Life’s been a bit dull since I handed in my thesis (which went very well!), but it was broken by the pleasant opportunity to give a tour of the Cast Gallery (the most visible part of the Museum of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge).
The Cast Gallery is nestled above the foyer of the Classics Faculty and is really pretty awesome. I have to admit though, ‘pretty awesome’ was not how I first thought of the Cast Gallery. I think my thoughts Continue reading
Sure, why not.
My first reaction to this article was skeptical, as it almost always is whenever someone has ‘discovered a new X’ and bases their discovery on miniscule evidence. I would certainly prefer the evidence were something other than names. However, it’s not such shoddy evidence as it might appear at first. Though I make zero claims to knowing much at all about Semitic languages or really anything at all about the big puddle of languages that lived east of the Aegean (reread the phrase ‘big puddle of languages’ and imagine the simultaneously crestfallen and disdainful look of the Assyriologist who just read that phrase), I would have to agree that when a whole bunch of names we’ve never heard before show up, it makes sense that they would have come from another language.
So, sincerely, well done dudes and dudettes who deciphered the tablet.
What irritates me is Continue reading
My thesis has been consuming a lot of my time (now that I’ve started working on it…), so the next installment of ‘w’ (I know you’re all dying to know how the saga ends!) will be coming along slowly; presumably when I take a hiatus from my thesis (it’s funny because my thesis is about hiatus.)
In the mean time, allow me to fill up my chunk o’internet by sending you along to a different chunk o’internet. A very nice chunk. One written by the lovely Mary Beard (who is lovely, despite whatever certain shallow pieces of excrement might say). It’s a quick little blurb about an amusing piece of epigraphy that she’d mentioned briefly in Meet the Romans: Mr “Hot Sex”: the full story
Enjoy!
Professor Mary Beard has just aired the first episode of her new series, Meet the Romans. Having just finished watching it, I do not hesitate to recommend it with high praise.
Listening to the first episode, I felt like I was seeing what the new era of Classics would look like: When people first began studying the Classics in earnest, they reminisced of the ‘glory of old’ and ‘better times’. The tone was moralizing, and the focus was Continue reading
(just a tiny) Piece of the Internet 