I just ran across the strangest comment in How and Wells' Commentary on Herodotus (now available for the Kindle for $1.59!). At 4.114 Herodotus is writing about how these Amazon women were in relationships with Scythian men, but while the Amazons learned the language of the Scythians, the Scythian men were unable to learn to speak Amazon. Later, in section 117, Herodotus says that the Amazon women spoke Scythian but not quite correctly.

So How and/or Wells write in their commentary at 4.114:

"The greater aptness of the Amazons is a delightful touch of nature; but they were inaccurate (cr. soloikizontes chap. 117), as lady linguists often are."

So...some private joke with the lady linguist down the hall? An inter-departmental romance turned sour?

Reposted from Ancient World Bloggers Group (posted by Charles Ellwood Jones). 

It's certainly distressing but perhaps also a serious warning of the power of a monopoly that aspires to be the digital librarian and cataloguer of the entire world. 

Distressing? Distressing! BMCR is not spam!

A notice at the Bryn Mawr Classical Review reads:

Please note that Google has removed all access to our blog after incorrectly flagging it as a spam blog. We had requested a review which did not happen, and on September 28 Google removed all access to the blog, which we are attempting to appeal.

For now the BMCR blog is blank.

L.S.,

From Hewlett Packard: "The Antikythera Mechanism is an ancient astronomical computer built by the Greeks around 80 B.C. It was found on a shipwreck by sponge divers in 1900, and its exact function still eludes scholars to this day. In September, 2005, as part of the Antikythera Research Project, HP was able to access the device in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens to apply reflectance imaging techniques to the front and rear surfaces of the > 70 fragments that comprise the mechanism."

[I would doubt the word 'computer'; orrery would be better.]

A metre-wide plastic dome, covered with flashbulbs, is used to take photos of an object lit from 50 different directions. The images are fed into a computer and used to make a reconstruction of how the surface of the object reflects light. Once that's done, you can ask the computer to light the object from any angle, even impossible ones like beneath its surface, or you can change how the surface reflects light - such as making the crumbling stone of a cuneiform tablet as shiny as metal. Then it's just a case of playing around to find the effect that makes the lettering as clear as possible.

You can try this for yourself on Hewlett Packard's website. Click on one of the images to download the interactive demo in a new window, then move the mouse around to change the direction of the light. Or  right click on the image to bring up a little menu, and under "effects" turn on "specular".

The applications in the field of archaeology are awesome (not a word I often use).

For more on the Antikythera Mechanism, see Jo Marchant's blog, Decoding the Heavens, especially the Stunning Antikythera video.

Judith

-- 
Visit Zenobia's blog at Empress of the East <http://judithweingarten.blogspot.com>

I'm a small press publisher in the hinterland of central Ohio, and have just published a fine translation of Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica -- 1st century AD Latin version of earlier Greek epic, now in lively English verse. The translation is from Michael Barich of the Kenyon College Classics department, with illustrations by his student, Thomas Chappell Lewis (including a vivid cover illustration crafted on Post-It Notes). The little-known Latin Argonautica has keen Roman touches that heighten the sense of adventure and erotic passion of the Greek, and Professor Barich does a fine job in creating his accurate and compelling version in English verse. Take a look at http://xoxoxpress.com/titles.php?g=poetry -- and thanks!

A splendid piece in The New Republic by the always readable Peter Green on the Daniel Mendelsohn translation of the collected poems of Constantine Cavafy. Every autodidact, someone once claimed, can be guaranteed to have a bee in his bonnet somewhere, and this was certainly true of Cavafy, whose bee (pursued in no less than a dozen poems, five of them unfinished) was the improbable figure of Julian the Apostate. It might be thought that a poet who glimpsed the old gods winging it over Ionia would welcome an emperor who aimed to put them back officially on their pedestals; but in fact Cavafy reveals a visceral distaste and contempt for Julian. G.W. Bowersock, in two characteristically erudite and incisive essays....

Read more at Bread & Circuses

All good wishes,

Judith Weingarten
Visit Zenobia's blog at Empress of the East

L.S.,

The city of Zenobia, said to have been founded by Queen Zenobia of Palmyra, and refortified by Justinian, is now in mortal danger from a plans for a new dam on the Euphrates River.  The French-Syrian Archaeological Mission, excavating at Zenobia/Halebiye since 2006, are circulating a petition in the hope of saving this fascinating site.  They do not aim to cancel the project (which is needed for the development of the region) but to have the dam moved so that it will not drown most of the city.  Please help by clicking here and signing the petition:

Please also forward the petition to as many interested parties as you can.  More information on the site and excavations at the Mission's webpage.

And you can read a post that I recently wrote about the city's history here: Where Did Zenobia Die?

All good wishes,

Judith Weingarten

Via History News Network, the British Library's EThOS beta is now available on-line. EThOS stands for Electronic Theses (dissertations) Online Service.  Nearly all British Universities are participating (except Cambridge and Oxford; naturally not). Any thesis ever accepted in Britain is eligible for inclusion in the database, possibly going back to the 1600s.  The theses have been OCRed, not just scanned, which means that you can do keyword searches on the PDFs, for example. And, if you only want an electronic copy, it is free of charge (hardcopy costs, obviously). If the thesis you want hasn't been scanned yet, then you may be asked to contribute towards the cost of that.

Brilliant.

Judith Weingarten

You can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/iHerodotus.

In case you haven't seen it yet, here's the Aeneid on Facebook: http://home.comcast.net/~fuuchan/aeneidonfacebookfinal.png



I particularly like the various relationship statuses.

Another story from The Week (November 14, 2008). This one's not funny (unlike this one), but it does call to mind an interesting classical parallel:

"An avid bowler from Michigan bowled his first perfect game after 45 years of trying, and promptly died. Don Doane, 62, had just rolled his final strike, say witnesses, bringing his score to an unimprovable 300, and was accepting congratulations from teammates when he suffered a massive heart attack and died instantly. 'It was like a book, a final chapter,' said teammate Todd Place. 'He threw his 300 game with all of his friends, gave each other high-fives, and it's like the story ended. He died with a smile on his face.'"

Readers familiar with Herodotus will immediately see this as a modernized version of the Cleobis and Biton story (Hdt. 1.31). The Athenian sage Solon, asked by the Lydian King Croesus to name the most fortunate of men, named as second most fortunate the brothers Cleobis and Biton. When their mother needed a ride to a religious festival, but the oxen weren't yet available for her cart, they yoked themselves to it and pulled her some five miles. Everybody was impressed: people gathered around and congratulated the boys, and they congratulated the boys' mother on what great sons she had. And she, the mother, prayed to a statue of Hera that her sons might get from the goddess whatever is best for men to receive. Afterwards the boys feasted and then fell asleep and they never woke up again, and so died at the pinnacle of their accomplishments. And, importantly, because they died there was now no chance for misfortune to befall them in the future: fate, being fickle, tends to upend the lives of men given enough time.

Both these blog posts came through my RSS reader today. The question is, what's inside the real one?

• A Garden Carried in the Pocket: The Blood of Caesar

• The Labors of Herakles -- 21st century

• Counting My Blessings - Sunday Salon: Favorite history books?
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• Powell's Books - PowellsBooks.BLOG - Bright Oblivion

• Ancient gold treasure puzzles Greek archaeologists - Yahoo! News

• Et Tu Brute? « Blacklin’s Reading Room Reviews & More
  Re. the UNRV History site

• Neatorama » Blog Archive » 10 Fascinating Facts About the Ancient Olympic Games