A new writing tablet from Vindolanda!

The Vindolanda Trust has tweeted this picture of a writing tablet found yesterday in the current excavations at the Roman fort:

More tablets from the Vindolanda excavations today, this one is a stylus tablet. Great find. #Vindolanda pic.twitter.com/q9h6uSzvWQ

— Vindolanda Trust (@VindolandaTrust) June 20, 2017

The tablet looks beautifully well preserved – in the picture you can clearly see the indentation in the middle which would have held the wax for writing on (unlike most of the tablets found at Vindolanda, which were written in ink). We’ll presumably have to wait until the tablet is cleaned and conserved to find out whether there are any traces of writing preserved on the wood – which happens when the stylus went right through the wax and scratched the wood underneath – and whether they’re at all readable (as some of the stylus tablets found in London have been). Fingers crossed…

Barefaced Greek: Trojan Women

Another fantastic short video from Barefaced Greek, this one from Euripides’ Trojan Women, set in the aftermath of the Greek army’s sack of Troy: Poseidon and Athena agree to destroy the Greek fleet on its way home:

Ugaritic Clay Play Day

Ugaritic abecedarium: drawing above, my attempt at copying below.

It’s become a tradition for Cambridge classical linguists to get together in Easter term and attempt to read inscriptions in languages most of us know nothing about, so this term Philip Boyes has been leading sessions on the ancient Semitic language Ugaritic. Related to modern languages like Hebrew and Arabic, and other ancient Near Eastern languages like Phoenician, Ugaritic was spoken in an area of what’s now northern Syria. The written evidence comes from several archives of clay tablets in the city of Ugarit – these cover a wide range of genres, from administrative texts to letters to poetry.

Frescoes in the Roman Catacombs

A couple of days ago we had some exciting news about new Roman finds in Britain; now here’s some even more exciting archaeology news from Rome itself. Frescoes in the Catacombs of Domitilla, just outside the city, have been restored to show images and inscriptions which provide new evidence for life in Rome in the 3rd-4th centuries CE – from the organisation of the communal corn dole to the role of Christianity in the city at this period – plus graffiti left by the catacombs’ first excavators in the 17th century. Details and some nice pictures here. This is definitely going on my list of things to see in Rome!

Roman baths discovered in Carlisle

Archaeologist Kevin Mounsey holds a Roman water pipe (from the News & Star)

Some exciting news from the north of England – the remains of a Roman bathhouse have been found underneath a cricket pavilion in the city of Carlisle. The baths are thought to be associated with a nearby fort on Hadrian’s Wall. Here‘s the BBC report, and the local News & Star paper has more details and pictures here (including the one on the right, featuring the archaeologist in charge of the dig holding a rather nice Roman water pipe). Hopefully the site will be open to visitors in the future!

Phaistos Discuits!

Probably the best linguistics baking ever – Phaistos Discuits! (via the CREWS Project)

We all love a good pun. And by ‘we’, I mean ‘I’, and by ‘good’ I mean ‘terrible’. So for a long time I’ve wanted to make ‘Phaistos Discuits’ – biscuit versions of the famous Phaistos Disc.

The Phaistos Disc is probably the most controversial inscription from ancient Crete, showing a ‘writing system’ (if that is what it is) that is almost unparalleled – a one-off as far as ancient inscriptions go. Despite some (really very unconvincing) attempts at decipherment, our understanding of this object remains extremely limited. However, it is just the perfect shape to turn into a biscuit!

View original post 292 more words

Barefaced Greek: Lysistrata

Another great video from the team behind the Cambridge Greek Play, whose new ‘Barefaced Greek‘ project is creating a series of short films with extracts from ancient Greek plays in the original language (with subtitles!). After doing the opening speech from a tragedy, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, for their first film, now they’ve turned to comedy, with an extract from Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. The eponymous heroine explains to the men of Athens how she and the other women aren’t going to put up with the men fighting wars any more – or as Barefaced Greek’s description puts it, ‘why patriarchy is pants’. Enjoy!