2022 Year-Ender
The year 2022 is being escorted away by 200 soldiers and 70 horsemen and 200 ambidextrous soldiers so that the locals don’t do it an injury.[1] What on earth can I say about it?
Read moreMonth: December 2022
The Stele of G. Damianus
In the before times, when I could travel and had something to travel to, I visited Bologna. In their museum of antiquity I saw this funerary stele. Judging by the clothing and style I would date it around 150-250 CE. The soldier wears boots not sandals, his tunic has long sleeves, and his belt is narrow and not covered with brass or silver plaques. At first I was amused by the soldier’s very Celtic moustache in one of the cities where the Romans did their best to eliminate the native Celtic population. A little research showed an unexpected story!
Read moreThe Cuneiform Stylus
In an interview about her new book Weavers, Scribes, and Kings on the cuneiform world, Amanda Podany talks about how the ancient Near East is still not as widely known as the Greek world or the La Tène world.
I’ve been teaching this material for a very long time, and I see what my students find fascinating and what surprises them and what questions they have. And based on that, I had a sense of what I thought would be fascinating in the book. I think it’s not as hard as you would think to translate what scholars have written into language that is just more accessible, because they’ve done a wonderful job already. I mean, I’m not suggesting that I am somehow taking something that was very obscure and making it accessible. They’ve done that work. It’s just that it’s been published in academic journals that are hard to find if you’re a general reader. They’ve been published in books that may be very expensive, that are from academic publishers. It just felt as though this is a way of kind of opening the window to this field for people where they can then go and read the works if they’re interested by the scholars who have worked on it.
Interview, Amanda H. Podany https://www.worldhistory.org/article/2104/weavers-scribes-and-kings-a-new-history-of-the-anc/
In honour of that, this week I will post about one of those articles which could get a wider readership if people knew about it: Michele Cammarosano’s “The Cuneiform Stylus” (academia dot edu).
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