearing royal portraits and a complex hieroglyphic script. They excelled in art, architecture, astronomy, and mathematics—developing a calendar system that amazes and intrigues to this day.

The Margarita Panel, a grand, modeled-stucco building panel, measures almost 9 feet high by 12 feet wide. Discovered by a Penn Museum excavation team in the 1990s, it features the emblematic name of Copan's royal founder, K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo'. The king's name is shown as two entwined birds: a quetzal bird (k'uk') and scarlet macaw (mo'), with crest elements that spell the initial part of the name yax meaning 'first' or 'green.' Carved around 450 CE it is in remarkable condition buried deep within the Copan Acropolis. MAYA 2012 features a replica of this monumental piece in its full-colour splendour. Photo courtesy: Early Copan Acropolis Project, Penn Museum.

The exhibition invites the visitor to explore the ancient Maya’s complex, interlocking calendar systems, which were based on an advanced understanding of astronomy and the night sky. Their most elaborate system, the Long Count, encompasses trillions of years, and one of its important cycles comes to a close on 23 December, 2012 (some scholars say 21 December, 2012). This is the origin of the Maya 2012 “end of the world” phenomenon.

Copan and the Lords of Time

The ancient Maya believed that their kings were embodiments of time. At the site of Copan, Honduras, a dynasty of 16 kings ruled for nearly four centuries, from 426 to after 800 CE. Discoveries from recent excavations—including work by Penn Museum archaeologists—provide new insights and remarkable artefacts to tell the story of these lords and their unique understanding, and use, of time. Tunnelling deep under the pyramids of Copan, archaeologists uncovered the tomb of the founder of the Copan dynasty, “Radiant First Quetzal Macaw.” The exhibition features jade jewellery and sophisticated ceramic vessels that accompanied the king on his journey into the Underworld.

Teotihuacan style Vessels with Carved Decoration This pair of colourful painted vessels combines the decorative style of Central Mexico and the Maya kingdoms. Ceramic with stucco and paint (each 4.75” diameter x 11.25” tall), circa 551 CE, they come from the Sub-Jaguar Tomb at Copan, Honduras. Photo courtesy: Kenneth Garrett.

Several important artefacts too massive to travel outside Honduras have been reproduced at full scale using state-of-the-art 3D scanning technology. These include the historically significant Altar Q, the ultimate symbol of the Copan dynasty that carries portraits of all 16 kings, and the Margarita Panel, a vibrantly painted architectural panel featuring the emblematic name of Copan’s first ruler, shown as two elegantly entwined birds.

In all, 75 Classic period Maya artefacts excavated at Copan are featured. An interactive multimedia touchtable allows visitors to explore the extraordinary tunnels and tombs under the pyramids at Copan, using the actual drawings and images from the archaeologists who first uncovered them.

 

 

The massive stone monument called Altar Q presents the royal succession of 16 kings from the Classic dynasty of Copan. This view of Altar Q shows (at centre left) the founder K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo' symbolically handing a staff of office to the last successor in the Copan dynasty, a king called Yax Pahsaj Chan Yopaat. The large square altar, or throne, was commissioned by the 16th king in 776 CE. MAYA 2012 features a replica of the altar. Photo courtesy: Kenneth Garrett.

The “Lost” History of the Maya

The fall of divine kings and the abandonment of a great number of Maya cities are referred to as the Maya “Collapse.” This exhibition connects the missing pieces of the Maya story following its still mysterious decline, taking visitors to the present day. The Maya did not disappear. Today, more than seven million Maya, speaking a variety of Mayan languages, live in Central America and Mexico, with more Maya people living around the globe.

Many aspects of Maya culture were lost during the Spanish Conquest. Only four Maya books remain from this period. Two reproductions, the Dresden and Madrid Codices, are partnered with an extremely rare manuscript written just after the Conquest, revealing the extent to which Maya concepts of time were altered. Fine ethnographic textiles and 20th century folk art masks from the Penn Museum’s own collection lead the visitor to meet the Maya in the contemporary world.

Throughout the exhibition, visitors are able to “meet” experts on the ancient Maya to hear their perspectives through a series of interviews. In the final section of the exhibition, several Maya people speak for themselves, sharing their perspectives on the end of the world predictions—and on the contemporary concerns of the Maya.

TICKET AND TOUR INFORMATION for MAYA 2012: Lords of Time:

General admission timed tickets (includes admission to the rest of the Museum) for individuals are available for purchase beginning February 1, 2012.
* Adult: $22.50
* Senior (65+)/Military: $18.50
* Students (full-time with ID)/Children (6 to 17 years): $16.50

Special exhibition timed tickets may be purchased online: www.penn.museum/maya2012, or by phone: 1.888.695.0888

Source: Penn Museum

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More information:

Early Copan Acropolis Program: http://www.penn.museum/research-american-section/392-early-copan-acropolis-program.html

UNESCO page for Copan: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/129

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Participants at the Sarajevo workshop making their own pest traps for museum use. Image: Heritage Without Borders

Heritage Without Borders (HWB), a newly established social enterprise founded at UCL (University College London) adopts an innovative approach to capacity building where communities require help and support to conserve their cultural heritage.

Following the success of HWB’s recent international projects in Turkmenistan and Bosnia and Herzegovina it has now been awarded £25,000 by the Headley Trust to run a conservation summer school in Albania.

HWB matches museum and conservation professionals with people who need help to conserve, interpret and use their heritage. Through HWB communities in countries lacking heritage resources can tap into specialist skills and practical training that would otherwise be impossible to obtain due to financial and geographical constraints. Meanwhile, qualified volunteers from the UK engage in an active collaboration with their hosts which leads to an exciting exchange of ideas. This experience gives HWB volunteers an experience that radically changes their outlook and transforms their future employment opportunities.

Sarajevo summer school

In September 2011, HWB ran a conservation summer school at the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo. There were 26 attendees from Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania and Serbia, including students from the local Institute of Archaeology. The course was run by three skilled HWB volunteers, including a professional conservator (Dominica D’Arcangelo) and two conservation students from the UCL Institute of Archaeology (Nicola Harrison and Carmen Vida).

Two participants at the Sarajevo workshop presenting a condition survey to the rest of the group. Image: Heritage Without Borders

The week long course in Sarajevo gave participants the opportunity to learn about how preventive conservation is relevant to their daily work and provided practical solutions to their issues around collections care with funding and space shortages. Participants said they valued the experience of being able to meet and talk with other colleagues facing similar challenges. Likewise, HWB volunteers expressed how much they learned through their first-hand interaction with other museum professionals and university students from the participating countries.

Funding from the Headley Trust

The Headley Trust was so impressed with the success of the project in Sarajevo that they have agreed to give Heritage Without Borders funding to carry out a further summer school in Albania in 2012. This support will allow HWB to pay for accommodation, travel and subsistence for all local participants as well as for the HWB volunteer team. In addition, it is planned that additional follow-up projects will be run in regional museums. Long-term mentoring and support will also be provided through the programme.

‘Heritage Without Borders operates a unique model where collaborative problem solving, communication and cooperation provides the key to long-term sustainable solutions,” said Dominica D’Arcangelo, HWB Co-Director. “In Sarajevo we learned first-hand how building a professional network extends benefits beyond the immediate group of project participants.  It has also become apparent in HWB’s first projects that students and heritage professionals who are early in their careers value the opportunity HWB gives them to build their confidence and skills.”

Brainstorming session on the final day of the Sarajevo workshop. Image: Heritage Without Borders

Comments from summer school participants in Sarajevo Included:

“On the first day I saw how this can help me in my work… The most fun thing during this school was packing [museum objects] and using some things that I didn’t know could be used…I will also try to organise collective education for my colleagues and I hope that my knowledge that I learned here can pass to my friends and colleagues from my museum…”
Stevan Salatic, regional museum in Trebijne

“It is nice now that we [participants from the course] are close. We can collaborate more – we can exchange ideas and help each other.”
Tatjana Mijatovic, National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Source: Heritage Without Borders

Heritage Without Borders works with a partner organisation in the Balkans, Cultural Heritage Without Borders (CHwB), a Swedish non-governmental organisation working to rescue and preserve tangible and intangible cultural heritage touched by conflict, neglect or human and natural disasters.  CHwB provides invaluable guidance, administrative support and has made HWB’s work in the Balkans region possible. HWB will collaborate with CHwB on the programme in Albania.

Heritage Without Borders is a social enterprise that is currently registering for charitable status.  To operate HWB depends on grants and donations. In January 2011, HWB received a grant from UnLtd, a charity which supports social entrepreneurs.

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More information:

Heritage Without Borders Website: http://heritagewithoutborders.org/

The Headley Trust: http://www.sfct.org.uk/headley.html

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La séance du mercredi 8 février reviendra aux enjeux théoriques et pratiques de l’encodage des textes. Cette déviation par rapport au programme initial, qui prévoyait une séance sur les bases de données, nous permettra de dialoguer avec les maîtres d’œuvre de deux projets.

Enracinés l’un et l’autre dans les traditions intellectuelles des études classiques, ces projets rencontrent des questions d’une portée générale : modélisation et visualisation des inscriptions, pour le premier ; analyse du genre du commentaire, pour le second ; modes de collaboration et renouvellement des pratiques philologiques, dans les deux cas.

Voici donc le programme :

• Marion Lamé, « Représenter scientifiquement le document épigraphique dans un espace numérique » (le carnet Épigraphie en réseau donne des informations sur le travail de thèse de Marion, qui concerne « la reine des inscriptions antiques », les Res Gestae Diui Augusti, et sur sa participation aux activités de la communauté internationale EpiDoc) ;
• Bruno Bureau et Christian Nicolas, « Présentation mise à jour d’HyperDonat : pour une philologie digitale » (voir le site de ce projet collaboratif, ainsi que le carnet HyperDonat, dont l’équipe fait un usage très intéressant dans son étude du commentaire des pièces de Térence par le grammairien Donat. Les développements actuels de cette entreprise lui font aborder presque toutes les questions de l’édition savante numérique.

Au plaisir de réfléchir avec vous grâce à ces deux présentations : nous prendrons tout le temps d’interroger les intervenants et de discuter ensemble !

Review of Aram Topchyan, David the Invincible, Commentary on Aristotle's Prior Analytics: Critical Old Armenian Text with an English Translation, Introduction and Notes. Philosophia antiqua, 122. Leiden; Boston: 2010. Pp. x, 221. $138.00. ISBN 9789004187191.

Review of Michael Gagarin, Speeches from Athenian Law. The oratory of classical Greece 16. Austin: 2011. Pp. x, 396. $24.95 (pb). ISBN 9780292726383.

Wall Mile 33 from Milecastle 34

The landscape now takes on a more gentle aspect for the walker. We are also soon going to encounter the Military Road again after a long interval and it will be a close companion until we reach Newcastle. Meanwhile, the remains of the curtain wall are visible as a low mound with occasional blocks of stone poking out. Treat it gently and tread carefully. It continues like this until we reach the remains of Turret 33b (Coesike).

Turret 34b, with blocked doorway

Another of the short-lived turrets, with broad gauge footings cut away by the narrow gauge wall. Once again, the recess-filling wall is present, albeit not of the best quality workmanship, probably to enable a wall walk to cross it safely. The doorway still retains its blocking, so the turret was evidently not completely reduced upon abandonment.

The Military Road crosses the Vallum

To the south of us, the Military Road emerges from a softwood plantation to swoop across the Vallum and now keep pace with us, although still not actually on the curtain wall. We cross from walking behind the wall to walking along the berm and a field wall now sits just to the south of the curtain wall’s remains, beginning a gentle climb up towards Carraw Farm.

Milecastle 33

We proceed in this fashion until we come to Milecastle 33 (Shield-on-the-Wall), the side walls of which we have to cross, as the curtain wall is to our left and the field wall to our right.

The north gate and parts of the side walls of this long-axis milecastle are still exposed, perhaps a bit too much for those who worry about potential damage to the monument. One interesting detail to note is how excavation has changed its flora and made it stand out. Excavated in 1935–6, it usually shows as a patch of bracken, with an old spoil heap standing proud at its south-east corner (it is not generally thought good practice for archaeologists to leave their spoil heaps lying around, but it sometimes happens).

The north gate of Milecastle 33

Update:

Popular Archaeology, a new online magazine and companion website to Archaeological Digs, offers much more to readers than simply the latest dig information. Visit the site at http://popular-archaeology.com and see for yourself.

Students of archaeology and related subjects may now publish their best papers online for a global readership. See the Student Scholar Program for details.

See the latest dig postings, including archaeology field schools and job opportunities, by scrolling down below. New dig opportunities for 2012 will be posted. See below and stay connected!

There are archaeology field schools and research activities being conducted all over the world. Many archaeology excavations are conducted during the summer months; however, some are ongoing throughout the year, and some are being conducted even during the winter months in parts of the world where the climate is favorable. This weblog serves as a gateway to up-to-date information about current archaeological digs and archaeological job opportunities throughout the world. It also features special postings highlighting specific archaeological digs, and other links related to archaeology and archaeological digs.


See the new introductory website about archaeology for young people and educators: Archaeology Adventures

I was reading 4 Maccabees in Greek this evening and was reminded of this audio clip from Brian Regan:

It’s the fascinating metaphorical extensions of the word: οἶστρος.

Here’s the entry from LSJ (with integrated supplement):

οἶστρος, ὁ, gadfly, breese, prob. Tabanus bovinus, an insect which infests cattle, τὰς μέν τʼ αἰόλος οἶ. ἐφορμηθεὶς ἐδόνησεν, ὥρῃ ἐν εἰαρινῇ Od.22.300; of the fly that tormented Io, A.Supp.541 (lyr.), Pr.567 sq. (lyr.) (also called μύωψ, ib. 675, Supp.308: but the two are distd. by Arist.HA490^a20, 596^b14).

2. an insect that infests tunny-fish, prob. Brachiella thynni, ib. 557^a27, 602^a28.

3. a small insectivorous bird, perh. Sylvia trochilus, ib. 592^b22.

II. metaph., a sting, anything that drives mad, κεραυνοῦ οἶ. E.HF862; οἴστροις Ἐρινύων Id.IT1456: abs., the smart of pain, agony, S.Tr.1254.

2. any vehement desire, insane passion, Simon.36.10 P., Hdt.2.93, E.Hipp.1300, Pl.R.577e, etc.; ὄρεξις μετὰ οἴστρου καὶ ἀδημονίας Epicur.Fr.483: c. gen. objecti, κτεάνων for wealth, AP11.389 (Lucill.): generally, madness, frenzy, S.Ant.1002, E.Or.791: pl., Id.Ba.665; μανιάδες οἶ. Id.IA548 (lyr.).

3. in good sense, zeal, οἶ. εἰς πᾶν ἀγαθὸν ἔργον PMasp.3.13 (vi a.d.).

And the text from the 4 Maccabees 2.2-3:

² ταύτῃ γοῦν ὁ σώφρων Ιωσηφ ἐπαινεῖται, ὅτι διανοίᾳ περιεκράτησεν τῆς ἡδυπαθείας. ³νέος γὰρ ὢν καὶ ἀκμάζων πρὸς συνουσιασμὸν ἠκύρωσε τῷ λογισμῷ τὸν τῶν παθῶν οἶστρον.

The semantic development here is pretty great:

Physical entity of the external world: gadfly.

Metaphoric Extension (my supposition): the sight of cattle freaking out while being bit by gadflies.

Semantic Bleaching: Any sort of sharp pain or sting.

Semantic Bleaching: An apparently inexplicable pain (i.e. the gadfly isn’t seen) giving the appearance of madness.

Metaphoric Extension: An inexplicable passion giving the appearance of madness.

Semantic Bleaching: inexplicable passion extended to both positive (zeal) and negative.

Specific Instantiation in 4 Macc 2:3: Sexual desire is irrational emotion.

This sort of metaphorical phenomenon is the grounding of all language use, too. Our ability to categorize and metaphorize our experience is what grounds language in the world. But translation as it is currently done, doesn’t account for this very well (whether we’re talking about “literal” or “functional” translation). Consider the NRSV’s translation here:

vs 2-3 It is for this reason, certainly, that the temperate Joseph is praised, because by mental effort he overcame sexual desire. For when he was young and in his prime for intercourse, by his reason he nullified the frenzy of the passions.

Aside from the incredibly awkward phrasing and the generally terrible way that most translations deal with translating texts involving sex (it always feels like they’re blushing when I read them), the bigger point is that all of the semantic entailments of the metaphor are lost here. The problem is how to regain them–if that’s even possible in English. In terms of the theoretical questions, we’re getting there slowly. We haven’t yet gotten there in terms of practice. Linguists have been working on these issues of meaning for a few decades now and they’re starting to get through (I hope). It’s what Rich Rhodes was talking about when he spoke of a 4G translation.

Filed under: Cognitive Linguistics, English, Greek, Hermeneutics, Language, Lexicography, Linguistics, Translation

Shorter can be better: Case in point, Bryan Hockett has a short (five pages) paper in press in Quaternary International entitled "The consequences of Middle Paleolithic diets on pregnant Neanderthal women," and it is a must-read for anyone interested in prehistoric nutrition. In a nutshell, what he does here is consider what the hypothesized Neanderthals caloric requirements proposed by a number

 Small Demons is a new beta site dedicated to opening up the worlds inside of books by connecting all their details (people, places, and things). Small Demons is a Los Angeles based company that believes powerful and interesting things can happen when you connect all the details of books.
This site is the first step in showing what happens when you do just that.

Not just another search engine for what’s inside your favorite novel, Small Demons collects and catalogs the millions of references to real-world and fictional music, movies, people, and objects that are found in literature. Your new favorite restaurant could be on the next page of the book you’re reading, and Small Demons hopes to provide a place where you can draw meaningful connections between stories and everyday life.

See comments on Cool Hunting.

Amnesty International is asking for people to send a message to Russia not to block with it's veto a resolution going through the United Nations Security Council aimed to stop the Syrian government from it's bloodshed of peaceful demonstrators.

Please take action to help the peaceful people of Syria!!!

Photo: Zeledi

I’m leaving tomorrow morning for a workshop at the Lorentz Center at the University of Leiden focusing linguistic databases for biblical texts and languages:

Biblical Scholarship and Humanities Computing: Data Types, Text, Language and Interpretation

I’m hoping that I’ll have an opportunity to blog about it as we go, but I don’t know what things will look like until I get there. We’ll see. I’m looking forward to meeting a number of people whom I’ve only dialogued online (whether e-mail, this blog, or B-Greek).

From the description:

[T]he question to be discussed by biblical scholars and ICT specialists is: how to deal with a historically grown and changed set of literary and linguistic data? How can we analyse, store and retrieve linguistic data at the level of syntax and discourse, especially when we know that texts have been reworked and updated during the long period of their transmission?

The research question is: can one go beyond databases that just add learned annotations to linguistic knowledge? Some examples. When using the existing data base for research of ‘verbal valence patterns’ one will find patterns and functions not being present in classical lexica.

The organizing team, a collaboration by specialists in Greek texts, Hebrew texts and in data bases designed for research in the Humanities, will prepare this colloquium by debates and experiments on (1) linguistic system versus unique literary artefacts and (2) the challenges of historical change: texts, variants and ancient translations. So our aim is to start the colloquium with a presentation of some models to be discussed based on input from the various disciplines involved. After presentations of type (1) and (2) a computer specialist will react, ask questions and make proposals (3).

Filed under: Greek, Hebrew, Linguistics

On Planned Parenthood and the Komen Foundation:

A multi-year concerted effort to shut down a nonprofit for ideological reasons, one even pursued in the halls of Congress: not just fine, but applauded. A pushback against said partisan efforts? Tyranny! Villainy! Oppression! – Daily Kos

WordChorus: Searching for Patterns in Ancient Greek Texts!

 

WordChorus is a tool specifically designed to find patterns in Ancient Greek texts. Have you ever wondered how many verses in the Iliad begin with a rough breathing? Or how many words in Antigone end in the phoneme group οι, ει or αι? Do you want to count the number of accents in the Argonautica? If so, you have come to the right place!

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Εθνικό Αρχείο Διδακτορικών Διατριβών (EAΔΔ) - The National Archive of PhD Theses

Το Εθνικό Αρχείο Διδακτορικών Διατριβών (EAΔΔ) συγκεντρώνει τις διδακτορικές διατριβές που έχουν εκπονηθεί στα ελληνικά πανεπιστήμια ή σε πανεπιστήμια του εξωτερικού από Έλληνες διδάκτορες. Την ευθύνη συγκρότησης και διατήρησης του έχει το Εθνικό Κέντρο Τεκμηρίωσης (ΕΚΤ). Στο ηλεκτρονικό αποθετήριο του ΕΑΔΔ διατίθενται περισσότερες από 25.000 διδακτορικές διατριβές, με δυνατότητες αναζήτησης και πλοήγησης. 

The National Archive of PhD Theses contains the PhD theses from all Higher Education Institutions in Greece as well as PhD theses completed by Greek scholars abroad. The National Documentation Centre (EKT) is the organization responsible for the collection, development and maintenance of the National Archive of PhD Theses. The digital repository contains currently, more than 25.000 PhD Theses, available to the end-users for searching or browsing.

Πλοήγηση στο ΕΑΔΔ ανά "Επιστημονικό πεδίο" : "History and Archaeology" 

Browse Discipline Date Author Country Language Degree Grantor

The Parthenon Frieze

The Parthenon Frieze Repository repository is an organized infrastructure of digital content, that offers free access to cultural material. The repository was carried out by the National Documentation Centre (EKT) and the YSMA-Acropolis Restoration Service of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The repository provides the possibility of immediate access to the frieze, both as a database for scholars and, as digital games for schools and their pupils. The Parthenon Frieze, a unique work of art, is also presented in the website www.parthenonfrieze.gr, which utilizes new technologies to present and elevate cultural content online.

	Stone Block Numbering
	Subject
	Museum
	Frieze Sides
	Games
	Educational booklets
	About Parthenon
	About Parthenon Frieze
	Bibliography
	Glossary
	Contributors

An ebullient Anne Hawley, director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, speaking at the press preview for the expansionBy sheer good luck, my drive back home from my visit to Salem, MA (where I reviewed for the Wall Street Journal...

Allan Bevere chose my caption as the winner of his latest caption contest. Here’s the photo with my caption:

“If I speak in the tongues of penguins and of polar bears, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.”

Pictures: Civil War Sub Finally Revealed

Titre: Horace, Ars Poetica 120-219
Lieu: Université de Cambridge / Cambridge
Catégorie: Séminaires, conférences
Date: 08.02.2012
Heure: 17.15 h - 18.45 h
Description:

Infomation signalée par Jacques Elfassi

Cambridge Classics Research Seminars
Lent Term 2012
Literature Seminar

The Seminar meets on Wednesdays, 5.15 pm to 6.45 pm in Room 1.04, Faculty of Classics.


8 February

Richard Hunter

Horace, Ars Poetica 120-219

 

Source : Université de Cambridge.

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.

In a previous post, I attempted to describe folio 188r of the eleventh-century manuscript of the Iliad known as E4, in order to make some preliminary observations about the manuscript and its relationship to other Medieval manuscripts of the Iliad with scholia. It was a difficult task, even with the help of my colleagues Christopher Blackwell, Mary Ebbott, and Neel Smith. E4 has not been well studied, and it has many features that make it unlike the other manuscripts we have digitized as part of the Homer Multitext. It became clear to me as I was working on it that I could not fully appreciate 188r without understanding its facing page on the left side, folio 187v. I have now had the chance to study 187v in detail, and it has only confirmed my initial impression of the manuscript, that it is an unusual, very likely unique assemblage of text and paratexts that span multiple lines of transmission. The scholia contained on folio 187v, which comment on the text of 188r (containing Iliad 22.1–37), are particularly indicative of the unique character of E4.

Folio 187v is taken up by a hypothesis to book 22, a large selection from Porphyry, and scholia, both with and without lemmata, including comments on the text of the Iliad that is written on 188r. It should be noted from the beginning that there are two separate hands in this manuscript, which both Allen and Erbse deem to be contemporaneous. The first hand has written the hypothesis, the scholia immediately following it, and the text of the poem and paraphrase on the next folio. The second hand has written the selection from Porphyry and the scholia in the margins.

At the top of folio 187v is the excerpt from Porphyry’s Homeric Questions. The following is a transcription from Schrader’s (1880-1882) edition: 

ἠγνόησαν οἱ πολλοὶ ὅτι ἡ κλίσις παρ’ Ὁμήρῳ τὴν περιοχὴν σημαίνει, καὶ πάντα τὰ ἐσχηματισμένα ἀπ’ αὐτῆς ῥήματα, οἷον <οἱ δὲ ῥηγμῖνι θαλάσσης κεκλίαται, χώρης ὀλίγην ἔτι μοῖραν ἔχοντες>· λέγει γὰρ ὅτι περιεχόμενοι ὑπὸ τῶν Τρώων ἐπὶ ῥηγμῖνι θαλάςσης συνηλάθησαν. οὕτως λύσεις καὶ τὸ <ὣς οἱ μὲν κατὰ ἄστυ πεφυζότες ἠύτε νεβροὶ ἱδρῶ ἀπεψύχοντο πίον τ’ ἀκέοντό τε δίψαν, κεκλιμένοι καλῇσιν ἐπάλξεσιν· αὐτὰρ Ἀχαιοὶ τείχεος ἆσσον ἴσαν, σάκε’ ὤμοισι κλίναντες> (Iliad 22.1–4)· λέγει γάρ· περιεχόμενοι τῷ τείχει οἱ Τρῶες, οἱ δ’ Ἀχαιοὶ τὰ σάκη περιέχοντες τοῖς ὤμοις. καὶ τὸ <εὗρεν ἔπειτα μάχης ἐπ’ ἀριστερὰ θοῦρον Ἄρηα ἥμενον, ἠέρι δ’ ἔγχος ἐκέκλιτο καὶ ταχέ’ ἵππω> (Iliad 5.355–356) δηλοῖ περιείχετο, καὶ τὸ <κεῖθ’ ἁλὶ κεκλιμένη ἐριβώλακος ἠπείροιο> (Odyssey 13.235), κεῖται περιεχομένη. πάλιν ὡσαύτως καὶ τὸ <ὅς ῥ’ἐν Ὕλῃ ναίεσκε μέγα πλούτοιο μεμηλὼς λίμνῃ κεκλιμένος> (Iliad 5.708) δηλοῖ περιεχόμενος. καὶ τὸ <οἳ δὴ νῦν ἕαται σιγῇ, πόλεμος δὲ πέπαυται ἀσπίσι κεκλιμένοι> (Iliad 3.134–5) ἀντὶ τοῦ περιεχόμενοι ὑπὸ τῶν ἀσπίδων. γέγονε δὲ ἀπὸ τοῦ κλείω· τὸ γὰρ ἀποκλεισθὲν περιέχεται· <οὐδὲ πύλῃσιν εὗρ’ ἐπικεκλιμένας σανίδας> (Iliad 12.120). τὸ δ’ αὐτὸ παρίστησι καὶ τὸ <ἀλλ’ ἐν γὰρ Τρώων πεδίῳ πύκα θωρηκτάων πόντῳ κεκλιμένοι ἑκὰς ἥμεθα> (Iliad 14.739. 40), ἀντὶ τοῦ ὑπὸ τοῦ πόντου περιεχόμενοι.

The comment is part of a larger discussion of the meaning of the word κλίσις in Homer, and Iliad 22.1-4 is cited along with several other passages. The scribe of Ε4 saw that this passage in Porphyry was relevant to the opening lines of 22 (in which the Trojans rest by “leaning” on the walls), and so he copied it here. He links the excerpt from Porphyry to the text of the poem (on folio 188v) by means of a graphical sign, or siglum, which is reproduced in the appropriate place on the other folio. 

Next follow several scholia, written across the full length of the page. These too are connected to the text of the poem by means of sigla (more on which below). After these scholia, the hypothesis begins, with a title written in crimson ink: ὑπόθεσϊς τῆς χι ὁμήρου ῥαψωδίας. 

The hypothesis is followed by more scholia, which are contained within the same text block as the hypothesis. These scholia differ from the surrounding scholia in that they have lemmata. Very significantly, both of the scholia with lemmata recorded in this text block can also be found in A in some fashion. Let’s look at them more closely. 

First, we find in crimson ink ὅν τε κύν’ὠρίωνα followed by a lengthy mythological note, whose content is attributed to Eratosthenes, the third head of the library of Alexandria (c. 235–c. 270). The following is Heyne’s (1834) transcription of the note: 

Ὅν τε κύν’ Ὠρίωνος Τὸν ἀστρῶον κύνα οὕτως ἔφη. ἔνιοι δέ φασι τόνδε τὸν κατηστερισμένον κύνα, οὐκ Ὠρίωνος, ἀλλὰ Ἠριγόνης ὑπάρχειν, ὃν κατηστερισθῆναι διὰ τοιαύτην αἰτίαν. Ἱκάριος γένος μὲν ἦν Ἀθηναῖος ἔσχε δὲ θυγατέρα Ἠριγόνην, ἥτις κύνα νήπιον ἔτρεφε. ξενίσας δέ ποτε ὁ Ἱκάριος Διόνυσον, ἔλαβε παρ’ αὐτοῦ οἶνόν τε καὶ ἀμπέλου κλῆμα. κατὰ δὲ τὰς τοῦ θεοῦ ὑποθήκας, περιῄει τὴν γῆν προφαίνων τὴν τοῦ Διονύσου χάριν, ἔχων σὺν ἑαυτῷ καὶ τὸν κύνα. γενόμενος δὲ ἐκτὸς τῆς πόλεως, βουκόλοις οἶνον παρέσχε. οἱ δὲ ἀθρόως ἐμφορησάμενοι, οἱ μὲν εἰς βαθὺν ὕπνον ἐτράπησαν. ὀψέ τε ἐγερθέντες, καὶ νομίσαντες πεφαρμάχθαι, τὸν Ἱκάριον ἀπέκτειναν. ὁ δὲ κύων ὑποστρέψας πρὸς τὴν Ἠριγόνην, δι’ ὠρυγμοῦ ἐμήνυσεν αὐτῇ τὰ γενόμενα. ἡ δὲ μαθοῦσα τὸ ἀληθὲς, ἑαυτὴν ἀνήρτησε. νόσου δὲ ἐν Ἀθήναις γενομένης, κατὰ χρησμὸν Ἀθηναῖοι τόν τε Ἱκάριον καὶ τὴν Ἠριγόνην ἐνιαυσιαίαις ἐγέραιρον τιμαῖς. οἳ καὶ κατηστερισθέντες, Ἱκάριος μὲν Βοώτης ἐκλήθη, Ἠριγόνη δὲ παρθένος. ὁ δὲ κύων τὴν αὐτὴν ὀνομασίαν ἔσχεν. Ἱστορεῖ Ἐρατοσθένης.

This note is also found on the Venetus A manuscript, though it is not included in Erbe’s edition of the scholia (because Erbse excludes the mythological scholia or “D” scholia from his edition). It is also found in the Venetus B, but in the later, 12th or 13th century set of scholia on that manuscript. (Hence it postdates the construction of E4.) 

A potentially very significant variation is recorded in this note on E4. What is significant about this note is not actually its content, but its lemma. The reading ὅν τε κύν’ὠρίωνα does not match the corresponding text of the poem on folio 188v of E4, nor is it found in any other manuscript, all of which read κύν’ὠρίωνος (“the dog of Orion”). In fact κύν’ὠρίωνα does not make much grammatical sense, though we could take the two accusatives, somewhat awkwardly, to be in apposition to one another (“the dog, Orion”). The Venetus Α scholia, however, record another discussion of this phrase, this one about the proper division of the words:

ὅντε κύν’ ὠρίωνος ὁ Σιδώνιος ὑφ’ ἓν ἀναγινώσκει. ἄμεινον δὲ κατὰ παράθεσιν, ὅτι οἱ κύνες πολλάκις ὀνομάζονται μετὰ τῶν κτητόρων, οἷον Κέρβερος Ἅιδου, Ὄρθρος Γηρυόνου, Ἄλκαινα Ἀκταίωνος· οὕτως κύνα Ὠρίωνος. τῷ δὲ κυνηγετικὸν αὐτὸν εἶναι καὶ πλησίον κατηστέρισαν τὸν κύνα.

“The dog of Orion”: The Sidonian reads it as one [word]. But it is better to read it as two, because dogs are often named with their owners, such as Kerberos of Hades, Orthros of Geryon, Alkaina of Aktaion; likewise the dog of Orion. Inasmuch as he was fond of hunting they also made his dog in the constellation next to him. 

Dionysius Sidonius was an Aristarchean scholar who seems to have been very familiar with the methods and scholarship of Aristarchus. (See Nagy 2009: 151–152.) In this comment he seems to be arguing for a reading, perhaps known to Aristarchus, that represents κύν’ὠρίωνος as one word. The only way that such a one-word reading could work grammatically would be if the word were in the accusative case: that is to say, something like κυνωρίωνα. Is it possible that the source from which the scribe of E4 was copying his scholia with lemmata had this other reading? Could such a reading have been corrupted by the influence of the genitive in other sources, so that instead of κυνωρίωνα we find in E4 κύν’ὠρίωνα (divided into two words)? If so, E4’s lemma here would be the sole witness to preserve what seems to be an ancient variation that was being discussed in antiquity. 

The other scholion recorded in this text block, also with a lemma in crimson ink, also has an interesting link to the A manuscript. 

Εἶσϊ τὴν ἑώαν ἀνατολὴν. ἅνεισιν ἀνατέλλει.

A version of this comment is found in several other manuscripts of Homeric so-called D scholia, including the 9th century manuscript Z (= Romanus, Bibl. Naz. Centr. Gr. 6 + Matrit. B. N. 4626), but it is not in B, T, C, or Ge. In the Venetus A, however, ανεισιν ἀνατελλει is written here in semiuncial script above εἶσιν. 

Detail from folio 282v of the Venetus A

This link is now a second indication that the scholia with lemmata in E4 are drawn from a tradition with ties to the Aristarchean scholarship that we find in the Venetus A. 

In the left margin and at the bottom of the folio, surrounding the text block containing the hypothesis and these scholia are additional scholia. These scholia, like those above the hypothesis, do not contain lemmata, and are clearly drawn from other sources. The first two of these scholia are preceded by a siglum in the outer margin, while the final three are preceded by Greek numerals (in the form of letters of the alphabet). The numbered scholia correspond to the numbered scholia in B, E3, and C. The scholia connected to the text with sigla contain material from the so-called “D” scholia. These scholia can also often found in B, but in the second, later hand of B. 

It is clear that the E4 brings together many different sources, which are used selectively and in combination. This is significant because it shows us that the Homeric scholia and other Homeric paratexts cannot be easily defined or placed in a neat stemma. Scribes clearly had a variety of sources available to choose from when constructing a manuscript. We should likewise assume that the text of the Iliad itself was collated in various ways as each manuscript was constructed.  While many scribes may have simply copied an exemplar, we know that they often compared what they were copying to other exemplars and made changes, or else recorded variations in the margins. This practice is especially clear in the Venetus A (on which see Allen 1889). In its text and scholia E4 may well preserve vestiges of the scholarly controversies of antiquity that survive nowhere else.

References cited in this post

Allen, T.W. 1899. “On the Composition of Some Greek Manuscripts: The Venetian Homer.” Journal of Philology 26: 161-181.

Allen, T. W. 1931a. Homeri Ilias  I-III. Oxford.

Dué, C., ed. 2009.  Recapturing a Homeric Legacy: Images and Insights from the Venetus A Manuscript of the Iliad. Cambridge, MA and Washington, DC.

Erbse, H., ed. 1969-1988. Scholia Graeca in Homeri Iliadem I-VII. Berlin.

Heyne, C. G., ed. 1834. Homeri Ilias cum brevi annotatione curante C.G. Heyne; accedunt scholia minora passim emendata, necnon Heraclidis Allegoriae Homericae. Oxford.

Nagy, G. 2009. “Traces of an Ancient System of Reading Homeric Verse in the Venetus A.” In Dué 2009a: 133–158.

Schrader, H., ed. 1880-1882. Porphyrii quaestionum Homericarum ad Iliadem pertinentium reliquiae. Leipzig.

 National Iranian American Council (NIAC) has posted the following:

Alert: Persepolis Tablets Threatened By Senate Sanctions Bill

A Senatecommittee voted yesterday to make it easier for individuals to seize and auctionoff priceless ancient Persian antiquities held by American museums anduniversities in order to collect court judgments against the Iranian government. Already, lawyers are in court trying to seize the Persepolis Tablets – priceless2,500 year-old artifacts that provide a unique first-hand account of life inthe Persian Empire under Darius the Great. If this proposal becomes law, the Persepolis Tablets are almost certainto be confiscated from the universities and museums and sold to the highest bidders.
The Persepolis Tablets are a part of our rich heritage that shouldcontinue to be shared at museums and universities, not auctioned off like cheapitems on eBay. 

Takeaction now to protect our heritage!
Thisproposal by Senator Menendez (D-NJ) will soon be considered by the full Senate aspart of its latest Iran sanctions bill – which builds on the broad Central Bankof Iran sanctions spearheaded by Senator Menendez just last December. This is perhaps one of the starkest examples yet of how broad sanctions punishordinary Iranians and Iranian Americans, not the Iranian government. 

With the Iranian people facingunprecedented repression at home and economic warfare from abroad, we muststand united against collective punishment and the looting of our veryheritage.

The Iranian government has harmed manyinnocent lives, and its victims should receive just compensation.  But wemust be able to protect the rights of victims without attacking our Iranianheritage.

Takeaction now to stop Congress from looting our history!
NIAC has led the Iranian-Americancommunity’s efforts to protect the Tablets, fighting in the courts, theCongress, and even the White House to protect them. In order to permanentlysecure these and all other priceless Persian artifacts under threat, NIAC hascalled on Congress to change the law to protect all cultural artifacts held byAmerican museums and universities so our heritage will never again come underattack

Persepolis in Pleiades http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/922695

Institut du Monde Arabe Bibliothèque Numérique

Oeuvrant en faveur de l'établissement de ponts entre les cultures arabe et européenne, l'Institut du Monde Arabe poursuit énergiquement sa mission visant à introduire et diffuser électroniquement la culture arabe en Europe. Ainsi, le partenariat privilégié entre la Bibliotheca Alexandrina et l'Institut du Monde Arabe, a abouti à la création d'une bibliothèque numérique de plus de 1166 ouvrages et 19 titres de périodiques tombés dans le domaine publique mis à la disposition des étudiants, des chercheurs et des internautes du monde entier.


Afin de donner accès à la connaissance à tous et de combler le fossé culturel entre les nations, la préservation de la riche collection de la bibliothèque de l'Institut du Monde Arabe a été effectuée pour servir aux générations à venir ; et ce, en recourant à l'expertise de la Bibliotheca Alexandrina en matière de numérisation. La collection a été déjà numérisée et mise en ligne via une interface conviviale dotée des outils de navigation et des facilités de recherche nécessaires.

Books

• Art (70)
• Généralités (48)
• Histoire et géographie (439)
• Linguistique (119)
• Littérature (199)
• Philosophie (21)
• Religion (179)
• Sciences appliquées, Médecine, Technologie (37)
• Sciences exactes, Sciences naturelles (21)
• Sciences sociales (39)

Journals

• Le Monde arabe dans la recherche scientifique : MARS (10)
• Revue Africaine (67)
• Revue Tunisienne (94)
• أبولو (9)
• الأديب (7)
• الجنان (12)
• الرواية (8)
• الزهراء (2)
• الزهور (4)
• الشهاب (2)
• المعرض (16)
• المقتبس (4)
• المقتطف (128)
• الموسيقى (1)
• جريدة أبي نظارة (10)
• مجلة الرسالة (36)
• مجلة الضياء (8)
• مجلة المعهد الطبى العربى (20)
• مجلة سيركيس (4)

Detail of Apulian loutrophoros. Gift of Mr & Mrs C.W. Sahlman.

I am grateful to Todd Smith, Executive Director of the Tampa Museum of Art, for clarifying which item in the collection is linked to Edoardo Almagià. The piece is an Apulian loutrophoros attributed to the White Sakkos painter acquired in 1987 from a private collector (inv. 1987.037). The private collector is reported to have purchased the pot from Almagià.

An Apulian loutrophoros features in an article by Michael Padgett ("A modern delight at the Tampa Museum of Art", Tampa Bay Magazine January / February 1991, 29-31 [p. 30]).  It is recorded as the gift of Mr & Mrs C.W. Sahlman.

Tampa also holds pieces from the Keros haul of Cycladic figures. They, too, are derived from the Sahlman family.

I've been following Roy Zimmerman's output of musical satire since his 2004 album Faulty Intelligence, and I was certainly not disappointed by the recent You're Getting Sleepy. The CD's title is shared with the opening song and refers to the hypnosis that must be going on when half of the US electorate votes for the increasingly insane Republican Party. (Remember, Mitt Romney is their low-key, sensible and uncontroversial alternative!) As resident of a country whose entire spectrum of mainstream politics lies to the Left of Barack Obama, I of course have no problem with Zimmerman's stance. But nor do I really need to have my anti-Conservative flame fanned. I listen to Zimmerman for his razor wit and his musicianship.

These qualities are particularly in evidence on the blues tune "The Unions Are To Blame", the slickly soulful "Citizens United" (I had to look that up) and the country send-up "I'm So Friggin' Country". Zimmerman knows his Americana styles and moves effortlessly among them, which makes for nice variety. I sometimes feel bad for him when he lavishes this kind of attention on a topic that will only be notable and comprehensible for a few years ("Mister Bush Sends His Regrets"), but such of course is the nature of political satire. It buys a hard punch in the present at the price of a short shelf life.

So Dear US Reader: if you have a chance, definitely catch a Roy Zimmerman gig when he plays in your state! He's touring all 52 of them during the run-up to the presidential election. And everybody else, buy the album!

Read the comments on this post...

Targuman Christian Brady tells us of a new Unicode typeface from Brill. It is really quite lovely and has great support for diacritical marks and Greek. Two things stopped me from adopting it as Abnormal Interest's official typeface. First it has no support for Hebrew or Arabic. Second, and more vexing, the more I considered using it, the more I thought I should charge my read(s) $2.00 or $3.00 per post or perhaps $1000.00 for access to the site!

And there is another problem with Brill’s font. It doesn’t seem to support Unicode &#x1f4a9;. Not sure what that is? Check it out at Boing Boing.

Forensic Sci Int Genet. 2012 Jan 30. [Epub ahead of print]

An investigation of admixture in an Australian Aboriginal Y-chromosome STR database.

Taylor D, Nagle N, Ballantyne KN, van Oorschot RA, Wilcox S, Henry J, Turakulov R, Mitchell RJ.

Abstract

Y-chromosome specific STR profiling is increasingly used in forensic casework. However, the strong geographic clustering of Y haplogroups can lead to large differences in Y-STR haplotype frequencies between different ethnicities, which may have an impact on database composition in admixed populations. Aboriginal people have inhabited Australia for over 40,000 years and until ∼300 years ago they lived in almost complete isolation. Since the late 18th century Australia has experienced massive immigration, mainly from Europe, although in recent times from more widespread origins. This colonisation resulted in highly asymmetrical admixture between the immigrants and the indigenes. A State jurisdiction within Australia has created an Aboriginal Y-STR database in which assignment of ethnicity was by self-declaration. This criterion means that some males who identify culturally as members of a particular ethnic group may have a Y haplogroup characteristic of another ethnic group, as a result of admixture in their paternal line. As this may be frequent in Australia, an examination of the extent of genetic admixture within the database was performed. A Y haplogroup predictor program was first used to identify Y haplotypes that could be assigned to a European haplogroup. Of the 757 males (589 unique haplotypes), 445 (58.8%) were identified as European (354 haplotypes). The 312 non-assigned males (235 haplotypes) were then typed, in a hierarchical fashion, with a Y-SNP panel that detected the major Y haplogroups, C-S, as well as the Aboriginal subgroup of C, C4. Among these 96 males were found to have non-Aboriginal haplogroups. In total, ∼70% of Y chromosomes in the Aboriginal database could be classed as non-indigenous, with only 169 (129 unique haplotypes) or 22% of the total being associated with haplogroups denoting Aboriginal ancestry, C4 and K* or more correctly K(xL,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S). The relative frequencies of these indigenous haplogroups in South Australia (S.A.) were significantly different to those seen in samples from the Northern Territory and Western Australia. In S.A., K* (∼60%) has a much higher frequency than C4 (∼40%), and the subgroup of C4, C4(DYS390.1del), comprised only 17%. Clearly admixture in the paternal line is at high levels among males who identify themselves as Australian Aboriginals and this knowledge may have implications for the compilation and use of Y-STR databases in frequency estimates.

Link

NYT: Rabbi admits Torah tales were a fraud - US news - The New York Times - msnbc.com:

For years Rabbi Menachem Youlus, a self-described “Jewish Indiana Jones,” received plaudits from those captivated by his stories of traveling to Eastern Europe and beyond to search for historic Torahs that were lost or hidden during the Holocaust.

I've covered calling "bull" on Menachem Youlous here and here ...

The JISC-funded OAPEN-UK (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) project have published a report on the first round of focus groups, held in the British Library late last year. Various groups of stakeholders (in this case academics who author research material) were brought together to discuss issues surrounding open access monograph publication. The conclusions and recommendations are perhaps less radical (or more practical?) than some discussions of open publication in this venue, but the report still raises some valuable issues. (Full disclosure, I participated in this session.)

The report can be found at: http://oapen-uk.jiscebooks.org/research-findings/y1-initial-focus-groups/authors-readers/

Because of the bereavement, I’m still having difficulty concentrating on anything, and this has very odd effects if you are sat at home, as I am. 

I can’t do anything work related, or indeed anything leisure related either.  I just don’t want to.  It helps if I make myself go out and post a parcel (as I did this afternoon — a copy of the Eusebius book), but otherwise I just sit here.  I’ve no energy.  I don’t care about my projects at all.  Things that are ordinarily of interest leave me cold.  I can’t read many books at all.

It doesn’t help that it’s cold out with snow threatened.  That doesn’t motivate me to go and see friends who knew her.  Not when I might be stuck in a snowdrift.

There’s nothing for me to do, no-one to talk to, and it’s rather like being on Mars.  Very spacey-feeling.

The sunlight drifts through the window, but I don’t care.  Ordinarily I would travel out somewhere, but I don’t care enough to do so.

It seems to be important to make sure you eat properly.  I don’t seem to be hungry a lot of the time.  But you feel a lot more upset if you feel tired or haven’t eaten, it seems.  So … food must be consumed.

I find that things are getting deferred that I ordinarily would deal with immediately. 

I can’t listen to sad songs, and indeed what I can listen to is somewhat limited.

I get waves of pain, lasting 1-3 minutes, in which I can do nothing except walk around the house, saying her name and just hurting.  Then it goes.  At other times I just feel flat.  The pain has been increasing for a while, curiously, but my feeling is that the underlying trend is upward. 

It has helped a lot to get a short book on bereavement.  It indicates some of what I can expect, which is rather helpful.

It’s also helped to have a set of photographs of her, which I begged from people who knew her at college.  It’s only a few, but that’s probably all there ever were; there are none at all of me from my college days, not that I recall.  You didn’t think of it, in those halcyon days.  You would always be young, you thought.  Of course seeing the photos brings pain, but it is a good pain. 

I took the digital images — scanned – down to Boots on a memory stick and had them printed out on the 1 hr service, and they came out fine.  I’ve looked at them a lot.

Talking to some people helps too.  I have had some awful regrets; but talking to a college friend, it seems he was no more successful at that age with the girls than I was, and he tried a lot harder!  So I am freed from wondering what would have happened if I had tried harder, and that does help. 

The main thing seems to be to construct a narrative of her life, to come to terms with it, and to accept that she had a good life and is gone, but that I shall see her again.  How the unbelievers manage without that last bit I do not know.

All very weird, this stuff.  God, very kindly, has given me space to grieve, time when I don’t have to be working.  Praise Him.

GEPHYRA 8, 2011.

Il cosiddetto «Ciprominoico 2»: Una decifrazione possibile? – Matilde Serangeli
At the current state of the studies concerning the decipherment of the so–called «Cypro–Minoan»…

Eumenes II and Apollonioucharax – Peter Thonemann
This article presents a revised edition of an important new Hellenistic document from Lydia,…

Three new sarcophagi from Kios (Gemlik) – Enver Sağır, Hüseyin Uzunoğlu, Koncagül Hançer
Three sarcophagi (Fig. 2) dated to the Roman Imperial Period were recently unearthed in Gemlik…

The funerary inscription of Gaius Tarquitius – Konrad Stauner
This article presents a fragmentary inscription of a Roman soldier named Gaius Tarquitius …

Parerga zum Stadiasmus Patarensis (5): STR 59 und Daseia von Bonda – Sencer Şahin
The road between Myra and Limyra (STR 59) was not built along the coast, …

Parerga to the Stadiasmus Patarensis (6): Route 54 (Patara – Phellos) and new inscriptions – Fatih Onur, Mehmet Alkan
In the field survey of the Stadiasmus Patarensis (SP) in 2009, the route between Patara and Phellos …

Parerga to the Stadiasmus Patarensis (7): New inscriptions from the territory of Phellos – Hüseyin Uzunoğlu, Erkan Taşdelen
Some results of the 2010 survey conducted in Central Lycia within the framework of the Stadiasmus …

Parerga to the Stadiasmus Patarensis (8): On the named places in the journeys of sacrifice recorded in the Vita of Saint Nicholas of Holy Sion – Mehmet Alkan
This paper aims to determine the route taken by Nicholas of Holy Sion in his journeys of sacrifice …

Iulius Tarius Titianus, Proconsul of Lycia et Pamphylia – Nuray Gökalp
The inscription presented here was found in a quarter of Antalya and contains an honorary decree …

A Revised Gravestone from Pisidian Apollonia – Asuman Coşkun Abuagla
A gravestone from Pisidian Apollonia, published, with mistakes, by Sterrett, has been revised …

Zu Inschriften aus Kleinasien II – Thomas Corsten
This article proposes thoughts and corrections to three inscriptions…

An interpretation of some unpublished in situ and recorded Rum Seljuk 13th c. external and internal figural relief work on the Belkıs (Aspendos) Palace, Antalya – Terrance Michael Patrick Duggan
This article is divided into four parts. Firstly, it notes the precedent provided by the conversion…

There’s really only one thing you can do with a book: read it. You can learn from it, cite it or feel that your life has been changed by it, but you can’t directly reuse it (well, apart from making it an
accessory piece of furniture, but that doesn’t make use of the contents of the book). One of the distinctive differences of digital scholarship is that, if it is well designed, it can be used for purposes the original author may not have foreseen. The original author may even discover unintended reuse for digital work, as I did recently.

I had been working on an image service using a URN notation to retrieve and view images of the famous Archimedes Palimpsest. Using a URN like

urn:cite:hmt:chsimg.081v–088r_Arch03v_Sinar_pseudo_no-veil

the service lets you do things like

• Retrieve a binary image at a given size. . This is bifolio 81v–88r at 50 pixels wide.
• 
  Retrieve a region of interest . This extracts from the same image a region with a mathematical figure, the construction of Archimedes, Floating Bodies 1.proposition.1
• open a pannable/zoomable version of the image in a web browser, either with or without a highlighted region of interest. Try these two links to the same bifolio illustrated in the static images above:
  
  1. with no highlighted region
  2. including highlighting of the mathematical figure

For a course I taught in English translation, I put together a text service, allowing you to retrieve passages of text by canonical reference. With a URN like this

urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0552.tlg008.chs03:1.proposition.1

the service lets you retrieve archival XML source for a passage. This request gets the XML source for Archimedes, Floating Bodies, postulate 1 — not necessarily a thing of beauty to the casual reader of Archimedes. But it’s trivial to associate an XSLT stylesheet to format the archival XML for reading in a browser, so here is the same passage associated with stylesheet for easy reading.

At some point, the penny dropped, and I realized it would also be trivial to mash up the two services. When I started work on the image service, I had not imagined that the digital images of the Greek palimpsest would be of any interest to Greekless readers of Archimedes, but the mathematical figures in the manuscript are extremely important even if you’re reading Thomas Heath’s public-domain English translation.

A minor addition to the XSLT stylesheet uses the markup indicating the presence of canonically identified figures in Heath’s translation to embed references to the image service.

Try this view of book 1, proposition 1, where any reader (Greek scholar or not) now gets to follow the text in Heath’s translation together with images in the only surviving Greek manuscript of Floating Bodies. Images of regions are embedded in the text, and are linked to the zoomable view of the whole bifolio.

London Arts Picks:

Culture Concierge
What we love in London
03.03.2012

London is one of the cultural capitals of the world, so there is always a great deal to see and do. We're here to help you navigate through the almost overwhelming choices by presenting our top picks. This week it's what we love that's on in London.

Next week we'll be looking at archaeology and the ancient world.
Future emails will provide city guides to Istanbul and Venice, as well as regular London arts picks.

Une conférence d’Anne Lehoërff à la MESHS (Lille).

La Maison européenne des sciences de l’homme et de la société de Lille propose une conférence d’Anne Lehoërff, Maître de conférences en protohistoire européenne à l’université Lille 3, consacrée à l’Âge du bronze dans l’espace Manche-Mer du Nord le mercredi 8 février 2012 à 18h00.

L’Âge du bronze désigne une longue période comprise entre 2 200 et 800 avant J.-C. Dans les actuelles régions du Nord-Pas-de-Calais, des Flandres, du sud de l’Angleterre, vivent alors des sociétés de l’oralité, qui n’ont pas laissé de textes mais de nombreux vestiges matériels, témoins de leurs modes de vie, leurs pratiques religieuses, leurs connaissances techniques. Ce sont donc les archéologues qui écrivent leur histoire. Longtemps mal connue, assez peu développée, l’archéologie de ces périodes hautes a été marquée par un dynamisme sans précédent durant les vingt dernières années, en particulier grâce aux découvertes faites dans le cadre de l’archéologie préventive, celles qui sont réalisées pour la construction des routes, des lotissements, des espaces industriels, etc. L’archéologie est le plus souvent nourrie de découvertes modestes mais que les chercheurs d’aujourd’hui sont à même d’exploiter pour décrire l’environnement du quotidien, les milieux, le type de végétation, de cultures, d’alimentation, y compris pour des populations si anciennes.

L’archéologie est parfois faite, aussi, de belles découvertes. Ainsi, en 1992, dans le port de Douvres (Angleterre) fut mis au jour l’un des plus vieux bateaux maritimes connus, daté de 1550 avant notre ère, en plein Âge du bronze. Ce bateau, pièce maîtresse de l’histoire maritime, servait à des liaisons régulières de part et d’autre de la Manche et de la Mer du Nord, sur un trajet reliant Douvres vers Wissant ou ses environs. Les études des archéologues qui travaillent en collaboration dans ces régions soulignent un fait étonnant : la mer que nous percevons aujourd’hui comme une barrière était à l’époque un espace d’échanges et les frontières n’étaient pas sur les côtés mais dans les terres, à l’arrière de l’espace côtier. Où se situaient-elles ? Comment peut-on les appréhender à partir des données archéologiques ?

L’enjeu, derrière une histoire à si grande échelle, est de porter la réflexion sur les fondements à la fois historiques et géographiques de ce que nous nommons aujourd’hui l’Eurorégion.

Anne Lehoërff est Maître de conférences à l’université Lille 3. Auteur d’un ouvrage portant sur l’artisanat du bronze en Italie centrale entre 1200-725 avant notre ère (École française de Rome, 2007) [voir notice], elle a publié récemment « L’Âge du bronze est-il une période historique ? » dans l’ouvrage dirigé par Dominique Garcia, L’Âge du bronze en Méditerranée : recherches récentes (Errance, 2011) [voir notice] ainsi qu’un ouvrage d’entretien avec Jean Guilaine (Actes Sud, 2011) [voir notice]. Elle a également participé au Guide des méthodes de l’archéologie aux éditions La découverte [voir notice] et a dirigé l’ouvrage Construire le temps : histoire et méthodes des chronologies et calendriers des derniers millénaires avant notre ère en Europe occidentale dans la collection « Bibracte » (2008) [voir notice].

Anne Lehoërff est coordinatrice du projet « Boat 1550 BC », Projet INTERREG IV A « 2 Mers Seas Zeeën », qui permettra, autour de la reconstitution à l’échelle ½ du bateau retrouvé à Douvres, une exposition itinérante (accompagnée d’un catalogue), des conférences, des colloques, ainsi qu’un ensemble d’actions pédagogiques. Renseignements sur « Boat 1550 BC » sur le site de la MESHS.

Pour information

Conférence « L’Âge du bronze dans l’espace Manche-Mer du Nord : le regard de l’archéologie », le mercredi 8 février à 18h00 la MESHS : Espace Baïetto, 2, rue des Canonniers, Lille. Y aller. Renseignements de l’annonce sur le site de la MESHS.

ΔΕΛΤΙΟN ΤΗΣ ΧΡΙΣΤΙΑΝΙΚΗΣ ΑΡΧΑΙΟΛΟΓΙΚΗΣ ΕΤΑΙΡΕΙΑΣ  - Deltion of the Christian Archaeological Society
ISSN: 1105-5758

  Χριστιανική Αρχαιολογική Εταιρεία (ΧΑΕ) με ιδιαίτερη χαρά ανακοινώνει την έναρξη λειτουργίας της ηλεκτρονικής έκδοσης του ΔΕΛΤΙΟΥ ΤΗΣ ΧΡΙΣΤΙΑΝΙΚΗΣ ΑΡΧΑΙΟΛΟΓΙΚΗΣ ΕΤΑΙΡΕΙΑΣ (Δελτίον). Οι εξελίξεις στον τρόπο επιστημονικής εργασίας και δημοσίευσης των αποτελεσμάτων της έρευνας μας οδήγησαν στην απόφαση, συγχρόνως με την έντυπη έκδοση του Δελτίου που εκδόθηκε για πρώτη φορά το 1892, να προχωρήσουμε σε παράλληλη ηλεκτρονική έκδοση προσφέροντας στους ερευνητές και το ευρύτερο κοινό εύκολη πρόσβαση, μέσω του διαδικτύου, στο περιεχόμενο του Δελτίου. Η ηλεκτρονική έκδοση του περιοδικού υλοποιείται σε συνεργασία με το Εθνικό Κέντρο Τεκμηρίωσης (ΕΚΤ).

The Christian Archaeological Society (ChAE) is pleased to announce the launch of the online edition of the Deltion of the Christian Archaeological Society (Deltion). The developments in research and scholarly communication have led to the decision to publish an online edition of the Deltion alongside the print edition, which began in 1892. The online edition facilitates access to the content of the Deltion for scholars and the wider public. The electronic publication of the journal is carried out in collaboration with the National Documentation Centre (EKT)

2006

Δελτίον XAE 27 (2006), Περίοδος Δ'. Στη μνήμη του Νικολάου Β. Δρανδάκη (1925-2004)

2005

Δελτίον ΧΑΕ 26 (2005), Περίοδος Δ'. Στη μνήμη του Γεωργίου Γαλάβαρη (1926-2003)

2003

Δελτίον ΧΑΕ 24 (2003), Περίοδος Δ'. Στη μνήμη του Νίκου Οικονομίδη (1934-2000)

2004

Δελτίον ΧΑΕ 25 (2004), Περίοδος Δ'

2002

Δελτίον ΧΑΕ 23 (2002), Περίοδος Δ'

2001

Δελτίον ΧΑΕ 22 (2001), Περίοδος Δ'. Στη μνήμη του Μανόλη Χατζηδάκη (1909-1998)

2000

Δελτίον XAE 21 (2000), Περίοδος Δ'

1999

Δελτίον XAE 20 (1998), Περίοδος Δ'. Στη μνήμη του Δημητρίου Ι. Πάλλα (1907-1995)

1997

Δελτίον XAE 19 (1996-1997), Περίοδος Δ'

1995

Δελτίον XAE 18 (1995), Περίοδος Δ'

1994

Δελτίον XAE 17 (1993-1994), Περίοδος Δ'. Στη μνήμη της Ντούλας Μουρίκη (1934-1991)

1992

Δελτίον XAE 16 (1991-1992), Περίοδος Δ'. Στη μνήμη του André Grabar (1896-1990)

1991

Δελτίον XAE 15 (1989-1990), Περίοδος Δ'

1989

Δελτίον XAE 14 (1987-1988), Περίοδος Δ'

1988

Δελτίον XAE 13 (1985-1986), Περίοδος Δ'. Στη μνήμη του Μαρίνου Καλλιγά (1906-1985)

1986

Δελτίον XAE 12 (1984), Περίοδος Δ'. Στην εκατονταετηρίδα της Χριστιανικής Αρχαιολογικής Εταιρείας (1884-1984)

1983

Δελτίον XAE 11 (1982-1983), Περίοδος Δ'. Στη μνήμη του Αναστασίου Κ. Ορλάνδου (1887-1979)

1981

Δελτίον XAE 10 (1980-1981), Περίοδος Δ'. Στη μνήμη του Ανδρέα Γρηγ. Ξυγγόπουλου (1891-1979)

1979

Δελτίον XAE 9 (1977-1979), Περίοδος Δ'. Στη μνήμη της Μαρίας Γεωργίου Σωτηρίου (1888-1979)

1976

Δελτίον XAE 8 (1975-1976), Περίοδος Δ'. Στη μνήμη του Βίκτωρα Λάζαρεφ (1897-1976)

1974

Δελτίον XAE 7 (1973-1974), Περίοδος Δ'. Στη μνήμη του Anatole Frolow (1906-1972)

1972

Δελτίον XAE 7 (1970-1972), Περίοδος Δ'. Στη μνήμη του Παναγιώτη Μιχελή (1903-1969)

1969

Δελτίον XAE 5 (1969), Περίοδος Δ'. Στη μνήμη του Δημητρίου Ευαγγελίδη (1888-1959)

1966

Δελτίον XAE 4 (1964-1965), Περίοδος Δ'. Στη μνήμη του Γεωργίου Α. Σωτηρίου (1881-1965)

1964

Δελτίον XAE 3 (1962-1963), Περίοδος Δ'

1962

Δελτίον XAE 2 (1960-1961), Περίοδος Δ'

1960

Δελτίον XAE 1 (1959), Περίοδος Δ'. Στη μνήμη του Νίκου Βέη (1883-1958)

List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies

TOTEM: The University of Western Ontario Anthropology Journal
ISSN (Print): 1203-8830
ISSN (Online): 1925-8542

TOTEM is a peer-reviewed, student-run journal of anthropology published annually in association with the Anthropology Society and the Department of Anthropology at The University of Western Ontario (U.W.O). TOTEM is currently on its 20th volume; the first volume was published in 1994. 2010-2011 was the first year TOTEM published online through the Scholarship@Western initiative, and 2011-2012 will be the first year we move to an online submission system. 2011-2012 will also be the first year that TOTEM will be selecting one student submission for an Editor's Recognition Award.


TOTEM’s mandate is to publish exceptional works of creative and original research by undergraduate and graduate students in any of the four sub-fields of anthropology including socio-cultural anthropology, archaeology, biological/physical anthropology, and linguistics. TOTEM is dedicated to providing a forum for undergraduates and graduate students in anthropology to present and discuss their work with their peers. Due to anthropology’s interdisciplinary nature, we invite students from other disciplines and institutions to submit papers of value or interest to anthropology and anthropologists.


Our editorial board consists of two Anthropology Department graduate students that are elected to act as co-editors, and our reviewers are drawn from all four fields of anthropology. This year’s co-editors are Andrew Wade, a bioarchaeologist in the fourth year of his PhD program, and Jennifer Morgan, a bioarchaeologist in the third year of her PhD program.


Additionally, we have a large number of peer-reviewers from the undergraduate and graduate Anthropology Department that change every year. We work in conjunction with the undergraduate Anthropology Society at UWO, and have future plans to work with the newly formed Western Anthropology Graduate Society.


TOTEM is also pleased to feature the artwork of David Kanatawakhon-Maracle.

Volume 19 (2011)

Issue 1

Volume 18 (2010)

Issue 1

Volume 17 (2009)

Issue 1

Volume 16 (2008)

Issue 1

Volume 15 (2007)

Issue 1

Volume 14 (2006)

Issue 1

Volume 13 (2005)

Issue 1

Volume 12 (2004)

Issue 1

Volume 11 (2003)

Issue 1

Volume 10 (2002)

Issue 1

Volume 9 (2001)

Issue 1

Volume 8 (2000)

Issue 1

Volume 7 (1999)

Issue 1

Volume 3 (1997)

Issue 1

Issue 2

Volume 2 (1995)

Issue 1

Volume 1 (1994)

List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies

This second episode of the Patrick Troughton era, “The Highlanders” witnessed the arrival of a companion who would be with the Second Doctor throughout the rest of his stint: Jamie McCrimmon. This episode also witnessed something that William Hartnell had done, but which Patrick Troughton did much more comically: impersonations and disguises.

The episode featured strong female characters, eschewing the tendency of much science fiction (from which Doctor Who itself has not been immune) to have female characters provide shrieking reactions to monsters and people who find themselves captured or in danger and wait for males to come and rescue them. Even in the few years since the show’s beginning, one can see how the show reflects more progressive gender attitudes.

Listening to the episode, I found myself wondering how viewers in England and Scotland felt about its treatment of war between the two nations. Was this controversial territory, I wonder? If this episode had the potential to be controversial in one notoriously touchy area, namely politics and the history of conflicts between peoples and territories, the next will offer criticism of religion in a manner that seems to me to be unprecedented in the show’s history.

This special double-issue on the deep history of rice in Asia has just appeared in print, with a number of contributions deriving from the multi-disciplinary international symposium “Rice and Language Across Asia: Crops, Movement, and Social Change,” recently held at Cornell University, in Ithaca, on Sept. 22-25, 2011 (see http://conf.ling.cornell.edu/riceandlanguage/). The authors come from a variety of disciplines, including archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, genetics, and more:

Rice (ISSN 1939-8425), Volume 4, Numbers 3-4 / December 2011. Special Issue: “Rice and Language Across Asia: Crops, Movement, and Social Change.”
Guest Editors: Magnus Fiskesjö and Yue-ie Caroline HSING
Table of Contents: http://www.springerlink.com/content/1939-8425/4/3-4/

Preface: “Rice and Language Across Asia”, by Magnus Fiskesjö and Yue-ie Caroline Hsing, pp. 75-77

Pathways to Asian Civilizations: Tracing the Origins and Spread of Rice and Rice Cultures, by Dorian Q. Fuller, pp. 78-92

The Checkered Prehistory of Rice Movement Southwards as a Domesticated Cereal—from the Yangzi to the Equator, by Peter Bellwood, pp. 93-103

Millets, Rice, Social Complexity, and the Spread of Agriculture to the Chengdu Plain and Southwest China, by Jade d’Alpoim Guedes, pp. 104-113

Rice in Thailand: The Archaeobotanical Contribution, by Cristina Castillo, pp. 114-120

How Many Independent Rice Vocabularies in Asia?, by Laurent Sagart, pp. 121-133

Proto-Tibeto-Burman Grain Crops, by David Bradley, pp. 134-141

Rice in Dravidian, by Franklin Southworth, pp. 142-148

Northeast Asian Linguistic Ecology and the Advent of Rice Agriculture in Korea and Japan, by John Whitman, pp. 149-158

A Genetic Focus on the Peopling History of East Asia: Critical Views, by Alicia Sanchez-Mazas, Da Di and María Eugenia Riccio, pp. 159-169

Evaluation of Genetic Variation Among Wild Populations and Local Varieties of Rice, by Takashige Ishii, Takashi Hiraoka, Tomoyuki Kanzaki, Masahiro Akimoto and Rieko Shishido, et al., pp. 170-177

Studies on Ancient Rice—Where Botanists, Agronomists, Archeologists, Linguists, and Ethnologists Meet, by Jaw-shu Hsieh, Yue-ie Caroline Hsing, Tze-fu Hsu, Paul Jen-kuei Li and Kuang-ti Li, et al., pp. 178-183

The Origin and Spread of Early-Ripening Champa Rice: Its Impact on Song Dynasty China, by Randolph Barker, pp. 184-186

Discussant’s Remarks: Reviving Ethnology to Understand the Rice Neolithic, by Richard A. O’Connor, pp. 187-189

(via Magnus Fiskesjö by email)

We awoke to a foggy morning and our drive to campus saw cloud-burst style snow showers. But the good news is that we’ll see balmy temperatures again today with highs in the 30s!!!

So with the arrival (once again this year) of spring, it seems like a great time for some quick hits and varia.

• Guy Sanders has been on a roll lately with the links, so I’ll pass them on to you:
  • Deltion of the Christian Archaeological Society is now available online. This has suddenly made some other journals look really really behind. (Yes, I’m looking at you Journal of Roman Archaeology).
  • The Onassis Foundation has made available online the lovely A. Lazaridou ed., Transitions to Christianity: Art of Late Antiquity, 3rd-7th Century A.D. (New York 2011). Reading it online (through a rather clunky viewer will save you almost $30!).
  • Finally, Greece has made available an index of dissertations online and many of them have full text via a clunky online reader.
• Ten “Metatrends” in technology and education from the NMC Horizon Project (pdf here). I am not entirely sure that Horizon needed “100 distinguished thought leaders from all over the world” to come up with this list.
• The Sunoikisis Consortium is offering a fellowship for participants in the Kenchreai Archaeology Field School. Get your Corinthia on with Dr. Prof. Big Joe Rife.
• An interesting tale of how Amazon’s clever marketing can help an author get noticed.
• I sort of like Twitterfall.
• The AIA might be a bit too ambivalent (for my taste) in their attitudes toward open access to their scholarly publications (via Dimitri Nakassis), American Journal of Archaeology does offer a nice list of blogs now on their page.
• For some reason I am fascinated with these little interviews of famous techtypes. Here’s one on Jason Kottke. And this post by Mr. Kottke on how to pronounce things hilariously is hilarious.
• Selling a story then creating a product. This is the essence of the interwebs.
• And the Internets are now GOOD for you, but we need to figure out how to use it in order for it to make us happy.
• Some interesting thoughts on Contemporary Archaeologies from the Paul Mullins, the President of the Society for Historical Archaeology (via Richard Rothaus).
• Yesterday was Teaching Thursday.
• This 6 by David Warner is just amazing.
• A pretty amazing story of how the famous Dan Reetz saved some girls from sex traffickers using Metafilter.
• Poor T-rex.
• What I’m reading: T. F. Tartaron, D. J. Pullen, R. K. Dunn, L. Tzortzopoulou-Gregory, A. Dill, and J. I. Boyce, “Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project (SHARP): Investigations at Mycenaean Kalamianos, 2007-2009,” Hesperia 80.4 (2011), 559-643. (It’s almost 100 pages, so cut me a break!)
• What I’m listening to: Gonjasufi, MU.ZZ.LE, Chairlift, Something.

Hoar frost

Base de données sur les auteurs ancien: édition patristique, Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée

Base de données éditée par l’Institut des Sources Chrétiennes (HISOMA - UMR 5189).

Cette base recense tous les auteurs anciens édités dans la collection Sources Chrétiennes ou susceptibles de l’être : il s’agit essentiellement de Pères de l’Église. Elle est régulièrement alimentée par tous les membres de l’équipe Sources Chrétiennes au fur et à mesure de la gestion des projets éditoriaux ; elle peut l’être également par toute personne désireuse d’enrichir la page d’un auteur qu’elle connaît bien.Elle permet de connaître de façon fine le contenu des volumes déjà parus, de ceux en cours de préparation, mais elle a aussi une finalité prospective, puisqu’elle indique les textes que Sources Chrétiennes souhaiterait éditer dans les années à venir et pour lesquels l’Institut cherche des collaborateurs.
Vous y trouverez notamment :

 des informations sur l’état d’avancement des éditions, sur les colloques ou journées d’étude consacrés aux Pères
 des éléments biographiques et bibliographiques, des liens vers des sites dédiés.

 Consulter la base

Seen on the Classicists list:

Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Augustan Rome
International Conference, Leiden University, 31 May and 1 June 2012

The Greek rhetorician and historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus settled in Rome in 30 BC. His rhetorical works, critical essays and history of early Rome (Roman Antiquities) are inextricably linked with the culture of Augustan Rome. In recent years, there has been a remarkable revival of interest in Dionysius. This international conference brings together the leading specialists in Dionysian scholarship: scholars working on rhetoric, literary criticism, Greek historiography and Roman culture. The conference aims to interpret the works of an important Greek scholar within the cultural, political and literary context of Augustan Rome.

Conference Website:

http://www.hum.leidenuniv.nl/gltc/actueel/conference-dionysius-of-halicarnassus-and-augustan-rome.html

Speakers:

Jeroen Bons (Utrecht University): ‘Dionysius on Isocrates’
Michael Edwards (University of Wales, Lampeter): ‘Dionysius on Isaeus’
Matthew Fox (University of Glasgow): ‘The Roman polis in Dionysius’
Dan Hogg (Cranleigh School): ‘How Roman are the Antiquities?’
Richard Hunter (Cambridge University): ‘Dionysius and the Idea of the Critic’
Casper de Jonge (Leiden University): ‘Composition in Augustan Rome. Dionysius, Horace and Longinus’
Stephen Oakley (Cambridge University): ‘The Invention of Detail in the Roman Antiquities’
Christopher Pelling (Oxford University): ‘Dionysius and Regime Change’
James I. Porter (University of California, Irvine): ‘Dionysius and the Sublime Style’
Clemence Schultze (Durham University): ‘Ways of Killing Women. Dionysius on Horatia and Lucretia’
Antony Spawforth (Newcastle University): ‘Dionysius, Declamation, and Augustan Cultural Politics’
Laura Viidebaum (Cambridge University): ‘Dionysius and Lysias’ Charm’
Nicolas Wiater (University of St. Andrews): ‘Parahistory: Language, Time, and Historical Consciousness in Dionysian criticism’
Harvey Yunis (Rice University, Houston): ‘Dionysius and Contemporaries on Demosthenes’

Registration:

Registration for this conference is now open. There are various options:

1) There is a limited number of places available for colleagues and students who would like to attend the conference papers on Thursday 31 May and / or Friday 1 June. Location: Gravensteen, Pieterskerkhof 6 in Leiden (45 seats). Single day rate (including lunch and refreshments) = 25 euro.

2) Two keynote lectures are open to the general public: both lectures will take place in the Klein Auditorium of the Academy Building, Rapenburg 73 in Leiden:
- Thursday 31 May at 4.00 pm: professor Christopher Pelling (Oxford): ‘Dionysius and Regime Change’
- Friday 1 June at 4.00 pm: professor Richard Hunter (Cambridge): ‘Dionysius and the Idea of the Critic’

Both keynote lectures will be followed by a reception. Participants are kindy requested to organize their own accomodation. A list of hotels in Leiden is available. A detailed programme will be circulated in due course. The conference is generously sponsored by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.

Contact:

If you are interested to attend the conference or one of the keynote lectures, please contact Casper de Jonge (c.c.de.jonge AT hum.leidenuniv.nl).

Seen on the Classicists list:

Metaphor in Greek and Roman Literature and Culture (a one-day workshop)
Friday 4 May, 2012
School of Classics, University of St Andrews

* Anna Uhlig (Cambridge): Sea as metaphor in fifth-century Greece.
* Sebastian Matzner (KCL): Metaphor’s other: making sense of metonymy.
* Nicolas Wiater (St Andrews): The erotics of mimesis: language, time, and desire in Greek classicism.
* Helen Lovatt (Nottingham): On the edges of images: blurring the boundaries between simile and
metaphor in Statius’ Thebaid.
* Victoria Rimell (Rome): Senecan dwelling and the conditions of metaphor.
* Shadi Bartsch (Chicago): The pleasure of the trope: pagan and Christian authors on the ethics of
metaphor.

All welcome. For registration information, please see:
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/classics/conferences/metaphor.shtml

For other queries, please contact Jason König (jpk3 AT st-andrews.ac.uk)

Only two research projects left to talk about in my survey of what I have done previously, and this is the biggy, the blast-from-the-past upon which your star will forever be hung, the doctorate. I cant even say PhD - you get a DPhil from Oxford, which will confuse people evermore.

My doctoral funding came from an EPSRC grant, working on an established, funded, project at the University of Oxford, which was split between The Department of Engineering Science and the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, as a collaborative project between Professor Mike Brady, and Professor Alan Bowman. They were interested to see if they could use new and novel imaging techniques to try and read the damaged inscriptions on the Vindolanda stylus texts, above. At the start of 1999 I joined them on a 3 year project, where two doctoral students and a postdoc were employed. My role was to work in the space between the classicists and the engineers, given I had a training both in classics (but classical art!) and in computing science.

I'm not going to kid that this wasnt hard work, nor a tough time for me - but looking back, I see its part of the doctoral process that you generally get the stuffing knocked out of you, and then you rebuild yourself and are academically stronger as a result. Essentially, I hadnt done an undergraduate in Engineering, or Maths - but was being examined in Engineering. It was a steep learning curve, and I had a lot of catching up to do, learning a lot both about Latin and Probability Theory, Roman Archaeology and Parallel Computing. I successfully defended in January 2003 - although it took me months to even face doing the (2 hours worth) of corrections, and a further year to go back to the work and turn it into Image to Interpretation, my monograph published by OUP.

I published five pieces on my doctorate, as well as the book. One of them is pretty promissory (in general, something that has the words "Towards" in the title, you think, aye aye.....)

Terras, M (2000) Towards a reading of the Vindolanda Stylus Tablets: Engineers and the Papyrologist. Human IT , 4 (2/3) PDF.

Although the further three pieces are more substantive, the last one contains the maths:

Terras, M. and Robertson, P. (2004) Downs and Acrosses: Textual Markup on a Stroke Based Level. Literary and Linguistic Computing , 19 (3 ) pp.397 - 414 . PDF

Terras, M. (2005) Reading the Readers: Modelling Complex Humanities Processes to Build Cognitive Systems. Literary and Linguistic Computing , 20 (1 ) pp.41 - 59 . PDF

Terras, M and Roberston, P (2005) Image and Interpretation: Using Artificial Intelligence to Read Ancient Roman Texts. HumanIT , 7 (3) PDF.

The final paper is a contribution to an edited volume we were all asked to write a paper for, to reflect what research was being undertaken in our department at UCL, so it has crossovers with these two, above (and there is probably room, at some point, to discuss just how much you can publish in a paper that has already been covered elsewhere, in a different format, for a different audience, as its a pretty murky academic practice):

Terras, M (2006) Interpreting the image: using advanced computational techniques to read the Vindolanda texts. ASLIB Proceedings , 58 (1/2) 102 - 117. PDF.

It's only in the most recent couple of years that I've started to focus again on imaging of manuscript material, and how best we can tackle degraded texts. I'm working again with computer scientists and engineers on some fairly gnarly imaging problems, and its very rewarding - although the fun, now, is knowing I wont be examined at the end of it, and I dont have the "what will become of me!" stress that people have to face at the end of their doctorate (even though I am committed to helping my PhD students over those mental hurdles). It's now almost (six months short of) a decade since I handed in my PhD. How did that happen?????

• 2012.02.04:  Achim Lichtenberger, Severus Pius Augustus: Studien zur sakralen Repräsentation und Rezeption der Herrschaft des Septimius Severus und seiner Familie (193-211 n. chr.). Impact of empire, 14.
• 2012.02.03:  Suzanne Saïd, Homer and the Odyssey (originally published 1998).
• 2012.02.02:  Fabio Berdozzo, Götter, Mythen, Philosophen: Lukian und die paganen Göttervorstellungen seiner Zeit. Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Geschichte, Bd 106.
• 2012.01.52:  Michael F. Wagner, The Enigmatic Reality of Time: Aristotle, Plotinus, and Today. Ancient Mediterranean and medieval texts and contexts. Studies in Platonism, Neoplatonism, and the Platonic Tradition v. 7
• 2012.01.51:  Nicolini on Hunink on Nicolini, Ad (L)usum lectoris: etimologia e giochi di parole in Apuleio. Response by Lara Nicolini.

I'm setting up a "Culture Concierge" weekly newsletter with some friends. Mostly we'll be covering cultural events in London, but there will be city guides for cities such as Istanbul packed with great suggestions. The emails will be archive at the Friend of Dorothy blog. If you'd like to sign up, just click on the link below:


Subscribe to our newsletter


We do not sell / rent / share email addresses, we will only send one email a week, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

This newsletter is part of a larger programme of creating a curatorial concierge service based on our experience in the art world.

Plato's Protagoras, a translation

This is an attempt at a collaborative translation of Plato’s Protagoras, a beautiful and challenging dialogue. The lead author is Dhananjay Jagannathan, a graduate student in ancient philosophy at the University of Chicago. Find out more about this translation.

Read the Protagoras, arranged by Stephanus page, with the Greek text, the collaborative translation, and Jowett's translation side-by-side. You can add comments and suggestions at the bottom of each page (see the latest comments, or subscribe to comments via RSS).

309

310

311

312

313

314

315

316

317

318

319

320

321

322

For other collaborative translations project see:

• Suda On-Line 

Lauren Hackworth Petersen, The Freedman in Roman Art and Art History, Cambridge, 2012.

Éditeur : Cambridge University Press
312 pages
ISBN : 9781107603592
£30.00

From monumental tombs and domestic decoration, to acts of benefaction and portraits of ancestors, Roman freed slaves, or freedmen, were prodigious patrons of art and architecture. Traditionally, however, the history of Roman art has been told primarily through the monumental remains of the emperors and ancient writers who worked in their circles. In this study, Lauren Petersen critically investigates the notion of 'freedman art' in scholarship, dependent as it is on elite-authored texts that are filled with hyperbole and stereotypes of freedmen, such as the memorable fictional character Trimalchio, a boorish ex-slave in Petronius' Satyricon. She emphasizes integrated visual ensembles within defined historical and social contexts and aims to show how material culture can reflect preoccupations that were prevalent throughout Roman society. Interdisciplinary in scope, this book explores the many ways that monuments and artistic commissions by freedmen spoke to a much more complex reality than that presented in literature.

Lire la suite...

Luca Grillo, The Art of Caesar's Bellum Civile , Cambridge, 2012.

Éditeur : Cambridge University Press
234 pages
ISBN : 9781107009493
£55.00

Traditional approaches have reduced Caesar's Bellum Civile to a tool for teaching Latin or to one-dimensional propaganda, thereby underestimating its artistic properties and ideological complexity. Reading strategies typical of scholarship on Latin poetry, like intertextuality, narratology, semantic, rhetorical and structural analysis, cast a new light on the Bellum Civile: Ciceronian language advances Caesar's claim to represent Rome; technical vocabulary reinforces the ethical division between 'us' and the 'barbarian' enemy; switches of focalization guide our perception of the narrative; invective and characterization exclude the Pompeians from the Roman community, according to the mechanisms of rhetoric; and the very structure of the work promotes Caesar's cause. As a piece of literature interacting with its cultural and socio-political world, the Bellum Civile participates in Caesar's multimedia campaign of self-fashioning. A comprehensive approach, such as has been productively applied to Augustus' program, locates the Bellum Civile at the interplay between literature, images and politics.

Lire la suite...

ante diem iii nonas februarias

• 316 a.d. — martyrdom of St. Blaise
• 1995 — death of John Pinsent (classicist and founder of Liverpool Classical Monthly)

February 07, 2012 - 1:01 AM - Exhibition opening - 8 February - 24 March, 2012

Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacan. Image: David Hamill (Flickr, Creative commons Licence)

Archaeologists discovered a series of deposits in the interior of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan in Mexico. The team of researchers announced their findings after exploring the 65-metre high pyramid from 2008 to 2011.

Using the 116 metre long tunnel excavated in the 1930s by archaeologist Eduardo Noguera, the Pyramid of the Sun Project, directed by Alejandro Sarabia, stratigraphically excavated 59 trenches and created 3 short tunnels in order to reach the natural rock level and verify the presence of burials and offerings.

“We knew that if the builders of  Teotihuacan placed something inside the monument it would have been done at the base level, so we made a vertical shaft at the end of the tunnel and a short horizontal tunnel to reach the centre of the pyramid, since the original tunnel was cut approximately 6 metres to the west of the centre of the monument”, commented team member Perez Cortes.

A tunnel into the heart of the pyramid

Over the course of the exploration three architectural structures were discovered, constructed prior to the current Pyramid of the Sun. Seven human burials, including  children, were also recorded as having been buried before the construction of the building. In addition, two votive deposits were recovered.

One of the votive offerings was discovered inside the original foundation material, so it is certain it was deposited as part of a consecration ceremony of the structure, probably at the beginning of its construction more than 1900 years ago.

Foundation offering with Jade mask. Image INAH

The deposit, which contained an outstanding greenstone mask was part of several layers of artefacts.

A considerable number of of obsidian artefacts including projectile heads and small knives were recovered, an anthropomorphic eccentric artefact and three anthropomorphic figurines with shell and pyrite eyes.

Among the three greenstone sculptures found, the mask carved from a single stone is, according to studies conducted by Dr. Jose Luis Ruvalcaba, from the National University Physics Institute (IF UNAM), “the only greenstone mask discovered in the ritual context of Teotihuacan.”

The small 11 cm high mask is different to other Teotihuacan types because of it’s size; it is possible that it was a portrait. A seashell was found next to the sculpture.

The offering also contained eleven Tlaloc vessels, (dedicated to the God of Rain) most of them broken, placed in the middle of the whole deposit. Further objects include three pyrite discs, one with a 45 cm diameter and mounted on a slate slab – the largest ever recovered from Teotihuacan.

Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacan. Image: Codilicious (Flickr, Creative commons Licence)

A possible link to rain

A substantial quantity of animal skeletons were also found. The skull of a feline was placed to the northeast; a canine to the south, and an eagle covered with volcanic rock, to the southeast. The bird had been fed before the sacrifice with two rabbits, analysis has revealed. This kind of faunal deposition is similar to those found as offerings in the Pyramid of the Moon.

The archaeologists had long suggested the function of the pyramid was linked to the underworld because of the tunnel excavated by the inhabitants of Teotihuacan. However, the objects found in this recent investigation seem to be indicating that the Pyramid of the Sun was possibly connected to a rain deity, an early version of Tlaloc.

Source: INAH

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More information:

National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH)

Teotihuacan Information Page (Arizona State University)

Teotihuacan | Thematic Essay

 

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Titre: Typologie des rêves dans les manuels de divination antiques
Lieu: Université Toulouse II - Le Mirail / Toulouse
Catégorie: Séminaires, conférences
Date: 09.02.2012
Heure: 10.30 h - 12.30 h
Description:

Information signalée par Marie-Karine Lhommé

 

Les images du rêve représentent-elles la réalité ?

La typologie des rêves dans les manuels de divination antiques.

Mireille Armisen-Marchetti (Université de Toulouse le Mirail)

 

Séminaire littéraire du CRATA 2012: "Regard et représentation dans l'Antiquité"

du 19 janvier 2012 au 26 avril 2012
Le séminaire aura lieu au second semestre les jeudis de 10h30 à 12h30.

Parmi les axes retenus pour le quadriennal 2011-2014, l'équipe de recherches PLH-CRATA a choisi de travailler sur l'étude du phénomène de la représentation dans le monde antique. Il s'agit d'étudier les effets de filtre que les représentations littéraires et figurées produisent dans le regard que les Anciens jetaient sur la réalité. Mais cet effet de filtre s'exerce aussi quand l'objet de la perception est déjà le produit d'une représentation, lorsqu'il s'agit, par exemple de la description d'une œuvre figurée. La puissance des constructions mentales joue alors un rôle essentiel.
C'est dans ce cadre de réflexions et de recherches que prend place ce séminaire qui fait suite à une Journée d'Étude consacrée au thème : « Regard et représentation dans l'Antiquité ». En effet, la problématique du regard est essentielle pour aborder la question de la représentation. Les conceptions du regard dans l'Antiquité, souvent bien différentes des nôtres, méritent d'être étudiées ou rappelées. Mais le regard n'a pas été que théorisé, il a aussi été représenté, et les images et les descriptions qui en ont été faites constituent tout un champ de recherche qui, sans être vierge, est encore peu exploré. Enfin, auteurs et artistes de l'Antiquité nous proposent souvent leur propre expérimentation du regard, celui qu'ils portaient sur les choses et que trahit parfois le vocabulaire, mais aussi celui que les autres portaient sur eux. Le regard qui trompe, le regard redressé par les procédés optiques, le regard voyant, le regard pensé, le regard métaphore de la pensée, mais aussi le regard vu, telles sont les pistes que nous proposons de suivre lors de ce séminaire.

PROGRAMME

19 janvier : Jean-Baptiste Guillaumin (Université de Paris-Sorbonne), Lumine claro cernere uerum : lumière et vision dans la Consolation de Philosophie de Boèce.
25-27 janvier : COLLOQUE PLH-CRATA « TEXTES ET IMAGES »
2 février : Ghislaine Jay-Robert (Université de Perpignan), Le vocabulaire de la vision et la représentation du regard chez Aristophane.
9 février : Mireille Armisen-Marchetti (Université de Toulouse le Mirail), Les images du rêve représentent-elles la réalité ? La typologie des rêves dans les manuels de divination antiques.
16 février : Sylvie Rougier-Blanc (Université de Toulouse le Mirail), Le regard des poètes sur l'architecture dans la poésie grecque d'Homère à Apollonios de Rhodes : évolutions et interprétations.
1er mars : Jean-Pierre Aygon (Université de Toulouse le Mirail), Enargeia, phantasia et ecphrasis : définitions, enjeux et usages dans la rhétorique et la poétique antiques.
8 mars : Laury André (ENS de Lyon et Université de Paris Ouest La Défense), Regard et représentation du paysage dans l'épopée grecque d'époque impériale : le cas de mirabilia.
15 mars : Estelle Galbois (Université de Toulouse le Mirail), Le regard de l'artiste sur son modèle : réflexions sur l'élaboration du portrait royal à l'époque hellénistique.
22 mars : Adeline Grand-Clément (Université de Toulouse le Mirail), La mer pourpre. Façons grecques de voir en couleurs.
29 mars : Émilie-Jade Poliquin (Université de Laval et Université de Toulouse le Mirail), Regards sur la nature et natures du regard.
5 avril : Régis Burnet (Université de Louvain-la-Neuve) et Régis Courtray (Université de Toulouse le Mirail), Du miroir au face à face: voir comme Dieu voit, dans le Nouveau Testament.
26 avril : Frédéric Le Blay (Université de Nantes), Miroirs philosophiques : vertu et perversion de la connaissance de soi

Contact :
Régis Courtray
courtray@univ-tlse2.fr
Lieu :
Maison de la Recherche de l'Université de Toulouse Le Mirail, salle D155

Source : Patrimoine Littérature Histoire - PLH

Titre: « Restituer » l'Antiquité à la Renaissance
Lieu: Université Toulouse II - Le Mirail / Toulouse
Catégorie: Colloques, journées d'études
Date: 10.02.2012
Heure: 09.00 h - 17.00 h
Description:

Information signalée par Martine Furno

 

« Restituer » l'Antiquité à la Renaissance

entre érudition et créativité imaginative

 

Journée d'étude de l'équipe Erasme

 

L’Antiquité n’a jamais disparu de la culture occidentale. Néanmoins, l’ambition de « restituer » le monde antique dans tous ses aspects – linguistiques, littéraires, artistiques, mais aussi économiques ou sociaux – est à juste titre considérée comme une invention distinctive de la Renaissance. Cet intérêt s’incarne dans des attitudes nouvelles vis-à-vis des « vestiges » littéraires ou matériels de l’Antiquité, attitudes qui s’enrichissent mutuellement. De l’étude des sources littéraires à l’interprétation des monuments, des études antiquaires à la création littéraire ou artistique, les échanges sont nombreux entre les domaines et les hommes. Si l’érudition renaissante porte en germe l’élaboration de disciplines qui se constitueront plus tard en sciences, telles l’archéologie, l’épigraphie, la numismatique, ou encore la philologie, elle laisse en même temps une large place à l’intuition, à la reconstitution imaginative, et même à la libre création de formes artistiques
et littéraires nouvelles.
Cette journée permettra à des spécialistes de disciplines diverses – histoire de l’art, littérature française, histoire du livre, néo-latin – de donner à voir des exemples concrets, variés et piquants de ces tentatives de « restitution » à l’antique.

Maison de la Recherche, salle D31

Programme
9h00 :Accueil des participants
9h15 : Introduction

« Restitutions » antiquaires et artistiques

Président de séance : Olivier GUERRIER (Université de Toulouse II-Le Mirail)

9h30 : Bruno TOLLON(Université de Toulouse II-Le Mirail)
L'Antiquité à nouveau vivante : architectes, sculpteurs, humanistes et l'art à Toulouse au milieu du XVIe siècle
10h00 : Ginette VAGENHEIM(Université de Rouen)
Pirro Ligorio (1513-1583) et des dessins inédits sur les moyens de locomotion dans l'Antiquité (De re vehiculari)
10h30 : Échanges et pause
11h00 : Sophie CASSAGNES-BROUQUET (Université de Toulouse II-Le Mirail)
L'inquisiteur, l'enlumineur et les déesses. Les déesses antiques dans les Vies des femmes célèbres, un manuscrit d'Anne de Bretagne
11h30 : Jean GUILLEMAIN(Université Paris Descartes)
Iconographie et numismatique : les médaillons dans les pages de titre à la Renaissance
12h00 : Échanges

« Restitutions » littéraires et linguistiques, réceptions philosophiques et idéologiques

Présidente de séance : Sophie CASSAGNES-BROUQUET (Université de Toulouse II-Le Mirail)

14h00 : Pascale CHIRON(Université de Toulouse II-Le Mirail)
Traduction et « conversion » des épîtres héroïdes d'Ovide à la Renaissance (Charles Fontaine et François Habert)
14h30 : Martine FURNO(Université Stendhal – Grenoble 3, CERPHI)
Parler latin au XVIe siècle : quelques témoignages sur l'enseignement de la langue dans les premiers niveaux des collèges
15h00 : Échanges et pause
15h30 : Bérengère BASSET (Université de Toulouse II-Le Mirail)
L'Antiquité comme miroir inverse des « misères de ce temps » : usages des références antiques dans la pensée politique du XVIe siècle en France
16h00 : Anne-Hélène KLINGER-DOLLÉ (Université de Toulouse II-Le Mirail)
Quand les druides tracent des figures : prisca theologia et antiquités nationales dans le dialogue De animæ immortalitate de Charles de Bovelles (1551-1552)

16h30-17h00 : Échanges et remarques conclusives

Contact : Anne-Hélène Klinger-Dollé - anne-helene.klinger@club-internet.fr

Programme complet

Source : Patrimoine Littérature Histoire - PLH

CONGRATULATIONS TO GEZA VERMES:

Emeritus Fellow Geza Vermes celebrates Dead Sea Scrolls golden jubilee

2 February 2012

Wolfson College was honoured to welcome Emeritus Fellow Geza Vermes and Penguin Books on 23rd January for the 50th Anniversary of the publication of his The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, which has sold an estimated half-a-million copies worldwide.

[...]

The article also reports that the latest version of this translation is set to go online with the Google/Shrine of the Book online publication of the Scrolls (on which see, e.g., here).

THE BIBLIOBLOG CARNIVAL FEBRUARY 2012 has been posted by Amanda MacInnis at the Cheese-Wearing Theology blog.

CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT:

The Canadian Society for Syriac Studies (CSSS) will hold its annual Symposium XII entitled Studies on Syriac Manuscripts: Texts, Illuminations, and Collections, on Saturday November 10, 2012, 9 am to 5 pm. The CSSS welcomes a limited number of speakers to present papers related to this theme. There will be no registration fee; however, participants are expected to cater for their own travel and accommodation. Those interested are requested to email us the topic title, an abstract, and a short biography.

Best wishes.



Board of Directors

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Canadian Society for Syriac Studiers

Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations

University of Toronto

4 Bancroft Avenue

Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1C1

Tel. 416-978-3184

FAX 416-978-3305

Posted on the Hugoye list.

And on a related note, Cornelia Horn flags another Syriac event: Call for Papers SBL Syriac Literature and Interpretations of Sacred. The call for papers for the November 2012 SBL meetings opens tomorrow. If you're in the SBL, I assume you will automatically get a message about it, but I'll post a link here anyway.

Review of Achim Lichtenberger, Severus Pius Augustus: Studien zur sakralen Repräsentation und Rezeption der Herrschaft des Septimius Severus und seiner Familie (193-211 n. chr.). Impact of empire, 14. Leiden; Boston: 2011. Pp. x, 478; 96 p. of plates. $238.00. ISBN 9789004201927.

Review of Suzanne Saïd, Homer and the Odyssey (originally published 1998). Oxford; New York: 2011. Pp. vi, 420. $45.00 (pb). ISBN 9780199542857.

Review of Fabio Berdozzo, Götter, Mythen, Philosophen: Lukian und die paganen Göttervorstellungen seiner Zeit. Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Geschichte, Bd 106. Berlin; Boston: 2011. Pp. x, 332. $165.00. ISBN 9783110254594.

<p><a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/-bUljbYtB8uPFzIGy6f8xffe-HA/0/da"><img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/-bUljbYtB8uPFzIGy6f8xffe-HA/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"></img></a><br/> <a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/-bUljbYtB8uPFzIGy6f8xffe-HA/1/da"><img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/-bUljbYtB8uPFzIGy6f8xffe-HA/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"></img></a></p><div class="feedflare"> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/BloggingPompeii?a=11XWK-W2WZI:Z9KCcc6dnSU:yIl2AUoC8zA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/BloggingPompeii?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"></img></a> </div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/BloggingPompeii/~4/11XWK-W2WZI" height="1" width="1"/>

NEW BOOK from Wipf and Stock:

Laws in the Bible and in Early Rabbinic Collections
The Legal Legacy of the Ancient Near East
By Samuel Greengus

-
Book Description

The remarkable discovery of ancient Near Eastern law collections or "codes," beginning with the Laws of Hammurabi and followed by many other collections in decades following, opened a new window upon biblical law. This volume seeks to examine within a single study all of the biblical laws that are similar in content with ancient Near Eastern laws from Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria, and Hatti. The book also examines a small but important group of early rabbinic laws from postbiblical times that exhibit significant similarities with laws found in the ancient Near Eastern collections or "codes." This later group of laws, although absent from the Bible, are nevertheless of comparable antiquity. The presentation focuses on the actual law statements preserved in these ancient law "codes." The discussion then adds narratives, records, and reports of legal actions from ancient sources outside the laws-all of which relate to the formal law statements. The discourse is non-polemical in tone and does not seek to revisit all theories and interpretations. The format allows readers, including those who are new to the subject of biblical law, to engage the primary sources on their own.

(Via the Agade list.)

CONSTANTINA KATSARI: Redundancies at the Foundation of the Hellenic World.

Possibly cross-file under "Higher Education Bubble," although this sounds more like a side effect of the Greek economic disaster in general.

That’s my conclusion after checking out My Cartoon Version of Reality, Conor McHale’s brilliant blog. He had a lovely series on the Meeting House Square Excavations, showing some behind-the-scenes sketches, such as this view from the window of a digger (American archaeologists, read backhoe):

If his sketches are this good, I’d love to see his context plans!

Five students in the small Baltic state of Estonia, who have abandoned modern conveniences for a week in a replica wooden hut built on the site of an ancient hill...

Sandy Gerrard, a former English Heritage designation officer for 20 years, reported the discovery of an ancient stone row on the site of a proposed wind farm in Wales. It...

Some time ago, researchers discovered a 3,300-year-old on Emirau Island in the Bismark Archipelago (a group of islands off the coast of New Guinea). The 2-inch (5-centimeters) stone tool was...

Archaeologists are investigating the truth behind the story that Ice Age Neanderthals in Jersey would push mammoths off cliffs in St Brelade for food. About 30 years ago, evidence suggested...

Titre: Pragmatique et philologie grecque à propos des excerpta des Antiquités romaines de Denys d'Halicarna
Lieu: Université Paris Diderot - Paris VII / Paris
Catégorie: Séminaires, conférences
Date: 07.02.2012
Heure: 16.00 h - 18.00 h
Description:

Information signalée par Jean-François Cottier

 

Antiquité au Présent 2011-2012

Commenter, expliquer, paraphraser. Enjeux historiques et anthropologiques des pratiques de commentaire dans le monde antique et au-delà

 

Les Grands Moulins (Metro Bibliothèque FM, ligne 14), Bât. C, salle 779 C

Mardi 11 octobre
Ch. Delattre, « De quoi un texte mythographique est-il le commentaire

Mardi 15 novembre
Séance bibliographique

Mardi 13 décembre
Rachel Darmon, « La mythographie est-elle un commentaire ? »

Mardi 10 janvier
M. Ribreau, « Tel public, tel commentaire ? L'ambiguité du Commentaire du Psaume 118 d'Augustin »

Mardi 7 février
S. Kefallonitis, « Pragmatique et philologie grecque à propos des excerpta des Antiquités romaines de Denys d'Halicarnasse »

Mardi 13 mars
J.-F. Cottier, «  Est-ce que paraphraser c'est commenter ? ».

Mardi 10 avril
E. Valette, « Les mots pour le dire : le vocabulaire latin du commentaire »

An ancient spearpoint was found at an excavation site in Connecticut (USA) during a Norwalk Community College-sponsored archaeology dig. Chelsea Dean, senior at Fairfield Ludlowe High School, took the Introduction...

February 08, 2012 - 1:01 AM - Lecture Dr. Yona Stamatis, Ethnomusicologist

For reasons that should become clear fairly soon, I've had experimental archaeology videos on my mind lately. In many cases, actually seeing segments of an experimental study play out can convey so much more of the experience itself than summary tables and graphs, which really take the human element out and often don't do justice to some of the phenomena observed as they unfold. I saw a couple

According to Diogenes Laertius, who compared

©Clipart.com

the educated and uneducated by saying the former were superior ...

Read Full Post

Readers in Singapore may be interested in this talk about ceramics production in Mainland SEA by Louise Cort and Leedom Lefferts. Click on the image to download the flyer (pdf). No registration is required.

Pots and how they are made in mainland Southeast Asia
Louise Allison Cort and Leedom Lefferts
Friday, 17 February 2012, 7 to 8.30pm
Ngee Ann Auditorium, Asian Civilisations Museum

1.2871594 103.85179489999996

Metrical Book-Summaries on Two Byzantine Manuscripts

Book 1 (“Alpha”) Summarized with one line of Greek in dactylic hexameter, on the Venetus A and the Escorialensis 4

Each Byzantine manuscript of the Homeric Iliad that the Homer Multitext has digitized represents a complex juxtaposition of many complementary texts. Each contains a text of the poem, in Greek, along with other texts that contain commentaries, summaries, biographies of Homer, or other additional materials. The editors of the HMT divide these texts into two categories: primary texts, which stand alone, and secondary texts, which refer explicitly to primary texts. The text of the Iliad is a primary text, of course, but so is a biography of Homer or a summary of another, lost epic poem such as the Ilioupersis (the “Sack of Troy”). The inter-linear scholia constitute a secondary text, because each note, or “scholion”, refers to a word, phrase, line or passage in the primary text.

One of the most interesting secondary texts that appears on several of these manuscripts is the collection of one-line summaries of each book of the Iliad, from Book 1 (“Alpha”), to Book 24 (“Omega”). After some thought, we have decided to consider these a secondary text, since they accompany and refer to the poetic text. Each of the summaries is written in Greek and in dactylic hexameter, the same poetic meter as the Iliad itself. With this posting on the Homer Multitext Blog, we are pleased to announce a publication of the metrical summaries from two manuscripts, the Venetus A (Marcianus Graecus Z.454 [=822]), and the Escorialensis 4 (Escorialensis ω.I.12 [513 = Allen E⁴]).

Links:

• XML version (with stylesheet for in-browser display)
• HTML version
• Downloadable archive containing XML, stylesheets, and associated files.

This publication consists of an XML document that contains the following fields for each book-summary for each manuscript:

• a label
• a CITE-URN that identifies a region-of-interest on a digital image of a manuscript page
• the text of the metrical summary
• a translation of the metrical summary

The CITE-URN is a canonical reference to a defined section of an image; these concise strings can be resolved to show the image data itself, which is exposed through the CITE Image Service.

Of the twenty-four pairs of summaries, no two are completely identical in every respect. The Venetus A and E4 follow different conventions for punctuation, for example. But eighteen of the twenty-four books are substantially similar from one manuscript to the next.

Six of the summaries have more significant differences in the texts preserved on the Venetus A and the E4.

For Book Γ (3), the two manuscript have:

Venetus A
Text: γάμμα δ’ ἄρ. ἀφ’ Ἑλένης. οἴοις μόθος ἐστὶν ἀκοίταις·
Translation: And then Gamma is from the point of view of Helen; the pitch of battle is only for husbands.

Escorialensis 4
Text: γάμμα δ’ ἄρ’ ἀμφ’ Ἑλένηι· οἴοις μόθος ἐστὶν ἀκοίταις·
Translation: And then Gamma is around Helen; the pitch of battle is only for husbands.

The one-letter difference between the prepositions ἀφ’  and ἀμφ’ is intentional, because the scribes used the correct case for the object-nouns (genitive in the VA and dative in the E4).

In both Books Δ (4) and Θ (8), the summaries consist of the book number (i.e. “Delta”, “Theta”), which serves as the grammatical subject of the sentence. In these two instances, the predicate of the sentence is either in the nominative or the accusative. We read the VA says that “Delta [contains] an assembly [accusative] of the gods,” while E4 says that “Delta [is] an assembly [nominative] of the gods.” Interestingly, in Book 8 this usage is reversed even though the words in 8 are the same as in 4, an “assembly of the gods” (ἀγορ- θεῶν): VA has “Theta [is] an assembly [nominative] of the gods,” and E4 has, “Theta [contains] an assembly [accusative] of the gods.”

The summaries for Book Ζ (6) are subtly different. We translate both of them:

“And then Zeta is the fond discourse of both Andromache and Hektor.”

The Greek for each is:

VA - ζῆτα· δ ὰρ. Ἀνδρομάχης τὲ καὶ Ἕκτορός ἐστ’ ὁαριστύς·
E4 - ζῆτα· δ’ ἄρ’ Ἀνδρομάχης καὶ Ἕκτορός ἐστι ὀαριστύς.

Venetus A · folio 89 verso

The most obvious difference is in VA’s τὲ καὶ … ἐστ’, versus E4’s καὶ … ἐστι. The result is equally valid dactylic hexameter. More interesting is the presentation of the word ὀαριστύς on the Venetus A.

We see what looks like an intentional space between ὁ and αριστύς, but the scribe is meticulous about using breathings, so we conclude that he intended this to be one word. The word is, as we have translated it, ὀαριστύς, “fond discourse”. It should properly have a smooth-breathing, as it does on the E4, but the scribe of VA has written a very clear rough-breathing. Did the scribe, unfamiliar with this exclusively epic word, guess wrong at the (no longer pronounced in the 10th century) breathing?

In Book Η (7), between E4 and the Venetus A, the words translated here “one-on-one” are reverse: μόνος μόνωι (in E4) versus μόνωι μόνος (in the Venetus A). The two versions are equally correct, grammatically and metrically.

Taken together, these differences, while minor, do not seem to us likely to be attributed to “scribal error”. It seems more likely that we have two different presentations of traditional material, with its own tradition that includes a certain amount of variation. The differences in Books 4, 6, 7, and 8 might suggest that the scribes were not in fact looking at a written source, but knew this material – perhaps as aids to navigating the 24 books of the poem reduced to a jingle committed to memory. This is purely speculation.

Katie Phillips, a Sophomore at Furman University, is editing the metrical summaries on the Escorialensis 3, which we will look forward to adding to our publications, and to our analysis of this interesting secondary text on the Byzantine witnesses to the Iliad.

Folio 188 recto of the manuscript of the Iliad known as E4.

In this post I will give some basic information about the Iliad manuscript known as E4 (Allen, = West F, Escorialensis Ω.I.12), and then proceed to describe a single folio in detail, folio 188 recto. (Thanks to University of Houston undergraduates Kat Dybala and Matthew Davis for their contributions to my understanding of this folio!)  In this way it will be possible to see how E4 relates to other manuscripts in the Homer Multitext as well as the several features that distinguish it from them.

E4 is an eleventh-century parchment codex, thought by Allen and previous scholars to be later than E3 (also eleventh century).  It consists of 216 folios, containing a complete text of the Iliad, a commentary with lemmata on Iliad 1–2.300, lives of Homer, a summary of the Cypria, an excerpt from the Batrachomyomachia (“Battle of Frogs and Mice”), excerpts from Porphyry, and other scholia with lemmata. The main text of the Iliad begins on folio 7, where a new set of scholia likewise begins. Individual books are preceded by hypotheses and a one verse metrical summary (the same one verse summaries that you find in Venetus A). The layout of E4 is quite different from Venetus A, Venetus B, and E3. On each folio there are two columns. The left column contains the text of the poem and the right columns consist of a paraphrase. According to Allen (1931:148), E4 is not related to any of the other early minuscule manuscripts. The manuscript seems to have been acquired in Venice for the price of 25 ducats, according to a subscription on the last folio (liber mei Benedicti Cornelii quem emi meis pecuniis pretio ducatorum viginti q).

Folio 188r

Folio 188r of the manuscript known as E4 (= West F, Escorialensis Ω.I.12) marks the beginning of Iliad book 22. We may compare it to Venetus A folio 282r, Venetus B folio 292r, and E3 283r. Its facing page on the left side, folio 187v, is taken up by a hypothesis, a large selection from Porphyry, and scholia, including comments on the text of the Iliad that is written on 188r.

Layout and Adornment

The folio contains Iliad 22.1-37 in the left column, and a paraphrase in the right. There are scholia in the top and outer margins and between the lines of the paraphrase. This layout differs considerably from that of the Venetus A, the Venetus B, and E3, where there is a central block of Iliad text with scholia surrounding it in the top, bottom and outer margins, as well as, to a much less extent, in the inner margin.

A large omega in red comprises the first letter of the main text of the poem in the left column. The initial omicron of the paraphrase  text in right column is also in red, and somewhat larger than the rest of the paraphrase text, set in the margin to the left of the text block.  Occasionally the initial letters of the line in both the left and the right columns are highlighted in a similar way.

There is a metrical summary of the book in red ink that spans the width of the two text blocks. It is placed just under a decorative border across the top, also in red ink. The summary reads: ἱλιάδος χ ὁμήρου ῥαψωδίας : χι δ‘αρα τρὶς περὶ τεῖχος ἄγων κτάν‘ Ἕκτορ‘ Ἀχιλλεύς (Rhapsody 22 of the Iliad of Homer: Chi. And leading him around the walls three times, Achilleus kills Hektor). This is the same summary as in Venetus A. There is no other subscription on the page. Note that the Venetus B has a different summary: χῖ Θέτιδος γόνος ὡκὺς ἀπώλεσεν Ἕκτορα δῖον :- ἀρχὴ τῆς χῖ ὁμήρου ῥαψωδίας  :- (Chi. The swift offspring of Thetis kills brilliant Hektor.  [This marks] the beginning of rhapsody 22 of Homer). E3 has the same summary as B; for this book in E3 there does not seem to be anywhere the summary of A in any hand.

We can already see that E4 has many features that distinguish it from the other manuscripts with scholia, including those of comparable date. Its layout is different, it contains a running paraphrase of the poem, and its metrical summary at the start of each book matches the tradition that we find in A, not B. The hypotheses at the start of each book of E4 are not found in A, B, or E3.

Main text

There are 37 lines of the poem on folio 188r, considerably more than would be found on a typical folio of A, B, or E3. For this reason E4 consists of only 216 folios, whereas A has 327 and B has 338.

12    E4 reads δεῦρ’ ἐλιάσθης (with A, T, and several other mss.) whereas several papyri and B read δεῦρο λιάσθης.

18    E4 and the codex Ambrosianus read ἀφείλαο where most manuscripts read ἀφείλεο.

27    E4 reads ὀπώρηις along with A (the text of A appears to have been corrected here) where most mss. read ὀπώρης.

30    E4, A, and one other manuscript read ὁ δ’ where others and the papyri read ὁ γ’.

33    E4 reads γ’ ἐκόψατο where most other manuscripts and the papyri read γε κόψατο.

36    E4 and A read ἑστήκει where most manuscripts read εἱστήκει.

Although one folio cannot be considered a representative sample, E4’s text of the Iliad on this folio seems to resemble A more closely than B.

Scholia

The scholia of E4 seem to have been collected from several different sources. There is a set of numbered scholia which corresponds to the numbered scholia in B, E3, and Laurentianus 32.3 (= Allen C and West C). There is another set of scholia in the same hand that is connected to the text with symbols, and these contain material from the so-called “D scholia” (also known as the scholia minora). This set of scholia is also found in B, but it is in the second, later hand of B. The scholia in this group are linked to the text through signs.

On folio 188r, we do find both numbered scholia and scholia linked to the text through symbols. Some scholia are written between lines of the paraphrase. The scholia that we find on E4 can all for the most part be found in B (not A), but they do not have the same layout as in B and their associated numbers and symbols do not correspond with those in B. In a future post I plan to provide a transcription of the scholia on folio 188r together with a comparison with the corresponding set on B and E3. There are definitely differences. For example, we find this comment at the top of folio 188r of E4:

ἀκέοντο: ἐθεραπεύοντο· κυρίως ἀκεῖσθαι τὸ ἄχος ἰᾶσθαι· καὶ τὸ ὃ δή ποτε θεραπεύειν· ὅθεν Φρύγες ἀκεστὴν τὸν ἰατρόν· καὶ Ἀθηναῖοι ἀκέστριαν.

Most of this comment, but not the whole, is in the numbered scholia of B and in E3 (with no lemma however in B or E3), while the whole, with the exception of ἐθεραπεύοντο, is also in T. So for this scholion, E4 resembles T more closely than B.

Preliminary observations

A preliminary study of a single folio reveals that E4 is a very unusual manuscript, both in its layout and content. Its main text seems very possibly in some way related to the tradition of A, while its scholia are related to those of B (and E3 and C). The scholia are related to those of B, but there are many differences between the two sets, most notably that the group of scholia connected by symbols are in a later hand of B (and not present in E3) while in E4 they are in the same hand and of the same date as the numbered scholia. As Allen observed, this manuscript cannot be precisely connected with any single other manuscript or manuscript family, and it would well deserve further study.

Stop it. Just Stop it. Stop citing the Bible and/or Jesus in favor of (or against) anything. It says exactly nothing that might directly inform our modern world about anything and that includes tax policy. Truthfully, it says very little that might inform us on Iron Age or Hellenistic Age government funding. But that doesn’t stop politicians including President Obama from citing it as if it does. I favor most of the President’s tax proposals, not because the Bible somehow might or might not support them. I favor them because they are, for the most part, fair and address real issues. But I sure wish he would remember that he is not Preacher in Chief. And that goes for all those other people who would be lead our secular state. May it ever be so. But I do worry.

Every year I get more and more bored with the apparently obligatory rants from sports writers about the use of Roman numerals in regards to the Super Bowl (to say nothing of my annual conversation with mater in which I have to reteach her how Roman numerals work, but that’s different). And so, after paging through myriad exempla of such schoolboy rhetoric, I have to tip my pileus to Ben Cohen at the Wall Street Journal, who actually came up with something original to say on this … here’s the incipit:

The NFL is four years away from its 50th Super Bowl, which means it is already trying to plan around a peculiar self-inflicted marketing nuisance: How can the world’s most powerful sports league get around putting a big, fat “L” on hundreds of thousands of souvenir T-shirts?

The first thing the winning players will do when Sunday’s game ends is drape themselves in celebratory gear emblazoned with the Super Bowl logo. This year, that logo consists of the Lombardi Trophy above the silver Roman numerals XLVI.

But come 2016, the Roman numeral for Super Bowl L happens to be the lone letter that most connotes losing.

“Wouldn’t that be a nice time to switch over to Arabic numerals?” said Bob Dorfman, the executive creative director for Baker Street Advertising.

• via: The NFL Has an ‘L’ of a Problem (Wall Street Journal)

… alas, I strongly suspect that might be the year the Roman numerals disappear, although one really should think of the marketability of champions’ hats with the L emblazoned on it, thus saving the winners the effort of making that ‘L’ gesture with their hands towards the team that came in second place (which is something the rest of the article almost reaches, but not quite).

Via Dan Diffendale:

Theories of the Past: The Role of History in Archaeological Approaches
An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference
Sponsored by the University of Michigan Collaborative Archaeology Workgroup

Date: March 23-24, 2012
Where: University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, MI

Understanding the human past is the goal of both archaeology and
history, yet the methodologies and theoretical approaches they
implement intersect in both complementing and contrasting ways. This
conference will provide an opportunity for junior researchers to
present innovative research and provide a forum for discussing the
gaps, bridges, shared goals, and incompatibilities of archaeological
and historical approaches to the human past.

We are calling for papers of 20 minutes in length that deal with the
relationship between archaeology and history and tackle broad themes
through specific case studies and applications. Papers will be
presented in panels with other graduate students working on similar
themes or approaches. While engaging with these panel themes,
presenters should situate their research in particular archaeological
or historical case studies. The following themes will structure these
panels and provide a starting point for contributed papers and larger
discussions:

The Formation of Texts
Archaeologists often employ written evidence to provide accounts of
processes not materially visible. These sources may include
ethnography and ethnohistory, administrative documents, journals and
personal accounts, and ancient historical records. Textual scholars
must wrestle with questions of authorship and consider the context and
conditions in which texts are produced—a process we can think of as
text formation. How does the production and preservation of texts
affect how they are employed by archaeologists in the analysis and
interpretation of the past?

Contemporary Issues as Historic Processes
Many issues of contemporary political, social, and economic interest
have deep histories in the human past. How can contextualizing
contemporary problems like debt, inequality, cultural interaction, or
environmental impacts with a long-term perspective help us understand
the genesis and dynamics of these issues?

Events and Processes in the Past
Different lines of evidence, both material and textual, engage with
multiple tempos – from singular events to the longue durée.
Archaeologists must consider tempos of archaeological formation
processes that produced these lines of evidence, but also consider
short and long-term scales of change. How can we synthesize multiple
lines of evidence to provide a more complete understanding of the
impetus for and implications of change?

Comparative Approaches
The comparative approach continues to find widespread use in the study
of the past. In addition to using narratives from different places
and/or times, archaeologists and historians also use comparison to
approach methodological and evidentiary problems. What do comparative
approaches add to our understanding of the past? What are the
similarities and differences in the ways archaeologists and historians
deploy comparative examples?

Presentations will be followed by a moderated discussion of the papers
and their relationship to the panel’s central theme as well as the
broader subject of the conference. All fields of archaeology and
history (Anthropological, Classical, Near Eastern, area studies, etc.)
are welcome.

To facilitate a ‘workshopping’ atmosphere and to promote informed
discussions, participants are asked to submit a paper copy of their
presentation one week before the conference (March 16, 2012).
Pre-circulated papers should be of presentation text length only
(approximately 10-12 double-spaced pages); polished written copies are
not expected.

Abstracts of no longer than 200 words should be submitted by February 15, 2012.
Please submit abstracts and direct questions to CAW.Conference.2012@umich.edu.

Although travel stipends will not be available for this conference,
accommodations (with Michigan archaeology graduate students) for
Friday and/or Saturday night(s) will be arranged upon request.
Breakfast, lunch, and dinner will be provided on the day of the
conference.

The Collaborative Archaeology Workgroup (CAW) is a group of graduate
students from several departments at the University of Michigan
(including Anthropology and Classical Art and Archaeology) who share
an interest in archaeological research, theory, and methods. We are
dedicated to promoting interdisciplinary research and facilitating the
exchange of information among all students interested in studying the
past through archaeological techniques.

The conference is co-sponsored by the Rackham Graduate School,
International Institute, Museum of Anthropology, Kelsey Museum of
Archaeology, and Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and
Archaeology.

Any readers playing Minecraft? I don’t play it myself (I hardly have any time to play games on my phone for that matter!), but if you’re playing the award-winning game of construction and creativity, you might be interested in this minecraft project to build Angkor Wat.

Angkor Wat Minecraft

Full details here.

A potentially interesting item in Gizmodo begins thusly:

The ancient Greeks called the thapsia garganica plant “deadly carrot,” because their camels would eat it and quickly die. The Roman emperor Nero mixed it with frankincense to treat bruises.

• via: Scientists Transform Deadly Plant Into Cancer Killing Smart Bomb

hmmm … I’d really love to have a source for this claim, especially as regards camels (the Nero claim is possibly in the same section). I strongly suspect Theophrastus’ plants tome (9.20 or so), but there doesn’t seem to be a copy available on the web. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t refer to camels and I honestly can’t recall ever reading of the ancient Greeks keeping camels around …

UPDATE (an hour or so later) … tip o’ the pileus to JR Strang who pointed me to an online source for Theophrastus’ plants thing at the Open Library (very useful; not sure how I missed this) … 9.20.2  f was indeed the section of interest and via the Loeb is:

The root of thapsia has emetic properties : and,
if one retains it, it purges both upwards and down-
wards. It is also able to remove bruises : and it
restores other contusions to a pale colour. Its
juice is stronger and purges both upwards and
downwards : the seed is riot used. It grows especially
in Attica, but also in other places : the cattle of the
country do not touch it, but imported cattle feed on
and perish of diarrhoea.

Here’s the source …

I can’t seem to get the Greek here on my netbook, but the word used is ‘bosketai’ which usually refers to cattle but in theory could be any ‘grazing beast’. Even so, I don’t think ‘camel’ is a likely candidate in Attica. JR Strang also just alerted us to the Nero passage coming from Pliny NH 13.43-125-126 (via Lacus Curtius):

quibusdam tamen morbis auxiliari dicunt medici permixtam aliis, item alopeciis suggillatisque ac liventibus, ceu vero remedia desint, ut scelera non tractent. sed ista praetexunt noxio instrumento, tantumque inpudentiae est, ut venenum artis esse persuadeant. thapsia in Africa vehementissima. quidam caulem incidunt per messes et in ipsa excavant radice, quo sucus confluat, arefactumque tollunt.

alii folia, caulem, radicem tundunt in pila et sucum in sole coactum dividunt in pastillos. Nero Caesar claritatem ei dedit initio imperi, nocturnis grassationibus converberata facie inlinens id cum ture ceraque et secuto die contra famam cutem sinceram circumferens. ignem ferulis optime servari certum est easque in Aegypto praecellere.

… in case you’re not up to speed in your Latin, the skinny here is that Nero apparently was a sort of ‘sleepwalker’ and got into trouble while sleeping, which resulted, apparently in assorted beatings from ne’er-do-wells and would use a mixture of this thapsia, wax, and other things which apparently cleared things up over night!

Florida based Odyssey Marine Exploration has been ordered by an Atlanta judge to return to Spain the half million gold and silver Spanish coins recovered off the coast of Spain from the wreck of the Spanish ship Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes. Odyssey Marine Exploration found the treasure in 2007 and quickly packed it under what they called "The Black Swan Project" bringing it to Florida.

The Mercedes was bringing the treasure back to Spain from it's colony in Peru in 1804 when British ships attacked sending the Mercedes to the ocean floor. There is also some talk that Peru may also have a claim on the find.

This case will probably go on for many years before it reaches a conclusion as I imagine it will come to an end with everyone a little richer, or allot!

I have just scored 100% on the most worthless exam I have ever sat -- the Cambridge University "Equality and Diversity Essentials" test online.

I have had some experience of the futility of online tests from the USA, and had always rather boasted that the Brits hadn't gone down this silly route. So when I was notified that I would not be able to be on my Faculty Appointments Committee or my Faculty REF Committee (of which currently I am the Chair) unless I took the Uni online training course, I felt I would pass on the opportunity...

Look, if I don't do the training and the test, just think how many days I save by NOT being on the Appointments Committee or chairing the REF (probably, if you take into account writing the REF statememts,  a good 21 days.. attractive eh?). But, in the end, I thought of my mates who are trying to run the Faculty and how difficult it would be for them if I didnt do it (we havent got enough senior women, after all).. so I gave in.

And I suppose I thought that, resistant as I was, I might learn something .. like I had learned somethimg from the Speed Awareness Course I did a few years ago.

No such luck. This was a very bad way of spending 90 minutes.

Let me get this straight. I have no doubt that the University of Cambridge has a good bit still to do in equality terms (and I'm writing as someone who was for a few years the only woman University Lecturer in her Faculty.. so I know). And I have no doubt that these problems cross all levels of appointment, from temporary cleaner to regius professor, from physical disability to race or gender.

But the one size fits all version of 'equality training' in this online course could have satisfied no one. And I suspect that, if there were some unreconstructed old fogies in my Faculty (as it happens, there aren't-- even if 20 years ago there probably were), they would have been sent running into their unreconstructed bunkers by this course. It would have made matters worse rather than better.

For a start, equality training needs more than platitudes (amyone can agree with  platitude); it needs a bit of specificity. There are some similar -- and more very different -- equality issues when it comes to appointing a Lab technician or a Professor of History.  The course I have just done is clearly an off the peg package (loads of stuff about "halls of residence" which we don't have); and it doesn't engage with  any of the major issues which face academics in general, or the particular circumstances in Cambridge -- and certainly almost none ofthe issues which face classicists.

There is still an issue, for example,  about how far the highest level expertise in Latin and Greek language is as easy for ordinary women (or men) to acquire -- as for certain priliveged groups of independent school educated guys. And it's something that we need, in our Faculty, to keep in mind and discuss (as, I can assure you, we do).There is nothing whatsoever in this test package to help there.. nothing at all, not even a genuflection (and I imagine  same would be true for Physics appointments, with all the different nuances that come with different subjects). Instead it is full of platitudes.. reminding you  that if you find something offensive (in equality terms) you should look the offender in the eye ("maintain eye contact"), or insisting that you should say "X has epilepsy", not "X is an epileptic"... with a load of well meaning stuff about fair treatment, level playing fields and so forth.

None of this is bad in itself, and I think all my colleagues would sign up to the platitudes on offer .. who couldn't? But if you want actually to do something about the apparent disparity of opportunity for (say) women (or whoever) at the top of the Cambridge hierachy, this stuff is not only a waste of money, not hitting the targets ...but it's also a terrible waste of money.

There is a big job to do in this respect, both in Cambridge and also through most of the university sector. And that means working at the micro level, and drawing people into the project ... it's about consciousness raising in the old sense and about capitalising on the strides we have made since I took up my job (people really did use to ask women what they would do about childcare.., and there are similar advances with other 'minority ' groups.. not that women are a minority!)

But nothing comes from getting us all to sign up to slogans, on-line late at night, with our brains out of gear. And, of course, one suspects that a good part of the motive for the whole exercise is covering the university... if anyone challenges an appointment, don't they want to say "but all our appointing staff are 'equality and diversity trained'". But this is equality and diversity on the cheap. Can we, perhaps, calculate the number of person hours spent on this test and then work out how - with those hours -- we could better have served the cause of equality and diversity. Answers in comments please.

I would love to share the test with you, but -- no doubt for commercial reasons -- it is only available  with a Cambridge 'Raven " password (so you've been spared).

(PS my friend, the excellent Athene Donald is the Cambridge Gender "Champion".. yes that's the title... Please don't blame her for this rubbish.)

 

U.S. court backs Spain over $500M sea treasure - CNN.com:

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta on Tuesday turned aside another motion from the U.S.-based company, Odyssey Marine Exploration, and Spanish officials said they now expect the coins -- nearly 600,000 of them -- to arrive in Spain soon.

Recent stories from the world of archaeology!

The Penn Museum celebrates its 125th anniversary year by placing an arguably incomparable collection of ancient artifacts online for the world to see. The Penn Museum Online Collections Database is designed as a utility for scholars to obtain preliminary information on artifacts for research purposes, for teachers and students to explore a region’s cultural materials, and for any person who wishes to electronically organize and file their own set of favorite “finds” and share them with others. The database currently contains hundreds of thousands of object records and over fifty thousand images and is growing.

A scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is challenging the conventional wisdom about a 2,000-year-old artifact recently discovered in the Temple Mount area of Jerusalem.  The button-sized object was thought to be a seal indicating the purity of offerings, but Prof. Shlomo Naeh argues that the object is a kind of voucher or token which enabled the Temple administrator to keep track of commerce related to sacrificial offerings.

The Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture & Heritage (ADACH) has unveiled its plans for two key projects in Al Ain: the Al Ain National Museum and Hili Archaeological Park. Hili Archaeological Park is an internationally significant archaeological site, comprising Bronze Age, Iron Age and Islamic remains.

An update on  Ness of Brodgar, a Neolithic site in the Orkney islands that is looking progressively more like a temple complex.

Pompeii risks joining the World Heritage in Danger list. A Unesco report has identified serious problems with the World Heritage Site, including structural damage to buildings, vandalism and a lack of qualified staff.

Excavations at Mont-Saint-Michel uncovered the remains of  the Tower of Denis, a fortification tower built sometime around 1479 and demolished in 1732. 

Finds of residential architecture at Cahokia indicate that it was not a seasonal, ceremonial center, but an affluent neighborhood of Native Americans, set amid the largest concentration of people and monumental architecture north of what is now Mexico, large even by European and Mesoamerican standards of the day.

Plans to restore Rome’s nearly 2,000-year-old Colosseum are causing rumblings among heritage workers and restorers, compounded by reports in December that small amounts of powdery rock had fallen off the monument. The current $33 million (25 million euro) restoration plans to restore the Flavian amphitheater, which once hosted spectacular shows and gruesome gladiatorial battles, are being sponsored by Diego della Valle, of luxury Italian brand Tod’s, in exchange for advertising rights.

A terracotta head excavated from a village in Nigeria is one of the best-preserved examples of its kind ever discovered. It is a product of the Nok culture, an Iron Age culture that flourished from about 1000 BC to AD 500.

They got married, had children, made beer. Although they lived 3,500 years ago in Nippur, Babylonia, in many ways they seem like us. Whether they were also slaves is a hotly contested question which Jonathan Tenney, assistant professor of ancient Near Eastern studies, addresses in the newly released “Life at the Bottom of Babylonian Society: Servile Laborers at Nippur in the 14th and 13th Centuries, B.C.”

The Global Heritage Network (GHN), the world’s first early warning and site monitoring system dedicated exclusively to endangered cultural heritage sites in developing countries, became operational in March of 2011. The Network features updated satellite imagery for 175 of the developing world’s most significant archaeological and cultural heritage sites, including profile information on at least 80 of those sites.

Mexican archaeologists have found some 3,000 cave paintings, some almost 2,000 years old, in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, the National Anthropology and History Institute, or INAH, said.

A collection of rare ancient Greek coins which has been hidden away for two decades is expected to sell for millions of dollars when it goes up for auction in New York on Wednesday.

Now a leading scientific body, the Munich-based Max Planck Society, is teaming up with Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science to create a joint center devoted to studying archaeology and human evolution, to be based in both Rehovot, Israel, and Leipzig, Germany.

Spain has won a major victory in its long court battle with a Florida-based deep-sea salvage company over rights to an estimated $500 million in silver and gold coins, officials said Wednesday. The treasure was recovered in 2007 from a 19th century sunken ship off the Spanish coast.

 

Latest in a Playing with PELAGIOS series

Some of the PELAGIOS partners distribute their annotation RDF in a relatively small number of files. Others (like SPQR and ANS) have a very large number of files. This makes the technique I used earlier for adding triples to the database ungainly. Fortunately, 4store provides some command line methods for loading triples.

First, stop the 4store http server (why?):

$ killall 4s-httpd

Try to import all the RDF files.  Rats!

$ 4s-import -a pelagios *.rdf
-bash: /Applications/4store.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/4s-import: Argument list too long

Bash to the rescue (but note that doing one file at a time has a cost on the 4store side):

$ for f in *.rdf; do 4s-import -av pelagios $f; done
Reading <file:///Users/paregorios/Documents/files/P/pelagios-data/coins/0000.999.00000.rdf>
Pass 1, processed 10 triples (10)
Pass 2, processed 10 triples, 8912 triples/s
Updating index
Index update took 0.000890 seconds
Imported 10 triples, average 4266 triples/s
Reading <file:///Users/paregorios/Documents/files/P/pelagios-data/coins/0000.999.101.rdf>
Pass 1, processed 11 triples (11)
Pass 2, processed 11 triples, 9856 triples/s
Updating index
Index update took 0.000936 seconds
Imported 11 triples, average 4493 triples/s
Reading <file:///Users/paregorios/Documents/files/P/pelagios-data/coins/0000.999.10176.rdf>
Pass 1, processed 8 triples (8)
Pass 2, processed 8 triples, 6600 triples/s
Updating index
Index update took 0.000892 seconds
Imported 8 triples, average 3256 triples/s
... 

This took a while. There are 86,200 files in the ANS annotation batch.

Note the use of the -a option on 4s-import to ensure the triples are added to the current contents of the database, rather than replacing them! Note also the -v option, which is what gives you the report (otherwise, it's silent and that makes my ctrl-c finger twitchy).

Now, back to the SPARQL mines.

There certainly are those Jesus mythicists who would also deny that there was a historical Paul. But for many mythicists, perhaps the majority, the historicity of Paul and the authenticity of Paul’s letters is in fact important to their argument, since their case for mythicism focuses much attention on what Paul allegedly did not say about Jesus.

There is an irony here. Some mythicists actually do use the same tricks to deny the historicity of Paul as are used to deny the historicity of Jesus. Yet on the other hand, many of the arguments used to deny the historicity of Jesus by mythicists who accept that there was a historical Paul could be used to argue against Paul having been a historical figure as well, if the degree of skepticism applied to Jesus were to be applied consistently across the board.

For instance, many mythicists claim that since there are (allegedly) no early non-Christian historians that mention Jesus, he probably did not exist. Yet none of these figures they typically point out (or in the case of Josephus, claim) failed to mention Jesus – from Philo and Josephus to Seneca the Younger – mentions Paul, even though Paul is supposed to have traveled more widely than Jesus, and to have spread the religion we today refer to as Christianity, even going to the very capitol, Rome itself.

In none of its forms does mythicism deal with evidence in the manner that historians do. But the fact that few mythicists deny that there was a historical Paul shows that even in their treatment of figures connected with Christianity, there is significant inconsistency in how most mythicists deal with evidence or apply their arguments.

The sale of a 8.5 by 5.8 centimeter Qing dynasty (late 18th- early 19th century) gold box for £490,000 ($764,694.00) at London auction house Woolley and Wallis has provoked an international debate. The gold box, embellished with seed pearls, enamel glass panels, and floral motifs, inscribed in 1860 "Loot from Summer Palace, Perkin, October 1860, Captain James Gunter, King's Dragoon Guards." This engraving not only increased the box's value by 50%, but also sparked a passionate dialogue about looting during war, the Chinese art market, and auction house responsibility.

All is Fair in Loot and War?

Whether we regard items such as the Captain Gunter box as "stolen," "plundered," "contraband," "spoils of war," "ransacked," "pillaged," or as Gunter appropriately chose "looted," the taking of valuable goods from invaded areas during war is as old as war itself. Art Law: Cases and Materials perhaps says it best:

This historical sketch [referring to Roman activities] emphasizes the problem that can arise when the army of one nation occupies another. Historically, the world community did very little to protect national patrimony from plunder and destruction. Conquering armies believed they possessed the right to despoil a apparently defeated enemy. What about the interest of future generations in their nation's cultural property? Should they be deprived of their national artistic heritage merely because their country was defeated in battle? The protection of national patrimony from plunder has ramifications beyond the preservation of cultural heritage for future generations. (Leonard D. DuBoff, Sherri Burr, Michael D. Murray, Art Law: Cases and Materials, 2004, 32).

The looting of the Summer Palace on October 18th and 19th, 1860 is considered by many as one of the most embarrassing events in Chinese history. The Opium War, also known as the Anglo-Chinese War, occurred in two stages between 1839 and 1860 after trade relations broke down between the Qing Dynasty and the British Empire. During the war, British forces razed historic Chinese sites and looted of Chinese "souvenirs."

Interesting enough, the looting and destruction of the Summer Palace occurred under the orders of the British High Commissioner to China, James Bruce, the Eighth Lord Elgin, son of Thomas Bruce, the Seventh Earl of Elgin responsible for the "preservation" of the metopes, friezes, and pedimental sculptures of the Acropolis, now in the British Museum. The destruction of the Summer Palace, a brash act of pyromania led to the death of hundreds of eunuchs trapped inside the compound and the "pillaging" of some 1.5 million relics. This signaled the end of the Opium War. In October 2010, China lamented the 150 year anniversary of the Opium War and the burning of the Summer Palace.

Captain Gunter's inscribed box is only one of the many items that he "looted" from the Summer Palace. On May 19th, 2011, Duke's Auctioneers of Dorchester Captain Gunter's descendants sold eleven pieces from the Summer Palace, including a 18th Century Qianlong period yellow jade pendant with a carved dragon for £478,000. In the auction catalogue, Duke's identified the pieces as "acquired" from the Summer Palace, rather than the more controversial term "looted." The Gunter family still holds possession of an extensive collection of artifacts-- ivory chopsticks, jade boxes, jade chimes, bowls, and a jadeite belt hook estimated to be worth over £2 million. Guy Schwinge, an expert from Duke's, recounts his visit to the Gunter estate in May 2011. He stated in The Daily Mail:

When I arrived at the house and was shown into the sitting room, I was not sure what I was going to see. We discussed the market for Chinese works of art over a cup of coffee and the results we had achieve at our recent Melplash Court sale, which included many Chinese works. The family then began to pull the most stunning pieces of jade from the back of a display cabinet in the corner of the room. I was stunned by the quality and number of pieces of jade that emerged from the cabinet. I felt the hairs at the back of my neck stand up. (The Daily Mail, May 4, 2011). 

The future of these items is still not known.

The "looting" that took place at the Summer Palace is not an isolated incident. In fact, the Chinese Cultural Relics Foundation predicts that over ten million cultural objects were "plundered" from China between 1840 and 1949. The 150th anniversary of the Summer Palace looting, coupled with China's growing wealth and status has ignited a strong and unified movement to return Chinese antiquities to their homeland.

The Chinese Art Market

However, instead of going to public museums, most Chinese antiquities enter private collections, displayed as a sign of wealth and power, not patriotism. Andrew Jabobs, a reporter for The New York Times, wrote in 2009:  

At its core, such mixed signals [of the Chinese search for relics] are an outgrowth of China's evolving self-identity. Is it a developing country with fresh memories of its victimization of imperial powers? Or, is it the world's biggest exporter, eager to ensure good relations with the outside world to protect its trade dependent economy? (The New York Times, "China Hunts for Art Treasures in U.S. Museums," December 17, 2009).  

The China Daily, agreed that the motives of China's wealthy class to purchase of antiquities is questionable. They wrote, "Although patriotism is playing a part in this hunting to recapture looted treasures, experts say that majority of buyers are in fact more interested in the investment potential of ancient works--and the glamour" (Cheng Yingqi, The China Daily, December 15, 2010).

The trade of Chinese antiquities is big business. The sale of Chinese artifacts has now surpassed the purchase of Old Master paintings (Scott Rayburn, "China Antique Sales Raise Record Sums", The China Daily, May 23, 2011). The revenue from the sale of Chinese works now exceeds $10 billion annually. After the October 2011 sale of "looted objects" from the Summer Palace, Tom Flynn, author of the blog ArtKnows, stated:

Recent auctions in the UK--even those held in the British Provinces--have demonstrated the lengths to which Chinese dealers and collectors will travel-- and indeed how high they are prepared to bid--to secure Imperial wares. Their buying power has now reached a level at which few Western dealers can compete (Art Knows, October 27, 2011). 

In recent years, major auctions houses such as Sotheby's and Christie's have opened locations in China, Singapore, and Hong Kong-- each enjoying enormous success. For example, a 2010 auction at Sotheby's Hong Kong specializing in Asian art totaled a record $447 million (Giles Turner, "Buying Frenzy for Chinese Art," Financial News, May 12, 2011).

Government Regulation

The sale of artifacts "looted" from the Summer Palace is complicated by China's export laws and Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the United States. China's Ministry of Culture issued "Interim Provisions on the Administration of the Import and Export of Art" on July 17, 2009. Article 5 of the provision states: "Art works are prohibited from being imported or exported if they contain content which:  

(1) violates the basic principles of the Constitution of China;

(2) endangers the unification of the country, national sovereignty or territorial integrity;

(3) divulges state secrets, endangers state security, honor or interests;

(4) incites ethnic hatred, discrimination, or harms ethnic unity or habits and customs;

(5) propagates or publicizes cults or superstitions;

(6) disrupts social order or stability;

(7) advocates or publicizes obscenity, pornography, gambling, violence, horror, or instigates crime;

(8) libels, slanders or harms the legal interests of others;

(9) deliberately tampers with history or severely distorts history;

(10) harms public morals or ethnic cultural traditions; or

(11) other content prohibited by laws, regulations and rules." (Nancy M. Murphy, "Provisions on the Managements of the Import and Export of Art," July 17, 2009). 

These provisions, in summary, give the government complete control over any and all works of art which enter or exit the country. These rules can be broadly interpreted and make it almost impossible to export Chinese antiquities from the country. The provisions also have created an underground trade, or black market, for Chinese antiquities.

Furthermore, the United States entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with China on January 14th, 2009, "acting pursuant to the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the means of prohibiting and preventing the illicit import, export, and transfer of ownership of cultural property, to which both countries are party; and desiring to reduce the incentives for pillage of irreplaceable archaeological material representing the rich cultural heritage of China." (United States, Department of State). For this reason, the trade in Chinese antiquities, particularly items that are newly discovered or have no established provenance, has shifted from the United States to the United Kingdom, Europe and Asia. For more information on the China MOU visit  SAFE's web site here and SAFECORNER's coverage at "Bilateral Agreements at Work," "Trying to put 'Humpty Dumpty back together again," and "Cultural Heritage in Danger: Reacting to the New York Times."

Yuanmingyuan Park, which houses the remaining Summer Palace relics, recently called upon foreign museums to return the "looted" relics. According to the United Kingdom's The Daily Telegraph, the main target of this action was the British Museum (Peter Foster, "China to Study British Museum for Looted Artefacts," The Daily Telegraph, October 19, 2009). Experts, however, are doubtful that items will ever be returned from international museums. Instead, some argue that the government's public campaign is an attempt to encourage private collectors in China to return or donate the antiquities to the Yuanmingyuan Park. In November 2011, the Yuanmingyuan Park called for a boycott of auctions selling "looted" relics. This, along with the founding of several non-governmental organizations such as the Lost Cultural Relics Recovery Program, has led to aggressive action to retrieve the 1.5 million relics "stolen" from the Summer Palace ("China Experts to Search Abroad for Looted Relics," France 24, October 19, 2009).

Questionable Auction House Sales

The art world was stunned on March 7, 2009 by what is now being called the "Yves Saint Laurent Fiasco." The Times' Richard Morris reported: "The fury of the reactions to an act of sabotage by an incensed Chinese bidder has rocked the art world" (The Times, March 7, 2009). At an Asian sale at Christie's Paris a pair of bronze animal heads, once of a set of twelve that made up a water clock at the Summer Palace, achieved a hammer price of £28 million. The bidder, Cai Mingchao, a once trusted Christie's client, promptly refused to pay. In a statement he said his intentions were to "draw attention to this sale of looted treasure.... There is an indignation in China that Chinese bidders have to spend millions simply to retrieve artifacts that were looted from the country" (The Times, March 7, 2009).

Christie's options included: (1) sue for the payment, drawing attention to the fact that they are selling known "looted" goods; or (2) attempt to re-auction the heads to buyers now aware of the questionable provenance and potential for a title claim. Both options would damage Christie's image, respectability, reliability, and result in extreme legal fees. The bronze animal heads were returned to the consignor. However, unconfirmed reports indicate that Christie's may receive some form of payment. Cai Mingchao was, therefore, successful in his statement about "looted" goods. This episode served as a wake-up call. As a result, auction houses in the United Kingdom now require pre-registration applications, financial references, guarantees, and deposits at least three days before Asian art sales. Such measures limit the possible economic losses for auction houses. Yet, these pre-registration requirements they do not prevent the loss of reliability and reputation that are key to the auction business.

This brings us back to Captain Gunter's gold box.  Was the risk of auctioning an obviously "looted" item worth Woolley and Willis' premium return on $764,694? Granted, the Gunter family currently has possession, but who truly owns such "looted" items? Where should they go, what should happen to them? These are questions not only relevant to the Captain Gunter case, but to the all the artifacts "stolen" or "looted" from the Summer Palace.


Photos Courtesy of Woolley and Wallis, The Daily Mail, and The Times.

Particularly appropriate for a digital classicist or archaeologist with an interest in digital preservation and a high level of computer skills (from University of York jobs):

The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) has a vacancy for a Digital Archivist for a fixed term of two years, commencing immediately.

The post will involve accessioning, mounting, and indexing of data collections, validation of data and conversion into preferred formats; curation and migration of digital collections; design and development of user interfaces; and discussion and data audits with data depositors.

You should have a first degree or postgraduate qualification in archaeology and/or computer science, and you should possess an exceptionally high level of ICT skills.

So, I want to see how hard it is to query the RDF that PELAGIOS partners are putting together. The first experiment is documented below.

Step 1: Set up a Triplestore (something to load the RDF into and support queries)

Context: I'm a triplestore n00b. 

I found Jeni Tennison's Getting Started with RDF and SPARQL Using 4store and RDF.rb and, though I had no interest in messing around with Ruby as part of this exercise, the recommendation of 4store as a triplestore sounded good, so I went hunting for a Mac binary and downloaded it.

Step 2: Grab RDF describing content in Nomisma.org

Context: I'm a point-and-click expert.

I downloaded the PELAGIOS-conformant RDF data published by Nomisma.org at http://nomisma.org/nomisma.org.pelagios.rdf.

Background: "Nomisma.org is a collaborative effort to provide stable digital representations of numismatic concepts and entities, for example the generic idea of a coin hoard or an actual hoard as documented in the print publication An Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards (IGCH)."

Step 3: Fire up 4store and load in the nomisma.org 

Context: I'm a 4store n00b, but I can cut and paste, read and reason, and experiment.

Double-clicked the 4store icon in my Applications folder. It opened a terminal window.

To create and start up an empty database for my triples, I followed the 4store instructions and Tennison's post (mutatis mutandis) and so typed the following in the terminal window ("pelagios" is the name I gave to my database; you could call yours "ray" or "jay" if you like):

$ 4s-backend-setup pelagios
$ 4s-backend pelagios

Then I started up 4store's SPARQL http server and aimed it at the still-empty "pelagios" database so I could load my data and try my hand at some queries:

$ 4s-httpd pelagios

Loading the nomisma data was then as simple as moving to the directory where I'd saved the RDF file and typing:

$ curl -T nomisma.org.pelagios.rdf 'http://localhost:8080/data/http://nomisma.org/nomisma.org.pelagios.rdf/'

Note how the URI base for nomisma items is appended to the URL string passed via curl. This is how you specify the "model URI" for the graph of triples that gets created from the RDF.

Step 4: Try to construct a query and dig out some data.

Context: I'm a SPARQL n00b, but I'd done some SQL back in the day and XML and namespaces are pretty much burned into my soul at this point. 

Following Tennison's example, I pointed my browser at http://localhost:8080/test/. I got 4store's SPARQL test query interface. I googled around looking grumpily at different SPARQL "how-tos" and "getting starteds" and trying stuff and pondering repeated failure until this worked:

PREFIX rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
PREFIX foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>
PREFIX oac: <http://www.openannotation.org/ns/>

SELECT ?x
WHERE {
 ?x oac:hasBody <http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/462086> .
} 

That's "find the ID of every OAC Annotation in the triplestore that's linked to Pleiades Place 462086" (i.e., Akragas/Agrigentum, modern Agrigento in Sicily). It's a list like this:

• http://nomisma.org/nomisma.org.pelagios.rdf#igch1910-agrigentum-5
• http://nomisma.org/nomisma.org.pelagios.rdf#igch2089-agrigentum-24
• http://nomisma.org/nomisma.org.pelagios.rdf#igch2101-agrigentum-32
• ...

51 IDs in all.

But what I really want is a list of the IDs of the nomisma entities themselves so I can go look up the details and learn things. Back to the SPARQL mines until I produced this:

PREFIX rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
PREFIX foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>
PREFIX oac: <http://www.openannotation.org/ns/>

SELECT ?nomismaid
WHERE {
 ?x oac:hasBody <http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/462086> .
 ?x oac:hasTarget ?nomismaid .
} 

Now I have a list of 51 nomisma IDs: one for the mint and 50 coin hoards that illustrate the economic network in which the ancient city participated (e.g., http://nomisma.org/id/igch2081).

Cost: about 2 hours of time, 1 cup of coffee, and three favors from Sebastian Heath on IRC.

Up next: Arachne, the object database of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut.

Querying Pleiades annotations out of Arachne RDF was as simple as loading the Arachne Objects by Places RDF file into 4store the same way I did nomisma and running the same SPARQL query.  Cost: 5 minutes. Now I know about 29 objects in the Arachne database that they think are related to Akragas/Agrigentum. For example:

• 41149: Sarkophag mit dem Hippolytosmythos (Agrigent, S. Nicola): 
  http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/entity/1098273 == http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/item/objekt/41149
• 75: Statue des Apollon (Agrigent, Museo Civico): http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/entity/1060434 == http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/item/objekt/75
• 75000: Atlant des Olympieions von Agrigent (Akragas, Agrigentum, Agrigento): http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/entity/1111253 == http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/item/objekt/75000

After putting together the version of Eusebius’ Church History for BibleWorks, I thought I stumbled onto something good and there was a need to add more writings of the early Church Fathers* into BibleWorks. The only question was whether to add them as separate versions or put them together in one release. I decided that it would be better to start putting them together in one gigantic release. So this is the first of hopefully many updates to this version.

Out of the zip file what you have included is original language and translations of the following texts:

• Justin Martyr: Apology 1, Apology 2 and Dialogue with Trypho
• Clement of Alexandria: Protrepticus, What Rich Man is Saved?, and To the Newly Baptized
• Tertullian: Apology, On Spectacles
• Minucius Felix: Octavius
• Eusebius: Church History
• Basil the Great: To Young Men on Greek Literature

If that’s not enough to get you excited, I’m not sure what is!

Oh I know. It’s probably the cost. These are all free downloads for BibleWorks users. The files all work perfectly in BibleWorks 9 (make sure you have updated the latest executable files), and should work in BibleWorks 8, but I make no guarantees.

Special thanks to those who have helped me put together these files and especially to Kevin Edgecomb for sharing the work he had done on Justin’s Dialogue!

DOWNLOAD!

1. Unzip the files to the \databases\ subfolder in your BibleWorks folder and restart BibleWorks. The new versions will use the version IDs CF-G for the Greek version, CF-L for the Latin version, and CF-E for the English translations.

2. In order to get the book names to show up correctly you must also add any of the missing lines to your books.bna file (which is found in the BibleWorks subfolder called \init\ and can be opened with a simple text editor like Notepad)

Unless I’m mistaken the following book names come standard in BibleWorks, but if not, you would need to add them to your books.bna file:
JAp,The Apology of Justin,JAp,JAP
DJT,Dialogue of Justin with Trypho a Jew,DJT,DJT
TAp,Tertullian Apology,TAp,TAP
TSh,Tertullian The Shows,TSh,TSH
MFO,Minucius Felix The Octavius,MFO,MFO

If you’ve downloaded the Eusebius files, you should already have added the following to your books.bna file:
EH1,Ecclesiastical History-Book 1,EH-1,EH-1
EH2,Ecclesiastical History-Book 2,EH-2,EH-2
EH3,Ecclesiastical History-Book 3,EH-3,EH-3
EH4,Ecclesiastical History-Book 4,EH-4,EH-4
EX5,Ecclesiastical History-Preface Book 5,EH-5preface, EH-5preface
EH5,Ecclesiastical History-Book 5,EH-5,EH-5
EH6,Ecclesiastical History-Book 6,EH-6,EH-6
EH7,Ecclesiastical History-Book 7,EH-7,EH-7
EH8,Ecclesiastical History-Book 8,EH-8,EH-8
EH9,Ecclesiastical History-Book 9,EH-9,EH-9
EHX,Ecclesiastical History-Book 10,EH-10,EH-10

These are the new book name abbreviations and need to be added to your books.bna file:
Jaq,Justin-Apology 2,Justin-Apology 2,Apology 2
CPT,Clement-Protrepticus,Protrepticus,Protrepticus
CRM,What Rich Man is Saved?,What Rich Man is saved?,Rich man
CBP,To the Newly Baptized,To the Newly Baptized,To the Newly Baptized
INC,On the Incarnation of the Word,On the Incarnation of the Word,Incarnation
BTY,To Young Men on Greek Literature,To Young Men on Greek Literature,To Young Men on Greek Literature

* I use this term rather loosely to mean Christian writers of the first few centuries.

After it came up on this blog a while back, I’ve wanted to return to the topic of the “Original Aramaic Lord’s Prayer.” Why? Because the thing that can be found online referred to in this way is not original, not Aramaic, not a translation, and not the Lord’s Prayer.

Let me elaborate further.

This prayer can be found online in a number of places, and stems for the most part from books like Prayers of the Cosmos: Reflections on the Original Meaning of Jesus’s Words by Neil Douglas-Klotz.

The transliteration is poor, and so anyone reading the English letters will not get a sense of what the words sound like. The transliteration is based on the Syriac version of the Lord’s Prayer. Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic, but it differs in some respects from Galilean and other Palestinian dialects of Aramaic, and so even to the extent that the Syriac prayer is Aramaic, it is not the original Aramaic. (Scroll to the end of the post for the text of the prayer in Syriac).

Let me go through the alleged translation of the alleged original Aramaic prayer line by line, and explain why it is not a translation of the meaning of the Aramaic into English (whether the Syriac or a reconstructed Galilean version), and thus does not deserve to be considered a form of the Lord’s Prayer.

Oh Thou, from whom the breath of life comes, who fills all realms of sound, light and vibration.

This is not a translation of either Matthew’s or Luke’s version, much less an attempt to determine which is the more original. The likelihood that Jesus’ own uttered version of the prayer, before it was adapted for communal use by Christians as reflected in Matthew, simply began with Abba, the Aramaic word for father, is likely. There is no personal pronoun, and no sense in which Abba means “one from whom the breath of life comes.” Nor does the reference to heaven/sky – again, found in Matthew but not in Luke – translate naturally to “realms of sound, light and vibration.”

May Your light be experienced in my utmost holiest.

This is clearly an attempt to do something with “Hallowed be your name.” But how does name become light, and how does the expression of a desire for the name to be sanctified become something holy in the one praying? This is not a translation or even an interpretation of what is in the Syriac, Aramaic or any other version of the Lord’s Prayer.

Your Heavenly Domain approaches.

This line is not as bad as the previous ones if considered an attempt to paraphrastically explore the meaning of Matthew’s version. But since we know that the version in Matthew, “kingdom of heaven,” is his rendering of “kingdom of God,” combining the sense that it is God’s domain with the idea that it is heavenly is potentially confusing.  As for the verb, the future tense has been rendered in previous lines as expressing the desire for something to happen, and so for consistency it should be rendered the same way here: “May the domain of God come.” Otherwise, it should be “The domain of God will come.”

Let Your will come true – in the universe (all that vibrates) just as on earth (that is material and dense).

The first part of this is not bad – a very literal rendering might be “Let your will be” which can carry the sense of “Let your will happen/come to pass.” Turning the heavens into a universe that vibrates and adding commentary about density to the earth is unhelpful and does not reflect an ancient understanding, which did not necessarily view the heavens as immaterial, nor do I think that people today think of the universe as immaterial. So once again, not only is this not translation, much less good translation, but it is unnecessarily confusing.

Give us wisdom (understanding, assistance) for our daily need, detach the fetters of faults that bind us, (karma) like we let go the guilt of others.

Turning the request for bread into a request for wisdom, however much the provision of manna was treated as symbolic of the giving of wisdom, takes one well beyond translation. The second part adds karma for no reason, and this is clearly the importing of an Indian concept into what is being claimed as a first century Galilean Jewish prayer.

Let us not be lost in superficial things (materialism, common temptations), but let us be freed from that what keeps us from our true purpose.

The interpretation of temptation as having to do with superficial things and materialism, and the interpretation of evil as “what keeps us from our true purpose” is interesting and worth reflecting on, but it is not in any sense a translation of what the Aramaic words mean, but an attempt to apply the prayer to today’s very different setting. Materialism was not an issue that most of Jesus’ audience had the luxury of being tempted by.

From You comes the all-working will, the lively strength to act, the song that beautifies all and renews itself from age to age.

This has almost nothing in common with the Aramaic. The closest is its rendering of the word for power in terms of “strength to act,” since strength is indeed one of the meanings of the Aramaic word found where, in the familiar English versions, the Greek is rendered “power.” But the introduction of a song as a substitute for “glory” when the Aramaic has no musical connotations is unjustified, and so too the introduction of the notion of “will” where previously the same word for kingdom was rendered (quite legitimately, if narrowly) as “domain.”

Sealed in trust, faith and truth. (I confirm with my entire being)

I am tempted to mention that “Amen” means different things in different contexts – my pastor regularly says that in a Baptist church, “Amen” means “You may be seated.” The question of what Amen means in a lexical sense is relevant, but so too is the question of how the term functioned when used even by people who were speaking languages other than Hebrew and yet still used the Hebrew term.

In short, I have no problem with anyone who happens to want to utter this prayer or finds it meaningful or spiritually useful. Just don’t mistake it for a translation of the Lord’s Prayer, much less the original Aramaic one. The same applies to many of the other supposed translations of the Aramaic Lord’s Prayer that one can find online. In short, the less it looks like the Lord’s Prayer as you know it, the more likely it is to be a free paraphrase or interpretation rather than a translation. And if you want to really grasp the Lord’s Prayer as Jesus uttered it in his own language, there is only one way to get even close to doing that: learn the ancient Palestinian dialect of Aramaic. Translating words from one language into another always involves some transformation of meaning. There is simply no way to fully grasp the precise meaning and nuance of anything in another language than by becoming intimately acquainted with the language and culture in question.

For more on this subject, see the several relevant posts by Steve Caruso on The Aramaic Blog as well as other critical appraisals available online.

Just the other day I posted news of the online availability of digitized images of the tablets and inscriptions from the Musées d’Art et d’Histoire of Geneva. Now comes news that images of the Columbia University Libraries cuneiform collection are online. Several of the tablet presentations also have transliterations.

Both image libraries were facilitated by Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative.

Via Jack Sasson’s Agade List

A. Kropp, Ausgewählte koptische Zaubertexte

Courtesy of Alin Suciu

• Angelicus Kropp, Ausgewählte koptische Zaubertexte Bd. I: Textpublikation (Brussels: Edition de la Fondation égyptologique reine Elisabeth, 1930) download
• Angelicus Kropp, Ausgewählte koptische Zaubertexte Bd. II: Übersetzungen und Anmerkungen (Brussels: Edition de la Fondation égyptologique reine Elisabeth, 1931) download
• Angelicus Kropp, Ausgewählte koptische Zaubertexte Bd. III: Einleitung in koptische Zaubertexte (Brussels: Edition de la Fondation égyptologique reine Elisabeth, 1930) download

The Classics faculty at Royal Holloway have just been informed that in 2014 they will lose one position or, if applications decrease this year, two positions. Applications are holding up, so it seems that only one position will be lost. This is much better than the dire scenario that was threatened last summer, when many of our members signed an international petition in defense of Classics at RHUL.

[First posted in AWOL 5 October 2010. Updated 2 February 2012]

The Alexandria Center for Hellenistic Studies

The Alexandria Center for Hellenistic Studies, was established as a joint collaboration between the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the Onassis Foundation, the Vardinoyannis Foundation and the University of Alexandria. Graduates of departments of Classics or Archeology may apply for the Masters directly. Non-specialized students will take a one year qualifying Diploma, which qualifies candidates to apply for a Masters degree.

• Digital Library

Bulletin de la Société archéologique d'Alexandrie Author(s): Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) - Antiquities - Archaeology Volume: 1-2-3-4-5 Publication Date: 1898-1925 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Read now

Bulletin de la Société archéologique d'Alexandrie Author(s): Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) - Antiquities - Archaeology Volume: 9-10-11 Publication Date: 1898-1925 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Read now

Bulletin de la Société archéologique d'Alexandrie Author(s): Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) - Antiquities - Archaeology Volume: 12-13-14 Publication Date: 1898-1925 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Read now

Bulletin de la Société archéologique d'Alexandrie Author(s): Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) - Antiquities - Archaeology Volume: 15-16-17 Publication Date: 1898-1925 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Read now

Bulletin de la Société archéologique d'Alexandrie Author(s): Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) - Antiquities - Archaeology Volume: 18-19-20 Publication Date: 1898-1925 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Read now

Bulletin de la Société archéologique d'Alexandrie Author(s): Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) - Antiquities - Archaeology Volume: 21-22-23 Publication Date: 1898-1925 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Read now

Bulletin de la Société archéologique d'Alexandrie Author(s): Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) - Antiquities - Archaeology Volume: 46 Publication Date: 1898-1925 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Read now

Bulletin Author(s): Subject(s): Archéologie Volume: 6 Publication Date: 1904 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Read now

Bulletin Author(s): Subject(s): Archéologie Volume: 40 Publication Date: 1953 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Read now

Bulletin Author(s): Subject(s): Archéologie Volume: 41 Publication Date: 1956 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Read now

Bulletin Author(s): Subject(s): Archéologie Volume: 42 Publication Date: 1967 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Read now Bulletin Author(s): Subject(s): Archéologie Volume: 43 Publication Date: 1975 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Read now Bulletin Author(s): Subject(s): Archéologie Volume: 44 Publication Date: 1991 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Read now Bulletin Author(s): Subject(s): Archéologie Volume: 45 Publication Date: 1993 Language: English Category: History of ancient world Read now Bulletin Author(s): Subject(s): Archéologie Volume: 47 Publication Date: 2003 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Read now Bulletin de la Société royale d'archéologie d'Alexandrie Author(s): Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) - Antiquities - Archaeology Volume: 24 Publication Date: 1926-1951 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Egypt Read now Bulletin de la Société royale d'archéologie d'Alexandrie Author(s): Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) - Antiquities - Archaeology Volume: 27 Publication Date: 1926-1951 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Egypt Read now Bulletin de la Société royale d'archéologie d'Alexandrie Author(s): Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) - Antiquities - Archaeology Volume: 30 Publication Date: 1926-1951 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Egypt Read now Bulletin de la Société royale d'archéologie d'Alexandrie Author(s): Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) - Antiquities - Archaeology Volume: 31 Publication Date: 1926-1951 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Egypt Read now Bulletin de la Société royale d'archéologie d'Alexandrie Author(s): Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) - Antiquities - Archaeology Volume: 32-33 Publication Date: 1926-1951 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Egypt Read now Bulletin de la Société royale d'archéologie d'Alexandrie Author(s): Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) - Antiquities - Archaeology Volume: 34-35 Publication Date: 1926-1951 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Egypt Read now Bulletin de la Société royale d'archéologie d'Alexandrie Author(s): Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) - Antiquities - Archaeology Volume: 36 Publication Date: 1926-1951 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Egypt Read now Bulletin de la Société royale d'archéologie d'Alexandrie Author(s): Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) - Antiquities - Archaeology Volume: 37 Publication Date: 1926-1951 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Egypt Read now Bulletin de la Société royale d'archéologie d'Alexandrie Author(s): Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) - Antiquities - Archaeology Volume: 38 Publication Date: 1926-1951 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Egypt Read now Bulletin de la Société royale d'archéologie d'Alexandrie Author(s): Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) - Antiquities - Archaeology Volume: 39 Publication Date: 1926-1951 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Egypt Read now Monuments de l'Egypte gréco-romaine Author(s): Subject(s): Egypt Antiquities - Classical antiquities - Sculpture, Greco Roman Egypt - Sculpture Volume: vol. 2 pt. 2 Publication Date: 1934 Language: Italian Category: Sculpture to ca. 500 Read now Rapport sur la marche du service du musée pendant l'exercice 1929-1921 Author(s): Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) - Antiquities - Art - Greco-Roman Volume: Publication Date: 1923 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Egypt Read now Rapport sur la marche du service du musée en 1913 Author(s): Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) - Antiquities - Art - Greco-Roman Volume: Publication Date: 1914 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Egypt Read now Bulletin de la Société archéologique d'Alexandrie Author(s): Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) - Antiquities - Archaeology Volume: no. 8 1905 Publication Date: 1898-1925 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Read now Bulletin de la Société archéologique d'Alexandrie Author(s): Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) - Antiquities - Archaeology Volume: no. 7 1905 Publication Date: 1898-1925 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Read now Annuario del Museo Greco-Romano Author(s): Adriani, Achille. Subject(s): Matḥaf al-Yūnānī al-Rūmānī (Alexandria, Egypt) Volume: vol. 1 Publication Date: 1934 Language: Italian Category: History of ancient world Egypt Read now Annuaire du Musée Greco-Romain (1933-34 - 1934-35) : La Nécropole de Moustafa Pacha Author(s): Adriani, Achille. Subject(s): Art, Greco-Roman Volume: Publication Date: 1933 Language: French Category: Read now Annuaire du Musée gréco-romain Author(s): Adriani, Achille. Subject(s): Greco-Roman Volume: vol. 2 Publication Date: 1940-1952 Language: Arabic Category: Ancient world Read now Annuaire du Musée gréco-romain Author(s): Adriani, Achille. Subject(s): Greco-Roman Volume: vol. 3 Publication Date: 1940-1952 Language: Arabic Category: Ancient world Read now La côte Alexandrine dans l'antiquité Author(s): Botti, Giuseppe Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) - Antiquities Volume: vol. 1 Publication Date: 1897 Language: French Category: Ancient world Read now Plan de la ville d'Alexandrie à l'époque ptolémaique Monuments et localités de l'ancienne Alexandrie; Mémoire présenté à la société archéologique Author(s): Botti, Giuseppe Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) - Descriptions et voyages Volume: Publication Date: 1898 Language: French Category: Africa Read now L'acropole d'Alexandrie et le sérapeum d'apres Aphtonius et les fouilles : mémoire présenté à la Société archéologique d'Alexandrie à la séance du 17 août 1895 Author(s): Botti, Giuseppe Subject(s): Aphthonius - 4th cent - Greece - Acropolis (Athens) - Serapeum Volume: Publication Date: 1895 Language: French Category: General history of Africa Egypt & Sudan Read now Fouilles à la colonne Théodosienne (1896) : Mémoire présenté à la Société archéologique Author(s): Botti, Giuseppe Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) - Antiquities Volume: Publication Date: 1897 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Egypt Read now Catalogue des monuments exposés au Musée gréco-romain d'Alexandrie Author(s): Botti, Giuseppe Subject(s): Art - Greek - Roman - Classical antiquities - Catalogs Antiquités gréco-romaines Volume: Publication Date: 1900 Language: French Category: Galleries, museums, private collections Read now Egitto greco e romano Author(s): Breccia, Evaristo Subject(s): Egypt - Antiquities - History - Greco-Roman period, 332 B.C.-640 A.D. Volume: Publication Date: 1957 Language: Italian Category: History of ancient world Egypt Read now Iscrizioni greche e latine Author(s): Breccia, Evaristo Subject(s): Inscriptions, Latin - Inscriptions Egypt Alexandria Catalogs - Inscriptions, Greek Volume: Publication Date: 1911 Language: Italian Category: History of ancient world Egypt Read now La necropoli di Sciatbi Author(s): Breccia, Evaristo Subject(s): Egyptian Art - Glassware - Ancient Egypt - Roman Egypt - Tombs - Antiquities Volume: vol. 2 Publication Date: 1912 Language: Italian Category: History of ancient world Egypt Read now Alexandrea ad Aegyptum : a guide to the ancient and modern town, and to its Graeco-Roman museum Author(s): Breccia, Evaristo Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) - Antiquities - History - Matḥaf al-Yūnānī al-Rūmānī - Oudheden - Roman Antiquities - Guid Volume: Publication Date: 1922 Language: English Category: History of ancient world Egypt Read now Le musée Gréco-Romain, 1925-1931 Author(s): Breccia, Evaristo Subject(s): Matḥaf al-Yūnānī al-Rūmānī (Alexandria, Egypt) Volume: Publication Date: 1925 Language: French Category: Read now Le musée Gréco-Romain, 1931-1932 Author(s): Breccia, Evaristo Subject(s): Matḥaf al-Yūnānī al-Rūmānī (Alexandria, Egypt) Volume: Publication Date: 1931 Language: French Category: Read now Mémoire sur l'antique Alexandrie : ses faubourges et environs découverts par les fouilles, sondages, nivellements et autres recherches, faits d'aprés les ordres de son Altesse, Ismaïl Pacha, vice roi d'Egypte Author(s): Falakī, Maḥmūd Bāshā Subject(s): Egypte - Antiquités - Alexandrie (Egypte) Volume: Publication Date: 1872 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Egypt Read now L'architecture et la décoration dans l'ancienne Egypte Author(s): Jéquier, Gustave - Mestral Combremont, Victor de Subject(s): Egypte - Antiquités - Temples - Architecture Volume: vol. 3 Publication Date: 1920-1924 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Egypt Read now L'architecture et la décoration dans l'ancienne Egypte Author(s): Jéquier, Gustave - Mestral Combremont, Victor de Subject(s): Egypte - Antiquités - Temples - Architecture Volume: vol. 1 Publication Date: 1920-1924 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Egypt Read now L'architecture et la décoration dans l'ancienne Egypte Author(s): Jéquier, Gustave - Mestral Combremont, Victor de Subject(s): Egypte - Antiquités - Temples - Architecture Volume: vol. 2 Publication Date: 1920-1924 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Egypt Read now City of Alexandria town planning scheme : (projet d'aménagement, d'embellissement et d'extension de la ville d'Alexandrie) Author(s): McLean, William Hannah Subject(s): Urbanisme Égypte Alexandrie Volume: Publication Date: 1921 Language: French Category: Area planning (Civic art) Read now L'ancienne Alexandrie : étude archéologique et topographique Author(s): Neroutsos, Tassos Demetrios Subject(s): Alexandria (Egypt) Volume: Publication Date: 1888 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Egypt Read now Les Grecs en Égypte d'après les archives de Zénon Author(s): Préaux, Claire - Zēnōn Subject(s): Grecs - Égypte - Antiquité - Civilisation Volume: Publication Date: 1947 Language: French Category: History of ancient world Egypt Read now Pharos, antike, Islam und Occident : ein beitrag zur parchitekturgeschichte Author(s): Thiersch, Hermann Subject(s): Lighthouses - Egypt - Alexandria Volume: Publication Date: 1909 Language: German Category: Architecture to ca. 300 Read now رسالة عن الاسكندرية القديمة و ضواحيها و الجهات القريبة منها التى اكتشفت بالحفريات و اعمال سبر الغور و المسح و طرق البحث الاخرى Author(s): حسين، محمد عواد - الفلكى، محمود احمد حمدى Subject(s): الإسكندرية (مصر) - آثار- الآثار اليونانية - الآثار الرومانية - احياء و ضواحى - خرائط Volume: Publication Date: 1966 Language: Arabic Category: History of ancient world Egypt Read now

Just back from a flying visit to Groningen, where I presented at a Lustrum which celebrated 25 years of Humanities Computing - or "Alfa-Informatica" - there. I was invited to present about Digital Humanities, and my talk can be summed up in one sentence:

Why dont Digital Humanities folk talk to Computational Linguistics folk, and vice versa?

It was a lovely event - fun, and informative. I particularly enjoyed meeting Eduard Hovy, and hearing his talk about issues in training question and answer systems, and the way they parse questions we set them. I met some good people, and heard some interesting things.

Groningen is a lovely University town, very vibrant. I managed to include a couple of hours in my schedule to have a bit of a wander, which is becoming more important to me as I travel away from home. If you dont manage to see the place at all, it just becomes a veeeeeery long commute to give a half an hour, sometimes hour long, lecture. In my recent trip to Portugal, I managed an hour to go and see the Frida Kahlo exhibition, in Groningen I had an hour to trawl round fleamarkets, finding some cool dutch tat. I have upcoming trips, in the next month, to Edinburgh, Paris and Munich. Its all good - I enjoy the travel, tend to get lots done when I am away from home, get one or two good night's sleep, meet new people - and if I'm lucky, get a wander round a city, and enjoy the chance to explore.

Should we refer to J. J. Abrams as in some sense a “theologian”? Last week’s episode of Fringe, “Forced Perspective,” which I only found the time to watch last night, is full of theology and philosophy. From a girl with remarkable precognition asking why God made her this way (and being reassured that God makes everyone and everything for a purpose) to discussions of fate and foreknowledge, the episode explored interesting theological and philosophical topics.

Even in the Latin slogan on the courthouse, ”Dei judicium fiat justitia” – “By the judgment of God, let justice be done” – there is a theological component.

On the one hand, the vision of the young prophetess who is at the center of the story seems to predict the inevitable, and yet – just as with those known as prophets in ancient Israel, for instance – it turns out that by taking her warning to heart, it is possible to avoid the predicted outcome.

On the other hand, the observers seem to be in the role of gods or angels. They exist outside of time, or in all time, and so they do not predict the future, but have already experienced it. Even there, their knowledge seems to be what is known as “middle knowledge” – not knowledge that one course of events is inevitable, but knowledge of what will transpire given every possible unfolding of events.

The subjects of foreknowledge, fate, and free will are fascinating ones. But perhaps even more interesting is the very fact that a science fiction TV show is exploring theology. I wonder how many viewers actually treat shows like Fringe as an opportunity for theological and philosophical reflection.

 

So, what has been going on guys? Things have been rather quiet around here. I don&#8217t expect anyone to still be around...but hi anyway! Now begins the obligitory &#8220I have not blogged in like forever&#8221 post.

Alright, some factoids for those who care. My next post will actually have real content ;)

• I still live in Dallas. I still have one wife and three kids. I also now own fish.
• I am still a developer by trade and I still love it. I am also still at the same job I was last time. Lots of tech stuff has changed over the last few years but you guys may not really care about that. If so, follow my technical blog. I have actually been updating things there.
• My forays into early Christianity have continued. I have spent less time in the world of textual criticism and manuscript reading. TC itself isn&#8217t that huge of an interest for me but I do enjoy manuscript reading still. Need to do more of that...
• Perhaps the most mind-opening study I have been doing has been in far eastern Christianity, as in east of the Eastern Orthodox, among the so-called "Assyrian Orthodox." There is a lot of interesting stuff there and a lot more for me to learn.
• In the meantime I actually studied a little Latin, but just enough to make me feel guilty for quitting again. I think I made it through a little over a quarter of Wheelock this time.
• I am still attending FBC Parker, a reformed Baptist church in Parker, TX. Strangely enough, I happen to be in the first long break from teaching that I&#8217ve had in years. It has been refreshing, but I am anxious to start back. I plan on starting with a study of the Gospel of John. Related, Richard Bauckham is such a valuable asset :)
• I am currently studying the only extant letter of Theophilus of Antioch, his letter to Autolycus. I hope to start blogging on it next week. You have to start somewhere.
• I have this problem. As a web developer, I feel the need to write my own blog site. Most web developers are smart enough not to think this way but, alas, it is a burden I bear. I have had a new version of it for quite some time but this blog was not on it. Problem #2 is that if my blog isn&#8217t up to snuff technically, I don&#8217t want to use it. This actually has contributed quite a bit to my silence over the last year. This will not make any sense to any of you. Like I said, I have a problem :) Things are mostly converted over now though I have some old image links to update, some content to fix, some urls to make backwards-compatible and some styling to do. I should get most of this fixed soon, but I won&#8217t let that keep me from my blogging this time!

My stalwart readers, if you still exist, I look forward to chatting with you :)

Onassis Foundation USA Publications

Transition to Christianity: Art of Late Antiquity, 3rd – 7th Century AD

"Transition to Christianity: Art of Late Antiquity, 3rd – 7th Century AD." contains an introductory essay by Peter Brown, and essays by Fabrizio Bisconti, Kimberly Bowes, Averil Cameron, Slobodan Ćurčić, Jaś Elsner, Henry Maguire, Katherine Marsengill, Aristotelis Mentzos, Helen Saradi-Mendelovici, and Ioannis Touratsoglou.


New! Read the Transition to Christianity Catalogue online.
Click here

You can now watch the taped sessions online.

I’ve been running this blog for nearly six years now, but for most part I don’t know who my readers are! Over the last couple of years I’ve had interactions with a few of you, either in-person at conferences or over an email conversation.

So, for the first time, make yourself known! Leave a comment at the end of this post. Introduce yourself and what you do, and what you would like to see more of in this site. If you’re reading this on Facebook, you can comment directly on this post. If you are reading this via email, click on the title of this post (Who’s reading this blog?) to get sent to the website so that you can leave a comment here.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

One of the key arguments against assigning term papers to undergraduate students is that they have a very limited audience. This argument assumes, of course, that most post-collegiate writing has a significant audience, but anyone with time in academia (or business) knows that many of the things that we write are never read at all.

For example, each year, I write a reflective, self-evaluation of my teaching for my annual report. I assume that no one reads it.

I include it here so that at least a few people will see it:

Teaching Self Evaluation

Teaching was my top priority in Spring 2011 and Fall 2011. Over these two semesters, I taught 8 classes, co-advised on one completed M.A. thesis and advised another. The heavier teaching load allowed me to focus more time on teaching by forcing me to spend less time on research and service. In particular, this time with a heavier teaching load made me become more efficient in my course preparation and grading. Additional courses also gave me a chance to experiment with new forms of teaching including a language class and two digital history practica which could enter my rotation on a more regular basis at some point in the future.

Both the language class and practica involved one-on-one work with students as they worked to develop the skills necessary to negotiate unfamiliar texts. Theodore Mommsen famously advised historians to study languages and law. Perhaps in our increasingly digital age, historians should be encouraged to understand digital tools and (of course) languages. I discovered that I needed to develop a more robust skill set both in terms of pedagogy and in terms of technical knowledge to coax even senior graduate students through the complex world of digital content development.  My own trial and error method for learning software or web-based applications did not transfer successfully to students far more tentative in their approach to technology. Moreover, my own high-flexible approach to research projects, which tends to emphasize highly punctuated, but continual development through breaking large projects into many small tasks, found very little purchase among the students. As a result, both digital history practica did not accomplish successfully their larger goals. Future digital history courses will need to be more highly structured and more directed toward getting the students broadly familiar with digital tools and the range of digital technologies at play in both popular culture and in historical research.  

Conversely, I was far more successful encouraging Latin students to take a more trial and error approach to translating in Latin 202. I found that teaching Latin gave me invaluable experience in a classroom environment where a range of abilities and aptitudes manifest. Some students required hands on attention to internalize basic instructions, others only learn by doing, and others still can take abstract concepts and apply them in the real world with a minimum of guidance. While I knew this in a conceptual way, I am not sure whether I had a chance to see it play out in as dynamic way as I did in teaching a language. 

In the Spring of 2012, I plan to bring some of the lessons that I have learned teaching Latin and digital history to play in my History 240: The Historians Craft course. While the course has largely remained unchanged since I made a major revision in 2010, I will add conferences to my course this semester. The conference will involve a one-on-one meeting with each student to discuss the research proposal that they develop over the second half of the class. The idea is that some students will struggle to grasp the techniques and principles of research that I introduce over the course of the semester without some required face-to-face time. While I will not require it in the Spring, I will make bonus points available and strongly recommend it in class. If it is successful, I will make conferences a regular part of the course in the Fall 2012. 

I made a significant change to my History 502: Graduate Historiography course in the Spring of 2011. I eliminated two of the traditional writing assignments – a comparative, critical book review and a longer historiographic essay. The addition of the new History 501: Research Methods course, which was designed to reinforce many of the basic graduate research and writing skills, made these rather routine papers less necessary in History 502. In their place, I moved to a weekly journal which then became the basis for a longer, reflective research paper. This paper asks the students to use their weekly reflections as a source for an reflexive study of their own engagement with various modes of historical thinking. In other words, I am asking the students to recreate a though experiment postulated by R.G. Collingwood who argued that when he re-read his own writing he was rethinking his past thoughts and thus producing history. The reflexive assignment in History 502 not only reinforces the ideas introduced by Collingwood on the writing of history, but also asks the students to reflect on their own learning experience. To use the lingo of the day, this is a form of “closing the loop”.   

My History 101: Western Civilization course has not seen many changes over the course of the 2011 academic year. Most of the changes have been minor tweaks to the delivery and continued work to clarify the structure of the course. While this class has not produced a systematic and reliable body of student evaluations, the outcomes of graded assessments continue to improve suggesting that minor adjustments to how I communicate my expectations and requirements.  I am working now with the Office of Disability Services to prepare an edited transcript of each of my podcast lecture. These will form a textbook for the class. From the Fall of 2010 on, I committed to teaching more as an important step to teaching better. Experience teaching Latin and starting the development of a digital history course gave me experiences that were transferable to my History 240 course which is one of the anchors in my rotation. Over the past 5 years, I have gradually made my History 502 more experimental and driven by reflexive methods that involve a meta-cognitive closing of the loop as an important part of the graded assessment. Finally, my online 101 class has continued to evolve based on feedback provided by a careful reading of graded assessment. 

Tip o’ the pileus to Nigel Webb (via Twitter) for pointing us to an item on the history of book blurbs at The Millions … inter alia, of course, there’s the link to ancient Rome:

If you needed beach reading in ancient Rome, you’d probably head down to the Argiletum or Vicus Sandaliarium, streets filled with booksellers roughly equivalent to London’s Paternoster Row. But how to know which books would make your soul shriek with delight? There was no Sunday Times; newspaper advertising didn’t catch on for another 1,700 years, and neither did professional book reviewers. Aside from word of mouth, references in other books, and occasional public readings, browsers appear to have been on their own.

Almost. Evidence suggests that booksellers advertised on pillars near their shops, where one might see new titles by famous people like Martial, the inventor of the epigram (nice one, Martial). It’s safe to assume that even in the pre-codex days of papyrus scrolls, a good way to assess the potential merits of Martial’s book would have been to read the first page or two, an ideal place for authors to insert some prefatory puff. Martial begins his most well-known collection with a note to the reader: “I trust that, in these little books of mine, I have observed such self-control, that whoever forms a fair judgment from his own mind can make no complaint of them.” Similar proto-blurbs were common, often doubling as dedications to powerful patrons or friends. The Latin poet Catullus: “To whom should I send this charming new little book / freshly polished with dry pumice? To you, Cornelius!” For those who weren’t the object of the dedication, these devices likely served the same purpose that blurbs do today: to market books, influence their interpretation, and assure prospective readers they kept good company.

• via: I Greet You in the Middle of a Great Career: A Brief History of Blurbs(The Millions)

… to which we might add an excerpt from a piece written by Mary Beard on the same subject a few years ago for the New York Times (which I don’t think I linked to), again, inter alia:

All the same, there’s a lot in the Roman literary world that seems quite familiar two millenniums later: money-­making booksellers, exploited and impoverished authors, celebrity book launches and career-making prizes.

Like Martial, most Roman writers knew that the profits of their writing ended up in the pockets of the booksellers, who often combined retail trade with a copying business — and so were, in effect, publishers and distributors too. At best, the author received only a lump sum from the seller for the rights to copy his work (though once the text was “out,” there was no way of stopping pirated copies). Horace, the tame poet of the emperor Augustus, made the obvious comparison: booksellers were the rich pimps of Roman publishing and authors, or even the books themselves, were the hard-working but humiliated prostitutes. He refers to his slim volume of poetry being “on the game, all tarted up with the cosmetics of Sosius & Co.,” his publishers. Not that Horace did so badly from his writing. In the absence of royalties he was, like most of the best-known authors in Rome, taken under the wing of a patron. In fact, Maecenas, Augustus’ unofficial minister of culture, set him up in a house.

Bookstores in Rome clustered in particular streets. One was the Vicus Sandalarius, or Shoemakers Row, not far from the Colosseum (convenient for post-gladiatorial browsing). Here you would find the outsides of the stores plastered with advertisements and puffs for titles in stock, often adorned with some choice quotes from the books of the moment. Martial, in fact, once told a friend not to bother to venture inside, since you could “read all the poets” on their doorposts.

For those who did go in, there was usually a place to sit and read. With slaves on hand to summon up refreshments, it would have been not unlike the coffee shop in a modern Borders. For collectors, there were occasionally secondhand treasures to be picked up, at a price. One Roman academic reported finding an old copy of the second book of Virgil’s “Aeneid” — not just any old copy but, the bookseller assured him, Virgil’s very own. An unlikely story maybe, but one that persuaded him to part with a small fortune to acquire it (rather more, in fact, than the combined annual wages of two professional soldiers). The risks on cheaper purchases were different. A cut-price book roll would presumably have fallen to pieces as quickly as a modern mass-market paperback. But worse, the pressure to get copies made quickly meant that they were loaded with errors and sometimes uncomfortably different from the authentic words of the author. One list of prices from the third century A.D. implies that the money needed to buy a top-quality copy of 500 lines would be enough to feed a family of four (admittedly, on very basic rations) for a whole year. If you settled for an inferior job, you could get a 20 percent discount.

Even if ancient writers did not make money from sales, many still wanted to announce to the world that their new volumes were now on the shelves. The Roman launch party took the form of select readings from the work, given semi-publicly or at exclusive invitation-only events, perhaps in the home of a rich patron. These could be just as frustrating for the author as the modern book launch where only half the expected guests turn up, drink a polite glass of wine and beat a hasty retreat without buying a copy. Pliny, writing in the early second century A.D., complained that in Rome “there was scarcely a day in April when someone wasn’t giving a reading,” and that the poor authors had to put up with small audiences, most of whom slipped out before the end anyway.

• via: Scrolling Down the Ages (New York Times)

… and just for fun, we’ll end this post with the incipit of Lucian’s address to an illiterate book collector, who likely relied on such blurbity to choose the works he collected for appearances’ sake (via Sacred Texts: REMARKS ADDRESSED TO AN ILLITERATE BOOK-FANCIER … the whole thing is good for a larf):

Let me tell you, that you are choosing the worst way to attain your object. You think that by buying up all the best books you can lay your hands on, you will pass for a man of literary tastes: not a bit of it; you are merely exposing thereby your own ignorance of literature. Why, you cannot even buy the right things: any casual recommendation is enough to guide your choice; you are as clay in the hands of the unscrupulous amateur, and as good as cash down to any dealer. How are you to know the difference between genuine old books that are worth money, and trash whose only merit is that it is falling to pieces? You are reduced to taking the worms and moths into your confidence; their activity is your sole clue to the value of a book; as to the accuracy and fidelity of the copyist, that is quite beyond you.

And supposing even that you had managed to pick out such veritable treasures as the exquisite editions of Callinus, or those of the far-famed Atticus, most conscientious of publishers,–what does it profit you? Their beauty means nothing to you, my poor friend; you will get precisely as much enjoyment out of them as a blind lover would derive from the possession of a handsome mistress. Your eyes, to be sure, are open; you do see your books, goodness knows, see them till you must be sick of the sight; you even read a bit here and there, in a scrambling fashion, your lips still busy with one sentence while your eyes are on the next. But what is the use of that? You cannot tell good from bad: you miss the writer’s general drift, you miss his subtle arrangements of words: the chaste elegance of a pure style, the false ring of the counterfeit,–’tis all one to you. [...]

ante diem iv nonas februarias

• 304 A.D. — martyrdom of Apronian the Executioner at Ancona

… it’s also Candlemas Day … And for all you Latin teachers out there … you can present this Latin ‘distich’ quoted by Thomas Browne in Robert Chambers Book of Days (the quoting of) which predates Punxsutawney Phil (and Wiarton Willy, and the plethora of other large rodents that probablyreally  aspire to be beavers, but that’s a different tail):

Si sol splendescat Maria purificante,
Major erit glacies post festum quam fuit ante

Traditionally when bioarchaeologists are discussing trends in disease or burial patterns, while it may be based on individuals, it is spoken about at the population level. We assess the way that culture and biology shape populations. Human remains are lumped … Continue reading →

Michael D. Reeve, Manuscripts and Methods. Essays on Editing and Transmission, Rome, 2011.

Éditeur : Edizioni di storia e letteratura
Collection : Storia e letteratura, 270
xviii-434 pages
ISBN : 9788863723021
62,00 €

Michael Reeve's work since the mid 1970s on the textual traditions of classical authors has brought him into the forefront of debate on editorial aims and methods. From the outset he has championed both stemmatic method and historical approaches to manuscripts. He assembles here 18 articles, published from 1983 to 2009, in which he deals not so much with particular traditions as with methodological questions; two unpublished pieces are added. The collection ranges from the identification and status of autographs to the use of computer programmes for classifying witnesses; it includes comparative studies of genealogical classification in textual scholarship, historical linguistics, biology, and the analysis of ‘folk tales'.

Lire la suite...

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It seems the coineys have it in for Professor Nathan Elkins, an academic numismatist who sides with the Preservationist White Hat guys rather than with the no-questions-asked antiquities buyers and sellers. First to start the mud-slinging was bitter Old Man Sayles, copied by Jorg Lueke on his "A Historical Perspective" ("exploring history and how it is crafted, manipulated, and used by governments, agencies, and others") blog. When however challenged to formulate and back up his views more precisely, he now claims that what he wrote was "satire". Lueke now follows up his ("satirische") Schlammschlachten, ja, ja with an exposition ("Archaeologist finds all the "evidence" he needs on Ebay") about why what we can see on eBay in fact does not show what it seems to show. Once again this is focussed on the person of "Dr. Nathan T Elkins an Assistant Professor of Art History at Baylor":

In a recent appearance focusing on the cultural property of Bulgaria Dr. Elkins displays a fondness for using Ebay as a source for his arguments. This comes as no surprise as Dr. Elkins used Ebay as a research tool when he wrote his article “Why Coins Matter”. This fondness for superficial results from Ebay opens up several interesting questions that I shall examine.

Having said that of course, the coiney does not. Now, Nathan Elkins has been looking into the US trade on ancient coins for a number of years, and from what I know of that research (which I venture to suggest is considerably more than what Jorg Lueke knows about his research) I would not say that his conclusions are based on "superficial results from Ebay". That is the first straw man argument offered by coiney Lueke.

Coiney Lueke indicates that in his opinion on the extremely rare occasions a seller of dugup ancient coins gives the information from which country they came, it would be "a rather naïve belief [...] that eBay sellers are in all cases telling the truth and not simply marketing what they think will work". In other words' Lueke has no problem accepting that collectors of ancient coins in the US and elsewhere are being lied to by the dealers selling them. Given an awareness of that level of deceit, in what way could that person then turn round and say this is a "legitimate market"? Why would somebody lie about coins coming "from Bulgaria", instead of admitting they come from which country?

Mr Lueke suggests that the number of coins actually being sold by eBay is less than the number presented by Nathan Elkins (nota bene NOT in his comments on the Bulgaria MOU but in several articles on the more general issues connected with the US trade in dugup coins). Lueke suggests we should note how many coins are SOLD rather than the number offered from sale. Presumably he considers that the ones not sold any given week are the ones that fell off trees or were produced by the coin elves and did not come out of the ground, so they are irrelevant to the question about the damage caused by the no-questions-asked market masking looting. But it is not just eBay is it? Let us then note that in parallel venues are also relatively high numbers of coins offered for sale. Just one example is the ACCG's old fried: V-coins (today: "160 Ancient Dealers, 98,940 Items, $22,743,591" - all produced by the coin Elves no doubt).

As it happens, today there are 26,725 results to be found in the category "Coins ancient" on eBay.com. If we narrow that down to those located only in the US, the result is "16,359 results" - so today 61% of the global trade in such items is being done out of the USA (a country whose soil does not as a rule produce ancient coins). Lueke himself notes that when he looks for coins produced in the Roman mint Serdica (mainly supplied the Balkan region and limes, but these coins also reached Britannia) "most of those are already in the US".

The figures for eBay sales of such items today are far higher than the number "5000 a week" mentioned by Elkins and now criticised by Lueke. Yes, it is true that not all those coins are sold from week to week, while some with "buy it now" prices will have gone well before we open the page to look. The feedback for many sellers shows the number of items week after week, month after month. This is (part of ) the turnover of the market, obviously many more items need to be added to the market every week and month to produce the stock from which clients with different needs and financial abilities select what they fancy. Many US dealers have stock which extends far beyond what they put on sale on the Internet any given day, week or month.

What one can see happening on the Internet is not just an array of (superficial) "figures" used to "support" any arguments. This is information anyone can see for themselves when they open the eBay page (or any other dealer's list, or "uncleaned bulk lots of coins" sales sites and discussion lists, of which there are many). However you spin those numbers, they do not reflect too well on the trade when you see how many of them are offered with any sort of information where they came from or any sort of expressly-worded guarantee offered by the seller that he only offers coins where there is due diligence done to ascertain that these are not freshly surfaced coins from recent looting and smuggling, but material he can demonstrate to the buyer has a documented history of licit acquisition and legal export (and legal import into the US).

Looking at the sorry array of sales offers giving no such guarantees (let alone offering potential customers any information about the documentation of legal collecting history and export) and comparing that with what (in the situation this market finds itself in) a truly legitimate market in such material should look like in the second decade of the twenty-first century can readily lead the onlooker to certain conclusions.

Lueke says:

In my view there is no rationale for believing the figures hastily printed off of (sic) eBay and woven (sic) around in front of some bureaucratic committee [i.e., CPAC PMB]. Even if true the story this volume of coins would (sic) tell about a marketplace, one that doesn’t exist in reality, would be contradictory at best [...] all these numbers are make believe and created just to serve a pre-defined purpose: to make it harder to collect coins [...] these numbers are hogwash and I will shortly present a more rational analysis of the current market.

It is unclear why Lueke says there is no "marketplace" for ancient coins when he himself makes use of it to add to his own collection. Anyway, we await with bated breath his promised analysis of the figures to show that the Coin Elves do not really put all that many undocumented ancient coins on the US market.

The CSCO Classical Reading group will continue to meet this semester to discuss Graeco-Roman literature broadly contemporary with the NT.  The programme for the next few months looks like this:

February 16 – 2 Maccabees (introduced by Dr. Helen Bond)

March 29 – Tacitus’ Annals (introduced by Dr. Sandra Bingham, Dept. of Classics)

April 26 – Plutarch’s Lives of Demetrius and Antony (introduced by Dr. Sean Adams)

Prof Steve Mason will visit the School in late May to give a two-day talk on the Judaean war. We will aim to meet in the run-up to that (date to be decided) to discuss Josephus’ account of the war.

All meetings are in the Porteous Room, New College at 1pm. As ever, all are invited.

Apollo Magazine | The Acquisitive Gene:

Christian Levett’s fanaticism for collecting antiquities has led to him opening a museum for his collection in the South of France. He spoke to Apollo about his collecting and the museum’s mission to reveal the thread of Classicism in Western art

Nice feature in Apollo about the Mougins Museum of Classical Art

Les organisateurs de cette rencontre proposent d’engager une réflexion sur l’occupation et l’évolution des espaces civiques comme élément de compréhension de l’histoire urbaine et municipale dans les provinces occidentales de l'Empire entre le IIe siècle et IVe siècle.

POLLEN from a Persian-Period garden has yielded up some surprises:

Jerusalem dig uncovers earliest evidence of local cultivation of etrogs

Pollen reveals ancient palace grew the citrus in its garden.

By Zafrir Rinat (Haaretz)

Tags: Jerusalem Israel archeology Tel Aviv University

The earliest evidence of local cultivation of three of the Sukkot holiday's traditional "four species" has been found at the most ancient royal royal garden ever discovered in Israel.

The garden, at Kibbutz Ramat Rachel in Jerusalem, gave up its secrets through remnants of pollen found in the plaster of its walls.

[...]

Then, Lipschits said, he and his colleagues had a "wild thought": If plasterers had worked on the garden walls in springtime, when flowers were blooming, breezes would have carried the pollen to the walls, where it would have become embedded in the plaster.

Enlisting the aid of Tel Aviv University archaeobotanist Dr. Daphne Langot, they carefully peeled away layers of the plaster, revealing pollen from a number of plant species.

Most of the plants were wild, but in one layer of plaster, apparently from the Persian period (the era of the Jewish return from the Babylonian exile in 538 B.C.E. ) they found pollen from ornamental species and fruit trees, some of which came from distant lands.

The find that most excited the scholars was pollen from etrogs, or citrons, a fruit that originated in India. This is the earliest botanical evidence of citrons in the country.

[...]

ALIN SUCIU has found yet another venerable Coptic resource online: A. Kropp, Ausgewählte koptische Zaubertexte.

The Coptic magical texts draw on a great many Jewish traditions. You can find lots of them in English translation in Marvin Meyer and Richard Smith (eds.) Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power.

LINA BROYDO visits the Dead Sea Scrolls online with Google and on site in Israel: Google Offers Stroll Through Dead Sea Scrolls (The Epoch Times). The Discovery Times Square exhibition is also mentioned in passing, but not reviewed.

, Books Received January 2012.

Something is rotten in the State of Greece. This time the stench comes from the Foundation of the Hellenic World, which used to promote research on Greek civilisation outside the strict borders of the modern Greek state. This private Foundation (though heavily subsidised by the government) reached its peak a decade ago, when I received my postdoctoral fellowship from them. They funded my research on the Economy of Roman Asia Minor under the guidance of Prof. Stephen Mitchell at the University of Exeter. Today the tables have turned. I have just found out from a reliable source that they have already fired two archaeologists/ historians, a philologist and a sociologist, while they reduced a numismatist’s post to one day per week. And bad news keep coming. The administration decided to cut 18 % of the staff’s salaries. Salaries that have not been paid for the past two months anyway. Of course, more redundancies will soon follow. How many researchers will be jobless by the end of 2012 is only a matter of conjecture. It all depends on the finances of the foundation, the financial state of Greece (which we all know is not rosy), the TROIKA. By now we are well aware that historians and archaeologists are not highly valued in Europe, where economics has become the new religion. And I am wondering, has any of the powerful European politicians considered how the world would look like without historical knowledge?

Latin teacher and prolific writer Rose Williams [for her bio, scroll down on her Pliny's Haunted House...

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February 07, 2012 - 3:01 AM - Exhibition opening - 8 February - 24 March, 2012

February 03, 2012 - 1:01 AM - Ημερίδα

© Clipart

In his The Battle of Salamis, Barry Strauss explains the special attributes of the only female naval commander in Persian king Xerxes' army. Among other points, Strauss says ...

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The Philippine Army Central Command has refused requests from members of the public to preserve some unexploded ordnance found in Kawit Island, citing safety reasons. I’m noting a record here because it might be useful for the future studies in the archaeology of World War II!

The unwillingness of the military to display the bombs, as well as their preference to destroy them for safety reasons is interesting, contrasted with the display of similar UXO at the My Son Sanctuary that I saw last month.

Preserving bombs ‘dangerous’
Sun Star Cebu, 31 January 2012

Vintage bombs probably used as ‘booby trap’: archaeologist
Sun Star Cebu, 1 February 2012

Requests to preserve and display some of the vintage bombs discovered at the Kawit Island of the South Road Properties (SRP) were rejected by the Central Command (CentCom) of the Armed Forces of the Philippines.

The bombs are too dangerous and should be detonated, military officials said.

Aside from the Fort San Pedro museum, war veterans in Cebu City and the Toledo City Government want to take custody of some of the bombs and preserve them, said Philip Zafra, the chief of staff of Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama.

Zafra met with officials of CentCom, the Special Weapons and Tactics (Swat) team of the Cebu City Police Office and the Cebu City Local Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council yesterday morning to discuss the matter.

He said that during their meeting, CentCom officials expressed a “strong opposition” to the request to preserve the bombs.

Full story here.

Columbia University Libraries cuneiform collection in CDLI

The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI <http://www.cdli.ucla.edu/>), in partnership with the Rare Book andManuscript Library of the Columbia University Libraries in New York(CUL, <http://library.columbia.edu/indiv/rbml.html>), is pleased toannounce the addition of new digital content to its web offerings.

The collection of 629 cuneiform texts of the Columbia UniversityLibraries is one of the oldest in North America and is made up of anunusual mixture of genres of materials ranging in date from theProto-Elamite period to Hellenistic times. The Ur III texts in thecollections have been the subject of several scholarly publicationsdating from as early as 1896 (William R. Arnold, Ancient-BabylonianTemple Records in the Columbia University Library), and were mostrecently gathered together in a comprehensive 2010 monograph by StevenGarfinkle, Herbert Sauren, and Marc Van De Mieroop (=CUSAS 16). Butbeyond the tablets from the Ur III period, the CUL collection remainsrelatively unstudied.

Following the 2010 publication, CDLI staff contacted Jane Siegel, RareBook Librarian of the CUL, and with her kind assistance and that ofthe CU library staff, UCLA graduate student Jared Wolfe was, in Juneof last year, able to flatbed scan all then accessible artifacts. Theraw images of that campaign were subsequently processed to CDLIfatcrosses by UCLA staff, and have been posted to web, accessible boththrough CDLI's search page<http://www.cdli.ucla.edu/cdlisearch/search/indexi.php> as well asthrough a special website dedicated to the collection at<http://cdli.ucla.edu/collections/columbia/columbia.html>, with abrief introduction written by M. Van De Mieroop at<http://cdli.ucla.edu/collections/columbi/columbia_intro.html>. Wewelcomecorrections and additions to our text identifications, and areparticularly desirous to learn of specialist interest in the scholarlyedition of texts listed as unpublished. The now available image
documentation, itself reduced for web dissemination from archival600ppi tif to 300ppi jpg files, is envisioned as a facilitator in thepreparation of annotated manuscripts.

The imaging and image processing in this Columbia-CDLI collaborationwere made possible by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,and are part of the on-going mission of CDLI to ensure the long-termdigital preservation of ancient inscriptions on cuneiform tablets,and, in furtherance of cuneiform research, to provide persistent, freeglobal access to all available text artifact data.

For the CDLI and the CUL:
Jane Siegel, Rare Book Librarian, Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
Columbia University
Marc Van De Mieroop, Professor of Ancient History, Columbia University
Robert K. Englund, Director, CDLI

The Morton W. Bloomfield Fund at Harvard University, in conjunction with the Medieval Doctoral Conference of the Department of English, invites applications to the Bloomfield Visiting Scholar Program. 


The program is intended to assist scholars wishing to conduct research at Harvard over approximately a four-week period during the regular academic year, in any of the fields associated with Morton W. Bloomfield: particularly Old and Middle English, the history of English, the history of Christian thought, and medieval Jewish studies. 


We offer $3000 in travel and accommodation subsidy for one or more selected scholars in these fields; we may be able to offer a further travel subsidy for fellows traveling from outside North America.


Bloomfield fellows will give a presentation of their work at the Medieval Doctoral Conference and might also be asked to meet with graduate students or attend a student seminar as a temporary member of our community. 


Harvard’s academic year runs from early September to early December, and from early February to the end of April. Although applications are open to anyone, preference will be given to younger scholars who might benefit from access to Harvard’s resources. 


To apply, please send a brief curriculum vitae, the title of a possible talk, a one-page project description, and a covering note detailing your proposed travel plans (offering alternative sets of dates if possible) to Daniel Donoghue, Department of English, Harvard University, 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. by March 30, 2012.

-- 
Martin K. Foys
Executive Director of the International Society for Anglo-Saxonists
Co-Director: DM Project - http://ada.drew.edu/dmproject
Associate Professor of English
Drew University
Madison, NJ 07940

The Anglo Saxon Studies Colloquium announces The Eighth Annual ASSC Graduate Student Conference: "Philology" University California, Berkeley, 24 - 25 February 2012

Conference Website: http://graduatemedievalists.org/assc.html

***Please remember to register by emailing assc2012@gmail.com if you plan to attend***

Conference Program - All talks to be held in 300 Wheeler Hall

===========

Friday, 24 February

5:00 Keynote - “We Philologists”
Jan Ziolkowski
Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Medieval Latin, Department of Classics, Harvard University
Director of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection

Reception to follow in 330 Wheeler Hall

===========

Saturday, 25 February

9:30 Light breakfast & registration

10:15 Opening Remarks

10:30 Session I: Words, Words, Words: Lexical Approaches to Old English

- Dave Wilton, University of Toronto, “You Keep Using That Word.  I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means: Fæhð in Beowulf”

- David Pedersen, Fordham University, “Wyrd in the Old English Poem Solomon and Saturn II”

- Leonard Neidorf, Harvard University, “Beow in Beowulf: New Evidence for an Old Emendation”

Respondent: Jacob Hobson, UC Berkeley

===========
12:00 Lunch – 330 Wheeler Hall

===========
1:30 Session II: Where Did the Middle Ages Go? The Modern Reception of Anglo-Saxon England

Peter Buchanan, University of Toronto, “Caedmon and the Gift of Song in Black Mountain Poetics”

Joseph Livingstone, New York University, “‘Like solid rocks’: Language, Nature and the Nature of Language”

Annie Abrams, New York University, “‘Mutilated Remains’: Longfellow’s Historicized Anglo-Saxons

Respondent: Marcos Garcia, UC Berkeley

 ===========

3:00 Coffee break – 330 Wheeler Hall

===========
3:30 Session III: The Form of the Content: Formal Approaches to Old English Literature

Kathryn Jagger, University College London, “Words for Learning in Alfred’s Preface to the Pastoral Care: Philology and the History of Intellectualism in West Saxon Literature”

Leslie Carpenter, Fordham University, “A New English Verse Form: Poems of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

Emile Young, New York University, “Runes, Wisdom, and Textual Transmission”

Respondent: Jennifer Lorden, UC Berkeley

===========

5:00 Banquet – 330 Wheeler Hall – please RSVP by 16 February if planning to attend

****

Conference Website: http://graduatemedievalists.org/assc.html

This conference has been generously sponsored by: The UC Berkeley Department of English, College of Letters and Sciences, Program in Medieval Studies, Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, Center for British Studies, Student Opportunity Funds, Graduate Assembly, Graduate Medievalists at Berkeley, and the Anglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium.     

  

The Anglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium is a forum for scholars of early medieval England.  ASSC aims to foster intellectual exchange among faculty and graduate students whose interests embrace the language, literature, and culture of early medieval England. Currently based in Columbia, New York University, the University of Rhode Island, Rutgers, UC Berkeley, and King's College London, the Colloquium seeks to expand the resources available to Anglo-Saxonists from these universities and other institutions in the area, and also to create a welcoming intellectual community for anyone who is interested in Anglo-Saxon studies.

****

Organized by: Marcos Garcia, Jacob Hobson, Jennifer Lorden, R. D. Perry, and Benjamin A. Saltzman

****

For other ASSC events and for further updates on this conference, please visit the ASSC website at www.columbia.edu/cu/assc.

There is a web site featuring a magic button that makes everything OK. How did I not hear about this until today? You’ll find it at the appropriately-named web address http://make-everything-ok.com/  Click through and make everything OK!

From Stylianos Chronopoulos:

We are very pleased to post the invitation to participate in the conference “Commenting Fragments: the Case of Ancient Comedy”, that will be held at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau – July 2-7, 2012.

The project “Kommentierung der Fragmente der altgriechischen Komödie” (“A Commentary on the Fragments of Ancient Greek Comedy”) invites applications to participate in a one-week conference/workshop, “Commenting Fragments: The Case of Ancient Comedy”, to be held July 2–7, 2012 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. The workshop is part of a multi-year research project supported by the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften and directed by Bernhard Zimmermann. The goal of the project, which has been underway at the Albert Ludwigs University since January 1, 2011, is to produce commentaries on all surviving fragments of Greek comedy.

Applications are open to all, but younger scholars (including graduate students) and other individuals interested in producing commentaries on individual comic poets are particularly encouraged to apply. Further information on the project (which builds on the textual work of R. Kassel and C. Austin, Poetae Comici Graeci), and on its publications to date, is available at the homepage of the Seminar for Classical Philology: http://www.altphil.uni-freiburg.de/komfrag

The workshop will have two separate but related agenda.

Mornings (9-12 AM) will be occupied with a series of round-table style discussions of some of the challenges of commenting on fragmentary comedies. The first two sessions will be devoted to sample commentaries produced collectively by the participants, and will consider methodological and practical problems such as the use of parallels, argumentative structure, textual matters, handling of sources, citation practices, reconstruction of scenes and plays, and the like. More information will be provided with the application, but every participant in the conference will be expected to produce a sample commentary on 5–6 lines of Greek text. These samples will be due June 1, and will be combined and precirculated to all workshop participants. The final three morning sessions will be devoted to close discussion of substantial samples of draft commentaries produced by individual workshop participants. The precise number and arrangement of these sessions will depend on the number of samples submitted. These samples (25–30 doublespaced pages) will be due April 30, and will be similarly precirculated to all workshop participants. A final round-up session will be held on Saturday, 7 July.

Afternoons (3-7 PM) will be devoted to talks by recognized experts in the field on the general theme: “The Periodization and Dramatic Form of Greek Comedy”.
The provisional schedule of afternoon talks is as follows:

Monday July 2:
Bernhard Zimmermann (University of Freiburg) – “The Periodisation of Greek Comedy as Necessary – and Problematic.” (the talk will be in German)
Eric Csapo (University of Sydney) – “The Earliest Phase of Ancient Greek Comedy.”

Tuesday July 3:
Andreas Willi (University of Oxford, Worcester College) – “Epicharmos and Attic Comedy.”
Jeffrey Henderson (Boston University) – “Pherecrates and Athenian Comedy between 450 and 420 BC.”

Wednesday July 4:
Guiseppe Mastromarco (University of Bari) – “Euripidaristophanizein (Cratinus, fr. 342 K.-A.): Aristophanes and Euripidean Paratragedy.” (the talk will be in Italian)
Heinz-Günther Nesselrath (University of Göttingen) – “Periodisation of Ancient Greek Comedy in Hellenistic Philology.” (the talk will be in German)

Thursday July 5:
Ioannis Konstantakos (University of Athens) – “Tendencies and Variety in Middle Comedy.”
Benjamin Millis (University of Oxford) – “Comedy in- and outside of Athens in the 4th Century BC.”
S. Douglas Olson (University of Minnesota / University of Freiburg) – “And on to Rome. Aristophanes and Athenaeus.” (Key-note lecture)

Friday July 6:
Antonis Petridis (Open University of Cyprus) – “Before and after Menander.”
Michael Scott Fontaine (Cornell University) – “From Athens to Rome: From Greek to Latin Comedy.”

Talks will last 45-50 min. and will be followed by a one-hour discussion period. Those interested in participating should submit proposals by March 30, 2012. Proposals must include
(1) a short CV (no more than one A4-page)
(2) a statement of purpose (no more than 600 words) describing why you want to participate; if you have any previous experience working with fragmentary texts, ancient Greek Comedy or writing a commentary; and how you intend to use participation to advance your research.

Applicants who also wish to have their own work discussed in one of the morning sessions are invited to send a 20-pages sample of their work by April 30. No participation fee for the workshop is required. A presentation of the project “Kommentierung der Fragmente der griechischen Komödie” and a grand conference banquet will be held after the talks on the first day. Various free-time activities (e.g. city tours of old Freiburg, hiking in the Black Forest, a guided visit to the Freiburg Cathedral, collective readings of aristophanic comedies) will be offered as part of the unofficial program.
The working languages for the conference and workshop will be English, German and Italian.

Due-dates:
Applications for participation March 30, 2012
Sample commentary (on 5-6 lines of Greek text), that each participant has to submit as basis for the discussion in the first two morning sessions June 1, 2012
Samples of draft commentaries (work in progress) to be discussed in the final three morning sessions April 30, 2012

Invitation for Participation (pdf)

For more information or to submit applications, please contact stylianos.chronopoulos@altphil.uni-freiburg.de

I love Academia.edu - I think it's a fantastic way for papers to reach the broadest possible audience, and it's made me aware of many studies I wouldn't have otherwise heard of. While I'm not necessarily the best Academia citizen myself (I really should start following some people), it's really been a tremendous help in tracking down some papers published in obscure sources that might have

Current repairs to Ayutthaya from last year’s devastating floods will include measures to prevent against future floods.

Inspection of flood damage at Ayutthaya, MCOT News 20120131

Restoration of historic Ayutthaya sites to cope with renewed flood
MCOT News, 31 January 2012

Thailand’s antiquities authorities will speed up restoring the former capital’s historic sites, damaged by last year’s flooding in the city of Ayutthaya, and reinforce weak structures in preparation for possible repeat flooding in the future.

Culture Minister Sukumol Kunplome and Somsuda Leeyawanich, director-general of the Fine Arts Department on Tuesday inspected the collapsed wall of the Mahathat Temple. A five-kilometre section of the wall tumbled down during the flood and Ayutthaya’s provincial fines art agency has used wooden staves to prop the remaining sections of wall to prevent further collapse.

Full story here.

14.352720775996987 100.56514540502928

My collaborator on the Mandaean Book of John translation project, Charles G. Häberl of Rutgers University, is scheduled to present on “Digital Analysis of Mandaic Manuscripts” at the workshop “Ancient Religion, Modern Technology” to be held February 13-14 at Brown University.

Some of the other presentations also look fascinating, covering topics from Syriac linguistics to ancient monotheism.

The Director of ASCSA, Jack Davis, accepted a special award on behalf of the School from the American-Hellenic Chamber of Commerce on January 30, 2012. The School was recognized for its excellence in education.