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Odysseus looking into camera: Our Fall of Rome is collapsing as an epistemological concept

We always end up with the Fall of Rome, always. Well, believe me, I have opinions on this one.

Learn about the Carolingian sources and what they can tell us about Jewish-Christian relations in the ninth century in this episode!

Funny you should mention that

Half the planet is having a massive fight about how to correctly interpret an Ancient Greek poem but go ahead, close some more humanities departments.

These papyrus fragments of Homer's Odyssey date to the 2nd century CE! They were written in Egypt – using early Greek uncial script, a well-practised formal bookhand of the time – roughly 800 years after the original versions of the Odyssey were composed (around 700–650 BCE). MS Add.4074

Blowguns don't appear all that often in carvings and reliefs at other sites, but a blowgunner has been cast into the copper alloy section of the "Knaud" keris, the oldest dated keris (a type of dagger of Javanese origin), which was made in the late fourteenth century.

I wrote about the Nolan Odyssey for the LRB. I'll summarize some of my main points below, in case you don't feel like reading all that. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

They asked the Muse and she told them about a complicated man

Proofs time.

hey! you! almost 1000 folks have read/downloaded Virginia Burrus's new Element in Religion in Late Antiquity, isn't it time you joined them? www.cambridge.org/core/element...

A big part of the relentless propaganda of AI corporations is the fear-mongering about omnipotent AI being just around the corner and thus making any critique (or resistance) futile. A perfect facet of the totalitarian aesthetics used to make it look inevitable.

No.

I've been going through some old files. Java truly is a palaeographer's dream; there's so much interesting variation in the forms of written text from the island, especially before the sixteenth century

The most compelling argument I’ve ever seen for learning Dutch! 🎅

Coming soon. It's now in the hands of the copy-editors and all those other professionals that make us academics look good.

Was there economizing in the second part of the first millennium? Sure. But think about what these societies had at their disposal and what we do. It is very easy to let complex solutions slip and be forgotten.

Not the point here but: we cannot fully build a machine that was designed 50 years ago with massive archiving capabilities and yet people in the Middle Ages kept the knowledge of making complex writing technology and much more for way longer. Dark Ages, huh?

friends and neighbors, the newest Element in Religion in Late Antiquity is now *live* and *free to download* through August 4! The inimitable Virginia Burrus on "Martyrdom as Witness in Late Ancient Christian Literature"! www.cambridge.org/core/element...

just got an email from my (former) chair that the university has acted & the state has approved the formal closure of my department. this was done without any faculty input on the decision or the process, & has ended a vibrant, growing (!), humanities department that won teaching and research awards