Pasts Imperfect (9.22.22)
The Power of Myth, Hope Studies, and the Future of the Past
This week, we look at a new, open access book on ancient myths as medicine for children and young adults. Then, a Disney version of the Mahabharata, the deciphering of Linear Elamite script, the role of the Third Sibylline Oracle, new ancient world journals, and much more.
Myth as Medicine by Joel Christensen
Delighting in myth’s effects while still contemplating what and how myth works in the world seem to be nearly as old as the written word. This is especially true if we imagine moments like the end of the Gilgamesh poems, when the eponymous hero looks on the city he built and hearkens back to the beginning of the poem, as anticipating Greek notions of kleos and the power of the story to surpass all else. Indeed, as I explore in writing on the Odyssey, story has the power to reshape narrators and audiences alike, for good or for ill.
When academics talk about the history of mythology–the study of myth, rather than the stories themselves–we sometimes start in the modern era, thinking about debates in approaches from the ritual school to the psychoanalytic school through structuralism and post-modern frameworks. Yet as any close reader of Greek epic knows, ancient audiences were aware of the power of storytelling to inspire, to offer models to emulate or avoid, or to provide complex narratives to help audiences situate their lives in larger contexts. While Plato has his Socrates in the Republic repeatedly express anxiety about myth’s power, Aristotle famously prefers myth to history because of its ability to speak to generalizable experiences.
Teachers of the ancient world know the gravity that ancient myths continue to exert on the imagination, both because of the cultural authority they embody and because of their near constant return within popular culture. Ancient myths live on in podcasts like Liv Albert’s Let’s Talk About Myths Baby, in the reimagined pages of the Percy Jackson series, and lurking in the background of massive entertainment schemes like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And there’s no lack of critical reappraisals of myth too: scholars like Helen Morales (Antigone Rising) write insightfully about how mythical narratives can adapt and be readapted, even as cultures change. Such narratives are also especially potent for children and young adults.
Into this landscape of stories constantly told and reimagined enters Katarzyna Marciniak’s edited collection Our Mythical Hope: The Ancient Myth as Medicine for the Hardships of Life in Children’s and Young Adults’ Culture. This remarkable collection combines a modern framework of “hope studies” with the suggestion that classical mythology has functioned as a shared point of reference across culture over time. The authors present studies of texts and images to help us explore how myth functions to frame the experiences of the young (and not so young) as we grow into the more complex and challenging world of adulthood.
This is more than a simple Campbellian sideshow: the collection is ranging, and broad minded, admitting space for the psychoanalytic but also the experiential and the hopeful. By positioning storytelling and myth as recuperative instead of just limiting, the authors imagine the optimistic potential of narrative. We are participants in the telling and hearing of tales, and can be partners in the creation of better worlds.
You may read it for free here.
Global Antiquity and Public Scholarship Online
Last week in Anaheim, the Walt Disney Company announced at the D23 Expo that they are currently creating a retelling of the “Mahabharata” (महाभारतम्) the 2,300-year-old Sanskrit poem, for release on Disney+ Hotstar in 2024. You can also read Manmatha Nath Dutt (Shastri)’s famed translation for free at the Internet Archive.
Over at ASOR, François Desset, Kambiz Tabibzadeh, Matthieu Kervran, Gian Pietro Basello, and Gianni Marchesi discuss “Breaking the Code: Ancient Iran’s Linear Elamite Script Deciphered.” These scholars of the Ancient Near East explore their new and revolutionary decipherment of a writing system from southern Iran, dated to between 2300—1880 BCE, called Linear Elamite script. As they note:
…the newly deciphered Linear Elamite script, which is purely phonetic (signs represent vowels, consonants, and syllables of the CV [consonant + vowel] type), should, among other things, also enable us to improve our understanding of this fascinating language, one of the oldest languages of human history to have come down to us. For the first time, the Elamites are able to speak to us through their own indigenous script.
On the “Women Who Went Before” podcast (hosted by by Rebekah Haigh and Emily Chesley), historian of religion Annette Yoshiko Reed speaks on a number of issues, from whether the Third Sibylline Oracle tried to one-up Homer to ghost writing.
In Hyperallergic, art historian Elizabeth Marlowe wonders, “When Will Museums Tell the Whole Truth About Their Antiquities?” In her discussion of looting, provenance, and the need for transparency on museum labels, she also addresses the fact that the Met and a number of other museums hold antiquities likely looted from a Roman site in Turkey:
In May 1967, villagers in southwestern Turkey uncovered an extraordinary trove of high-quality bronze statuary at Bubon, an unexcavated Roman site…The Metropolitan Museum of Art displays two pieces associated with Bubon, but avoids connecting them to each other lest this raises questions about their respective paths to the museum.
Finally, how often is a Tacitus scholar on Jeopardy? Ecce Kelly Shannon-Henderson!
Online Events, Lectures, and Conferences
The hybrid lecture series “The Future of the Past: Rethinking Legacies of Injustice in the Study of Antiquity” is back for another year of dynamic speakers. The Department of Classical and Near Eastern Religions and Cultures at the University of Minnesota hosts these fora, starting with Yurie Hong and Nandini Pandey on Friday, September 23, 2022 in person and on Zoom 1:00-2:30pm CDT [Register here] discussing the future of Classics. Then, on October 14, 2022, Hanna Tervanotko and Raphael Greenberg talk about studying Ancient Israel & Judaism. Finally, Zainab Bahrani and Salam Al Kuntar debate the future of Ancient Near Eastern studies on November 11, 2022.
On September 28, 2022, at 5pm BST online through Zoom, the Pelagios Network Visualisation Activity’s annual open talk with Olivia Vane will be held. Vane specializes in data visualization for The Economist. “Olivia joined The Economist’s Data Journalism team in 2021 after a number of years writing software in the Digital Humanities. She previously did a PhD visualising digitised museum collections and later was a member of the Living with Machines research project at The British Library and The Alan Turing Institute. Sign up for this data viz talk using the form at https://bit.ly/OliviaVane-SignUp.
On Friday, September 30, 2022, Temple University is hosting a symposium regarding "Epidemics and the Environment in the Pre-Modern World." Register here to listen to a great lineup of speakers discuss how disease and the environment have long interacted.
New Antiquity Journal Volumes (by @YaleClassicsLib)
Archiv für Religionsgeschichte Vol. 23, No. 1 (2022) The Benefit of Doubt. Between Skepticism and Godlessness, Critique or Indifference in Ancient Mediterranean Religious Traditions
Anatolian Studies Vol. 72 (2022)
The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition Vol. 16, No.2 (2022) Special Issue in Honour of Werner Beierwaltes
Rhetorica Vol. 40, No. 3 (2022) NB: Shawn Ramsey, “Psychopompos: Thoth, Plato's Phaedrus, and the Context of Egyptian Mythic Rhetoric”
Journal of Egyptian History Vol. 15, No. 1 (2022)
Revue des Études Byzantines Vol. 80 (2022)
Polis Vol. 39, No. 3 (2022)
Journal of the Economic & Social History of the Orient Vol.65, Nos. 5-6 (2022)
Latomus Vol. 81, No. 1 (2022) NB: Carla Rubiera Cancelas & Lidia González Estrada, “Niños y niñas serviles en la sociedad romana”
American Journal of Archaeology Vol. 126, No. 4 (2022) NB: Lisa Lodwick & Erica Rowan, “Archaeobotanical Research in Classical Archaeology”
Manuscripts on My Mind No. 37 (2022) #openaccess
Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures Vol.48, No, 2 (2022)
Anais de Filosofia Clássica Vol. 15, No. 30 (2021) #openaccess Tempos na Antiquidade II
Mnemosyne Vol. 75, No. 5 (2022)
Journal of Late Antique, Islamic and Byzantine Studies Vol. 1, Nos. 1-2 (2022) New Journal