X-Rays reveal Draconian Measures!

Researchers at Cornell have used x-ray fluorescence to recover a number of illegible inscriptions, and apparently Draco's laws are among them.

The article is found in ZPE 152 (2005): 221–227, 'X-ray Fluorescence Recovers Writing from Ancient Inscriptions.'

Unfortunately our copy is currently in 'labelling' which means I may never see it. I'll have to make do with short-on-content articles that feel the need to translate the names of publications.

(Zeitschrift fuer Papyrologie und Epigraphik is translated--Journal for Papyrology and Epigraphy--and given with no further citation other than 'the August issue,' so that lots of people who might want to read the article--and not the article about the article-- might have a hard time finding it.)

Ancient Egyptian Secret

Here's something that might actually get me out of the Philly area for a day: the Edwin Smith papyrus:

What researchers call the world's oldest known medical treatise, an Egyptian papyrus offering 4,000-year-old wisdom, has long dwelled in the rare books vault at the New York Academy of Medicine.

It is an extraordinary remnant of a culture that was already ancient when Rome was new and Athens was a backwater - Egypt's stone monuments endure, but the scrolls made of pulped reeds have mostly been lost. One expert, James H. Breasted, who translated the papyrus in the 1920's, called it "the oldest nucleus of really scientific knowledge in the world." Yet relatively few people know of it, and fewer have seen it.

It is about to become much better known. After a short trip down Fifth (insert down-the-Nile metaphor here) to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the papyrus will go on public display, probably for the first time, on Tuesday, as part of the Met's exhibition "The Art of Medicine in Ancient Egypt." The show will also include items like a CAT scan of a mummy, surgical needles and other medical artifacts.

I guess spending a few months with Nicander makes medical history seem not so unappealing as it might otherwise have been.

MedGadget has more, including a previous post which links to an interactive translation (click the symptom and read the suggestion).

Congratulations, Eric.

Today Eric completed the oral examination for his PhD prelims and will be heading off to Rome next week to begin work on his dissertation as the first Marti Fellow to the American Academy.

As Professor Scott told us today over champagne following Eric's exam, Berthe Marti was partial to three institutions: Bryn Mawr College, UNC Chapel Hill, and the American Academy. Her dream was to send one Bryn Mawr and one UNC graduate to the Academy each year on a fellowship, a dream which the changing times and financial constraints have forced to compromise.

All of us here know that Eric will do everyone proud.

Here's a biographical sketch of Berthe Marti written by Bryn Mawr alumn Eleanor Dickey (A.B./M.A. 1989) while still an undergraduate:

Berthe Marti, a graduate of the University of Lausanne, came to Bryn Mawr as a graduate student in 1925, wrote her dissertation with Lily Ross Taylor, and received her Ph.D. in 1934. She began teaching in 1930 and remained at Bryn Mawr until 1963. Although most famous as a medievalist, she also taught classical Latin and sometimes French.

What that doesn't tell you (but what Professor Scott told us) is that she was forced to leave by the strict retirement laws in effect in those days. That led to her tenure at UNC, where the laws were freer.

Once again, congratulations. As Jason once told me, 'Eric is the only one of us well on his way to becoming a true scholar.'

Google Earth Roman Villa Update

I found this at Slashdot:

(Make sure you're on satellite view and not map.)

Old Timey Scholars

I am thoroughly enjoying (very occasionally) browsing through Briggs and Calder's Classical Scholarship: A Biographical Encyclopedia (and I do take Rusten's caution to heart, especially since I noted a few glaring omissions myself).

You can read about former Bryn Mawr professors Paul Shorey, Tenney Frank, and Lily Ross Taylor. I see via the department's site that Briggs's Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists contains entries on Paul Shorey, Herbert Weir Smyth, Gonzalez Lodge, Arthur Leslie Wheeler, Tenney Frank, Lily Ross Taylor, Louise Adams Holland, and T. Robert S. Broughton.

But the reason I started this post was simply to say that I envy the old-timers who knew these languages better than many of us ever will. I've just gotten my hands on J.G. Schneider's edition of the Theriaca of Nicander (1816) which has been highly praised by those in the know (one modern scholar once called it the only useful edition, a direct slap to Otto Schneider's edition of 1856 and an acknowledgment of the limitations of Gow-Scholfield). I haven't time to do much with it yet, but the most promising thing is J.G. Schneider's prose: his Latin is the clearest academic Latin prose I've come across.

That's high praise.

Google Earth helps to find Roman Villa?

The following story has relevance for those interested in classical civilization and archaeology, as well as the internet (hat tip to Sarah):

A computer programmer looking at Google Earth satellite images has reportedly discovered the remains of an ancient Roman villa near Sorbelo, Italy.

Luca Mori of Sorbelo was looking at a satellite image of his area, located near Parma, when he noticed unusual shading near his home, the London Telegraph reported Wednesday.

He said the area had an oval shaded form more than 500 yards long, with some unusual rectangular shadows nearby.

Archaeologists subsequently determined the rectangular lines were, most likely, a buried structure and the oval area was likely the course of an ancient river.

Mori contacted the National Archaeological Museum of Parma, which investigated.

"At first they thought the site might be Bronze Age, but a closer inspection turned up ceramic and stone pieces that showed it was a Roman villa built some time just before the birth of Christ," he told the newspaper.

Mori said he was happy with his discovery. "I have managed to get people talking about the Internet because of something interesting rather than pedophiles and viruses," he told the Telegraph.

That last bit is my favorite, I think.

On the German verb

This will probably seem silly to anyone who actually knows German, but I've been working on my reading competence and I'm finding it much easier to deal with compound verbs by thinking of a hierarchy of compositional elements.

The second position in the sentence of course takes the finite verb, and the other parts get kicked back to the end of the sentence.

The rank goes like this:

(1) Futurity (2) Perfectivity (3) Passivity (4) Verbal idea

Their ordering goes like this:

... A ... (D,C)B

It's that final position which moves right to left that seems tricky at first.

In English we have the same hierarchy but for the fact that ours reads from left to right.

Compare the following:

G. ... wird ... gesagt worden sein.
E. ... will have been said ....

If you remove any element, the hierarchy requires that the other elements take their proper place. If you wanted to remove the passivity, worden and been would both be dropped and their place would be taken up by gesagt and said, and the auxiliary of sagen (haben) rather than of werden (sein) would take final position:

G. ... wird ... gesagt haben.
E. ... will have said ....

In neither language is there any flexibility in the position of each element. If any of them is present it will take its place in the hierarchy.

Again,
German, ... A ... (D,C,B)
English, ... A (B,C,D) ...

Then again, I'm just a classicist struggling through this language. Go ahead and trash and/or correct me in the comments.

The Greek textbook chugs along

I've been working on a new edition of an old Greek textbook, as some of you know, and I've made my share of contributions--mostly of the negative variety, like successfully lobbying to delete unsound linguistic arguments.

But yesterday I was greeted with the note 'NEED EXAMPLE' on the accusative absolute.

I wrote:

(e.g., δέον ἡμῖν ἀπιέναι, ‘it being necessary for us to depart’ ; δέον is the neuter accusative participle of the impersonal verb δεῖ. Compare the genitive absolute ἀπερχομένων ἡμῶν, ‘with us departing’).

He said he liked it and thanked me for the addition.

It's a small thing, but it sort of made my day.

I'd say we're about two-thirds of the way through the new edition, but it'll doubtless spend at least a year being tested in classrooms here and elsewhere. (Our students already want the Greek to be bigger. But what's worth more? Printing costs, or their eyes? Bah!)