Jn 16:33, Pre-Athonite and Athonite:
მე მიძლევიეს სოფელსა.
ἐγὼ νενίκηκα τὸν κόσμον.
The Adishi version, instead of the perfect (a-me-victum-est = vici), has the aorist ვსძლე.
Old Georgian phrases and sentences 11
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The Townley Homer at the British Library
A very welcome addition to the British Library collection of digital manuscripts is announced on their blog today. In an excellent article by Julian Harrison, Hooray for Homer!, we learn that BL. Burney 86, a 10th century manuscript with copious scholia, is now accessible here.
The article itself is really useful, giving the history of the Ms. in modern times, links to other Homer mss. at the British Library, and a bibliography. It would be impossible and unnecessary to do this for every manuscript placed online; but it is nice to see, once in a while.
It is also very nice to see an appreciation of a manuscript that is of textual interest, rather than the “pretty pretty picture” type manuscript that tends too often to attract digitisation.
Scholia are remarkably hard to get access to, and only Eleanor Dickey’s handbook Greek scholarship is available to guide those interested. So it is nice to see pictures in the blog article of the text, and some explanation (with translation) of what these have to offer.
Well done.
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Mark Goodacre on Doctor Who and New Testament Canons
Mark Goodacre brings his expertise in New Testament and his expertise in Doctor Who together in a Two Minute Timelord podcast. Click through to have a listen!
I would be interested to know what listeners think of Mark’s points.
An interesting point to consider is that this podcast is by definition not canonical, and so, just as with the New Testament, any answer to the question “what is in the Doctor Who canon?” is by definition itself extracanonical.
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Plaque Jewellery Seven gold plaques, each decorated with two...
Plaque Jewellery
Seven gold plaques, each decorated with two female heads in relief, perhaps Astarte, in a window-like frame of granulation. The central plaque has a boss decorated with granulation, and five suspended beads; the other six plaques have four suspended beads.
c.700-600 BC
Orientalising Period (Greek)
(Source: The British Museum)
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Cuirassed statue of Hadrian wearing the Corona Civica, from the North Nymphaeum at Perga, Antalya Museum
Hadrian statue, Antalya Museum
Carole Raddato
The larger than life size marble statue depicts Hadrian (from the Chiaramonti 392 type) in military garb including a leather molded chest covering (cuirass), a military cloak (paludamentum) draped over his shoulder and arm, a special belt (cingulum), a knee length garment (tunic), sandals, etc. His head is crowned with a tall wreath of oak leaves.
Perga was an ancient Greek city in Anatolia and the capital of Pamphylia, now in Antalya province on the southwestern Mediterranean coast of Turkey. Today it is a large site of ancient ruins 15 kilometres east of Antalya on the coastal plain. During the Hellenistic period, Perga was one of the richest and most beautiful cities in the ancient world, famous for its temple of Artemis.
In the reign of Hadrian, Plancia Magna, one of the most successful and influential women from Anatolia, undertook large remodelling projects in Perga, including a nympheum. She erected a number of statues depicting Roman emperors and their wives, from the reigns of Nerva to Hadrian.
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Mersu is an ancient desert that you can read more about...
Mersu is an ancient desert that you can read more about here
Can be used for many Near Eastern and Mesopotamian deities/spirits.
Mersu - Date Nut Rolls
Ingrediants
1/2kg of de-seeded dates
Chopped almonds
Chopped pistachios
Directions
Cut and mash de-seeded dates until they form a paste that can be flattened out to about 1/2 inch to 1 inch thick.
Sprinkle whole paste mixture with chopped almonds.
Roll date mix into a sausage shape with almonds in the centre.
Roll or cover date log in chopped pistachios.
Cut into small slices and serve.
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Diving For Bottles Again
The people who owned my mom’s summer house in the 60s and 70s threw household waste into the sea from the main dock. And they methodically filled their empty wine bottles with water and sank them there. (If you toss an empty bottle into the sea it floats away.) The water’s only about 2.5 m deep at the dock, so when we took over in ’82 we could see the junk covering the sea floor clearly. Hundreds of bottles. For a few years in the mid-80s me, my brother and our friends did a lot of diving and took most of the stuff ashore. But a few empties have still been visible in favourable lighting, farther out than we used to dive. Today I picked them up, using a hand net for the first time on my dives, which made the whole operation way more effective. I’ve been retouching the archaeological record.
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Center for Artefact Research boven de doopvont
De archeologische sector is een kenniscentrum rijker. Het nieuwe Center for Artefact Research (CAR) legt zich toe op het promoten en ondersteunen van archeologische materiaalstudies. Dit wordt gedaan door het verzamelen en toegankelijk maken van kennis. Center for Artefact Research voert ook archeologische materiaalstudies uit voor archeologische bedrijven en andere archeologische instellingen. Op dit moment kan men er terecht voor (post-)middeleeuws aardewerk (BE en NL). Het aanbod wordt op termijn, en op aanvraag, verder uitgebreid. Meer informatie op www.artefactresearch.be.
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Offering Stand, Yorghan Tepe, Stratum II. This house-shaped...
Offering Stand, Yorghan Tepe, Stratum II.
This house-shaped ceramic offering stand was found in one of the smaller dwellings at Nuzi. A separate bowl would have rested on top of the cylindrical support. The house, which forms the base of the stand, has windows (or doors), battlements around the roof and roof-beams at the corners. The incised vertical strips at the corners may represent a structural feature, or they may just be decoration, like the small impressed circles. (Text: Semitic Museum)
Courtesy & currently located at the Semitic Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
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Cinerary Urn 510-490 BC Height: 22cm Length:...
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Antony and Cleopatra Coin Found in Israel
BETHSAIDA, ISRAEL—A bronze coin unearthed in a first-century house at Tel Bethsaida features an image of Cleopatra on one side and Marc Antony on the other. The coin was minted in the Mediterranean port of Akko, also known as Acre, following Marc Antony’s victory over the Parthians in 35 B.C. Only six other coins bearing likenesses of the powerful lovers have been found anywhere in the world.
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Two Men Arrested in Greece Possessed Antiquities
MILOS, GREECE—Two brothers were arrested on the Greek island of Milos after police found antiquities, and illegal weapons, firecrackers, and drugs in their homes and food service operation. The artifacts, which include pieces of pottery, are from the Roman and Byzantine periods.
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Mycenaean Tombs Discovered in Bodrum, Turkey
ANKARA, TURKEY—Mycenaean tombs have been unearthed in Bodrum by researchers from the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology. So far, archaeologists have recovered a canteen, a three-handled cup, a jug, a bronze razor, animal bones, glass, and beads from the 3,500-year-old tombs, according to excavation supervisor Yusuf Boysal.
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18th-Century Garbage Pit Unearthed in Boston
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS—An excavation of the backyard at the Clough House in Boston’s North End has revealed garbage from the eighteenth century. The two-story house was built by mason Ebenezer Clough in 1715. He also helped construct the nearby Old North Church, which opened in 1723. One hundred years later, another story had been added to the house, which was broken up into apartments and rented, as the neighborhood became less affluent. But the backyard remained intact. City archaeologist Joseph Bagley and a crew of volunteers unearthed animal bones, doll parts, and bits of dishes. “This whole backyard was a trash dump. And back in the day, I think the backyard would have been just disgusting,” he said.
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Cars Banned From Rome’s Forum and Colosseum
ROME, ITALY—New mayor of Rome Ignazio Marino has closed the major route through the forum and the Colosseum to all traffic except for buses, taxis, bicycles, and emergency vehicles. Built by Benito Mussolini, the road divides the historic district. Mayor Ignazio wants to protect archaeological monuments and uncover the forums of Nerva, Julius Caesar, Trajan, and Augustus buried under the avenue. “I don’t think any other city in the world… would have turned the Colosseum, probably the most famous monument on the planet, into a roundabout,” he said. But reduced traffic during the month of August could erupt into chaos next month.
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Open Access Archaeology Digest #141
A nice batch of Open Access (free to read) articles:
Roman Antiquities in South Germany
http://bit.ly/1030cQq
Towards an Archaeological Methodology for Expert Systems
http://bit.ly/17ud8xO
Sites and Site Clusters: Middle Period Archaeology of the San Francisquito Drainage
http://bit.ly/17udaFY
Roman Antiquities in South Germany
http://bit.ly/1030cQq
Towards an Archaeological Methodology for Expert Systems
http://bit.ly/17ud8xO
Sites and Site Clusters: Middle Period Archaeology of the San Francisquito Drainage
http://bit.ly/17udaFY
Learn more about Open Access and Archaeology at: http://bit.ly/YHuyFK
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Admin News: We're Opening Submissions for a trial period!
Hey guys!
Since we’ve been really busy of late with our own work, it’s made interacting with you guys a bit difficult and we regret that Suggestion Sunday/Solve it Sunday haven’t run in months. We’re just run off our feet!
To remedy this, we have decided to do a trial of opening submissions, for one month, so that you guys can submit objects that you have seen that you think are awesome, write ups of galleries containing ancient objects you’ve seen on museum visits, or write ups of specific cultures that you think would be interesting for your fellow followers.
We’re doing this as we recognise that our followers have a wide knowledge base that exceeds ours in some areas, and they may be able to tell you guys about things we could never dream of. We think this would be beneficial to us all in the long run and more fun for you, our followers.
So, these are our submission guidelines (which can also be found on the submission page):
1) Any post made must be on a subject within our given time frame - 7000 BC - 600 AD (or on Pre History). If you’re posting about a trip to a museum, please make sure that you only cover the “Ancient" part of the trip :)
2) Object posts must follow the same framework as our own object posts, along with the object being correctly sourced to where the object came from (i.e. British Museum web page or Flicker page etc). We will add submission credit to your post. If the photo is your own photo, please let us know and we will give you photo credit.
3) Information posts must follow our format, but of course you can add sources if you wish. These will also have submission credit given to you.
4) All posts will be vetted before being added to the queue. This is just to catch any spelling mistakes, or historical errors before your post is put out.
5) We observe the right to delete any abusive material or posts we feel aren’t appropriate to be put out.
6) We have a very long queue and, depending on what type of post you have submitted (object or information), it may take a while to turn up on the blog. It has reached us and we ask you to be patient.
That’s all the guidelines for now. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask us :)
So that’s it guys! We hope that this will be successful so that we can keep doing this in the future.
The Ancient Peoples Admin Team
Edit: It would be useful if admin remembered to add a link to the submit page. (She’s been researching all day) You can find it here.
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Gary Dorrien on Liberal Protestantism
Gary Dorrien has some thoughts on why Liberal Protestantism may seem not to be thriving, and yet be doing some very important things less visibly. Here's the conclusion:
I regret that religious progressives like me have reached so few people beyond the small worlds of the academy, church and community organizing in which we live.
Progressive Christianity today, by whatever name, is characterized by an ethos of egalitarian civility that makes it allergic to developing strong leaders. It works in a coalitional style and speaks in the voice of an improvisational ensemble, or as James Wind says, an always-evolving chorus. We don’t want anyone to presume to lead us or speak for us, and we tend to be reticent about our faith.
On occasion we lament the absence of prophetic heroes, but what really matters to us is to build cooperative, ecumenical, egalitarian communities that promote human flourishing and the variety of spiritual gifts.
Click through to read the rest.
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Archaeology and GitHub
When I was an undergraduate, I had an awesome class in archaeological statistics at UVa. We were tasked with doing a final project using actual archaeological data and manipulating the data using statistics. I wanted to do something osteology-related and, in 1998, this involved going to the library and poring through archaeological site reports until I found one, from Egypt, that provided some metric data of skull size and shape. The data were hardly contextualized, languishing in an appendix. This was cumbersome, to say the least, and I learned as much about data entry as I did about archaeological statistics with this project.
It may be surprising, then, that osteological data access isn't much better in the new millennium. Many osteological data are still sent to appendices of site reports, which make them difficult to find and use. New policies such as the NSF's data management plan implemented in 2010 should mean that archaeological and osteological data are brought to the fore; in reality, though, this doesn't seem to be the case. Even when osteological data are published, it's usually as static charts or tables, not in any sort of digital, database-friendly format that could be imported into Excel or SPSS. And unless you have a student willing to type in all the data for you, this presents a barrier for the busy scholar who wants to do cross-site and cross-cultural research.
Fortunately, archaeologists are leading the way in increasingly opening up their excavations and the resulting data to their colleagues and even the public in the past few years. This embracing of openness seems to come from the broader open-source movement that started in computer science in the late 90s and expanded into academia as a whole, most notably through open-access publishing, which also took off in the late 90s with the rise of the Internet. Plenty of other archaeologists have written about opening up their research and their rationale behind it, so I won't repeat those excellent arguments. Although I'm very open with the products of my research -- with giving out my dissertation and articles -- and often use this blog as something of an "open notebook" to work through ideas and results, I actually haven't been great at sharing the data files themselves. So I'm starting to remedy that.
Currently, I'm putting up information on GitHub, and you can click through to see all the things that I've posted so far. GitHub is mainly geared towards software developers, to aid them in working on collaborative projects, but it made some headlines recently when the White House decided to post a bunch of policy documents on GitHub. It's free for open-source projects and fairly cheap if you want to keep your data totally or partially private. There are a bunch of archaeologists and digital humanists there, posting a variety of interesting stuff. But I was convinced to join when I learned that GitHub will let you visualize .stl files (3D models) in your browser.
(Full disclosure: My husband works for GitHub, so he's tasked me with proselytizing the benefits of it to other archaeologists. I'm exaggerating... but only a little.)
Some stuff I am posting:
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It may be surprising, then, that osteological data access isn't much better in the new millennium. Many osteological data are still sent to appendices of site reports, which make them difficult to find and use. New policies such as the NSF's data management plan implemented in 2010 should mean that archaeological and osteological data are brought to the fore; in reality, though, this doesn't seem to be the case. Even when osteological data are published, it's usually as static charts or tables, not in any sort of digital, database-friendly format that could be imported into Excel or SPSS. And unless you have a student willing to type in all the data for you, this presents a barrier for the busy scholar who wants to do cross-site and cross-cultural research.
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| For some reason, the Octodex doesn't have an ArchaeOctocat. The Octocat de los Muertos will have to do instead... |
Currently, I'm putting up information on GitHub, and you can click through to see all the things that I've posted so far. GitHub is mainly geared towards software developers, to aid them in working on collaborative projects, but it made some headlines recently when the White House decided to post a bunch of policy documents on GitHub. It's free for open-source projects and fairly cheap if you want to keep your data totally or partially private. There are a bunch of archaeologists and digital humanists there, posting a variety of interesting stuff. But I was convinced to join when I learned that GitHub will let you visualize .stl files (3D models) in your browser.
(Full disclosure: My husband works for GitHub, so he's tasked me with proselytizing the benefits of it to other archaeologists. I'm exaggerating... but only a little.)
Some stuff I am posting:
- Syllabi. Don't just use my syllabi for ideas... fork them, and post your own! I posted these spiffed-up syllabi that I created with the hope that people will use them as they see fit and post their own syllabi. I love reading others' class syllabi; it makes for good ideas for my own classes, as I can pick and choose from a variety of activities, lecture topics, and bibliography entries.
- 3D models. Just one posted so far, from the Medieval Berliners project. I have been slow to learn the 3D scanning and modelling software, but I did scan and photograph all the teeth from this project before drilling into them. Also check out hacky486, one of our grad students, who is doing more with modelling than I am.
- Osteology Database. I posted a blank version of the osteology database I designed in 2007 to collect data in Rome. It has a few updates from 2010. For those of you osteologists, it's based largely on Standards but more user-friendly (I think) than the Smithsonian's free Osteoware. Mostly, I posted this database here to have somewhere for people to download a big file.
- Data from Published Articles. Want to snag my Sr/O/C/N/Pb isotope data from my articles, but don't want to type it all in? Check out this repository of all the raw data from my 2010 dissertation (and some data from an article that wasn't published in the diss). I'll probably be updating this file with more contextual information as I go.
That last one is definitely a sticking point. I haven't published all of these data yet. That is, although most of these data can be found in my dissertation, there is an entire Access database chock full of information that will go in a couple articles I'm still working on. I do want to post the entire database for comparative research purposes (since what Roman bioarchaeology needs is a good data set from Rome!), but I also want to keep my job. So I'm trying to strike a balance by publishing on GitHub those data that are already out there -- in the diss or in articles. I feel like a bad open-access enthusiast for embargoing the data like this, but I have multiple reasons, some of which I could explain here and others I don't feel comfortable discussing in a public forum.
So while I'm not exactly using GitHub for its intended purpose, I hope my opening up of data and ideas will be useful or inspirational to others. If GitHub's not for you, though, go check out OpenContext, the brain-child of Eric Kansa, which is fantastic and might be a bit more social-scientist-friendly. (While OpenContext is awesome, it feels more like a platform for dissemination rather than collaboration, another reason I'm trying out GitHub first.)
Finally, for more help in using GitHub and what it all means, check out the great posts by Prof Hacker at the Chronicle of Higher Education -- his "Fork the Academy" essay has links to all posts in the series.
If you're on GitHub, let me know in the comments! I'm interested in seeing how others are using the site to share data...
So while I'm not exactly using GitHub for its intended purpose, I hope my opening up of data and ideas will be useful or inspirational to others. If GitHub's not for you, though, go check out OpenContext, the brain-child of Eric Kansa, which is fantastic and might be a bit more social-scientist-friendly. (While OpenContext is awesome, it feels more like a platform for dissemination rather than collaboration, another reason I'm trying out GitHub first.)
Finally, for more help in using GitHub and what it all means, check out the great posts by Prof Hacker at the Chronicle of Higher Education -- his "Fork the Academy" essay has links to all posts in the series.
If you're on GitHub, let me know in the comments! I'm interested in seeing how others are using the site to share data...
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Durch Dein Wort ward jegliches Ding!
The proceedings of the 2nd International Conference of Mandaic and Samaritan Studies, held in Berlin in 2008, has appeared in print, published by Harrassowitz Verlag. The title is »Durch Dein Wort ward jegliches Ding!«
You can read the table of contents online in pdf format.
A prepublication draft of Charles Häberl’s chapter on a Mandaean folktale can be found on Academia.edu, as is a draft of Ionuţ Daniel Băncilă’s chapter on a Mandaean version of Psalm 114 found in Qolasta, the Canonical Prayerbook of the Mandaeans.
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More Pages to Explore .....
