Maia Atlantis: Ancient World Blogs

Wayne Sayles recounts his experience returning home from the Newcastle archaeological conference here: http://ancientcoincollecting.blogspot.com/2010/03/guarding-america.html

One would hope U.S. Customs and Border Protection has not placed Wayne Sayles on a "watch list" in retaliation for his part in filing a case to test U.S. Customs and State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs regulations concerning Cypriot and Chinese coins. That, of course, would constitute a very serious breach of the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment right to seek access to the courts.

The coins in question were properly declared on entry to the U.S. ACCG's customs broker even directed U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel to the applicable regulations. In other words, U.S. Customs was apprised from the get-go that the coins were imported for purposes of a test case. Under the circumstances, any possibility that that the search of Wayne Sayles on his entry back into the U.S. is related to that test case would be troubling indeed.

Back in January, U.S. Customs also detained the stock of a dealer who supplied the coins for the test case. See http://culturalpropertyobserver.blogspot.com/2010/01/just-coincidence.html Is it all just another coincidence or is something much more sinister at work?

Wayne Sayles Executive Director of the ACCG which organized the Baltimore Illegal Coin Import stunt reports on his blog that despite his involvement in the Baltimore illegal coin import stunt, he of course had no trouble getting through British customs; that would be too much like taking cultural property matters too seriously. US border controls however were perhaps more efficient in this case. Sayles reports that he was stopped by US border controls after his documents were checked and asks if he is on a watch list. Well, if he is not, he jolly well should be.

"Would the U.S. government intentionally hassle me because I used the due process of our legal system to defend the rights of fellow Americans?"

No, I would say that if he is on a watch list it would be because the organization of which he is a director has a case pending in Maryland District court concerning the illegal import of coins. I hope all the ACCG board members and ACCG-affiliated coin dealers are on that list for the same reason. The "process" of course if successful would facilitate foreign criminals to send illicitly obtained and traded goods across US borders unchecked, which is precisely what the US has customs officers to protect against.

there was a report that the (unnamed) dealer that had sold the ACCG the coins and shipped them without the proper documents had also been stoppped by Customs (British ones this time) and searched at the border. Let that be a lesson to him not to associate himself with such people.

A. Delatte begins his article of the above title with the following words:

Never did anyone prophesy so much, in the special form known as prophecy post eventum, as in the first centuries of Christianity.  The rapid conquest of souls by the new ideal and the solid establishment of the Christian churches showed the hand of God, and this transfiguration of the face of the world so stirred some spirits that in order to explain it they felt obliged to fall back on the idea of a preparation stage for the gospel.  Similarly some were unable to believe that the brightest and most inspired of the pagans did not have some presentiment or secret revelation of the mystery of the Redemption. 

In order to satisfy this longing of faith, some people who were well-intentioned but too little scrupulous of their choice of methods composed new Sybilline oracles, and placed in circulation prophecies that had previously come, so they said, from the sanctuaries of Apollo, announcing the coming of the messiah.  They also began to search the books and the biographies of the philosophers for features and doctrines that could easily be misinterpreted as disguised evidence of foreknowledge of the great event. 

Did they find them?  Some apostles of dissident Christian groups, those whose followers were of limited education and unable to detect the fraud, did not hesitate to resort to the falsification of ancient literary works to nourish the faith of their followers.  It might seem, moreover, that this was an excellent means of propaganda among those lingering in paganism, who were not fleeing the embrace of Christianity so much as clinging to the debris of the too mystical teachings of the magi, astrologers, and the theurgists, and were therefore ill-equipped to detect imposters.

Perhaps for Christianity to become universal, it had to appeal to the irrational element in every society, as well as the rational and devout; to the people who waste their time on New Age frauds in our day, as well as to the university-educated who make up most evangelicals in our day.  The thought is an interesting one, and the parallel also.  But let us return to Delatte, who is not so far footnoting these comments, unfortunately.

But in putting Christianity back among paganism, in making Orpheus, Pindar, Plato, Hermes Trismegistus and many others be Christians before the fact, the Orthodox faith was at great risk of diminishing itself, or even being contaminated.  The church was cautious; some of these theologians  to the troubled soul learned this to their cost. 

A certain Aristocritus (5th century) used all the resources of an uncertain science and the powers of a too supple spirit of conciliation to compose a book entitled Θεοσοφία.  He wanted to show that the most eminent souls among the Hebrews and the Greeks had, by the grace of God, the divination of the mysteries and prior knowledge of certain Christian doctrines, but in the opinion of orthodox theologians he only succeeded in demonstrating the identity of the doctrines of Judaism, Hellenism and Christianity, which was a hopeless error.  This system of accomodation which resembles the methods practised by the Stoics in handling previous philosophies was not to the liking of the strong-minded and clear-minded.  As a result the book of Aristocritus features among the works tainted with the Manichaen heresy which are anathematised in an ancient formula used for renouncing Manichaeism.

Accomodation is indeed the chronic hazard of the apologist; to be coloured by the views of those you oppose, to insensibly move to resist certain views and unknowingly accept others equally fatal to your position.

Delatte then goes on to review the scattered remains of Greek texts which preserve supposed extracts from philosophers predicting the coming of Christ.  I won’t repeat all this here, in what is already too long a post.  But these texts deserve to be gathered and made more readily available.

Entranced by "Lavinia"! Next, a serious reading of The Aeneid?

I just finished attending one of the most fascinating conferences, "Recovering the Past: Archaeologies and Travelers in Ottoman Lands." Organized by Renata Holod and Robert Ousterhout at the University of Pennsylvania, "Recovering the Past" is an 18-month long initiative, involving the conference, graduate seminars and exhibitions. Each of the 18 papers in the conference (and Holod's final

Paolo Totaro starts the article which I discuss below in another post:

Our parents had taken us to Pompeii, the Roman town frozen in the moment it was buried in lava on August 24, 79AD. It was 34 years ago, on a bright winter's day, and we wandered the streets, peering in shops and tiny houses, and envisaged life before Vesuvius struck. Visitor access was almost unfettered: few guards, no security cameras. We were respectful, even as young teenagers, but we spied an American tourist who was not. I have never forgotten watching transfixed as he used his pocket knife to prise a handful of tiny, coloured tiles from the wall and trouser them, a souvenir of one of the world's most wondrous archaeological sites. In 1976 cultural mores had yet to shift into the sophisticated and protectively conservationist responses we apply to heritage sites now. The American man was an ass then, and things have changed now. Or have they?

The process of manufacture of portable antiquities from one that is not... I wonder where those purloined bits of antiquity are now? When the tourist dies, will his heirs even recognise what those tesserae were and where they were from? Will they find their way onto the market for those who want their own 'pieces of the past', or will the supply continually have to be augmented by more knife-wielding 'cultural tourists'? The same goes for all those chips knocked off Stonehenge by souvenir hunters of the past, have any of them survived properly labelled? Probably no more than any of the ancient coins collected indiscriminately by ACCG members across the sea.

Jane Akshar has a related post on the behaviour of tourists ("Responsible Tomb and Temple visiting") on her excellent News from Luxor blog. She was speaking recently to Moustafa Wazery, the SCA director of the West Bank who gives tourists some advice on how to help preserve the monuments for future visitors:

"Please, please, please do not touch the paintings, they are real and original. You don’t need to test. I actually saw a tourist scraping at the paint with their nails and saying ‘look it comes off’ I slapped them, yes it does come off and touching, scraping, rubbing will take it off. Don’t do it. Rucksacks, backpacks please carry them in hands in the tombs; a lot of damage is done by people’s backpacks scraping the walls. As churches as for Christians, mosques for Muslims and synagogues for Jews so were the temples for the Ancient Egyptians. Please dress respectfully and keep beachwear for the beach".

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The Morgantina Hoard has gone on display in the Palazzo Massimo, Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome (until 23 May 2010) [MiBAC press release]. The hoard is part of a series of returns of antiquities from North American institutions. Some $22 million worth of objects linked to Morgantina on Sicily have been handed back.

The hoard had been acquired over several years (1981, 1982 and 1984) by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art (see earlier comments). It had been sold by Robert Hecht who is reported to have made over $2 million profit from the transaction. (Hecht is currently on trial in Rome.)

Malcolm Bell has talked about his work at Morgantina (Elizabeth Wilkerson, "Underground tale told: Malcolm Bell and the case of the missing silver", University of Virginia Magazine December 12, 2001).

In 1996 the Italian government asked Bell to excavate the hill where he’d seen the clandestine work.

“As we dug down, it was very disconcerting, because the soil was entirely churned up. What the clandestine workers had done was to start in one room, empty it out and then dig the room right next to it. Their strategy was to empty each room so they could get to the floor.”

When Bell and his crew reached the floors, they found two large holes that correspond to the size of the lots bought by the Met. They also found a 1978 Italian coin that helped pinpoint the time of the looting.

One of the key issues was the interpretation of insctriptions that appeared on two of the pieces. They had originally been read as "from the war", perhaps indicating that they had been ancient booty that had been dedicated in a sanctuary as a thank-offering. Bell, however, realised the significance:

When, after several requests, Bell was allowed to examine the silver at the Met in 1999, he puzzled over a lightly scratched inscription on the bottom of two of the pieces. Translated by the museum curator as “from the war,” the words suggested that the silver had been buried as the city was being captured.

Instead of “from the war,” Bell realized, the word was the possessive form of the name Eupolemus. The name represented the owner’s claim to the silver.

“We don’t have too many names from ancient Morgantina, but we do have the name Eupolemus,” Bell said. A lead tablet in the Morgantina museum bears the name — and the tablet is the deed to a house in the area where Bell had found the looters’ tracks.

“It was almost like meeting the man. It was one of those moments of epiphany when you realize something makes far more sense than you had thought,” said Bell.

Details of the find can be found in Franco De Angelis' summary (p. 177). The location for the burial appears to have been in a Greek house in the western part of the city. A full discussion can be found in Guzzo.

The hoard will go on display at the Museo Archeologico Regionale Antonino Salinas di Palermo from June 2010.

Bibliography
Bell, M. 1997 [2000]. "La provenienza ritrovata: cercamdo il contesto di antichità trafugate." In Antichita senza provenienza II: Atti del colloquio internazionale [Viterbo] 1997, edited by P. Pelagatti and P. G. Guzzo: 31-41. Bollettino d'arte suppl. to nos. 101-2. Rome.
De Angelis, F. 2000-2001. "Archaeology in Sicily 1996-2000." Archaeological Reports 47: 145-201. [JSTOR]
Guzzo, P. G. 2003. "A group of Hellenistic silver objects in the Metropolitan Museum." Metropolitan Museum Journal 38: 45-94. [JSTOR]

The finder's keepers argument for antiquities | Minnesota Public Radio NewsQ

An interesting discussion between Jim Cuno and Patty Gerstenblith. A few observations:

The moderator calls Cuno's bluff about his claim that governments care much more about symbols of national identity than people do. Is that really true? She asks him if he thinks a poll of Egyptians would show they would prefer to have the bust of Nefertiti or the Rosetta Stone returned, or be indifferent? "I have no way of guessing," he responds, surely disingenuously. Cuno must know that the image of Nefertiti is on Egyptian currency and that the Egyptian press covers repatriation stories assiduously. Of course both of these are governmentally-backed undertakings, and yes, governments use symbols of national identity to promote their agendas, but the public in Egypt would not accept the imposition of a symbol on their currency, and the press would not cover a topic if its readers were not interested. Cuno goes on to throw in the red herring of suggesting that most Egyptians would probably place many other issues (freedom of speech, for example) much higher on their list of priorities, as if one would have to choose between pride in one's heritage and the wish to make one's country or one's own life better.

The argument against nationalist feeling as the basis for claims to cultural patrimony, then, is: nationalism is a conspiracy by governments to create identity where none exists, to invent traditions; luckily, most people have no deep investment in national identity, despite the efforts of states, so we can discount any claims that certain objects really are connected to a people.

But what about where people of a country, say Greece, have somehow internalized the invented tradition and show they do care, in ways that cannot be poohpoohed as merely the effects of governmental incitement? In that case, their caring is outweighed by our caring more about the tradition that has been built up (i.e., not invented) over several hundred years while the Elgin marbles have resided in the British Museum.

The moderator does a fine job of continuing to push Cuno, asking him whether then he would be happy if, say, the Declaration of Independence had somehow been taken back to London (she might have done the thought experiment by imagining this happening in the War of 1812). Cuno said it would not bother him at all. Incredulous, the moderator asks whether it makes no difference viewing the Declaration in the context of Washington, DC. Not to Cuno. Authenticity, yes; context, no (unless the context is the museum's collection, apparently).

Unfortunately, time ran out before the conversation could really come to grips with the issue which is much more pressing than that of repatriation: the problem of looting today. The recent adoption of more stringent rules for acquisition of unprovenanced antiquities gives Cuno the chance to point out that very few antiquities are being acquired by US museums today. Gerstenblith raises the question of whether museums are using the same standards in accepting donations from collectors, but time runs out before that can be answered.

The follow-up question, which never gets raised, is whether museums should go beyond the "clean hands" position to something like "active engagement" in protecting archaeological sites from destruction at the hands of looters (as well as by development). What does Cuno think could and should be done about the problem of site destruction?

The Athenian News Agency reported that at the riverside region of Logas, in Elati, northwest Greece, have been discovered an impressive amount of archaeological findings.[At the region, it] was a residential settlement until the Hellenistic Period while the first dwellings date back to the Neolithic Period, based on the findings unearthed during excavations conducted for the Ilarion Dam that is

UPI.com reports that in Turkey has been discovered the oldest temple in the world. Archaeologists say a temple being excavated in southeastern Turkey is 12,000 years old and is likely the oldest temple ever uncovered.The site was first identified in 1986 when a farmer tilling his field in Sanliurfa found a statuette in the soil, the Radikal newspaper reported Wednesday.The structure the press

Some time around 20 March each year, my part-time employers in The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters celebrate the 1753 foundation of the Academy. This gives me a rare reason to dress in tails. And I now look forward to performing for the first time that ultimate ritual of 20th century masculinity, leaving shirts to the dry-cleaners.

The image to the right allows anyone who is uncertain as to whether they are a girl to test this. Wise men teach us that every girl go crazy for a sharp-dressed man. Dear Reader, if you study the image and do not go crazy, then by simple logic you are not a girl.

Read the comments on this post...

Four Stone Hearth 88 is up at Ad Hominin. Give it a look.

I almost missed this one. Thanks to Carl Feagans at A Hot Cup of Joe, I didn’t.

Not paleobabble, but deals with it. Actually, a good post from an archaeo-astronomy blog on ancient Greek speculation about other worlds.

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Technorati Tags: aliens, ancient, ancient astronauts, extraterrestrials, Greece

I doubt that I am alone in possessing piles of photocopies from books and articles.  Like blocks of stone they rise on every side.  Made by my own hands, mostly, the photocopies were paid for in time and money.  Many a trip to the university library has ended in a session at home reading through the products of my labours with excitement.  Then the photocopies were laid aside, as I might want them again, and never seen again.

A soft and rainy day is the perfect day to try to rediscover your furniture.  Mine has bowed under the weight of these toppling piles for years.  A whim moved me to sort some of them out, and transfer at least some of them to the cupboard, where dust does not darken nor the cleaners condemn.

Of course I have these urges every few years.  The last time was when I got a fast modern Fujitsu scanner and converted quite a lot into PDF’s.  But I couldn’t remember why a certain pile had survived.

Inspection revealed that it contained mostly materials relating to the Eusebius project.  As I looked through it, there were print-outs of catalogue entries; books that I had once sought, mostly successfully, sometimes in vain.  Cordier’s catena was listed, a reminder that I sat in Duke Humphrey’s Library once and looked through it for Eusebian material.  I can remember the hardness of the chair, and getting caught in a rainstorm outside.  I had not realised, in truth, how long the Eusebius project has been part of my life and a focus for my efforts.  I tend to think that it is only for a year or two; but in truth I have probably spent much of the last decade on it.  So our lives slip away, while we play with this or that.

Among the items I found was a copy of A. Delatte, «Le déclin de la Légende des VII Sages et les Prophéties théosophiques», Musée Belge 27 (1923), p. 97-111.  I got this when I was looking at material in Arabic derived supposedly from patristic sources.  There were all these collections of “Sayings”, often by philosophers or the like, predicting the coming of Christ, or other “wisdom” type sayings.   Such collections of sayings were analogous to the volumes of “Wit and Wisdom” that populate shops selling remaindered books.  The accuracy of attribution and quotation is probably about the same.  These collections are called gnomologia. 

Delatte’s article discussed the twilight of the classical tradition of the Seven Sages.  In Late Antiquity this unfixed myth was found useful by people such as theosophists to provide a frame for their ideas.  Consequently it connects to the idea of “famous sayings of the philosophers.”

Delatte also published in the article one of the texts feeding into this tradition, which was why I got it.  No translation, tho.  Don’t you hate it when people do that?  It’s four and a bit pages of Greek; almost worth commissioning a translation of it and giving it away.

I might try and reacquaint myself with this paper this afternoon.  I’ve created a PDF, and run it through the OCR software.  My sofa will now help me understand it!

VESUVIUSonLINE: LA RASSEGNA STAMPA di www.vesuvioweb.com

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

Rufus’ latest at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen (I might be a bit late with this one):

• “Prometheus Bound” (via Hesiod, Aeschylus, Heidegger, McLuhan) | The League of Ordinary Gentlemen.

I’m glad to hear that Logos is throwing a lot at the mac development side of things: The good news is that the Logos 4 Mac team is seeing success after success. Our shared-code strategy is working, and ensuring compatibility of both content and documents. And as the platform becomes more stable we’re seeing increased speed implementing [...]

Stranger in Paradise, the diary of an expat in Bali, has a feature on the the recent excavations at the Candi Kimpulan site at Universitas Islam Indonesia.

Buried Treasure and Hindu-Balinese Crusades
Stranger in Paradise, March 2010

Twenty metres into the site my jaw drops: I spy a largish crater, inside which is nestled a pristine tenth-century stone temple. On the temple’s floor is a Ganesha statue, still half-buried (to deter the thieves); the rest of the small walled temple court is completely exposed, and looks brand new.
Javanese workers convey baskets of volcanic soil up rough stairs. A ‘posse’ of archaeologists — roped off from the general swirl of activity — sit on a large woven mat surrounded by boxes of biscuits, kretek cigarette packs, floor plans and other tricks of the trade.
After a tour of the site, which includes a good look at the excellent information board for the public, I am invited to sit with the experts and swap tales.
It is an exhilarating hour and I learn much about Central and East Javanese candi and the ancient Hindu cultures that spawned them..

The Caspian Sea near Ramsar

As a boy, I was already dreaming of visiting the Caspian Sea. The Mediterranean Sea was far away, the Black Sea sounded even more exotic, but the Caspian Sea – that was at the edges of the earth. Two weeks ago, I finally visited Mazandaran and saw what I had been longing to see for such a long time. The country between the sea and the Elburz Mountains offers a spectacular landscape, but not the almost tropical climate I expected. Yet, there were forests (our word jungle is a loan word from this area) and there were several splendid medieval tombs at a/o Lahijan and Sari.

Because I had no camera with me, I took a photo of the sea with my telephone. I also used the small toy to call a friend in Holland, who could hear the surf, and in return told me the results of the past elections and the soccer matches. In the evening, we had White Fish for dinner. There’s more here.

Seen on Classicists (please send any responses to the folks mentioned in the quoted text, not to rogueclassicism!):

Conference on ‘Integrity and Corruption in Antiquity’
Unisa Classics Colloquium, 21-22 October 2010)

Proposals for papers are hereby solicited on topics related to the
conference theme that might contribute to a multi-faceted discussion. Of
concern is not merely proving corruption to be common to ancient and modern
societies, but rather to elucidate both notions in the theme from a
historical distance and to grapple with the real issues (social,
historical, personal) involved. The organizing committee will be interested
in papers dealing with definitions of corruption, philological analyses of
the Greek and Roman terms within the field, to what extent the two notions
were juxtaposed, philosophical discussions of personal morality and power
abuse, root causes, responses, remedies and counter-measures. Scholars
working on historical, literary, oratorical, religious, philosophical,
epigraphical and other material are welcome to contribute.

The Unisa Classics Colloquium is hosted by the Department of Classics and
World Languages at the University of South Africa. We have invited two
quest speakers to this year’s conference: Proff. Clifford Ando of the
University of Chicago and Emily Greenwood from Yale.

Papers will be limited to 45 minutes. Please submit abstracts of appr. 200
words via e-mail attachment to bosmapr AT unisa.ac.za by the end of June 2010.

More on the conference
The Unisa Classics Colloquium is a pleasant and intimate conference in a
relaxed atmosphere with ample opportunity for discussion. Over two (and a
half days), approximately 14 papers from scholars around the world are
presented.We try to avoid parallel sessions to promote unity and focus in
the conference, and delegates get to know each another properly. We also
try to show guests from abroad a little of the country during the
conference.

Venue
The colloquium takes place on the Muckleneuk Campus of the University of
South Africa (UNISA) in Pretoria.

Dates
The conference is to be held on 22-23 October, to which another half day
might be added, depending on interest. We start on Thursday morning,
meaning that participants should arrive in Pretoria on the 21st at the
latest, and only book a flight out from the afternoon of the 23rd.

Programme
A preliminary programme will be compiled from the received proposals and
will be published on the Departmental website after the final date for
submissions. Previous conference programmes may be viewed at
http://www.unisa.ac.za/Default.asp?Cmd=ViewContent&ContentID=18743.

Conference Fee
More detail on the conference fee will follow at a later stage. As an
indication, the 2009 conference fee was $150 for overseas visitors,
inclusive of transport (from and to the airport and during the conference)
and meals during the conference.

Postgraduates, other students and interested parties not able to claim
their conference fees back from their institutions should please contact
the organizers for a discount.

Accommodation
We will provide more information on accommodation in due course. Pretoria
offers a variety in this regard. During past conferences, guests stayed at
the Brooklyn Guest Houses (http://www.brooklynguesthouses.co.za/ ) situated
in a safe and attractive neighbourhood close to Unisa, the University of
Pretoria, and the Brooklyn and Hatfield shopping centres. A group booking
with discount for delegates is planned.

Excursions
We plan a trip for Sunday 24 October to the Pilanesberg Game Reserve, a 1½
hours drive west of Pretoria. Transport will be provided.

Possible publication
Depending on interest and quality, the possibility exists of publishing the
colloquium papers in an edited volume on the theme. Submitted papers are
subject to a refereeing process. If you would consider submitting your
paper for publication, please indicate that to us via return mail for
further guidelines on style.

Seen on Aegeanet (please send any responses to the folks mentioned in the quoted text, not to rogueclassicism!):

Assistant Teaching Professor
Roman Archaeology

The Department of Art History and Archaeology seeks an assistant teaching professor to teach courses in Roman art and archaeology. This is a full-time, non-tenure track position from August 2010 to May 2011. The position is responsible for six courses (three each semester), including an introductory survey of Roman art and archaeology, and undergraduate and graduate-level Roman courses in a variety of topics. A PhD is required for appointment at this rank, but advanced ABD applicants also will be considered at a different rank. Teaching experience is preferred.

The department offers the BA, MA, and PhD degrees in classical archaeology and art history. There are normally about 80 undergraduate majors and 25 graduate students. Graduate degrees in art history and archaeology can be combined with interdisciplinary minors in Ancient Studies, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies. The University of Missouri-Columbia is the main campus of the state university system and offers a broad range of undergraduate and graduate programs.

Please send letter of application, curriculum vitae, and contact information for three references to:

Anne Rudloff Stanton, Chair
Department of Art History and Archaeology
109 Pickard Hall
University of Missouri-Columbia
Columbia, MO 65211

Application review starts March 15, 2010.

For more information see the department website at http://aha.missouri.edu.

The University of Missouri-Columbia is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action/ADA employer.

Brief AP item making the rounds … here’s the incipit from the Daily Herald:

A collection of ancient Greek silverware dating to the third century B.C. is going on display in Rome after being returned by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, officials said Friday.

The 16 pieces of silverware with gold detail were returned as part of Italy’s aggressive campaign against illegal trafficking in antiquities. They include two large bowls, a cup with two handles, plates and drinking utensils.

Italian art officials said the pieces form one of the most important Hellenistic silverware collections to have survived from Sicily. The pieces are known as “The Morgantina Treasure” after the name of the ancient Greek settlement where they were excavated, near what is now the Italian city of Aidone.

Angelo Bottini, the archaeology superintendent in Rome, said the objects were likely crafted by different artists and served different functions. Some, like the large bowls with mask-shaped feet, were likely used to mix wine with water during meals; others, like the plates, were likely used during ceremonies, officials said.

The pieces came back as part of a deal with the Met that also led to the return of the Euphronios Krater, a 6th-century B.C. painted vase that is widely regarded as one of the finest examples of its kind.

They will go on display at the Museo Nazionale Romano in the Italian capital from Saturday through May 23. The show then moves to Sicily.

via Rome to display ancient Greek silverware | Daily Herald.

More coverage:

• Antiquities, Once the Met’s, Go on Display in Rome | NY Times

• Rome to display ancient Greek silverware | Washington Post

In case you haven’t seen it yet, a lengthy article in Newsweek:

• ‘Clash of the Titans’: Ancient Greece and Us – Newsweek.com.

You probably think you know why we have spring: something to do with distance from and position of your location in connection with the sun. While this is undoubtedly "true," it isn't nearly as charming as the Greek mythological version. In the story of Demeter and the abduction of Persephone, it is explained that during winter the grain goddess, Demeter, won't do her work of feeding mankind because she is in mourning for the seasonal loss of her daughter Persephone. When Persephone re-emerges from her subterranean home, her mother rejoices, and the earth breaks out in green.

Persephone and Demeter Reunited
Homeric Hymn to Demeter

Photo © Clipart.com

Greek Spring Myth originally appeared on About.com Ancient / Classical History on Saturday, March 20th, 2010 at 12:52:10.

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It's 7:25 am on a partly cloudy Saturday. Here's what the river is up to from the Grand Fork Herald's Flood Cam.

Have a good Saturday.

Washington University in St Louis

Jennifer Smith, PhD, associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, was belly crawling her way to the end of a long, narrow tunnel. The tunnel was carved in the rock at a desert oasis by Egyptians who lived in the time of the pharaohs.

“I was crawling along when suddenly I felt stabbed in the chest,” Smith says. “I looked down and saw that I was pressing against the broken end of a long bone. That freaked me out because at first I thought I was crawling over bodies, but I looked up and saw a sheep skull not too far away, so I calmed down. At least the bones weren’t human.”

What was she doing in the tunnel?

The answer: seeking an uncontaminated sample of a mineral that might have been the key ingredient in the blue used to decorate “blue painted pottery” popular among the Egyptian elite during the New Kingdom (1550-1079 BC).

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Luxor News Blog (Jane Akshar)

Jane has kindly shared her notes from the latest Mummification Museum lecture again.

Otto opened the lecture by reminding us that whatever KV63 finally turns out to be it will always be the first tomb discovered since the tomb of Tutankhamen. It started with a search for foundation deposits for the tomb of KV10. Excavation revealed 2 huts to the west and 10 huts to the east. These were used by the workman who lived in the valley and filled with ostracha and other artifacts. Theodore Davies had excavated the east most huts 10, 9 and 9a but left the central area. Under hut 5 they found KV63. Consisting of a single chamber with a stack of 8 coffins and 28 huge storage jars. This season they have been working on restoration of the coffins and the contents of the jars. Within these jars they have found natron, pots, textiles and the ‘embalming bed’ that is now in the mummification museum.

Coffin B (please refer to the Kv63 website for identification and pictures) was in a dreadful state, split with its mask fallen off and laying face down. SCA conservators have restored it and put the mask back in place. This is slow and painstaking work like watching the grass grow. It is not a work of art (I thought the profile was nice) and there is no writing or decoration.

It is nice to know that KV10 is not being forgotten!

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Global Post (Jon Jensen)

Ecotourism is taking off throughout Egypt, boosting an economy already heavily dependent on tourism revenue. Bahariya is among those destinations increasingly popular for their pristine natural environment.

However, Egypt is quickly learning the need for balance between environment and development, amid concerns that tourism is stressing the country's fragile ecosystems to the point of collapse.

And the debate on ecotourism is even being had here, on the dusty streets of Bahariya’s largest village.

Ali Abdel Salem, 58, has lived in Bawati all his life. He has fond memories of the days before an asphalt highway was built linking the oasis to Cairo.

A trip from the capital that once took five days now takes only five hours.

“Fifty years ago, Bahariya was calm and quiet,” said Abdel Salem. “Now it’s starting to feel like Cairo. It’s crowded and noisy.”

Bahariya Oasis, once a thriving agricultural center for the Roman Empire, is now the preferred stepping-stone and supply stop for tourists heading to the surrounding deserts. Newly discovered ancient temples set against a stunning natural backdrop is another reason tourism is increasing here.

In recent years, the number of visitors to Bahariya has climbed so high that one-third of the oasis’ almost 40,000 residents are now working in tourism. Over the past decade, unemployment decreased as the number of hotels in Bahariya shot up 500 percent, according to Bahariya’s tourism office.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Culture24

Rarely-seen treasures from Anglo-Saxon England, Ancient Egypt and the Mediterranean are being opened up to public view following the refurbishment of the small museum of Girton College Cambridge.

The Lawrence Room at Girton contains a range of unique pieces including Anglo-Saxon treasures recovered on the college site in 1881 and, perhaps most importantly, Hermione Grammatike, a named portrait mummy of a young female classics teacher from the Fayum city of Roman-era Egypt.

Excavated by William Flinders Petrie during the winter season of 1910/1911 in the Roman cemetery at Hawara, on the eastern edge of the Fayum, Hermione has become something of a Girton icon.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Amigos de la Egiptologia (Javier Uriach Torelló)

If you speak Spanish this is a really nice introduction to the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology written by a recent visitor. It includes a history of the museum and gives a blow by blow account of the visit t the museum. It is accompanied by around ten good photos and a plan of the museum.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Available to journal subscribers, or by purchase for download.

Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 37, Issue 4, Pages 671-900 (April 2010)

Investigating the likelihood of a reservoir offset in the radiocarbon record for ancient Egypt
M.W. Dee, F. Brock, S.A. Harris, C. Bronk Ramsey, A.J. Shortland, T.F.G. Higham, J.M. Rowland

Abstract
Some radiocarbon dates for ancient Egypt have been significantly offset from the established historical chronology (see Bonani et al., 2001). In this paper, short-lived plant species collected in Egypt between 1700 and 1900 AD were used to investigate the possibility that the radiocarbon record had been influenced by reservoir effects. AMS radiocarbon measurements were made on 66 known-age samples, resulting in an average offset from expected values of 19 years. The implications of this minor discrepancy on the likelihood of a reservoir process are discussed, and the agreement of the data with recent models of radiocarbon seasonality is also considered.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Thanks to the Resource Shelf blog for the information that the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus is now available online at the Turning the Pages Online website, from where you can load the virtual papyrus, or you can link to it directly by clicking here (it takes quite a while for the page to load). This is a terrific way of looking at the original papyrus. The Eye of Ra that shows under the papyrus allows you to zoom in on any part of it.

The Edwin Smith Papyrus, the world's oldest surviving surgical text, was written in Egyptian hieratic script around the 17th century BCE, but probably based on material from a thousand years earlier. The papyrus is a textbook on trauma surgery, and describes anatomical observations and the examination, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of numerous injuries in exquisite detail.

American archaeologist Edwin Smith discovered the papyrus in Egypt in the 1860s, and his daughter donated the papyrus to the New-York Historical Society after his death. It eventually made its way to the Library of the New York Academy of Medicine, and it was recently translated for the first time in over 50 years into English by James P. Allen of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

New York Times

MOST people associate museums with art and artifacts, not research libraries. But many of New York’s most prestigious museums have extensive collections of books and papers. Four of them — the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Frick Collection — have combined forces to share resources, save money and make their holdings more accessible to the public.

Together these institutions make up the New York Art Resources Consortium, an integrated library system formed in 2007 that is supported by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Its Web site, nyarc.org, just went on line in February. Last year, three of the museums united their collections in one catalog, called Arcade (the Met has kept its catalog separate).

“This allows us to do some things collaboratively that we weren’t able to do individually,” said Milan R. Hughston, the chief of library and museum archives at MoMA. “Together we aggregate close to a million books, articles, periodicals and special collections that document art history.”

The database, at arcade.nyarc.org, is a trove of more than 800,000 records from ancient Egypt to contemporary art that includes exhibition and auction sale catalogs, monographs, periodicals, rare books, photographs and archival materials.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Ramesses II with the Elephantine deity Khnum and his consort Anukis
Beit el-Wali, New Kalabsha island, near Aswan

This is the last of the photos from Beit el-Wali.
There will be more from New Kalabsha in the next couple of weeks.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Serge Rosmorduc has just announced on the AEL wires that a new version of his free hieroglyphic editor, JSesh has been released.

JSesh is an excellent tool to help you study the ancient Egyptian language and this new release brings the software up to version 3.0.

Here is what Serge said:

I have the pleasure to announce version 3.0 of JSesh. Thanks to M. Thomas’ work, the full Manuel de Codage (or, in other terms, the “extended library”) is now covered by JSesh (save a few signs here and there, which will be fixed in the near future). So JSesh 3.0 is essentially JSesh 2.13, but with complete X, Y and Z families. I thought however that a full coverage of the Manuel de Codage warranted a new version number.

Visit the JSesh website to read more about it and download the latest verison of the software.

Related posts:

1. JSesh Hieroglyphic Processor Update
2. JSesh New Version Update
3. JSesh Tutorial: Mixing Hieroglyphs with Drawings

THE IRIS BOG PSALTER has been restored and is going on display next year:

Psalter to go on display in 2011

MICHAEL PARSONS (Irishtimes.com)

FOUR YEARS after its sensational discovery in a midlands bog, new photographs today reveal the conservation work on the 1,200-year- old “Faddan More Psalter”.

The National Museum of Ireland has announced that the eighth century religious manuscript “of staggering importance” will go on public display for the first time next year.

The book was found in 2006 by a workman operating a mechanical digger on the bog at Faddan More, near Riverstown in north Co Tipperary.

[...]

He praised the “magical and internationally important work” undertaken by senior conservator, John Gillis.

Mr Gillis (49), who is on secondment to the museum from Trinity College Library, was “confounded” when he first saw what had been salvaged from the bog and initially “transfixed with fear” at the scale of the “once-in-a-lifetime” restoration task.

[...]

The Psalter is compared favorably, if perhaps a little enthusiastically, to the Dead Sea Scrolls

Background here and here (bottom of post) and follow the links.

Starting on Weds 24th at 9pm on More 4 they show a seven week season of Ancient World films. The series starts with a new documentary about the neglected culture of Alexandria. As part of the documentary they explore the life of the pagan philosopher Hypatia, who met a terrible end when she was lynched for her beliefs in the city. All in all this is sixteen hours of in-depth analysis of antiquity, with new material from the redeveloped Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

Thought to have been born on this day in 43 B.C., Ovid (aka Naso 'nose') was a prolific Roman poet, best known for his Metamorphoses (a collection of stories from mythology) and love poetry. Ovid counted among his friends the poet Horace and the family of the emperor Augustus.

As a result of some scandal, perhaps involving the women of the imperial family, which Ovid refers to as carmen et error 'a song/poem and a mistake,' Augustus banished Ovid to Tomi, near the Black Sea. [Nl on the small map on the right, bottom.] Ovid dearly loved the cosmopolitan life that he had enjoyed at the center of the Roman world. The banishment would have been torturous enough if Ovid could have looked forward to a recall date, but the exile or relegation was permanent.

Read more about Ovid.

Also see Roman Authors -- By Century.

Photo © Clipart.com

On This Day in Ancient History - Ovid - The Poet Exiled for a Song and an Error originally appeared on About.com Ancient / Classical History on Saturday, March 20th, 2010 at 06:50:10.

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Paola Totaro is an Italian born Australian journalist working for the Sydney Morning Herald Among other things she covers political and social issues in Britain and mainland Europe.
In a recent article ( Antiquities not just another brick in wall, Sydney Morning Herald, March 19th 2010 - which also appeared a day later in the Melbourne newspaper The Age :"History hoons ransack Europe's heritage" The Age, March 20, 2010) she has a few observations on the British treatment of their heritage:

Last weekend, standing beside the mighty Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland National Park, I watched open-mouthed as a [... woman...] tried to haul herself atop the wall. First she dug her heavy boots into the masonry to get a grip. When that failed, she used her walking stock to scrape a foothold. Then she tried to haul herself up with her hands, and used her boots again to halt her slide back to earth. A shower of dust accompanied each clumsy manoeuvre. She was not alone. Dozens of others did the same at an event organised by British heritage authorities to highlight the need to protect Britain's biggest, longest monument. It seems extraordinary that while Hadrian's legacy is taught in schools worldwide, the 117-kilometre wall's keepers have to tell the 47 million people who come to see it that while they are welcome to look, they must not touch.

Totaro reports that she has often been struck by the very cavalier attitude to history that she has observed as she has travelled Europe: "splashes of graffiti on the walls of Venetian palazzi, adults leaning against the fragile colours of an ancient chapel in Croatia, camera-toting tourists ignoring ''No flash'' signs before Milan's Last Supper, a child in the Louvre allowed to hang off a marble statue before a guard lambasts the parents". These are, she admits "seemingly small misdemeanours in the scheme of the damage done by the illicit antiquities trade, a market estimated by a 1999 UN report at $US7.8 billion a year worldwide". They are nevertheless shocking examples of the complete disregard for the fragility of the record past generations have left us and our descendants. One example she highlights in particular:

In Britain, pseudo-archaeologists and treasure hunters with metal detectors are an increasing problem. Caches of ancient treasures are being dug up by sleuths equipped with ever-more-sophisticated equipment. Just last week in Northumbria, local newspapers reported that an amateur group had unearthed Roman treasure, including a pot of gold coins apparently bearing an image of Emperor Hadrian's head. Last year a stash of Anglo-Saxon gold artifacts was found on a farm by a man with a metal detector. The collection could be broken up and sold to collectors if £3.3 million cannot be found by April 17 to secure it for museums. Increasingly, British archaeological faculties have come to the conclusion that if you can't lick 'em, it's best to join 'em. They are exploring ways to educate amateurs on how to document their finds - harm minimisation for antiquities.

I appreciated the fact that she explicitly used the phrase "pseudo-archaeologists", it is good to see that some journalists see the difference, pity though that its not Brit ones who tend to be misled by teh pro-collecting rhetoric fed to them by the PAS and other pro-collecting archaeologists. She concludes this is all due to lack of respect:

At Hadrian's Wall last Saturday, I was sure of one thing: if it had been an Australian historic building or a site of Aboriginal or natural significance, those climbers would not have lasted a minute at the hands of the crowd. Cultural respect starts with children, and we have taught ours well.

Not so the Brits, where a public archaeological outreach Scheme costing millions is telling people that artefact hunting and collecting is not only "OK", but in some way "beneficial". Certainly a case of if they can't be bothered to even try to beat them, they are in it together with their esteemed metal detector using "partners". It seems that by encouraging a particular (dig up your own) type of hands-on approach to the past, we do not seem to be getting the message of 'feet and bottoms off'.

Hoon, by the way, I find out is apparently a derogatory term used in Australia and New Zealand to refer to a younger person who engages in loutish, anti-social behaviour. I would say that the way archaeological antiquities are dug out of the ground by selfish individuals for entertainment and profit is pretty hoonish too.
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Photos: Hoons on Hadrians wall, the first is some 'anorak' the other two are an American Christian group who were guests in the UK and obviously felt very much at home there.
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I was struck by the terminology used in the Associated Press article: "Rome to display ancient Greek silverware" March 19th.

A collection of ancient Greek silverware dating to the third century B.C. is going on display in Rome after being returned by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, officials said Friday [...] The pieces are known as "The Morgantina Treasure" after the name of the ancient Greek settlement where they were excavated, near what is now the Italian city of Aidone.


... Italy's aggressive campaign against illegal trafficking in antiquities...
... came back as part of a deal with the Met ...
...Italy has been aggressively campaigned (sic) to ....
... recover antiquities it says were looted ...
... secured the return of dozens of [...] artifacts in deals with museums...

[Those nasty "aggressive" foreigners, eh? But its a good job the Americans tricked them into agreeing to some kind of "deal"].

Somewhat more balanced and informative was Elisabetta Povoledo's "Antiquities Once Owned by Met Go On Display in Rome" New York Times March 19, 2010, which gives a bit more of the background to the Morgantina Treasure affair. "In 1981 and 1982 the Met bought the silver hoard from the American dealer Robert Hecht for $2.74 million. Mr. Hecht is currently standing trial in Rome on charges of conspiracy to traffic in looted artifacts". The objects were returned to Italy as part of a 2006 agreement between the government and the Metropolitan Museum. In recent years Italy has signed similar accords with other American institutions and archaeologists praised such restitutions "as indicative of a cultural sea change that recognizes that “archaeology is context,” according to Malcolm Bell III, a professor at the University of Virginia who played a crucial role in establishing the provenance of the objects, which led to their return".

The silver will be on display in Rome until May 23, when it will travel to Sicily, where it will eventually be exhibited in Aidone. It will return to the Met periodically in keeping with the 2006 agreement, which also provides for a continuing exchange of antiquities. Last month the Met installed a recently excavated ancient Roman silver dining set from Moregine, on the outskirts of Pompeii, sent by Italy in exchange for the silver.

XVIII edizione Giornata FAI di Primavera
27 e 28 marzo 2010, apertura straordinaria di 590 monumenti in tutta Italia

Da Palazzo Chigi a Roma alla Biblioteca Braidense a Milano, dal complesso della Misericordia a Venezia al Palazzo della Banca d’Italia a Firenze.
Sono 590 i monumenti che il FAI aprirà in via straordinaria in tutte le Regioni italiane sabato 27 e domenica 28 marzo nella diciottesima edizione della Giornata FAI di Primavera.

Visite a contributo libero.

Un grande spettacolo di arte e bellezza dedicato a tutti coloro che hanno a cuore il patrimonio artistico e naturalistico italiano. E ambientato in centinaia di siti particolari, spesso inaccessibili ed eccezionalmente a disposizione del pubblico, 590 in tutte le Regioni.

Trai beni che verranno aperti al pubblico:

A Roma l’eccezionale apertura di Palazzo Chigi, uno dei più prestigiosi palazzi romani, dal 1961 sede della Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri: in occasione della Giornata FAI sarà straordinariamente possibile visitare alcune delle sale più sontuose e importanti del piano nobile – come la Galleria Deti, studio del Presidente del Consiglio, e la Biblioteca Chigiana.

A Milano saranno aperte eccezionalmente alcune sale della Biblioteca Braidense, parte del progetto illuminista voluto dall’imperatrice Maria Teresa d’Austria dopo la confisca ai Gesuiti del Palazzo di Brera.

A Firenze per la prima volta verrà aperto al pubblico il Palazzo della Banca d’Italia, costruito tra il 1865 e il 1869, quando la città toscana era capitale d’Italia. A Casignana (RC) si potranno vedere gli splendidi mosaici della Villa Romana che si estende su una superficie di oltre 7.000 metri quadrati e a Siracusa si andrà alla scoperta di una zona misteriosa dell’Ortigia e si potranno visitare due chiese chiuse da decenni, la Chiesa di San Filippo Apostolo e quella di San Francesco di Paola, oltre a un percorso ipogeico chiuso dal 1943.

E ancora, a Venezia il complesso della Misericordia con la Scuola Grande – salone destinato alle riunioni dei confratelli affrescato da Paolo Veronese -, la Scuola Vecchia e l’Abbazia, mentre a Napoli il Conservatorio di Musica di San Pietro a Majella, parte integrante del centro antico della città e diretto in passato da artisti come Donizetti e Cilea, che custodisce antichi manoscritti autografi, edizioni musicali del XVI secolo, raccolte di libretti.

Per gli iscritti al FAI o per chi si iscriverà durante le Giornate orari di visita esclusivi e corsie preferenziali e, tra le aperture riservate speciali visita dell’appartamento di Giuseppe Verdi al Grand Hotel Et de Milan a Milano.

Anche quest’anno il FAI propone in tutta Italia curiosità e itinerari culturali: aree archeologiche, percorsi naturalistici, borghi, giardini, chiese, musei, che per due giorni saranno a disposizione di tutti i cittadini che desiderino visitarli, oltre a escursioni e biciclettate. Circa il 40% dei beni aperti sono fruibili da persone con disabilità fisica.

I visitatori potranno avvalersi anche quest’anno di guide d’eccezione: saranno, infatti, oltre 12.000 gli Apprendisti Ciceroni®, giovani studenti che illustreranno aspetti storico-artistici dei monumenti. Il progetto Apprendisti Ciceroni® è sostenuto da Alleanza Toro.

BENI CULTURALI VISITABILI, suddivisi per Regione:

http://www.giornatafai.it/Beni-aperti.htm

Concorso a premi:
Quest’anno, in premio, fantastici voli: chi si iscrive online al FAI dall’ 1 al 31 marzo 2010 e partecipa al concorso “Cara Italia ti scrivo” potrà vincere un volo per New York. Per informazioni su altri premi e modalità di partecipazione www.giornatafai.it.

Info:

http://www.fondoambiente.it/territorio/xviii-edizione-giornata-fai-di-primavera.asp

A Roman pendant unearthed in Hampshire in December 1999 was auctioned off on March 19th by Timeline Auctions in London for £30,000, though the estimate was £50 000. It was bought by an anonymous telephone bidder.

The object is of solid gold and has a cast bust of an emperor wearing a laurel wreath and is inscribed with the letters TI CAESAR. There is a loop at the top and the item contains a red carnelian stone. It has been dated to the first Century AD.

The pendant was found by metal detectorist Peter Beasley, 68, from Portsmouth in a field near Alton, after years of digging in the area. It was discovered very near the findspot where the same detectorist had three years previously found a first century AD hoard (the so-called Alton Hoard), which was purchased by the British Museum for £100,000, that consisted of 256 'celtic' coins, a torque and a ring. The pendant was found 10 inches down in a field about 25 yards from the rest of the hoard. "The British Museum kept the rest of the hoard but gave this back as they couldn't date it accurately because there is nothing to compare it with" the finder reported. The hoard itself has been in the BM for fourteen years and is still not published.

So, presumably Mr Beasley, "professional Treasure Hunter" will be out there again next week searching the site where nationally important cultural property has already been found, looking for more financial reward. He may well get some, obviously the follow up to the Treasure inquest was not a proper and full survey of the surrounding area to put the original find in context - obviously something was missed, just 25 m away. What else is still there that we do not know about? Once a Treasure item has been declared, should not the findspots be protected by legislation? After all, the findspots of nationally important finds are nationally important findspots - they should therefore be scheduled with a suitable buffer zone, so they are protected from people going there in the hope of finding more saleable goodies missed by the original finders. Otherwise they will be quarried away by artefact hunters.
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Sources,: Daily Telegraph: Roman jewel depicting emperor expected to sell for £50,000 BBC: Roman pendant bought for £30,000

(Hat tip: N.S. Gill)

Herodotus Time Map is an interactive feature that combines Herodotus' text (in English and Greek) with maps.  Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could read Strabo's Geography the same way?

There are also two related PDF documents:

• Repurposing Perseus: the Herodotus Encoded Space-Text-Image Archive (HESTIA)
• Mapping an ancient historian in a digital age

Image: Bust of Herodotus. 2nd century AD. Roman copy after a Greek original.  On display along the portico of the Stoa of Attalus, which houses the Ancient Agora Museum in Athens. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

As background to Lavinia, our current read, there is The Aeneid by Vergil (Publius Vergilius Maro). There are various translations available.  In print we have the 2008 translation by Robert Fagles, Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, and the 1981 translation by Robert Fitzgerald, Everyman's Library.  Online, there are,

• John Dryden at Project Gutenberg
• John Dryden at Perseus Digital Library
• Theodore C. Williams at Perseus Digital Library
• A. S. Kline

The above lists are by no means complete.

Some relief from the antiquity nonsense:  check out this post. Some good stuff (no aliens, I promise).

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A week or so ago, I mentioned the Obituaries of Kenneth Dover that appeared in The Times and the Telegraph. The Times has followed up with several enjoyable reminiscences in Lives Remembered:

Lives Remembered: Sir Kenneth Dover

. . . . Kenneth Dover was an extraordinarily gifted teacher. His classes on Thucydides, for example, brought his own painstaking scholarship to his students with that rare ability that invited them to share his interest and excitement. I remember the alarm with which we were told to use the French edition “as the only decent one around just now” (his own had not yet been completed); it was a toss-up which created more of a headache for the first-year undergraduate: the French notes or the Greek original . . . .

There is another brief entry in Lives Remembered earlier this week, and The Sunday Times commented briefly.

Also this week, a full obituary in the Independent:

Professor Sir Kenneth Dover: Hellenist best known for his work on Greek homosexuality and for two controversial presidencies

Professor Sir Kenneth Dover was the foremost Hellenist of his generation, a skilled and authoritative interpreter of almost all the multifarious genres of ancient Greek literature. Somewhat to his regret he was probably most widely known as a disarmingly frank pioneer historian of Greek male same-sex gendering and sexuality, but he should better be remembered, and his work long revisited, as a quite formidable exponent of a unique combination of precise philological mastery with broader historical, sociological, and aesthetic exegesis, both of major canonical texts and of Greek (mainly Athenian) popular thought and morality. His career of high academic office-holding was attended by some considerable notoriety as well as renown . . . .

Today's Times has its obituary of Geoffrey Rickman who died on February 8:

Professor Geoffrey Rickman: head of Roman history at the University of St Andrews

Professor Geoffrey Rickman was a man of integrity whose scholarship was never advertised. He was devoted to the study of ancient history and especially Rome: appropriately he was known at St Andrews University, where he taught for more than 35 years, as “the father of ancient history”. He was an inspiring teacher and a charismatic lecturer who was respected and much admired by generations of students. He built up, by his own sheer enthusiasm and commitment, the Department of Ancient History to one of international repute . . . .

Sadly, with no picture.

Testing, Testing, 123. I seem to be having problems with the RSS feed.

Your Photo Here

Today my family and I had the delightful privilege of having Joel Watts (possibly known to readers as Polycarp of the blog The Church of Jesus Christ) and his family spend time with us, first at the public library and then at home.

As if this weren't enough of a treat, we had a visit from another family after they left. They just showed up in our back yard. We caught it on video:

This isn't the most recent statues but is a video of the large Amenhotep III head whose discovery was reported 3 weeks ago.  There area few views that weren't in the photo I saw.

This article was written for News from the Valley of the Kings © Kate Phizackerley 2008-9.

I had to scan the introduction to Francisco Javier Caubee Iturbe’s edition of a Christian Arabic catena on the gospel of Matthew.  I found myself wondering how well Google translate would handle Spanish.  After all, it gives Spanish as the default foreign language, so I hope it might be good!  So I experimented a bit. 

The following notes are abstracted from Iturbe’s comments.  Since both volumes of his work have a 50-page introduction, these are very much short notes!  Anyhow, he introduces his edition thus:

Studies and research on gospel catenas – comments by various fathers listed successively around the text of the Gospel – to date have been limited almost exclusively to those conveyed to us in Greek. As regards those preserved in Arabic, we can say that, nothing exists apart from some brief references in a few authors.  And yet there are several Arabic manuscript codices containing exegetical catenas on the Gospels, with markedly different characteristics from Greek catenas. The problems that these codices present with regard to their origin, their language, the patristic extracts used, the method and means by which they have been transmitted, and so on, are various, and often difficult. There are some differences, more or less marked, in the text of the comments found in the manuscripts, but fundamentally, at least for the Gospel of Matthew, they are all the same catena, conceived as an organic whole, with proper proportions, in this surpassing many of the Greek catenas, which sometimes comprise lengthy scholia joined with other tiny extracts by many different fathers juxtaposed against the same verse. The copies of almost all these manuscripts were made in Egypt, in the Coptic Monophysite church, and they were long in use, especially in the monasteries of Scetis.

 Of all the existing Arabic manuscripts, of which thirteen are known to contain gospel catenas, four are in the Vatican Library, three in Cairo, two in Paris and one in each of the following cities: Strasbourg, Oxford, Gottingen and Baghdad. All have the catena on the Gospel of Matthew, except for one in Cairo and another in Paris.

A description of the manuscripts containing the catena on Matthew is presented in this volume, beginning with the oldest of them, ms. Vatican Arab 452, which is the basis for the text published here; in the notes of the apparatus are the variants of the other manuscripts that rely on the same textual tradition.

He then lists the sigla for his edition.  It is interesting to learn of so many manuscripts.  M and P belong to a different family to the rest.

B  = Ms. Vatican Arab 452.
C = Ms. Arab Cairo 411.
D = Ms. Arab Cairo 195.
G = Ms. Gottingen ar. 103.
K = Ms. karsuni Vatican syr. 541.
L =  The catena in the coptic ms. of Curzon, as printed in the edition by P. de Lagarde, Catenae in evangelio aegyptiacae quae supersunt,  Gottingae 1886.
M = Ms. Vatican ar. 410.
O = Ms. Arab Bodleian Hunt. 262.
P = Ms. Paris ar. 55.
S = Ms. Arab Strasbourg or. 4315.

The copies all derive from the Coptic catena printed by De Lagarde, which is now sadly missing many of its leaves. 

Iturbe begins by describing the first of these.  Since Arabic catenas are probably almost unknown to anyone, I think it’s worth translating this as a sample of what the manuscript contains.

MS. VATICAN ARABIC 452 – Siglum B.

1214 AD. Paper, 250 x 165 mm., the written area is 175 x 110 mm., 376 folios, 17 lines per page.

The manuscript is divided now into two volumes, bound in white leather: one has 196 pages and the second 180. The missing folios at the end, probably about thirty-five, are more or less what is needed to complete a version of the Gospel lessons of the holidays, Sundays, Saturdays, and so on, for the whole year, introduced and started on f. 369v  at the end of the manuscript; as it currently is, it only goes as far as 4th Hatur, which is the third month of the Coptic calendar.

On the first page, in the center of a large rectangle, to whose sides are attached 16 identical circles, enclosing as many Coptic crosses – four circles with crosses, one on each of the horizontal sides, two on the vertical, four more identical at the corners of the rectangle all drawn in red and black –, the manuscript title is written in black ink, indicating its contents: Book of the Gospels, its explanation and calendar.

On most of the rest of the page, above and below the rectangle, there is a certificate of ownership of the book, dated 55 years after the composition. We will discuss this document later.

A few short sentences in Arabic, which can barely be read — some of which seems to be an essay written by an ignoramus — plus two seals of the Vatican Library and the indication “452 Arabic”, occupy the remaining free space on the page, which because of that, plus humidity and other stains, presents a sorry state, which is felt in part on the verso of the same folio. This folio 1 is the most deteriorated of the manuscript, except folio 135v. The latter was originally left blank, before the commentary on the Gospel of Mark.  But then four lines were written in Karshuni, also repeated in Arabic, which a few illiterates then wrote over and over again like vandals, which, added to the horrendous lines crossing at the top of the page, has completely smeared the page. Something similar on a smaller scale, has occurred in ff. 188v-189, which were almost completely blank between the gospels of Mark and Luke, and on ff. 368v-369, the end of the Gospel of John. Except for these cases and others of less importance, the manuscript has been preserved in good condition.

On ff. 1v-5v, after a preface, the Ammonian sections are arranged in the ten canon tables of Eusebius, and marked by Coptic numerals.
Ff. 6-135 contain the Gospel of St. Matthew with the patristic commentaries.
Ff. 136-188v: Gospel of Mark and their comments.
Ff. 189v-298: Gospel of St. Luke and comments.
Ff. 299-c68: Gospel of St. John and their comments.
Ff. 369v identifies the Coptic gospel lessons for the first part of the year, as I indicated above.

A little further on he adds:

The colophon to the Gospel of Mark says (f. 188v): ‘The text of the Gospel of Mark the Evangelist and the commentary on its meaning is finished with the help of God – may He be exalted! — and by the blessing of His grace, on Wednesday, 6 Tut of the year 921 of the pure Martyrs. May his blessing be with us. Amen’.

The date is 3rd September, 1204 – the same year as the sack of Constantinople by the renegade army hired for the Fourth Crusade, in which so much ancient literature perished.

Iturbe published his edition in two volumes, the first with a preface on the manuscripts and then the Arabic text, the second with a preface on the contents and a Spanish translation.  The introduction to the second volume begins as follows:

The patristic catena on the Gospel of St. Matthew in ms. Vatican ar. 452, the text published in Volume I, which we here give in translation, after almost all of the 68 sections into which it divides the Gospel text, has one or more pieces of commentary — scholia — each preceded by a very brief indication - lemma – written in red, which states, most of the time, who is the Father or interpreter who composed it. In total, there are 336 scholia with corresponding lemmas.

But there are 86 lemmas which are no more than the word ‘interpretation’, and we may wonder whether the compiler of the catena – or the copier - meant to assign the scholia which immediately follow to the named author of the preceding passage. That certainly agrees with the reading of the Coptic manuscript of Curzon and other similar Arabic manuscripts, and in a comparative study of them all we find that of the 86 scholia, 82 belong  to the author last named in a lemma; 3 to a different author than the one listed in B above, and only 1 of them is unknown.

Having clarified the previous difficulty, and incidentally shedding light on other such mss, Coptic and Arabic, we have 113 which are scholia by St. Cyril of Alexandria and 109 of St. John Chrysostom. The two great Eastern doctors thus cover two thirds of all the commentary of St. Matthew in the catena. Then comes Severus of Antioch, with 53 glosses. And then, with a much smaller number, the other contributors. The list of all those in B, with the number of scholia that each must be awarded is as follows:

Cyril of Alexandria = 113
John Chrysostom = 109
Severus of Antioch = 53
Hippolytus of Rome = 15
Gregory the Theologian = 8
Gregory Thaumaturgus = 6
Epiphanius = 5
Eusebius of Caesarea = 5
Clement (Alexandria) = 5
Athanasius = 4
Basil = 4
Severian of Gabala = 2
Simeon the Hermit = 2
Cyril of Jerusalem = 1
Titus (of Bostra ) = 1
Isaiah the Anchorite = 1
An elder of the Desert Fathers [the abbot Ammon] = 1

These, then, are the authors for which we may find textual witnesses in this Arabic catena.  Iturbe also states:

On the other hand there are various authors in Greek catenas who do not appear in Coptic-Arabic catenas: Apollinaris, Gregory of Nyssa, Irenaeus, Theodore of Heraclea, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret, etc; and above all Origen, who in almost all Greek catena families has many scholia, such as in the third of type B, where Origen comprises 227 out of the total 874.

There is little point in looking for material by Origen in Coptic or Arabic, it seems.

Back in the first introduction, Iturbe discusses the Coptic catena published by De Lagarde, from which all the Arabic mss. derive.

The Curzon Coptic manuscript catena, siglum L.

In 1886 Paul de Lagarde (P. Boetticher) published the Bohairic text of a manuscript obtained by Robert Curzon in March 1838 in the Monastery of the Syrians, Wadi ‘l-Natrun. Never translated, little use has been made so far in the scholarly field of this good edition of De Lagarde.  But for the present study, however, we are particularly interested in this Coptic ms.

It contains a patristic catena on the four gospels – next to the Gospel text – divided into sections, as in B and other Arabic manuscripts. The text of the Gospels has only a short verse or verses, which are generally given before the lemmas and scholia: in this, then, it is similar to M and P. This codex was written in the year 605 of the holy martyrs (888/89 AD), more than three centuries before the oldest of our Arabic mss, codex B, which was written in the year 1214 AD as regards the part of Matthew. Because sixteen folios were lost, the comments on Matt. 2:1-5:5; 5:44-6:3; 7:24-29; 9:27-9:37; 12:48-13:10; 24:16-29 are missing; see the introduction.

All this detail  may swamp us; but we need to recall that almost no-one working on New Testament texts or on the patristic comments on them found in catenas — is there anyone working on the latter? — has any awareness of material that has made its way into Arabic.

When my Eusebius volume appears, at least those dealing with the Gospel problems and solutions will be aware that there is material that should be consulted in Christian Arabic.

Beside the pyramid of Khufu there are five boat pits. Actually seven pits have been found but two of these belong to the queens’ pyramids being located between satellite pyramids GI-b & GI-c. The two most well known boat pits are on the south side of the pyramid while two more are located in a similar arrangement on the east side of the pyramid. The last pit is located on the north side of the pyramid’s causeway.

Boat pit on the east side of Khufu's pyramid

Here are the other boat pits around Khufu’s pyamid:

Khufu's Boat pits

Video of Khufu’s Second Boat Pit:

Khufu's boat pit. Photo: Guy Flaneur.

View a video taken of Khufu’s second boat pit on the south side:
Video of Khufu’s Second boat pit

Podcast of the Khufu Boats:
An interview by Rossella Lorenzi with maritime archaeologist Cheryl Ward and SCA chief Dr. Zahi Hawass on the subject of Khufu’s boats.
Archaeorama Podcast: Khufu’s Boats

Books to download on the Khufu boats:
The Boat Beneath the Pyramid. King Cheops Royal Ship, by Nancy Jenkins, 198
The Cheops Boat, Part 1, by Mohammed Zaki Nour, Zaky Iskander, Mohammad Salah Osman, Ahmad Youssof Moustafa, Cairo, 1960.
Books on Khufu’s first boat

You can also download the journal, “Funerary Boats and Boat Pits of the Old Kingdom.” Abusir and Saqqara in the Year 2001 by Hartwig Altenmuller.
The Boat Beneath the Pyramid

Photo of Unas Boat Pit:
Other pyramids also have boat and a previous ‘Friday Photo’ featured the boat pit of Unas photographed from a similar angle.
Unas Boat Pit

Today’s Friday Photo is by Derek Meyer. Some rights reserved.

Related posts:

1. Photo of the Week – Unas Boat Pit
2. More Photos of Khufu’s Solar Barque
3. Video of Khufu’s Second Boat Pit

McLellan

What’s a poor writer to do? someone, some day, for some reason, will annotate you: and naturally, being long dead, you won’t be up to defending yourself. And so it is with the writer of a biographical sketch of the 19c American general George McClellan, famous for being so cautious not to lose battles that he would have lost the war had he not quickly been replaced by President Lincoln: our anonymous writer had the misfortune to use what was at the time a fairly conventional phrase — but one that in our own age, less attuned to the classics, got him a dose of annotation right between the eyes. I prolly wouldn’t mention any of this if (a) it weren’t a somewhat out-of-the-way place for this item; and (b) if it weren’t considerably better than the corresponding Wikipedia entry, yet very likely at the cost of half the expenditure of time. Jona, you’ve been there, and will doubtless have further, um, annotations on it all.

Patty Gerstenblith and James Cuno have been discussing the issues surrounding the return of antiquities ("The finder's keepers argument for antiquities", Minnesota Public Radio March 19, 2010). Much of the discussion was on objects that left their place of origin several centuries ago: the Parthenon marbles and the Rosetta stone. Cuno emphasised the role of the universal museum: "the world comes to London".

The discussion eventually got round to the contemporary issue of looting. The discussion of why so many major North American museums had returned objects to Italy and Greece was neatly side-stepped. Cuno made the point that few museums in North America would now buy antiquities that had surfaced on the market without appropriate documentation. ("if we can’t be confident … we don’t acquire it"). Gertsenblith made a comment about private collectors acquiring these same objects on the market and asked if museums were as rigorous over such donations.

Selling art from one's current gallery inventory after becoming a museum director? That's fine and dandy with LA MOCA's trustees.Mike Boehm today posted an update on his LA Times story, which followed up on CultureGrrl's Wednesday post. I had revealed...

As was common at the time, Mark Twain published much of his work, including whole novels, in journals like the Atlantic Monthly, the Saturday Evening Post, or The North American Review. Terry Ballard has reposted and expanded his collection of references to many of these journal peices on his website. For over half of his references, he links directly to the full text. If you like Twain, you’ll like what Ballard has done.

One short piece that I had not seen before is “The Austrian Edison Keeping School Again” on Jan Szczepanik and his problem with military service. Twain published it in The Century, 56 (Aug 1898), 630-631.

Our next book is Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin, at the April 7 chat.  It's not an easy read, so I appreciate all the help we can get.  My thanks to Robert for finding this 2009 entry in Tony Keen's  Memorabilia Antonina, called Lavinia:

I've just this week finished and sent off to Vector, the British Science Fiction Association's critical journal, a review of Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin. Almost immediately, a large online discussion of the novel, conducted by Niall Harrison, Adam Roberts, Abigail Nussbaum, Nic Clarke and Jo Coleman, has appeared, in four parts spread across four separate blogs:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

There are a couple of other links that will be relevant: Adam Roberts' original review on Strange Horizons, and another interesting discussion of the book by Andries du Toit. 

Read on, there is a lot of food for thought.  And we all might as well start reading the book as soon as possible …

This is a version of a communication I just posted on IraqCrisis

As of this weekend the United States and the Coalition have been at war in Iraq for seven years.
Millions of people have been forced from their homes as refugees or internally displaced; hundreds of thousands have been killed and basic services remain unattainable for many. Hundreds of thousands of US soldiers have been sent to fight resulting in over 4,000 deaths and many more injured. In addition, the war has cost U.S. taxpayers at least $3 trillion that could have been spent on jobs, healthcare, and schools. There are no winners.

The Library of Congress has undertaken to archive web sites selected by subject specialists to represent web-based information on the Iraq War.

Iraq War, 2003 Web Archive

Scope: On March 20, 2003, the United States initiated offensive military action against Iraq for the stated purpose of deposing Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and preventing his use of suspected nuclear weapons (weapons of mass destruction.) British, Australian, Polish, and Danish forces participated in the invasion. U.S. led forces took control of Baghdad on April 9, 2003. There was both support and opposition to the war.

The war continued with the United States coalition forces facing increased insurgency from Shiite militants, Sunni militants, and terrorists aligned with Al Queda. The United States has had more than 150,000 troops deployed at any one time in Iraq. The Library continued with two more phases of web capturing from December, 2003 to the present. These last two phases are not yet available but will be in the future.

Included in the web archive are U.S. government sites, foreign government sites, public policy and political advocacy groups, educational organizations, religious organizations, support groups for military personnel, anti-war groups, sites that target children, and news sources.

This collection is part of a continuing effort by the Library of Congress to evaluate, select, collect, catalog, provide access to, and preserve digital materials for future generations of researchers.

Collection Period: The Iraq War Web-capture has three phases of collection. The first phase, a weekly capture, began on March 13, 2003 with the commencement of the war and ended June 30, 2003.

Phase 1 has been processed and is available from this site.

Phase 2 is a weekly capture and covers December 2003 to December 2004. Phase 3, also a weekly capture, was begun in January 2005 and is ongoing as of January, 2008. Phases 2 and 3 are not yet processed.

Number of Sites: 231 constituting Phase 1.

The Iraq War Web Archive includes two websites under the subject heading "cultural property"

1. Iraq -- The cradle of civilization at risk: H-Museum Current Focus
linking to http://h-net.msu.edu/~museum/iraq.html
2. LOST TREASURES FROM IRAQ
linking to http://www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/IRAQ/iraq.html

Almost nothing else in the resource makes reference to archaeology, archaeological sites, museums, or libraries in Iraq. A search for the phrase "stuff happens" yields no results.

Fortunately two other sites remain online.

1. Francis Deblauwe's The Iraq War & Archaeology Blog
2. The IraqCrisis list Archive

I've asked that the Library of Congress include them in the next phases of the Iraq War Web Archive.

And who better to wish the best to our 2,053-year-old poet than Ovid himself:

Optime natalis! Quamvis procul absumus, opto
   candidus huc venias dissimilisque meo. (Tristia V.5.13-4)

The full poem describes Ovid’s absentee rituals in honor of his wife’s birthday–she is still back in Rome, hence absumus (poetic plural). But Ovid isn’t speaking directly to his wife but to the spirit of her natalis - “birthday” (hence the vocative optime; earlier parts of this poem have Ovid preparing pia sacra for his ceremony). He then slips back into singular with opto; note that in Ovid this verb often takes a plain subjunctive clause (rather than the usual acc. w. inf.) to complete its meaning.

Ovid hoped that this spirit would pay him a visit candidus and dissimilis meo–a small ray of sunshine amid gloomy Tomis. In turning his words back on him, I’m share a similar hope that this brief review of the poets later work from a much-inferior blogger amuses his spirit enough to grant a similar blessing.

The book we are all waiting for is one by Dr Schaden on the discoveries in tomb KV63.  For now, the next best thing is a lecture by Dr Schaden and Jane Akshar was lucky enough to attend one in Luxor and has written it up for us.

He doesn't miss the opportunity to remind people that KV63 is the only tomb found in the Valley of the Kings since Tutankhamun and, when found, many Egyptologists were claiming that there was nothing left to be found.

This article was written for News from the Valley of the Kings © Kate Phizackerley 2008-9.

Two more statues from the temple of Amenhotep III have been found.  I've looked, but I cannot find any pictures.  There seem to be just two major versions of the story in criculation, one from the AFP newsfeed and the other from the Reuters feed.  The linked article seems to combine both to a degree and is the best I can find, but it's still not a lot.

This article was written for News from the Valley of the Kings © Kate Phizackerley 2008-9.

William Kentridge's banner for the façade of the Metropolitan Opera House. The black silhouette of the renegade Nose is at the top, astride a horse.I love those rare moments when New York's preeminent cultural institutions work together in scintillating synergy....

.
There is a page from November 2007 apparently gone from one of the blogs. It was savaging me for criticising the policies and methods of the US Ancient Coins for Education programme (I of course had sent a reply as a comment to its author pointing out that he had forgotten to give the link where the reader would have seen I was quoted out of context - but the blog's author never posted it).

It also contained an interesting exchange between Mr Sayles and a British citizen who took exception to some of the things he was saying about British metal-detecting. I rather think the Brit won the argument. Maybe Sayles decided to remove the post after having met some real British metal detectorists...

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(Paper given at the Ancient History Seminar, London, March 11th, 2010. Brief report by Caroline Barron.)

Graffiti or Inscriptions? The Epigraphic Habit in Attica
Claire Taylor

Dr Taylor’s talk focussed on the problems that arise through the categorisation of some inscriptions as Graffiti. She suggested that by making such a stark categorisation, some ‘marks’ have not received the attention that that might deserve, and that, therefore, their full potential as not been realised. These categories also encourage us to view the texts in a certain way. In the modern world, graffiti is often considered part of an illicit subculture, with a common critical response. By referring to these marks and texts as graffiti, we are therefore imposing the judgement that they too are illicit, as well as unconsciously (or consciously?) comparing them less favourably with other epigraphic forms. This is further complicated by the variety of texts and marks that are called graffiti: Individual Letters, Names, Trademarks, Commercial notations, Dedications, Sexual references and pictures. Dr Taylor argued that each mark must be considered in terms of the context in which it appeared eg. A commercial notation on is an important communication for both the buyer and the seller. That it was added to the pot later on, and by a different hand, shouldn’t become more important than the trade information that it relates. Equally, the sexual graffiti found in Pompeii is entirely appropriate for the place in which it was found – a brothel. So, while there is very little that connects the Greek pot’s commercial notation and Pompeii’s sexual graffiti, they are both found in the same category of Graffiti.

Dr Taylor suggested that a micro approach to these marks would be more appropriate; one that considered in detail the geographical, spatial, temporal and cultural context of each mark. This context could then also be considered in terms of the wider epigraphic habit. A collection of marks from in Attica, which largely date to the Classical period, were chosen to illustrate this micro approach. The marks, carved into the bedrock of Attica, vary greatly, from boundary stones and single words or names, to pictures of Hoplites, phalloi and footprints. These marks appear in two precise sites: Thorokos, and the Hymetos foothills. Both are in the remote countryside, and both show epigraphic evidence different from many other Attic sites. Dr Taylor suggested that these marks were made to represent a link between the inscriber and their location. The footprints and phalloi could, therefore, be seen as physical representations of those who made the marks – a memorial of a particular person in that particular space, at a particular time and within a certain community. The same can be said for the καλός names that frequently appear, with their representation of an emotional link between people.

These marks appear in small clusters, and have clearly been made at different times; one cluster showed a καλός name, with a footprint placed over it later on. Dr Taylor suggested that this temporal layering might show the different generations of visitors to the place, who have added their own names, thereby situating themselves within the group, and within the community as a whole.

Such ‘community’ based clusters are not uncommon in the Greek World, but they are more usually found in gymnasia or other centres of urban gathering. That the communities referred to by Dr Taylor are found in a rural context should, she argued, give us some idea as to what kind of people might form them. Dr Taylor believes that there is good case for these marks having been made by quarry workers, and show the communication of a non-elite group with each other in a non-dedicatory capacity. If this were to be true, then the long-held belief that graffiti were made illicitly, by those with little to do, could be overthrown. These marks would represent the voice of a normally silent people, who in fact appear to have communicated regularly with each other, and within a certain set of cultural traditions. They are shown to be at least semi-literate, and to have been motivated by concerns similar to those that are represented in more formal inscriptions. Those were not literate were not held back from communicating with each other either – the pictorial reliefs and consistency of symbols such as the phalloi and footprints reveal a cultural tradition that was not unique to a particular group or time, but that was repeated by successive members of the community.

The graffiti discussed in this talk proved the value of seemingly random markings to both Greek historians and Epigraphers, and for a wider understanding of the epigraphic habit.

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The American Numismatic Society is a museum and research institute devoted to the study of coins from all periods and cultures. It is a privately funded 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, supported by membership fees and contributions, sales of publications, and foundation, corporate and government support. It has a number of activities and an educational programme, and a coin collection:

The ANS' numismatic collection, estimated at approximately 800,000 coins and related objects, is of international caliber, rivalled only by the largest state collections of Europe. Abounding in both large study collections and great rarities, the Society's cabinets are particularly strong in Ancient Greek, where the Hellenistic section is particularly notable; Roman Republican period issues; Islamic, of exceptional breadth and depth; Far Eastern, particularly the Chinese material; Latin American, developed over the past 40 years; and United States, both the Colonial series and Federal issues, as well as private coinages. The Collection Database is available online.

What however it does not seem to have is any kind of code of ethics by which its members agree to adhere (at least I could not find one on their website). Perhaps they feel there is no need for ethics in collection of coins?
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LOST Slapdown, Part 7



LOST Untangled - Recon

Our recording of the lecture yesterday may have hit some hiccups - I'll keep you posted. Either way, in the mean time, here are some other videos to enjoy.

First, here's a recent one posted by the BioLogos Foundation:



And then here's part one of a six-part sequence on YouTube with an audio recording of a longer lecture by John Walton:

Looting Matters: Why Has a Coffin Been Returned to Egypt?
Discussion of the Egyptian coffin seized at Miami.

I wonder what would happen to the US economy if we followed this set of laws in Deuteronomy:

Every seventh year you shall grant a remission of debts. And this is the manner of the remission: every creditor shall remit the claim that is held against a neighbor, not exacting it of a neighbor who is a member of the community, because the LORD’S remission has been proclaimed...If there is among you anyone in need, a member of your community in any of your towns within the land that the LORD your God is giving you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor. You should rather open your hand, willingly lending enough to meet the need, whatever it may be. Be careful that you do not entertain a mean thought, thinking, “The seventh year, the year of remission, is near,” and therefore view your needy neighbor with hostility and give nothing; your neighbor might cry to the LORD against you, and you would incur guilt. Give liberally and be ungrudging when you do so, for on this account the LORD your God will bless you in all your work and in all that you undertake. Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, “Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.”—Deuteronomy 15:1-2, 7-11 NRSV

<idle musing>
If ever there was evidence that the Bible is a communist/socialist plot, this has got to be it!

Seriously, though, what part of share the wealth don't you understand?
</idle musing>

In 2010, using and developing free and open source software for archaeological research is not interesting news: lots of us do that nowadays, and the quality and quantity of available software and programming libraries is something not questionable. But was it the same 5 years ago ? It was very different, believe me. In 2005 the IOSA project was less than one year old, GRASS GIS 6.0 beta was right there and it looked to us like just having a human graphical interface to a free GIS program would help solving any problem. Ubuntu Linux was just a Warty Warthog. But this is history.
What I'm going to write today is instead the archaeology of free and open source software in archaeology. A few weeks ago I found two unrelated items that will fit perfectly in such an archaeological study.

read more

Iturbe’s edition of the Arabic catena containing bits of Eusebius has arrived.  There are five fragments.  I’ve commissioned a translation of them, and also a transcription; also a transcription of the Syriac text translated earlier.

Jumping backwards, just because my bookmark was in the wrong spot, we go back to the beginning:

...the question is about the means of salvation, how it is accomplished. Here John Piper, and the tradition he represents, have said that salvation is accomplished by the sovereign grace of God, operating through the death of Jesus Christ in our place and on our behalf, and appropriated through faith alone. Absolutely. I agree a hundred percent. There is not one syllable of that summary that I would complain about. But there is something missing—or rather, someone missing. Where is the Holy Spirit?In some of the great Reformed theologians, not least John Calvin himself, the work of the Spirit is every bit as important as the work of the Son. But you can't simply add the Spirit on at the end of the equation and hope it will still have the same shape. Part of my plea in this book is for the Spirit's work to be taken seriously in relation both to Christian faith itself and to the way in which that faith is “active through love” (Galatians 5:6). and the way in which that Spirit-driven active faith, at work through love and all that flows from it, explain how God's final rescue of his people from death itself has been accomplished (Romans 8:1-11).—Justification, pages 10-11

<idle musing>
Yes! The work of the Holy Spirit is central to the Christian life, yet it is so often overlooked. It is all too common for people to get someone to acknowledge the atoning sacrifice of Jesus and then hand that someone a Bible and tell them to read it. As if that block of wood, thinly sliced, all by itself, will transform you! NO! It is only as the Holy Spirit quickens the words in that book that they have any power. It is always, yes, always, through the power of God, the Holy Spirit, that we are transformed—or, better yet, have been transformed.
</idle musing>

Henriette Roued-Cunliffe, a doctoral student based at CSAD, participated in the Day in the Life of Digital Humanities 2010 yesterday, blogging about her DPhil thesis and her work on the second edition of the Vindolanda Tablets web site. The aim of this initiative, now in its second year, "is to create a web site that weaves together the journals of the participants into a picture that answers the question, 'Just what do computing humanists really do?'" Here's some of what Henriette had to say about her work:

"So at the moment I am putting the finishing touches to the new Vindolanda Tablets Online II website. It is supposed to be a sister-site to the old Vindolanda Tablets Online but with more snazzy interaction between tablets. The work I am doing today is trying to shorten load time on some of the pages. There is one page that loads a list of all the tablets from an XML document generated by a Web Service. The Web Service searches through all 735 documents in the deposit. To do this and load this page takes 10.73 seconds. However, by creating a static XML document from the one generated by the Web Service I can get this down to 6.655 seconds. I have saved 4 seconds. Now, some may think that this seems ridiculous but I promise that you can feel the difference and it may very well be a difference between waiting and leaving the website."

Read more about Henriette's day here. The full list of participants, containing links to their blogs about March 18, is available at the project's wiki site.

Sorry for the lack of posts this week, as I was finishing up a lot of work and posts will resume again next Monday (with a lot of catching up to do!). Just a quick query from our Facebook page, posted by Christina Sewall who is looking for information about this ceramic piece:

Christina writes: “I’m studying a certain ceramic piece for my dissertation, and was wondering if anyone had come across anything similar in SE Asia. These were excavated in NE Thailand at Ban Non Wat. If anyone has any ideas what they are, or has seen them in any context (museums, digs, etc.) please get in touch with me. Thanks!” You can get in touch with her by emailing chrsewall [at] tidewater [dot] net.

Some cool quick hits on a chilly spring Friday morning:

• If you haven't tracked it down yet, check out Dan Reetz's home page and blog.
• The Electric Archaeologist is experimenting with Vue (Visual Understanding Environment) here and here.
• The Iklaina Archaeological Project publishes its final reports online on a fairly nice looking site.   
• Here's an update on the project sponsored by the University of Bristol to included homeless people in the excavation of an urban site.
• Here's a link to a somewhat interesting First Monday article on how students use Wikipedia and an interesting article on how peer governance works on that site.
• My lovely wife has offered to get my an iPad for my birthday. At the same time, I've been talking the Scott Moore who recently purchased a Kindle. And now I discover that I can read Kindle books on my Mac in a real mediocre way.
• Did I link to this interesting (and sort of long) talk by J. Zittrain on the Historical Record in the Digital Age?
• Some of Ryan Stander's work based on his time in Cyprus was recently declared indecent by the good folks at the County of Somerset Culture and Heritage Council.
• This is a very funny version of Classics version of Adam Sandler's Hannukah song produced by students at my old stomping ground, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.
• Joel Jonientz, one of our collaborators in the Working Group in Digital and New Media, interviewed Art Spiegelman.
• One of the fun things to do during the NCAA tournament is to check Google Trends to see what universities are getting lots of attention for their teams' success during the NCAA Tournament.
• For a tiny bit, it looked like New Zealand v. Australia might be interesting, but then folks settled in.
• Bristol this week.
• And the NCAA Tournament. I broke my own record for how quickly I could lose my NCAA Champion (Georgetown): first day, third session. What was I thinking?

As a point of comparison, I captured this photo at 7:22 am today. Compare it to the capture from 24 hours before.

Chroniques assyriologiques: Le nouveau site des Chroniques

Depuis 2005, le site des Chroniques assyriologiques offre des notes de lectures en assyriologie et hittitologie, principalement à partir des notices publiées dans la Revue Historique de Droit Français et Etranger (=RHD). Ce site a été créé à l’initiative d’Alice Mouton, qui contribuait alors régulièrement à la section « hittitologie » des Chroniques, et de Sophie Démare-Lafont, éditeur en chef des Chroniques assyriologiques de la RHD. Il reprend l’ensemble des notices publiées depuis 1991 et jusqu’à la dernière parution des Chroniques de la RHD en 2004.

Après une période d’inactivité relative principalement due à des difficultés techniques (problèmes de plateforme), le site renaît de ses cendres à cette nouvelle adresse.

Par souci de commodité, ce nouveau site des Chroniques assyriologiques reprend les anciennes notices du précédent site, mais y ajoute de nouvelles notes de lecture. L’ancien site des Chroniques ne sera donc plus mis à jour.
Bonne lecture à tous !

Dr. Alice Mouton, responsable du site internet

Contribuez aux Chroniques assyriologiques !

Avec la création du nouveau site internet des Chroniques, il a été décidé d’ouvrir les notices à l’ensemble des langues de l’assyriologie. Seront dorénavant acceptées les notices en anglais, allemand, italien et français. Autre nouveauté : le nom des auteurs des nouvelles notices sera spécifié, contrairement à l’ancien usage des Chroniques.
Toute notice doit être transmise à Alice Mouton à l’adresse suivante : alice.mouton@misha.fr
Il est rappelé que chaque notice doit comporter entre 5 et 10 lignes maximum.

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Présentation des Chroniques – Archives

Cosmopolitan popster Mika is a great showman and tours with a great band. The audience at his gig in Stockholm last night was thoroughly charmed by the friendliness and musical mastery on offer. Mika traces his musical ancestry back to acts like the Beatles, Queen, Elton John and George Michael, which would make for a good concert experience even if the front man didn't say a word. But he also entertained us with effortless improvised stage patter -- part of it in Swedish, even though he makes only a single stop here on his tour! Psychedelic animated backdrop projections and dancers in outlandish costumes reminded me of of Montreal's stage show. And Mika's studio-heavy pop translated beautifully to the live format.

The audience was unusually all-ages for a pop gig and there was a fine mix of hipsters and everyday Joes like myself. It may have been my imagination or my selective Darwin-determined gaze, but there seemed to be unusually many of the big girls whose beauty one of Mika's hits extols. Myself, I brought 11-y-o Junior and his buddy, and they loved it - which was great since neither of them had been to a pop concert since they learned to walk. Both study music, and it wouldn't surprise me if they ended up on stage at similar events in the 2020s. We're laying the groundwork now.

Mika has only two albums on his discography so far. But seeing him on stage last night I felt that this guy has it in him to be doing this for decades. A hard-working musician of great talent!

Up-and-coming Swedish pop act Ola Joyce opened together with his 6-piece band, and they did a fine job too. An album is in the works.

[More blog entries about mika, concert, review, music, pop; musik, pop, mika, konsert, recension, globen, stockholm.]

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The Association of International Antiquities Dealers Ltd. is a not-for-profit trade association, a company limited by guarantee, registered in the United Kingdom. It is an association of dealers in antiquities (including fine art, coins, metallic and ceramic objects) whose aim is

"to promote the benefits of artefact collecting and of the antiquities trade", but also "to promote responsible antiquities dealing and to provide a support network and means of exchanging relevant information about fakes, forgeries, fraudulent misrepresentation and stolen goods with a view to identifying such items offered for sale and notifying the appropriate authorities".

The AIAD Secretariat

"provides a service to Member companies and individuals dealing in antiquities by helping to establish a favourable trading and operating environment, by providing a forum for discussion on non-competitive issues, and by providing information to assist them in the achievement of their aims [...]. AIAD promotes responsible trading which necessarily includes meeting all legal requirements concerning reporting and documentation. Antiquities and ancient art dealers within AIAD apply the code of conduct set out in this website".

What a change from the attitudes of certain trade and antiquity collecting organizations over the other side of the ocean supporting robber-baron attitudes and moralities.

The AIAD Code of Conduct "is intended to provide a guarantee of responsible behaviour by Members in dealings with their customers".

1. GENERAL. The Member agrees to support the aims of the Association as set out in the constitution.
2. The Member agrees to conduct his business at all times with due regard to all pertinent current legislation and with utmost good faith.
3. Breach of the terms of this Code may result in the expulsion of the Member.
4. PROVENANCE. The Member agrees to maintain full and accurate records of relevant sales and purchases. Provenance of any item offered for sale is to be established to the extent that this is reasonably achievable, and the description thereof is to be as full and accurate as possible.
5. The Member agrees not knowingly to sell stolen items, fakes or forgeries nor to pass off as genuine items which have been restored, repaired or otherwise altered without clearly describing them as such. The Member agrees to take all reasonable steps to ensure that he has legal title to any item offered for sale.
6. The Member agrees to apply for all relevant legal permissions in respect of the supply of any item, including but not limited to export permits where applicable. A reasonable charge may be made to the purchaser for this service.
7. The Member agrees to offer appropriate written certification of items offered for sale, on request.
8. DESCRIPTION. The Member agrees to adhere to the relevant standards of best practice in advertising.
9. The member agrees to include in the item’s description the following information: (i) period and/or culture of origin; (ii) material(s) from which the item is made; (iii) any significant repair or restoration.
10. The Member agrees to take all reasonable steps to correct any errors in description or ascription in respect of any item offered for sale, and to deal promptly with any subsequent claim in respect of such an error.
11. APPROVAL. The Member agrees to provide items upon payment in full on 14 days’ approval for authenticity and grading. [...]
12. The Member agrees to offer to refund the purchase price of any item in full if the description is found to be significantly incorrect or misleading. [...]
13. VALUATIONS. The member agrees to provide written valuations for items, on request. A reasonable charge may be made for this service.
The Code does not affect the customer’s statutory rights in the United Kingdom.

Interesting. It's a bit too good looking though isn't it? Point 9 omits any mention of the provenance/legal origin doesn't it? I liked the bit about reporting criminals to the relevant authorities, but wonder how many times it happens.
.

These are some rough notes taken last week at Late Antique Archaeology conference 2010 about Local economies? Production & exchange of inland regions, that took place at King's College, London, Friday 12th to Saturday 13th March 2010. Overall, this conference was interesting, and I had a chance to meet lots of nice people working in Late Antique Archaeology. Inspiration for my PhD research was just great.

Contents

read more

I may have mentioned this one before, but I just came across this website while trying to track down another one of those ’spa therapy’ type claims which had one being found in the Palace of Nestor (they did find evidence of ‘rose scented oil’ there, but the claim is too vague to go further). Anyhoo, lots of good info on the ongoing dig there:

• The Iklaina Archaeological Project.

ante diem xiv kalendas apriles

• Festival of Mars (Day 19)
• Quinquatrus (Day 1) — a festival celebrating Minerva’s birthday (maybe)
• rites in honour of Minerva (obviously connected to the above)
• 11 B.C.E. — Herod dedicates his renovated Temple in Jerusalem
• 303 A.D. — Martyrdom of Pancharius of Nicomedia
• 363 A.D. — fire destroys the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine

.

US cultural property activists Sayles and Welsh have recently revealingly contributed to the debate on culture a rousing call to encourage people to join their movement urging world governments to give heed to the political demands of the worldwide community of Internationalist collectors of dugup antiquities which they lead. To pay heed to the Internationalist demands of the "educated working class" men and women for whom collecting antiquities becomes a "tangible bridge" linking cultures across space and time. To break down legal and administrative barriers thrown up by Nationalist bodies which the Sayleswelshian Internationalist movement proclaims serve only to divide and alienate. It was only a matter of time before such rousing Internationalist rhetoric would find its expression in words and music, in a rallying call under which all who think likewise can gather and confirm their adherence to the ideals espoused by their new leaders, First Secretary Comrade Executive Director and his Head Commissioner of International Affairs. After some laborious research in the internet for all of four minutes, I have found just the anthem this movement requires. Here are the words of the Internationalist Collectors' Manifesto set to music in MP3:

Stand up, all victims of oppression
For the tyrants fear your might
Hang on tight to your possessions
You have nothing, if you have no rights
Let nationalist ignorance be ended
For respect makes the empires fall
Freedom is merely privilege extended
Unless enjoyed by one and all

So come brothers and sisters
For the struggle carries on
Internationalism unite the world in song
So fellow collectors come rally
For this is the time and place
The international ideal
Unites the human race

Let no one build walls to divide us
Walls of hatred, nor walls of stone
Come greet the dawn and stand beside us
We'll work together or we'll die alone
In our world poisoned by exploitation
Those who have taken, now they must give
And end the vanity of nations
We've but one Earth on which to live:

So brothers and sisters...

And so begins the final drama
In streets, the courts and fields
We stand unbowed before their armour
We defy their guns and shields
When we fight (provoked by their aggression)
Let us be inspired by like and love
For though they offer us concessions
Change will not come from above.

Vignette: Sayleswelshian Internationalism in action? What actually lies behind their rhetoric?

.
Name-calling cultural property "Internationaliser" Wayne Sayles complains on his blog today that "in the cultural property world, civility is a rare bird", but reports gratefully that at the "Portable Antiquities: Archaeology, Collecting, Metal Detecting" Conference he managed to find "a refreshing display of British cultural property civility". Well, that is nice for him. I expect he found there too quite a few metal detectorists willing to share stories about how uncivil certain critics of artefact hunting can be about their erosive hobby.

He seems not to have achieved the rapport with Britis metal detectorists that I expected, some of the responsible detectorists there of course distanced themselves from what he was saying at the meeting, but he seems not to have understood the NCMD withdrawal. He notes that "

For some reason vaguely and cryptically described, the NCMD chose to withdraw at the last minute from this conference. Not only was that in poor taste, it was terribly counterproductive. I contacted the leadership of NCMD as soon as I heard about their withdrawal....

... well, I suppose there is not much ideological distance between conspiracy-theory founded ACCG and conspiracy-theory engulfed NCMD. Sayles does not understand the NCMD's problem because he does not read the metal detecing forums, but as a collectors' rights activist who has come all the way across the Atlantic to tell people what is what, surely this is precisely the sort of grass-roots information from collectors he should be seeking?

He however gained some other spiritual enlighten ment:

OFFICIAL (?) ACCG STATEMENT
"Collectors who purchase coins without any concern whatever for their source may unwittingly become part of what a law enforcement officer at the conference referred to as the "disposal network". That is not to say that they themselves are breaking any laws, but they may be helping to enable a law breaker elsewhere".

Sounds awfully close to me to the catchphrase: "collectors are the real looters". Just add the word "indiscriminate" and you've got it in one.

Except collectors are not exactly doing it "unwittingly" are they? They have a choice. But for Sayles the crux of the problem is something else:

How does one insure (sic) that coins, for example, are properly recorded when found? If they were, the world would be a far more civil place. The answer, in my view, is for source countries to impose fair and incentive based laws that do not criminalize normal activities like trying to profit from finding something valuable on your own property.

The first question that comes to mind is how a dealer up in the far off Ozark mountains when he does not even know the name of the site something comes from can somehow know an ancient object on the table before them was found by someone on their own property back in Bulgaria or Iran? Intuition? The second point is that collecting of anbtiquities as a whole would be considerably cleaned up if the place where the coins were after they had been dug up was properly recorded by those selling them on. This would allow the discriminating collector to differentiate the antiquities out of the ground a number of years from those that have been dug up. We are told by the dealers' lobby that the former are in the majority and the latter are in a minority (sold by a handful of unnamed black sheep dealers), but for some reason they cannot bring themselves to document this by showing that the coins that they call "legitimate" in fact are. (If they cannot document that they are, how do they "know" they are? Intuition?).

According to Sayles, trying to prevent the looting of archaeological sites to supply the collectors market by draconian restrictions is a pointless exercise. "It is far better to engage the finder, at the time of the find, and extract the information". But that does not stop the looting, does it? It does not stop archaeological sites being dug over and damaged.

Would the digging out of Native American graves in search of collectables in the Four Corners area be OK then according to US collectors' rights activist Sayles if the finder was engaged at the time of the find and the "information" (what does he mean by that) was extracted? Who would do such a thing when BLM staff are so thin on the ground? Now, I've asked this before, but somehow the US "Internationalist" collectors' rights activists do not seem in a hurry to answer.

Iraq ia a telling (no pun intended) example too. There indeed was apparently relatively little looting when draconian measures were enforced, with the weakening of the government by UN sanctions, it began; with increased civil unrest created by the US-led invasion, it got worse. Now would the problem have been "solved" (would the archaeological layers of the sites have been saved from being riddled like Swiss cheese) if the finder was "engaged" ever-so-civilly at the time of the find and the "information" (what does he mean by that) was extracted?

Also, even though England and Wales (and Scotland) have ever-so-civil antiquities laws which allow prople to take a spade to 90% of the archaeological sites on whosoever's land as long as they ask first, looting (aka "nighthawkjing) does occur. it was discussed at the Newcastle Conference. In Northern Ireland however which has more "draconian" (to use Sayles' terminology) the Nighthawking report notes no examples. So I do not think the actual evidence really supports the various glib assertions of the collectors' lobby too well. Not that they let little things like facts get in the way of their "Internationalist" vision of a Brave New World of cultural property Свобода, равенство и братство.

I really do have problems understanding what the US dealers like Mr Sayles are actually proposing here. What however they seem to be suggesting is lifting antiquities preservation laws (yes?) and lifting export controls for all but a very select group of items (yes?) - but then who decides that, the finder/exporter?

Sayles and all the rest seem totally unaware of the social, political and legislative conditions under which the British systems work, and why the PAS achieves what it does. These conditions do not exist in Egypt, Greece, Bulgaria, Iran, Iraq, India, China or anywhere else the coins and antiquities his members sell come from.

Sayles writes:

The British [...] have the most advanced system of cultural property management in the world.

Oh ha ha. That of England and Wales is firmly based in the Victorian world. It is in fact in many regards one of the most retarded. But its nineteenth century attitudes are of course what makes it so attractive for an activist who clearly wants to keep the antiquities trade ideologically and in terms of its praxis firmly in the nineteenth century. And if that sounds "uncivil", I am not at all apologetic.
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Vignette: the Portable Antiquities Scheme may (?) work in Islip, UK, but would it solve the problem cause by the search for collectables at Isin, Iraq?

CONGRATULATIONS to Abraham Tal and Aryeh Levin:

Israel Prize to two linguists, Abraham Tal and Aryeh Levin

By Or Kashti (Haaretz)

Professor Abraham Tal is the Israel Prize laureate in Hebrew linguistics, and Professor Aryeh Levin is the laureate for general linguistics, Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar announced yesterday.

The prize committee awarded the prize to Tal, of Tel Aviv University, for his achievements in the study of Samaritan traditions and the study of the language of the Targums, in lexicography, for his work as an editor of the Historical Dictionary of the Hebrew Language and his contribution in producing important students.

[...]

The prize committee honored Levin for excellent achievement in the study of the Hebrew language in the Middle Ages and research into Arabic dialects and for promoting literary and spoken Arabic in various state frameworks. ...

I've worked quite a bit with Tal's publications on Samaritan Hebrew and Aramaic.

(Via the Agade list.)

WHOEVER BUYS THESE should donate them to a museum. Or, at the very least, make them freely available to any scholars who want to study them. I don't see anything in the collection that looks unique, but each artifact has its own tale to tell.

JODI MAGNESS is lecturing in Louisville, KY, on looting and antiquities trafficking:

Questions & Answers | Archaeologist Jodi Magness

By Diane Heilenman • dheilenman@courier-journal.com • March 19, 2010

There is passion in the dust of ages — and evil. Looting is loathsome, said Jodi Magness, a distinguished and passionate archaeologist who gives a 6 p.m. talk on “Loot and Lies: Trafficking in Antiquities” on Thursday at the Speed Art Museum, 2035 S. Third St., Louisville. She will be accompanied by filmmaker Gary Glassman, whose “The Bible's Buried Secrets” has been seen on “Nova.” The film airs at 6 p.m. Friday at the museum. Both events are free.

[...]

The article also interviews her briefly.

ANGELA KIM HARKINS will be lecturing on the Dead Sea Scrolls in Bridgeport, CT:

Tuesday, March 23
“Dead Sea Scrolls” — Angela Kim Harkins, assistant professor of religious studies at Fairfield University, discusses the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 and today’s perspective on them, 6:30 p.m., Black Rock Branch Library, 2705 Fairfield Ave.; free to the public, 203-337-9676.

The eighty-eighth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Ad hominin. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!

Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Greg Laden. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is on 12 May. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.

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My friend Dora is a Distance Learning student in our School at the University of Leicester; writing her PhD on Hellenistic Gymnasia. Today is her upgrading from MPhil to PhD. She will meet the committee around 10, when, hopefully, they will acknowledge her superior knowledge of the Hellenistic period and her innovative ideas on the development of the Institution of Gymnasia. I am confident that she will pass with flying colours.

Dora’s self confidence, on the other hand, is non existent. Since months ago she has been bombarding me with the same question over and over and over again: What if they ask me something I do not know? Fair enough! Since we are only mortals, our knowledge of the world is limited. With regard to Hellenistic Gymnasia, though, Dora is an undisputed expert, since she has been gathering the ancient sources and has been reading relevant books and article for the past five years (long before she enrolled for the PhD). Even if some unlikely fact may have escaped her, she still has an excellent overview of the subject.

The role of the Upgrading Committee is not to check all the facts about the topic. Instead, they are there to ensure that: a) the main hypothesis is reasonable, b) the argument flows without hindrance, c) there are no logical leaps in the sequence of statements, d) the methodology is valid, e) the material is adequate, f) the theoretical model explains ancient developments and structures and, last but not least, g) the thoughts are original. Even if one of the above is problematic, Dora will still have three months at her disposal to make some corrections and resubmit her MPhil research.

All in all, no student should be fearful of the Upgrading. This is an amazing opportunity to discuss the PhD topic with professional ancient historians who can give valuable advice and direction. If Dora takes into account their suggestions and reorganises her research, her future success will be assured.

March 23, 2010 - 1:17 PM - Lecture Duncan Howitt-Marshall (University of Cambridge)

A few years back, we published a series of seven books called Guides to New Testament Exegesis. The seven titles are also available individually (links below go to individual volumes), but of course you save by purchasing the collection:

• Introducing New Testament Interpretation by Scot McKnight
• Interpreting the Synoptic Gospels by Scot McKnight
• Interpreting the Gospel of John by Gary M. Burge
• Interpreting the Book of Acts by Walter L. Liefeld
• Interpreting the Pauline Epistles by Thomas R. Schreiner
• Interpreting the Epistle to the Hebrews by Andrew H. Trotter Jr.
• Interpreting the Book of Revelation by J. Ramsey Michaels

These books provide a general introduction (by Scot McKnight, no less!) to the interpretation of the New Testament, as well as genre-specific methods and materials for doing exegesis. One thing I didn't know (but learned from reading the product page on Logos.com — good stuff there!) was that:

The vision for this collection comes from Gordon Fee’s New Testament Exegesis: A Handbook for Students and Pastors. By developing handbooks for each genre and book collection, this collection operates as an extended treatment of Fee’s narrower scope.

Fee's work is detailed and valuable; to have his methodology distilled and applied to these particular genres is a helpful thing. It's like getting a jump start in New Testament exegesis. And to have it done by folks of the caliber of Scot McKnight, Thomas Schreiner, and Gary Burge? Even better. Check it out.

Speaking of New Testament exegesis, another title that you might find helpful is Donald Hagner's introduction, New Testament Exegesis and Research: A Guide for Seminarians. This is geared toward seminarians, but helpful for everyone. If I understand correctly how the book came about, it is basically the information that Hagner gives incoming seminarians, to get them properly grounded at the start of their seminary career.

Need some more suggestions? I'm out of room here, but you might try I. Howard Marshall's New Testament Interpretation, David Alan Black's Interpreting the New Testament, or perhaps even Katharine Barnwell's Linguistics and New Testament Interpretation. Check 'em out!

I have mentioned TimeLine Originals (TLO) online antiquity dealer here before. This dealer from Upminster in the UK offers an "international clientele" a large selection of quality ancient coins, collectables and works of art (as well as collectors' books and accessories). They specialise in supplying Saxon, Viking and Medieval hammered coins and antiquities, presumably many of them coming from metal detecting. TimeLine therefore can unconditionally guarantee every item in their stocks "to be ancient and authentic" (because many of them were taken not long before being sold from archaeological deposits where they had lain undisturbed centuries or millennnia?). In their recent auctions though they have been offering antiquities from all over the ancient world.

In their sales policy they state that

"All ancient items offered for sale on our website are purchased by TLO from a variety of legitimate sources. These include old private collections, auction houses, legal finders and responsible dealers within the coin and ancient art market. We liaise with the Federation of Independent Detectorists. We regularly purchase large consignments of material so that we can offer a diverse range on a regular basis. We do not buy from dubious sources. We aim to promote responsible private ownership of ancient coins and antiquities in an investment conscious and legitimate manner. As corporate members of many societies and trade associations, we abide by an internationally recognized code of ethics. Our customers include museums, university lecturers and many of the world's major collectors".

University lecturers eh? So if they are so interested in the personal data of their clients, maybe they could tell us how many policemen and High Court judges they have on their books.

The trade associations they call upon to affirm their legitimacy are:

Well, of these the BNTA does not have in its Code of "Ethics" anything about trading in looted material. The American Numismatic Society does not seem to have a Code of Ethics at all and the American Numismatic Association has one, but the wording is really not at all clear on where it stands over material dug up illegally and exported illegally to the US. In any case, why would a British dealer be wishing to be judged by the ethics codes established for the dealers of the United States of America? Timelines Originals seems not to be a member of the British organization the Antiquity Dealers Association (ADA) who have their own Code of Conduct. Nor is it a member of the IADAA discussed here earlier. It is however one of the few members of the Association of International Antiquities Dealers (AIAD). This is an interesting looking organization (nice website) whose profile ("trustworthy and transparent trading") and Code of Ethics, at first sight at least, look quite interesting from the perspective of this blog. What however is disturbing is that these are figured alongside the Ancient Coin Collectors Guild which stands for policies which they call "internationalist" which call for the abolition of antiquities protection legislation and a trade free for all free of "retentive" conditions involving export licences and import restrictions on archaeological material of unknown origin. In pursuit of these aims the ACCG has deliberately imported a shipment of coins into the US in violation of the law. Should dealers who claim the highest ethics be associating themselves with such an organization? I think not. Given the policies it espouses, should other trade organizations not be concerned when their logo appears on websites of their members alongside the ACCG logo?

The American Numismatic Association is based in Colorado Springs, CO and is a nonprofit educational organization with nearly 33,000 members, "dedicated to educating and encouraging people to study and collect money and related items". The ANA "serves the academic community, collectors and the general public with an interest in numismatics [...] through its vast array of programs including its education and outreach, museum, library, publications, conventions and seminars".

It also has three quite long Codes of Ethics. The third (Board Member
Code of Ethics - revised March 1996) is not important here, but the other two are of interest.
The first is the Member Code of Ethics
Approved August 1965 by the ANA Board of Governors; revised February 1995.

As a member of the American Numismatic Association, I agree to comply with the following standards of conduct:
1) To support and be governed by the Federal Charter and the bylaws of the Association, and by such rules, policies and regulations as may be in force from time to time.
2) To conduct myself so as to bring no reproach or discredit to the Association, or impair the prestige of the membership therein.
3) To base all of my dealings on the highest plane of justice, fairness and morality,
and to refrain from making false statements as to the condition of a coin or as
to any other matter.
4) To neither buy nor sell numismatic items of which the ownership is questionable.
5) To conform to the accepted standards of dignified advertising.
6) To take immediate steps to correct any error I may make in any transaction.
7) Not to sell, exhibit, produce or advertise a counterfeit, copy, restrike or reproduction of any numismatic item if its nature is not clearly indicated by the word “counterfeit,” “copy,” “restrike,” or “reproduction,” incused in the metal or printed on the paper thereof, with the exception of items generally accepted by numismatists and not in any way misrepresented as genuine.
8) To represent a numismatic item to be genuine only when, to the best of my knowledge and belief, it is authentic.
9) To fulfill all contracts made by me, either oral or written, to make prompt payments upon delivery and to return immediately any item that is not satisfactory.
10) To give aid to members in their quest for numismatic knowledge.
11) To comply with the Dealer Code of Ethics with respect to my sale or purchase of any numismatic item.

It is interesting that this CoE refers entirely to the selling of coins, rather than their buying and collection (questionable origins, looking after objects in stewardship etc etc) and focuuses on fakes. One wonders whether the collectors' definition of an item of "questionable ownership" refers to questions of absence of information of origins and export procedures, or whether it just means "stolen from somebody else's coin collection"?

The second Code of Ethics is the ANA Dealer Code of Ethics Approved August 1967 by the ANA Board of Governors; revised March 2002.

As an ANA member dealer, I agree to comply with the following
principles:
1) To comply with the ANA Member Code of Ethics.
2) To purchase and sell numismatic items at prices commensurate with a reasonable return to the seller and for a reasonable return on my investment with regards to the then prevailing rate.
3) To furnish my clientele with advice on numismatic information to the best of my ability.
4) To not knowingly handle for resale forgeries, counterfeits, unmarked copies, altered coins or other spurious numismatic merchandise that is not clearly labeled as such.
5) To frequently publish my statement of return privileges, which will allow my customers a designated period of time in which to return numismatic material for a refund[...]
6) To abide by all local, state and federal laws in all numismatic matters and to assist in the prosecution of violators of the law in this respect.
7) To recognize and respect my own contracts and business dealings and those of fellow members of the Association.
8) To refrain from making unjustified and/ or false statements or misrepresentations in my relations with others, and to fully cooperate in the advancement of our hobby and business in my relations with collector and dealer alike.
9) Any violation of this code will be grounds for expulsion from the American Numismatic Association.

Again the focus on fake coins and normal business practice. "To abide by all local, state and federal laws in all numismatic matters" ... something missing there isn't there in the case of dugups illegally excavated in other countries. In other words the limit of an ANA dealers "ethics" is what is not forbidden by local, state and federal US laws. Which basically means when it comes to dealing in illegally exported dugups from eastern Europe ofr the near East "anything goes". It may be legal (still) in the US, but is it ethical? Also what exactly is implied by "to assist in the prosecution of violators of the law in this respect"? Which "the law"? US local, state and federal laws only? Or assist in the prosecution of those that for example come into the shop with a bagfull of silver coins from Iraq? Does it mean "assist" when asked, or is the Code of Ethics obliging the dealer aware that a crime has been committed to actually report the incident/miscreant? There's so much here left unsaid, presumably - given the length of these documents - deliberately.

The British Numismatic Trade Association was founded in 1973 and has, it says: "become an effective force in the fight against forgery, theft and other criminal activities, thus establishing a benchmark for the highest ethical standards in the domestic coin trade". "Application for membership of the BNTA is restricted to dealers and auctioneers in numismatic goods who are based in the UK and the Republic of Ireland, registered for VAT. Applicants need to be sponsored by two existing members and have to agree to abide by the published Code of Ethics. Membership is subject to annual review in order to ensure that standards are maintained". The BNTA code of ethics is as follows:

Every member of the Association agrees to adhere to the following Code of Ethics.
1) I agree to be bound by and support the Articles of Association and any further such articles and policies as may be agreed by the Association.
2) I agree to conduct my business in such a way as to bring no discredit on the Association or its Members and to take suitable action through the Association against flagrant breach of such business conduct.
3) I agree to maintain adequate records of purchases so that any enquiries from proper authorities can be satisfied.
4) I agree never knowingly to offer, exhibit or advertise counterfeits, copies, restrikes or reproductions without their being clearly described as such. In no way will I knowingly represent such items as being the genuine article.
5) I agree to take all reasonable steps to correct an error made in a normal transaction. In the event of a dispute, I would agree to submit the facts to the Council of the Association for arbitration.
6) I agree to conform to accepted standards of advertising within the meaning of the Trades Description Act.
7) I will not supply any goods on trade terms to anyone who does not order them in writing on suitably headed trade stationery or who does not produce a trade card when buying in person.
8) I will place to the credit account of any customer money paid to me by the customer. I will refund all or any part of the money in respect of the value of any goods which I am not able to supply if such repayment is demanded. [...]
9) I agree to fulfil all contracts made by me either orally or in writing. I further agree to pay on delivery for any material accepted from a customer [...] I will accept the return of any material which may be proved to be unsatisfactory, either from a customer or from a Member of the Association.
10) I agree to help Members of the Association and any others of serious intent in the furtherance of numismatic knowledge and research.

Actually nothing there whatseover about not buying illegally obtained objects, nothing about exercising due dilligence to avoid having such material in stock. Nothing there about reporting people offering illegally obtained artefacts for sale. There is nothing there either about having in their membership dealers who are members of any organizations involved in illegal activity, is there?

March 24, 2010 - 2:01 AM - EXHIBITION OPENING - 24 March - 4 April, 2010 Την έκθεση θα εγκαινιάσει η Υπουργός Παιδείας, Δια Βίου Μάθησης και Θρησκευμάτων, Κύρια Άννα Διαμαντοπούλου

David Gill has a new piece on the Miami seizure of a 21st dynasty coffin lid. On reading this I realised where the idea that the object might have left Egypt in the 1880s had originated, it was initially assumed for some reason to have come from one of the Deir El Bahari caches because it had been misuidentified as a royal coffin. More to the point, Gill notes pointedly:

The case is a reminder that there appear to be dealers and others associated with the movement of cultural property who still persist in bringing antiquities into the USA without the appropriate documentation. The case should also encourage the resolve of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as they seek to protect the world's cultural heritage.

I would say protecting the heritage is one thing, punishing those who knowingly defy the law in this regard thus encouraging the damage should be the aim. A series of dawn raids on the homes and offices of dealers and others associated with the movement of cultural property who still persist in bringing antiquities into the any country without the appropriate documentation might bring these laws to the attention of the dealers and importers.

Don't just Secure the Goods, Investigate the Crimes
Don't just Seize the Antiquities, Seize the Culture Criminals.

..

Thank you to everyone who attended tonight's lecture by John Walton on Genesis 1 and ancient cosmology at Butler University. I was really pleased with the turn-out, especially when there was the NCAA tournament game taking place at the same time.

And congratulations to Butler's team for winning - I know it wasn't your fault the game was scheduled at the same time as the lecture!

The lecture was videoed, and I will let readers know when and where it is available.

And in case anyone is wondering, the picture on the right is not from the lecture...

A River in the Sky: A Novel by Elizabeth Peters, HarperCollins, April 2010

This one backtracks to 1910. Publisher's intro:

August 1910. Banned from the Valley of the Kings by the Antiquities Service, Amelia Peabody and her husband, Emerson, are relaxing at home in Kent, enjoying the tranquil beauty of summer. But adventure soon beckons when they are persuaded to follow would-be archaeologist Major George Morley on an expedition to Palestine, a province of the crumbling, corrupt Ottoman Empire and the Holy Land of three religions. Searching for the vanished treasures of the Temple in Jerusalem, Morley is determined to unearth the legendary Ark of the Covenant.  read on

Fija y da esplendor y no es nuestra Academia sino, insospechadamente, la Wikipedia. Me explico. A pesar de haberla frecuentado a menudo, nunca se me había pasado por la cabeza que tuviera el poder de fijar los usos lingüísticos. Una, más que pequeña, nimia anécdota me lo ha revelado.

Iba un día de paseo por la wiki cuando me topé con una mención al templo de Afaia, en la isla de Egina. Detecté que estaba ante una más de las numerosas transcripciones erróneas de la Wikipedia y obré en consecuencia: redirigí el artículo Afaia a Afea, la transcripción correcta de Ἀφαία (ver reglas al respecto), y me quedé tan ancho. Pero un par de días más tarde, y para mi sorpresa, un compañero wikipedista me lleva la contraria. Tengo que reconocerle dos cosas: la priemra que argumenta como un caballero, y la segunda que sus argumentos pesan. Leamos:

No discuto la mayor o menor corrección filológica, pero las fuentes bibliográficas o en red en arte utilizan Afaia o Aphaia (que para el caso es lo mismo). Creo que deberías repensarte la redenominación. En cualquier caso, habría que conservar la antigua en el texto, y no creo que convenga modificar los enlaces en otros artículos. Ya me dirás.

Efectivamente la corrección filológica no deja lugar a dudas: Γαῖα > Gea, Ήλιαία > Heliea, Ποτίδαια > Potidea, etc. (por un momento Acaya me hizo dudar, pero en el Ἀχαΐα original hay una diéresis que no aparece en nuestra Άφαία). En lo referente al uso tiene razón el compañero, según se puede comprobar en internet: para “templo de Afaia” Google devuelve a día de hoy 27.100 páginas en español, en tanto que para “templo de Afea” sólo devuelve 13.200, la mitad (curiosamente Afaya, que es más correcto que Afaia, apenas se usa).

Fernández Galiano (La trascripción castellana de los nombres propios griegos, Madrid, SEEC, 1961) y el sentido común coinciden en que en esto de la transcripción, como en todo lo pertinente a la lengua, el uso asentado es ley. Pero tengo yo mis dudas con esta palabra, porque ninguna de las dos versiones se ha impuesto claramente sobre la otra, seguramente porque no se usa mucho. A mi manera de ver la mitad de resultados autorizados es suficiente para que apostemos todavía por Afea; creo que con esos números no hay que dar la batalla de la corrección por perdida. Y los que vengan detrás que arreen. Mejor dicho, que aprendan.

La revelación que decía al principio reside en que va a resultar que la Wikipedia, por su éxito arrollador, a lo mejor tiene en su mano el torcer mínimamente el uso e inclinar la balanza, a medio o largo plazo, en un sentido u otro. Vamos, que a lo mejor fija y estamos jugando sin saberlo a aprendices de brujo. Yo, por si acaso, me quedo con Afea la “invisible” y, para acabar con buen sabor de boca, cito:

Foto: Bibi Saint-Pol, Wikipedia.

…era una diosa griega de la luz, hija de Leto y por tanto, hermanastra de Apolo y Artemisa. Se la identifica con la ninfa cretense Britomartis. Fue venerada únicamente en el santuario de la isla de Egina, en el Golfo Sarónico. Se le atribuye la invención de las redes para la caza y la pesca. Muy bella, fue perseguida sin cesar por los hombres, entre ellos, el rey Minos, de quien intentó escapar arrojándose al mar. De allí fue recogida en las redes por un pescador egineta que se enamoró de ella. Britomartis llamó a su hermanastra y protectora que la hizo desaparecer: se hizo Afea, la invisible. El templo en su honor sería construido en el lugar de su desaparición.

Michael J. Lewis has published a fascinating little article on Louis Kahn's 1932 entry for a Lenin Memorial. The competition is largely unknown from Kahn's corpus because he intentionally expunged it from his resume in order to save himself from future political embarrassment. Although Michael Lewis had studied a verbal description of the monument (donated to the University of Pennsylvania

• Ancient Greek democracy: as similar to ours as we think? | BBC History Magazine.

From a Bonhams press release:

A delicate wreath made of fine gold oak leaves with acorns, of the type worn by Alexander the Great’s father, Philip II of Macedon, is one of the highlights of Bonhams sale of Antiquities on April 28 in New Bond Street.

This stunning artefact, estimate £100,000-120,000, may once have graced the head of a ruler or dignitary over 2,000 years ago. “The fact that this delicate collection of fine gold leaves and acorns formed into a wreath has survived the centuries is almost miraculous,” says Madeleine Perridge, Antiquities Specialist at Bonhams. Previously in a private collection since the 1930s, “it is a beautiful example of a type that is rare to the market.”

The sale also boasts a private English Collection of finely-painted Greek vases of exceptional condition. Previously exhibited at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, they are painted by leading artists from Classical Athens. They include:

An Attic red-figure stemless kylix by Douris, circa 480 B.C. showing a draped youth with defined musculature, standing in an Athenian wine-shop amongst large amphorae, (estimate £30,000-40,000). Exhibited in the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard from 1937, this drinking cup is a fascinating image of Athenian life in the Classical period.

An unusual intact Attic white-ground alabastron of the group of the Negro Alabastra, (circa 490-480 B.C.) showing a female figure walking to the right and turning to look back, draped in a chiton with himation and wearing a necklace and bracelet, holding a wreath in her right arm. A black lion walks behind her, with a palm tree on the far left, the word ‘KALOS’ (beauty) inscribed three times around the figure. Estimate £30,000-50,000. The name Melanphis Kale can be translated as ‘Black Flower’. Such alabastra were given as love gifts and the frequent use of ‘Kalos’ supports this.

An Attic red-figure lekythos finely painted by the Providence Painter, (circa 5th Century B.C.) depicts the god Eros as a young man, standing nude, in profile to his left, his wings behind him, holding a kithara in his left hand, a plectrum on a red ribbon in his right. Estimate £25,000-35,000

An Attic red-figure hydria in the manner of the Meidias Painter, (Circa 420 B.C.) depicts two Maenads draped in clinging diaphanous chitons, dancing away from each other while holding a number of ritual objects. It is estimated to sell for £25,000-35,000.

An unusual Attic stamnos painted in the rare Six technique, from the workshop of the Antimenes Painter, circa 510 B.C. showing Theseus and the Minotaur with Ariadne. Estimated to sell for £150,000-250,000, it was previously in the Ferrucio Bolla Collection in the 1950s and the Stavros S. Niarchos Collection, and it has been exhibited at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, in 1980.

via Glory that was Greece Seen in Golden Wreath and Greek Vases at Bonhams.

Here`s a photo of the wreath:

Bonhams photo

Here`s the Douris kylix (I`m assuming):

Bonhams photo

Press coverage:

• 2,300-year-old gold wreath fit for a champion to be sold at auction – Times

• Glory that was Greece Seen in Golden Wreath and Greek Vases at Bonhams | Art Daily

On Tuesday I went to an enterprising day at the Open University, organised by the "National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement" -- all about how academics and the media can work together in engaging publics (the plural is intentional) with the research being carried out in universites and elsewhere.

If you think that all this was driven by some kind of "impact agenda" then you would be right. But the day was also rather interesting,  because it brought together academics and media people who make programmes -- plus some who straddle the divide (that is, academics who make programmes, like Tristram Hunt).

I gave one of the ten minute papers, partly singing the praise of radio -- which (despite In Our Time etc) often gets left out when academics sit down to think about how to storm the media. We all imagine ourselves as the next Schama, Starkey or Hunt in front of the cameras, rather than the microphone.

I shall be doing my own bit in front of the camera over the next few weeks, which I'm quite looking forward to. But radio still has a lot going for it.

For a start, you don't have to bother about what you wear on the radio. There is no need for nice frocks. You can even pick your nose, so long as you have something to say.

It is also wonderfully speedy (so is great for the busy academic). You can walk into a radio studio, do a half hour programme -- and be out within 45 minutes. No waiting around.

Besides radio is less risk averse than tv, for one simple reason -- it is much, much cheaper. You don't lose someone hundreds of thousands if you mess up.

Anyway in the run up to this, as a warm up, I told a story I may have mentioned to you before, about a friend who advised a US tv company many years ago making a series of drama docs about ancient Rome. One day he was teaching a class and the researcher rang up to ask what kid of dogs the Romans had, as they wanted a dog on screen. Off he went to the library and tracked the answer down (it's not as easy as you think).

When he'd done he thought "Hang on a minute. What kind of mug am I? They mangle most of the basic principles of Roman history -- then I waste two hours searching out some spuriously accurate breed of dog."

In response to this, the excellent Martin Davidson of the BBC said that I needn't worry any longer, as researchers could now use Google to find out about Roman dogs, they didn't have to phone the likes of me.

Yes, I thought -- what a relief.Things must have changed.

Until today, when I came home to find that the husband had been rung by a tv researcher, wanting to find out what buildings her programme might film in Antioch and round about. The husband gave plenty of answers at first, but when she pressed her advantage and asked him for a further list of Byzantine objects, the worm turned. His first reaction was to ask if she had actually read anything about this, and suggested a couple of books she could start with (you could substitute Google). When this didnt work, he pointed out that he could only do this on a fee basis (on the "you'll be drawing on more than 40 years of expertise which doesnt come free, at least not on this scale" line).

The result? She ended the conversation rather rapidly.

• Chedworth Roman Villa to receive £3m transformation – BBC.

The Ides of March

The Ides of March is the name of March 15 in the Roman calendar. The term ides was used for the 15th day of the months of March, May, July, and October. The Ides of March was a festive day dedicated to the god Mars and a military parade was usually held. In modern times, the term Ides of March is best known as the date that Julius Caesar was killed in 709 B.C.

via Hancock News week of March 18 | Morris Sun Tribune | Morris, Minnesota.

… my guess is that they didn’t know what A.U.C. was in some of the items making the rounds …

John Hawks as started a series of review posts on William Burroughs’ Climate Change in Prehistory: The End of the Reign of Chaos. His first post largely reflects his own concerns at the intersection of genetics and archaeology. That issue is itself abnormally interesting. John used the following quotation from Burroughs’ book as a point of departure for his comments.

It is often easier to write with confidence on fast-developing and relatively new areas of research, such as climate change and genetic mapping, than to review the implications of such new developments for a mature discipline like archaeology. Because the latter consists of an immensely complicated edifice that has been built up over a long time by the painstaking accumulation of fragmentary evidence from a vast array of sources, it is hard to define those aspects of the subject that are most affected by results obtained in a completely different discipline. Furthermore, when it comes to many aspects of prehistory, the field is full of controversy, into which the new data are not easily introduced. As a consequence, there is an inevitable tendency to gloss over these pitfalls and rely on secondary or even tertiary literature to provide an accessible backdrop against which new developments can be more easily projected.

The concerns raised in this quotation extend will beyond prehistory. It’s not only prehistory that is full of controversy and it is becoming clear that climate change impacted the Levant during the Bronze and Iron Ages.

So I need to add this book to my ever-growing reading list. The good news is that I will live well into my second century before I complete everything on my list!

Via Afarensis

"I must say that [Vicki Léon] was one of the most genuine and fun historian/authors that I have encountered. The chat last night seemed far too short!" (a participant, "Working IX to V" chat)

The coffin seized in Miami was originally thought to belong to a 21st Dynasty (Third Intermediate Period) pharaoh. Indeed, initial reports, attributed to Zahi Hawass, suggested that it had left Egypt in the 1884.

The coffin had been sent to North America from a Spanish galerista based in Barcelona. It was detained in October 2008 after arriving in Miami via Ireland. A member of the US Customs service spotted that the coffin was not accompanied by appropriate documentation that would demonstrate its collecting history (or provenance). The item had been sent to an unnamed US dealer; it was claimed that it had already been sold to an anonymous Canadian collector.

Subsequent research showed that the Third Intermediate Coffin belonged to an individual named as Imesy. Reports in the Spanish press suggested that it had been acquired by a Spanish collector in the 1970s; these suggestions bring into question the earlier report that the coffin had left Egypt in the 19th century.

Although the Barcelona gallery initially challenged the detention, the legal case was withdrawn. It appears that the galerista was unable to produce paperwork that could demonstrate conclusively how the coffin had come into his (temporary) possession.

The Barcelona gallery, "Arqueología Clásica" (proprietor Félix Cervera), was, at the time, a probationary member of the International Association of Dealers in Ancient Art (IADAA). (The gallery's membership is reported to have lapsed at the end of 2009.) The code of ethics for the IADAA includes the statement, "The members of IADAA undertake not to purchase or sell objects until they have established to the best of their ability that such objects were not stolen from excavations, architectural monuments, public institutions or private property.".

The Barcelona gallery was named in the Italian investigation codenamed "Operation Ghelas". This operation apprehended a number of individuals handling recently surfaced antiquities from Sicily and southern Italy. The objects were apparently being passed onto the European and North American markets via dealers in Switzerland, Germany and Spain.

In March 2010 the seized Egyptian coffin was handed over to Dr Zahi Hawass in order for it to be returned to Egypt. Hawass acknowledged the partnership between Egypt and the US in keeping a check on the trade in recently surfaced antiquities. The plan is to place the coffin on display in Egypt.

The case is a reminder that there appear to be dealers and others associated with the movement of cultural property who still persist in bringing antiquities into the USA without the appropriate documentation. The case should also encourage the resolve of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as they seek to protect the world's cultural heritage.

Image
© ICE

Wow, Publishing Archaeology placed number 33 in the list of "50 Best blogs for archaeology students." What a great finish, something to feel proud of. Or maybe I should be depressed. They do list a bunch of nice blogs, but they leave out the one I have been projecting before class as we get set up: Archaeopop (I put on the music videos filmed at major sites).

Right now, though, this "inspirational" poster on blogging may be more in line with my attitude (thanks to my daughter Heather for pointing out the Demotivators site with many such inspirational posters. My favorite is this one, a materialist manifesto if I ever saw one:

My students prefer the Sacrifice poster, though (check it out at Demotivators).

Time to do some work, enough of this nonsense.

With Erica’s link, I think I might be able to make some headway on getting Opencontext.org materials into VUE… in the meantime, I thought it might behoove me to start on something more straightforward. So I took the feed from Tom Elliott’s Maia Atlantis feed, to see what’d happen… and I think it might be useful for working out the links of our own little corner of the blogosphere. With a does of network analysis (VUE generates connectivity matrices) it should be able to figure out who are the keyplayers, and other implications for information flow. Hmm!

(I also ran the feed for this blog through it, and discovered just how awful my tagging/categories really are. Great big blocks of unconnected posts – the categories are the links – so I should really try to rationalize all that).

A similar idea – well, standard social network analysis – is being done using VUE with regard to the WWI Poets:

Stuart Lee from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive is using VUE to draw out relationships between poets covered in the archive. From his post at the World War One Literature google group:

What I have done, therefore, is take a preliminary stab at showing -
in a mind-map – the relationships between the poets we have
concentrated on in the project (or will be) and show how they might
have known each other, etc. By no means is this complete, but it
begins to show poets who were clearly at the centre of things
(Sassoon, Thomas, Graves, and eventually Owen) and those who were on
the periphery (Leighton, Jones, Brittain).

Check out the map he created:

See the VUE blog, and the original post

This blog is an adjunct to The Roman History Reading Group which meets on the first and third Wednesday of each month except August in our chat room from 9:30 to 11:00 p.m. US EDT (UTC/GMT -04).  This means that in Asia and Australia/Pacific, it's daytime. Here is a world time clock as a general assistance for non-USAns.

Chat room location (with instructions) at Google Talk.

2010 Reading Schedule

April 7

Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin

April 21

Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
Online: The Meditations

Join us!

We are now also on Facebook. 
Find our updates on Twitter.

Getting Logos 4 for the Mac finished is one of our top priorities. Recent Alpha releases are in good shape, and offer many of the core features. We're working at top speed to get everything else done, too.

The number one questions, of course, is "When?" And we can't say, because we don't know. We're putting our energy into coding, not estimating. And, because of the unique challenges involved in sharing code between platforms, there are many things we can't predict the time-frame for, even if we tried.

The good news is that the Logos 4 Mac team is seeing success after success. Our shared-code strategy is working, and ensuring compatibility of both content and documents. And as the platform becomes more stable we're seeing increased speed implementing features at the interface layer.

We've been hiring Mac developers for quite a while, and we have even brought some of the Windows development team over to the Mac side. But we couldn't hire enough great Mac developers fast enough here in Bellingham, so we decided to do something even more dramatic: We opened a temporary office in Bellevue, Washington where we could get access to a bigger pool of Mac developers.

We rented an apartment and moved our Mac team lead there for four days a week. He's helping keep the half-dozen programmers there coordinated with the larger team in Bellingham.

The bottom line? Logos 4 Mac is full-speed ahead, and making lots of progress. We can't predict the final ship date, but we're confident we're doing everything possible to make it as soon as possible. And, of course, there's a new Alpha release every two weeks, which many users report is stable and meets their needs on a daily basis.

Want even more updates? Keep an eye on our forums, where you can hear about the latest progress and even interact with the development team.

Some nice Classically-themed comics by Luke Surl; for example, this one on Prometheus:

See also: 

• Atlas Shrugged
• Minotaur Myth-Busted
• Ad Hominem 

Since the beginning of 2009, the OI has put videos of five Member's Lectures online:
[First posted 12/16/09, updated 03/18/10]

• Sea of Galilee Boat
  Shelley Wachsmann, Texas A&M University
  Cosponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America
  October 7, 2009 Download Video of the lecture
• After the Revolution: the Oriental Institute and Archaeology in Iran
  Abbas Alizadeh, Director, Iran Prehistoric Project, Oriental Institute
  October 7, 2009 Download Video of the lecture
• Past, Present and Future of the Landscape in the Land of King Midas: Gordion, Turkey"
  Naomi Miller, University of Pennsylvania Museum MASCA-Museum Applied Science Center for Archaeology
  March 4, 2009 Download Video of the lecture Download Audio of the lecture
• Death and the City: Recent Work at Tell Brak, Syria"
  Augusta McMahon, University of Cambridge
  January 7, 2009
  Download Video of the lecture Download Audio of the lecture

And a video lecture by Walter Farber has emerged

Health Care and Epidemics in Antiquity: The Example of Ancient Mesopotamia

A part of the Epidemics Then and Now: Infectious Diseases Around the World series

Walter Farber

Lecture by Walter Farber, Professor of Assyriology, Oriental Institute, University of Chicago. From the ''Epidemics Then and Now: Infectious Diseases Around the World,'' the 2006 University of Chicago Summer Institute for Educators. Co-sponsored by the Center for International Studies, the Graham School of General Studies, the Center for East Asian Studies, the Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies, the Center for Latin American Studies, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the South Asia Language and Area Center, the Human Rights Program and the University of Illinois Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

Source: CHIASMOS

• Video: QuickTime

Vor more Oriental Institute video see

The Oriental Institute and Its Projects on Youtube

Today's term to learn comes from my reading about Apuleius' connection to magic. The lex Cornelia de sicariis et venefici(i)s, which was passed in 81 B.C., was a Roman law on magic named for the dictator Lucius Cornelius* Sulla. According to J.D. Cloud, the law is also referred to as the lex Cornelia de sicariis and, simply, when no confusion results, as the lex Cornelia. Apuleius wrote The Golden Ass and an Apology in which he defends himself (with unknown results) against charges of magic based on this law. Read more...

Thursday's Term to Learn - Lex Cornelia de Sicariis et Veneficiis originally appeared on About.com Ancient / Classical History on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 19:01:00.

Permalink | Comment | Email this

Supplementary Table 1 has the relevant data. I have sorted the data on national health index, and average masculinity preference.



Note that country scores were limited only to those judges who identified themselves as White.

Some observations:

• As the authors note health index is related inversely with preference for masculinity. However, there are some interesting cases:
• Canada and the USA have similar (high) masculinity preferences, even though they differ substantially in the health index.
• Iceland and Norway (small sample sizes, but we can combine the two) have a good health index as does Sweden, but a much stronger preference than masculinity than Sweden.
• The vast majority of EU nations are around ~0.4 in the masculinity preference index.

An untested factor is variation in the levels of facial masculinity across different nations. Differences in preference may not reflect differences in health, but rather differences in average facially-expressed masculinity. It would be interesting to use anthropometric data to test this possible influence, as "White" populations from different nations are not anthropometrically equivalent.

Another untested factor is the racial makeup of different nations. It is fairly striking that the top nations in masculinity preference (we can exclude Bulgaria with its small sample) are all the ones with the longest histories of racial co-existence. This may have altered attractiveness standards in these countries, as the Caucasoids within each country may have altered perceptions of attractiveness due either to familiarization with other races or (conversely) due to a desire to distance themselves from them phenotypically.

PS: You can download the paper and other face-related research at the Facelab.

Proceedings of the Royal Society B doi:10.1098/rspb.2009.2184

The health of a nation predicts their mate preferences: cross-cultural variation in women's preferences for masculinized male faces

Lisa M. DeBruine et al.

Abstract

Recent formulations of sexual selection theory emphasize how mate choice can be affected by environmental factors, such as predation risk and resource quality. Women vary greatly in the extent to which they prefer male masculinity and this variation is hypothesized to reflect differences in how women resolve the trade-off between the costs (e.g. low investment) and benefits (e.g. healthy offspring) associated with choosing a masculine partner. A strong prediction of this trade-off theory is that women's masculinity preferences will be stronger in cultures where poor health is particularly harmful to survival. We investigated the relationship between women's preferences for male facial masculinity and a health index derived from World Health Organization statistics for mortality rates, life expectancies and the impact of communicable disease. Across 30 countries, masculinity preference increased as health decreased. This relationship was independent of cross-cultural differences in wealth or women's mating strategies. These findings show non-arbitrary cross-cultural differences in facial attractiveness judgements and demonstrate the use of trade-off theory for investigating cross-cultural variation in women's mate preferences.

Link

I think Spring is here. Or, at least there are signs everywhere that it is close. I went for my first extended bike ride last night; the weather and the light both cooperated. Last week, the weather was right, but the light ended too soon. So, as much as I dislike the time changing, I do like the later evening light.

Anyway, as I was riding, I heard frogs creaking in the marshes. I hadn't heard it before yesterday, but another sign of spring. And, the trees are starting to get a greenish twinge to them as the buds get bigger. Plus, I saw the first flowers on Tuesday evening. There aren't any daffodils yet (a sure sign of spring), but some of the other bulb flowers are poking their heads out. And, tonight I will plant some stuff in the garden, as sure sign of spring!

I recently finished reading Wright's Justification. I found it a good read, but Wright is a hard author to grab little quotes from, which is probably one reason he is misunderstood. Anyway, I did grab some that I will post over the next few days. Here's the first one:

Sin is what bubbles up unbidden from the depths of the human heart, so that all one has to do is go with the flow. That has the appearance of freedom, but is in fact slavery, as Jesus himself declared. True freedom is the gift of the Spirit, the result of grace; but, precisely because it is freedom for as well as freedom from, it isn't simply a matter of being forced now to be good, against our wills and without cooperation (what damage to genuine pastoral theology has been done by making a bogey-word out of the Pauline term synergism, “working together with God”), but a matter of being released from slavery precisely into responsibility, into being able at last to chose, to exercise moral muscle, knowing both that one is doing it oneself and that the Spirit is at work within, that God himself is doing that which I too am doing.—Justification, page 189

<idle musing>
Mind you, it is all by grace. Yes, you are enabled to respond, but you are responding. I like Bonhoeffer's way of putting it: “When Peter stepped out of the boat in faith, was it works?” No, it was in response to God. To not respond is to believe in cheap grace, which is really not grace at all, but license in the guise of liberty.
</idle musing>

The American Bar Association Art and Cultural Heritage Law Committee will sponsor the following event at the ABA Section of International Law's Spring meeting:

ABA Section of International Law Spring Meeting
April 13, 2010 - April 17, 2010
Art & Cultural Heritage Law Committee event on
Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 2:30 p.m.
Grand Hyatt New York
Park Avenue/Grand Central
109 E 42nd St
New York, NY, 10017-5698

Moderated round table discussion: International Trade in Ancient Art and Archaeological Objects: Controversies Over U.S. Implementation of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on Cultural Property.

Speakers: Mark B. Feldman (moderator), Garvey Schubert Barer,Washington, D.C; James Fitzpatrick, Arnold & Porter, Washington, D.C.; Patty Gerstenblith, DePaul University College of Law, Chicago, IL; Josh Knerly, Hahn Loeser & Parks, Cleveland OH; Professor Nancy C. Wilkie, Carleton College, Northfield, MN

Although the event is for ABA members registered to attend the Spring meeting, the discussion should also be open to members of the press that register. Non-ABA members interested in the session should contact the meetings staff to ascertain whether it is possible to just attend this event, and if, so the fee.

For more about the ABA International Law Section Spring Meeting, see: http://www.abanet.org/intlaw/spring2010/

Jeffrey DeitchMike Boehm of the LA Times expertly moves the reportorial ball down the field today in his interview with Jeffrey Deitch regarding yesterday's revelations in CultureGrrl.LA MOCA's incoming director told Boehm one aspect of Deitch's plans that I hadn't...

Os facilio enlace a un artículo en pdf (pincha el enlace) sobre Los Bañales en el suplemento gratuito de Crónicas de las Cinco Villas del El Periódico de Aragón en su edición par aesta comarca zaragozana.

Bericht zur Pressekonferenz am 16.03.2010

Lawrence Kuhn asks whether intelligent aliens would undermine God.
Jesus Creed has part 2 of "The Challenge of Adam" which includes two videos by Peter Enns.
Gordon Glover offers the latest installment in the Design Detective video series.

Unreasonable Faith suggests that N. T. Wright's interpretations can be too clever by half.
Eric Reitan has been interviewed at Common Sense Atheism.
Steve Wiggins mentioned "Biblical" and "Science Fiction" in a post's title, and so I had to link to it.
The Golden Rule shared a video clip of Hank Azaria as Abraham.
Mark Goodacre pointed out the new web site for the Duke University Religion Department.
John Pieret links here in a post called "Dialogue" and am happy to be engaged in just that with him!

When an online news source publishes something related to the Oriental Institute a link will be added here. The most recent stories are at the top.

Raised from the ruins: After looting in Iraq damaged invaluable antiquities, archaeologists work to restore the cradle of civilization’s cultural heritage.
By Ruth E. Kott, AM’07
The University of Chicago Magazine
March-April 2010




Extension 720 Uncut Podcast 02-19-10

Extension 720 with Milt Rosenberg

Milt Rosenberg discusses Ancient Egypt with Gil Stein, Geoff Emberling, Janet Johnson and Emily Teeter from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

"...they're very very good scholars and very important people..."

Grandchildren of Oriental Institute’s founder James Henry Breasted visit new Pioneers to the Past exhibition
University of Chicago News
February 17, 2010

James Henry Breasted III paused for a moment before entering a gallery devoted to the life of his famous grandfather, the founder of the Oriental Institute. The grandson stood pondering a bust of his grandfather, also named James Henry Breasted.

“Do you see any family resemblance?” asked Gil Stein, Director of the Oriental Institute. Breasted looked closely, smiled and said, “I did when I used to have a moustache!”

“I grew up knowing I had quite an accomplished grandfather,” Breasted said. “But when I come here, I learn even more.”

Breasted was among a group of family members touring the Oriental Institute’s freshly installed exhibition on James Henry Breasted, “Pioneers to the Past: American Archaeologists in the Middle East, 1919–1920.” Breasted toured the museum and exhibition last week with Stein and Geoff Emberling, Research Associate and Chief Curator of the Oriental Institute Museum.

The younger Breasted studied the photos and artifacts in the cases and then looked at a wall that displayed a large map of the route his grandfather took in 1919 and 1920, while scouting sites in the Middle East for Oriental Institute expeditions. “It was quite an adventure,” Breasted said.

“Before donating my grandfather’s letters to the Oriental Institute, my father had copies of them made for all of us Breasted children. So although I have not read every word, I have read in the letters enough to appreciate my grandfather’s remarkable devotion to his chosen path of being, as my uncle Charles so aptly put it, ‘a pioneer to the past.’”

Breasted never knew his grandfather, as he was born two years after James Henry Breasted died in 1935. But James remembers that even as a child he loved making maps, and after he returned to the state where he was born, he became a map–maker in a land–surveying business in Colorado, where he still lives.

He joined two other Breasted grandchildren, his brother John Breasted, his sister Barbara Breasted Whitesides and also a great–grandson, for hors d’oeuvres and a talk Wednesday evening—under the watchful eye of the institute’s great Assyrian bull— with a group of supporters of the Oriental Institute, known appropriately as the James Henry Breasted Society.

From left, Geoff Emberling, Research Associate and Chief Curator of the Oriental Institute Museum, Gil Stein, Director of the Oriental Institute, and James Henry Breasted III stand near a bust of the latter’s grandfather and Oriental Institute founder James Henry Breasted. Breasted III came to Chicago with two of his siblings to view the Oriental Institute’s newest exhibition about their grandfather’s journey through Egypt and what are now Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel.

During their visit to the University of Chicago, James Henry Breasted’s grandchildren and great grandson posed for a photo near the steps leading to the Oriental Institute’s library. From left are grandson James Breasted III, granddaughter Barbara Breasted Whitesides, Oriental Institute Director Gil Stein, great-grandson John Larson, Chief Curator of the Oriental Institute Museum Geoff Emberling, and (seated in center) grandson John Breasted.

Members of the Oriental Institute’s James Henry Breasted Society gathered with the O.I. founder’s grandchildren for a refreshments and a talk in the Mesopotamian gallery, where the institute’s Assyrian bull is displayed as part of the Yelda Khorsabad Court installation.

E-mails in Scrolls case may implicate prof
The Chicago Maroon
By Ilana Kowarski
Published: February 16th, 2010

Raphael Golb, 49, faces 51 criminal charges of identity theft, criminal impersonation, harassment, and unauthorized use of computers. He is the son of Oriental Institute Professor Norman Golb.

New Twist in Dead Sea Scrolls Case
Inside Higher Ed, Quick Takes,
February 1, 2010.

In the latest twist of a curious legal case involving allegations of identity theft, cyber-bullying, and two-millennia-old religious artifacts, a well-known University of Chicago professor has been implicated in a complex, Internet-based scheme to smear opponents of his work. Norman Golb, a professor of Jewish history and civilization at Chicago, has been mostly a sideline figure since his son, Raphael, was arrested last March after allegedly creating dozens of Web aliases and using them to harass and discredit scholars who disagree with his father’s theories about the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls...

Museum exhibit features famed Rockford archaeologist
By David Dobson
Special to the Rockford Register Star

Rockford native and archaeologist James Henry Breasted is featured in a new exhibit at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, “Pioneers to the Past: American Archaeologists in the Middle East, 1919-20.” The exhibit opens Jan. 12 and runs through August.

The exhibit follows the travels of Oriental Institute founder Breasted during the formation of the modern Middle East and displays objects he purchased. From 12:15 to 1:15 p.m. Jan. 13, Geoff Emberling, Oriental Institute Museum chief curator, will discuss the photographs, artifacts and archival documents of the exhibit.

The Institute and its museum are at 1155 E. 58th St. in Chicago, on the grounds of the university. Hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays; 10 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Wednesdays; and noon to 6 p.m. Sundays. The telephone number is 773-702-9520, and the museum’s Web site is oi.uchicago.edu.

Breasted is known for founding the Oriental Institute in 1919, described by the university as a “research organization and museum devoted to the study of the ancient Near East … the Institute, a part of the University of Chicago, is an internationally recognized pioneer in the archaeology, philology and history of early Near Eastern civilizations.” The Institute‘s Web site describes its museum as a “world-renowned showcase for the history, art and archaeology of the ancient Near East.” The newly remodeled museum is open to the public for a suggested donation of $7 for adults, $4 for children.

Born in Rockford in 1865, Breasted became fascinated with ancient languages of the Near East while studying at Chicago Theological Seminary. He studied at Yale and earned a doctoral degree in Egyptology in Germany in 1894.

Upon graduation, Breasted began a professorship with the University of Chicago and traveled extensively in the ancient Near East. Breasted accompanied famed archaeologist Howard Carter at the opening of King Tut’s tomb in 1923. Breasted was featured on the cover of Time magazine Dec. 14, 1931, described by the magazine as the “foremost Egyptologist of the U.S.”
He wrote numerous books on ancient history and inscriptions, including a leading textbook. Breasted died in 1935 and is buried in Rockford’s Greenwood Cemetery.

An excellent resource on Breasted’s life is “Pioneer to the Past,” a biography written by his son Charles in 1943. The University of Chicago provides information about Breasted’s life and work at uchicago.edu; search for “Breasted.”

Oriental Institute's new exhibit examines it's [sic] founding father, James Henry Breasted
New exhibit tells tale of James Henry Breasted, whose 1919-1920 travels through the Middle East established center's famed antiquities collection
By William Mullen
Chicago Tribune
January 10, 2010

James Henry Breasted, founder of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, was short, bespectacled and cerebral -- hardly fitting the picture of Indiana Jones, the fictional archaeologist many think was based partly on him.

Yet some of the cinematic "Indy" swashbuckle could have been inspired by a perilous, 11-month journey Breasted took through the Middle East in 1919 and 1920, just after founding the institute.

On Jan. 12, the institute celebrates its 90th anniversary with a temporary exhibit -- "Pioneers to the Past" -- that retraces the adventure, including tense haggling with shady antiquities dealers, encounters with armed Arab horsemen and even a little fisticuffs.

It is described in Breasted's own words in vivid accounts he sent home to his family, photos taken by him and four companions, and hundreds of ancient artifacts he brought back.

"This exhibit gives us a fascinating glimpse of a pivotal moment in history -- the birth of the modern Middle East as we know it today, and the genesis of modern archaeological research in the cradle of civilization," said Gil Stein, director of the institute...

Founder’s archaeological journey to Middle East featured in Oriental Institute exhibit, University of Chicago News, January 6, 2010

A new exhibition at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute Museum chronicles an amazing and sometimes dangerous journey 90 years ago by James Henry Breasted, a famed archaeologist who brought back Egyptian artifacts to Chicago.

“Pioneers to the Past: American Archaeologists in the Middle East, 1919–1920,” opens Tuesday, Jan. 12 and will feature artifacts as well as photos and letters documenting the journey of Breasted, who was the first American to receive a Ph.D. in Egyptology.

“The exhibit takes visitors along on a real–life adventure story that follows Breasted and his team as they traveled across the Middle East in the unstable aftermath of World War I, with tribal and nationalist rebellions making the trip extremely dangerous at many points,” said Geoff Emberling, Research Associate and Chief Curator of the Oriental Institute...

Kitty Picken honors her mother’s long-time volunteer work with Rita T. Picken Professorship at Oriental Institute

University of Chicago News, December 22, 2009.

The Oriental Institute has established a professorship in honor of the late Rita Picken, a long-time volunteer docent who, for three decades, shared her fascination with the ancient Near East with school children and adults visiting the Oriental Institute Museum.

The Rita T. Picken Professorship in Ancient Near Eastern Art will enhance the work of the Oriental Institute by adding a faculty member whose expertise in ancient art will complement the institute’s strengths in languages and archaeology, said Gil Stein, Director of the Oriental Institute.

The professorship is being established with a $3.5 million gift from Rita Picken’s daughter, Kitty Picken, who began volunteering with her mother in 1977.

“Rita Picken was a true friend of the Oriental Institute. She loved ancient art and artifacts, and shared her enthusiasm with many generations of adults and school children as a docent in our museum,” Stein said.

Rita and Kitty Picken also sponsored the Picken Family Nubia Gallery and the Oriental Institute’s recent special exhibition on the ancient Egyptian mummy Meresamun.

Rita Picken, who was a Life Member of the Oriental Institute’s Visiting Committee, received in May the Breasted Medallion, the highest honor the institute gives for a career of volunteer service.

“She was a person whose sweetness, gentle wit and sparkling eyes always brightened up the room. The Oriental Institute was like a second family for her, and we all will miss her greatly,” Stein added.

Modern scholars rely on three complementary kinds of evidence to reconstruct early cultures, Stein explained. Archaeologists study artifacts, “to tell us about ancient behavior and what people actually did.” Scholars also examine texts written by philologists and ancient historians, which “lets us hear these ancient people describe in their own words the details of how their societies worked,” said Stein.

The third method, which the Picken professorship will help support, is the study of images that “provides insights into the ideologies of ancient people―how they expressed power and piety through visual symbols,” Stein added. This crucial third piece of the puzzle for understanding ancient Near Eastern cultures will build on the Oriental Institute’s traditional strengths in archaeology and textual studies. The institute has not had an art historian on its faculty since 1985, when the late Helene Kantor retired...

UW-Parkside loses part of its history
By David Steinkraus, Saturday, December 5, 2009 11:25 pm, The Journal Times
[An article remembering Rita Tallent Picken, 2009 Breasted Medallion laureate]

When Rita Tallent Picken died last month, the University of Wisconsin-Parkside lost a living part of its history as well as a woman who was intensely involved in its formation.

Tallent Hall was named for Rita's first husband, Bernard, director of the Kenosha UW-Extension Center that preceded the university. Yet the university, where she served as an assistant to the first chancellor, Irving Wyllie, was as much hers as his.

Even after she moved to Chicago in 1978, she remained active at Parkside and in Kenosha, said Kitty Picken, Rita's stepdaughter...

Oriental Institute’s important stewards of the past protect, preserve

The University of Chicago Features

By William Harms

A 300-pound fragment of a human-headed winged bull from the Neo-Assyrian city of Khorsabad sits on a table in the Oriental Institute’s conservation laboratory. The fragment, made of gypsum, is about to get the most attention it’s had since a team of archaeologists excavated it more than 70 years ago in northern Iraq.

Alison Whyte, Assistant Conservator, guides a small vacuum nozzle over the fragment’s surface—past its carved rosette decorations and over tiny bits of dirt, some of which are more than 2,000 years old. She uses a small artist’s brush with especially fine bristles to sweep up the dust...

Alison Whyte, Assistant Conservator, and Monica Hudak, Contract Conservator, clean the 300-pound gypsum fragment of a human-headed, winged bull, an artifact in the Oriental Institute's collection. (Photo by Lloyd DeGrane)

Letter from Sudan: The Gold of Kush

Archaeology,
Volume 62 Number 6, November/December 2009

by Geoff Emberling

When frequent ARCHAEOLOGY contributor Andrew Lawler reported on the construction of Sudan's massive Merowe Dam on the Nile River at Hamdab, some 220 miles north of the capital Khartoum ("Damming Sudan," November/December 2006), innumerable ancient sites were about to be flooded. The disastrous situation also posed a humanitarian crisis, as those in the water's path were systematically forced from their homes. The following year, University of Chicago archaeologist Geoff Emberling joined an international salvage effort to document sites before they disappeared..

WTTW's Chicago Tonight has a feature called Hidden Chicago.

On June 10, 2009 they broadcast a feature on architectural ornamentation Easily Overlooked Ornamentation. 5:10 into that broadcast is a segment on James Henry Breasted and the typmanum over the Oriental Institute doorway.


They also have a slideshow, and an extended "director's cut" of the show.

For more on the OI tympanum, see The Tympanum within the Arch on the Doorway to the Oriental Institute, and Some Decorative Motifs of the Oriental Institute Building.

Cold case techniques bring mummy’s face to life, University of Chicago Press Release, June 22, 2009.

Thanks to the skills of artists who work on cold case investigations, people have a chance to see what the Oriental Institute’s mummy Meresamun may have looked like in real life.

A Chicago forensic artist and a police artist in Maryland prepared the images, which depict an engaging woman in her late 20s as she would have looked in 800 B.C. Both artists, though working independently, produced strikingly similar images. The drawings are on display at the Oriental Institute Museum, and have been placed on the institute’s Web site (http://oi.uchicago.edu/museum/special/meresamun/), on Meresamun’s Facebook page, her Wikipedia listing and on YouTube....

Adams, former Oriental Institute director and anthropology professor, honored with Alumni Medal , University of Chicago Chronicle, June 11, 2009, Vol. 28 No. 18.

The Alumni Association has bestowed this year its highest honor, the Alumni Medal, on Robert McCormick Adams, a former Chicago faculty member and administrator (Ph.B.,’47, A.M.,’52, Ph.D.,’56), who is retired from the anthropology department of the University of California, San Diego...

Dead Sea Scrolls Scandal: Norman Golb seems to be fighting another losing battle in his quest to prove his son's innocence, By Sara Jerome, Chicago Maroon, Published: June 1st, 2009.

An academic scandal erupted in early March, and professor Norman Golb found himself at its center. As newspapers rapidly seized on the tale, a narrative emerged about Golb’s son Raphael, 49, who allegedly used false e-mail accounts to impersonate and undermine his father’s scholarly critics. Arrested in New York City, Raphael, with his family’s support, denies the charges. But the scandal overlays an already contentious debate about the Dead Sea Scrolls, adding another argument where many say the evidence disfavors Norman Golb.

Jewish history and civilization professor Norman Golb does not court controversy. The soft-spoken 80-year-old, a scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls, deliberately takes pains to avoid it ...

Oriental Institute offers free access to volumes of history, By William Harms , The University of Chicago Chronicle, May 28, 2009, Vol. 28 No. 17

... Gil Stein, Director of the Oriental Institute, said, “Our publications are the lasting record of our excavations and research. They are fundamental tools for scholars of the ancient Middle East throughout the world. Making these books available to our colleagues, to educators and the public reflects our mission to share knowledge.”

Publication of its research is a central tenet of the mission of the Oriental Institute. Equally important is making that research accessible to scholars and individuals throughout the world.

Toward that end, in October 2004, the Oriental Institute announced the Electronic Publications Initiative, which stated that all publications of the Oriental Institute would be simultaneously published in print and electronically. ...

Oriental Institute honors 90-year-old docent for 90th anniversary gala, By Hannah Fine, Chicago Maroon, May 8th, 2009.

The jubilee included a benefit dinner, the world premier of an Oriental Institute film, a silent auction, and the presentation of the Breasted Medallion for exemplary service.

Lauinger is named first Donnelley research fellow By William Harms, University of Chicago Chronicle, April 16, 2009. Vol. 28 No. 14.

...As a recent Ph.D. graduate in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, Lauinger will explore his interests further at Cambridge, where he will be the first Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College. His fellowship will run for three years...

What’s a mummy to do when she needs new tunes? If she’s Meresamun, she’ll ‘get by with a little help from her friends’ By William Harms, University of Chicago Chronicle, April 16, 2009. Vol. 28 No. 14.

A song contest has been initiated in honor of Meresamun, a mummy who is the focus of a special exhibition at the Oriental Institute Museum...

I can't even begin to do justice here to the amazing publicity Meresamun has had. I was in the UK when the show opened, and it was in all the London papers, and then all the US papers, and then everywhere else too. Google will give you eleven thousand hits for "Meresamun".

Twitter need: Can social media transform museums? By Lauren Weinberg, Time Out Chicago / Issue 214 : Apr 2–8, 2009.

Our Facebook friend Meresamun is almost 3,000 years old. We haven’t corresponded with the Egyptian temple singer much, partly because she’s a mummy. But Meresamun’s tech savvy changed our perception of the Oriental Institute, where she’s on display through December 6...

Scholars to interpret signs and omens of the ancient world, By William Harms, University of Chicago Chronicle, March 5, 2009, Vol. 28 No. 11.

Leading scholars from around the world will gather at the Oriental Institute to discuss the role of signs and omens in the ancient world. “Science and Superstition: Interpretation of Signs in the Ancient World” is a public symposium scheduled for Friday, March 6 and Saturday, March 7. Amar Annus, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Oriental Institute, organized the event.

All kinds of worldly phenomena were taken as signs that communicate divine messages about future events in ancient Mesopotamian civilization. The first references to diviners in written sources came from the third millennium B.C.

“The study of signs from gods was vitally important for ancient Mesopotamians throughout their history,” Annus said. That study and the literature associated with signs spread throughout the ancient world, as far as Rome and India.

“The concept of sign is found in all ancient cultures, but was first described in ancient Mesopotamian texts. This branch of Babylonian scientific knowledge had great influence, as witnessed by similar texts written in the Aramaic, Sanskrit and Sogdian, among other languages,” Annus said. Ancient Mesopotamians viewed potentially everything in the universe as signs from the gods.

Omens were apparently part of the oral tradition from earliest times in Mesopotamia and first appeared in the written texts of the Old Babylonian period. Different bodies of omens may be of heterogeneous origin, deriving from wisdom literature genres, such as proverbs like. “If the king does not heed justice, his people will become confused and the country will be destroyed.”

Some of the ancient Mesopotamian omens or proverbs resonate with stories found in the Bible. “The introductory statement of the parable of the Rich Fool in Luke, the person who does not know where to store his crops, finds a forerunner in a Babylonian omen,” Annus said.

The sessions for the symposium begin at
9 a.m. Friday, March 6, with remarks from Gil Stein, Director of the Oriental Institute. They continue through 5:45 p.m. The session resumes at 9 a.m. on Saturday, March 7, and concludes at 12:30 p.m.

Speakers from Chicago include Edward Shaughnessy, the Lorraine J. & Herrlee G. Creel Distinguished Service Professor in Early Chinese Studies and Chair of East Asian Languages & Civilizations, and Seth Richardson, Assistant Professor in the Oriental Institute.

This event is the fifth in a series of annual conferences that postdoctoral fellows organize to look at important themes in ancient Near Eastern studies. The proceedings of the conference will be published online and printed in the “Oriental Institute Seminars” series.

The yummy mummy uncovered after 3,000 years, by ROSS MCGUINNESS - Sunday, February 8, 2009 Associated Newspapers Limited.

Remarkable images of an entombed Egyptian singer-priestess have been released and they show she was a very pretty lady... about 3,000 years ago.

A hospital scanner has produced the most detailed pictures yet of Meresamun - or She Lives For Amun - who is thought to have led rituals worshipping the deity at a temple in Thebes in 800BC. ...

Tales from the Vitrine: Battles Over Stolen Antiquities, By Britt Peterson, January 7, 2009 This article appeared (sic) in the January 26, 2009 edition of The Nation.

... There is no place on earth where questions of patrimony and preservation are more urgent than Iraq, which, according to archaeologist Gil Stein, is undergoing the wholesale "eradication of the material record of the world's first urban, literate civilization." In Catastrophe! The Looting and Destruction of Iraq's Past, an exhibition catalog from the Oriental Institute Museum of the University of Chicago, Stein and other archaeologists and curators discuss the history of looting in Iraq and what is to be done about the future. Under Saddam Hussein--until the 1990s, at least--Iraq did a good job of protecting more than 1,000 archaeological sites, such as buried cities and tomb complexes from the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian and Akkadian empires. Saddam, who fancied himself the spiritual descendant of ancient Mesopotamian kings like Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar, provided ample funds for the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, and set a high penalty on looting. (This scrupulousness did not extend to his neighbors' treasures; after invading Kuwait in 1990, the Iraqi army made off with nearly every item housed in the Kuwait National Museum.)

Following the Gulf War, with the country's economic strength on the wane, the looting of archaeological sites became far more common and the enforcement of antilooting laws declined sharply. Nor did this much seem to bother the West. John Russell, an archaeologist and former cultural adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, claims that "newly surfaced Iraqi artifacts were sold in the United States at venues to accommodate every price range: the major New York auction houses, brick-and-mortar galleries, online virtual galleries, and the burgeoning, anonymous, unregulated mega-market of eBay."

After the invasion, however, even beyond the piñata bash that was the Iraq Museum in the early days of April 2003, unlawfully excavated antiquities became as coveted on the black market as weapons. By May the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani had issued a fatwa against illegal excavations; the United Nations passed a ban against traffic in stolen Iraqi art the same month. Still, an estimated 15,000 objects were stolen from the Iraq Museum, and more than half of these remain missing, including the museum's unique collection of Babylonian cylinder seals. Damage to the archaeological sites is unquantifiable, but through the use of DigitalGlobe aerial images, the Oriental Institute has assembled an extensive database cataloging the missing artifacts. As Roger Atwood writes in Stealing History (2004), "Antiquities pulled from the ground...have no...records, no catalogue numbers or schematic drawings, and so it is that much more difficult to detect them as they move through the market and, if seized, to prove that they were plundered." Even if the objects are someday returned, much of their history, not to mention their value, is lost forever. Without archaeological context, as McGuire Gibson writes in Catastrophe!, objects "are really just knickknacks. Beautiful and intriguing, but knickknacks."

Catastrophe! includes a day-by-day retelling of the looting of the Iraq Museum, an event that also features prominently in Thieves of Baghdad (2005), Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos's first-person account of leading the museum's restoration effort. According to Donny George, a former director of the museum (he fled Iraq in 2006), the first looters were professional thieves who knew exactly what to target, and it's likely that many of them were linked to former or current museum employees. Later waves appear to have been more local, casual and indiscriminately destructive. Many of the writers of Catastrophe! blame the US Army for not securing the museum and Iraq's archaeological sites quickly enough or with sufficient manpower. Gibson and Russell describe the days leading up to the invasion and the years since as a frustrating series of memos ignored, phone calls unreturned. Atwood tells the story of a group of Iraqi curators and their two guards trying to defend the 3,500-year-old city of Nimrud from looters in the first days after Saddam's fall. After weeks spent dodging Kalashnikov bullets and watching as the looters carved slices of Assyrian friezes out of the walls with stonecutting tools, the Iraqis requested additional American protection; an infantry battalion finally showed up in May, too late to save the most important pieces. Bogdanos, on the other hand, details his exasperation with archaeologists who assumed the Army had total mobility throughout Iraq in the early days of the occupation. He points out that Saddam's army had used the museum as a fortress, and that securing it immediately would have required its bombing.

But everyone from Bogdanos to Russell, except Cuno, agrees that the vast illegal antiquities trade is the major impediment to curtailing looting in Iraq...

Ancient mummy is 1st patient for new CT scanner, By Robert Mitchum, Chicago Tribune reporter, December 25, 2008 .

[When doctors at the University of Chicago put the first patient through their new cutting-edge CT scanner, they weren't very concerned about her health. But they did hope to find clues into how she died, 3,000 years ago.

Meresamun, a mummy owned by the university's Oriental Institute, recently had the honor of being the first subject of the university's 256-slice scanner, which is four times as powerful as the previous model and the first of its kind in Illinois....].

Kipper center encourages children to investigate field of archaeology, by By William Harms, University of Chicago News Office, University of Chicago Chronicle, November 20, 2008.

[...Chicago-area students will get some hands-on experience now that the Oriental Institute has opened its new Kipper Family Archaeology Discovery Center, where children can make their own discoveries in a simulated archaeological dig.

The Archaeology Discovery Center, which opened Monday, Nov. 17, will allow visiting school children to recover archaeological replicas buried in an artificial ancient mound, known as a “tel.” Oriental Institute archaeologists, whose expeditions take them across the Middle East, often dig for artifacts in these ancient mounds...].

Insight into the Soul, by Eti Bonn-Muller, Archaeology online features, November 19, 2008.

[...When graduate students from the University of Chicago, led by Virginia Rimmer, the excavation area supervisor, first uncovered the monument's rounded top, they noticed vertical lines incised across it. "They wondered if that was writing so they started looking at these scratches, trying to figure them out," he says. The lines, it turns out, were from modern plows. The stele lay fewer than eight inches below the surface of a wheat field that had been farmed for generations.

A workman carefully exposed the object further and next saw its rounded back, which the archaeologists thought might be a grindstone. But when the workman saw the top line of clear writing, he called Rimmer over right away. Working in the area were two graduate students specializing in Northwest Semitic philology, Samuel Boyd and Benjamin Thomas, who had just taken a course in exactly the kind of inscription and dialect on the stele. "None of the rest of us were experts on this particular script," says Schloen. "They translated it on the spot!" ...].

(Photo: Eudora Struble, University of Chicago)



(Photo: Eudora Struble, University of Chicago)

Funerary Monument Reveals Iron Age Belief That The Soul Lived In The Stone. ScienceDaily (Nov. 18, 2008).

[Archaeologists in southeastern Turkey have discovered an Iron Age chiseled stone slab that provides the first written evidence in the region that people believed the soul was separate from the body.].

Found: An Ancient Monument to the Soul. By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, Published: November 17, 2008 New York Times.

[In a mountainous kingdom in what is now southeastern Turkey, there lived in the eighth century B.C. a royal official, Kuttamuwa, who oversaw the completion of an inscribed stone monument, or stele, to be erected upon his death. The words instructed mourners to commemorate his life and afterlife with feasts “for my soul that is in this stele.”

University of Chicago archaeologists who made the discovery last summer in ruins of a walled city near the Syrian border said the stele provided the first written evidence that the people in this region held to the religious concept of the soul apart from the body. By contrast, Semitic contemporaries, including the Israelites, believed that the body and soul were inseparable, which for them made cremation unthinkable, as noted in the Bible].

(Photo: Eudora Struble, University of Chicago)

High resolution version of the above

Funerary monument reveals Iron Age belief that the soul lived in the stone. University of Chicago News Office, November 18, 2008.

[Archaeologists in southeastern Turkey have discovered an Iron Age chiseled stone slab that provides the first written evidence in the region that people believed the soul was separate from the body.

University of Chicago researchers will describe the discovery, a testimony created by an Iron Age official that includes an incised image of the man, on Nov. 22-23 at conferences of biblical and Middle Eastern archaeological scholars in Boston.

The Neubauer Expedition of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago found the 800-pound basalt stele, 3 feet tall and 2 feet wide, at Zincirli (pronounced "Zin-jeer-lee"), the site of the ancient city of Sam'al. Once the capital of a prosperous kingdom, it is now one of the most important Iron Age sites under excavation.

The stele is the first of its kind to be found intact in its original location, enabling scholars to learn about funerary customs and life in the eighth century B.C. At the time, vast empires emerged in the ancient Middle East, and cultures such as the Israelites and Phoenicians became part of a vibrant mix].

(Photo: Eudora Struble, University of Chicago)

High resolution version of the above





(Photo: Jason Herrmann, University of Arkansas)High resolution version of the above

Papers on resent work at Zincirli will be presented at the ASOR Annual Meeting this week:

Virginia Rimmer (University of Chicago), “The Impact of Assyrian Imperial Incorporation on Households at Sam’al (Zincirli) in Southern Turkey” (5 min.)

[In the Household Archaeology Workshop, 1:00-4:00pm, Friday 21 November]

David Schloen (University of Chicago) and Amir Sumakai-Fink (Tel Aviv University), “Zincirli (Ancient Sam’al) 2008” (25 min.)

[In the Reports Non-ASOR Affiliated Excavations and Surveys Session, 4:15-6:15pm, Saturday 22 November]

and at the SBL Annual Meeting

Dennis Pardee, University of Chicago, A New Alphabetic Inscription from Zincirli

[In the Paleographical Studies in the Ancient Near East Session, 11/23/2008, 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM, Meeting Room 304 - CC]

Abstract: On July 21, 2008, the Neubauer Expedition to Zincirli, directed by Prof. David Schloen of the University of Chicago and by associate director Amir Fink, found an inscribed basalt stele at the site of Zincirli in Gaziantep province in southeastern Turkey. The remarkably well-preserved stele, 70 centimeters wide and 95 centimeters tall, was found intact in its original location. It was set into a stone wall with its protruding tenon still inserted into the stone-paved floor. The alphabetic inscription on the stele is written in Sam’alian, the language spoken in the region of Zincirli (ancient Sam’al) during the Iron Age. It commemorates the life of “Kattammuwa servant of Panamuwa,” probably a high official of King Panamuwa, who reigned during the eighth century B.C. A bearded figure is depicted on the stele, seated in a chair in front of a table laden with food. Beside him is a thirteen-line inscription, elegantly carved in raised relief and preserved in almost pristine condition nearly three millennia after it was inscribed. It describes the establishment of the memorial stele and associated mortuary rites. This stele is unique in its combination of pictorial and textual features and thus is an important addition to our knowledge of ancient language and culture. An analysis and translation of the inscription will be presented by Prof. Dennis Pardee of the University of Chicago, and Prof. David Schloen will discuss the archaeological context

Ancient Mesopotamia: This History, Our History. Website Review in Education World, November, 2008.

[Ancient Mesopotamia: This History, Our History provides a wealth of resources for teaching and learning about this civilization. The artifacts in the learning collection were chosen by teachers to shed light on the everyday lives of the people who lived in this area which is now Iraq. Teachers and students can examine the artifacts and use the teacher developed questions to drive classroom discussions. The collection can be browsed by name, material, object type, time period, archaeological site map or cultural themes. The Interactives offer users the opportunity to view significant artifacts up close and go on a virtual archaeological dig in Iraq. Any of fourteen different themes can be explored to learn about the different aspects of ancient life in this region. Additionally, teaching materials such as standards based lesson plans, information on visual thinking strategies, how to use this resource and last but not least an online course for teachers wishing to learn more about this region]

Oriental Institute Museum helps visiting school students dig for "artifacts", Chicago News, November 13, 2008.

[Chicago-area students will be able to get a hands-on archaeological experience when a new simulated dig opens in November at the Oriental Institute, 1155 East 58th Street.



The Kipper Family Archaeology Discovery Center, which will have its grand opening November 17, will allow school groups to recover archaeological replicas buried in an artificial ancient mound, or "tel," which replicates the Middle Eastern mounds where Oriental Institute archaeologists dig].

Drink Like a Sumerian, Chicago Public Radio, Eight Forty-Eight 11/12/2008. [Audio presentation]

["As you look toward the weekend, or even later this evening, is a good “cold one” on your mind? Beer is one of humankind’s oldest and most beloved beverages, but it’s changed a lot over time.



It began as a light, sweet drink and has evolved to the heavier, more bitter brew we enjoy today. Eight Forty-Eight Food Critic David Hammond has this history lesson.



Food Critic David Hammond is a contributor to Chicago Reader and Time Out Chicago, and he moderates LTHForum.com, the Chicago-based culinary chat site].

Nectar of the Babylonians, November 11, 2008, The University of Chicago Magazine Blog.

["Students socializing at Jimmy’s over a pint of beer know that they’re participating in an age-old practice, but few likely realize just how old. Even before the dawn of recorded history, beer-brewing was widespread throughout the ancient Near East. In a presentation at the Oriental Institute last Wednesday, Kathleen Mineck, a PhD candidate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, coupled a lecture on beer in the ancient world with a tasting of her own home brews, prepared in the Sumerian manner..."].

Loot! Chicago at center of battle between archeologists, collectors. A 4,000-year-old artifact turns up at O'Hare. Stolen property or museum piece?, By Tom Hundley, November 9, 2008, Chicago Tribune Magazine.

["On April 11, 2003, three days after American tanks rumbled into Baghdad and the day after looters swarmed the Iraq National Museum like a plague of locusts, Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon press corps enjoyed a little laugh at the expense of Iraq's catastrophe. "The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over and over and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times and you think, 'My goodness, were there that many vases?' Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?" the defense secretary asked with mock astonishment. This was vintage Rumsfeld, and the journalists chuckled appreciatively. The looting would continue for two more days.



McGuire Gibson, a man who may know as much about ancient Mesopotamian archeology as anyone on the planet, was horrified by the events in Baghdad and by Rumsfeld's cavalier attitude, but he wasn't particularly surprised. In the months leading up to the U.S. invasion, the distinguished University of Chicago scholar had repeatedly warned the Pentagon and State Department about the likelihood of looting. n The warnings fell on deaf ears. n I had been hearing about the legendary Mac Gibson for years, but I did not meet him until a month after the ransacking of the museum, when I was in Baghdad as a Tribune correspondent and he traveled to that benighted city to inspect the damage for himself ..."].

The high-stakes game of trading in ancient artifacts, By Nadira A. Hira, writer, Fortune, Thursday October 23, 12:10 pm ET

["..."The state of the discussion between archaeologists and museum curators and directors is so polarized that it has ceased almost entirely to be productive," says archaeologist Geoff Emberling, who is also museum director of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, whose museum specifically does not acquire pieces on the market.



Emberling calls the lioness sale a "catastrophe," saying that prices at this level put archaeological sites in greater danger than they have ever been before. "In the big picture," he says, those artifacts "are better off still in the ground, awaiting a detailed excavation. But I acknowledge that's sort of a dream." ..."].

Safeguarding Iraq's antiquities: Country's scholars to get help from 2 Chicago museums, by Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune, October 17, 2008,

["... In announcing the $14 million program, Laura Bush named the Field Museum of Natural History and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago as sites where 45 Iraqis will "learn the new methods of preservation that they were largely isolated from during Saddam Hussein's regime." ..."].

Iraq Cultural Heritage Project (ICHP), October 16, 2008, Department of State Press Release

["The Department of State, through the American Embassy in Baghdad, has awarded a $13 million grant to International Relief and Development (IRD) a charitable, non-profit, non-governmental organization that directs assistance “in regions of the world that present social, political and technical challenges.” ... With the collaboration of the Field Museum of Natural History and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago a two year professional development program will be developed for employees of the Iraq State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH), the Iraq National Museum and other museums..."].

US unveils Iraq culture aid, October 16, 2008, AFP News

["US First Lady Laura Bush visited Baghdad's embassy in Washington on Thursday to unveil a 14-million-dollar US campaign to rebuild Iraq's cultural heritage and safeguard its treasures ... The funds will also help create a two-year education program for Iraqi preservationists at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, in collaboration with the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago ..."].

Ancient stories in modern dress: Gilgamesh, Silk Road Theatre Project

["On Saturday, Silk Road will present Gilgamesh, the “world’s oldest story,” in a recent version by Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa and dramaturg Chad Gracia, at the Oriental Institute in partnership with the Chicago Humanities Festival and the Poetry Foundation. Among its treasures, the Oriental Institute houses a mummified body roughly the age of the story, Mesopotamian prayer statues, and clay tablets with cuneiform writing that may depict Gilgamesh standing on the head of the vanquished monster Humbaba"].

Teaching the Loss of Iraq's Heritage, Art Historians at Work, Tuesday, September 30, 2008.



Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?, By JORDANA HORN, Wall Street Journal online, SEPTEMBER 26, 2008







The New York Review of Books published (Volume 55, Number 16 · October 23, 2008) Chuck Jones' Letter to the Editor responding to their omnibus review entitled The Devastation of Iraq's Past, by Hugh Eakin, of the editorial staff of The New York Review, discussing seven books including Catastrophe! The Looting and Destruction of Iraq's Past an exhibition at the Oriental Institute Museum, Chicago, April 10–December 31, 2008. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Geoff Emberling and Katharyn Hanson. Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 87 pp., $29.95 (paper).





Posted on the Oriental Institute's What's New page, and on several mailing lists, such as ANE-2, is the announcement of the discovery of an inscription at Zinçirli: New Alphabetic Inscription From Zincirli (ancient Sam’al) In Southeast Turkey.

["On July 21, 2008, the Neubauer Expedition to Zincirli, directed by Prof. David Schloen of the University of Chicago and by associate director Amir Fink, found an inscribed basalt stele at the site of Zincirli (pronounced “Zin-jeer-lee”) in Gaziantep province in southeastern Turkey. The remarkably well-preserved stele, 70 centimeters wide and 95 centimeters tall, was found intact in its original location."]

The homepage of the Zinçirli project is here.

The Facebook presence of the 2008 expedition of the Zinçirli project is here.





The University of Chicago's website features a story on a computerized tomography scan of one of the Institute's most-beloved objects on public display, the mummy of Meresamun. This recalls a News & Notes piece from the early 1990s, regarding the mummy of Petosiris.







In an omnibus review entitled The Devastation of Iraq's Past, Hugh Eakin, of the editorial staff of The New York Review, discusses seven books including Catastrophe! The Looting and Destruction of Iraq's Past an exhibition at the Oriental Institute Museum, Chicago, April 10–December 31, 2008. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Geoff Emberling and Katharyn Hanson. Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 87 pp., $29.95 (paper). He neglects to mention that the book is available in an open access format.



Off to the Oriental Institute and Offline Path Analysis, Marketing Productivity Blog: Moving from a Low Accountability to a High Accountability Business Model, by Jim Novo.

[Before and after comments by a marketing consultant for the Oriental Institute].

Archaeologists find silos and administration center from early Egyptian city, University of Chicago Press Release

[News from the OI project at Edfu - Several news sources are publishing articles based on this report].

Uncovering Evidence of a Workaday World Along the Nile, By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, Published: July 1, 2008. The New York Times [News from the OI project at Edfu].









When grain was currency, © Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly, 19 - 25 June 2008, Issue No. 902.

[News from the OI project at Edfu: A large administrative building and silos thought to be the largest grain bins from the ancient Egyptian era ever found are the latest discoveries at Tel Edfu. Nevine El-Aref reports on a site that is providing fresh clues about the emergence of urban life in ancient times].

Benched for the season, UCHIBLOGO, The University of Chicago Magazine's Web log, June 6, 2008.

[Campus improvements].

This is a link to a USAToday piece, which reads as perkily as one could possibly imagine, quoting OI Museum Director Geoff Emberling regarding the Indiana Jones business. USAToday, May 22, 2008.



Who is Indiana Jones? What we know (so far) about Indy, The Roanoke Times, Wednesday, May 21, 2008. [In which Gil Stein comments on the ambiguous image of Indiana Jones].







Teaching Web Site Highlights Gifts of Ancient Mesopotamia, IMLS Project Profiles, May 8, 2008.



Teaching Web Site Highlights Gifts of Ancient Mesopotamia, 7thSpace Interactive, 2008-05-05.



The looting of Iraq's past, Shanghai Daily - By Tara Burghart 2008-4-20 .







Dig Into History -- Ancient Mesopotamia, Archaeorama - April 16, 2008.



Artistic casualties of the Iraq war. U. of C. exhibit highlights looting of cultural gems, Chicago Tribune - 12:29 AM CDT, April 11, 2008.



Oriental Institute exhibit highlights looting of Iraq, Chicago Sun Times - April 10, 2008.



Exhibition, book and symposium in Chicago, IW&A Blog - April 10, 2008.



Exhibit details destruction of Iraq's cultural heritage, Associated Press report in The International Herald Tribune - April 10, 2008.



Exhibit details destruction of Iraq's cultural heritage, Associated Press - April 9, 2008 3:24 PM ET.



Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago to Examine the Looting of the Iraq National Museum, Art Daily.



Preservation along the Nile River, by Bill Harms, University of Chicago News Office.



AUB finds new president after year-long search, Daily Star staff, Saturday, March 22, 2008.



Gregory Areshian Collection of the Research Archives of the Oriental, Foy Scalf, ANE-2, Thu Mar 20, 2008.



Mysteries of Hamoukar, world's oldest city, Pravda, 13 March 2008.



American U. of Beirut to Name U. of Chicago Scholar as Next President, The Chronicle of Higher Education News-Blog, March 12, 2008.



Scholars will explore conflicts between tribal, national allegiances, by Bill Harms, The University of Chicago Chronicle, March 6, 2008, Vol. 27 No. 11.



Old News: Real Tough Rough Riders Were Sumerian Charioteers, Week of Feb. 23, 2008; Vol. 173, No. 8. (From the February 19, 1938, issue)

Raised from the ruins: After looting in Iraq damaged invaluable antiquities, archaeologists work to restore the cradle of civilization’s cultural heritage.
By Ruth E. Kott, AM’07
The University of Chicago Magazine
March-April 2010



See the chronicle of news about the Oriental Institute.

6° CORSO D’INTRODUZIONE ALL’ARCHEOLOGIA SUBACQUEA e CAMPO DI LAVORO

MONITORAGGIO NELL’AREA ARCHEOLOGICA PROTETTA DEL PALMENTO LOC. PUNTA SECCA E CON LA SUPERVISIONE  DELLA SOPRINTENDENZA DEL MARE AA.BB.CC. DELLA REGIONE SICILIANA

Finalità:
Il corso sportivo si propone di promuovere una più approfondita conoscenza dei problemi legati all’archeologia, e di fornire, a livelli diversi, strumenti tecnici d’osservazione, studio ed intervento, è pensato per fornire una base tecnico culturale in grado di favorire una corretta difesa e una corretta fruizione del patrimonio culturale sommerso, in collaborazione con le strutture preposte.

Organizzazione: Centro Subacqueo Ibleo Blu Diving di Ragusa, UISP Lega per le Attività Subacquee Nazionale, Uisp Lega per le Attività Subacquee Sicilia.
Supervisione: Soprintendenza del Mare della Regione Siciliana
Assistenza : Capitaneria di Porto di Pozzallo, Ufficio Locale Marittimo di Scoglitti.
Prerequisiti:
Indirizzato ai formatori, Insegnanti, Aiuto insegnanti, Sommozzatori 3°, 2°,1° livello, dell’UISP LEGA ATTIVITA’ SUBACQUEE, a numero chiuso di max 15 persone, in possesso di tessera UISP per l’anno in corso e visita medica agonistica valida anno in corso.
Non completando il numero possono entrare corsisti d’altre didattiche con equivalenti brevetti, cui sarà emessa tessera UISP a copertura assicurativa.
Standard previsti:
quelli adottati dalla Lega Attività Subacquee della UISP.
Località:
Il corso si svolgerà in Sicilia, nella Provincia di Ragusa, a Punta Secca (Santa Croce Camerina)
3 Periodi:
Dal 28 GIUGNO al 03 LUGLIO 2010
DAL 26 LUGLIO al 31 LUGLIO 2010
DAL 20 SETTEMBRE AL 25 SETEMBRE 2010

Alloggio:
Strutture alberghiere della zona, da contattare individualmente a seconda delle esigenze.

Attrezzature:
Il corsista dovrà avere la propria attrezzatura subacquea, solo per chi proviene da fuori regione potrà richiedere bombola e piombi.

Certificazione:
certificazione sul libretto d’immersione e brevetto di specializzazione della Uisp – lega per le Attività Subacquee.

Rimborso spese di partecipazione:
secondo leggi vigenti : € 140 per tesserati UISP; € 190 per tesserati altre organizzazioni, da versarsi entro il 18 MAGGIO 2010 con bonifico bancario a:
Centro Subacqueo Ibleo Blu Diving
IBAN: IT 31 D 01030 17000000000 383003
MONTE DEI PASCHI DI SIENA AG Ragusa
Inviare fax bonifico al 0932 681358

Il rimborso spese non prevede viaggio a/r vitto e alloggio per la durata del corso.

Docenti: Archeologi, Archeologi subacquei e Formatori UISP Lega Attività Subacquee

INFO:

Centro Subacqueo Ibleo Blu Diving
97100 Ragusa
Tel./Fax 0932 681358
e mail : buggea@tiscali.it
Cell. 3383498441
(Presidente: Maurizio Buggea)
www.uisp-sicilia.it

.
On March 10 and 11, in a joint operation between the GDPOB’s Directorate dealing with the illegal traffic of antiques, the police in the Black Sea city of Burgas and the Customs Agency at the Sofia Airport, Bulgarian authorities intercepted at the airport in Sofia two packages. They were addressed to Dutch citizens and upon opening were found to contain a large number of archaeological artefacts dating from Antiquity and the Middle Ages ("Bulgaria Police Bust Illegal Antiques Trade Channel", Novinite, March 13, 2010). The sender has been identified as G.G., 24, from the town of Karnobat who already has had problems with the law for his involvement in illegal artefact hunting and illegal trade in antiquities. A police search of his house after the seizure found over 100 other historical objects – coins, jewellery, ceramics and sculptures, as well as an antique iron sword, antique bronze vessel and two metal detectors. The two Dutch buyers were not named, but let us hope that the Dutch police also search their homes, who knows what other illegally exported material they may have been buying from foreign lawbreakers and are hoarding there, or perhaps they are dealers.
This however is small fry compared with the amount of archaeological finds dug out of sites all over the country to supply the no-questions-asked market abroad, to which tonnes, literally, have been shipped in recent decades. This shows just how damaging artefact hunting and collecting is to the archaeological record, and cases like this help to keep that n the public eye. Would the damage to and destruction of sites by digging this stuff up be any less if the law was liberalised and instead some kind of a PAS-type voluntary recording scheme introduced as some pro-collecting lobbyists suggest? Of course not, that is just a daft notion thrown out as a smokescreen by dealers.

Photo by BGNES It's not much of a haul, perhaps its only part of the seized material.

Oriental Institute Museum Photo Archives Database [Enter as "guest"]
[Updated 3/28/2010]

The Oriental Institute photographic archive contains more than 100,000 images dating from prior to the founding of the Oriental Institute up to the present day. The collection includes site photography, ethnographic images, object photos, event and vacation shots, and images of documents. Until recently, searching for these images was difficult at best. Beginning in the mid-1990s, we began to enter our card catalog of images into a Filemaker database. More recently, additional information was added to the database including a field for a thumbnail image. The database is now online, though not widely published.

As of February 2010, there are more than 70,000 entries from our photo catalogue in the database, 35,000 of which have an image scanned and attached.

We invite you to take a look at the database in its current beta form.

Click on the link that says 'Oriental Institute Museum Photographic Database.' At the login page, click the 'Guest Account' radio button and then click 'Login.' Use the left and right hand buttons on the screen to scroll through the database, or use the magnifying glass to search.

Photographs in our records are catalogued in several different ways. A P number refers to the photograph of an object, while an N number was given to a negative. Most images have both a P and N number. There are also S Numbers for lantern slides, SM numbers for 35mm slides, a wide variety of field number sequences, and a newer D number series for native digital images.

The current project is to complete data entry for the P. Number series. Currently we have entered 32,700 cards (out of 68,500) from the P. series. Finishing the data entry for the P number sequence will substantially complete the N and S sequences as well.

The database is a work in progress. If you find typos or other mistakes, or if you'd just like to send comments or suggestions for improvement please e-mail them to oi-museum@uchicago.edu

Many of the entries in the database have images attached in a resolution that is appropriate for use in PowerPoint or other presentations. Full resolution images for study and publication are available as well. If you would like to order images, please visit https://oi.uchicago.edu/order/photographs/

.
I thought it only right that David Connolly should be aware of the fact that I had discussed his paper delivered at the Newcastle Conference on this blog, so I sent him the links to the two posts here and here and invited him to reply. This is his response:

[Edit: Sadly the individual in question demanded I remove his reply to which indicated that he considered that to respond to my discussion of his "figures" would suggest that there - in his words - "would be anything (sic) worth replying to". He also indicated that he thought what I had written was nevertheless "very funny" and thanked me for that. Dave Connolly pers. comm. 18.03.10]

Well, I am not sure that we should be glad that the British archaeological heritage is in the hands of people like Mr Connolly who paint superficial pictures in academic presentations and who only laugh at attempts to get a clearer idea of what the effects of their current short-sighted polices are. David Connolly presented a paper at an academic conference which deliberately set out to play down the scale of erosion of the archaeological record due to artefact hunting. He did so by techniques which can be seen to be as lacking in intellectual honesty as the selectivity and word-twisting of the propaganda of the pro-indiscriminate-trade lobbyists over the other side of the Ocean . He just laughs when this is pointed out.

That is actually typical of the whole pro-collecting lobby in British archaeology, none of whom, experience shows time and time again, will engage in proper debate of the issues. They just dismiss anything they do not like to hear as "irrelevant". Mr Connolly and Mr Sayles probably got on very well together at Newcastle in what the organizers call "the informal networking breaks which we planned into the event for this purpose".

That's all right Dave, you carry on laughing at your own jokes and ignoring what you do not want to hear. Meanwhile some of us will carry on attempting to discuss in a more rational manner the implications for archaeology in Britain and in general of what you "archaeologists" in Britain are doing with public opinion about artefact hunting and collecting.

Vignette: British pro-collecting archaeologist clearly cannot cope with the weight of the problem he faces.

This classic piece of philosophical science fiction by Daniel Dennett, "Where Am I?", is the reading for my Religion and Science Fiction class for Friday. It is a valuable piece in its own right, but also nicely illustrates how science fiction can be useful to philosophers and other thinkers as thought experiments to help us explore difficult and puzzling issues.

Where Am I?

I also found (via Daniel Dennett's home page) this 1988 Documentary "Victim of the Brain" which includes a dramatization of Dennett's story "Where Am I?":



There are other copies of Daniel Dennett's "Where Am I?" online here and here.

It's that time of year again: flood season. Since so many of you have asked, I've embedded Grand Forks' flood cam in this post:

Streaming .TV shows by Ustream
To offer some perspective, I've included a screen grab of the flood cam as of 7:30 am today:


As you can see the bridge is still open and the Mighty Red River of the North is still largely within its banks. The flood obelisk is just to the right of center immediately to the left of the electrical pole on the right side of the bridge. As you can see it's in the water, but that's not too unusual or scary. The crest is predicted for early next week and to be between 47 and 49 feet. Apparently the long, early thaw combined with a snowy winter and relatively damp March has caused the major problems this year. Current predictions put the crest safely inside the to 10 historic crests:

Historic Crests1) 54.35 feet - April 22, 1997
2) 50.20 feet - April 10, 1897
3) 49.34 feet - April 1, 2009
4) 48.81 feet - April 26, 1979
5) 48.00 feet - April 18, 1882
6) 47.93 feet - April 6, 2006
7) 47.41 feet - April 16, 2006
8) 45.93 feet - April 21, 1996
9) 45.73 feet - April 11, 1978
10) 45.69 feet - April 16, 1969
Source: National Weather Service via Grand Forks Herald

I guess there is some worry about ice jams -- or at least that was the topic of conversation last night at dinner. If you want to know as much as we do out here, check out the Grand Forks Herald's flood page. We'll do all we can to stay dry and hope the best for our friends to the south.

Review of a show at the Capitoline Museum:

• In Rome, Revisiting the Spoils of War – In Transit Blog | NYTimes.com.

There is more by Ravel on the Internet Archive, but here are a few samples...

Daphnis and Chloe Suite No.2 (Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy)



Another recording of the Daphnis and Chloe Suite No.2 (because it is such a wonderful piece - I wish there was a recording of the whole ballet on the Internet Archive!) by the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Artur Rodzinski



Piano Concerto for the Left Hand

ante diem xv kalendas apriles

• Festival of Mars continues (day 18)
• 37 A.D. — The dead emperor Tiberius’ will is annulled and Gaius (Caligula) is given the title “Augustus” by the senate
• 235 A.D. (?) — murder of Alexander Severus at Moguntiacum (Mainz)

I’m still trying to get the manuscript of Eusebius Gospel problems and solutions completed.  We’re getting ever closer, tho!

I’ve started working on the text of the Latin fragments myself, faux de mieux, which I will get done by the end of the week. 

The two extra Syriac fragments, culled from Severus of Antioch and Ishodad of Merv, will be translated by the same time (I am promised).

I’ve got all the Greek in electronic form.  The passages from Cramer’s catena have all been proofed excellently, but I’ve now got a friend looking at the material from Migne: the first three chunks from Nicetas’ catena on Luke are with him.

I’ve heard nothing from the people doing the Coptic for a month, when I last prompted.  Time to prompt again.

I’ve also ordered a copy of the Arabic translation of the Coptic catena on Matthew.  I need someone with Coptic and Arabic to translate the relevant bits and compare it with the Coptic.

Our new website here at the Duke University Dept of Religion went live today.  Please take a look and let me know what you think, if you get a chance.  I think it's a great improvement on the old one and is the result of a pretty lengthy process in recent months:

Duke University Religion Departmemnt

We will continue to work on it in the coming months.

The ACCG has just released a press release "Collectors and Archaeologists Find Common Ground on Cultural Property Management at Newcastle, U.K. Conference " about its participation in a two-day event hosted by the CBA and Newcasle University, "Portable Antiquities: Archaeology, Collecting, Metal Detecting" held in Newcastle. The press release tells the world that at the event, the Executive Director of the ACCG representing all coin collectors presented a

61-page paper, "Coin Collectors and Cultural Property Nationalism" [...] covering cultural property history, law and philosophy a collaborative ACCG effort prepared in response to the event".

Well, I've read the text twice and a bit and canot say I noticed anything that might be termed "philosophy", it's short enough on logic. According to Sayles, the event

might well be characterized as the construction of a fresh bridge between archaeologists, museums, metal detectorists and collectors. Two days of hearing and discussing weighty cultural property issues, in a friendly and meaningful way, left the participants with broader perspectives and a genuine interest in moving forward.

Cute, eh? It's a good job then, isn't it for those nice cosy chats that the co-author of that collaborative philosophical paper, Dave Welsh was not there. He announced recently on his blog that he'd given up dialogue with the other blokes and, in the spirit of the Coin Collectors' manifesto which Sayles presented at Newcastle, will fight to defend his rights to sell what he likes through the courts alone. Mr Sayles makes no mention of friendly chats with the officers of the PAS sitting in the front row, nor that the paper he delivered was an apologia for the Baltimore Illegal Coin Import stunt (the coins of which were reportedly bought from an unamed British spplier). Neither is it mentioned how many metal detectorists Mr Sayles was able to network with.

Perhaps Sayles was too busy chatting up finders to ponder the involvement of Chief Inspector Mark Harrison, seconded to help English Heritage combat Heritage Theft. Oh, so it happens in England does it? Ooooo...

Obviously though he was busy with doing something like that, too busy to read the conference pack - or perhaps he did not understand the import of the letter from the National Council of Metal Detectorists which it contained. John Wells of the NCMD was due to talk on the first day on "The National Council for Metal Detecting and the Portable Antiquities Scheme: The Way Forward". He refused. Clive Sinclair from the same organization was also supposed to be there (I'd have liked to heard him, so I am glad I did not go to the UK to do so).

The Executive Committee of the NCMD made a last minute decision not to attend the conference. A letter outlining the reasons for this was included in the delegates' conference pack, which was the first opportunity most members of the organization had of learning why their representatives were abandoning them. Wells wrote that "little benefit would be gained from participating in a gathering more overtly focussed on the restriction and control of the legitimate hobby”. Mr Wells perhaps is the sort of person who must sleep with the lights on so the monsters do not come out from under his bed and attack him at night. Talk about paranoia... The NCMD have a long history of such histrionic withdrawals from almost every single important initiative which resulted in stronger collaboration between archaeologists and artefact hunters. Almost every single one. They claim to be the national representatives of the artefact hunter/collector and yet at every stage of any discussion head straight for conflict. (Rather like certain people on the board of directors of the ACCG then; it seems that collectors both sides of the Atlantic have a lot in commmon.) One collector in the UK was aware enough of the stuation of collecting today to notice that "the NCMD is not fighting our corner, but sidelining us from the leading edge of debate and developments". I wonder how long the US coin collector will take to realise that the ACCG is sidelining them in exactly the same way in the pursuit of the short-term aims of those who run it, a handful of (part-time) dealers in ancient artefacts dug up from sombody else's archaeological heritage and bought and sold no-questions-asked.

One detectorist went away from the conference having learnt a lesson which it is taking the ACCG and its member collectors an awful long time to grasp:

"Its already accepted that the genie is out of the box
and it isn`t going back in. No bans, no licencing but an acceptance that we cannot continue to remove a finite resource without taking on board some responsibility and that responsibility is to record the item as accurately as we
are able too ".

He is of course referring to the provenance of the artefact, not its mere existence.It seems a bit unlikely to me that anyone of normal intelligence could sit through two days of PAS-talk and NOT realise one simple fact. The collectors that are "on the bridge" with archaeologists are those who record the provenance of the objects they collect, pass that information on and record it in a permanent form. The ones that persist in collecting stuff without noting that information, hiding it or otherwise rendering it unavailable to study are an anathema. They are the ones who are destroying the archaeological heritage for mere personal entertainment and profit. It remains to be seen from his "report" whether Sayles actually understood that the PAS is actually set up to record provenance. It is around this alone that all the co-operation between archaeologist and artefact hunter in England and Wales is built. So what does that mean for coin dealers and coin collectors that too want to exhibit a "genuine interest in moving forward" along the path shown by the viable model of the PAS they so extoll? When will they leave the nineteenth century behind them?

The ABSTRACTS of the conference papers can be found here.

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Since I found Toyls Myrup's Roman Temple[s] in Lebanon over at WOGE 87, may I welcome you to an entirely legitimate WOGE 88 on TSA. Good luck.

Here are the rules:

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

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

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

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

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

When on Google Earth Facebook group here;

Have Fun.

La rédaction de Incidenza dell'Antico. Dialoghi di Storia Greca invite les collègues intéressés à soumettre à la rédaction, pour les prochains numéros de la revue, leurs articles et comptes rendus de livres, en les envoyant en format électronique à l’adresse incidenzantico@libero.it et en copie papier, par courrier, à l’adresse Incidenza dell’Antico, via Carlo Poerio, 110 – 80121 Napoli (Italia).

Les banquets civiques grecs ont fait l’objet de nombreuses études mettant l’accent sur le rôle essentiel du banquet dans le fonctionnement politique de la cité classique, communauté de citoyens-banqueteurs. Le propos du colloque de Tours sera principalement de reformuler dans d’autres contextes historiques (mondes orientaux, grec hellénistique, celtique, étrusque et romain) la question du lien entre banquet et politique, au centre de la problématique sur les banquets civiques grecs.

PROFESSOR GARY ANDERSON is interviewed in Christianity Today about his new book, Sin: A History.

Earlier review here.

A NEW NOVEL by a Hebrew scholar:

Hebraic scholar's historical novel unfolds love story of young woman caught between two cultures

Samuel's Daughter by Ann Brener creates the portrait of a young Jewish girl taken captive in the wars of ancient Iran and her road back to Judaism

WASHINGTON, D.C. (MMD Newswire) March 17, 2010 -- Samuel's Daughter: A Love Story from Third-Century Parthia by Ann Brener uses the story of the capture of Rabbi Samuel's daughter in 259 A.D. to propel a story about one girl's search for identity in the heart of ancient Iran.

[...]

HURVA SYNAGOGUE RESTORATION: Okay, so far I've ignored this story and the accompanying hoo-haw, since it's tangential to PaleoJudaica's interests. But here's an article in The Forward that summarizes briefly what's been going on:

No Longer in Ruins

Editorial

Published March 17, 2010, issue of March 26, 2010.

There is plenty to criticize when considering the Israeli government’s recent actions and statements on the future of Jerusalem, but that should not diminish its achievement in restoring the ancient Hurva Synagogue in the heart of the Old City’s Jewish Quarter.

[...]

Next week it is the "create your own oil spillage, make your mark on the local environment" event organized by the Northern Devon Coast & Countryside Service, but this week it is:

TRY your hand at metal detecting on Thursday (March 18th) with the History Hunters at Pilton in Barnstaple. The free Metal Detecting Training Day is being organised by Barnstaple Museum and offers an introduction to this fascinating hobby under the guidance of the Taw and Torridge Metal Detector's Club and the Devon Portable Antiquities Liaison Officer. It is part of the North Devon ALF project and is open to anyone aged 16 and over, but in particular those who would not normally get the chance to take part in such activities.The first session will meet at Pilton Park at 10am. Participants can find out about different machines, archaeology and how to be a responsible detectorist. There will be plenty of metal detectors to use, or bring your own. A second session will run from 2-4pm. To attend, call the museum on (01271) 346747.

I've left the number in for those who might fancy giving them a ring and asking them just what on earth they think they are doing. Here are the contact details of the Adult Learning (sic) Forum (ask them about their environmental policy).

Now it is one thing to set up a publicly funded Scheme to mitigate the damage caused by people running off with bits of the archaeological record (after hand-wringing and limp-wristed whinging that "we cannot really STOP them doing it"). It is another thing TOTALLY to use the same scheme to encourage more people to take it up. What on earth do these people think they are playing at? Whatever happened to Article 10(b) of UNESCO 1970?
Is that not what the PAS should be doing instead of fooling around teaching people that archaeological sites are great places to have fun digging up collectables? Is that archaeological "outreach" (no, collecting loose archaeological artefacts is not "archaeology") or just a cynical way to get the PAS "recorded finds" statistics boosted by getting more people involved in this erosive hobby? Outrageous.

Riots erupted at venerated burial grounds in Uganda on Wednesday after a suspicious fire on Tuesday engulfed the Tombs of the Buganda Kings at Kasubi. The violence is a symptom of continuing troubles between the Ugandan government and members of the Buganda traditional kingdom who want more local power. The tombs were built in 1882 and later converted into a royal burial ground for the Buganda kingdom and are now a World Heritage site. In the fire the main tomb, made of wood, thatch, reed and wattle, burnt to the ground. Supporters of the kabaka, the Buganda king, blamed arson as the cause of the disaster, and Kingdom officials called for a week of mourning.

By Wednesday evening, hundreds of members of the Buganda community were streaming toward the remains of the tomb, camping out by their remains. Protests erupted when Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, visited the scene of the fire and protesters tried to prevent him from approaching the tombs. Witnesses said that police officers shot and killed three protesters.

Jeffrey Gettleman and Josh Kron Suspicion of Arson at Royal Tombs Fuels Deadly Clashes in Uganda, New York Times March 17, 2010.

Video here

The site can be 'visited' virtually here .

This situation is another example of the embedding of cultural property (in this case a place, a powerful place, a place of memory) in identity which universalist collectors' lobbyists simplify under their "Nationalist" label. The situation with 'identity' and 'heritage' is of course far more complicated than the Cunos of this world would like their readers to think.

Ghost of a flea pointed me to jeff black, berlin, who writes:

A page from a 7th century Sanaa ms.

German researchers preparing “Qur’an: The Critical Edition”

This is a serious business. A team of researchers at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences is preparing to bring out the first installment of Corpus Coranicum – which purports to be nothing less than the first critically evaluated text of the Qur’an ever to be produced.

 What this means is that the research team is in the process of analysing and transcribing some 12,000 slides of Qur’an mansucripts from the first six centuries of the text’s existence. Once that is complete, the way is open to producing a text that annotates and, presumably, provides some sort of exegesis on the differences found in the early manuscripts.

…

The Potsdam-based team of Corpus Coranicum have so far concentrated on Suras 18 to 20, and are due to produce a first slice of the final product from that in the next few weeks. The whole book is meant to take until around 2025.

UPDATE: The English language site seems to be down but the Google cache contains the following, seemingly from an old update:

Welcome to the Corpus Coranicum

The project “Corpus Coranicum” contains two unworked fields of qur’anic studies: (1) the documentation of the qur’anic text in his handwritten as well as orally transmitted form and (2) a comprehensive commentary which elucidates the text within the framework of its historical process of development.

Because of the ambiguity of the early defective writing system of the Qur’anic manuscripts, a strict separation of the data on the one hand provided by manuscripts and on the other hand transmitted via the tradition of recitation is recommended. The documentation of the Qur’anic text will provide a documentation for both traditions and compare them afterwards.

The planned commentary focuses on a historical perspective, the Qur’an seen as a text which evolved through the period of more than twenty years, thereby getting formal and content-related differences through abrogation and re-definitions within the text. Furthermore, the commentary is based on an inclusion of the judeo-christian intertexts and looks at the Qur’an as a document of the Late Antiquity. “Corpus Coranicum” is in the early stage of its development; the first results are planned to be published online in 2009.

That shows a very sensible approach.  You eat an elephant a little at a time.  Rather than working on a Koran text as such, work on the early witnesses to the text, the physical remains, the unvocalised scripts, and find out what we actually have from that period and what it says.

In his paper delivered to the Newcastle CBA-sponsored Conference, Scottish archaeologist David Connolly attempted to deal "with the realities in the field", "drawing on a wealth of recent analysis and fieldwork" to discuss portable antiquities collection in the UK. One of the things he had obviously set out to do was convince his audience that estimates of the rate artefacts are being taken out of the ground by artefact hunters created by its critics (like the Heritage Action Erosion Counter) are false.

In order to do this he asked a couple of his mates with metal detectors on the detecting forums to create a little demonstration for him. Six case studies are presented (slides 11-14 in his online presentation). They represent the fruits of 26 hours detecting in four counties, only one of which is in the southeast of the country. Four guys were out in the fields for four hours a day, and two reportedly for six [one of whom according to details presented in the transcript but not on the recording was there between ten and two in the afternoon, work that out]. The average period of time spent in the field on these days was therefore 4.33 hours.

The intention behind this action was to show the truth of the statement one can frequently see on metal detecting forums in the UK (especially since the HA Erosion counter appeared) that "metal detectorists find lots of metal items, but our critics do not know that this is mostly rubbish" (the HA Erosion Counter does not estimate the number of all metal objects being found by metal detectorists, just the ones which are 'recordable' in PAS database terms).

The notion of "rubbish" is different for the collector and the archaeologist. There is indeed a remarkable amount of totally modern rubbish (tin cans, tinfoil, ring pulls etc etc) in British fields, showing what a slovenly lot they are. The five case studies however also produced a relatively large number of "scraps of lead", "scraps of copper alloy", "undiagnostic fragments of copper alloy" and "various bits of iron". These the artefact hunters dismissed as "rubbish" too. Now I do not know how David Connolly digs, but I wonder whether he would throw away such material in the course of his own investigations? What is "undiagnostic" archaeological material? Corroded iron really needs X-raying before being summarily dismissed. Pieces of non-ferrous metal do not fall from the sky in a shower, they do not get broken by raindrops falling on them. They are archaeological finds and archaeological evidence. What they are NOT is the sort of collectable that V-coins dealers in the States, or Timelines auctioneers in the UK would sell in their shops. You'll not see many of them on eBay, but they are nevertheless archaeological artefacts. They are archaeological artefacts being removed from archaeological assemblages by metal detector use. But they are not the kind of archaeological artefact which the PAS generally record, like the collectors, they too are very selective. We'll come back to these artefacts in a moment.

Of the items that Connolly showed, which are recordable by the PAS or the Scottish TTU? Well, there were three hammered pennies, recordable. Five "copper grots", they should at least be looked at; there were three fragments of copper alloy vessel, these are an object type recorded in the PAS database. Some Neolithic flintwork, recordable. Medieval pottery, recordable. There were various buckles, no picture was given, were they all Post-Medieval? Would all of the supposedly "undiagnostic" artefacts have been rejected by the PAS had they been submitted to them? We will never know because in only one of the case studies (20%) were the finds noted as having been seen by the PAS.

So if six sessions of a total of 28 hours metal detecting (average 4.33 hours each) in different parts of England find a minimum of seven individual or groups of recordable items, that means that ten thousand detector users in the same 4.33 hours could be finding 2500 recordable items (and if as in the case studies quoted only 20% of them are being reported to the PAS or TTU...). They also are denuding sites of large numbers of what would in a proper investigation be regarded as archaeological finds but which are not collectable, so are summarily discarded, or taken away to be sold as scrap metal.

The degree of bias in these quoted figures presented by Connolly should be considered. Before his presentation Dave Connolly was seen on detecting forums pleading for information for his test cases and stating what the results were going to be used for. Is it not conceivable, especially given the paranoia currently rampant in the UK detecting community, that the information supplied to him by his detectorist informants was selected in order to make a point? After all these lists have hundreds (claim thousands) of members, why were the "statistics" from just a single car-full of artefact hunters used in this "analysis of the situation"?

Oddly enough, Connolly makes no use of the other statistics he gives in his paper, of his Water Newton rally where he said in "two days" of detecting, 320 artefact hunters found 585 recordable items. Now, unfortunately Connolly (I sure this is just an accident) neglects to present in his report of this event the number of hours that people were searching. In the absence of this information, let us accept that the 4.33 hours average detecting session noted in the Connolly case studies is what most people can put up with (many detectorists say they only go to these rallies for the social life rather than the detecting). Thus 320 finders searching for 8.66 hours found 585 recordable objects. This finds rate (even without taking into account Connolly's "89%" recording rate) means that in the same 4.33 hours ten thousand detectorists could be finding 9140 recordable artefacts. There is more than a slight discrepancy between the two sets of figures that Connolly presents in his "analysis". In fact he ignores the implications of the data set provided by the rally he himself helped organize.

But then, it is just as hard to account for Connolly's other omission. I am sure he is aware that there was another survey carried out by UK metal detector users back in 2005. Nevertheless he does not even mention it. Why? In this earlier survey, "detectorists" were asked to list everything found in a three hour search, and the results were published on the UKDN detecting forum (the link is now broken). The results of thirty nine metal detecting sessions in various regions of the country were presented online, and they were surprisingly consistent. It is interesting to note that several of the participants called the results “typical”, while some emphasised they normally had “better” results (meaning a higher ratio of interesting finds). In all, the full results of over 127 hours detecting were presented for scrutiny. Of the 39 metal detector users taking part, in just those three hours 19 of them found between 1 and 7 items which fall into the category of ‘reportable’, 127 man-hours of detecting produced in total 52 items of this nature alongside many more other metal finds. This figure would be the equivalent of ten thousand people finding 19244 recordable items in those 4.33 hours detecting. Considerably more than the five test cases presented at the Newcastle conference by David Connolly. Why were the implications of these figures ignored?

There is however evidence that finds recovery rates can be much higher. On this blog I discussed a YouTube video some UK metal detectorists had made of their exploits in Suffolk. The video was almost immediately withdrawn when I pointed out its implications, which were clear. A single weekend's detecting can produce a relatively large number of recordable finds.

Now, ten thousand detector users is a low estimate, but obviously if each of them is finding objects at the rate indicated by any of the figures mentioned above, then the number of finds leaving the "productive sites" of the fields of Britain for eBay and various scattered personal collections is potentially - and disturbingly - huge.

Connolly rightly says that - shabily despite a dozen years of liaison - we do not know for sure how many hours different groups of metal detectorists spend out in the fields in the UK. Obviously this is something the PAS should have been able to found out by now, that they have not indicates that they have different priorities than creating an understandinfg of how the data that they accumulate are actually generated - surely fundamental to their informed interpretation and understanding. We learn from forums tha some detector using artefact hunters certainly spend every free moment out on their "productive sites", I've noted a couple of these in my blog as I recall. Terry Herbert comes to mind, home all day on a disability allowance. Others of course, less involved, go out maybe a few hours on the odd sunny weekend. Many however pay lots of cash to go on "club digs" and rallies so may spend longer out in the field. Up north there are groups that hold such meetings almost every weekend in the detecting season.

Perhaps it would not be going too far to assume that, to earn the name, the average metal detector using artefact hunter could go out fifteen times in a year, the equivalent of once a month and a couple of days more in the holiday season. That is a total of 65 hours a year. I believe that is a fair estimate. So how many finds a year would that produce? About thirty recordable items a year, a head.

Connolly criticises (at 19:01 of his presentation) the Heritage Action Erosion Counter because it "ticks away and is based on dodgy statistics". Now, I know for a fact that Connolly has not actually seen the figures on which it is based, but prejudges them - on the basis, it would seem, of his desire to present the metal detectorist as "not much of a threat" in order to then argue that co-operation with their denudation of archaeological assemblages would be an "opportunity". In fact the rate at which the HA counter is ticking is based on much better statistics than those he attempts to marshall to demonstrate that it is wrong.

The rate at which it is ticking is just under thirty recordable finds per person a year. A not unreasonable number - but numbers have a habit of adding up the longer one refuses to see a problem and do something about it. And I would say that daft-headed attempts to pretend "there is no problem" by British archaeologists like Mr Connolly are part OF the problem.

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UPDATE: Heritage Action's reaction can now be seen here: "Metal detecting: Heritage Action vindicated at Portable Antiquities conference".

" Mr Connolly went onto a detectorists forum and asked people to tell him what they found in a single session in order, as he told them, to “show that all current statistics are flawed” and achieve a situation where “the only people with stats will be us” (“us”, Mr Connolly??)"

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Today is the day of DH! over 150 people in digital humanities will be blogging throughout the day, saying what they are up to, and showing the diversity of the discipline.

You can see my own mini blog here, although its not going to be the day I thought, for yesterday my dear little laptop keeled over, forever. I am currently typing this on my TV in my living room (thank goodness we have 5 or 6 computers just kicking about, that come in useful in situations like this). But still - I am oddly bereft.

Bereft, but not tearing my hair out. I keep pretty good backups, so think I may have irrecoverably lost about 30 mins of work, and a to do list, so its not the disaster it could have been. But my little machine! my machine!

I'll remember the good times. sniff.

Scottish archaeologist David Connolly appeared at the Newcastle conference on building bridges between archaeology and artefact collecting. He has obligingly put his presentation "What's missing? Reality resources and reactions" online. This serves as a useful summary of what the problem is in the current "partnership" between British archaeologists and artefact hunters and collectors.

This is what he said before the conference he was going to do:

"Exploring the UK systems and preconceptions, this paper deals with the realities in the field and uses the author's previously gathered information along with statistical analysis that compares the two main processes of artefact collection – detecting and commercial archaeology. Drawing on a wealth of recent analysis and fieldwork, the purpose will be to reassess the directions taken, and argue for a focussed approach that acknowledges both the benefits and harsh realities when it comes to dealing with portable antiquities collection, sale and recording in the UK".

The talk fails to deliver the promise. There is a lot about what a wonderful "opportunity" (to get to see handfulls of loose archaeological artefacts) artefact hunting offers to the British object-oriented archaeologist, but the only "harsh reality" this speaker recognised is that there are "misconceptions on both sides" which stand in the way of full co-operation.

Archaeologist Connolly seems to regard the critics of current policies on collecting as his opponents. Here we have direct confirmation of the US de