Classics, Ancient History, Linguistics, Academia and more
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 →
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 →
I've recently started on a very exciting new collaboration with the I.Sicily project, which is building a fully searchable, freely available online corpus of the inscriptions of Sicily. (In my head I keep turning this project into "I, Sicily" in the manner of "I, Claudius" - this sounds quite dramatic, so I'm sticking with it.) To... Continue Reading →
I'm reviewing a book this week called Vanishing Acts On Ancient Greek Amulets by Christopher A. Faraone. It's a short monograph that's incredibly rich in detail, using magical amulets in Greek, Latin and other languages to trace developments in how healing spells were spoken and written from the first century to the sixth century AD. In particular,... Continue Reading →
I remember when I first realised that the English word "alphabet" came from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet - alpha and beta - and somehow I felt like I'd cracked a kind of etymological code. But the list of brilliant names for alphabet terms just goes on. The word "alphabet" is of... Continue Reading →
Last week was our second "Greek in Italy" project trip to the south of Italy. Like our last trip in September 2014, I'm sure that pictures and thoughts from this trip will keep bubbling up in my blog posts and articles for quite some time. But even though we've only just got back and I've... Continue Reading →
My holiday reading this year was Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, which I had been meaning to read for a while. For the first three hundred pages, it was a total escape from work - but then what should pop up in Part III but a reference to Umbrian: Alexei Alexandrovich ordered tea to be served in... Continue Reading →
pis: tiú: íív: kúrú: púiiu: baíteís: aadiieís: ahfineís: Who are you? I am a stone. Whose? Baitis Aadiis Afinis's. (Oscan inscription on stone. Altilia, Italy. c. 150-90 BC. Imagines Italicae: Saepinum 2, Sabellische Texte: Sa 31) It's not often that I'm tempted to describe an inscription as "cute", but I've always found this short Oscan... Continue Reading →
Katherine McDonald 