Appetitive: Three Random and Cool Grad Student Things

Yes, my title was oh-so-descriptive. I wanted to share three things for grad students that I thought were interesting that I came upon this week in various ways.

First, and most exciting, Living Greek. I don't know almost anything about the institute, but the idea of speaking to fellow scholars in classical Attic Greek and translating Homer into the Attic sounds amazing.

Second, even though my recent graduate orientation emphasized the necessity of aiming high when trying to get published, I thought that this list of open-access student journals in classics was useful.

Third, there is a cool conference happening this spring on food and consumption in the Ancient World. Over the last few years, I have noticed a growing set of cool conferences on things like synesthesia, touch, smells, etc in the ancient world. I think this one is particularly cool because it's for graduate students. Plus, there are some truly fascinating things about food in the ancient world from conceptions of ambrosia to Tramalchio's dinner and from the loaves perserved in Egyptian ovens to the preserved fish in barrels on sunken Roman ships.

Reasoning: Learn Ancient Greek Online

A professor at the University of Missouri Kansas city has created a resource for teaching ancient Greek online. I found the resource posted at AWOL. Enjoy! 

Reasoning: JSTOR Thematic Index

For those who have access to JSTOR through a university, this is pretty cool. I discovered in an AWOL post this morning that JSTOR has created a thematic index for classics. This is a little weird because it automatically generates groups of terms and then articles that relate to them, but it's also really interesting.

Two thematic lists I am browsing are:

1. First:  plato, republic, dialogues, socrates, platonic, laws, phaedo, dialogue, timaeus, ideas, phaedrus, parmenides, sophist, aristotle, taylor, philosophy, philebus, philosophical, theaetetus, cratylus, platon, cornford, burnet, doctrine, gorgias, dialectic, critias, method, symposium, passage
2. Second: soul, body, plotinus, plato, matter, intellect, souls, timaeus, universe, evil, divine, doctrine, things, intelligible, principle, bodies, cosmos, power, proclus, demiurge, cause, passage, forms, platonic, nous, sense, idea, rational, myth, immortal

From there, I generated the list of articles to browse one by one.


Enjoy!

Reasoning: Death Outside Attica

I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Plato's views on Greek tragedy. Much of this centers around Plato's perspectives on lament and the portrayal of death in tragedy and poetry. I contextualized this with evidence on the evolution of death ritual over time in Attica (which contains the greatest wealth of evidence). AWOL posted a link to an open access journal which, among other things, deals with death ritual in the Peloponnese.

Appetitive: POTSHERD

Being a Time Team (BBC) geek, a recent post from AWOL got my attention. POTSHERD is a project which crated an Atlas of Roman archaeology-- specifically ceramics and pottery. There is an introduction to archaeology created by University of Newcastle Upon Tyne which looks pretty cool as well as the Atlas, which can be searched by type of item (class) or area of discovery (source). Pretty awesome.

Reasoning: Constructs of Ethnic Identity in the Ancient World

Instead of what I was supposed to be doing today (reading Medea), I spent a lovely cool spring day on the porch reading the Landmark Herodotus and the Iliad (which I do have to read in preparation for reading book 14 in Greek with Propertius II). Much of Herodotus, in my mind, is a combination of political science and a quest to understanding ethnic identity. The way that the Greeks defined themselves and others is a fascinating question int he ancient world and one i would like ot expore more thoroughly.

In the last few days, both AWOL and Egyptology News have recommended a new open-access journal and magazine called Egyptological. I decided to browse around and read an article on Ancient Egyptian perceptions of Ethnic identities that sounded intriguing. The article was a comparison between two different books on ethnic identity in ancient Egypt which each take a different anthropological view of the way that Egyptians perceived foreigners.

Appetitive: Online Libianus Translation Project

I have been waiting for something like this to come up. This may not be the first collaborative online translation project, but it is the first one upon which I have stumbled. AWOL posted the Online Libanius Translation Project, which will attempt to translate the rhetoric of the Fourth Century CE orator into English (much of it for the first time).

I have been expecting this ever since I read the beginning of an MIT-published study on education in the digital age. The study spent a few pages introducing the difference between Information Technology (IT) and participatory media (i.e. user-generated content). One of the findings of the study was the critical difference between the way that modern students respond to the two forms of media: students are more engaged by participatory media than the traditional top-down approach of information technology. Even Perseus is fundamentally information technology because although users can vote on definitions of particular words, there is no real content generated by users. It is fascinating to see a classical project looking for user-generated content.

I am returning from my Alma Mater today and normal posting should resume soon.

Appetitive: Cuniform

One of my early fascinations with classics other than Hellenic studies was with Cuniform. In ninth grade my Ancient History class read The Epic of Gilgamesh, which I thoroughly enjoyed. My first Greek tutor actually took classes in Cuniform, which sounded incredible.

According to AWOL, Harvard, in connection with some other groups, have put up a digitized library of Cuniform texts and artifacts. It's quite impressive. Maybe I'll learn Cuniform at some point...

Appetitive: Ancient Medicine

I was never particularly interested in ancient medicine. I thought it was gory and it was not really my style. However, my childhood best friend ended up deciding to get a history of science degree and she has sparked my interesting in the science of the ancient world. Interestingly enough, one of Herodotus II's major fields of interest is also the Hippocratic Corpus and she has a vast knowledge of ancient medicine.

I realized, usually because my professors or scholarship I read indicated such, that other authors beside the ancient doctors and scientists employed medical terminology. Plato certainly writes his Socrates as spouting medical metaphors and Herodotus and Thucydides both employ some of this terminology [1]. However, I had no idea the amount of medical terminology that Euripides uses in the Μήδεια until I began reading the Μήδεια with Herodotus II. As emotions, and especially the emotions of women, are tied to anatomical parts for the ancient authors, those describing Medea constantly employ this terminology. It's quite fascinating and it is a real pleasure reading the text with someone who is knowledgeable on the subject.

Speaking of ancient medicine, a recent AWOL post on the digitizing and internet access to ancient medial texts. The papyri are beautiful.

Endnotes

1. Herotodus II's thesis discussed in part medical rhetoric in Plato and Thucydides.

Appetitive: Paleography is Sexy Again

"Paleography is sexy again," is one of my favorite of the strange statements by Messalla, my thesis adviser. It came up in a conversation about the works of Bacchylides [1]. But it seems that his assessment, however amusingly worded, is true. In the digital age, archives come up all the time and more and more work is digitized to bring it to a wider audience. AWOL catalogues a number of these digital resources.

One of the digital resouces (still in progress) that Propertius II brought to my attention is the Homer Multitext. The purpose of the Homer Multitext is to compile a digital archive of Homer in which scholars can easily compare and cross-reference materials. A partial facsimile prototype of some of the manuscripts is being released by the project, as they explain in a recent blogpost. The original texts seem amazing and the story of the students who worked on them is worth a read.

Endnotes

1. Bacchylides' works were lost until in 1896 they were discovered in a ransacked tomb in Egypt (or possibly as Messalla originally told us in a trashpit). The Wikipedia article makes the archaeologist sounds a bit like Indiana Jones.

Reasoning: TLG does LSJ

The Liddell, Scott, and Jones (LSJ for short) is the standard dictionary of classical Greek. I have had my intermediate LSJ (Middle Liddell) since high school. I love it, even though I often use the faster version of the big LSJ (Great Scott) on the Perseus Project.

The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG), according to AWOL, has now put out a digital version of the 9th edition (revised and with supplements). This version will be searchable in both English and Greek (an invaluable tool for anyone taking a Greek composition class) and sounds fabulous.

Appetitive: Biblical Art

There was a display at the Getty about a year ago of Old Testament heroes and heroines. These were depiction from illuminated books of hours. The portraits were fabulous. One heroine who stood out to me among them was Judith, primarily because I find hers to be one of the oddest strong-woman tales of all time.

My mother pointed out to me that AWOL recently posted that a donation to ARTstor (essentially an image equivalent of JSTOR) put up an incredible digital collection of images from the Judith story. I have not browsed it thoroughly, but it looks fabulous.

ARTstor in itself is a fabulous resource. While a student at my Alma Mater, I used it for a variety of papers, including one on Pythia's prologue in the Eumenides. A similar procession of gods and goddesses as she describes appeared on one of the friezes at the now-ruined temple of Apollo at Delphi. ARTstor provided me with the image reconstructed by various artists and a picture of the fragments that remain of the frieze. It was a fabulous resource.

Appetitive: The Aleppo Codex

I thought I would repost another one of the wonderful discoveries I have made on AWOL. I had never heard of the Aleppo Codex until this post. The codex is the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible. It appears to have been written in 930 CE by a scribe named Salomon is beautiful Hebrew calligraphy. AWOL posted an incredible website that has a complete text of the Aleppo Codex along with a searchable interface and introductory notes. Absolutely fantastic.

More discussion of the Μήδεια coming tomorrow!

Reasoning: Doctoral Theses

My mother pointed me to a set of theses on AWOL, and specifically one called "Astronomy and Ancient Greek Cult" by Efronsyni Boutsikas. It looks excellent and I am going to download it on my kindle to read.

One of my best friends was in town for the last two weeks (the one with whom I am planning to learn Sanskrit) and I spent a lot of time catching up with her in between relapsing on my horrible cold that I've had all month and talking about classics rather than doing any work. I have been so distracted I even forgot to translate my Μήδεια for tomorrow! Anyway, nose should go back to the grindstone as I translate Greek and review my Latin so I can finally meet with Propertius II again.

Reasoning: Online Encyclopedia of the Hellenic World

I found this amazing website on AWOL this morning. It is still under construction, but what has been constructed is fabulous. It is a free-access online Encyclopedia of the Hellenic World (in English and Modern Greek). It is produced by the Foundation of the Hellenic World.

At the moment, there are three volumes which allow access: Volume I, Asia Minor; Volume II, Black Sea; Volume III, Constantinople. I have only browsed through a few entries in the Volume I, but thus far they look thorough and integrate pictures and links. I think these volumes are still unfinished, because nothing came up when I tried to visit Herodotus' page, but the project is encouraging.

If any of these sites come up in Greek, click the British flag button and they will change-over to English.

Appetitive/Reasoning: Reminder about E-Books Collection

I just returned from my Alma Mater and I seem to have gotten a cold. At the moment, I am not particularly able to wade through scholarship. However, AWOL posted about the UC Press E-Book Collection, which is an incredible resource. I have a link on the left-hand column of my blog under "Interesting Links," but I thought I would be a copycat and remind everyone of this incredible collection. Anything marked "public" in the collection is open access and anyone at a University of California school has access to the entire archive. Happy reading!

Reasoning: (Mostly) Open Access European Theses/Dissertations

Today AWOL posted a fabulous resource: an internet archive of open-access European theses and dissertations. Having written my own thesis on Plato just last year, I searched Plato and found a number of fabulous theses/dissertations.

A few words of warning when searching:

1. Not all of the abstracts are in the same language as the dissertation. Only once you click on the title and get to the page about that dissertation can you view the "language" section. Some of the English dissertations have abstracts in Greek or German, and visa versa.
2. Not all of the dissertations are open access. The one that looked most interesting to me denied me access. Sad. However, this still looks to be a great resource.

Appetitive: Online Exhibits in Ancient Math

I have spent most of the day translating Horace, hence not posting the promised piece on dramatic and compositional dating in Plato. However, as I checked some of the blogs that I usually read I stumbled across something pretty cool: and online exhibit.

The online exhibit, Before Protagoras, posted by AWOL, shows preserved tablets of Babylonian mathematics.

Appetitive: Roman Coins and Akkadian Epics

Just some fun things for the eyes and ears of classicists over the weekend, before some analysis on the formation of Minoan Palace society tomorrow.

For anyone who is a fan of BBC's time team or Roman history in Britain, the British Museum has digitized photos and information for it's collection of Republican Roman coinage. It is pretty fabulous. I highly recommend a look.

To feast the ears, The Ancient World Online has posted a collection of recordings of Ancient Akkadian Epics. Excitingly, for anyone who took a general ancient history class in high school or college, the recordings include the Codex of Hamerabi and the Epic of Gilgamesh. Enjoy!

Reasoning: Marathon 2500

The Marathon 2500 project celebrates the 2500 year anniversary of the Battle of Marathon. I found this though AWOL this morning. The Project is providing a series of live online lectures (i.e. webinars), for which one can register for free, and ask questions via email.

Paul Cartledge, a wonderful Greek History scholar who specializes in the Spartan history among other things, gives the first lecture. You can download the first lecture here, and supposedly you can download the podcast, although I cannot figure out how (if someone figures it out, please comment and let me know). The only problem with the lecture is that the sound quality is very poor. However, the successive lectures have a significantly better sound quality. The slideshow that accompanied Cartledge's lecture can be found here.

The second lecture is by Peter Krentz and can be found here. I was only able to download it via the RealPlayer extension for Firefox, but there are probably other ways to do this. The website claims that you can download it directly off the site. I know he had a slideshow, but I am not sure how to access it. If anyone figures it out, please comment.

The third lecture will take place on November 10th. It will be given by Victor Hanson and it is entitled "A Soldier's Life." Registration is free and you can listen to the event live and send in questions.

The group has also put together a Herodotus reading group (in English) using the Landmark Herodotus. Robert Strassler, the editor and compiler of the Landmark Series, will also lecture on May 10, 2011.