Classics, Ancient History, Linguistics, Academia and more
The last two months have been incredibly busy as I scrambled to get the Italy Before Rome manuscript in before the deadline of 31st March (remind me in future not to set deadlines at the end of term). It feels great to have the manuscript finished and off my desk, at least for a little... Continue Reading →
This week is all about numbers (specifically the number 270). As we all sit here waiting for the counting to happen, I thought I'd share one of the most intriguing little pieces of detective work in Etruscan studies: the number system. As we've discussed before, it's not difficult to read Etruscan - we know what... Continue Reading →
Over the last few years, the field has been hugely enriched by lots of innovative new books on pre-Roman Italy and its populations. Many of them have really committed to interdisciplinary methods, combining historical, archaeological and linguistic evidence - with great results. Even better, these books are perfect to set for undergraduate reading (if you... Continue Reading →
As part of my AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellowship, I am lucky enough to have funding for several research trips to Italy. The first major trip, in April this year, took in a huge number of sites and museums - I really wanted to get a feel for parts of Tuscany and Umbria which I'd... 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 →
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 →
I've held off posting about my new module, Italy Before Rome, for two reasons. Most importantly, I've been extremely busy writing and teaching it! But I've also held back because, although I had a vision for what I wanted the module to be like, and the ideas I wanted to get across, I didn't know... Continue Reading →
Last week (just in time to coincide with both the "Greek in Italy" workshop and the triggering of Article 50) I was featured on a podcast series presented by my colleague Richard Flower. Distant Pasts: Adventures in an Alternative Antiquity looks at some of the more surprising, unusual and lesser known aspects of the ancient world,... Continue Reading →
I mentioned that at Geoff Fest last week I gave a paper on the "reception" of Oscan - mainly consisting of mentions of Oscan in slightly unexpected contexts from the sixteenth century onwards. One of those instances was in An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, written by John Wilkins in 1668. Wilkins was a... 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 →
Katherine McDonald 