Via Memoriae Classicae III – Tomb Raider

Righto, then. Let’s talk a bit about computer games. Being a shy and somewhat awkward teenager, a lot of the most memorable experiences of my secondary school years came vicariously from a games console or our just-about-operational-most-of-the-time PC. I explored Super Mario World many times, I braved the twisted forests of Hyrule’s Dark World. I choked down a lump in my throat when Aeris died and I’ve had the waltz music from Balamb Garden’s graduation ball stuck in my head since 1999. None of that has much place in a Classics blog.

Instead I’m going to talk about the only game series from my teenage years that genuinely intersects with Classics and archaeology in a more or less (probably less) meaningful way: Tomb Raider. A lot has been written about Tomb Raider over the years. It was one of those era-defining games which breached the ramparts of even the most mainstream of media awareness. Alongside its contemporary, Super Mario 64, it’s credited with effectively defining the 3D platform-game genre when it was released in 1996. Its main character, Lara Croft, became a 90s pop-culture icon and she’s still by far the most famous female video game character. It’s on this – and her supposed appeal to legions of teenaged boys – that most commentary about the game has focused.

The thing is, as a boy whose teenage years almost perfectly map with the original games (I bought the first one in 1997 when I was thirteen and got each instalment until Tomb Raider Chronicles in late 2000, just before my seventeenth birthday), it was never about Lara. At least not in the sense that the popular stereotype would have it. That old cliché does a disservice both to the developers and to the people who enjoyed the games. The dubious charms of her cuboid derrière or appropriately pyramidal bosom were not what attracted me to the series. I found her screams and breathy grunts little more than embarrassing. As a main character she wasn’t an object to be lusted after – honestly, even shy teenaged boys aren’t that undiscerning! She was an avatar. Just like Mario or Link or Cloud Strife, she was a figure I could inhabit to explore a world. Her gender was irrelevant.

What I loved were the tombs themselves. From the opening section in Peru’s Lost City of Vilcabamba (a real place, though less snowbound and dinosaur-infested than it was depicted in the game), through Egyptian ruins, to the strange, bacony architecture of long-lost Atlantis, the original Tomb Raider struck a slow, quiet, and memorably solitary pace through a succession of magisterial forgotten ruins. The setting is in stark contrast to the modern cities and military installations infested with gun-toting villains which became de rigeur from the first sequel onward. First time out, it was all about the tombs, and wonderful they were. As you’d expect in a game which no-one could have foreseen would go on to spawn such an enduring franchise, the makers blow all the most obvious ancient civilisations in the very first game: Inca, Egypt and Ancient Grome.

Habemus Consules!

White smoke billows from the chimney of the GIStine Chapel. Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Athene, Melqart and Po-ti-ni-ja Da-pu2-ri-to-jo have let their wills be known and new Consuls have duly been appointed to reign over next term’s seminars.

They will be Laura Viidebaum and Elena Giusti.

I for one welcome our new overlords. May they lead GIS to ever greater heights.

GIS 8/3/2013 – Supervising Round-Table

This week’s GIS summary is going to be a brief one, I’m afraid. Our speaker, Laura Viidebaum, was due to tell us about ‘Character-portrayal (ἠθοποιία) – between rhetorical theory and oratorical practice’ but unfortunately was stricken poorly and unable to attend. Instead we extended our round-table discussion of supervising. Joined by undergrad rep Francesca Bellei to speak up for supervisees’ perspectives, we discussed a wide range of issues including how to make it easier for new would-be supervisors to acquire students, how to give good feedback, and how to teach ‘core skills’ like structuring an essay or writing a bibliography.

This being my last consular communiqué, on behalf of both myself and Claire I’d like to thank everyone who presented papers and Snippets, asked questions, came to the seminar and read the blog summaries this term. Anyone interested in taking over is once more encouraged to get in touch.

Far Beyond the Pillars of Melqart

It’s not often that the Phoenicians make it into the mainstream press. They tend to get overlooked even by academia so it’s hardly a surprise that they rarely impinge upon the consciousness of the modern media. But in the last couple of weeks the Phoenicians have briefly made the headlines. The Daily Mail carried a story about – as the headline put it – ‘One Man’s Mission to Prove Phoenicians Discovered the Americas a Thousand Years Before Columbus’. As headlines go, it’s not one to inspire confidence in an archaeologist. Still, at least it wasn’t ‘Will Phoenicians Infect Homeowners With AIDS?’

GIS 1/3/2013 – Deciphering Linear B after Michael Ventris

It’s not often that we get to listen to a genuine, bona fide genius in the Graduate Interdisciplinary Seminar, but that’s just what we were treated to this week. Michael Ventris’s crisp, cut-glass tones played out, announcing his decipherment of Linear B. This was of course a clip from the famous 1952 radio broadcast in which Ventris revealed that h could prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the script of the Mycenaean Aegean did in fact render Greek, rather than Etruscan as he’d initially believed or any of the other fanciful suggestions which had been made over the years. This audio clip was met with swoons of delight by some members of the audience. I’d heard it before, but the frisson you get listening to it doesn’t go away. It’s no exaggeration to say Ventris is one of my academic heroes, and the fact that he was barely older than I am now when he made his most famous discovery kind of puts one’s academic contributions into perspective. The fact that he was dead 4 years later only adds to the poignancy.

But the decipherment of Linear B didn’t end with Ventris, as our own Anna Judson explained in her paper ‘Deciphering Linear B after Michael Ventris’. For even after the decipherment of the core signs of the syllabary had been accepted, a large number of signs remained uncertain. Many of these were filled in over time, but even now fourteen signs – around a fifth of the total syllabary – remain undeciphered. Anna took us through one particular case-study: sign *56 and some of the various suggestions which have been made over the years.