Musings on Daily Life in the Ancient and Early Medieval Mediterranean By Sarah E. Bond
I am not an Egyptologist. My specialities are digital humanities, epigraphy, and the laws of the late Roman Empire. The beauty of academia and of journalism is that far more brilliant people than you can allow exploration of intellectual terrain through their research, writing, and excavation. This is certainly the case for my new article... Continue Reading →
Fresco from the Bar of Salvius, Pompeii. In it, a bar maid holds a jug in one hand and a cup in another. One customer shouts “over here!”while another says “no, it’s mine!” The exasperated barmaid replies “whoever wants it should take it. Oceanus come here and drink”. (Caption and Image by Dr. Sophie Hay... Continue Reading →
Last week, my interview with Abydos Archaeology’s Matthew Douglas Adams was published at Hyperallergic. The article focused on the discovery of an industrial royal brewery dating to 3100-2900 BCE at the Egyptian site of Abydos, where Adams co-directs the excavation with Deborah Vischak, as part of fieldwork supported by New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and Princeton University. In... Continue Reading →
Last week, Candida Moss and I were lucky enough to catch the tail end of The World between Empires: Art and Identity in the Ancient Middle East, an exhibition which opened March 18 and closes on June 23, 2019 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The 190 objects within the exhibition acquired from... Continue Reading →
Pro Publica: A Public Classics Workshop Northwestern University, October 18-19, 2019 How can we better speak and write about the ancient Mediterranean for the general public? How can academics engaged in the study of antiquity underscore the relevance of Classics in the present day? The Society for Classical Studies and the Department of Classics at... Continue Reading →
Within ancient theater, the phrase 'deus ex machina' actually referred to a crane called a μηχανή (the Greek term from whence we get our "machine") used to suspend and then lower individuals onto the stage during performances of tragic plays, particularly those written by Sophocles and Euripides. In nine of his plays, an epiphanic deus was lowered... Continue Reading →
Thousands of refugees are currently standing at the US-Mexico border. In their 2,500 mile journey from Central America, these women, children, and men from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador have endured much in order to petition for a grant of asylum within the United States. As I have written about before, the concept of the... Continue Reading →
For the past year and half, I have written extensively about the appropriation of ancient symbols, texts, and material culture as a rallying point for hate and marginalization within the U.S. and Europe. I wanted to take a moment to aggregate this work, to address how and why ancient historians are working to record this... Continue Reading →
This week over at Hyperallergic, Sean Burrus and I published a co-written article on the use of variegated marbles (which have particolored and mottled veins that give it color) in order to orientalize and illustrate Roman ideas of the "barbarian." As per usual, I like to take to my own blog to discuss new essays, since it is... Continue Reading →
Over at Hyperallergic this week, I discuss the proposed release of over 2,000 Hieroglyphs into Unicode by 2020 or 2021. If you are a classicist then you know how important the Unicode movement has been in standardizing the visualization of Greek texts in particular. But the non-profit Unicode Consortium encodes many other ancient and endangered... Continue Reading →
History From Below 