‘Palaeography, administration, and scribal training’ now available online

I’m pleased to say that a paper I published a couple of years ago, ‘Palaeography, administration, and scribal training: a case-study’ is now freely available to read – you can download a copy via the Cambridge University open access repository (no account or academic affiliation required). In this paper, I presented some of the results from the part of my PhD in which I explored ways of using palaeography – the analysis of different writers’ handwriting – to understand more about the people who wrote the Linear B administrative documents in the Mycenaean Greek palaces of 1400-1200 BCE. I looked at the variation seen in a group of Linear B signs’ forms in texts by writers working in different areas of these palaces and/or on different administrative topics to see if there was any evidence for the widespread assumption that fully-trained writers would have gone on to work alongside their teacher, keeping records on similar areas of the palatial administration — cf. the illustration on the cover of John Chadwick’s The Mycenaean World, showing a scribe and his apprentice working in the ‘Archives Complex’ at Pylos.

Cover of John Chadwick’s The Mycenaean World, showing scribe and apprentice at work

I found that (at least as far as my small group of case-study signs suggested) the situation seemed to be a lot more complicated than people normally assume. The relationship between writers’ administrative work – and the working relationships we can reconstruct between them on – and the ways they (were trained to) write is definitely something that needs a lot more research, and that I’ll be returning to in future work. Also, there will be much more detail on this particular study in my forthcoming book – on which more news later in the year!

 

 

 

Last Supper in Pompeii at the Ashmolean

Statue of Bacchus, god of wine, at the introduction to ‘Last Supper in Pompeii’

Happy New Year to readers of this blog! And to start the year off, I’m reviewing an exhibition I went to see over the Christmas break – the Ashmolean’s ‘Last Supper in Pompeii’ (which closes in just a few days, on January 12th; for readers not in Oxford, there are a few pictures of exhibits and a video at the link).

The exhibition is billed as ‘tell[ing] the story of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii’s love affair with food and wine’, and it features plenty of wonderful artefacts relating to that theme, many of them loaned from the Naples Archaeological Museum or from the site of Pompeii itself — from the pots and pans used to cook and serve meals, to depictions of food on frescoes and mosaics, to an actual carbonised loaf of bread.

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.