Atlas Obscura Article

At the end of last year I made an Ugaritic biscuits cooking video. I kind of forgot to mention it on here what with all the pre-Christmas busyness, but it did moderately well. Now, in a slightly surreal turn of events for me, the website Atlas Obscura has picked up on it and interviewed me for an article:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ancient-writing-baking-cookies-cuneiform-near-east

Or, if you just want the original video, here it is:

 

Making Ancient Tablets 5 – Further stylus improvements

About a year ago I posted a series following my attempts to write Ugaritic cuneiform, first in plasticine and then in clay. I ended up using the square end of a chopstick for a stylus, and this is what I’ve been doing ever since, including in my cuneiform baking. It works, but it’s fiddly – the stick has to be held just right to make the wedge-shaped prints, and it takes practice to stop them being large and clumsy.

Last weekend I took part in a Prehistory and Archaeology Day as part of Cambridge University’s Festival of Ideas. Hosted by Cambridge Archaeological Unit, this offered hundreds of members of the public – mostly children – the chance to try their hands at a wide range of archaeology-related activities, from spear-throwing and archery to excavation and osteology. The ancient writing systems stall was particularly eclectic, with academics from the Faculty of Classics and the Division of Archaeology showing visitors how to write in Akkadian, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Linear B and alphabetic Greek.

Making Ancient Tablets 3: More Ancient Baking and Linear A Clay Play Day

I thought I was done for now with making tablets, but this week has turned out to be quite a busy one. This term the linguistics caucus at Cambridge’s Faculty of Classics has been running a Linear A Self-Help Group – sort of a seminar series, but with more baffled shrugging as we struggled to make any sense of the Minoan script. On Wednesday it was the last session of term, which meant two things.

Firstly, it’s traditional that there’s cake, usually decorated with an inscription in the language being studied. I ended up responsible for this this time and went for a chocolate brownie recipe. I decided to decorate it in white chocolate, which was probably a mistake since the window of opportunity for piping the writing between extreme runniness and utter solidity is very narrow. My end result was not as neat as some previous examples, especially those by Cakemeister to the Faculty, Anna Judson, so I did what the Minoans did if in doubt: cover liberally with horns of consecration.

H.P. Lovecraft meets the Bronze Age – Designing Ancient Horror

I wrote recently about the excellent Lovecraftian board game Eldritch Horror. That post was actually something of a preliminary to this one. You see, for the last several months I’ve been working on my own version of Eldritch Horror, set in the East Mediterranean Bronze Age.

Earlier this year, my friend and colleague Anna Judson called us together to play something else – her excellent Mycenopoly: an Aegean Bronze Age themed version of Monopoly, complete with barter system and utilities such as textile works and the ability to build megara instead of hotels. I highly recommend checking out her own blog about it, which went a bit viral, and deservedly so. Apart from having an excellent time with Mycenopoly, the evening left me wondering if it would be possible to do something similar for the game we most often play together, Eldritch Horror.

Making Ugaritic Tablets 2 -Baking Ancient Script Biscuits

A few weeks ago I wrote about my experiments writing Ugaritic cuneiform in plasticine. I’d had some success with a home-made Lego stylus, but it was a little large. My next step was to get hold of a chopstick with a square cross-section and try that. Unfortunately the stick had slightly rounded corners so the impressions were a little soft. Following the advice on this site, I sanded them to get sharper edges, which yielded improved results.

This week I was finally able to start work on the CREWS Project formally, and in honour of the occasion I wanted to try something a little more adventurous: Ugaritic cuneiform biscuits. This turned out to be an interesting exercise, not just because there were biscuits at the end of it, but because it forced me to think about the materiality of the writing material and how it would react.

Cambridge Festival of Ideas: the Ancient Worlds Highlights

The Cambridge Festival of Ideas runs from 17^th to the 30^th October. It’s one of the University’s biggest outreach events and has a wide range of talks, workshops and events open to everybody. A lot of them are specifically design to be family- or child friendly. If you’re in or around Cambridge, I highly recommend checking it out.

The full events list is available on the website, but here are a few things that might be of particular interest to this blog’s readers:

Visiting the Dead: Archaeology, Museums and Human Remains

The British Museum’s Pompeii exhibition has been a rollicking success. It’s been lauded by most critics and the public are evidently lapping it up. But it’s not perfect. As I mentioned in the comments on Anna’s review, I entirely agree with almost everything she says about it: shame about some of the presentation choices but the objects themselves are fantastic. The one note of disquiet Anna did raise about the items on display concerned the plaster casts of the dying Pompeians themselves. Here’s what she had to say about them:

In the final section, after a timeline of events and a case containing items found with some of the victims’ bodies, there are three sets of casts of victims: a woman from Oplontis, cast in resin; the seated man from Pompeii; and a family group, parents with their two children. Obviously you can’t talk about Pompeii and Herculaneum without talking about the human tragedy behind the preservation of all these wonderful things, and seeing the victims of the eruption brings it home in a way that no object or text panel can that these were real people – but that’s the problem: effectively, you’re watching real people’s death agonies, and displaying them spot-lit on a plinth just seems uncomfortably ghoulish. I’m not really sure what the alternative is – realistically, there was no way the casts were going to be left out, and indeed there are some pretty good arguments for including them. I just can’t think of a way of doing so that doesn’t still leave me feeling very uncomfortable about the whole thing.

I completely understand where Anna’s coming from with this, but I have to admit this was the one area where my response to the exhibition seemed to be largely at odds with that of my fellow Classicist visitors. I didn’t find the bodies particularly upsetting or uncomfortable. I found the anatomical details revealed by the resin cast interesting in a detached kind of way, but for the most part I didn’t really feel much about the ‘bodies’ at all.

This got me thinking. I’d like to believe I’m fairly well-adjusted and normal. I might tend a bit towards the traditional stereotype of the emotionally undemonstrative Englishman, but I don’t think I’m particularly lacking in empathy at any basic human level. Reflecting on my reaction – or lack of it – to witnessing the preserved death agonies of these poor Pompeians, I can only conclude that it’s my archaeological experiences that are responsible here; that working with ancient human remains on a fairly frequent basis has desensitised me somewhat to what they represent. Now this is important, and worth blogging about, not because of my own emotional state, but because of how it connects to two bigger questions: how do (and should) archaeologists relate to the fact that sometimes the objects they are working with also used to be people; and what are the rights and wrongs of using such material in museums and other public displays?