Thoughts on Antiquity

N. S. Gill links to an exciting new find:

For the first time, researchers have identified DNA from inside ceramic containers in an ancient shipwreck on the seafloor, making it possible to determine what the ship’s cargo was even though there was no visible trace of it.

This is very exciting news for Classicists! Here’s the exciting […]

The historical Jesus is not often a major object of my musings, but this time I will make an exception. Some of my recent readings in completely unrelated literature have brought to mind an interesting point of comparison for the development of Christian mythology and the historicity of Jesus. While Jesus as a historical figure […]

I’m becoming increasingly impressed by Plustek’s specialised book-scanner, the OpticBook 3600.  I bought one ages ago, and was unimpressed to discover that the built-in TWAIN driver only supported 300 dpi, since scanning and converting to text is best done at 400 dpi.  Later I found that, when using Abbyy Finereader 8 OCR software, the Abbyy […]

ArchaeoBlog has reported that digging at Herculaneum has begun again. Good to see that they’re combining the digging with conservation efforts:

The site was opened to the public four years ago, but has now been closed again so that archaeologists using picks and trowels can dig out the frescoed corridor or cryptoportico on the lower ground […]

These posts from CSNTM about a team photographing manuscripts at Patmos are models of how things should be done. Well done chaps!
http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2007/10/16/manuscript-discoveries-from-summer-2007-expeditions
http://www.csntm.org/Patmos2007.aspx

I came across this link accidentally:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071022-european-copyright-law-used-to-threaten-canadian-public-domain-site.html
Apparently a Canadian public domain site received threatening letters from an Austrian publisher in regard of some music scores which were out of copyright in Canada but in copyright in the EU. The web site owner, who was providing a public service, not selling anything, decided that they didn’t need […]

Georg Graf, Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Litteratur is the main handbook of Arabic Christian literature.  Rather to my surprise I found it offered for sale by an Italian bookdealer, deastore.com.  The first volume, which deals with all the translations into Arabic, is only available on CDROM; the other four in book form at around 20 euros […]

Tony Keen has an interesting post on Facebook over at Memorabilia Antonina, linking to an article on The Independent. While Facebook carries its own problems, some of the charges leveled against it in the paper seem absurd, and Tony does a good job discussing them.
I first joined Facebook in October ‘05 after consistently refusing to […]

A couple of months ago I offered several ancient and medieval passages describing the physical appearance of Jesus, and even more recently I mentioned my uploading of some ancient and medieval passages citing the Testimonium Flavianum. This present post has to do with both topics.
The Latin letter of Lentulus, an ancient or medieval forgery (refer to the Catholic Encyclopedia for more information), […]

As one who will hopefully soon be teaching Latin literature, I was particularly interested in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review’s review of A Concise Guide to Teaching Latin Literature ed. by Ronnie Ancona. The book “is a collection of essays designed to give both faculty groups rapid familiarity with some recent scholarship on Catullus, Ovid, […]