Musings on Daily Life in the Ancient and Early Medieval Mediterranean By Sarah E. Bond
tanta vis admonitionis inest in locis; ut non sine causa ex iis memoriae ducta sit disciplina. “Places have so great a power of suggestion that the technical art of memory is with good reason based upon them.” — Cicero, De Finibus, 5.2. "The 'living wolf' inside her enclosure on the Campidogli[o] from (above) L’Illustrazione Italiana no. 49 December... Continue Reading →
‘I have come from the City. I bring you a welcome gift with a sharp point that you may remember me. I ask, if fortune allowed, that I might be able (to give) as generously as the way is long (and) as my purse is empty.’ (trans. Tomlin 2019)
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 →
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 →
Finishing my third trimester in the midst of a pandemic was not what I had planned for the last months of pregnancy. Since the Ides of March, we have sequestered ourselves in our house in Iowa City and cancelled any and all social gatherings––including the planned baby shower––as has almost everyone else across the globe.... Continue Reading →
As the pandemic known as COVID-19 grips the globe, thousands of instructors in the United States and elsewhere have been asked to transition their courses online for the remainder of the semester. To some instructors, such as the superb Classics professors at the Open University, distance learning has become a normalized pedagogy. To many others... Continue Reading →
It is syllabus time for many once again. If you are like me, you want to save your students from spending too much on textbooks, but still want to have a rich array of current reading for students assigned on your syllabus. A few years ago, I put together a popular list of "Open Access... Continue Reading →
Isidore was a learned scholar and the Bishop of the Spanish city of Seville from 600-636 CE. Thousands of manuscripts containing his Etymologiae ("The Etymologies," also called the Origines, "The Origins") survive today; the only work to surpass it in terms of extant manuscript copies in Western Europe is the Bible (Throop 2005: xii). The sheer number of... 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 →
Over on Ancient Jew Review, I have a review of Donna Zuckerberg's new book, Not All Dead White Men. The review was certainly not easy to write, but I do recommend buying, reading, and then sharing this important read. It is honestly the only time in the past two years or so that I have been happy to... Continue Reading →
History From Below 