While it has been known for a long time that human languages can change in various ways, it was only in the early 19th century that scholars realized that certain aspects of language change proceed in a surprisingly regular manner, allowing us to reconstruct historical stages of languages which have never been documented in written sources. The…[Read more]

The paper proposes that the Egyptian-style design on a 5-6th century CE magical amulet discovered at Nea Paphos in Cyprus (Inv. no. PAP/FR 44/2011) draws upon an apotropaic design against the Evil Eye known as the “All-Suffering Eye,” which dates back to the time of the early Roman Empire and is common on Byzantine “Holy Rider” medallions. [No…[Read more]

Introduction, Greek text, and English translation of 3 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John, a Byzantine question-and-answer dialogue between Abraham and John set after Jesus’s ascension.

The weblog Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice, published on the Hypotheses platform for scientific blogging, offers tutorials and discussion notes on computer-assisted approaches to the history and diversity of languages. A substantial part of its content is contributed as part of the ERC Starting Grant “Computer-Assisted Language C…[Read more]

Two well preserved Punic texts from Carthage are translated and fully justified according to the scholar’s standard showing that Phoenician letter style texts are actually in the Akkadian empire language just like all other pre-Hellenistic Mediterranean texts. The black temple plaque has a poignant yet sophisticated argument blaming first one d…[Read more]

These seven alphabetic gravestone texts and one-coin texts from Sidon date to the Hellenistic era based upon their religious themes and their Greek Island letter styles. In contrast, one earlier coin style from Sidon from the Persian period has the Phoenician letter style. Their underlying language is Akkadian which was the empire language of…[Read more]

This paper provides evidence that Alphabetic Akkadian was being used in the Greek sphere of influence as an ancient authority temple language (like Latin in near modern Europe) prior to the mid-400’s BCE when the nationalistic fervor surrounding their war with the Persian empire replace it with Greek. Its Greek use is also evidenced by the 499 B…[Read more]

This article describes how the Polish intellectuals G.E. Groddeck (1763–1825) and Joachim Lelewel (1786–1861) referenced and analysed events connected with the fall of Athens in the Peloponnesian War. It aims to show how treatments of ancient Athens changed after 1795, when the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth ceased to be an independent count…[Read more]

Le romantisme constitue un moment où, dans le cas de la littérature polonaise, la nation est créée en tant qu’imagined community, pour reprendre la formule classique de Benedict Anderson. L’exploration du passé, conformément aux règles de l’historicisme romantique inspiré principalement des penseurs allemands tels que Friedrich Schiller et F…[Read more]

[This draft is for the Oxford Handbook of Apophatic Theology.] This chapter identifies an apophatic theology common to the three Cappadocian Fathers—Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa. The central theme of their apophatic theology is the incomprehensibility of God. God, they argue, is known under multiple concepts and n…[Read more]

This essay explores the persistent scholarly desires and motivations that structure the historical study of conversion in religious studies. Most “conversion studies” take a phenomenological approach, which acknowledges the diverse processes, contexts, and meanings of conversion but nonetheless sees the phenomenon as a way to access the con…[Read more]

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are the only early Greek heroic epics to have survived the transition to writing, even though extant evidence indicates that they emerged from a thriving oral culture. Among the missing are the songs of Boeotian Thebes.

Homer’s Thebes examines moments in the Iliad and Odyssey where Theban characters and thematic eng…[Read more]

This article reflects on how our own technological developments can help us see Herodotus’ archetype of historical inquiry in a new light. It explores various aspects of place in the Histories—as spaces that are lived, constructed, and relational—to show how and why the idea of place can be such a powerful means for linking information and under…[Read more]

This course explores the art, archaeology, and culture of the Greek world from prehistory to the Roman period. The course focuses on architecture, sculpture, painted pottery, and wall painting as its main object classes and situates artistic and stylistic developments within their social, political, and historical context. We will consider issues…[Read more]

This course introduces students to the study of Mediterranean material culture by focusing on the development of ancient Greek and Roman architecture from the Late Bronze Age to the beginning of Late Antiquity. The survey begins in the Greek world, examining the formal and technical development of Greek architecture. Topics considered will include…[Read more]

What happens when an exercise succeeds too well? Could a school exercise designed to teach
a foreign language also influence how a discipline interprets its central literary texts?
For centuries in Britain, Latin versification was the pinnacle of both pedagogy and scholarship,
the ultimate proof of a good teacher and a good pupil. Every day,…[Read more]

In this chapter, I discuss one particular virtue of women as it is narrated by Plutarch, that of moderation (sophrosyne), and how it manifests itself in a wife’s devotion to her husband. I focus on three characters who appear in Plutarch’s works, Camma (in Dialogue on Love and Virtues of Women), Cornelia (in the Lives of Brutus and Cato Minor), a…[Read more]

The purpose of this book is to analyse the role which the development of the German Altertumswissenschaft at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries had (in combination with the English-French intellectual base) on the birth of the Romantic reception of the ancient traditions in Poland.

Giuseppe PEZZINI, Terence and the Verb “To Be” in Latin, «Oxford Classi-cal Monographs», Oxford University Press, Oxford 2015, XVI + 355 pp., ISBN 978-0-19-873624-0, 75 £.

Giuseppe PEZZINI, Terence and the Verb “To Be” in Latin, «Oxford Classi-cal Monographs», Oxford University Press, Oxford 2015, XVI + 355 pp., ISBN 978-0-19-873624-0, 75 £.