Classics, Ancient History, Linguistics, Academia and more
From the CREWS project blog, here's a great new blog post by Pippa Steele. It's the result of an experimental archaeology investigation into the types of styli used for different types of clay tablets around the ancient Mediterranean. I saw Pippa give a paper based on this research in Cambridge a few weeks ago, and... Continue Reading →
This term, I'm working on the translations for my Italy Before Rome sourcebook. (Among other things, I've learned very swiftly that I am not capable of translating more than one language in the same day, so I have to block out each day for different things.) The result of reading these texts so closely is... Continue Reading →
You can never predict how the internet will react to something. On Friday, I tweeted a picture of a bronze Etruscan statuette which I described as 'Etruscan Lisa Simpson'. I'd actually tweeted this already, about six months previously, but came across it again as I was revising a chapter. This time, Lisa caught everyone's imagination,... Continue Reading →
I'm very pleased to say that Italy Before Rome: A Sourcebook is now under contract with Routledge, as part of the Routledge Sourcebooks for the Ancient World series. The book is based on my module 'Italy Before Rome', which ran in 2017/18 - but with plenty more material and, crucially, new translations of the material we covered.... Continue Reading →
I was amazed to hear recently that there is a film out where the dialogue is in Rhaetic. This is one of the more obscure languages of ancient Italy, and not one which usually gets a lot of attention. [NB - some links and videos in this post include images of human remains.] Iceman (2017) is a... Continue Reading →
The UK (and many other areas of the world) has been experiencing a prolonged heatwave this summer. Some love it, and some hate it, but it's clearly been fantastic for archaeologists. In the dry weather, grass and crops dry out at different rates depending on what the soil underneath is like - where there was... Continue Reading →
The ancient blogosphere has been alive with excellent blog posts this week (is it an end-of-term thing? Must be). Two posts particularly caught my eye for their new perspective on well-known ancient objects. In her post 'A Reversed Perspective: Looking at Greek and Roman Art from Behind(s)', Sarah Bond presents a round-up of some of... Continue Reading →
There's been a lot of interesting discussion recently in the Classics Twitter-sphere about translation - and specifically about sexism in translation. Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey has been the catalyst for a lot of this discussion, and she has been outspoken about the deficiencies that she sees in previous translations, including sexism and the... Continue Reading →
Here's a lovely post by CREWS Project colleague Philip Boyes on some of the fictional writing systems used in Star Wars. The examples of handwriting are particularly fun ways in which the filmmakers have used writing in very human ways. Philip also has interesting things to say on how useful or 'realistic' these strategies actually... Continue Reading →
This week marks the end of the AHRC-funded 'Greek in Italy' project. James Clackson, the PI of the project and my former PhD supervisor, has written a great post to mark the end of the project. He doesn't just look back at what the project has achieved - quite a lot in four years! -... Continue Reading →
