School visits to the Faculty of Classics

For any teachers who might be readers of this blog, the Faculty is taking bookings now for school visits during the next academic year – groups of Key Stages 3-5 students from maintained schools can visit the Museum of Classical Archaeology, listen to a talk by a Classics lecturer, and tour a college, plus there’s a free lunch on offer! (and help with travel expenses is available too). Students don’t have to be studying any particular topics, just to be interested in learning more about the ancient world.

Check out the Faculty’s outreach site here, and if you’re a teacher interested in bringing your students, talk to our outreach co-ordinator Jennie Thornber (jlt39 [a] cam.ac.uk; 01223 767044).

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.

“Tails from Mycenae”

There’s a nice temporary display that’s just gone up in the Museum of Classical Archaeology here in the Faculty, called “Tails from Mycenae” – it’s a case displaying various different depictions of animals on Mycenaean artefacts (i.e. from late Bronze Age Greece, c. the 16th-13th centuries BCE), put together by four current Classics undergradutes (Katie Phillips, Caroline Clements, Georgia Lowe and Anya Morrice). It’s nice to see such a range of different kinds of artefacts even in one small case – from pottery fragments and figurines to (replicas of) daggers and golden disks, plus of course Linear B tablets (I helped out a bit by providing a transcription of a tablet listing sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle). It’s also a good chance to see stuff that isn’t usually on public display at all in the Faculty – most of what you see in the museum is casts of statues, but as this case shows, the collection is actually quite a bit more diverse than that!

Cambridge readers can head to the Museum to see the display (free admission, Mon-Fri 10-5, Sat 10-1 during term time) – and by the way, this is also an excellent excuse to look around the rest of the Museum if you haven’t seen it before! For non-Cambridge readers, there’s a couple more pictures of the display below. And thanks to Katie, Caroline, Georgia, and Anya for putting the whole thing together!

Pottery, figurines, and Linear B tablet cast

Replicas of daggers, a cup, and gold disks

Clay Play Day #2

Last term I wrote about the ‘clay play day‘ we held in my department: as the last in a series of seminars about the undeciphered Cretan script Linear A, we all got a chance to try out making and inscribing our own Linear A clay tablets. Since there was quite a bit of clay left over afterwards, I decided to have my own clay play day at home to make some tablets with inscriptions in Linear B – the script I mostly work on, which is related to Linear A but used to write Greek. This was partly an excuse just to mess around with clay a bit more, but I also figured some replica tablets would come in handy for teaching purposes, outreach events, etc – it’s hard to show what sort of size the tablets actually are via photographs on a PowerPoint. So here are some pictures of 1) a tablet in progress, using a photocopy of the published photograph and drawing to get the size right; 2) holding the finished tablet, for scale purposes; and 3) all three tablets I ended up making.

Greek plays online

Last term I wrote a review of the fantastic Cambridge Greek play, a tragedy/comedy double bill of Antigone and Lysistrata: now the production team have made some video highlights of both plays available online. Have a look at the video below!

Time to Talk (about mental health)

Content advice: this post does not contain any detailed discussions of specific mental health issues, but linked sites may contain such discussions (these are provided with content warnings where possible).

Today (February 2nd) is ‘Time to Talk Day’: a day for talking about mental health problems, for reaching out to those who are currently experiencing such problems, and for educating people about the realities of mental health conditions to tackle the stigma that is still unfortunately often attached to these conditions.

Statistically, one in four people will experience a mental health problem every year, meaning that whether you know it or not, someone (probably several people) in your family, or your friendship group, or your workplace, will have or have previously had a mental health condition. From my own perspective as an academic, academia is very far from being an exception to this, with mental health problems being increasingly prevalent amongst university students and staff alike.

Practical epigraphy, or, Linear A Clay Play Day

This term in the Faculty we’ve been having a series of seminars looking at Linear A, an undeciphered script from prehistoric Crete (and the script out of which Linear B, which I mostly work on, was developed). We started off with a general introduction to what Linear A is – Sarah Finlayson gave us an overview of the different sites across Crete where Linear A inscriptions have been found, their chronology (roughly between the 19th to 15th centuries B.C.E.), and the general context in which they were written (some are from ‘palaces’, others from smaller administrative centres, and some come from religious sanctuaries). I then did a survey of the kinds of documents Linear A was used to write: these ranged from administrative texts on clay tablets or on small lumps of clay (used for, e.g., labelling objects, or sealing storage jars or store-rooms) to non-administrative inscriptions on clay or stone vases, metal objects, and even a couple of graffiti scratched onto walls (there are some pictures of different kinds of inscriptions here).