Graham Oliver, Destroying Inscriptions (London, Jan 14)

Posted on 2010-01-17 by Gabriel Bodard

(Paper given at the Ancient History Seminar, London, January 14th, 2010. Brief report by Gabriel Bodard.)

Destroying Inscriptions: the authorised and unauthorised removal of inscribed documents in the Greek world.
Graham Oliver

In this seminar, Graham Oliver discussed a few particular inscriptions from the Athenian sphere in the Late Classical, Hellenistic and Roman periods, using these examples to make some general observations on the removal and erasure of inscriptions.

(1) Re-use

The first examples he discussed were a series of statue bases signed by Antignotos, but their original texts erased when they were re-used and re-inscribed at a later date. As the original inscriptions were not, as far as we know, issued by the demos,  Oliver argues that no special authority was needed to remove them, and in fact they had probably fallen out of use or been taken off display already, since we should assume that inscriptions were not considered to be permanent. Even a handful of fourth century decrees were re-used by pyloroi in the Roman period, which tells us both that even these texts were not permanent and sacrosanct, but that these decrees at least were still intact and in place on the acropolis in the Roman period. The re-use of inscriptions seems to have been fairly normal; even official documents could be removed and re-used without official sanction.
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Call for Papers 2010: Archeomatica, Cultural Heritage Technologies

Posted on 2009-12-29 by franciscaferaudi

<https://www.archeomatica.it/call-for-papers

Call for Papers 2010

Archeomatica, Cultural Heritage Technologies

Issues 1-2-3-4 / 2010

CALL FOR PAPERS

Archeomatica is a new, multidisciplinary journal, printed in Italy, devoted to the presentation and the dissemination of advanced methodologies, emerging technologies and techniques for the knowledge, documentation, safeguard, conservation and exploitation of cultural heritage.

The journal aims to publish papers of significant and lasting value written by scientists, conservators and archaeologists involved on this field with the diffusion of specific new methodologies and experimental results. Archeomatica will also emphasize fruitful discussion on the best up-to-date scientific applications and exchanging ideas and findings related to any aspect of the cultural heritage sector.

Archeomatica is intended also to be a primary source of multidisciplinary and divulgatia information for the sector of cultural heritage.

The journal is divided in three sections Documentazione (Survey and documentation), Rivelazioni (Analysis, diagnostics and monitoring), Restauro (Materials and intervention techniques).

The issues are also published on line at the website <www.archeomatica.it

Archeomatica invites submissions of high-quality papers and interdisciplinary works for the next issues in all areas related to science and technology in cultural heritage, particularly on recent developments.

If you are interested please submit an original paper to

<paper-submission@archeomatica.it Questo indirizzo e-mail è protetto dallo spam bot. Abilita Javascript per vederlo.

The papers will be subject to review by the scientific board after which they are accepted or rejected in order to maintain quality. Applicants will be notified by email as to their acceptance.

Topics and trends relevant to the Archeomatica Issues include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Methodologies and analytical techniques for the characterization and for the evaluation of the preservation state of historical masterpieces
  • On-site and remotely sensed data collection
  • Digital artefact capture, representation and manipulation
  • Experiences in cultural heritage conservation
  • Methods for data elaboration and cataloguing
  • Setting of historical architectures
  • Intelligent tools for digital reconstruction
  • Augmentation of physical collections with digital presentations
  • Applications in Education and Tourism
  • Archaeological reconstruction
  • Electronic corpora
  • XML and databases and computational interpretation
  • Three-dimensional computer modeling, Second Life and virtual worlds
  • Image capture, processing, and interpretation
  • 3-D laser scanning, synchrotron, or X-ray imaging and analysis
  • Technology
  • Metadata of material culture
  • Optical 3D measurement
  • Cultural heritage recording
  • Terrestrial laser scanning
  • Virtual reality data acquisition
  • Photogrammetric processing
  • GPS
  • GIS
  • Remote sensing
  • Culture portals
  • Advanced systems for digital culture in museums, archives and art institutions
  • Digitalization of cultural property
  • Web 2.0 and development of social networks on the top of cultural heritage portals
  • Applications of mobile technologies for digital culture and cultural heritage
  • Ubiquitous and pervasive computing
  • Methodologies and approaches to digitization
  • Augmented reality, virtual reality and digital culture
  • Access to archives in Europe
  • Books and electronic publishing
  • 2/3/4D Data Capture and Processing in Cultural Heritage
  • Web-based museum guides
  • Applications of Semantic Web technologies in Cultural Heritage
  • Non-Destructive analytical techniques for the study of the composition and decay of cultural heritage components
  • Management of heritage knowledge and data
  • Visualization for cultural heritage

Publication Frequency
The journal is published quarterly a year

Submission Preparation Checklist
As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission’s compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

Copyright Notice
Copyright for articles published in this journal is transferred by the authors to the journal.

By virtue of their appearance in this journal, articles can be reproduced or copied in whole or in part, with proper attribution, in educational and other non-commercial settings.

Interested authors should download and read the Instructions to Authors Manual for all details of requirements, procedures, paper mechanics, referencing style, and the technical review process for submitted papers.

Color diagrams, figures, and photographs are encouraged. Papers should be submitted in a plain text, single-spaced Word or RTF file. Formatting should be kept to an absolute minimum. Do not embed graphics, tables, figures, or photographs in the text, but supply them in separate files, along with captions.

Papers, diagrams, tables, etc. should be emailed as attached files to the email address listed in the Instructions Manual.

December 27, 2009

Renzo Carlucci

Editorial Director

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Stamp Query

Posted on 2009-12-17 by Paul Iversen

Seal

I’ve received the above picture of a stamp with the following query:

When I was on a trip to Petra, Jordan, I happened to find an object that looks like a lead (bronze?) stamp. It bears an inscription in letters which are definitely Greek. Its diameter is 2 cm, the shape reminds of a truffle (a cone with a rounded tip).

I would really like to know when and where it was made, how it could get to Petra and what it says. You see, I am a philologist passionately interested in connections between nations, but I live in Sweden and here I could not find anyone knowledgeable enough to give me a trustworthy answer. I realize that it is a pretty difficult question to answer as Petra was visited by people from many countries, and Greek was so wide-spread. But please tell me what you think.

I am enclosing a picture on which the image is reversed – that is how the impression of the stamp would look.

Any idea what it says?  Perhaps a reference to Τύχη?

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7-9 gennaio 2010: Lo spazio ionico e le comunità della Grecia nord-occidentale. Territorio, società, istituzioni

Posted on 2009-12-16 by Lucia Criscuolo

The results of the research program of the Universities of Calabrie, Napoli Federico II, Parma, Roma Sapienza,Venezia Ca’ Foscari on La ‘terza’ Grecia e l’Occidente:

Lo spazio ionico e le comunità della Grecia nord-occidentale Territorio, società, istituzioni

a cura di Claudia Antonetti
Giovedì 7 gennaio 2010
10,00 Saluti del Rettore dell’Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia

Filippo Maria Carinci (Preside della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia) inaugura il convegno

Luisa Breglia (coordinatrice del PRIN, Università di Napoli Federico II) presenta il progetto di rilevante interesse nazionale La ‘terza’ Grecia e l’Occidente

Claudia Antonetti (responsabile dell’Unità di ricerca dell’Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia) presenta il convegno

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Matthew Canepa, ‘Inscriptions, Landscape, and the Built Environment in the Eastern Mediterranean and Iran in Late Antiquity’ (Oxford, November 2009)

Posted on 2009-12-11 by Charlotte Tupman

Paper delivered at the British Epigraphy Society Autumn Colloquium, November 21st, 2009, Oxford. Report by Emma Rix.

‘Inscriptions, Landscape, and the Built Environment in the Eastern Mediterranean and Iran in Late Antiquity’ (Oxford, November 2009)

Matthew Canepa, Oxford, November 21

In this paper, Professor Canepa demonstrated how the rulers of the Sassanian Empire used monumental sculpture and inscriptions to create and emphasise their cultural and racial decent from the Achaemenids, as well as simultaneously interacting with and differentiating themselves from their more recent predecessors, the kings of the Hellenistic Seleucid empire. A crucial feature of this interaction and hence of Canepa’s study was the way in which rock reliefs and other inscriptions interact with and become part of the landscape or building on which they are placed; this interaction can be a key part of their significance.

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Elizabeth Frood, ‘Claiming Space and Memory: the Development of Priestly Inscriptional Practices in Late New Kingdom Egypt (ca. 1190-715 BC)’ (Oxford, November 2009)

Posted on 2009-12-09 by Charlotte Tupman

Paper delivered at the British Epigraphy Society Autumn Colloquium, November 21st, 2009, Oxford. Report by Charlotte Tupman.

Claiming Space and Memory: the Development of Priestly Inscriptional Practices in Late New Kingdom Egypt (ca. 1190-715 BC)

Elizabeth Frood, Oxford, November 21

Dr. Elizabeth Frood of St. Cross College, Oxford, began with a paper which showed that although “epigraphy” does not exist as a discrete discipline within Egyptology, and there are elements to the study of Egyptian texts which do not pertain to the study of inscriptions in Greek and Latin, there is much that is familiar to the classical epigrapher.

Frood introduced a new project, currently in its development phase, to study the epigraphy of Egyptian temple environments. There were three elements to Frood’s paper: an overview of epigraphy in a temple context; a description of the nature and range of this inscribed material; and a case study of one particular inscription that could affect the way in which we understand Egyptian temple environments.

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EpiDoc Training at DH Summer School, Dublin, June/July 2010

Posted on 2009-12-07 by Gabriel Bodard

2010 DHO Summer School
in conjunction with NINES and the EpiDoc Collaborative
28 June – 2 July 2010
https://dho.ie/ss2010

The third annual Digital Humanities Observatory (DHO) Summer School will
take place in Dublin from 28 June to 2 July 2010. Following the highly
successful 2009 Summer School, next year’s event will see the expansion
of popular workshop strands such as:

  • A Practical Introduction to the Text Encoding Initiative
  • Data Visualisation for the Humanities
  • An Introduction to EpiDoc Markup and Editing Tools
  • The One to Many Text: Text Transformations with XSLT

The Summer School will feature lectures by Dr. Hugh Denard (King’s
College London Visualisation Lab) and Dr Ian Gregory (University of
Lancaster). Workshop facilitators include Dr Gabriel Bodard (King’s
College London), Dr James Cowey (University of Heidelberg), Professor
Laura Mandell (Miami University of Ohio), Dr Susan Schreibman (Digital
Humanities Observatory), Justin Tonra (NUI, Galway) and Dana Wheeles
(University of Virginia).

Major workshop strands will be conducted over four days allowing
delegates to choose a mini-workshop on Wednesday from one of the
following offerings:

  • Geospatial Methods for Humanities Research
  • Using Digital Resources for Irish Research and Teaching
  • Visualising Space, Time and Events: Using Virtual Worlds for Humanities Research
  • Finding the Concepts In the Chaos – Building Relationships With Data Models
  • Planning Digital Scholarly Resources: A Primer

The introduction of the one-day mini-workshops allows people to choose
to attend a single-day event only at a reduced cost.

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Elizabeth Solopova, ‘The Earliest Runic Inscriptions: Problems of Language and Interpretation’

Posted on 2009-12-03 by Philip Davies

Paper presented at the British Epigraphy Society Autumn Meeting. (Brief Report by Philip Davies)

The Earliest Runic Inscriptions: Problems of Language and Interpretation

Elizabeth Solopova, Oxford, November 21st, 2009

In keeping with the theme of the British Epigraphy Society’s Autumn Colloquium, (‘Epigraphy, but not as we know it’) this interesting paper took us away from the familiar territories of the Mediterranean to consider the Runic alphabet (or, to give it its proper name, futhark) used by Scandinavian and Germanic peoples from the second century through to, in the case of Scandinavia, the early modern period. Specifically, her paper examined the difficulties of interpreting ‘older runes’, these being the futhark as extant from approximately the 2nd to the 6th centuries AD. After this the futhark entered a phase of transition, developing and diversifying into regional variations, known collectively as ‘younger runes’.

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Job at LGPN

Posted on 2009-11-27 by Gabriel Bodard

Robert Parker writes:

The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names is seeking to appoint a Researcher for a full-time, two-year fixed term post. The project is funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Grant. The postholder must be educated to doctoral standard, or equivalent. Essential requirements are a proven record in working with epigraphical material (both the basic evidence and published corpora and articles), and an awareness of how to handle personal names. Familiarity with the epigraphy of Asia Minor will be an advantage.

Applications consisting of a curriculum vitae, a covering letter and a personal details form (obtainable from the Classics website: https://www.classics.ox.ac.uk/faculty/jobs/index.asp) should be sent to Erica Clarke, Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St Giles’, Oxford, OX1 3LU (recruitment@classics.ox.ac.uk), from whom further particulars can be obtained. Please arrange for your referees to send their references to the above address by the closing date.

The deadline for applications is 12 noon on Thursday 17 December 2009. No applications will be accepted after this date. The interviews are expected to take place in the week commencing 11 January 2010.

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Short reports from BES Autumn Meeting

Posted on 2009-11-26 by Gabriel Bodard

Reports given at British Epigraphy Society Autumn Meeting, November 21, 2009. (Brief summary by Gabriel Bodard)

1) Nicholas Milner on recent work at Oinoanda

Nicholas reported on the ongoing epigraphic work at the Oinoanda excavations (where he has been resposible for new inscriptions since 1994), funded by the DAI. New finds since 2007 include:

  • several inscriptions on an octagonal tower in the Hellenistic wall including references to Apollo Hypsistos; the tower seems to have been an outdoor shrine to the Sun, and seems to settle the taxing question of which god was referred to by Hypsistos at this site;
  • an inscription marking the foundation by C. Iulius Moles of a temple to Caesar, which appears to belong to the reign of Augustus;
  • in 2009, a base bearing a verse inscription to Nemesis and a sundial;
  • an inscribed lintel block from an early Christian church.

2) Ulrike Roth on Albert Rehm

Ulrike (incoming BES secretary) addressed the meeting with a question rather than a report. Albert Rehm was a German school-teacher and ancient historian (known for his epigraphic work), active in the periods before and after the Second World War, and was outspoken on the subject of the Nazi approaches to ancient history. He described himself as a “Third Humanist”, although this clearly meant something different from Werner Jaeger‘s use of the same label. Rehm believed firmly in the importance of working in the field (where Jaeger was reluctant to sully his view of the ancient world by visiting modern Greece), hence his epigraphic research. Ulrike is looking for information, even stories and anecdotes, about Rehm’s fieldwork, in the hope that this might cast light on his vision of “Third Humanism”.

3) Jonathan Prag on financial inscriptions from Taormina

Jon described a collaborative project to republish and analyse 13 financial inscriptions from the Sicel city of Taormina (which was allied to Rome in the Second Punic War), that have been published in scattered publications of variable quality. (8 of the inscriptions are in IG 14; 4 were published by Manganaro from inadequate photographs.) The inscriptions reveal many details of the city’s finances and administration in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC: there are changes over time in the math used, as well as in the administration, the calendar, and the currencies in use. One text in particular offers a thorny problem of dating: it is written in Greek, so should be from before the Roman colony in 27 BC; the reference to the month of  “Quinctilis” should be from before 46; the reference to “duoandres” should be after 44. Manganaro suggests that the text may date from the period when Sextus Pompeius governed the city between 44 and 36, but much remains unclear. The new publication will make new joins between some of the text fragments, and will also thoroughly address issues with the provenance of the inscriptions, some of which are moved and only partially recorded in the excavation reports.

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Silvia Ferrara, ‘Writing in Cypro-Minoan: Beyond decipherment’

Posted on 2009-11-24 by Gabriel Bodard

Paper presented at British Epigraphy Society Autumn Meeting. (Brief report by Gabriel Bodard)

Writing in Cypro-Minoan: Beyond Decipherment.

Silvia Ferrara, Oxford,  November 21, 2009

In this paper, Ferrara introduced the audience to problems in the decipherment and interpretation of inscriptions in the Cypro-Minoan script. Since there are only some 217 documents (comprising 4000 signs) in this script, decipherment is difficult if not impossible, and so identification of the language and context of the texts will depend more upon quantitative elements, the objects themselves, their distribution and other archaeological information.

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Processes in the Making of Roman Inscriptions by Richard Grasby

Posted on 2009-11-20 by Gabriel Bodard

PROCESSES IN THE MAKING OF ROMAN INSCRIPTIONS
STUDIES BY R.D. GRASBY: SEPTEMBER 2009

The Studies present inscriptions at various stages of their making from draft text to carefully constructed letters set out on the stone itself, brush painted and carved. It is possible to draw a significant amount of forensic evidence of these stages from the stones themselves. Through measurement and an understanding of the processes of making, some epigraphists may find in these Studies another approach to the reconstruction of fragmentary inscriptions.

See the attached Flyer and Order Form for more information.

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