The failures of leadership… the destructive power of beauty… the quest for fame… the plight of women… the brutality of war… Such themes have endured for over 2,700 years in Homer’s classic The Iliad — from the flight of Helen and Paris, to the fury of Menelaus and Agamemnon, to the fight between Hector and Achilles. We sat down with Barbara Graziosi and Anthony Verity, the writer of the introduction and translator respectively, to discuss the new Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Iliad.

How did the Ancient Greek performance tradition inform the text of The Iliad?

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What can you tell us about the writer of The Iliad?

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How is the anger of Achilles portrayed in the poem?

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How is war, violence, and death portrayed in the poem?

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Describe the translation process.

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Barbara Graziosi is Professor of Classics at Durham University. She has written extensively on Homer.

Anthony Verity taught Classics in several schools in England, his last job being Master of Dulwich College. He has translated Theocritus and Pindar for Oxford World’s Classics, his OWC edition of The Illiad was published in September, and he is currently working on a version of Homer’s Odyssey. Read his previous blog post: “Who needs another translation of Homer’s Iliad?”

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics onTwitter and Facebook.

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The Trojan War may be well known thanks to movies, books, and plays around the world, but did the war that spurred so much fascination even occur? The excerpt below from The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction helps answer some of the many questions about the infamous war Homer helped immortalize.

By Eric Cline

The story of the Trojan War has fascinated humans for centuries and has given rise to countless scholarly articles and books, extensive archaeological excavations, epic movies, television documentaries, stage plays, art and sculpture, souvenirs and collectibles. In the United States there are thirty-three states with cities or towns named Troy and ten four-year colleges and universities, besides the University of Southern California, whose sports teams are called the Trojans. Particularly captivating is the account of the Trojan Horse, the daring plan that brought the Trojan War to an end and that has also entered modern parlance by giving rise to the saying “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts” and serving as a metaphor for hackers intent on wreaking havoc by inserting a “Trojan horse” into computer systems.

But, is Homer’s story convincing? Certainly the heroes, from Achilles to Hector, are portrayed so credibly that it is easy to believe the story. But is it truly an account based on real events, and were the main characters actually real people? Would the ancient world’s equivalent of the entire nation of Greece really have gone to war over a single woman, however beautiful, and for ten long years at that? Could Agamemnon really have been a king of kings able to muster so many men for such an expedition? And, even if one believes that there once was an actual Trojan War, does that mean that the specific events, actions, and descriptions in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, supplemented by additional fragments and commentary in the Epic Cycle, are historically accurate and can be taken at face value? Is it plausible that what Homer describes actually took place and in the way that he says it did?

In fact, the problem in providing definitive answers to all of these questions is not that we have too little data, but that we have too much. The Greek epics, Hittite records, Luwian poetry, and archaeological remains provide evidence not of a single Trojan war but rather of multiple wars that were fought in the area that we identify as Troy and the Troad. As a result, the evidence for the Trojan War of Homer is tantalizing but equivocal. There is no single “smoking gun.”

According to the Greek literary evidence, there were at least two Trojan Wars (Heracles’ and Agamemnon’s), not simply one; in fact, there were three wars, if one counts Agamemnon’s earlier abortive attack on Teuthrania. Similarly, according to the Hittite literary evidence, there were at least four Trojan Wars, ranging from the Assuwa Rebellion in the late 15th century BCE to the overthrow of Walmu, king of Wilusa in the late 13th century BCE. And, according to the archaeological evidence, Troy/Hisarlik was destroyed twice, if not three times, between 1300 and 1000 BCE. Some of this has long been known; the rest has come to light more recently. Thus, although we cannot definitively point to a specific “Trojan War,” at least not as Homer has described it in the Iliad and the Odyssey, we have instead found several such Trojan wars and several cities at Troy, enough that we can conclude there is a historical kernel of truth — of some sort — underlying all the stories.

But would the Trojan War have been fought because of love for a woman? Could a ten-year war have been instigated by the kidnapping of a single person? The answer, of course, is yes, just as an Egypto-Hittite war in the 13th century BCE was touched off by the death of a Hittite prince and the outbreak of World War I was sparked by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. But just as one could argue that World War I would have taken place anyway, perhaps triggered by some other event, so one can argue that the Trojan War would inevitably have taken place, with or without Helen. The presumptive kidnapping of Helen can be seen merely an excuse to launch a pre-ordained war for control of land, trade, profit, and access to the Black Sea.

In 1964, the eminent historian Moses Finley suggested that we should move the narrative of the Trojan War from the realm of history into the realm of myth and poetry until we have more evidence. Many would argue that we now have that additional evidence, particularly in the form of the Hittite texts discussing Ahhiyawa and Wilusa and the new archaeological data from Troy. The lines between reality and fantasy might be blurred, particularly when Zeus, Hera, and other gods become involved in the war, and we might quibble about some of the details, but overall, Troy and the Trojan War are right where they should be, in northwestern Anatolia and firmly ensconced in the world of the Late Bronze Age, as we now know from archaeology and Hittite records, in addition to the Greek literary evidence from both Homer and the Epic Cycle. Moreover, the enduring themes of love, honor, war, kinship, and obligations, which so resonated with the later Greeks and then the Romans, have continued to reverberate through the ages from Aeschylus and Euripides to Virgil and thence to Chaucer, Shakespeare, and beyond, so that the story still holds broad appeal even today, more than three thousand years after the original events, or some variation thereof, took place.

Eric H. Cline is Professor of Classics and Anthropology and chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, as well as director of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at George Washington University. He is Co-Director of the ongoing excavations at Megiddo (biblical Armageddon) in Israel and the author of Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction, winner of the 2011 Biblical Archaeology Society Publication Award for the Best Popular Book on Archaeology. His recent addition to the Very Short Introductions series is The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with Very Short Introductions on Facebook, and OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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Image Credit: The Procession of the Trojan Horse in Troy 1773. Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo. Via Web Gallery of Art. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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There’s a lot we still don’t know about the Vikings who raided and then settled in England. The main documentary source for the period, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, simply tells us that Viking armies raided Britain’s coastline from the late eighth century. Raiding was followed by settlement, and by the 870s, the Vikings had established a territory in the north and east of the country which later became known as the ‘Danelaw’. Here, the Chronicle famously records, Scandinavian armies ‘shared out the land… and proceeded to plough and to support themselves’.

Despite over 50 years of research, many fundamental questions about the Scandinavian settlements remain unanswered: which areas of England saw the greatest settlement? How many settlers were there? Did they get on with the locals? Were they all men? Until recently, there was little in the physical record to provide answers. Archaeological traces of Scandinavian settlement were notably few: just a handful of Scandinavian-style burials and rural settlements have been found in England, for instance, while the Scandinavian contribution to urban development and certain strands of material culture, such as stone sculpture, remains elusive.

Within the last 20-25 years, this picture has changed dramatically. Thanks largely to metal-detecting, there has been an explosion of new finds of Viking-Age metalwork recovered from areas of known Scandinavian settlement. Surprisingly prominent within the new finds is female jewellery in Scandinavian styles: brooches and pendants worn by women in everyday dress. To date, over 500 such items have been found, scattered across large swathes of rural England.

The date of the jewellery chimes exactly with written accounts of the settlement (c. 870-950). Its careful study reveals that while some items were made locally after a Scandinavian fashion, others are likely to have been imported from the Scandinavian homelands, probably on the clothing of female settlers. Although Anglo-Saxon women also wore brooches, they were of a very different style to those favoured by Scandinavian women, so it’s clear that the new jewellery finds represent a distinctly ‘foreign’ dress element. The jewellery being unearthed in England is strikingly similar to that found in Scandinavia, particularly its southern regions: there are disc, trefoil, lozenge, oval, and bird shaped brooches decorated with animals and plants from the Scandinavian art styles of Borre, Jellinge, Mammen and Urnes. Encountering women on a walk around tenth-century Norfolk, you could be forgiven for thinking that you were in Denmark.

Viking-Age Scandinavian-style brooches from England

The discovery of such artefacts is unexpected, not only because such jewellery was unknown in England a generation ago, but also because it helps to elucidate a population group with has, until now, been largely invisible. Faced with a dearth of both archaeological and written evidence for Scandinavian women in England, historians have tended to assume that settlement was carried out entirely by men, who took wives among the local population. The jewellery offers the first tangible archaeological evidence for a significant female Scandinavian population in Viking-Age England, potentially numbering in the thousands. In this way, it is revealing the presence of women we never expected to see.

Women were not merely participants in the settlement process; they were active agents in negotiating relationships with the existing, Anglo-Saxon population. Their jewellery became a platform for the expression of cultural values, usually in a way that maintained Scandinavian traditions. One observable trend is that female dress in the Danelaw preserved Scandinavian preferences for particular brooches long after they had fallen out of fashion in the homelands. This deliberately archaising suggests that articulating historical ties via jewellery was important in a new settlement context, when cultural memories were likely to be challenged. The fact that it was done through women’s dress highlights a role for women as bearers of cultural tradition in Danelaw society.

The jewellery also provides a fresh perspective on one of the most elusive of topics regarding the Viking settlements, namely, their location. We tend to think of Yorkshire and the north-east Midlands as Viking hotspots, due in part to the areas’ Scandinavian-style place-names and stone-sculpture (as well as the success of the Jorvik Viking centre). Yet female jewellery here is rare, being concentrated instead in rural Norfolk and Lincolnshire. These areas are not commonly associated with Viking activity, but it is clear that they were exposed to strong Scandinavian cultural influence, at least in terms of female dress. Of course, the distribution pattern has to be interpreted with care: jewellery is eminently portable, and levels of metal-detecting can vary from county to county. Nonetheless, it does seem that East Anglia and Lincolnshire were vibrant centres of Scandinavian culture in ninth- and tenth-century England, to an extent not previously recognised. Once again, the jewellery shines new light on this historically dark period of British history, revealing the presence of peoples in areas we never knew were there.

Jane Kershaw is a British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at University College London. Jane Kershaw is the author of Viking Identities: Scandinavian Jewellery in England (OUP, 2013).

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Image credit: Both images © Norfolk County Council; do not reproduce without permission.

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The long-awaited third season of Game of Thrones premiers on HBO 31 March 2013 and Oxford University Press has everything you need to get ready, whether you’re looking to brush up on your dragon lore, forge your own Valyrian steel, or learn about some of the most dramatic real-life succession fights culled from our archives.

For the aspiring Daenerys Targaryen:

Dragons, Serpents, and Slayers in the Classical and Early Christian Worlds: A Sourcebook
By Daniel Ogden
This comprehensive collection of dragon myths from Greek, Roman, and early Christian sources is perfect for any would-be Mother of Dragons.

Boats of the World: From the Stone Age to Medieval Times
By Seán McGrail
Having trouble finding boats to take you to Westeros? This collection of ancient vessels is all you need to build your own.

Goddess: Myths of the Female Divine
By David Leeming and Jake Page
A history of divine women, from Hera and Pandora to The Holy Mother.

History’s greatest “real life” Game of Thrones:

Poisoned Legacy: The Fall of the Nineteenth Egyptian Dynasty
By Aidan Dodson
Aidan Dodson explores the mysteries of the origins of the Egyptian usurper-king Amenmeses and the career of the ‘king-maker’ of the period, the chancellor Bay (sort of an Egyptian Petyr Baelish). Having helped to install at least one pharaoh on the throne, Bay’s life was ended by his abrupt execution, ordered by the woman with whom he had shared the regency of Egypt for the young and disabled King Siptah.

The Children of Henry VIII
By John Guy
Henry VIII fathered four children who survived childhood, each by a different mother. Their lives were consumed by jealously, mutual distrust, bitter rivalry, hatred…sound familiar?

“John Snow (1813–1858)” in the Oxford DNB
By Stephanie J. Snow
OK, so he only shares the same name as the member of the Night’s Watch, but still…he discovered that cholera was a waterborne infection! That’s pretty heroic.

For the student of the Common Tongue:

 
From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages
Edited by Michael Adams
Think Dothraki is a cool language? You may be interested in some other made-up languages.
 
The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary, First Edition
By Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall and Edmund Weiner
No study of invented languages is complete without the father of them all, J.R.R. Tolkien.

“Words are wind – the language of Game of Thrones” on the OxfordWords Blog
By Adam Pulford
Pulford examines Martin’s language, some truly archaic and some only archaic-sounding.

For those looking to besiege King’s Landing:

Masters of the Battlefield: Great Commanders From the Classical Age to the Napoleonic Era
By Paul K. Davis
Vivid portraits of fifteen legendary military leaders on and off the battlefield. Tywin Lannister would fit right in.

The Illustrated Art of War: The Definitive English Translation by Samuel B. Griffith
By Sun Tzu
Translated with an Introduction by Samuel B. Griffith
Robb Stark could take a lesson or two from this masterpiece of battle tactics and strategy.

How to trade like you’re the richest man in Qarth:

“The Medieval Spice Trade” in The Oxford Handbook of Food History
By Paul Freedman
If you’re applying for a spot in the Ancient Guild of Spicers, this article is a must-read.
 
The Silk Road: A New History
By Valerie Hansen
Xaro Xhoan Daxos would have a whole chapter in this book if he were, you know, real.

Some of George R.R. Martin’s literary inspirations:

 
Oxford Book of British Ghost Stories
By Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert
George R.R. Martin has his own list of recommended authors, a good many of whom are collected here.
 
The Classic Horror Stories
By H. P. Lovecraft
Edited by Roger Luckhurst
While note exactly fantasy, there are enough ghouls and monsters here to frighten a White Walker.
 
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Edited by J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon
Revised by Norman Davis
Knights, castles, and magic. A classic.

That’s it! So crack open some of these books (and some Iron Throne Ale) and enjoy Season Three!

Jonathan Kroberger is an Associate Publicist in the New York office of Oxford University Press. Special thanks to Kimberly Hernandez for research assistance.

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Image credit: All images from the Game of Thrones television series copyright HBO. Used for purposes of illustration.

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Christians today owe a tremendous debt to the Roman emperor Constantine. He changed the place of the Church in the Roman World, moving it through his own conversion from the persecuted fringe of the empire’s religious landscape to the center of the empire’s system of belief. He also tackled huge problems with the way Christians understood their community. The three most important things the church owed to Constantine were a roadmap for reuniting communities split by persecution, a universal definition of the Church’s teaching, and a fixed date for the celebration of Easter. His solutions to the second and third issues remain in place to this day.

Constantine dealt with all three of the Church’s major issues at the conference he summoned at the ancient city of Nicaea (modern Iznik in Turkey) in June of 325 AD. The issue of persecution stemmed from a period of bitter conflict with the imperial government that had ended just over ten years before the council convened, while the debate over the Church’s teaching had exploded a few years before Nicaea (the issue was Jesus’ humanity). The Easter question had been festering for centuries, and the problems were inextricably tied up with the fact that no one recorded the actual day of the Crucifixion.

All that people could know on the basis of Christian Scripture was that the crucifixion was linked to the celebration of Passover, which meant that it should come at some point in the spring. But when? Since the date of Passover, then as now, is celebrated in accordance with the Jewish calendar, the correlation with the Julian calendar used by Christians and most other inhabitants of the Roman Empire was always inexact. Some Christians believed that the best way to solve the problem was to celebrate Easter on the first day of Passover according to the Jewish calendar, another group held that Easter should be celebrated on the first Sunday after the opening of Passover, while yet another group felt that the timing of the Christian festival should not be determined by the timing of Passover and should instead be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the Vernal Equinox.

Emperor Constantine I, presenting a model of the city to Virgin Pary. Detail of the southwestern entrance mosaic in Hagia Sophia (Istanbul, Turkey). Photo by Myrabella. Creative Commons License.

The Easter story was extremely important to Constantine. Conscious as he was that he had been raised as a pagan, and that he had done things in his earlier life of which he was not proud (he never tells us what those things were), he felt that he had experienced a sort of moral resurrection when he became a Christian. He credited his extraordinary military career to God’s willingness to forgive his past sins and he wanted to make sure that he ruled in a way that would repay the benefits he believed his God had given him. In a sense there was nothing more obvious to Constantine than that Easter shouldn’t be connected with the festival of another faith. It should stand on its own in connection with the natural world. Hence he ordained that Easter should be celebrated on the Sunday after the first New Moon of Spring.

The solution to the Easter issue had the added advantage of allowing him to make an important concession to the group whose definition of the Faith he was rejecting outright at Nicaea, the so-called Arian faction, named for the Egyptian priest who had aggressively preached a doctrine asserting the human aspect of Christ. Constantine liked his God, like his empire, to be completely united, which is what we see today in the Nicene Creed in the phrase “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.” That desire for unity also enabled him to arrive at an acceptable solution to the divisions that had arisen out of the period of persecution as he essentially argued that the two sides should bury the hatchet and recognize each other as Christians first. That approach has not had nearly so much influence as his approach to Easter or to the Trinity.

Constantine was a complex and at times difficult man, a passionate one with a ferocious temper. But he was also a man who was able to recognize his own weaknesses. It may have been that self-knowledge which enabled him to come to the new faith he hoped would make him a better ruler, and gave him the ability to find and forge compromises to build a better and more unified society.

David Potter is Francis W. Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman History and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan. His books include Constantine the Emperor, The Victor’s Crown, Emperors of Rome, and Ancient Rome: A New History.

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Romans measured time in months but not in weeks. The Ides simply meant the middle day of a month and it functioned simply as a temporal navigation aid — one that looks clumsy to us. So one might make an appointment for two days before the Ides or for three days after the Kalends (the first day of the month) and so on. A man shouting from the back of the crowd “Beware the Ides of March!” must have sounded about as sane as a heckler yelling to a modern day politician that he should watch out for the third Tuesday in April.

But for us the Ides of March has only one meaning: the date in 44 BC when Julius Caesar was murdered by a crowd of senators led by his protégés Brutus and Cassius. Tyrannicide, treachery, pathos. And the cry “Beware the Ides of March!” is forever the warning that was ignored.

This we owe to William Shakespeare who made his murder the focal point of the tragedy Julius Caesar. The play is punchy and the action moves fast. It opens in the streets of Rome, where the people are preparing to welcome Caesar home in triumph after the defeat of his civil war rival Pompey. Meanwhile aristocrats mutter over the loss of freedom. Brutus agonizes, torn between his love for Caesar and his hatred of tyranny. The murder itself occurs at almost the exact center of the play. The outcome is briefly uncertain — will the Roman people hail Brutus and Cassius as liberators, or condemn them as murderers? Then Mark Antony, Caesar’s right-hand man, sways the crowd with a passionate funeral oration. The rest of the play follows the flight of the conspirators, their defeat in battle at Philippi, at the hands of Antony and Caesar’s heir Octavius, and their subsequent suicides. Brutus earns the shortest of obituaries from his enemies before Octavius’ closing lines “So call the field to rest, and let’s away, to part the glories of this happy day.”

The Ides themselves were not a happy day, according to Suetonius, one of Caesar’s ancient biographers. The Ides of March had been declared the Day of Parricide, and the senate was forbidden ever to meet again on that date. For things had not turned out as Brutus hoped. By Suetonius’ day it was possible to see Julius Caesar as the first of the Roman emperors, all of whom — beginning from Octavius — took Caesar’s name as a kind of title. An entire mythology had grown up of signs that had marked Caesar’s imminent death and even his subsequent transformation into a god. As Caesar’s wife Calpurnia puts it:

When beggars die there are no comets seen
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes

“Beware the Ides of March!” was just one prophesy among others that transformed Caesar’s murder from a sordid and ultimately pointless crime into an event of cosmic significance. The deaths of emperors (like their births, when viewed in retrospect) were always marked by omens. Emperors were absolute rulers in their lifetime and gods in waiting. How could their deaths be ordinary? And how could their murder even be justified?

Tyrannicide was no more popular under the reigns of Elizabeth I (when the play was first performed) or of her successor James (when it was first printed). Yet political murder and dilemmas like that of Brutus were definitely still on the agenda. Mary Queen of Scots, for example — Elizabeth’s cousin and James’ mother — had been executed for treason just a decade before Julius Caesar was first staged. These issues still mattered.

And Shakespeare’s audience knew this story in advance. A vast mass of the detail of this play, as of Antony and Cleopatra, was drawn from the Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, written by Suetonius’ contemporary Plutarch but first translated into English in 1579, a generation before Julius Caesar began to be performed. Plutarch’s Lives, which mined classical history for morally improving tales, were fantastically popular in the early modern period and indeed remained so well into the eighteenth century. Shakespeare’s audience knew from the start that Caesar would die, who would kill him, and even that young Octavius would turn out to be a greater tyrant than Caesar had ever tried to be.

So the soothsayer’s cry “Beware the Ides of March” was not a plot-spoiler. For Shakespeare this warning, and all the others, were devices to raise the tension and focus our attention on the pivotal moment of the murder. As in a thriller today, the excitement is in the obstacles put in the way of the plot. Caesar must die. But what if he listens to his wife’s terrible nightmares? or heeds the soothsayer’s warning? or reads the written warning pushed into his hand by Artemidorus “Delay not Caesar, read it instantly!” (Caesar does not.)

Shakespeare has transformed the signs of cosmic sympathy into mood music. His opening scenes are overshadowed by storms. And again before the death of Brutus there is another omen. Plutarch’s Life of Brutus tells how a monstrous figure had appeared in his tent before the final campaign. Asked its name, it replies “I am your evil demon, Brutus, and I will see you at Philippi!” then vanishes. Shakespeare tells the story almost word for word, but add the stage direction reads Enter the Ghost of Caesar. Brutus’ imminent tragedy points back to the Ides.

Shakespeare’s Renaissance audiences and readers knew the history of Rome as a history of violence. They were drawn more to the chaos of the Republic than to the imperial peace that followed it. And they certainly did not believe in closure. The story of Julius Caesar is not self-contained, and the conflicts are not resolved. It opens with two tribunes remembering how Pompey had once been just as much adored by the Roman people, as his conqueror was now. And Octavius’ last words remind us that Antony and Octavius would immediately fall out over how exactly to “part the glories” (that is to divide the spoils). There would be fresh civil wars, more treachery and many, many more murders to come. Beware the Ides of March!

Greg Woolf is Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Rome: An Empire’s Story, Et Tu, Brute?: A Short History of Political Murder and editor of The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Roman World.

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Image credits: La Morte di Cesare. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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• The Great Temple of Abu Simbel at Sunrise

   

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  The façade of the Great Temple built by Ramesses II at Abu Simbel and dedicated to his deified self as well as the god Amun and the sun god Re-Harakhte. The four colossal figures that dominate the facade depict the king, with smaller figures of female family members beside him. Above the doorway, between the pairs of figures stands a statue of a hawk headed deity crowned with a sun disk and holding a plant; this is a rebus writing of Ramesses II’s name and is one of the first parts of the temple to be illuminated by the rising sun. © Photographs by Chester Higgins Jr.

• The Interior of the Great Temple Of Abu Simbel

   

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  The interior of the Great Temple of Abu Simbel with figures of the king wearing his royal kilt and holding the crook and the flail, symbols of his royal office, in his crossed hands. On the right side the figures wear the double crown symbolic of the king’s dominion over Upper and Lower Egypt, and perhaps also over both Egypt and Nubia, while on the left side he wears the white crown, indicative of his rule over Upper Egypt. The ceiling of the chamber is decorated with vultures with outspread wings, protecting the sacred space, and in the distant holy-of-holies the statues of the king and the gods can be seen. © Photographs by Chester Higgins Jr.

• Pyramids of Meroe

   

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  The pyramids at Meroe were constructed to house the bodies of the kings and queens of the Kingdom of Meroe. The pyramids combine a temple-like pylon entrance with a chapel set within the pyramids. These chapels are carved in sunk relief with images of the deceased royalty together with divinities. The famous gold treasure discovered by Ferlini and belonging to a Meroitic Queen was found buried with their owner in the burial chambers of one of these pyramids. © Photographs by Chester Higgins Jr.

• Relief from the Tomb of Pennout

   

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  The tomb of Pennout, deputy of Wawat and chief of the quarries, dating to the reign of Ramesses VI (1141-113 BC) was originally located at Aniba, but moved to save it from the rising waters of Lake Nasser after the building of the Aswan High Dam. Images of the deceased’s family wearing white robes and holding lotus and papyri, symbols of resurrection, and praising the deceased, as well as images of deities are found in this charming rock cut tomb. © Photographs by Chester Higgins Jr.

• Soleb Temple

   

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  The papyrus-bundle pillars of Soleb temple still dominate the sacred landscape at the site. The temple was built by Amenhotep III and dedicated to the god Amun-Re as well as the deified king himself. © Photographs by Chester Higgins Jr.

• Interior of the Temple of Beit al-Wali

   

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  The temple of Beit al-Wali, originally situated 40 miles south of Aswan, was constructed during the reign of Seti I and decorated and completed during the early part of the reign of Ramesses II. The entire temple is unique in form when compared to other Egyptian temples in Nubia, and entirely cut into the rock face. The entrance hall leads into the vestibule, which shows scenes of the king and the gods worshiping. On either side, fluted columns are visible situated in the center of the room, through which is a view of the sanctuary with a recess cut into the back of the chamber for statues that would sit upon the bench-like structure in the back. This is the most sacred area of the temple, where the divine world of the gods existed. This temple was later moved during the 1960s to its current location south of the Aswan Dam. © Photographs by Chester Higgins Jr.

• Relief of Satet, Horus, and Isis from the Lion Temple at Musawwarat al-Sufra

   

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  The Lion Temple at Musawwarat al-Sufra is located 180 kilometers northeast of Khartoum. This site was important during the Meroitic Period as a major religious cult center. Shown on the side of this temple is a relief of the goddess Satet wearing a crown with horns, behind whom stands the hawk-headed god Horus and his mother, Isis. © Photographs by Chester Higgins Jr.

Ancient Nubia: African Kingdoms on the Nile attempts to document some of what has recently been discovered about ancient Nubia, with its remarkable history, architecture, and culture, and thereby to give us a picture of this rich, but unfamiliar, African legacy. It is edited by Marjorie Fisher, Peter Lacovara, Sue D’Auria and Salima Ikram, photographs are by Chester Higgins Jr., and the foreword by Zahi Hawass. It is published by the American University in Cairo Press.

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Image credit: © Photographs by Chester Higgins Jr. Used with permission of the American University in Cairo Press. All rights reserved.

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Science works in mysterious ways. Sometimes that’s even truer in the study of the origins of the human race.

Piltdown is a small village south of London where the skull of a reputed ancient human ancestor turned up in some gravel diggings a century ago. The find was made by Charles Dawson, a lawyer and amateur archaeologist, with an unusual knack for major discoveries. Shortly thereafter a lower jaw that fit the skull turned up and, voilá — the missing link between the apes and man had been found in the British Isles.

The Manchester Guardian headlined “The earliest man? Remarkable discovery in Sussex. A skull millions of years old.” The find was widely regarded as the most important of its time. The discovery of Piltdown Man made Europe, and especially Great Britain, the home of the “first humans”. The find fit the expectations of the time and resolved certain racist and nationalist biases against evidence for human ancestry elsewhere. Early humans had large brains and originated in Europe.

Piltdown Gang by John Cooke (1915). Back row: (left to right) F. O. Barlow, G. Elliot Smith, Charles Dawson, Arthur Smith Woodward. Front row: A. S. Underwood, Arthur Keith, W. P. Pycraft, and Sir Ray Lankester.

For 40 years this Piltdown Man was generally accepted as an important ancestor of the human race. Various authorities raised doubt and critiqued the evidence, but Piltdown kept its place in our early lineage until a curator at the British Museum, Kenneth Oakley, took a closer look. Oakley and several other scientists assembled incontrovertible evidence to the show that Piltdown was a forgery. The chemistry of the jaw and skull were different and could not have come from the same individual. The teeth of the lower jaw had been filed down to make them fit with the skull. The skull was human but the jaw came from an ape. The bones had been stained to enhance the appearance of antiquity. In 1953, Time magazine published this evidence gathered by Oakley and others. Piltdown was stricken from the record and placed in ignominy, a testimony to the gullibility of those scientists who see what they want to see.

Hoax, fraud, crime? Perhaps the designation is not so important, but the identity of the perpetrator appears to be. More than 100 books and articles have been written over the years, trying to solve the mystery of who forged Piltdown. Various individuals have been implicated, but the pointing finger of justice always returns to Charles Dawson. Dawson’s knack for finding strange and unusual things was more than just luck. His sense of intuition was fortified by a home workshop for constructing or modifying these finds before he put them in the ground. A recent book by Miles Russell, The Piltdown Man Hoax: Case Closed, documents Dawson’s numerous other archaeological and paleontological “discoveries” that have been revealed as forgeries. As Russell noted, the case is closed. That fact, however, is not keeping British scientists from throwing a good bit of money and energy into the whodunit, using the latest scientific technology to try to unmask the culprit.

So, 100 years of Piltdown. Not exactly a cause for celebration — or is it? Science does work in mysterious ways. Although Piltdown misled the pursuit of our early human ancestors for decades, much good has come from the confusion. Greater care is exercised in the acceptance of evidence for early human ancestors. Scientific methods have moved to the forefront in the investigation of ancient human remains. The field of paleoanthropology — the study of early human behavior and evolution — has emerged wiser and stronger. The earliest human ancestors are now known to have come from Africa and begun to appear more than six million years ago. Evolution, after all, is about learning from our mistakes.

T. Douglas Price is Weinstein Professor of European Archaeology Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His books include Europe before Rome: A Site-by-Site Tour of the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages; Principles of Archaeology; Europe’s First Farmers; and the leading introductory textbook in the discipline, Images of the Past.

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In the heyday of the British Empire, Britain’s second most-widely-read book, after the Bible, was: (a) Richard III (b) Robinson Crusoe (c) The Elements (d) Beowulf ? Why do I ask?

“Since late medieval or early modern time,” Michael Walzer writes in Exodus and Revolution, “there has existed in the West a characteristic way of thinking about political change, a pattern that we commonly impose upon events, a story that we repeat to one another. The story has roughly this form: oppression, liberation, social contract, political struggle, new society…. Because of the centrality of the Bible in Western thought and the endless repetition of the story, the pattern has been etched deeply into our political culture. It isn’t only the case that events fall, almost naturally, into an Exodus shape; we work actively to give them that shape.”

The second-most-widely-read book plays that role in Western thought too: (c) The Elements by Euclid. Since late medieval or early modern time, there has existed in the West a characteristic way of organizing knowledge, a pattern that we commonly impose upon observations, concepts, and ideas, a pattern we teach our children. Because of the centrality of Euclid in Western education and the endless repetition of his axioms, definitions, theorems and proofs, the pattern has been etched deeply into our intellectual culture. It isn’t only the case that knowledge falls, almost naturally, into a Euclidean shape; we work actively to give it that shape.

Euclid was the geometry of the medieval university and the bedrock of European education for centuries. It wasn’t just about the triangles; Euclid sharpened your mind, trained your logic. His clever proofs were the very model of argument. To master Euclid was to master the world, the world around you and beyond. “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.” And what did Newton’s lamp look like? See for yourself in the Principia Mathematica. “All human knowledge begins with intuitions,” said Kant, “proceeds from there to concepts, and ends with ideas.” Where do you think he got that? Euclideana even permeates our politics, but for this blog I’ll stick to science.

Non-Euclidean geometries put an end to that? No, they didn’t. Non-Euclidean geometries substituted one axiom for another, but they kept Euclid’s vision of organized knowledge, his faith in deductive reasoning. Non-Euclidean geometry is as Euclidean as Euclid’s! So is the new, improved axiom set David Hilbert proposed for geometry in the 19th century. (It turned out that Euclid’s wasn’t perfect.) So is the quixotic Russell-Whitehead program, in the early 20th century, to reduce mathematics to logic. Modern mathematics is consciously Euclidean to the core. In 1900, in a still-influential address, David Hilbert proposed rewriting Newton for modern physics along this vision of organized knowledge.

Born in 1894, Dorothy Wrinch grew up in a London suburb. She aced the mathematics program at Cambridge University and then studied logic with Bertrand Russell. The naturalist D’Arcy Thompson was another mentor and friend; his Growth and Form was her bible. Tugged by philosophy, mathematics, and biology for a decade, she cast her lot with biology, determined to unravel it through the powerful lens of logic. The model of protein architecture she came up with catalyzed protein chemists despite or because of its weaknesses. Why?

Figure 1. Dorothy Wrinch’s model of scientific development: First stage: brute facts. Second: sorting facts into classes. Third: theories linking the classes and explaining the facts. Fourth, finding the relationships among the theories and deducing their logical consequences. Fifth, Euclid-style axioms.

With this map to guide her, she found what she was looking for. “A number of new sciences have passed from the embryonic stage,” she wrote in 1934. “Discarding description as their ultimate purpose, they are now ready to take their places in the world state of science. The thesis which I wish now to develop is but a logical consequence of the thorough-going application of this principle.” Her protein model was one such consequence.

Biology ripe for logic? Some natives were not amused. (Or they were.) “Her idea of science is completely different from theirs,” Linus Pauling put it. You betcha!

Euclid fell from his curricular throne and the British Empire collapsed at about the same time. Quantum mechanics scotched Hilbert’s program and Gödel scotched Russell’s. Biology has resisted Euclid too. Though the structures of thousands of proteins are now known in exact detail, their inner logic remains where Dorothy left it, the brass ring on the Nobel carousel.

Marjorie Senechal is the Louise Wolff Kahn Professor Emerita in Mathematics and History of Science and Technology, Smith College, author of I Died for Beauty: Dorothy Wrinch and the Cultures of Science, and Editor-in-Chief of The Mathematical Intelligencer. At the Join Mathematics Meeting, AMS-MAA Special Session on the History of Mathematics, II, Room 9, Upper Level, San Diego Convention Center, she is speaking on 5:00 p.m. on Saturday, 12 January, on Biogeometry, 1941.

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By Anthony Verity

Who needs another translation of Homer’s Iliad? There must have been hundreds of English versions since Chapman (c.1560-1634), a good many of them on bookshop shelves today. The usual answer is that great literature needs frequent reinterpretation. If students of antiquity and curious general readers are being urged today to return to the first work in writing in the Western canon, those who can read Greek will continue to translate the Iliad for their benefit, in the hope of recreating something of the “feel” of the original. It doesn’t do any harm, either, to have more than one version to browse among before buying. Teachers will choose a translation that captures what they think are the essentials of Homer; the casual reader may well go simply for a rattling good yarn.

Translation, as everyone knows, always fall short. All one can hope for is a degree of success. Homerists bring with them various kinds of baggage, among them: current views (if any) of what epic poetry should sound like in English; their own prejudices about what should be preserved, and what regretfully abandoned; and perhaps recent Homeric scholarship.

Dryden (1631-1700) aimed at a version of the Iliad “such as would have been composed by the original author were he alive now and writing in English.” Pope (1688-1744) latinized unfamiliar Greek gods, elided the rough corners of heroes’ gross conduct, and skated over Homer’s fascination with fatal wounds, all in the interests of poetic and social decorum. Neither was much interested in recreating a distant heroic world. “It is a pretty poem, Mr Pope,” said the Greek scholar Bentley, “but you must not call it Homer.” Indeed not; but it is a superb Augustan creation.

The Victorians were fascinated by Homer, possibly because, as George Steiner has observed, they saw in it qualities they admired: an ideal of virility and masculine intimacy, and also a portrayal of the good loser (Hector). Post-Romantics, they tried in various ways to transport their readers back to heroic times. Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), a better critic than translator, opted for clunky English hexameters in imitation of Homeric verse (“So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of Xanthus / Between that and the ships, the Trojans’ numerous fires”). Lang, Leaf, and Myers’s prose version appeared at roughly the same time as Schliemann’s dramatic discoveries at Troy (1882). Once unkindly described as the Authorized Version meeting Morte d’Arthur (“Wherefore thus among the ships and through the camp do ye wander alone, in the ambrosial night; what so great need cometh over you?”), it is unusually faithful to the Greek, but often strained and obscure — as Homer never is — possibly even to generations of schoolboys for whom it was a popular crib.

Since then, most translators have tried to reproduce something of Homer’s heroic vitality, many of them seeking to reproduce Arnold’s famous four qualities of rapidity, plainness, directness, and nobility (the first three easier to catch today than the last). No one writes epic poetry any more (Christopher Logue’s strikingly successful poems are not translations but recreations based loosely on Homer), and we no longer have at hand an accessible elevated diction to describe great deeds. So we aim for a kind of middle register between colloquial and fustian, always mindful that something has to go. I like some modern versions, which often tell the tale with vigour and rapidity, though the teacher in me objects to imported material and beefed-up imagery, and the exclusion of essentially Homeric features such as repetition and fixed epithets. Nor can I take seriously a translator who thinks that Homeric language can “cramp and distort my own.” But translation isn’t one thing, and depends on what you set out to do.

My own starting principles were:

1. To keep close to the Greek and let Homer speak as far as possible in his own words;
2. To render line by line — for ease of reference, not because I thought I was writing poetry; my version is often fairly prosaic;
3. To preserve echoes of heroic oral poetry, such as repetition, stock descriptions, and fixed epithets (“swift-footed Achilles; Hector, breaker of horses”);
4. To follow where possible Homer’s syntax (“and…and…but…then…”);
5. To translate just about every word (mainly for the benefit of students).

Other approaches are possible, and legitimate. Readers will judge for themselves. All one can hope for is that they will catch something of the immediacy and yet otherness of the original. And perhaps one or two will be impelled to learn Greek, which is the only way to read Homer with satisfaction.

Anthony Verity taught Classics in several schools in England, his last job being Master of Dulwich College. He has translated Theocritus and Pindar for Oxford World’s Classics, his OWC edition of The Illiad was published in September, and he is currently working on a version of Homer’s Odyssey.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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Empire State Building. Photo by robertpaulyoung, 2005. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

This debate is pointless and ahistorical. The United States is not an empire because, quite simply, there are no empires any more. By strict definition, empire meant the overt, formal, direct, and authoritarian rule of one group of people over another. Empires ruled permanently different and disenfranchised subjects, while the populations of twenty-first century nation states are, at least in theory, rights-bearing citizens. Many of these contemporary states encompass communities that have their own frustrated nationalist ambitions, but no modern government would cite empire as their reason for denying separatist groups the right of self-determination. Doing so would be an open admission of tyranny. Empire became so stigmatized over the course of the twentieth century, particularly after the 1960 United Nations resolution 1514 (XV) labeled foreign imperial rule “a denial of fundamental human rights,” that no power would admit to being one.

But there is more to the institutional demise of formal empire than the nuances of nomenclature or Cold War politics. The main reason that the United States is not an empire is because formal imperial rule is no longer possible in the transnational and increasingly interconnected contemporary world. In earlier times, when most people’s perspectives rarely extended beyond family and village, conquerors built viable and inexpensive empires by using the members of one subject community to govern and police another. The industrial revolution, which produced a sharp but temporary imbalance in global political, economic, and technological advancement, allowed western powers to acquire African and Asian empires on the cheap. But these were short-lived empires because the experience of direct, and most often oppressive, foreign rule broke down the highly localized and parochial forms of identity that were essential to imperial stability and longevity. Imperial administration required local allies, but empire was no longer possible once participation in such a system became treasonous collaboration. Moreover, the ease with which capital, migrants, weapons, and unifying ideologies now flow around the globe mean that conquered populations have the tools to thwart formal imperial rule.

So if there are no more formal empires, then why is the “American Empire” debate so pervasive and controversial? After the 2001 terror attacks, neo-conservative hawks and their academic allies made the case for invading Iraq by claiming that the supposedly liberal French and British Empires of the twentieth century showed that it was possible to use hard imperial power to “reform” and “modernize” non-western societies. This argument contained a strong current of western cultural chauvinism that was doubly appealing to rightwing thinkers, for the only way that European empire builders could reconcile their African and Asian conquests with western liberal ideals was to portray their subjects as backwards and in need of moral uplift. On the left, the opponents of the Iraq War and American unilateralism predictably reject these stereotypes, but they also hold fast to their own imperial stereotypes. Drawing on empire’s Cold War connotations, they deploy empire as an attack word to cast American policy as imperial, and thus immoral. In this sense empire loses it original historical meaning and becomes a banal metaphor for bad behavior or the deployment of hard power.

The utility and versatility of these various imperial metaphors lead both camps to react angrily to suggestions that there is no American Empire. The resulting crossfire obscures the risks of making policy on the basis of ahistorical clichés. While George Bush emphatically declared that the United States did not “seek an empire” in Iraq, his belief in the transformative power of imperial rule and the assumption that it was still possible to rule an unwilling population for an extended period of time proved disastrous.

Furthermore, the critics and defenders of American unilateralism both confuse formal empire, which belongs to an earlier age, with “informal empire” or hegemony (from the Greek hegemon, meaning preeminence or leadership). This exercise of influence and privilege without expense of conquest and direct rule remains a viable instrument of foreign policy. It was the basis of Britain’s global preeminence in the nineteenth century and the potency of the American Monroe Doctrine in Latin America. While the United States and Great Britain occasionally used military force to demonstrate their power to friend and foe alike, they were sufficiently confident in their power to resist the temptation of turning conquests into formal and permanent rule. Debates over the existence of an American Empire obscure the reality that, at least in the modern era, formal empire was an expression of insecurity and weakness.

Timothy Parsons is a Professor of African History at Washington University. He is the author many books, including The Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fall; The British Imperial Century, 1815-1914: A World History Perspective; and The 1964 Army Mutinies and the Making of Modern East Africa.

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Today sees the launch of a major new publishing initiative from Oxford University Press: Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO). OSEO will provide trustworthy and reliable critical online editions of original works by some of the most important writers in the humanities, such as William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, as well as works from lesser-known writers such as Shackerley Marmion. OSEO is launching with over 170 scholarly editions of material written between 1485 and 1660, and annual content additions will cover chronological periods until it contains content from Ancient Greek and Latin texts through to the modern era. This is exciting stuff, and here Project Director Sophie Goldsworthy explains why!

By Sophie Goldsworthy

Anyone working in the humanities is well aware of the plethora of texts online. Search for the full text of one of Shakespeare’s plays on Google and you’ll find hundreds of thousands of results. Browse popular classics on Amazon, and you’ll find hundreds available for free download to your device in 60 seconds or less. But while we’re spoilt for choice in terms of availability, finding an authoritative text, and one which you can feel confident in citing or using in your teaching, has paradoxically never been more difficult. Texts aren’t set in stone, but have a tendency to shift over time, whether as the result of author revisitings, the editing and publishing processes through which they pass, deliberate bowdlerization, or inadvertent mistranscription. And with more and more data available online, it has never been more important to help scholars and students navigate to trusted primary sources on which they can rely for their research, teaching, and learning.

Oxford has a long tradition of publishing scholarly editions — something which still sits at the very heart of the programme — and a range and reach unmatched by any other publisher. Every edition is produced by a scholarly editor, or team, who have sifted the evidence for each: deciding which reading or version is best, and why, and then tracking textual variance between editions, as well as adding rich layers of interpretative annotation. So we started to re-imagine how these classic print editions would work in a digital environment, getting down to the disparate elements of each — the primary text, the critical apparatus, and the explanatory notes — to work out how, by teasing the content of each edition apart, we could bring them back together in a more meaningful way for the reader.

We decided that we needed to organize the content on the site along two axes: editions and works. Our research underlined the need to preserve this link with print, not only for scholars and students who may want to use the online version of a particular edition, but also for librarians keen to curate digital content alongside their existing print holdings. And yet we also wanted to put the texts themselves front and centre. So we have constructed the site in both ways. You can use it to navigate to a familiar edition, travelling to a particular page, and even downloading a PDF of the print page, so you can cite from OSEO with authority. But you can also see each author’s works in aggregate and move straight to an individual play, poem, or letter, or to a particular line number or scene. Our use of XML has allowed us to treat the different elements of each edition separately: the notes keep pace with the text, and different features can be toggled on and off. This also drives a very focused advanced search — you can search within stage directions or the recipients of letters, first lines or critical apparatus — all of which speeds your journey to the content genuinely of most use to you.

As a side benefit — a reaffirmation, if you like, of the way print and online are perfectly in step on the site — many of our older editions haven’t been in print for some time, but embarking on the data capture process has made it possible for us to make them available again through on-demand printing. These texts often date back to the 1900s and yet are still considered either the definitive edition of a writer’s work or valued as milestones in the history of textual editing, itself an object of study and interest. Thus reissuing these classic texts adds, perhaps in an unanticipated way, to the broader story of dissemination and accessibility which lies at the heart of what we are doing.

For those minded to embark on such major projects, OSEO underlines Oxford’s support for the continuing tradition of scholarly editing. Our investment in digital editions will increase their reach, securing their permanence in the online space and making them available to multiple users at the same time. There are real benefits brought by the size of the collection, the aggregation of content, intelligent cross-linking with other OUP content — facilitating genuine user journeys from and into related secondary criticism and reference materials — and the possibility of future links to external sites and other resources. We hope, too, that OSEO will help bring recent finds to an audience as swiftly as possible: new discoveries can simply be edited and dropped straight into the site.

Over the past century and more, Oxford has invested in the development of an unrivalled programme of scholarly editions across the humanities. Oxford Scholarly Editions Online takes these core, authoritative texts down from the library shelf, unlocks their features to make them fully accessible to all kinds of users, and makes them discoverable online.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sophie Goldsworthy is the Editorial Director for OUP’s Academic and Trade publishing in the UK, and Project Director for Oxford Scholarly Editions Online. To discover more about OSEO, view this series of videos about the launch of the project.

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Myth: A Very Short Introduction

By Robert A. Segal

It is trite to say that one’s pet subject is interdisciplinary. These days what subject isn’t? The prostate? But myth really is interdisciplinary. For there is no study of myth as myth, the way, by contrast, there is said to be the study of literature as literature or of religion as religion. Myth is studied by other disciplines, above all by sociology, anthropology, psychology, politics, philosophy, literature, and religious studies. Each discipline applies itself to myth. For example, sociologists see myth as something belonging to a group.

Within each discipline are theories. A discipline can harbor only a few theories or scores of them.  What makes theories theories is that they are generalizations. They presume to know the answers to one or more of the three main questions about myth:  the origin, the function, or the subject matter.

The question of origin asks why, if not also how, myth arises. The answer is a need, which can be of any kind and on the part of an individual, such as the need to eat or to explain, or on the part of the group, such as the need to stay together. The need exists before myth, which arises to fulfill the need. Myth may be the initial or even the sole means of fulfilling the need. Or there may be other means, which compete with myth and may best it. For example, myth may be said to explain the physical world and to do so exceedingly well — until science arises and does it better. So claims the theorist E. B. Tylor, the pioneering English anthropologist.

Function is the flip side of origin. The need that causes myth to arise is the need that keeps it going. Myth functions as long as both the need continues to exist and myth continues to fulfill it at least as well as any competitor. The need for myth is always a need so basic that it itself never ceases. The need to eat, to explain the world, to express the unconscious, to give meaningfulness to life – these needs are panhuman. But the need for myth to fulfill these needs may not last forever. The need to eat can be fulfilled through hunting or farming without the involvement of myth. The need to express the unconscious can be fulfilled through therapy, which for both Sigmund Freud and his rival C. G. Jung is superior to myth. The need to find or to forge meaningfulness in life can be fulfilled without religion and therefore without myth for secular existentialists such as Albert Camus.

For some theorists, myth has always existed and will always continue to exist. For others, myth has not always existed and will not always continue to exist. For Mircea Eliade, a celebrated Romanian-born scholar of religion, religion has always existed and will always continue to exist. Because Eliade ties myth to religion, myth is safe. For not only Tylor but also J. G. Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, myth is doomed exactly because myth is tied to religion. For them science has replaced religion and as a consequence has replaced myth. “Modern myth” is a contradiction in terms.

The third main question about myth is that of subject matter. What is myth really about? There are two main answers: myth is about what it is literally about, or myth symbolizes something else. Taken literally, myth is usually about gods or heroes or physical events like rain. Tylor, Eliade, and the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski all read myth literally. Myth taken literally may also mean myth taken historically, especially in myths about heroes.

The subject matter of myth taken symbolically is open-ended. A myth about the Greek god Zeus can be said to symbolize one’s father (so Freud), one’s father archetype (so Jung), or the sky (so nature mythologists).  The religious existentialists Rudolf Bultmann and Hans Jonas would contend that the myth of the biblical flood is to be read not as a explanation of a supposedly global event from long ago but as a description of what it is like for anyone anywhere to live in a world in which, it is believed, God exists and treats humans fairly.

To call the flood story a myth is not to spurn it. I am happy to consider any theory of myth, but not the crude dismissal of a story or a belief as a “mere myth.” True or false, myth is never “mere.” For to call even a conspicuously false story or belief a mere myth is to miss the power that that story or belief holds for those who accept it. The difficulty in persuading anyone to give up an obviously false myth attests to its allure.

Robert A. Segal is Sixth Century Chair in Religious Studies at the University of Aberdeen.  He is the author of Myth: A Very Short Introduction and of Theorizing about Myth. He is presently at work editing the Oxford Handbook of Myth Theory. He directs the Centre for the Study of Myth at Aberdeen.

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Who Was Who online, part of Who’s Who online, has granted free access for a limited time to the entries for the philosophers and scholars mentioned in the above article.

Image credit: Thetis and Zeus by Anton Losenko, 1769. Copy of artwork used for the purposes of illustration in a critical commentary on the work. Source: Wikimedia Commons. 

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In a year when Michael Phelps became the most decorated Olympian of all time with 22 medals, and Usain Bolt became the first man to win the 200 meters twice, it’s worth asking: What does ‘great’ mean in sports? We might gain perspective by considering how the Ancient Greeks determined greatness in athletes. Then and now, true greatness is as defined not by a single moment, but by the ability to build a record of extraordinary achievement.

Milo of Croton was the greatest ancient Greek Olympian. He was a wrestler who won six consecutive Olympic crowns beginning in 540 BC, and lost in the finals of his seventh consecutive competition. He won even more titles at the other important athletic festivals of his time — the Python games, also held every four years, the Nemea and Isthmian games that were held at two year intervals — becoming a five time winner of the grand slam (winning the title at all major festivals). That’s twenty-eight years at the top; he was in his early forties when he lost his first Olympic match. That match was a classic confrontation between an aging champion and a rising star, a man who had trained in Milo’s home town. Timesitheus, the man who beat Milo, wore him down while avoiding the body slams that were Milo’s specialty. The loss did nothing to diminish Milo’s near legendary status in the Greek world and may have even helped people understand how astonishing his achievement actually was. It proved that he was human. In same way seeing Michael Phelps’ loss in the 400 individual medley (IM) made his later performance — the four gold and two silver medals — all the more impressive. They remind us that Olympic victories don’t just depend on ability, they depend on desire.

Two wrestlers is a scene from palaestra. The Base for Funerary Kouros in pentelic marble. Kerameikos, built into Themistoclean walls. c.510 BC. Photo by Fingalo, 2007. Creative Commons License.

In the post-Milo era of the Olympic desire, willingness to take on extraordinary feats of endurance or compete in radically different events came to define true greatness. The theoretical founder of the games was Hercules, who being the greatest hero (albeit mythological) came to set the theoretical standard for above average excellence by winning two of the three combat sports: boxing, wrestling, and pancration (a combination of boxing and wrestling). The first person who tried to do this was Theagenes of Thasos, a boxer whose townsmen would later celebrate him as a semi-divine figure (the shrine in his honor survives to this day). He failed because was exhausted after beating another great boxing champion, Euthymus, just before the pancration began. Euthymus was so impressive that people believed that he had actually defeated a divine spirit himself — the story was still told more than five hundred years after his death!

Two hundred years after Theagenes failed, Caprus of Elis finally won two events (wrestling and pancration) and was remembered as a man who won because he was willing to take on great challenges. There would be six more men who would do the same in the next 150 years before competition in the two events was banned. All seven victors were well remembered. So too was Polites, described as “a great wonder” by an ancient writer because he won all three Olympic foot races on one day. While two of these events were sprints, the third was a distance race, and it appears that he placed first in the qualifying heats for each final — meaning that he won six Olympic races on a single day! Our source for his achievements said he was the second greatest runner of all time; the greatest, in his view, was Leonidas of Rhodes who won the two sprint events in four straight Olympics.

Greatness in the ancient Olympics required longevity and the willingness to take on exceptional challenges. That is what Phelps and Bolt have done, and that’s why they’ll be remembered amongst the greatest of all times (ancient and modern).

David Potter is Francis W. Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman History and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Greek and Latin in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Victor’s Crown: A History of Ancient Sport from Homer to Byzantium, Ancient Rome: A New History and Emperors of Rome, and two forthcoming OUP titles, Constantine the Emperor and Theodora. Read his previous blog posts: “Funding and Favors at the Olympics,” “The Ties That Bind Ancient and Modern Sports,” “The Money Games,” and “Sports fanaticism: Present and past.”

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Public funding for sports events was a fact of life for the Greeks and Romans. So was private funding, and both the Greeks and the Romans knew what the benefits and what the pitfalls associated with either might be. Can we be certain that the organizers of the London Olympics are quite so clear about this?

The widely advertised donation (amounting to thirty-one million dollars) by pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) of testing facilities for 6,250 blood samples taken from athletes (testing for 62% of contests, up from 45% at Beijing) could raise that question. The Olympic Committee, while a private organization, works hundreds of governments that provide public funds for Olympic sports and must regulate GSK’s products. The fact that GSK has recently offered to pay a three billion dollars settlement to one of three governments that doesn’t provide public funds to its Olympic athletes (that of the United States) for deceptive advertising might make people wonder about the definition of “drug cheat” at these games.

The Ancient Greeks, by and large, tended towards the use of public funds for major athletic events. Even before they developed the western world’s first system of coinage, they were aware of the impact of wealth on public decision-making. The first reference to bribery occurs in one of the earliest Greek poems, and one of the earliest surviving documents from the ancient Olympic games indicates deep concern about shady financial transactions on the part of the bigwigs who were in attendance.

The city of Elis, in whose territory Olympia was located, paid for the administration of the games (a colossal pain in the neck then as now). Elis appointed a board of officials every four years to make sure everything worked. The board advertised the games, appointed the officials, oversaw the training of the athletes before the opening ceremonies to make sure that the competitors were legitimate, and made sure that the facilities were in decent shape. Since venues like stadium were only used every four years, there was always a lot of deferred maintenance. We have a fascinating document, albeit connected with another major festival, detailing payments an organizing committee was making to local contractors to do things like clean trash out of the venues, provide the best surfaces, and so forth.

Big spenders from elsewhere were always welcome. In time, some of them did build splendidly self-commemorative structures at the site of the games, but those buildings were never central to the games themselves. They tended instead to cater to the needs of fans who were by and large drawn from the class of people who could afford to take a few weeks off work to go to the games. Elis never sold naming rights to the stadium and made it clear that the rich and powerful, even if sponsoring athletes (often the case) weren’t connected with the way the games ran.

The Romans took the opposite approach. Quick to recognize the political benefits of a good show, Roman politicians moved away from a publicly-funded model of entertainment, which existed for hundred of years in conjunction with chariot racing, to a private model at about the same time that Rome became the dominant power in the Mediterranean World (the end of the third century BC). From then on the rise in privately funded spectacles tracks very closely the transformation of Rome from democracy to autocracy.

The corrosive effect of private funding model becomes immediately clear when we see a staunch defender of the traditional political system (Marcus Cicero) in the business of hiring out gladiators to other politicians and receiving extensive correspondence from a friend about the importance of providing some panthers for games that he will put on. If only Cicero, then governor of a province where the desired beasts resided, would hurry up and catch a few! Cicero himself noted that the massive spectacle put on by one of Rome’s aspiring autocrats failed because the events were either too familiar, or, in the case of the slaughter of some elephants, too distressing. The man who ultimately brought the Roman democracy crashing down, Cicero’s contemporary Julius Caesar, was a major gladiatorial contractor who made many friends by helping people fund things that they couldn’t afford. There may perhaps be no more powerful statement of the linkage personal funding of sports events and non-democratic government than one of Rome’s most important monuments. The building we know as the Colosseum was actually built as “The Flavian Amphitheater,” named for the family of the emperor who paid for it with the money he took from the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD.

The Olympic movement provides amazing spectacles, drawing the world together just as the ancient games once did. It gives athletes the chance to excel on a unique stage and us a chance to watch astonishing achievements in awe. At the same time we need to be conscious, as the original founders of the games were, of where the money comes from and just what is being bought.

David Potter is Francis W. Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman History and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Greek and Latin in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Victor’s Crown: A History of Ancient Sport from Homer to Byzantium, Ancient Rome: A New History and Emperors of Rome, and two forthcoming OUP titles, Constantine the Emperor and Theodora. Read his previous blog posts: “The Ties That Bind Ancient and Modern Sports,” “The Money Games,” and “Sports fanaticism: Present and past.”

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The mess in and around Obamacare is a good illustration of what’s wrong with democracy in the United States. Notice I do not say “what’s wrong with democracy.” Democracy in a truer form wouldn’t produce such monstrosities. Here we have a law designed to bring much needed benefits to ordinary citizens — which it will do, given a chance — while showering unnecessary riches on the insurance industry. The interests of a few have cruelly distorted a program for the many. A Republican House voted to repeal this law, even though it was based on policies devised by Republicans, mainly in order to embarrass a Democratic president in an election year. And all this irresponsible behavior concerns what is most precious to us: our health.

Some might say this sort of behavior is inevitable in democracy, but that is nonsense. Rather it is a product of features peculiar to our form of democracy, which was grafted onto roots established by thinkers like James Madison. Madison was deeply opposed to democracy and wanted us to have a republic instead, designed to prevent genuine rule by the people. Democracy was invented in ancient Greece precisely to keep special interests at bay and prevent party cliques from mangling the people’s interest with silly fighting.

Why not ask an ancient Greek? Pericles would say that one major cause of our trouble in the United States is money. A few weeks ago we heard that eight-figure gifts are now in play to influence this year’s election, thanks to the Citizens United decision. Pericles’ democracy was designed to reduce the power of wealth to a minimum and it did so. We know that, because for the almost two hundred years of democracy in Greece, the rich often tried to bring it down and replace it with oligarchy.

A second cause Pericles would point out is our dependence on elections. “Elections!” you exclaim. “But aren’t they the essence of democracy?” Not at all. Pericles’ democracy cut way back on the use of elections for two reasons: elections give money an opportunity to exercise power, and elections make cliquish infighting the norm in politics. What ought to be the norm (Pericles would say) is serious discussion of what is best for the people.

Elections, thought Pericles, give too much power to the rich and famous and too much scope to political parties. So powerful representative bodies in Athens, such as the Council (like our senate), the courts, and the lawmakers, were composed of representatives selected by a lottery to represent equally the divisions of the city, somewhat like an American jury. These representatives didn’t have to run for election, so they didn’t need to listen to special interests, build up a war chest, or do stupid things to embarrass a political party. All they had to do was carry out their duties as best they could and avoid any charge of corruption.

Imagine a council of 500 citizens chosen at random from our various regions to represent our citizen body, and then imagine them sitting down — with no worries about reelection — to find a solution to our health care problem. They would be given time to sort through the issues on the basis of expert testimony. If caught taking money from special interests, they would be subject to severe fines.

How would they be chosen? Pericles’ way of choosing representatives was so fair that it never led to complaints. It began with a division of the citizen body into tribes each of which represented the regions of Attica, and it ended with the use of a machine you can see today in the Agora Museum. All citizens who had sworn to uphold the law were eligible, apparently all felt an obligation to serve, and were paid a reasonable salary for the time they served. (Well, not quite all: Like the United States in its early days, ancient Athens did not give political rights to women, slaves, or resident aliens. To their credit, some of their thinkers at the time saw this as a problem.)

Taking electoral politics and money out of the deliberative process on health care might just produce what we all want — as fair a solution as we can reach. Why not try the lottery? It’s a lot cheaper than an election. Lottery or no lottery, we must do our best to take large sums of money out of the arena. Ask Pericles. The best policy isn’t the one with the richest supporters, or the one that does the most harm to the other party. Letting the super rich decide our fate is not democracy.

Paul Woodruff teaches philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has held positions for over twenty years as department chair, honors director, and dean. He served in the United States Army as a junior officer, 1969-71. His many books include The Ajax Dilemma: Justice, Fairness and Rewards, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue, First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea, and The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched.

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Bust of Pericles wearing a Corinthian helmet. Marble, Roman copy after a Greek original. Museo Chiaramonti, section I, #14. Photo by Jastrow, 2006. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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As the Olympic Games kick off tomorrow, Mayor of London Boris Johnson has ensured that London 2012 retains its ties to the ancient world. Trained as a classicist and fond of reciting Latin (particularly in debate), he commissioned an ode by Armand D’Angour in the style of the Ancient Greek poet Pindar, which was recited at the Olympic Gala at Royal Opera House on July 24th. Oxford University classicist Dr Armand D’Angour’s Olympic Ode will be installed at the Olympic Park in East London, but you can discover Pindar’s verses on the blog today. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction by Stephen Instone to The Complete Odes by Pindar, translated by Anthony Verity:

The victory odes are divided into Olympians, Pythians, Nemeans, and Isthmians after the four great ‘panhellenic’ games that were open to all Greeks. All athletics games in ancient Greece were part of a religious festival in honour of gods or heroes. The Olympic games were the oldest and most prestigious, held in Elis in the western Peloponnese in honour of Zeus. There had been a sanctuary to Zeus there even before the traditional date for the founding of the games (776 BC). Athletics competitions provided an additional way of honouring the god, the winner owing his victory to the help of the god and in consequence thanking the god. The festival lasted five days and took place, as nowadays, every four years. On the first day Zeus apomuios or ‘averter of flies’ was invoked to keep the sacrificial meat fly-free, and on the third day a hundred oxen were sacrificed to Zeus. The programme of events developed and changed during time.

In the fifth century, when Pindar was writing, there were

• three running events: the stadion (a sprint the length of the stadium), the diaulos (there and back), and the dolichos (twelve laps);
• a race when the runners wore armour and carried a large shield (there and back);
• boxing, wrestling, and the pancration (‘all power’, in which virtually any method of physical attack was permitted);
• the pentathlon (long jump, sprint, discus, javelin, and wrestling).

Most of these events had separate age-categories for men, youths, and boys. There were also horse an horse-with-chariot races held in the hippodrome. For a few Olympics there was a mule race (Olympian 6 is for a winner in this event); mules were bred in Sicily, and the Sicilian tyrants may have played a part in establishing this event. The Pythian games were held in honour of Apollo at Delphi. The programme was broadly similar to that of the Olympics, but included music competitions (for Apollo the god of music); Pythian 12 is for a winner in the pipe-playing competition. They were traditionally founded in 573, took place every two years at Nemea on the east of the Peloponnese. They were also in honour of Zeus. The Isthmian games, traditionally founded 582, also took place every two years. They were held in honour of the sea-god Poseidon at the Isthmus, the strip of land that then connected the Peloponnese with mainland Greece. In his victory odes Pindar generally refers to the god presiding over the games where the victory had been gained and sometimes the myth relates to the particular games (for example, in Olympian 1 the myth concerns Pelops who had a hero-cult at Olympia).

These four games formed a circuit for athlete, as the Olympics, World Championships, European, and Commonwealth Games do for some athletes today. A few outstanding athletes, such as Diagoras of Rhodes for whom Pindar composed Olympian 7, won at all four (like the British decathlete Daley Thompson who in the 1980s simultaneously held Olympic, World, Commonwealth, and European titles). In most events the athletes competed naked (probably because of the heat). Several times in his odes for victors from Aegina Pindar praises the trainer. Generally, he concentrates on the implications of victory rather than the winning itself, but occasionally he provides interesting athletics details.

In winning at the Olympics both the stadion race and the pentathlon Xenophon of Corinth achieved, according to Pindar, what had never been done before (Olympian 13.29-33). In Pythian 5 (lines 49-51) Pindar says that the charioteer of the victor, the king of Cyrene, was in a race in which forty charioteers fell. The dangers inherent in the equestrian events meant that the mean who entered those events, and who were crowned victors, did not themselves usually ride or drive but employed jockeys and charioteers; but in Isthmian 1 for a chariot-race victor, Pindar says that the winner, Herodotus of Thebes, held the reins himself (line 15), as if this was exceptional. In Isthmian 4, for a Theban pancratiast, Pindar rather surprisingly says that the victor was of puny appearance (line 50) – perhaps a joke for a fellow Theban, The ordering of the odes, Olympian, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian, reflects the order of the games in terms of their importance; within each group of odes those celebrating victories in the chariot race generally come first because it was the event held in great esteem. No Olympian or Pythian odes is for a victor in the pancration, whereas three Nemeans and Isthmians are; conversely, eleven Olympians and Pythians, but only give Nemeans and Isthmians are for chariot – and horse-race victors. At the major games Pindar focused on the major events.

The Greek poet Pindar (c. 518-428 BC) composed victory odes for winners in the ancient Games, including the Olympics. He celebrated the victories of athletes competing in foot races, horse races, boxing, wrestling, all-in fighting and the pentathlon, and his Odes are fascinating not only for their poetic qualities, but for what they tell us about the Games. Pindar praises the victor by comparing him to mythical heroes and the gods, but also reminds the athlete of his human limitations. The Odes contain versions of some of the best known Greek myths, such as Jason and the Argonauts, and Perseus and Medusa, and are a valuable source for insights on Greek religion and ethics. Pindar’s startling use of language, including striking metaphors, bold syntax, and enigmatic expressions, makes reading his poetry a uniquely rewarding experience.

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As the world awaits the London 2012 Summer Olympics, we spoke with David Potter, author of The Victor’s Crown: A History of Ancient Sport from Homer to Byzantium, about how sports unites us with our past.

Click here to view the embedded video.

David Potter is Francis W. Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman History and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Greek and Latin in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Victor’s Crown: A History of Ancient Sport from Homer to Byzantium, Ancient Rome: A New History and Emperors of Rome, and two forthcoming OUP titles, Constantine the Emperor and Theodora. Read his previous blog posts: “The Money Games” and “Sports fanaticism: Present and past.”

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The polymath Thomas Young (1773-1829) — physicist, physiologist, physician and polyglot, among several other things — became hooked on the scripts and languages of ancient Egypt in 1814, the year he began to decipher the Rosetta Stone. He continued to study the hieroglyphic and demotic scripts with variable intensity for the rest of his life, literally until his dying day. The challenge of being the first modern to read the writing of what appeared then to be the oldest civilization in the world — far older than the classical civilization of Young’s beloved Greeks — was irresistible to a man who was as equally gifted in languages, ancient and contemporary, as he was in science. He himself described his Egyptian obsession as being driven by “an attempt to unveil the mystery, in which Egyptian literature has been involved for nearly twenty centuries.” His epitaph in London’s Westminster Abbey states, accurately enough, that Young was the man who “first penetrated the obscurity which had veiled for ages the hieroglyphics of Egypt” — even if it was the linguist and archaeologist Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832) who in the end would enjoy the glory of being the first actually to read the hieroglyphs in 1822-23.

From 1814 until the publication of his important Encyclopaedia Britannica article (‘Egypt’ in 1819), Young had had the field of hieroglyphic decipherment largely to himself. Champollion, though actively interested in the Rosetta Stone from 1808, did not tackle its decipherment in earnest until 1821. He quickly overtook Young and became the founder of Egyptology as a science.

During the 1820s, the two men sometimes cooperated with each other, but mostly they competed as rivals. Their relationship could never have been a harmonious one. Young claimed that Champollion had built his system of reading hieroglyphics on Young’s own discoveries and his tentative hieroglyphic ‘alphabet’, published in 1819. While paying generous and frequent tribute to Champollion’s unrivalled progress since then, Young wanted his early steps recognized. This Champollion was adamantly unwilling to concede, claiming that he had worked independently; and in his vehemence he determined to give all of Young’s work the minimum possible public recognition. Just weeks before Young’s death in May 1829, Champollion, writing in the midst of his 1828-29 expedition to ancient Egypt — he was then at Thebes in the Valley of the Kings — exulted privately to his brother in Paris: “So the poor Dr Young is incorrigible? Why stir up old matter that is already mummified? Thank M. Arago for the cudgels he has so valiantly taken up for the honour of the Franco-Pharaonic alphabet. The Briton can do as he pleases — it shall be ours: and all of old England will learn from young France to spell hieroglyphs by a totally different method.”

Such defiantly nationalistic overtones — at times evident in Young’s writings, too — have to some extent bedevilled honest discussion of Young and Champollion ever since those Napoleonic days of intense Franco-British political rivalry. Even Young’s loyal friend and admirer, the physicist Dominique Arago, turned against his work on hieroglyphics, at least partly because Champollion was an honoured fellow Frenchman.

Alongside this, Egyptologists, who are the people best placed to understand the intellectual nitty-gritty of the dispute, are naturally drawn to Champollion more than Young because he founded their subject. No scholar of ancient Egypt would wish to think ill of such a pioneer. Even John Ray, the Cambridge University Egyptologist who has done most in recent years to give Young his proper due, admits: “the suspicion may easily arise, and often has done, that any eulogy of Thomas Young must be intended as a denigration of Champollion. This would be shameful coming from an Egyptologist.”

Demotic script on a replica of the rosetta stone on display in Magdeburg. Photo by Chris 73. Creative Commons License. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Then there is the cult of genius to consider; many of us prefer to believe in the primacy of unaccountable moments of inspiration over the less glamorous virtues of step-by-step, rational teamwork. Champollion maintained that his breakthroughs in 1822-23 came almost exclusively out of his own mind, arising from his indubitably passionate devotion to ancient Egypt and his unrivalled knowledge of the Coptic language descended from ancient Egyptian. He pictured himself for the public in his writings as a ‘lone genius’ who solved the riddle of ancient Egypt’s writing single-handedly. The fact that Young was known primarily for his work in fields other than Egyptian studies, and that he published his studies on Egypt anonymously up to 1823, made Champollion’s solitary self-image easily believable for most people.

Lastly, in trying to assess the differing styles of Young and Champollion, there is no avoiding the fact that they were highly contrasting personalities and that this contrast sometimes influenced their research on the hieroglyphs. Champollion had tunnel vision (“fortunately for our subject,” says Ray); was prone to fits of euphoria and despair; and had personally led an uprising against the French king in Grenoble in 1821, for which he was put on trial. Young, apart from his polymathy and a total lack of engagement with party politics, was a man who “could not bear, in the most common conversation, the slightest degree of exaggeration, or even of colouring” (wrote his closest friend after Young’s death). Young and Champollion were poles apart intellectually, emotionally and politically.

Consider their respective attitudes to ancient Egypt. Young never went to Egypt and never wanted to go. In founding an Egyptian Society in London in 1817, to publish as many ancient inscriptions and manuscripts as possible so as to aid the decipherment, Young remarked that funds were needed “for employing some poor Italian or Maltese to scramble over Egypt in search of more.” Champollion, by contrast, had long dreamt of visiting Egypt and doing exactly what Young had depreciated, ever since he saw the hieroglyphs as a boy, and when he finally got there, he was able to pass for a native, given his swarthy complexion and his excellent command of Arabic. “I am Egypt’s captive — she is my be-all,” he thrilled from beside the Nile in 1828. Later he described entering the temple of Ramses the Great at Abu Simbel, which was blocked by millennia of sand: “I undressed almost completely, down to my Arab shirt and long linen underpants, and pushed myself flat on my stomach through the small opening in the doorway that, if cleared of sand, would be at least 25 feet in height. I thought I was entering the mouth of a furnace, and, when I had slid entirely into the temple, I found myself in an atmosphere heated to 52 degrees: we went through this astonishing excavation, Rosellini, Ricci, I and one of the Arabs holding a candle in his hand.”

Such a perilous adventure would probably not have appealed to Young, even in his careless youth as an accomplished horseman roughing it in the Highlands of Scotland. Unlike Champollion, Young’s motive for ‘cracking’ the Egyptian scripts was fundamentally philological and scientific, not aesthetic and cultural — in contrast with his attitude to the classical literature of Greece and Rome. Many Egyptologists, and humanities scholars in general, tend not to sympathize with this motive. They also know little about Young’s work in science and his renown as someone who initiated many new areas of enquiry (such as a theory of colour vision) and left others to develop them. As a result, some of them seriously misjudge Young. Not knowing of his fairness in recognizing other scientists’ contributions and his fanatical truthfulness in his own scientific work, they jump to the obvious conclusion that Young’s attitude to Champollion was chiefly one of envy. But not only would such an emotion have been out of character for Young, it would also not have made much sense, given his major scientific achievements and the fact that these were increasingly recognized from 1816 onwards — starting with French scientists, who awarded Young their highest honours.

For Champollion, the success of his decipherment was a matter of make or break as a scholar and as a man. For Young, his Egyptian research was essentially yet one more fascinating avenue of knowledge to explore for his own amusement. Both men were geniuses, though of exceptionally different kinds, and both deserve to be remembered in the story of the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphs: Young for taking some difficult but crucial initial steps in 1814-19; and Champollion for discovering a coherent system in 1822-23, and thereafter demonstrating its validity with a vast array of virgin inscriptions.

Andrew Robinson is the author of the biographies Cracking the Egyptian Code: The Revolutionary Life of Jean-François Champollion, and The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young. . He has also written two Very Short Introductions for OUP: Writing and Script, published in 2009, and Genius, published in 2011.

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