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.

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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 🙂

Reconstructing Mycenaean scribes and archives… in Lego!

For International Lego Classicists Day (yes, apparently that’s a thing now), a great post from my colleague Pippa Steele with a Lego model of the ‘Archives Complex’ at Pylos! Plus a great discussion of what these two rooms (where most of the Linear B tablets from this palace were found) were actually used for.

Happy International Lego Classicism Day to all our friends and colleagues! In celebration this year, I have been working on something special: a re-imagining of the cover art from John Chadwick’s The Mycenaean World book, in a 3D Lego model. Far from a just-for-fun exercise, this actually has some helpful practical applications in making us question what Mycenaean scribes did at work, and how Linear B archives functioned.

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A very short introduction to the undeciphered Aegean writing systems

The Phaistos Disc – see below

Every so often a news article will make the rounds of the internet – or, for that matter, a paper will be published in an academic journal – presenting a new ‘decipherment’ of an undeciphered ancient writing system. Obviously, such decipherments have taken place in the past – probably most famously that of Egyptian hieroglyphs – and it’s certainly possible that more will take place in the future; but when it comes to the undeciphered writing systems of the Bronze Age Aegean, at least, there’s good reason to be extremely sceptical about any such claims of decipherment. This post is a quick guide to some key facts about the various related writing systems found in Bronze Age Crete and mainland Greece, starting with the one deciphered writing system, Linear B, and then surveying the undeciphered ones roughly in order of how much we know about them, looking very briefly at where and when they’re from, what kinds of documents exist, and how much (if anything) we know about the writing system or the language it represents.

Conversing the Classics podcast: Linear B

I’m very pleased to be able to share a podcast I recorded for the Classical Youth Society of Ireland‘s “Conversing the Classics” series, in which I talk to Oscar McHale about the Linear B writing system: what it is, what kinds of text were written in it, and what it can tell us about Greece in the Late Bronze Age, as well as how it was first discovered and deciphered. You can listen/watch here:

 

The Silence of the Girls – review

The Iliad tells the story of the Greek hero Achilles’ anger after Briseis, a woman he’s taken captive as his ‘prize’ after sacking her city, is taken away from him by Agamemnon, and the disasters that strike the Greek army after Achilles withdraws from the fighting over this slight. Briseis herself doesn’t feature much in the poem; she’s only mentioned ten times, and only speaks once, to mourn the death of Patroclus, who, she says, was kind to her after her capture by Achilles (19.282ff). Pat Barker‘s The Silence of the Girls (2018) gives us Briseis’ version of the Iliad: the story of the war told from the point of view of one of the many women who lose their homes, families, and freedom at the hands of the Homeric ‘heroes’. It’s a wonderful novel, beautifully written in mostly very simple language that manages to shift seamlessly in and out of near-translations or Homeric references when recounting key moments from the poem: Barker uses this to particularly strong effect when she recreates a Homeric battle-scene — a long list of men suffering gruesome deaths interspersed with small details about their lives or their final moments — then subverts it by giving the alternative version of their story: the one told by their female relatives after their death to their fellow-slaves.

Ashurbanipal at the British Museum

“I am Ashurbanipal, king of the world, king of Assyria” proclaims the subject of the British Museum’s current major exhibition, whom the stunningly-lit first object in the display shows in the middle of a lion hunt:

Stone relief showing Ashurbanipal hunting lions