Pasts Imperfect (6.29.23)
LGTBQIA+ in Antiquity, Discovering the Earliest Book?, Ancient Abortion, and More
This week, ancient legal and intellectual historian Zachary Herz discusses time, queerness, and shifts in how we interpret the past. Then, new claims regarding the earliest known book, questioning the “Roman Warm Period,” the complicated legacy of Indiana Jones, Aksumite food-provisioning strategies, exploring ancient abortion, Pompeiian focaccia, new ancient world journal volumes, and much more.
A Family Affair by Zachary Herz
Queerness means having a weird relationship with time. We live in a society that uses family and reproduction to keep track of itself, often in ways that we don’t even notice. For example, I’m part of ‘the millennial generation,’ because we sort people into cohorts based on when they were generated. These categories are there to distinguish between the past of our parents and the future of our children.
This Pride month, I’m worrying about time: about how queer children of straight parents write themselves into history, and imagine futures without their own kids. This idea is hardly new in queer historiography, and there is some great work on the concept by Carolyn Dinshaw. The literary girlies have Heather Love (or Lee Edelman, if you like your theory dense and your nouns abstract), but queer identification poses some ethical problems when we talk about actual people, who might have been actually queer but are definitely actually dead.
Sometimes, I find those problems paralyzing. I’m mostly an intellectual historian, so in my primary research I don’t have to worry too hard about how my subjects felt. But when I read queer Classics scholarship I can get nervous. I think of my own gayness as both internal and social; as a culturally contingent script that I use to understand my personal feelings and desires. Both of those features of identity make it hard to find in an archive; our subjects did not see themselves in the same ways that we do, and it is hard for us to know how they saw themselves without risking ventriloquism.
I prefer not to put words in people’s mouths when they cannot correct me, and accordingly I can get very tentative whenever I think about how people engaged with ancient sex and gender. For example, when historians take the child emperor Elagabalus (r. 218–22 C.E.) as a trans woman on the basis of hostile biographers like Cassius Dio, I worry that we prioritize how we want to see Elagabalus over how the kid (who appears as male in all the coins and portraiture produced during their reign) actually wanted to be seen. I know this is a normal part of historical practice, but it makes me feel guilty, and almost selfish.
A new book by Kit Heyam, Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender (2022), has been helping me get over those bad feelings. Heyam is an early modern historian with an interest in how trans people look to history to make sense of themselves. They combine an overtly “genealogical” (to quote Laura Doan) approach to the trans past with a capacious, savvy understanding of what made that past trans in the first place.
For Heyam, trans history is not simply a history of trans people (and thus an opportunity to argue about who did and didn’t fit the brief) but of “people who’ve troubled the relationship between our bodies and how we live; people who’ve taken creative, critical approaches to gender binaries; people who’ve approached gender disruptively or messily.” Heyam’s understanding of what makes someone a trans elder—an ancestor, a part of a chosen family—resonates with me. I don’t agree with all of their particulars (I think they’re wrong about Elagabalus!), but they frame queer history so generously. Heyam writes a history of people and not of categories.
Heyam’s work also reminded me of an interesting book review that ran in BMCR this April. Sandra Boehringer’s L’Homosexualité féminine dans l’Antiquité grecque et romaine (2007) is already a classic work of lesbian history, with a new translation into English from 2021. But Jessica Wright’s review reminds us that ancient characters like Lucian’s Megillus, whom one generation read as part of a butch lesbian heritage, can also be taken as part of trans history. Queer Classics moves fast, and a new audience looks to these stories for evidence of different kinds of deviance, from different kinds of rules.
The question, though, is what happens when these different readings meet. Wright argues that “Boehringer’s focus on finding examples of ‘female homosexuality’ compromises the care she is able to offer her gender non-conforming subjects.” Ultimately, Wright concludes that Boehringer missed an opportunity to update her framing and reveal a trans Classical past.
To be clear, I disagree with Wright’s approach to reviewing and do so pretty strongly. There is nothing wrong with having written a book in 2007, and the preface to a new translation is not the place to overhaul one’s method. But beyond that, there is a straight line between genealogy, family, and Wright’s vision of care. Wright imagines Boehringer’s subjects as not just fully realized people but as ancestors who deserve, among other things, to be seen as they are.
The impulse is a generous one. The only trouble is that historians can’t see people as they were. Our sources are awful! They are fragmented! Archives are violence! We bring ourselves to the past and construct the genealogy to which we want to belong. That genealogy, like other genealogies, will look a little different for everyone. The tension Wright explores between a ‘gay’ and a ‘trans’ historiography comes from the natural urge to have our families all to ourselves. What looks like a methodological dispute may really be a kind of sibling rivalry.
Maybe the most revolutionary moment in Before We Were Trans addresses this exact concern. In their discussion of lesbian writer Jenn Shapland, Heyam casually acknowledges that the same people might appear, to different viewers, as lesbian icons or as trans men avant la lettre. To Heyam, this is not a problem: they have “faith that our communities are expansive enough to hold both meanings alongside each other; to recognize that one person’s attachment to our history does not diminish our own.”
This isn’t how family usually works. Maybe it should be? Queers stand outside of time, and outside of the family; as the cliché goes, we choose our own. Maybe that means we don’t have to worry if someone else chooses the same ancestors as we do; it’s not like anyone is getting cut out of the will. We can be imaginative without being possessive, we can build our own families but also share them. We do not need to identify a ‘true’ queer parentage to know who is mother.
Public Scholarship and a Global Antiquity
Within Special Collections at the University of Graz in Austria, conservator Theresa Zammit Lupi took a deeper look at a papyrus dating to the 3rdC BCE and found in 1902. Her re-analysis indicated that it was sewn (P.Hib. 113). This has led to the claim that the papyrus may have been part of the earliest known codex. As Brent Nongbri commented on his blog, Variant Readings,
It would be nice to see the whole thing subjected to multi-spectral imaging to see what is legible on the right side of the papyrus as well as the “back” side. If there is continuous text from the back to the front, that would be a nice confirmation that we do in fact have a very early codex here. I look forward to learning more about this piece!
The generally accepted evidence for the earliest codex is currently P.Oxy. 1.30 (Papyrus 745 at the British Library). It is a piece of Latin on parchment dated to 50-150 CE, recording De Bellis Macedonicis, possibly by Lucius Arruntius. But we should not be too hasty to celebrate this new fragment. A counter argument against the Graz pronouncement comes from Coptologist and papyrologist Gesa Schenke, who notes that some mummy cartonnage—from whence this papyrus fragment came—also uses sewing between the mask and shroud portions.
In a recently published article coauthored by twenty-one historians and scientists, “An Environmental and Climate History of the Roman Expansion in Italy,” in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, the authors provide a synthesis of the role of climate in early Roman Imperialism from 400-29 BCE. The extensive analysis “casts doubt on ideas of a unitary, historically consequential ‘Roman Warm Period.’” Instead, the authors take a more localized approach and ask us to think more about “resilience and risk-mitigating behavior by Italian communities” during this important period.
Over at Pleiades, managing editor Tom Elliott reports changes to the “references” functionality of the gazetteer. The modifications will “make it quicker and easier for people to enter bibliographic references. It gives you rapid selection options for a small number of “frequently used” short titles, plus the ability to have Pleiades search the Zotero library for you to find author name, date, and word-in-title matches for you to point-and-click choose from.” The whole Zotero bibliography for Pleiades is here and you can download Pleiades spatial data in various file types here.
In a poignant essay at The New Yorker, historian of Latin America Christopher Heaney discusses the legacy of Indiana Jones; his own interest in ancient Andean history and culture; and where archaeology is headed today. He then takes a more personal turn by addressing how Dr. Jones’ relationship with his dad hit home for Heaney while reflecting on his own connection with his anthropologist father, who died of Covid-19 during the pandemic.
My wife and I kept the Indiana Jones movies from our sons (eight and five) until a few weeks ago. I had turned forty-two, and we were celebrating my final proofread of a history of Inca mummies that I had to finish while mourning an ancestor of my own. We were turning the page on a difficult but beautiful chapter.
Whether you like the new movie or not, there is no denying that the series has had both a positive and negative cultural impact on the field. And for some? The movies have become a touchstone for how we remember our own loved ones.
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In a chapter for the new book, Food Provisioning in Complex Societies: Zooarchaeological Perspectives, archaeologist Helina Woldekiros discusses “Aksumite Foodways and Economic Strategies in the North Ethiopian Highland.” In it, Woldekiros reflects on the development of the Aksumites (50 BCE–800 CE) in the North Ethiopian and Eritrean highlands, before looking at “faunal data and evidence from the salt caravan trade” to analyze the broad spectrum of food-provisioning strategies at work.
The powerful Aksumite state controlled trade on the Red Sea and was considered a strong partner by the Romans. It is not surprising, therefore, that studies of external trade have dominated research. There has been little consideration of key local or regional food supply networks. I argue here that the Aksumite state had multiple food- provisioning systems in place, including market participation, indirect provisioning, local direct provisioning, and specialized provisioning by the state.
In an article in the journal Science, Assyriologist Troels Pank Arbøll and biologist Sophie Lund Rasmussen offer a more ancient history of sexual-romantic kissing in Mesopotamia around 2500 BCE using a number of overlooked texts. They then discuss its roll in our understanding of the history of disease transmission, arguing that “the kiss cannot be regarded as a sudden biological trigger causing a spread of specific pathogens, as recently proposed.” In terms of who “invented” this type of romantic kiss? They conclude that the the act emerged in many places at many different times and cannot be allocated or attributed to just one culture.
At Nursing Clio, historian of Greco-Roman medicine and ancient religion scholar Kristi Upson-Saia discusses a lawsuit wherein physicians are suing the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) to to try to revoke their approval of the drug mifepristone, a commonly used synthetic steroid for medically induced abortions. As she notes, “the plaintiffs, medical professionals who call themselves the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, self-consciously position themselves as heirs of a long-standing medical tradition. Their name suggests that their stance aligns with medical precedent, but does it?” After an important review of the ancient literature and understandings of pregnancy, abortion, and “illness,” she concludes:
This ancient medical precedent should cause us to pause and scrutinize how definitions of “illness” function in the mifepristone case. The mifepristone plaintiffs understand pregnancy to be “normal” and “natural,” without regard to the unhealthful symptoms that many pregnant people experience nor to the outsized maternal mortality rates in the U.S. The plaintiffs’ inattention to these health risks in their categorization of pregnancy as illness might lead us to wonder if indeed women’s health is their primary concern, or if they, like ancient physicians, are merely using women’s health as cover for other guiding interests, such as an anti-abortion agenda.
In The New York Times, Emily Wilson discusses her forthcoming translation of Homer’s Iliad. As she notes, “Around 100 complete English translations of the “Iliad” have been published over the past 400 years…Each of these translations — along with dozens more — suggests a different understanding of the central themes of courage, marriage, fate and death.” She then shows the variant translations of Iliad 6. 482-497 and looks at the important choices that translators make. From Fagles’ use of American idioms not in the text to her own “rhetorically punchy” translation, the piece is an important reflection on the art of translation.
Finally? We leave you with some new Pompeii focaccia. Even if many have insisted on calling the new fresco 🍕 a pizza, we know Romans didn’t have any tomatoes yet.
New Antiquity Journal Issues (by @YaleClassicsLib)
Dialogues d'histoire ancienne Vol. 49, No. 1 (2023) #openaccess
Nova Tellus Vol. 41 No. 2 (2023) #openaccess NB Javier Espino Martín, “De Europa a América: el latín de Nebrija, “compañero del imperio”, entre España, los virreinatos y el México novohispano”
Classical Philology Vol. 118, No. 3 (2023) NB Giordano Lipari & Francesco Giuseppe Sirna, “Laughing Waves in Ancient Greek”
Hermes Vol. 151, No. 2 (2023)
Philologus Vol. 167, No.1 (2023)
Skenè Vol. 9 No. 1 (2023) #openaccessPerforming the Book of Esther in Early Modern Europe
Archaeological Dialogues Vol. 30, No. 1 (2023) Finding the fun: Towards a playful archaeology
Annuaire de l'École pratique des hautes études, section des sciences historiques et philologiques, 2021-2022 Vol. 54 (2023) #openaccess
Journal of Egyptian History Vol. 16, No. 1 (2023)
Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Vol. 65, No. 2 (2022) Problems with the Greek Gods
Online Lectures, CFPs, and Current Museum Exhibitions
There is a new museum exhibition on now at the Quirinal Palace in Rome, “The Gods Return.” It displays the stunning 24 bronze statues found in the ancient thermal baths of San Casciano dei Bagni, near Siena last year. These bronzes date to the 2ndC BCE-1stC CE. Although Tiberius closed the baths when a “bolt of lightning hit the sanctuary and was interpreted as a message from the gods that the area must be cleansed and sealed,” you can see this incredible visualization of the transition from Etruscan to Roman culture from now until July 25, 2023 in Rome, and then again from September 2-October 29, 2023.
The new exhibition, ‘L'amato di Iside. Nerone, la Domus Aurea e l'Egitto’ (“The Beloved of Isis. Nero, the Domus Aurea and Egypt”) is on now until September 30, 2023 in the Octagonal room of Nero’s Domus Aurea in Rome. As a press release notes, the exhibition brings together "dozens of precious artifacts related to Egyptian culture from the major Italian museums." ‘‘L'amato di Iside’ is curated by Alfonsina Russo, Francesca Guarneri, Stefano Borghini, and Massimiliana Pozzi.
On July 4, 2023 from 3:30-11:30 CDT will be #ECRday2023—an Engaged Research Masterclass hosted online. They will explore “how to do engaged research for different audiences and across different media. [You’ll] learn about best practice in Public Engagement when working with institutions such as museums, galleries and libraries; how to write a trade press book; and what works on TV & Radio.” AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker Fariha Shaikh will be joined by Mai Musié, Julia Laite, and Síobhra Aiken. Register here.
At the Móra Ferenc Museum in Szeged, Hungary, a new exhibition of Han Dynasty artifacts is now on display. Curator Gu Xiance, deputy head of the art department of the Shanghai Museum, spoke at a press conference about the special partnership between the Móra Ferenc museum and the Shanghaiji Museum, Chengdu Archaeological Institute, Xuzhou Museum, Francis Hopp Museum of Asian Art, and Magic Wall (BRISC).
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