Appetitive: Pyramids in Egypt Found by Modern Technology

I am a huge Time Team geek. Before every dig on Time Team, the team does a geophysical scan of the area in order to see anomalies in the soil. Sometimes they even go up in a helicopter-- Roman ruins are often visible as lines in fields, soil, or crops that can be seen from the air.

What archaeologists are doing in Egypt takes this type of scanning one step further. The are scanning with inferred images from satellites in order to discover tombs-- and possibly even pyramids-- under layers of silt. Listen to the story on NPR.

Appetitive: Transactions of the American Philological Society

A few days ago, I received my first Transactions of the American Philological Society. There are a couple of articles on Homer scholarship that look pretty interesting. I will be relaxing and reading it this weekend.

I have also started working on Parmenides with Ovid II. More to come...

Appetitive: More Secrets from Giza

The Great Pyramid at Giza is the only remaining of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Recently, robots using cameras have ventured into a small chamber hidden by a cover stone and revealed writing in red. Apparently, masons and work-gangs often left marks on the rock to indicate the origin of the workmanship in the same way that Roman roof tiles sometimes bear the marks of those who made them. I found this story on Egyptology News and New Scientist.

Appetitive: Xenephon

Three of my favorite classical scholars gathered together to discuss Xenephon on Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time: Paul Cartledge, Edith Hall, and Simon Goldhill. I am listening to it right now. You can listen to it here.

Paul Cartledge describes Xenephon's Socrates (as depicted in the Memorabilia) as orthodox and boring, which is true. I have not yet pushed myself to finish Xenephon's Socratic dialogues for this reason.

Enjoy the podcast!

Appetitive: Indo-European Linguistics

When I teach grammar and vocabulary, I tend to digress. I always liked to to hear about words in a broader context, but it only interests some of my students. Today, I ran headlong into a discussion about Indo-European linguistics. I talked about the traditional hypothesis concerning the Indo-European homeland and the branching and differentiation of the different branches off of the language tree. It was kind of fun, but it went over the heads of most of my students. I think I really need to be teaching classics...

Appetitive: Plato and Egypt

In the Laws, Plato presents Egyptian art and music as a static set of arts rigidly regulated by custom. In the Laws, the Athenian Stranger presents Egypt as a potential model for proper regulation of the arts. This lead me to believe there was strict regulation of the arts. However, an Egyptology News article lead me to a New York Times article that explained that this impression of Egyptian art is false: there was a move toward the greater characterization of humans as humans rather than rigid forms following an specified pattern.

Spirited: Ian Morris on the Formation of the Polis

 

During an exam I was proctoring today, I set out once again to read Ian Morris' Burial and Ancient Society, which traces the evolution of the polis through burial monuments and other means. Morris is brilliant. One of the pieces I found most fascinating was a brief mention of Plato in the introduction. Morris argues that Plato is one of the few instances in history of extreme introspective political analysis directly after a regime change. Ian Morris contends that the reason for this is that the polis is the first truly political system: one based solely on political relationships and specifically on the context of citizenship. This makes a lot of sense to me based on Plato's analysis. More to come...