Pasts Imperfect (8.11.22)
Podcasting the Past, Ancient Footprints, and More
We are back from summer break! And this week, we look at a series on ancient women brought to you by Peopling the Past, explore ancient footprints in the Utah desert, follow Ovid to China, and much more.
Podcasting for the Classroom
Over at Peopling the Past, a number of new posts address women in antiquity. As many of us prep syllabi and integrate new activities into our courses, we might consider weaving in their academic podcasts, blog posts, and classroom activities. If you are interested in the Etruscans, there is an interview with Judith Swaddling, retired Curator of Pre-Roman and Etruscan Collections at the British Museum, who addresses the painted sarcophagus of Seianti. Or perhaps bring in Tara Mulder’s discussion of Roman childbirth and midwifery. We also adore art historian Sanchita Balachandran’s episode on the sensory experiences of potters and painters in antiquity. By the by, Princeton’s Educational and Classroom Technologies site has a great guide to rubrics and pedagogy through podcasting, if you want to create podcasts as an assignment with your students.
Global Antiquity in the News
In The Point magazine, Daniel José Camacho has a great essay on “Saint Augustine’s Slave Play.” In it, he delves into the complexities of slavery in antiquity, the translation of Augustine’s words today, and the reception of the saint over time. In the end, he asks us to confront the bishop and the reality of ancient servitude head-on.
I once longed for a pure Augustine. But there’s nothing pure about this world. We can invent spotless saints, or we can honestly confront the complex legacy of a figure or a tradition, and in doing so imagine a more expansive version of freedom.
At Utah’s Hill Air Force Base within the Great Salt Lake Desert, 88 footprints have been discovered by archaeologists conducting a 5,000-acre archaeological review. The footprints are about 12,000 years old, putting them in at around 10,000 BCE during a wetland period. Daron Duke, PI with the Far Western Anthropological Research Group, noted evidence of adults with children aged 5-12 years that left behind bare footprints.
A new volume edited by Thomas J. Sienkewicz and Jinyu Liu which examines the reception of Ovid in China is now published:
The seventeen essays in this volume, by a group of international scholars, examine Ovid’s interaction with China in a broad historical context, including the arrival of Christian missionaries in 1294, the depiction of Ovidian scenes on 18th-century Chinese porcelain, the growing Chinese interest in Ovid in the early 20th century, a 21st-century collaborative project to translate Ovid’s poetry into Chinese with commentary, and comparative studies on such themes as conceptualization of time, consolation, laughter, filicide, and revenge.
Portions of the book are open access at the moment, particularly the Ovid in China timeline, which reveals that the “first known translation of a passage from Ovid (Ars Amatoria I.349–350) into Chinese, in Qiuyou pian 逑友篇 [A Treatise on How to Make Friends] by Jesuit Martino Martini (Wei Kuangguo 衛匡國)” was in 1647.
In art crime news, The New York Times reports that 24 antiquities—the “Palmyra Stone” and 23 mosaics— were seized by Homeland Security from collector Georges Lofti.
In what is characterized in court papers as an act of hubris, Mr. Lotfi, 81, is said to have invited the authorities to inspect antiquities that he was holding in a Jersey City, N.J., storage unit, which they did in 2021.
A new, open access book edited by David Konstan looks at Emotions Across Cultures: Ancient China and Greece. From a chapter on anxiety by Zhao Lu to Stavroula Kiritsi’s analysis of emotions in ancient Greek tragedy, this looks like a great cross-cultural comparison that illustrates how notions of emotions change over time.
In this book, eleven scholars examine a variety of emotions in ancient China and classical Greece, in their historical and social context…A general introduction presents the major issues in the analysis of emotions across cultures and over time in a given tradition. Subsequent chapters consider how specific emotions evolve and change. For example, whereas for early Chinese thinkers, worry was a moral defect, it was later celebrated as a sign that one took responsibility for things. In ancient Greece, hope did not always focus on a positive outcome, and in this respect differed from what we call “hope.”
Queer and the Classical (QATC) has posted all of their QATC 2022 conference lectures as videos, which can be accessed here. Below is one of the keynotes from Kay Gabriel: "10 Maxims for Culture Work.”
Lectures and Conferences of Note
On September 14, 2022 online through Prairie Lights Bookstore, Sarah Derbew will speak about her new book, Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity, with Nell Irvin Painter in an event sponsored by the University of Iowa’s History Department. You can register for the Zoom event here.
UC-Berkeley has announced the Fall 2022 Sather Lecture series, given by Greg Woolf.
New Antiquity Journal Volumes (by @YaleClassicsLib)
Elenchos Vol. 43, No. 1 (2022)
Journal of Classics Teaching Vol. 23, No. 46 (2022) #openaccess NB: Justine Diemeke, “Teaching about the senses in antiquity: exploring the ancient world of scents through recreating ancient perfumes.”
Arethusa Vol. 55, No. 1 (2022)
Arion Vol. 30, No. 2 (2022)
Journal of Coptic Studies Vol. 24 (2022)
Classica: Revista Brasileira de Estudos Clássicos vol. 35 no. 2 (2022) #openaccess
Pegasus-Onlinezeitschrift Vol. 20 (2021) #openaccess
Anzeiger für die Altertumswissenschaft Vol. 75, no. 1 (2022) #openaccess
Antiquity Vol. 96 , No. 2 (August 2022) NB Roger Thomas & Timothy Darvill. “What Haven't We Found? Recognising the Value of Negative Evidence in Archaeology.”
Virtual Archaeology Review Vol. 13 No. 27 (2022) #openaccess
Zephyrvs Vol. 89 (2022) #openaccess
Forum Classicum No. 2 (2022) #openaccess
Ancient Philosophy Vol. 42, No. 2 (2022) NB: Emily Hulme, “Is Farming a Technē?:
Folk Concepts in Plato and Aristotle”
Acta Classica Vol. 65 (2022)