Month: January 2013

Social Networks at Pompeii?

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

Another one from the AIA shindig/LiveScience/Stephanie Pappas … since most of our readers will be aware of Pompeii political graffiti, we’ll jump to the end of this one about the work of Eeva-Maria Viitanen from the University of Helsinki:

[…] The first find was that politicians wanted an audience. The campaign ads were almost invariably on heavily trafficked streets, Viitanen reported Friday (Jan. 4) at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Seattle.

The second, more surprising, discovery, was that the most popular spots for ads were private houses rather than bars or shops that would see a lot of visitors.

“Bars were probably more populated, but could their customers read and would they vote?” Viitanen said.

Some 40 percent of the ads were on prestigious houses, she said, which is notable because there were only a third as many lavish homes as there were bars, shops and more modest residences. Clearly, candidates were vying for space on the homes of the wealthy.

That discovery makes Viitanen and her colleagues think the ads reveal early social networking. It seems likely that candidates would need permission from the homeowner to paint their ads, suggesting the graffiti is something of an endorsement.

The research is preliminary and not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal, and Viitanen said there is much more work to do to map the social networks revealed on the ancient walls.

“So far, we have barely scratched the surface on this,” she said. “There are hundreds of texts and locations, and it takes a lot of time to go through them all.”

Interesting Black Sea Hoard

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

The incipit of an Owen Jarus piece at LiveScience:

Residents of a town under siege by the Roman army about 2,000 years ago buried two hoards of treasure in the town’s citadel — treasure recently excavated by archaeologists.

More than 200 coins, mainly bronze, were found along with “various items of gold, silver and bronze jewelry and glass vessels” inside an ancient fortress within the Artezian settlement in the Crimea (in Ukraine), the researchers wrote in the most recent edition of the journal Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia.

“The fortress had been besieged. Wealthy people from the settlement and the neighborhood had tried to hide there from the Romans. They had buried their hoards inside the citadel,” Nikolaï Vinokurov, a professor at Moscow State Pedagogical University, explained. [See Photos of the Buried Treasure]

Artezian, which covered an area of at least 3.2 acres (1.3 hectares) and also had a necropolis (a cemetery), was part of the Bosporus Kingdom. At the time, the kingdom’s fate was torn between two brothers —Mithridates VIII, who sought independence from Rome, and his younger brother, Cotys I, who was in favor of keeping the kingdom a client state of the growing empire. Rome sent an army to support Cotys, establishing him in the Bosporan capital and torching settlements controlled by Mithridates, including Artezian.

People huddled in the fortress for protection as the Romans attacked, but Vinokurov said they knew they were doomed. “We can say that these hoards were funeral sacrifices. It was obvious for the people that they were going to die shortly,” he wrote in an email to LiveScience. The siege and fall of the fortress occurred in AD 45.

Curiously, each hoard included exactly 55 coins minted by Mithridates VIII. “This is possibly just a simple coincidence, or perhaps these were equal sums received by the owners of these caskets from the supporters of Mithridates,” the team wrote in its paper. […]

… as indicated, there’s a photo that accompanies the article (and a slide show). Is it right to call it a hoard when it seems obviously an offering of some sort (I’ve wondered this about many ‘coin hoards’ as well). We always seem to link these things to times of troubles and ‘hiding’ things … maybe we need to start thinking simply in terms of offerings …

Seen in Passing: The ‘Standard’

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

I’ll just post the headline/link to this one because I’m not sure if it’s a blog or what … some good points:

WCC Honours for Helen King

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

From an Open University press release:

Professor Helen King has been awarded a prize by the Women’s Classical Caucus for the best article published in the last three years relating to their mission of ‘fostering the study of gender, sexuality, feminist theory, or women’s history’.

The winning article by Professor King, Professor of Classical Studies at the OU called Galen and the widow, questions existing orthodoxy on the history of masturbation as something practised by doctors on women in the ancient world and beyond.
Professor King challenges assumptions made by Rachel Maines in her book published in 1999, The Technology of Orgasm. Maines argued that therapeutic masturbation had a very long history even before technological change enabled the development of the object at the centre of her research, the vibrator.

“I have found that Maines’ work obscures female agency,” Professor King said. “She uses a translation of Galen’s text from which female healers and midwives are absent. Galen presents women’s desire as based on expelling their ’female seed’: Maines too assumes that this is all about an orgasm modelled on the male, playing into a male fantasy of passive women waiting for men to give them pleasure.”

The Women’s Classical Caucus was founded in 1972 to foster feminist and gender-informed perspectives in the study and teaching of all aspects of ancient Mediterranean cultures and classical antiquity. Based in the USA, it works to advance the goals of equality and diversity within Classics. For further information, visit: http://wccaucus.org/