From: http://www.springer.com/mathematics/history+of+mathematics/book/978-1-4614-3781-9

As the world shrinks, one is increasingly grateful for glimpses of cultures, farflung in time or place, that stir up one's inner Tintin or Conan Doyle with a sense of irreducible mystery. The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) seems dedicated to bringing us just such glimpses—in the most scholarly way, of course, it being a branch of New York University. The Institute's whimsically old-world setting accentuates the feeling of discovery.

You walk into a repurposed townhouse—externally discreet, internally grand—just off upper Fifth Avenue and find a wholly unimaginable experience, an encounter, say, with 3000 B.C. Nubia or with Danube Valley relics from 5000 B.C. (two shows from recent years). The current show, "Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan," couldn't be more splendidly esoteric, focusing as it does on that most perennially opaque of the earth's remote regions, the vast steppe-lands of Eurasia...

Read the entire article online at wsj.com.

In this book, Monson looks at the impact of the coming of Roman rule to Egypt, using theoretical perspectives from the social sciences as well as a reexamination of the extensive papyrological evidence to argue for a primary importance for fiscal reform as an agent of change.

More information is available from the publisher's website.

Nakovana Cave overlooks the Adriatic Sea from a ridge near the western tip of Pelješac Peninsula, 100 kilometers northwest of Dubrovnik. Some of the most important Adriatic sea-lines of antiquity pass through the channels below the cave. The Nakovana Project (directed by Timothy Kaiser and Stašo Forenbaher) began work at the cave in 1999, and towards the end of the field season a hitherto unknown extension of the cave was discovered. Fragments of pottery vessels were lying about, most of them Hellenistic finewares datable to the last four centuries BCE, evidently the accumulated remains from cult offerings. The ivory fragments were discovered among this material.

When complete, the board had twelve arc-shaped ivory plates forming a complete circle and representing the twelve signs of the zodiac. An astrologer would have displayed a horoscope by placing colored stones standing for the Sun, Moon, and planets in the places they occupied in the zodiac on a particular date, for example a client's birthdate. It is not clear whether the board was actually used where its remains were found in Nakovana cave or whether it was deposited there as a precious offering.

Professor Hoyland studied early Islamic history at the University of Oxford where he earned his DPhil in 1994. Prior to coming to ISAW he was Professor of Islamic History at the University of Oxford. He also held previous positions at St. Andrews University and UCLA, and was both a Fulbright (Princeton University) and Erasmus scholar (Groningen University). His scholarly interests lie with the history, languages, and literature of the late antique and early Islamic Middle East, more specifically the relations between Muslims, Jews, and Christians, the links between identity, religion, and ethnicity, and the transmission of knowledge from the Ancient world to the Islamic world.

Prof. Hoyland is the author of Seeing Islam as Others Saw it: A survey and analysis of the Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian writings on Islam (1997), and Arabia and the Arabs from the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam (2001). His most recent books include Theophilus of Edessa’s Chronicle: and the Circulation of Historical Knowledge in Late Antiquity and Early Islam (2011) and Doctrine and Debate in the East Christian World, 300-1500 (with Averil Cameron, 2011). He is also a member of the editorial committee of the Library of Arabic Literature, which aims to establish a Loeb-style translation series for Arabic texts, to be published with NYU Press, and is involved in the Oxford excavation of Andarin, a Byzantine/Early Islamic town in Syria.

Please join us in welcoming Prof. Hoyland to our community this fall.

LAWDI, funded by the Office of Digital Humanities of the National Endowment for Humanities, will bring together an international faculty of practitioners working in the field of Linked Data with twenty attendees who are implementing or planning the creation of digital resources.

More information, including a list of faculty, and application instructions are available at the LAWDI page on the Digital Classicist wiki.

Many people have worked to make this a reality; the heavy lifting was done by Nate Nagy and Iris Fernandez on AWIB, Sean Gillies on Pleiades, and Daniel Bogan at Flickr.  Their work makes it easy to feature thumbnails and lists of related images on individual Pleiades pages and to provide historical-geographic context to photos on Flickr.

You can read more about how all this works in two blog posts by Sean Gillies: one on the Pleiades News Blog and another (a guest blog post) on the Flickr Code Blog.