Pasts Imperfect (10.24.24)
Ancient Work Lives, Gazan Heritage Sites, A Giza Pyramid Dog, & More
This week, Del Maticic discusses his new co-edited volume with Jordan Rogers reconstructing Working Lives in Ancient Rome. Then, cross-comparing salt production in Han China and Ancient Rome, the art and fashion of Kaos, Ancient Persia and the rock formations of Teniky, a forthcoming book on “What is Ancient History?”, a good boi visits the Pyramids of Giza, new ancient world journal issues, and much more.
Roman Work/Life by Del A. Maticic
If you are like me, this time of year is a challenging one for maintaining a healthy work/life balance. I am an academic, which means I am in the full swing of a teaching term. Meanwhile, the impending holidays steadily pile up social and familial pressure. On top of these duties, there is the burgeoning responsibility of emotional care for students and loved ones amidst global wars, natural disasters, and elections of world-historical consequence. It’s difficult not only to balance personal and professional responsibilities, but to clearly distinguish between those two domains. Perhaps it is better to speak of work/life integration, as some HR departments have started to do, or, on a less optimistic note, of work/life cross-contamination.
Although these questions about the nature of the relationship between work and life seem distinctly relevant in the context of late capitalism, they are in fact not new. Working Lives in Ancient Rome, a book which I co-edited with Roman historian Jordan R. Rogers and which was published this month as part of Palgrave MacMillan’s series The New Antiquity, explores similarly intense discourses about the relationship of living and working in the world of ancient Rome. Across the twelve chapters of the book an international team of literary critics, archaeologists, and historians consider how different Roman occupations shaped the lives and identities of different groups across Roman social hierarchies.
The book is divided into three sections of four chapters each that loosely evoke the schema of the 9-to-5 working day. Section I, “Getting Up, Brushing Up, Going In” collects three papers associated with the commencements of work. After our introductory chapter, Tom Geue’s study of the short anonymous Moretum shows how that poem uses metaphors of labor to reinforce power hierarchies in the poem. Claire Holleran then considers evidence for the geographical mobility of doctors, construction workers, and other skilled professionals in the Roman Mediterranean, shedding light on the importance of professional networks for Rome’s “wandering workers.” Caroline Cheung then considers the evidence for networks of education and training in the work of making and repairing the ubiquitous clay storage containers known as dolia.
Section II, “Showing Up,” turns to the work of representing the laboring life. A long chapter by Ann Kuttner surveys depictions of work in republican and imperial Roman art, tracing evidence for a visual “culture of competency” in which both laborers and viewers engage in a reciprocal dialogue about what constitutes the social legitimacy of a job well done. Jane Sancinito turns to representations and stereotyping of the much-maligned figure of the Roman merchant and traces a rich vein of evidence for how individual merchants and groups of professionals responded to such stereotyping. Rebecca Sausville advances to another tier of ancient work, the so-called “lettered labor” of public intellectuals like doctors operating in Roman Anatolia, and follows a thread of literary and inscriptional evidence for how this group asserted their own value to their community. Finally, Jordan Rogers considers the professional, religious, and cultural networks around a particular representation of work, the so-called fabri tignarii relief, and demonstrates the religious and cultural entanglements of skilled artisans in Roman public life.
Section III, “Escaping, Commuting, and Passing Out,” considers themes of fugitivity, death, and afterlife in discourses about work. Nicole Giannella compares the depiction of two ex-slaves of Cicero and the distinct ways in which they navigated personal and professional obligations. Marco Formisano reads Ovid’s account of Arachne’s metamorphosis into a spider via Hannah Arendt. He interprets the metamorphosis as a process whereby the goddess Minerva punishes her by taking away her creative work and instead forces her into the drudgery of labor. John Bodel surveys the history of the funeral worker known as the praefica and shows how the position was subsumed by elites. Finally, my chapter shows how Vergil represents labor as a vital force and argues that ancient and early modern Vergilian biographers respond to this living labor in their Lives.
This project, which began as a series of Zoom workshops in 2020 and extended into the post-pandemic present, has advanced during world-historical shifts in work and life. As a small homage to that context, the book is dedicated to the friends, family members, and colleagues that the Working Lives team lost during this process.
Global Antiquity and Public Humanities
In a global comparative, open access article on “Salt infrastructure and environmental history in imperial Rome and Han China,” economic historian Darian Marie Totten looks at salt production and the impact on the environment in Rome and Han China. In terms of this comparative approach, “While no history is precisely the same, a comparative approach can help amplify our knowledge of each case by destabilizing assumptions and bolstering interpretations (Scheidel, 2018: 42; Sivin, 2018)…salt was a topic through which the elite in both empires made sense of social interactions and hierarchies.”
From Goya references to lyre tattoos to Dionysian tiger shirts, Greco-Roman mythology expert Aimee Hinds Scott breaks down how “Kaos Draws From Art History to Tell Its Story” in the digital pages of Hyperallergic. I think I speak for everyone when I say that Hera (Janet McTeer)’s gold and silver kaftan is what I plan to live in during my sabbatical, although the Fendi baguette glasses are at a price point that only the Gods can afford.
Over at the Lesche (λέσχη) podcast, Johanna Hanink speaks to Rachel Kousser about Alexander III of Macedon's post-Persepolis campaigns in Asia (330-323 BCE), the subject of her recent book Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great. Please note that the National Museum of Asian Art is also currently presenting “An Epic of Kings: The Great Mongol Shahnama.” The exhibition presents a folio of the Shahnama made around 1330, which depicts Iran’s historical rulers—beginning with Alexander the Great (Iskandar).
Archaeologists Chantal Radimilahy and Guido Schreurs report on mysterious rock formations in Teniky, a valley in Isalo National Park in central-southern Madagascar. The terraces, shelters, and other architectural features have long been subjects of speculation. But the new archaeological study of Teniky indicates that the shape of the rock niches across the 30-hectare site show that they may have been inhabited by people who traveled from ancient Persia 1,000 years ago.
You might enjoy it as a breakfast pudding, but chia was a foundational crop for the ancient Aztecs. David Lentz, an ethnobotanist at the University of Cincinnati, endorses its health benefits in the ancient and modern day: “People say fats are terrible for you, but this is not really so,” Lentz says. “A lot of vitamins are fat soluble so if you don’t have fats in your diet, you’ll be malnourished.”
In April 2025, ancient historian Walter Scheidel has a new book coming out with Princeton Press called “What is Ancient History?” Get your book clubs together now, because this one is gonna be good.
The time has come, Scheidel argues, to put the ancient world back together—by moving beyond the limitations of Greco-Roman “classics,” by systematically comparing ancient societies, and by exploring early exchanges and connections between them. The time has come, in other words, for an ancient history for everyone.
In the words of Josephine Quinn, author of How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History: “This is a brilliant, glorious flamethrower of a book.” 🔥🔥🔥
Not to be glib, but the Atacama Desert in northern Chile has really been through it. The latest? Destruction of its ancient geoglyphs by people racing their motorcycles. Anthropologists Daniela Valenzuela and Gonzalo Pimentel, among many other Chilean academics, are working to preserve and restore these sites while promoting education about them.
Over at Everyday Orientalism, Assyriologist Moudhy Al-Rashid discusses “Melting Pot Middle East: Ancient Palestine and Lebanon in the Amarna Letters.” Additionally, Pilar Montero Vilar has an important piece on how the “Destruction of Gaza heritage sites aims to erase – and replace – Palestine’s history.” As Israeli forces continue to bomb near the ancient ruins of Baalbek and now Tyre, the erasure of cultural heritage is increasingly being underscored.
The New York Times, Scientific American, and Science all report on the discovery of substantial medieval cites in the highlands of Uzbekistan by the archaeologist Michael D. Frachetti (Washington University in St. Louis) . These findings, just published in Nature, suggest a much more complicated picture of the trading networks making up the Silk Road. The NYT quotes Peter Frankopan “I can’t tell you how exciting this study is.”
In a recently published open-access article in WIRES Climate Change, Byzantinist John Haldon and a multidisciplinary team of historians and scientists discuss “Past Answers to Present Concerns. The Relevance of the Premodern Past for 21st Century Policy Planners: Comments on the State of the Field” The work is part of a project of National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) at the University of Maryland.
Last, and never least, please enjoy this viral video of a dog hanging out on one of the Great Pyramids of Giza.
New Antiquity Journal Issues (by @YaleClassicsLib / yaleclassicslib.bsky.social)
Journal of the History of Collections Vol. 36, No. 3 (2024) Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli between Milan and Europe. Travels, connections and patterns of taste of a mid-nineteenth-century collector
Apeiron Vol. 57, No. 3 (2024)
Centaurus Vol. 65, No. 3 (2024) #openaccess Scientific Collections on the Move
The Catholic Biblical Quarterly Vol. 86, No. 4 (2024) NB James Nati “Prophetic Authority and Scribal Anxiety in the Late Second Temple Period”
eisodos No. 2 (2024) #openaccess
Persica Vol. 28 (2023-2024) NB Leonard Lewisohn† “The Esoteric Platonists of Persia and Florence”
The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition Vol. 18, No. 2 (2024)
Rosetta Journal No. 29 (2024) #openaccess
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies Vol. 48, No. 2 (2024)
Journal of Social Archaeology Vol. 24, No. 3 (2024)
Philosophy East and West Vol. 74, No. 3, (2024)
Vetus Testamentum Vol. 74, No. 4-5 (2024)
Revista Española de Filosofía Medieval Vol. 31, No.1 (2024) #openaccess The Powers of the Soul in Medieval Franciscan Thought
Gesta Vol. 63, No. 2 (2024)
Sophia Vol. 63, No. 3 (2024) Concepts of God and the Divine in Indian Traditions
Classical Receptions Journal Vol. 16, No.4 (2024) NB Tori F. Lee “The haunting of classics in the Dark Academia aesthetic”(Editor’s Choice)
Le Muséon Vol. 137, Nos. 1-2 (2024)
Online Events, Workshops, and Exhibitions
Note that the Future of the Past Lab and the Center for Premodern Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities invite applications for four, week-long visiting fellowships focused on the question of “Comparative Work.” They are “seeking fellows whose work approaches the study of premodern societies from a comparative perspective (either putting them in dialogue with other premodern cultures or with modern ones) while also considering questions of methodology and theory.”
Word comes from Flint Dibble that the Real Archaeology online conference will be held from October 25, 2024 @ 10:00 am - October 27, 2024 @ 6:00 pm EDT. As they note: “Hop onto a livestream and ask us your questions with us in the chat, or watch a video on one of our wide variety of topics covering archaeology, prehistory, debunking pseudoarchaeology and more!”
WCC Job Market Series: Negotiating a Job Offer: On November 4, 2024 4:00 PM, EST, you can join the WCC Job Market Series! Register here for '“Negotiating a Job Offer,” and they will “tackle your questions about what to do after you have an offer: what are reasonable asks in response to an offer, the difference between hard and soft money, and how much time you have to make a decision.”
Panelists: Joel Christensen (Brandeis University), Monica Cyrino (University of New Mexico), Patrice Rankine (University of Chicago)
Moderators: Amy Pistone (Gonzaga University), Erika L. Weiberg (Duke University)
On Wednesday, October 30th at 12:30pm, the Center for African Studies at Howard University will host a virtual Distinguished African Archaeology Lecture by Shadreck Chirikure, Edward Hall Professor of Archaeological Science at Oxford: “When Informants Become Knowledge Producers: Rethinking Great Zimbabwe"
