Scribes, blogs and cakes: Interview with Anna Judson

I did an interview for the Cambridge archaeology postdocs’ blog, talking about my research, blogging, cake, and more! Also featuring some SF, fantasy, and classics-inspired fiction recommendations, Wikipedia editing, and my favourite view in Cambridge

Archaeology Postdocs at Cambridge University

What is the first word that comes to your mind when you think of Cambridge and why?

Not a word, but an image – the view of Kings Chapel while walking along the Backs. It may be a bit of a cliché, but I never get tired of that view, even walking past it most days! Even better if the cows are out in the meadow or the swans are on the river.

Kings Chapel view from the Backs

Can you tell us a little about you, and your research interests? As you analyse the Mycenaean scribes’ writing practices, what differences and commonalities between documents have you identified? Is there any sign of authorship or personal style?

I work on the Linear B texts from Late Bronze Age Greece – these administrative documents were written on clay tablets in the Mycenaean palaces c.1400-1200 BCE.

Example of a Linear B…

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Languages in the prehistoric Aegean

A great post by Dimitri Nakassis on why scripts, languages, and ethnicities don’t necessarily match up with each other in the Bronze Age Aegean:

https://wp.me/puzb9-EH

Tripods, tables, and tablets – or, how to prepare for a Mycenaean feast

I recently jumped on the Twitter bandwagon of writing poems in the style of William Carlos Williams, since it was pretty clear to me that the internet could only be improved by having more poems based on Linear B tablets:

This is just to say

Tripod in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum (photo: author)

I have counted
the tripods
that were in
the storeroom

and which
you were probably
wanting
for the feast

Unfortunately
one has only one foot
and another
is burned off at the legs

 

I thought now I’d talk a bit more about the actual Linear B tablets which inspired the poem, starting with the famous ‘tripod tablet’ from the palace of Pylos. This tablet famously proved that Linear B had been correctly deciphered as representing an early form of Greek, since the symbols representing different kinds of vessels matched their Greek descriptions: the three-legged vessels were preceded by the Greek word tripodes ‘tripods’, and jars depicted with four, three, and no handles were described as k^wetrōwes ‘four-eared’, triōwes ‘three-eared’, and anōwes ‘with no ears’. (You can read more about this, and about the process by which Linear B was deciphered, here).

The ‘tripod tablet’ (PY Ta 641) in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens (photo: author)

Learning Etruscan

Nice post on learning Etruscan from my colleague Pippa Steele!

https://wp.me/p7mx5R-1iA

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)