Classics, Ancient History, Linguistics, Academia and more
The new book Échanger en Méditerranée: Acteurs, pratiques et normes dans les mondes anciens turned up in my pigeon hole this week - and I'm thrilled to see it in physical form at last! I was also sent some beautifully produced physical off-prints of my chapter - I haven't seen one of them in ages, and they look... Continue Reading →
Last week I enjoyed a nice afternoon off, checking out the British Museum's "Sicily: Culture and Conquest". I highly recommend it - the displays are fascinating, though somewhat crowded (as always). The exhibition focusses mainly on the Greek and Norman periods of Sicilian history, so go with that in mind if you're expecting lots of... Continue Reading →
On the 27th and 28th May, the E Caucus and the Greek in Italy project are hosting the Laurence Seminar 2016, a yearly conference at the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge. This year, our theme is Migration, Mobility and Language Contact in Italy and the Western Mediterranean. Over the past decade, language contact has become a key... Continue Reading →
This week at the Faculty of Classics, we held the second Venetic seminar (summed up by one attendee as "Close Encounters of the Venetic Kind"). We tackled a few more of the shorter inscriptions as a warm up, including one of the dedicatory styluses from Este - you can see a selection of these in... Continue Reading →
Yesterday we had the first of two introductory seminars on Venetic. The high point was, of course, the excellent cake by Anna Judson, shown here with Anna holding it up next to a picture of the inscription itself for comparison. As you can see, it was both tasty and highly accurate! Epigraphy-themed cakes have become... Continue Reading →
Everyone interested in ancient languages and scripts should follow the CREWS project blog. CREWS (which stands for Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems) is a major new ERC-funded project hosted at the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge, run by my excellent colleague Pippa Steele. To quote from her introduction to the project: The aim of... Continue Reading →
Today's inscription is a fantastic example of linguists getting a huge amount of information about ancient societies out of very short texts. How short? Well, about two letters actually. Buxentum 2 (c. 300 BC) reads <ΔΗ>, or <DE> to transcribe it into the Roman alphabet. The two letters are joined by one of their lines, to make... Continue Reading →
Tomorrow I'll be speaking at the Cambridge Philological Society, 4pm in the Old Senior Combination room at Trinity College. Tea, coffee and cake is provided - all welcome! My title is Competition and Identity in Venetic Funerary Epigraphy: Becoming Roman at Este and Padua. I'm very excited about this talk, as I'll be dealing with a... Continue Reading →
It’s been a busy week for me this week, with two big events taking up all of my time. The first was the launch of the Women’s Classical Committee UK, and the second was a digital humanities workshop for training in EpiDoc XML mark-up and other digital methods. A week of contrasts, and lots of... Continue Reading →
One of the odd things when you learn Latin is that you start to see it everywhere. It's so embedded into Western culture, that you need look no further than your own pocket to find some Latin (assuming you have a couple of coins in your pocket, that is). But what's even weirder is that... Continue Reading →
Katherine McDonald 