CSI Knossos: palmprints on the Linear B tablets

There’s something particularly special about seeing the physical traces left behind on ancient objects by the people who made or used them, whether that’s footprints on a tile from ancient Italy, teeth marks of a teenage student who apparently bit into a cuneiform tablet from ancient Mesopotamia, or even a mark left by an animal rather than a person:

A dog’s paw print on a 4,000-year-old brick from Iraq always warms my heart.

Based on the stamped cuneiform inscription, the brick was laid during the reign of Ur-Namma, who was also responsible for the earliest known collection of laws https://t.co/4ZnxMU1vBq pic.twitter.com/uDx0jt9yT8

— Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid (@Moudhy) August 15, 2019

Once, while working in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, I turned over a Linear B tablet from Pylos to find four deep marks left by the fingers of someone handling the tablet (presumably its maker and/or writer) soon after it was made, while the clay was still wet. For all that my research is all about trying to use the evidence the tablets provide to reconstruct the activities of their writers, I still felt pretty overwhelmed by the fact that I was putting my own (gloved!) hand into fingermarks made by a person who lived more than 3,000 years ago. But ancient hand- and fingerprints can do much more than make us feel a connection to the person who left those marks. There’s a wide range of archaeological research now being done on fingerprints, especially on ceramics, where they can give important information about the identities (particularly the gender) of the people making them — and they also play a part in the study of the Linear B tablets.

A Tale of Two Scholars, and the Center for Minoan Linguistic Research that never came to exist —

Cassandra Donnelly, who was visiting Cambridge recently to work with my colleagues on the CREWS Project, has written this great blog post about the collaboration and friendship between two American scholars who are incredibly important in the history of studying Aegean and Cypriot writing systems – Alice Kober and John Franklin Daniel:

Guest post by CREWS Visiting Fellow Cassandra Donnelly The two months I have spent as a Visiting Fellow with the CREWS project were full of all things Aegean, from the Cypro-Minoan seminar series, to the Mycenaean Epigraphy Room, and the Aegean Archaeology Group’s Work-in-Progress conference. I am incredibly grateful to Pippa, the CREWS team, and […]

via A Tale of Two Scholars, and the Center for Minoan Linguistic Research that never came to exist —

Clay play day and baking double bill: Cypro-Minoan

My fellow ancient writing system researchers in the CREWS Project have organised a Cypro-Minoan seminar/’reading’ group this term, to coincide with the visits of two visiting researchers who work on ancient Cyprus (Cassie Donnelly and Giorgos Bourogiannis, who have written about their research here and here). Cypro-Minoan is an undeciphered writing system used in the late Bronze Age/early Iron Age, mainly on the island of Cyprus but also at the site of Ugarit on the coast of Syria. My recent(ish) post about undeciphered writing systems focused on those found on Crete, so didn’t include Cypro-Minoan, but a lot of the same issues arise with trying to understand it: the corpus is very small (200-odd inscriptions), widely dispersed both geographically and chronologically, and consists of a very wide range of different types of inscribed objects (from probably administrative clay tablets and balls to inscriptions on metal bowls, clay figurines, ivory pipes, and seals); and we don’t know what the language(s) it represents is/are. As is now traditional, for this week’s seminar I made a baked version of one of the inscriptions we’ve been looking at: six signs incised on a miniature copper ‘oxhide’ ingot from the site of Enkomi.

Cypro-Minoan inscription on a miniature copper ingot, in brownie form (##175)

Babel: Adventures in Translation at the Bodleian

On a recent trip to Oxford, I took in the Bodleian Library’s current exhibition, ‘Babel: Adventures in Translation‘, mostly because I expected there would some nice multi-lingual manuscripts. I was definitely not disappointed about that – the display started off with some lovely texts like this codex from Mexico, written in Nahuatl and Spanish (left) and this Bible which includes multiple different versions in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin (right):

WCCWiki comes to Cambridge

Votive figurines from the Temple of Hera at Vibo Valentia, Calabria. Katherine McDonald via Wikipedia

Women are currently represented by less than 18% of the biography pages on Wikipedia, and in academia it’s even worse – just 12% of the subjects of pages about academics are women (data from here). I’ve written before about joining WCCWiki, a project run by the Women’s Classical Committee aiming to improve the representation of women classicists, archaeologists, and other scholars of the ancient world on Wikipedia, which people of all genders and backgrounds (not just women, and not just classicists!) are encouraged to join. I’m organising a training session and editathon for anyone interested in finding out more about this project and learning how to edit Wikipedia on May 8^th, 1:30-4:30pm, in room 2.03 of the Cambridge Classics Faculty. (This room is on the second floor; step-free access is available via a lift, and a wheelchair-accessible toilet is available on the ground floor near the lift. Please note the doors to access the lift and toilet are not automatic; we can provide help with these if required).

AWLL12: Diversity of Writing Systems

Association for Written Language and Literacy logo (written in English, Russian, Greek, and Chinese)

A year and a half ago, I attended my first Association for Written Language and Literacy conference in Nagoya, Japan; last month, my colleague Robert Crellin and I were privileged to bring the Association’s 12th meeting (AWLL12) to the Cambridge Classics Faculty. AWLL is for researchers working on writing from any perspective, from theoretical analyses of how writing systems are structured and how they encode language, to experimental work on how readers and writers actually learn and use writing systems. The theme of ‘Diversity in writing systems: embracing multiple perspectives’, was intended to reflect the diversity in members’ approaches and disciplinary backgrounds, as well as in the geographical and chronological spread of the writing systems they study – writing systems discussed at AWLL12 covered a time-span of several thousand years and are/were used in Europe, the Middle East, Egypt, Ethiopia, West Africa, India, South-East Asia, Japan, Korea, China, and Central and North America: presentation topics ranged from ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphic to present-day Hebrew, Hindi, Korean, and Yoruba via early modern English shorthand, Mayan hieroglyphic, and much much more.

International Women’s Day 2019

Happy International Women’s Day! To celebrate, I’d like to share a quick round-up of a few relevant blogposts and articles about women (and more broadly about gender and sexuality) in the ancient world, as well as about women classicists and archaeologists.

“Sappho and Erinna” by Simeon Solomon (photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Sententiae Antiquae has been sharing ancient literary texts written by women, such as Erinna (shown with the better-known Sappho in the painting above) and Nossis – keep following them all month for more!

Eidolon published a great piece a little while ago by LKM Maisel about transgender people in ancient literature (content warning for discussions of misgendering and transphobia), and another one by Rachel Herzog on retellings of the Iliad focusing on the experiences of women, particularly Briseis, and particularly regarding issues of sexual violence (content warning applies). I also recently wrote a review of one of the novels this article discusses, The Silence of the Girls.

I’ve written before about the #WCCWiki project, which aims to improve the representation of women classicists and other scholars of the ancient world on Wikipedia – why not check out some of our recently-created articles, such as Frazelia Campbell, a black classics teacher in the late 19th/early 20th century US; Raksha Dave, an archaeologist and TV presenter who featured on Time Team; Véronique Dasen, who works on ancient magic and medicine; and many others. We’re also always looking for new people to join the project – no previous Wikipedia experience required!

Alice E. Kober in 1946 (Image: Brooklyn Public Library)

And finally, I wrote a post last International Women’s Day about Alice Kober, who made incredibly important contributions towards the eventual decipherment of Linear B, and whose story is well worth a read!

Please do share any other articles you’ve enjoyed reading lately (or have written!) in the comments 🙂