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Presentación del Bronce de Novallas en el Museo de Zaragoza

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La presentación del Bronce de Novallas en el Museo Provincial de Zaragoza ha dado motivo a la difusión del evento en varos medios informativos de Aragón.  Os pasamos el artículo de ayer de Heraldo de Aragón en su edición digital titulado "El bronce hallado en Novallas enlaza la lengua celtíbera con el latín", con bajotítulo "Este descubrimiento supone la primera documentación de una modificación del alfabeto latino para transcribir la lengua celtibérica".
"El fragmento de una tablilla de bronce encontrado de forma fortuita en las proximidades de Novallas (Zaragoza), escrito en alfabeto latino y en una lengua paleohispánica indoeuropea, seguramente celtibérica, se ha convertido en el documento pionero en el uso del latín en la cultura paleohispánica.
El director de Museo de Zaragoza, Miguel Beltrán, ha sido el encargado de presentar la pieza, que permanecerá en sus instalaciones, junto al director general de Patrimonio Cultural del Gobierno de Aragón, Javier Callizo, y el coordinador del equipo científico que lo está estudiando, Francisco Beltrán.
Francisco Beltrán ha destacado las características únicas del fragmento, que proviene de una placa de bronce encontrada en el yacimiento de la Plana (Navillas), en una villa romana que data de la segunda mitad del siglo I de nuestra era, una localización posterior a la fecha del escrito que, según Beltrán, iba a ser refundido para volver a utilizarlo.

Beltrán, catedrático de Historia Antigua en la Universidad de Zaragoza, ha destacado que en el escrito "aparece un préstamo del latín", la palabra "publicus" y un nuevo signo, la "s" con una línea horizontal en la parte de abajo.
Una marca que, según ha dicho, corresponde al intento de diferenciar en el alfabeto latino las dos silbantes conocidas en la lengua celtibérica, aquella que representaría la "s" y la que se acercaría más a una "z".
Este descubrimiento supone la primera documentación de una modificación del alfabeto latino para transcribir la lengua celtibérica, a través del cual se han documentado en otros textos de la comunidad, lo que supone, en cierto modo, la identificación del primer sistema de escritura original ideado según todos los indicios en el territorio del Aragón actual.
El bronce fue depositado en el Museo de Zaragoza el pasado mes de junio y ha sido sometido a diversos estudios para "asegurar su autenticidad", tal como ha explicado Beltrán, y los expertos han llegado a la conclusión de que se trata de un bronce compuesto por cobre, plomo y estaño, que estuvo fijado a una pared y que fue afectado por el fuego.
Beltrán también ha explicado el grupo científico ha querido presentarlo ahora en Zaragoza antes de hacerlo público en el XI Coloquio Internacional de lenguas y culturas prerromanas de la Península Ibérica que se celebrara en Valencia a partir de este miércoles.
Por su parte, el director del Museo de Zaragoza, Miguel Beltrán, ha explicado que en estos tiempos de crisis, muchas entidades adolecen de recursos para comprar obras, pero que "en Aragón tenemos a la arqueología como aliada y a la figura del hallazgo casual", y se ha remitido a otras obras encontradas de manera fortuita como el león funerario de Fabara o el bronce de Agón".

Blogosphere ~ October 24: Proverbial Lolcat

Blogosphere ~ Highlights from the Gallo-Roman Museum in Lyon, part 3

Blogosphere ~ Kings and regime change in the Roman Republic

This Day in Ancient History: ante diem ix kalendas novembres

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ante diem ix kalendas novembres

  • 31 A.D. — execution of Strabo, son of the Praetorian Praefect L. Aelius Sejanus
  • 51 A.D. — birth of the future emperor T. Flavius Domitianus, better known as Domitian

Classical Words of the Day

Double Take Headline of the Moment

Red Polished Philia pottery from Cyprus

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October 24, 2012 - 12:36 PM - FITCH-WIENER LABS SEMINAR Dr. Maria Dikomitou-Eliadou (University of Cyprus, Fitch Bursary Holder)

Autumn field school at Amarna

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The latest news update from Professor Barry Kemp, from the Amarna Project.

On October 14th the current Amarna field school began to assemble, five overseas students and seven SCA inspectors (drawn mostly from the Middle Egypt region) converging on the Amarna expedition house. The theme of the field school is survey, both in the mapping and planning sense and through the appreciation of human impact on the landscape. Amarna is ideal for these purposes, offering a variety of reasonably clear examples and opportunities for instruction. This year's venue for instruction in planning and profile drawing, using a total station, basic measuring and drawing tools and aerial photography from the expedition's helium photography balloon is the Great Aten Temple, and more particularly one of the broad spreads of gypsum concrete on which are marked the outlines of large numbers of offering tables. The weekly exercises in archaeological landscape appreciation take in the South Tombs Cemetery, the area of the city around the house of Thutmose, the Stone Village and the tomb of Panehsy and surrounding territory. Evening lectures and visits to other sites complete the programme.

The field school is run in conjunction with the Institute for Field Research (IFR) of California (info@ifrglobal.org) and with the agreement of the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt and in particular with the support of Dr Abd el-Rahman El-Aidi. We are grateful to Dr Hans Barnard, Gwil Owen and Miriam Bertram for volunteering their services as instructors.

The clearing of the gypsum surface of the first court of the temple has revealed a surprising fact. The area is surrounded by an embankment of dusty sand, about 1 metre high, with a thick capping composed of gypsum concrete that is the remains of the floor that originally spread across the entire temple. The sides of the embankment have slumped over the years. In the course of cleaning back the edges it has become clear that it contains fragments of fine sculpture and pieces of carved inlays in darker stone.
The fragments include pieces in indurated limestone (evidently from a large and ornate architrave), travertine, granite and quartzite. We must conclude that, before the final phase of the temple was completed, fine pieces of sculpture were no longer needed and were thoroughly broken up.

On October 22nd and 23rd the expedition was honoured by a visit by the British ambassador, James Watt, and his wife, Amal.

The field school is scheduled to run until November 15th. From October 28th, it will overlap with the start of the next season of excavation at the South Tombs Cemetery, directed by Dr Anna Stevens.

The attached picture shows the group writing landscape description above the South Tombs Cemetery.

Colorizing Statuary Redux Redux Redux …

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Smithsonian Magazine has the latest:

The Greeks took their beauty seriously. It was a beauty contest, after all, that touched off the Trojan War. Athena, Hera and Aphrodite vied for Paris to decide who was the fairest among them. After Aphrodite promised him the love of the most beautiful mortal woman, Paris carried off Helen to Troy. Thus began the true mother of all wars.

As the goddess of love, beauty and sexual pleasure, Aphrodite inspired cult worship and challenged artists to render her in suitably magnificent form. We have inherited an image of her as an idealized nude chiseled in white marble, immortalized by works such as Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos or the Venus de Milo.

That image is dead wrong, according to modern scholars. Ancient sculptors were very much interested in color as well as form; the white marble statues we admire looked stunningly different in antiquity. They were painted with a palette that displayed a sophisticated understanding of color and shading.

To illustrate how a marble Aphrodite might have appeared to the ancients, we asked German archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann, who has pioneered techniques of color restoration, to create a photomechanical reconstruction—never before published—of the first-century A.D. Roman Lovatelli Venus. It was excavated from the ruins of a villa in Pompeii. Unlike most ancient statues, this one gave Brinkmann a head start, because copious evidence of original paint survived. “There are rich traces of pigment which we analyzed using noninvasive methods such as UV-Vis absorption spectroscopy,” he explains. “What we do is absolutely faithful, based on physical and chemical measurements.”

Brinkmann is struck by the synergy of form and color in modeling the goddess’s act of disrobing. “The spectator,” he says, “awaits the next second, when her nakedness will be displayed. The sculptor creates a mantle that is heavy on the upper rim, to clearly explain that it will slide—and enhances this narrative by giving the rim its own color.”

The Lovatelli Venus may be one of the earliest examples of private art collecting, Brinkmann says. The work lent a decorative flourish to a nouveau-riche household.

To the Greeks, the marriage of color and form had deeper connotations, suggests Harvard art historian Susanne Ebbinghaus. She points to a passage in Euripides, in which a remorseful Helen bewails her role in sparking a catastrophic war:

If only I could shed my beauty and assume an uglier aspect
The way you would wipe color off a statue.

“The passage is very interesting,” Ebbinghaus says, “because it conveys the superficial, transient nature of paint—it can be easily removed. But at the same time, if we take the words literally, what the paint contains is the very essence—the beauty—of an image.”

… I can only wonder when folks will stop presenting this as something breathlessly new; we’ve pretty much had a generation’s worth of this sort of article, no? Compare:

… which has links to much of our previous coverage too …


More on the Iceman

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The most-talked about man in prehistory must be Otzi, a.k.a. the Iceman or Hauslabjoch Man or Simalaun Man. Found eroding out of a glacier in 1991, the human remains of a 40-year-old mountain man who had been attacked and killed high up in the Alps about 5500 years ago have been studied in detail for the past twenty years.

...

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FWIW: Mimesis in the News?

CJ Online Review: Arnason and Raaflaub, The Roman Empire in Context

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posted with permission:

The Roman Empire in Context: Historical and Comparative Perspectives. Edited by Johann P. Arnason and Kurt A. Raaflaub. Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Pp. viii + 319. Hardcover, £90.00/$149.95. ISBN 978-0-470-65557-3.

Reviewed by Greg Woolf, University of St. Andrews

How could one study the Roman empire “out of context”? The trick is to find the appropriate context for each specific enquiry being undertaken. The stated context for Kurt Raaflaub’s series Ancient World: Comparative Histories, of which this is the fifth volume to appear, is a broad set of societies from the Bronze Age to the early Middle Ages along with (more contentiously) other societies “that are structurally ‘ancient’ or ‘early’” for which pre-modern Japan and pre-Columbian America are the paradigms. Not pre-capitalist, then, nor pre-industrial, nor even pre-modern since Europe and western Asia after 600 AD are excluded. Those readers worried about unacknowledged Eurocentrism might be more comfortable with a sociological-cum-technological definition such as Ernest Gellner’s “agro-literate state” or either a Weberian or Marxist version of early / tributary empires. Arnason and Raaflaub lean, in different ways, towards recent reworkings of Karl Jaspers’ Axial Civilizations concept: appropriately the dedicatee of this volume is Shmuel Eisenstadt.

This particular volume collection originated in a conference held in Florence in 2005 and brings together 16 papers, most of them first given on that occasion. About half are written by Roman historians with interests in comparative studies: the other half by like-minded scholars from cognate fields. Assyriology, Mediaeval History, Byzantine Studies, Sinology and Islamic and Iranian Studies are all represented. The line up—which includes Mario Liverani, John Haldon, Michael Loewe, Egon Flaig, Garth Fowden and Guy Stroumsa—is impressive.

Few chapters disappoint, but there is little in the way of an overarching theme.[[1]] Apart from the editors, only a few contributors undertake explicit comparative analysis. Notable exceptions are Peter Fibinger Bang on universal empire,[[2]] Michael Loewe whose paper on early China makes frequent references to Rome, and Ted Lendon and David Cohen who co-author an entertaining chapter comparing the letter style of Roman emperors and a mediaeval Aragonese king.[[3]] Because the original conference was focused on the “formation and transformation of empires” several papers consider transitions across conventional historical periodizations: from Republic to Empire, from the early empire to late antiquity, from Rome to Byzantium, and so on. This offers a different kind of comparison, diachronic rather than taxonomic, with the accent on interpretative narrative rather than structural analysis.

For the most part, then, the volume offers the academic equivalent of “proximity talks,” with the work of compare and contrast, of generalization and differentiation, largely left to any interested reader who works through the whole collection. Perhaps inevitably for papers originally aimed at colleagues in other disciplines a good deal of introductory material is included. Roman historians may feel they have learned more about other empires than about “their own,” but that may be no bad thing. A few papers on Roman themes do indeed find new things to do with familiar material: invidiously I single out Egon Flaig on the end of the Republic and Arnason’s interesting if challenging chapter comparing approaches to Rome as a state, as an empire and as a civilization.[[4]]

The Roman Empire in Context does not offer a unified and novel perspective on Roman history, nor a major contribution to the theorizing of early empires.[[5]] Perhaps this is not the sort of project from which it would be fair to ask for a more rigorous historical sociology.[[6]] But reading it does provide an opportunity to think harder about the comparative enterprise. Few individuals will probably want to pay quite so much to own the proceedings of this experiment, but those interested in a pursuing serious comparison between early empires will learn a good deal from consulting it.

NOTES

[[1]] The volume is less successful in this respect than other volumes in the series, such as the tightly focused and very interesting K. Raaflaub (ed.), War and Peace in the Ancient World (Malden 2007).

[[2]] A study for his own collection P. F. Bang and D. Kolodziejczyz (eds.), Universal Empire. A comparative approach to imperial culture and representation in Eurasian History (Cambridge 2012).

[[3]] A model worth pursuing. For a very successful recent application of this technique to interdisciplinary history, a collection in which every chapter is co-authored, see A. Shryock and D. L. Smail (eds.), Deep History. The Architecture of Past and Present (Berkeley 2011).

[[4]] This essay includes a rare engagement with the important study H. Inglebert, P. Gros and G. Sauron, Histoire de la Civilization romaine (Paris 2005).

[[5]] For this, readers should return to S. Eisenstadt, The political systems of empires (London 1963), J. H. Kautsky, The Politics of Aristocratic Empires (Chapel Hill NC 1982), S. E. Alcock, T. D’Altroy, K. D. Morrison and C. M. Sinopoli (eds.), Empires. Perspectives from Archaeology and History (New York & Cambridge 2001), I. Morris and W. Scheidel (eds.), The Dynamics of Early Empires. State power from Assyria to Byzantium (Oxford & New York 2009), P. F. Bang and C. A. Bayly (eds.), Tributary Empires in Global History (Basingstoke 2011).

[[6]] See the useful survey by P. Vasunia, “The Comparative Study of Empires,” Journal of Roman Studies (2011) 222-37.


Latin TweetUp Tomorrow!

NEWS: Hundreds witness solstice at King Ramses II temple


EVENT: Culture vultures set to enjoy Glasgow Pharaoh

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Calendrier du séminaire 2012-2013

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Le séminaire de méthodologie de l’ED 1 se réunira cette année en salle D421 de la maison de la recherche, rue Serpente.

Le calendrier est le suivant :

31 octobre ;

28 novembre ;

19 décembre ;

30 janvier ;

27 février ;

27 mars ;

24 avril ;

et 29 mai.

N’hésitez pas à apporter vos annonces.

 

Le premier séminaire sera l’occasion de présenter notre fonctionnement aux nouveaux venus. Dans un second temps, nous présenterons un logiciel de bibliographie qui permet la gestion des références en ligne : Zotero.

 

Si vous souhaitez qu’un thème soit abordé ou si vous vous proposez pour une intervention, n’hésitez pas à nous contacter.

Totenbuch-Projekt Bonn: Online-Publikationen

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Totenbuch-Projekt Bonn: Online-Publikationen
 Sie können hier unsere Datenbank zu Totenbuch-Besitzern der Spät- und Ptolemäerzeit herunterladen. Bitte lesen Sie zuerst die Datei "Hinweise". Für die Verwendung der FileMaker-Datenbank müssen Sie als erstes die Schriftart "AegyptischDos" auf ihrem Rechner installieren:

Schriftsatz AegyptischDos (True Type-Font: 44 kb)
Hinweise (pdf: 119 kb)
Prosopographische Datenbank der spätzeitlichen- und ptolemäischen Totenbuch-Besitzer (FileMaker: 1 MB; pdf: 8,35 MB)
Index der Personennamen (pdf: 55 kb)

And see also: Das altägyptische Totenbuch: Ein digitales Textzeugenarchiv

Basel Busts Portable Antiquities Smuggling Ring

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.
There is possibly more to this report than meets the eye:
World radio: 'Basel busts antique smuggling ring', October 23, 2012
Basel prosecutors say they’ve arrested a 27-year-old Swiss man for receiving stolen antiques mainly from Eastern Europe. The man is said to have had 14,000 coins and 800 other antiques recovered by officials in Switzerland, Austria, and Germany. Most of the goods went through Balkan middlemen, and dated from the Roman, Greek or Byzantine eras. Prosecutors said the Basel smuggler had been suspected for years, and is accused of money laundering, fraud, and multiple counts of violating laws on transferring cultural goods. Two accomplices in Switzerland are also being charged, but no other details were given.
So from where in "the Balkans" do the finds come? Can we infer that if they were travelling in the EU through Austria to Basle, that Germany (just across the border from Basle) was the intended destination? This is not the first time that marketeers from Basle have been involved in large-scale antiquities smuggling ...

Christian Union banned at US university

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The tide of religious persecution in our universities has reached yet another nadir.  I learn today via Virtue Online here of this news report:

Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts has banned a Christian group from campus because the group requires student leaders to adhere to “basic biblical truths of Christianity.” The decision to ban the group, called the Tufts Christian Fellowship, was made by officials from the university’s student government, specifically the Tufts Community Union Judiciary.

The ban means the group “will lose the right to use the Tufts name in its title or at any activities, schedule events or reserve university space through the Office for Campus Life,” according to the Tufts Daily. Additionally, Tufts Christian Fellowship will be unable to receive money from a pool that students are required to pay into and that is specifically set aside for student groups.

There are various procedural pretexts for this hateful action.  One of the bigots even posted (anonymously) a “justification” in the comments section at Virtue Online, which reveals the real intent:

Had the group dropped the “biblical truths” requirement, and adopted democracy, they could have still chosen leaders who shared their beliefs, albeit with a ballot and not discrimination.

The technique is becoming familiar.

All student societies are open to all students.  Christians are a minority.  Any student may be a member; so naturally the leaders must be believers.  Otherwise a group of hate-filled non-Christians — and clearly we have some here — can gather a mass of drunken unbelievers in the bar, turn up to the vote, and simply take over the society in one go, and vote it into non-existence.

Precisely the same technique was used in the Exeter University persecution in England.  The pretext is “anti-discrimination”, as a means to prevent the Christians on campus from having recognised groups and blocking their access to funds which Christians are obliged to contribute to.

I have written to the PR department for Tufts university to enquire whether the university endorses this action, and if not, what it proposes to do about it, and likewise to the president of the university.  No university should allow vicious attacks on minorities like this.

I have also written a response to the anonymous persecutor on Virtue Online.  It occurred to me, as I wrote that the “Christian groups on campus” not selected for persecution must be gnashing their teeth at being found unworthy.  For persecution is the litmus test of sincerity.  “Not all those who say, ‘Lord, Lord’…” after all, and “They have hated me and they will hate you”.

The Lord has allowed this persecution, I think, to make clear in the eyes of the whole university who is, and is not, Christian.  Which is rather encouraging, isn’t it?  Well worth the inconvenience.

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