Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory

Welcome to the PASP website.

Here you can find news on PASP’s latest projects, current initiatives and links to thousands of items of our archival materials hosted at Texas ScholarWorks. A summary of the archives work done at PASP can be read in the May/June 2019 issue of Archival Outlook in the article The Ancient Past: Learning a Language to Connect Materials with Users. From the imaging and publication of the Pylos tablets, to our new annual research program focusing on script use throughout the world, to our proposal to expand PASP into a larger research center for the study of scripts and decipherment, we are moving in new directions and will be keeping you informed on all of them.

Tom Palaima’s scholarship and public intellectual work pertaining to war and violence and to Dylanology can be found at his homepage.

Please use the contact form if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions.  Thank you for visiting, and we hope you find the new site and format useful!

PASP News and Project Updates

July 2019

PASP featured in SAA Archival Outlook May/June 2019

The Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory was featured in the May/June issue of the Society of American Archivists’ Archival Outlook. The Ancient Past: Learning a Language to Connect Materials with Users was authored by PASP archivists Sarah Buchanan and Garrett R. Bruner.

Archives of the ancient world evince the longevity of our shared interests in preserving and documenting the culture, government, and knowledge of civilization. Whether studied by global travelers, classical archaeologists and historians, or filmmakers and television producers, archival materials from the ancient Mediterranean are contributing to collective memory, educational programming, and institutional collections. In this vein, the Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory (PASP) in the Department of Classics at The University of Texas at Austin fosters research and scholarship on the use of writing in Minoan Crete, Mycenaean Greece, and the island of Cyprus during the Bronze Age. There is a special focus on two early writing systems: Linear A and Cretan hieroglyphics (1900–1450 BCE) and Linear B (1400–1200 BCE). The program boasts an international base of researchers and users, and in recent years, staff have improved collection accessibility by reconfiguring physical spaces, advancing digitization projects, preserving endangered email accounts, and expanding the scope of collections to provide better access to these important materials.

University of Texas Libraries Texas Scholarworks permanent link: https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/74857

Keep checking back for more updates on PASP archives projects.

Updated on July 27, 2019 by Garrett R. Bruner. garrettbruner@utexas.edu

July 2019

Summer 2019 Recap. By Garrett R. Bruner

Overview

For three years I have served on the Oplontis Project under the direction of Dr. John Clarke and Dr. Michael Thomas. The Oplontis sites are located in the small town of Torre Annunziata, about ten minutes from Pompeii. Oplontis shares the same fate of its neighbors Pompeii and Herculaneaum of being destroyed by Vesuvius in 79 AD. On site for the four week excavation season, my role is to catalog the finds recovered from our opened trenches.

After the season’s end, I stayed in London for two weeks to do further research on archiving and data management of archaeology projects. This research began in the aftermath of learning, years ago, about the erasure of Dr. Emmett Bennett Jr.’s email account at the University of Wisconsin following an Office365 migration. It still puzzles me. It raises the question, what plans are there by departments to archive their faculty’s research? Is there a plan for UT Classics?

I used this trip as a sort of launchpad to begin to answer this question. Before leaving, I had many discussions on this with other faculty and archivists at the University of Texas to frame questions for interviews and get wider perspective. Conversation touched on some Emeriti who possess decades of irreplaceable archaeological records and research but with no place to store it. On this trip, I wanted to compare how other universities are preparing faculty to preserve their research beyond publication and how to organize something of this scale for any department. I was fortunate to interview and brainstorm with many archaeologists, professors, archivists and digital archivists, architects, and data coordinators to begin to answer these questions. A final objective from these discussions and research would be a proposal which would address the issues and recommend solutions.

This report briefly recaps these trips and discussion.

Oplontis Project Season 2019

 

I began my trip in southern Italy at the archaeological site of Oplontis for the 2019 excavation season. This lasted from May 20 to June 15. There I worked on a number of cataloging projects regarding our excavation’s finds. My normal project is the on-site finds processing of recovered finds from opened trenches. This year, however, we completed a number of projects concerning our backlog in addition to normal processing. These related mainly to holes in our database and finds inventories. Last, I put together an inventory of the Special Finds excavated by the Oplontis Project at Villa A for future publication.

The season went well. It began with a lot of rain and a few cool days and ended with days hitting over 100 degrees (which is good for pot washing). With my team of catalogers, we completed all cataloging of this year’s finds, re-housed previous seasons’ finds in order to create new shelving space, and re-cataloged many of these old finds which were not consistent with current standards. All of this work will be entered on our database for the most up-to-date inventory of the objects recovered at the Oplontis Excavations.

In the back of my mind throughout all of these excavations is the question I also ask at PASP. What plans are there to archive this research, by professors or departments? If there is no plan, should there be? A season of excavation produces all sorts of records and metadata, like finds inventories, stratigraphy data, environmental sample analysis, photographs, and drawings. What is the future of the data collected for the Oplontis Project, or any archaeology project at the University of Texas, apart from its publication?

On these concerns, I had good conversations with architect Jess Galloway. Galloway serves on the Oplontis Project as a researcher of the Villa architecture and waterworks and has decades of experience with archaeology projects. Specifically we touched on legacy media and obsolete data collection by old versions of the AutoCAD software which he uses to capture precise measurements of the site’s architecture. This is a application many archaeology projects use.We discussed how old versions can be still emulated or migrated to stable formats. The importance of this is crucial: legacy archaeology projects, like in the 1980s-2000s, would record architecture or contextual information using AutoCAD but this data can possibly become obsolete with every new version. Soon, data might be irretrievable. Already, it is expensive to retrieve.

Reasons AutoCAD should be preserved that we touched on:

1. Protects the integrity of the research
2. Archaeology sites can be destroyed or change over time
3. If the site is changed, old records can restore or inform original states
4. Reduce costs now by migrating earlier to stable platforms
5. AutoCAD (and other proprietary software packages) requires expensive licenses, making access to data difficult for collaborators

In the middle of the Oplontis season it was by good fortune that I met the former PASP archivist, Sarah Buchanan. One afternoon, we met by chance in the hotel lobby where I was lodging, “Hotel Villa dei Misteri”, located only a few minutes walk from the Porta Marina entrance to Pompeii. It was good to meet her (in person) finally, briefly catch up, and learn about her latest work. Over the summer, she worked on site for the Venus Pompeiana project, performing data management and collection.

There, we also caught up on our PASP report recently published by Archival Outlook.

Digging did not fill my entire schedule. On weekends, we were free to travel, so I made it to Baia, Naples, and Pompeii. Another group made it to Capri. The ruins of Baia were spectacular (grab the train from Naples to Lucrino and walk the rest of the way to Baia). Some highlights of Baia are its spectacularly placed Aragonese castle, its expansive Baths including the echo-chamber Temple of Mercury, and amazing coasts. Ruins are scattered throughout the city; a minute from the docks is a Temple to Venus and in the center of town is a huge ruin (shaped like an open egg) known as the Temple of Diana. Nearby Baia, fifteen minutes walk from Lucrino, is Lake Avernus, a volcanic lake where it was written in antiquity to be the entrance to the underworld.

What amazed me was Baia’s absence of tourists for all its wealth of offerings. On a Sunday, castles, ruins, and beaches were all the more pleasant without fighting through crowds. Within the baths, I saw perhaps three or four people and no guards. There you could freely wander through tunnels, up and down stairs, observe frescos. It wasn’t too hot, with plenty of shade. Experimenting with the Mercury temple’s otherworldly echoes was an unexpected marvel. All this contrasts with Pompeii, where houses can be shut, guards can be too much, peddlers can be annoying, and crowds can spoil a view, or, the day.

Between the Oplontis season’s end and arriving in London on the next leg of my trip, I was able to spend time in Ravello and its awesome Villa Cimbrone, see many churches in Naples, and visit the Borghese Museum in Rome.

London

After Italy, I visited the United Kingdom for two weeks, basing myself out of London. This was my first visit ever to the UK. There, I had a few appointments with archives on the subject of what is done for preparing or processing Emeritus papers within their institutes. Also, I spent time at Museums to get first-hand knowledge of Linear B and Myceanean Greek history. Last, I also caught up with former PASP visiting scholar Regina Dürig who is nearing completion on her Alice Kober dissertation research. (One exciting detail was that she discovered a “new” photo of Kober on an archaeology project).

British National Museum

My lodging at the International Hall within the University College of London made it easy to visit the British National Museum. It was a ten minute walk from “home” in Russell Square.

This is one of the world’s largest museums covering cultures from Ancient Egypt, Greece, Japan, India, Africa, in nearly every era and all geographies in-between. The wealth of objects is indescribable and overwhelming, from the Rosetta stone, to Egyptian mummies, a full Samurai suit, and the Elgin Marbles. It takes some bit of planning and concentration not to get side-tracked. What interested me, primarily, then, was the Mycenaean Greek and Greek Epigraphy sections as they related to Linear B. The Museum holds two Linear B tablets on display amid a number of other Aegean script items (below, also are terracotta ball inscriptions in Cypro-Minoan script). This is the first Linear B tablet I have seen. Their size, which I had already known to be small, still is striking to me, especially the size of the written characters. Coming off my archaeology trip, there was so much to learn from the archaeological context of Linear B items with respect to what other objects exist. I had not seen many of the As an archivist, their provenance interested me (it was written they came to the British National Museum from Arthur Evans’ collection).

Cambridge

After my first weekend in London, I visited Cambridge for a day trip to meet their Classics Archivist, see their classics archive repository, and visit the Mycenaean Epigraphy Room. I was fortunate also to meet PASPian Cassie Donnelly who recently was awarded the CREWS fellowship. She has been there since early May.

In our meeting, I learned Cambridge Classics shares many dilemmas and solutions as PASP regarding how to archive Emeritus collections. Some of them are sensitive. Specifically, like anywhere, funding and staffing is an issue. This has the effect of simply putting archival processing “on ice.” Archivists are stretched thin working on several projects at once. Another problem is how to get professors or their heirs interested and welcome their collections. As equal a dilemma is then the processing and “selling” of these ideas to the University as objects with enduring usefulness. Conversation on how professor collections are “passed around” followed, which seems to be the more traditional (and unpredictable) route of Classics faculty collections being transferred to archives, or, even, accessed. (For example how this relates to PASP, see the letter from Letter From Emmett L. Bennett Jr. to Thomas G. Palaima, June 30, 1992, where on page 2 he briefly relates the a chain of provenance of Arthur Evans’ archival materials).

The archivist also demonstrated to me in some detail their utilizing the Access to Memory (AtoM) platform. This links their online archival finding aids to their collections materials, like that of Alan John Bayard Wace and also links them to a wider network of archives throughout the United Kingdom at Archives Hub. This is a direction PASP must explore, like encoding our finding aids and enhancing the access and browsing of our online materials.

After the meeting, I was toured through Cambridge’s many colleges and old town center by PASPian Cassandra Donnelly. I was shown the Mycenaean Epigraphy Room and felt some distant homesickness for PASP’s archives and excitement for all the archival material remaining to be processed.

Museum of London Archive / Bloomberg London Mithraeum

Back in London, I coordinated with the post-excavations manager of the Museum of London Archaeological Archives (MOLA) at the Mortimer Wheeler House to receive a tour of their operations and after that, a field trip to the London Mithraeum exhibit, located in the basement of the Bloomberg building. Museum of London Archaeological Archives preserves archaeological artifacts and research on London based excavation projects. The goal in this visit was to observe a large scale operation which deals with the creation, publication and preservation of archaeological data. This would inform some idea how to go about this, permanently, at the University of Texas, as opposed to the setup I am familiar with, which is project-by-project (like Oplontis or The Institute of Classical Archaeology).

This was a very useful field trip. The manager took me from bottom to top: from loading docks where recent finds had been delivered and their being processed, to the work floor where they are researched, to the databases they are linked and mapped out on ArcGIS, to their publication in books. From there she showed and demonstrated to me an RTI (Reflective Transformation Imaging) station used to photograph writing tablets from the London Mithraeum, something similar which has been done for many Linear B tablets.

It was important to see the organization and structure of tasks assigned to specialists. It amazed how their work cohered, how the division of tasks gets so much completed.

After, we visited the ruins of the Temple of Mithras in downtown London. The London Mithraeum is in the City of London area and are come from the 3rd century Roman London. Upon entering the entrance in the Bloomberg building, visitors are first faced with a wall of finds on exhibition from the site. They are diverse as iron nails to mosaics to writing tablets. One writing tablet on display actually contains the oldest mention of London.

Downstairs, visitors enter the lowest level of the site, seven meters beneath modern pavement. It is called the Mezzazine. There, one waits for the next presentation of the Temple of Mithras ruins. In the waiting area, there are more interactive displays which provide information on the history and mythology of the Mithras cult. They also tell the story of the temple ruin’s discovery after the Blitz, their public exhibition (and slight damage) on the streets for several decades, to the modern reconstruction now housed below the Bloomberg building. Resin casts of the tauroctony are explained in detail for their symbolic imagery by the displays. (The real tauroctony and some other sculptures of the London Mithraeum is on display at the Museum of London, a few minutes walk away).

Visitors are then let into the room housing the ruins. It is a large, dark, rectangular room, with the ruin walls set into the floor. Visitors walk on a platform around them. Then, a rectangular box of light encloses the ruins, mist lightly drifts in, and sounds of chanting begin as low murmurs to gradual humming. At the end of the ruins, a large tauroctony altar display glows. Pilasters appear as shadows within the box of light by carefully hung “capitals” dispersed throughout the room.

What really impressed me was was the harmony between the Temple ruins and the art installation they were couched inside. The dark atmosphere, sound effects and lighting all conjured an atmosphere of awe for the passing ritual. Then it is over. Visitors are only allowed in for the moment of the “performance” and then are ushered out. This was very different than simply “presenting” the ruins, as, perhaps, could be compared to the British Museum’s Nereid Monument.

It reminded me of the importance of making the Past fresh. There is room for both traditional museum displays and more interactive presentations. In the Linear B realm, the paintings of Nikos Samartizidis conjure similar feelings.

York

A short overnight trip to York included an appointment with the digital archivists of the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) of the University of York. ADS sets the standard for the digital preservation of archaeology data ranging from commercial to academic projects within the UK. They preserve and make widely accessible completed archaeological datasets from around the United Kingdom.

An American counterpart is the Digital Archaeology Record (tDAR) and Open Context, two data repositories that are specifically for archaeological data. Here at the University of Texas at Austin, the Texas Data Repository (TDR) is a new option for archiving any kind of data produced at UT. It’s free for UT researchers but not just for archaeology data. Currently PASP has two datasets, SMID and the Cyprus Inscriptions database, preserved and accessible at the Texas Data Repository.

A few lessons from the Archaeological Data Services:

1. They provide guidelines to users on how to submit and curate their data for longterm preservation
2. Publishing their own research on changing standards and technology
3. Simple yet rigorous data management help
4. Paid service. Researchers must budget for future preservation.

My take away from this meeting, with respect to my own research of how to preserve faculty collections, are the costs. ADS is not free nor is it cheap to run. Digital archiving requires maintenance, staffing and money for continued access. Here it was highlighted that these costs should be addressed in earlier research phases of archaeological projects.

Outlining a Path Forward

The purpose of this visit was to survey what options exist for archiving faculty collections which include archaeological records. It highlighted a number of mutual dilemma across many institutions and also solutions. These would be addressed to not only PASP but also UT Classics more generally. This trip was only a beginning to collect information on this problem.

There’s no easy answer. Emeritus professors should not worry what happens to their materials after retirement. A plan for archiving their papers properly would address many issues raised from this trip (and experience):

• Ensure to them there is staffing and space to archive their works properly.
• If they worry their collection is isolated and not used, ensure to them meaningful collaboration within larger archival networks so that they are part of a larger system, like UK archaeology and archives has with Archaeology Data Services and Archives Hub.
• Consider incentives to keep professors papers within their departments.
• Ensure that professors are aware to budget for the preservation of their materials.
• Ensure we provide guidelines so they are practicing some degree of data management to make the transition from its everyday use to longterm preservation is more stable and efficient.
• Consider how to do more than digitize materials; already, PASP does outreach within the department, like Cassandra Donnelly’s “Clay Time” workshop, or, utilizing materials in creative arts, like Samartizidis, or interactively, as in the case of the London Mithraeum, or integrating them into course work. For instance, in the case of archaeologists like Wace or Blegen, archives might attempt reconstructing through GIS site plans or in databases their finds registers.

This summer I was fortunate for all the cities, museums, people (including three PASP-ians), I was able to connect with. There’s no lack for inspiring or practical conversations or ideas. It stressed the variety and prevalence of the interest in ancient history, from traditional museums, to art installations with ruins as a center piece, interactive apps, to pavement drawings of archaeological trenches (like above).

Drawing from it and other case studies (like collections at PASP or at UT), I hope some awareness of the problem has been clearly stated and some solutions that could benefit everyone.

Updated on July 22, 2019 by Garrett R. Bruner. garrettbruner@utexas.edu

May 2019

Clay Time: A Workshop in Late Bronze Age Scripts. By Cassandra Donnelly

During the last week of April, the Program for Aegean Scripts and Prehistory (PASP) hosted its first ever “Late Bronze Age Clay Time! Study Break” in the Classics Lounge in Waggener Hall at the University of Texas at Austin. Approximately twenty undergraduate and graduate students, along with some staff and their children, produced a veritable archive of Late Bronze Age (LBA) tablets. We provided attendees with the clay (local-fire “Longhorn Red” clay from Armadillo Clay), three types of styluses, and one of three different instruction packets. The first type of instruction packet pertained to Mycenaean Greek and Linear B, the second to Ugaritic, and the third to Cypro-Minoan. Each packet included instructions for how to make one of three tablet types, a signary in the corresponding script, and a model text to write in the corresponding language. Each of the texts, once combined, tells the story of the Late Bronze Age copper trade as mediated by Cypriot traders.

The idea for “Clay Time!” arose at the suggestion of our archivist Garrett Bruner. I was in the midst of telling him about my recent experiments in making Cypro-Minoan (CM) clay boules (or balls) at home. Driven by an interest in the distinctiveness of the CM “tear drop” ductus,

or method of inscription, which features on some CM tablets and balls, I had been experimenting with whether the tear-drop shape comes from the stylus being impressed or drawn into the clay. The former method, of impression, recalls the technique used for making cuneiform wedges, while the latter method of drawing was used to inscribe the signs of the Linear scripts. Registering my enthusiasm for clay time, Garrett figured it would be easy enough to spread. For my part, I figured it would be a nice way to spread the LBA gospel. I may have also been keen to test a hypothesis or two concerning stylus choice and impression vs. drawing styles.

We supplied students with three different instructions for the three different scripts and three different stylus choices.

The only thing we did not tell them was which stylus matched which script. The three stylus types on offer were bladed styluses, after the Linear B model, pointed, round-tips for Cypro-Minoan, and rectangular tipped styluses for Ugaritic. The first two stylus types were shaped from wooden dowels using an exacto knife and a pencil sharpener, respectively, and the third, rectangular styluses were unworked chop-sticks. As for the tablets, there were three shapes on offer: for Linear B, leaf shaped tablets, for

Ugaritic, cushion-shaped tablets, and for Cypro-Minoan, convex-shaped tablets (modeled CM ## 208). Instructions for how to shape the tablets were drawn from the work of Thomas Palaima in the case of Linear B, and Jonathan Taylor in the case of the Ugaritic tablets. As both authors have noted, very little is written on the subject. In the case of the Cypro-Minoan convex tablet, no instructions were supplied as none exist (I am mean, I know). In addition to the written instructions, we assembled a powerhouse of script and tablet consultants: Kevin Pluta and Joann Gulizio for the Linear scripts and Øyvind Bjøru and Aren Wilson-Wright for Ugaritic. I was the lone CM expert.

Overall, the day was a success.  No one threw their tablets down in disgust or frustration, though one or two people were serial re-pulpers. The places where people needed the most help were in the creation of the Linear B tablet (there was a tendency to make very thin tablets), and in deciding which styluses to use for the Ugaritic and CM scripts.  The overwhelming tendency in both cases was for people to try and use the blade styluses first. In the case of Ugaritic this appears to be due to the triangular shape of the blade. In the case of Cypro-Minoan, I believe this was because of the ambiguity regarding whether the script is drawn or impressed. One of the most interesting outcomes to me was that two different people who made Cypro-Minoan tablets, once they hit upon the right stylus-type, experimented with both drawing and impressing signs. They ultimately settled on a combination of the two styles, which is where I myself had landed when inscribing my own clay balls.

All-in-all, the day was educational and fun, both for the participants and for the observer’s alike. A great thank you to Garrett for coming up with such a fun idea!

Updated on May 15, 2019 by Garrett R. Bruner. garrettbruner@utexas.edu

February 2019

Archivist: A Connective Branch in the PASP Ecosystem.

By Sarah Buchanan

Archivists rarely dwell in a sense of finality, rather many archivists position their work as capturing – actively and interventionally – “representative” snapshots of life activities both past and present. We try to supplement the storied box of archival materials that arrives at an archive, with specific dialogue, interviews, or oral history of the persons involved in the creation of the records, so that we may one day tell the materials’ story with authenticity and reliability (to quote a well-known Luciana Duranti article I have the privilege now of teaching in my Appraisal class). Such an approach – one of connecting disparate threads of a story longer than your self – is the one I adopted as PASP Archivist from 2013-2016.

As a first-year PhD student at Texas’ iSchool, I brought a material interest in classical archaeology that could complement a core research agenda in archival studies, especially given the efforts of digital classics professionals at research libraries and archaeological data repositories. A timely conversation with Zach Fischer (MSIS ’13) at the iSchool Capstone event led to my meeting with Dr. Palaima and PASPians Will Bibee and Dygo Tosa (MA ’13) where we discussed preparing archival collections for access. It was a wonderful introduction to the singular resources PASP stewards for an internationally networked community of Aegean scholars. Soon my archival contributions at PASP, which I will describe, were propelling and sustaining my dissertation research and scholarly growth. I am honored to have been able to shape PASP into a world-class resource through archival work.

Jerry E. Ifie (1942-2004), a Classics scholar from Nigeria, was a Visiting Professor at Texas in 1996 and 1997, and PASP had a small collection of his papers. I started with his collection. Writing a biography of the records creator and describing the Ifie items at hierarchical archival levels allowed me to provide better context and awareness for researchers who might encounter the finding aid we contributed to the then-UTDR, now Texas ScholarWorks, in late 2014. I know that Professor Palaima has had undergraduate students interested in Nigeria use this material.

By then, I had also aided in the donation of an archival collection dealing with the undeciphered Minoan/Cretan Linear A script from linguist and textile historian Dr. Elizabeth Wayland Barber. Making a tangible connection between Dr. Barber and Lydia Neuman, then-TAM graduate student and currently head of exhibitions at the International Quilt Study Center & Museum, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in the course of my work is still to me rewarding reminder of the rippling impact an archivist can have across disciplines and even across generations of scholars.

As PASP archivist, I assisted PASP Visiting Scholars Flavia Carraro (France), Carlos Varias García (Catalonia, Spain), and José Melena (Spain) with their research inquiries.

Closer to home, my participation in PASP’s epigraphy workshop offered to young visitors during Explore UT in spring 2015 and 2016 remains a highlight of my doctoral program.

Dr. Palaima, the Robert M. Armstrong Centennial Professorship, and funding from the Department of Classics and the College of Liberal Arts supported me in activities like the 2014 Summer Course in Greek and Latin Epigraphy held at Ohio State University. I learned much there about archaeological collections management.

Now I integrate museum artifacts as much as I can in teaching archival studies, but meanwhile have returned to epigraphy through research and studying the information practices of scholars in the humanities. Research-wise, Texas helped me connect the field of Classics with archives, continuing today with the cuneiform collections in Austin, Columbia (both in the CDLI, the former thanks to my work with Dr. Adam Rabinowitz, Tiffany Montgomery, and Dr. John Huehnergard), and other museums with which I engage. I have deepened that connection through epigraphical, archaeological curation, and provenance research projects.

PASP launched the informal Scripts Institute in Fall 2014. Dr. Kevin Pluta and I took the opportunity to present to colleagues across campus the early results of our RTI (Reflectance Transformation Imaging) work with Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform tablets (primarily, but also squeezes and coins). Dr. Alex Walthall’s Digital Archaeology Lab and the UT Libraries’ photogrammetry equipment foster its continuation in exciting directions.

After acquiring the Barber collection, PASP also acquired the William C. Brice collection in 2014. I prepared a finding aid for the Brice Collection and another large collection in the Emmett L. Bennett, Jr. Offprints. These experiences gave me a lifelong toolkit of archival techniques and academic strategies that I continue to draw on regularly as an assistant professor.

I also gained a valuable set of insights by recruiting and interviewing candidates to succeed me as PASP Archivist in early 2016 – learning how to articulate needs and goals in forward-thinking and inclusive ways so as to retain support. Though she and I worked together for only a few months, the time management and multimodal communication skills I developed quickly proved their transferability as I began my work at University of Missouri, notably the ArCla (Archives of Classical Scholarship) collaboration during 2017.

Archivist Garrett Bruner has quickly transformed PASP’s archival operations into a systematic and multifaceted program, expanding particularly its interdisciplinary graduate training, metadata automation, and email preservation achievements.

We have a two-part article forthcoming in Archival Outlook, the magazine of the Society of American Archivists, detailing recent collections processed and ongoing digitization projects. I miss Dr. Palaima’s daily generosity and wise appreciation of the archival enterprise (to quote the esteemed archival educator and our mutual friend Dr. David Gracy), but am so gratified that great work continues with Garrett Bruner.

I have enjoyed talking with fellow Dylanologist on University of Missouri’s campus, Dr. Dennis Trout, about teaching and research and the opportunities we have to build and visualize new branches between archival studies and classical studies.

Keep up with Sarah Buchanan’s work on her faculty page at University of Missouri.

Updated on February 20, 2019 by Garrett R. Bruner. garrettbruner@utexas.edu

February 2019

A Semester in Review by Zoé Thomas

For the months of August through December 2018, I had the opportunity to work with the archival staff of the Program of Aegean Scripts and Prehistory on a large collection of miscellaneous letters found among the various personal effects of Emmett Bennett, Jr.

The collection, which consists of nearly 300 letters, cards, and notes, includes serious academic debates, gentle advice for hopeful scholars, personal letters, and the ever-present bureaucratic correspondence that now is taken care of with e-mails. Working under the direction of the PASP Archivist Garrett Bruner, I learned about the international standards for archival procedures and labeling. Drawing from my previous archival experiences at my undergraduate institution, I eagerly jumped into the process of sorting, naming, scanning, and tracking down missing information about each letter. By the end of the semester, we had just reached the metadata entry phase of the project, and collectively Bruner and I have been tackling this monumental task.

In addition to my work on the Bennett Correspondence project, I helped translate and enter the metadata for a series of letters written in French by the scholar Jean Pierre Olivier, a close associate of Bennett’s and his co-author of The Pylos Tablets Transcribed (usually shortened to PTT in their extensive correspondence). I also worked for the Pylos Tablet RTI project under the direction of Kevin Pluta and Cassandra Donnelly. The RTI project involved transforming a series of captured photographs into a texture-based digital facsimile.

My interest in the RTI work led me to participate in the Multi-Spectral RTI Workshop hosted by the University of Texas at Austin; I brought a cast of the archaic Cypro-Minoan tablet from Enkomi (housed at PASP) to the workshop to create the first digital facsimile of the object using their equipment. Using the images that the team generated, we learned how to use multi- spectral RTI software to create facsimiles for academics all over the world using different forms of light analysis to reveal subtle textural and color changes in the surface of objects.

My time working at PASP was marked by wonderful learning experiences. Professor Palaima kindly gave me the tools I needed to begin learning Linear B; Garrett Bruner happily taught me how to do basic conservation of delicate paper materials; Cassandra Donnelly was a constant source of invaluable information regarding the history of Linear B scholarship. On more than one occasion Bruner, Donnelly, and I worked together as a team to decipher scrawling handwriting, identify scholars and friends mentioned in the letters, and share exciting discoveries we had made in perusing them.

One of my favorite moments was discovering a letter (HMtoELB19651115 – the upload to Texas ScholarWorks is pending) from Hugo Mühlestein, a Swiss scholar , to Bennett. Mühlestein created his own “Mycenaean crossword,” the clues written in French and the answers actually written in Linear B, which he sent to Bennett (along with the key) “puisqu’il est permis de rire.” Hopefully Mühlestein’s work will continue to provide amusement for the Linear B scholars among us willing to take a stab at the crossword — the solution key will be uploaded to Texas ScholarWorks along with the letter. Bennett also kept the sheet of paper upon which he tried to work out Mühlestein’s Linear B crossword. Professor Palaima recalls Bennett doing the New York Times crosswords with a ballpoint pen in about a half hour, sometimes less.

The novelty of a Mycenaean crossword, carefully drawn out by hand, clues thoughtfully laid out and typed, Bennett’s own worksheet included, is a symptom of the most striking thing about Bennett’s personal correspondence — the human side to academia. Excluding the bureaucratic correspondence, emotion bubbles up in almost every letter, whether it is fighting over Linear B theories with other scholars or a heartfelt letter from across the country (or globe!) to Bennett from his former students, scholarly admirers, colleagues, and friends. Many of the letters I worked with were from his students who had gone on to pursue careers outside of Classics. They still took the time to thank Bennett years after the fact for his kindness and his careful instruction. Still more were filled with the little human foibles that mark daily life: the spelling mistakes, the little doodles, the dreams, the rejections, the papers that seem to get lost when we need them and show up right when we no longer want them. On one memorable occasion, Olivier sheepishly writes to Bennett to tell him he found his manuscript notes concerning The Pylos Tablets Transcribed under a loaf of bread (letter JPOtoELB19681009).

For a graduate student just stepping into the world of academia, it is comforting to see “the greats” like John Chadwick, Colin Renfrew, and Bennett himself fall into the same little traps that we all find ourselves in. But the importance of this, I think, goes even further than the implications that our heroes are people too. Our heroes are people who work together to achieve great things. Of course they are bright and capable people in their own right, but it is through collaborative work that we agree or disagree often, learn more, produce our best content, and have the most impact on the lives and work of others. Working with Bennett’s correspondence is a pleasant reminder of the very real role we play in each others’ lives inside and outside of the academic world. This is a truly important ‘something’ that frequently slips our minds as we think about funding, deadlines, conferences, and grading. My time in PASP, living amongst the remnants of Bennett’s letters and his lasting influence, has made me more appreciative of the long tradition of collaboration and the strong sense of community within the field of Classics. Perhaps more importantly, it helps me keep our reality in perspective: that we are humans first, academics second, and that missing paperwork is probably hidden under a loaf of bread.

Zoé Elise Thomas is a first-year Classical Archaeology track PhD student in the Department of Classics of the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests lie in identity studies, domestic architecture, bioarchaeology, digital humanities, and finding the best cat cafe.

 Updated on February 2, 2019 by Garrett R. Bruner. garrettbruner@utexas.edu

 

January 2019
Emmett Bennett Jr. in Greece, October 1986

In the coming months we will be digitizing correspondence between Emmett Bennett Jr. and Thomas G. Palaima. The correspondence will cover Bennett’s trip to the Peloponessus in 1986. Below, a picture of Bennett with on location from the period.

From Left to Right:

John McK. Camp II, director ASCSA excavations of Athenian Agora and now, too, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Classics Randolph-Macon College.

Gail Hoffman, then regular member ASCSA 86-87 and now professor of Classical Studies Boston College.

Emmett L. Bennett, Jr., longtime ASCSA member and then professor of Classics and institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin Madison.

Joe Walsh, then Oscar Broneer Fellow ASCSA 86-87 and now professor of Classics and History at Loyola University Maryland.

Bill Hutton, then regular member of the ASCSA and graduate student at UT Austin.  Now associate professor, Classical Studies, William and Mary College.

Keep checking back as we add more of our collection material to the Texas ScholarWorks digital repository!

Updated on January 16, 2019 by Garrett R. Bruner. garrettbruner@utexas.edu

January 2019
Brent Davis – New Insights into the Language of the Phaistos Disk

Updated on January 14, 2019 by Garrett R. Bruner. garrettbruner@utexas.edu

December 2018
The Phaistos Disk: A New Way of Viewing the Language behind the Script

Make time in your holiday schedule for the upcoming talk by Brent Davis on the Phaistos Disk!

When and Where: Monday January 14, 2019.

12 noon – 2 PM in WAG 116 Seminar Room

This talk outlines a new linguistics-based method of investigating the languages behind the undeciphered members of the Bronze Age Aegean family of syllabic scripts. Using this new method to compare the script on the Phaistos Disk against Linear A reveals a statistically significant similarity in the behavior of the homomorphs in the two scripts, strongly suggesting that both scripts encode the same language.

Brent Davis is a Lecturer (US: Asst. Prof.) in archaeology at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He received his undergraduate degree in Linguistics from Stanford, and in 2011 completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne on Minoan ritual vessels and Linear A.

With a background in both archaeology and linguistics, his interests include not only the cultures of the ancient eastern Mediterranean, but their languages and scripts as well, particularly their undeciphered scripts. He has published numerous articles and chapters on ancient cultures and scripts, as well as on archaeological theory, and has undertaken more than a decade of archaeological fieldwork in Israel at Tell-es Safi/Gath, the site of a major Philistine city.

Brent’s superb monograph Minoan Stone Vessels with Linear A Inscriptions. Aegaeum (Annales d’archéologie égéenne de l’Université de Liège et UT-PASP) 36 Leuven; Liège: Peeters, 2014. Pp. xxiv, 421. ISBN 9789042930971 was reviewed comprehensively by UT’s own Aren Wilson-Wright and Tom Palaima in Bryn Mawr Classical Review: http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2015/2015-11-36.html .

Updated on December 15, 2018 by Garrett R. Bruner. garrettbruner@utexas.edu

December 2018
PASP Visit Report by Helena Tomas, University of Zagreb

Zagreb, 7 December 2018

                                   Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Zagreb
Ivana Lučića 3
10000 Zagreb
Croatia

A report for the Visiting Scholar Fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin
(16 March – 14 April 2018)

In spring of 2018 (16 March – 14 April) I spent a month at the University of Texas at Austin as a visiting scholar. I was invited by Thomas G. Palaima, Robert M. Armstrong Centennial Professor of Classics, chair of the Department of Classics and the Director of the Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory (PASP).

The aim of the Fellowship was to conduct a research at PASP related to my previous work on the pinacology and epigraphy of tablets inscribed in Linear A and Linear B. This research falls within the realm of my comparative study of clay documents in the three Aegean Bronze Age administrative systems (Cretan Hieroglyphic, Linear A and Linear B) that I have been conducting over the past 15 years. Although they are clearly related, these three systems show remarkable differences in the types of employed documents, especially in sealings. The issue has been addressed in my doctoral dissertation Understanding the transition from Linear A to Linear B script, supervised by Prof. John Bennet at the University of Oxford (defended in 2003).

Since the completion of my dissertation I have concentrated on one of the rare document-types that matches in the three administrative systems – the clay tablet. I decided to approach clay tablets as objects themselves and pay full attention to their physical features, and not treat them as secondary to the contents of inscriptions they carry. Clay documents are, after all, archaeological objects and not pure carriers of information, so their materiality should be equally acknowledged. For that reason, I decided to explore how physical aspects of documents influence the type of conveyed information, how/if those physical aspects also shaped the way of thinking of the early administrators, and to what extent physical qualities of documents allowed for specific functions and administrative practices (for most sealing types and some tablets the latter is indeed the case).

The first phase of that research was supported by the 2007 Michael Ventris Memorial Award for a study entitled “Pinacological and epigraphical differences between Linear A and Linear B tablets”, the results of which have been published in a series of papers (as listed in my CV submitted to Prof. Palaima prior to my arrival to Austin). In that study I focused on the comparison of the chronologically closest Linear A and B tablets, i.e. Linear A tablets of the LM IB date and Linear B tablets from Knossos, and showed that they display more differences than similarities. In some instances these differences can be explained as an improvement of scribal practice from Linear A to Linear B, but in most cases they clearly show that Linear A page-shaped tablets served an administrative purpose distinct from those in Linear B. Indeed, the differences are so noticeable that page-shaped tablets from the two administrative systems have little more than their name in common. Such profound differences between the chronologically closest Linear A and Linear B tablets indicate that this document type went through extensive transformations. Differences become even more obvious once we move outside the chronological framework of my focus to date. For example, it is generally understood that the main Linear B pinacological innovation was the introduction of the elongated (or palmleaf-shaped) tablet, which was unknown to the LM IB Linear A administrative system. But we must not forget that the MM II Linear A administration had knowledge of elongated tablets, as did the contemporary Cretan Hieroglyphic system. This obviously means that the clay tablet underwent a transformation even within the Minoan administrative system, that is from MM II examples to those in LM IB. The transformation of the clay tablet within the same administrative system is observable even in Linear B. For example, most elongated tablets are extremely small in the Room of the Chariot Tablets deposit and have a minimal amount of text; they are larger and textually more complex in the other Knossian deposits, but the largest tablets and most extensive texts are found in the Pylian archive.

This expanded comparison of pinacological and epigraphical features of Aegean clay tablets was then a subject of my postdoctoral research in Greece (Alexander S. Onassis Fellowship in 2010). The study not only encompassed those changes observable on tablets of chronologically earlier and later administrative systems, but also changes in chronologically distinct tablets within the same system and results of those comparisons have also been published as individual papers. My research on that topic continues and the final result will be a detailed diachronic study of the Aegean clay tablet from its earliest modest examples in the MM II period on Crete to the latest both complex and numerous examples on the LH IIIB Mainland. This study should improve our understanding of what administrative practices in different places and in different times led to the creation of different types of tablets. The overall aim of this research is to emphasise: 1) that tablets should not be considered secondary to sealings in our studies of similarities and differences between Minoan and Mycenaean administrative systems; 2) that the clay tablet is not a uniform type of document and that its numerous transformations have not yet been properly explored and demonstrated; 3) that recognising these transformations can have a far-reaching impact on still unresolved issues in Aegean studies. This last point refers specifically to disagreements over the date of the Knossian Linear B tablets. I have already mentioned above that the Knossian and the Mainland tablets display some differences, and I would consider it a success if the study proposed here showed that these differences reflect the chronological gap between the two.

My time at Austin was devoted to just mentioned study of similarities and differences between Linear B tablets from Crete and those from the Greek Mainland. A month of a fellowship at the Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory provided an unparalleled environment for that research thanks to the archive of excellent photographs of almost all Linear B tablets and the accompanying relevant publications. In addition, during my research at PASP I had an opportunity to examine RTI images of Linear B tablets from Pylos and thus familiarise myself with pinacology and epigraphy of that archive. On several occasions that examination was conducted together with prof. Thomas Palaima and his graduate students. Thus I had a chance to also get a taste of what goes on at PASP on a weekly basis, and my only regret is that I could not enjoy that privilege for a longer period of time. Prof. Palaima and his students have been analysing the mentioned RTI images in a very detailed, lively, insightful and motivating manner. Despite my two decades long dealing with the Aegean scripts, I never had a chance to experience such an enthusiastic and productive teamwork of a professor and students. During such readings of tablets I realised that I always mostly worked alone and that I miss fruitful and inspiring discussions of the sort and sharing the joy of little discoveries which would occur frequently at PASP while reading and interpreting the tablets. Before my departure from Austin I was given copies of the RTI images of Linear B tablets from Pylos which allows me to continue examining them from Croatia. This next stage of my diachronic study of Aegean clay tablets (the comparison of Linear B tablets from Knossos and Pylos) will be presented at the forthcoming Mycenological Colloquium at the British School at Athens in 2020.

In addition to just described study of tablets, a significant portion of my time at PASP was spent on reading the archives of unpublished letters sent mostly to professor Emmett Bennett (I thank Garrett Bruner, the PASP archivist, for sorting out these letters in a such a superb way that navigating through them was easy and efficient). They were extremely useful for getting acquainted with the decipherment efforts of the first half of the 20 th century. Before coming to PASP I had not realized that Emmett Bennett was such a central figure of the Linear A and Linear B “decipherment world”. What I discovered at PASP was that absolutely everyone was writing to Prof. Bennett informing him of his or her work, or asking for advice and guidance. The most precious were the letters written before the decipherment of Linear B in 1952. It was so interesting for me to trace back right and wrong decipherment paths, including those of Michael Ventris himself. Because so many of those attempts at deciphering remained fruitless, the work of numerous scholars was never published, so I only found out about it from those archived letters. Even if fruitless, those efforts are extremely useful for following the logic of decipherment strategy. Being myself a scholar who deals with an undeciphered script (Linear A) I could track in those letters some of my own patterns of thinking, and then analyze why they would be right or wrong. By doing that I realized that I would love to write an article on the historiography of the Linear B decipherment. A month in Austin was not enough to gather all the data for that article, especially because my research time was dominated by the study of tablets. But, should another opportunity present itself for a research visit to PASP, it would definitely be devoted to writing up of such an article. It is not only the letters to Emmett Bennett that would contribute to that, but also many other unpublished notes and other relevant materials that are sitting at PASP shelves, especially the precious notes and notebooks of Alice Kober. While at PASP I also realized that just like Emmett Bennett was the center of the Linear B world during his time, Thomas Palaima is the same center of that world today. He has created an unprecedented research place for the Aegean Scripts in which true unpublished treasures are stored, and not just a library with the most relevant publications. And just like everyone was writing to Emmett Bennett before, all Aegean scholars seem to be writing to Thomas Palaima now – notes and letters of names of almost everyone who has done any work on Linear A and Linear B can be spotted all over PASP.

I would actually like to end this report by saying a few more words about Professor Palaima. He has always been my academic idol, but I was never fortunate to be his student. Having shared for a month the premises of the PASP and having observed his ways of teaching and discussing the Aegean Scripts, I learned why he has always been considered such a superb teacher and not only a superb scholar. He has a talent of creating circumstances in which in a very skilful and spontaneous way he can lead his students through a complex labyrinth of prehistoric scrips (whether deciphered or still undeciphered) and bring them to a proper, self-confident and independent research path. I always knew that Prof. Palaima was highly respected and admired by other fellow scholars and former students. While in Austin I was very much pleased to see that his colleagues and current students share the same attitude. In addition to all his knowledge and expertise, he is an inspiring and charismatic person, so sharing a work and research environment with him for a month was a true scholarly joy. For all those reasons Prof. Palaima’s invitation to Austin and an offer of a visiting fellowship was an exceptional privilege for me and a treasured recognition of my so far work.

In addition to Prof. Palaima, I would also like to thank Joann Gulizio, Kevin Pluta, Garrett Bruner, Cassandra Donnelly and Dimitris Nakassis for their generous help with absolutely everything I needed while working at PASP, and for being so welcoming and accommodating. I would also like to thank Vanessa Noya and Khoa Tran for sorting out all the logistics of my visit. Finally, I would like to thank Prof. Palaima for inviting me to give a guest lecture during my stay.

 

 

Helena Tomas
Professor of Aegean Archaeology and Mycenaean Epigraphy
Department of Archaeology
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Zagreb, Croatia
htomas@ffzg.hr

Updated on December 8, 2018 by Garrett R. Bruner. garrettbruner@utexas.edu

October 2018
“Beauty in clay: Aesthetics and script in Mycenaean Greece” by Dimitri Nakassis

Recently published by Dimitri Nakassis in the book ΟΙ ΑΜΕΤΡΗΤΕΣ ΟΨΕΙΣ ΤΟΥ ΩΡΑΙΟΥ ΣΤΗΝ ΑΡΧΑΙΑ ΤΕΧΝΗ / The Countless aspects of Beauty in Ancient Art is a chapter on the aesthetic of the Linear B script. Check it out here!

Beauty in Clay

Updated on October 27, 2018 by Garrett R. Bruner. garrettbruner@utexas.edu

October 2018
CREWS Fellowship Awarded to PASP Researcher and Classics PhD Candidate Cassandra Donnelly

The Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) of Cambridge University has awarded PASP’s own Cassandra Donnelly to develop her research on Aegean scripts.

The announcement can be found below, with information on her research and a brief interview:

Written in Stone: Studying the Relationship Between Ancient Writing Systems and Their Writers

Cassandra will be presenting a brief talk on Sunday, October 21, on her research of Bronze age Aegean society in the 11th annual Archaeology Playdate hosted by the Austin society of the Archaeological Institute of America. Talks will be presented in Patton Hall (RLP) in Room 0.102.

3:30 PM  Cassie Donnelly, Classics:  “Epigraphic Evidence for Regional Administrative Practices in Late Bronze Age Cyprus”

Cassandra Donnelly also coordinates Scripts Institute lectures in Classics every semester. Upcoming is a presentation by Dr. Joann Gulizio of UT-Classics titled “Divine Families in the Mycenaean Pantheon at Pylos? Connections between PY Tn 316 and the Fr series”. It will be held on Wednesday, October 24th, at 12 PM in WAG 116. Hope to see you there!!

More information about CREWS can be found here.

Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS)

And follow their blog at:

https://crewsproject.wordpress.com/

Updated on October 20, 2018 by Garrett R. Bruner. garrettbruner@utexas.edu

May 2018
William C. Brice – Scripta Minoa III Correspondence Now Online

Now online at Texas ScholarWorks are over 150 items of correspondence from the William C. Brice collection. This correspondence spans four decades of research and includes the very brightest Classics figures of the period, like decipherers Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, Emmett L. Bennett Jr. archaeologists Sinclair Hood and Leonard Woolley, and classicists like Mortimer Wheeler and Anthony Snodgrass. They cover a great range of subjects like script research in Linear A/B and the latest archaeological discoveries in the 1950s by Sinclair Hood.

A bulk of the letters document Brice’s progress on Scripta Minoa III, a volume which was intending to be the comprehensive catalog for all Linear A inscriptions discovered up to that point. It was an international effort spanning half a century of research which Brice would painstakingly edit following the death of Sir John Myres. It includes contributions from Sir Arthur Evans, Sir John Myres, Michael Ventris, Emmett Bennett, Maurice Pope, Sinclair Hood, John Boardman, among many other leading figures. In 1957, the project was ultimately discontinued by the Society of Antiquaries of London for a variety of reasons, but Brice’s effort was compiled and organized for another publication, Inscriptions in the Minoan Linear Script of Class A, published 1961.

Keep checking back!! Another batch of correspondence from the Brice collection, most of it concerning the Scripta Minoa III project, is being digitized over the summer of 2018.

Updated on May 3, 2018 by Garrett R. Bruner. garrettbruner@utexas.edu

April 2018
Bob Dylan in Nuremberg – by Thomas G. Palaima

Between April 15-25 Tom Palaima attended the 2018 Aegaeum conference in Venice and then lectured at the University of Zagreb. He was also present at Bob Dylan’s concert in Nuremberg.

1 Things Have Changed
2 Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
3 Highway 61 Revisited
4 Simple Twist of Fate
5 Duquesne Whistle
6 Melancholy Mood (Frank Sinatra cover)
7 Honest With Me
8 Tryin’ to Get to Heaven
9 Come Rain or Come Shine (Harold Arlen & Johnny Mercer cover)
10 Pay in Blood
11 Tangled Up in Blue
12 Early Roman Kings
13 Desolation Row
14 Love Sick
15 Autumn Leaves (Yves Montand cover)
16 Thunder on the Mountain
17 Soon After Midnight
18 Long and Wasted Years

Encore:

19 Blowin’ in the Wind
20 Ballad of a Thin Man

A younger Croatian professor friend of mine, Helena Tomas of University of Zagreb, and I drove up for this show from Venice, where we had spent the week at a scholarly conference. We came up through the Brenner Pass and across lots of history. “Lots of water under the bridge / lots of other stuff, too.”

It was her first show. We felt privileged to be sitting in row 5 audience just to the right of the piano (and the left of his Oscar statuette for “Things Have Changed” and—from the Tempest cover—what looks like a copy of the classical stylized bust of a river goddess from the Pallas Athene statue grouping outside the Parliament Building in Vienna).

From our vantage point, we could see Bob sitting or standing at the keyboard where he stayed the entire night (with the exception of his three standards which Bob sang stage center mostly singing back across the stage toward his piano although for a brief segment on one number facing Stu Kimball audience left) with a preternatural look of intense concentration and absorption—and at times delight—on his face as he coaxed, tickled or attacked the keyboard to produce the haunting melancholic delicacy of “Simple Twist of Fate”and “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” the rag-time hints of “Duquesne Whistle,” or the take-no-prisoner building rhythmic tsunami of “Thunder on the Mountain.”

Weather was magnificent. In late afternoon Nuremberg had 82 degrees, light blue skies and 9 mph breezes. Strolling in with Helena we stopped and listened, coming and going, to two musicians performing in separate places Dylan’s music. We thought of the “Homeridae,” literally the sons of Homer, local or itinerant song-poets who must have likewise performed song parts from the Homeric repertory surrounding main festival events when the great oral songsters gathered.

The stage setting and colors of the lighting produced extraordinary, but not obtrusive, atmospheres for the songs.

Helena loved best “Simple Twist of Fate,” “Come Rain or Come Shine” (which Bob did knock out of the park Arlen and Mercer created for him to play in, complete with choreographed arm gestures), “Desolation Row,” and “Thunder on the Mountain,” which she rightly described as building and building and building and building……..

Lyric subtleties:

On “Simple Twist of Fate” the hotel had a “flashing neon sign” that allowed the “she” of the song to ask: “What do you have in mind?” And when the ‘he’ reads “the note she left behind,” Bob breaks the narrative and interjects “What did it say?” before giving us the new standard variant, something like: “We should have ended up in 58 / and forgotten about this simple twist of fate.”

Likewise at the end of “Desolation Row,” still the song dearest and most embedded in my heart and soul and which I used to sing, in its entirety, as a lullaby to my now grown son, the new standard variant:

“Yesterday is dead and gone / Tomorrow might as well be now.
Some of them live on the mountain / some of them down on the ground
Some of their names are still the same
Others, well, they just left town.”

Bob and his band left town after re-instantiating Bob’s music and making it new for us, so that we will be leaving town with it in our heads and hearts and souls in a new way for our today’s selves, like the German man I talked to at the adjacent men’s room stall after the show. He noted that Bob’s voice was in stunningly good form. And I agreed. And he agreed with me that the band was producing music as if it were at times the Nelson Riddle Orchestra and at other times sidemen behind Jelly Roll Morton. And he was heading to Baden-Baden, staying briefly ‘on the road’ with Bob and his band.

Thank you, Bob, as you move toward the completion of your seventy-seventh year among us mere mortals.

Tom Palaima, Austin TX

Helena Tomas was a visiting scholar of PASP in the months of March-April 2018.

Updated on April 25, 2018 by Garrett R. Bruner. garrettbruner@utexas.edu

 

April 2018
Aegean Scholarship at UT accessible at Texas ScholarWorks – by Kevin S. Lee

As the PASP research assistant, one of my tasks this semester was to curate and process material for the Aegean Scholarship collection on Texas ScholarWorks. This is part of PASP’s ongoing mission of making accessible as much of our research materials and resources as possible.

The Aegean Scholarship collection at TSW serves as the digital home for Aegean-related dissertations and theses authored by former PASP students, touching on topics like Minoan religion, Mycenaean archives, and figures of authority in Mycenaean society. The students’ dissertations demonstrates the rigor of scholarship PASP attracts.  For instance, Dimitri Nakassis’ 2013 book Individuals and Society in Mycenaean Pylos grew out of his 2005/2006 dissertation entitled “The Individual and the Mycenaean State: Agency and Prosopography in the Linear B Texts from Pylos.”  Dr. Nakassis’ work is pivotal in new understandings of Mycenaean palace-states as networks of individuals rather than monolithic blocks.  Dr. Nakassis now teaches in the Department of Classics at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

TSW’s Aegean Scholarship collection also curates faculty research on the Aegean studies. For now, this consists primarily of the scholarship currently of Thomas Palaima and Cynthia Shelmerdine.  The scholarly works of Professor Palaima span his entire UT career and reflect a lifetime of comprehensive and granular research. They consist of a range of articles on a variety of Mycenaean subjects, book reviews, and conference papers. It has been my responsibility to digitally process and make permanently accessible fourteen articles and conference papers Professor Palaima has published in UT publications. They run the gamut from a reappraisal of the last years of the Palace of Nestor at Pylos to humorous pieces delivered at iterations of the Aegean Conference. Also online are Palaima’s research into the history of Linear B decipherment, covering individuals like Michael Ventris, Alice Kober, and Emmett Bennett. Like his contributions to the Times Literary Supplement and Austin American-Statesman, these reflect the whole person of Professor Palaima, both learned scholar and jovial concerned citizen.

We are in the process of having all former PASP Electronic Theses and Dissertations digitized to TSW, so keep checking back!

Updated on April 9, 2018 by Garrett R. Bruner. garrettbruner@utexas.edu

 

February 2018
Paintings and Poetry in Linear B – The Nikos Samartzidis Collection

PASP is very pleased to exhibit the works of Nikos Samartzidis collection. Samartzidis is a painter and poet and has exhibited his works in Germany and Crete. These collection pieces are works of art inscribed with Linear B on canvas, clay tablets, and compact disks. In the works, Linear B is used as a script for poetry. Works on canvas, board, clay and CD are on display at PASP.

In his works, he quotes ancient poets like Hesiod and Homer and many modern Greek poets like Elytis and Cavafy. In the painting below, Dylanology II, he even transcribes the lyrics of American musician Bob Dylan into Linear B.

Dylanology II, 2017

Source: Bob Dylan, Blowin’ in the wind
Free Translation by Nikos Samartzidis

po-sa, ko-ro-ni-a, po-re,
na, u-pa-re-ke, e-na, qo-u-no
pi-ri, na-ka-te, me-sa, te-ta-ra-sa
ka-i, po-sa, ko-ro-ni-a, po-ro-u
ka-po-jo, a-to-ro-po-i, na, u-pa-ro-ko-u,
pi-ri, to-u, a-pe-so-u, na, e-i-na, e-re-u-te-ro(2),
te, a-pa-te-se, pi-re, mo-u
te, pa-i-re-na, o, a-ne-mo,
pu(2)-so-ta,
me, to, a-ka-ta-re-po-to, qo-u-e-to, to-u
ro-we-ro-to, a-re, ti-si-me-ra-ma

«…Πόσα χρόνια μπορεί να υπάρχει ένα βουνό,
πριν να χαθεί μέσα στη θάλασσα;
Και πόσα χρόνια μπορούν κάποιοι άνθρωποι,
να υπάρχουν πριν τους αφήσουν νάναι λεύτεροι;
Την απάντηση φίλε μου την παίρνει ο άνεμος,
φυσώντας μέ το ακατάληπτο βουητό του…»

“…How many years can a mountain exist,
before it is washed to the sea?
Yes, and how many years can some people exist,
before they’re allowed to be free?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.
The answer is blowin’ in the wind…”

These paintings are also permanently accessible through Texas ScholarWorks (URL). Transcriptions and translations of the works are included with every entry, too. Also at PASP are clay tablets and etched CDs in Linear B and many papers of Samartzidis, like exhibit handouts, news articles covering his work, and notebook pages.

More of his works can also be accessed at his website.

In the near future, a digital exhibit of his works will be published on Scalar. There, paintings from PASP’s Samartzidis collections will be presented with interactive transcriptions and transliterations from Linear B to Greek and English.

Updated on February 27, 2018 by Garrett R. Bruner. garrettbruner@utexas.edu

February 2018
William C. Brice Collection update by Yogita Sharma

From December 2017 to February 2018, I performed the digital processing of the correspondence between Beatrice Gwynn and William C. Brice for online access. This was completed under the supervision of PASP archivist Garrett Bruner.  The Gwynn-Brice correspondence is now online and open access at Texas Scholarworks where all digitized PASP collection material can be found.

Overview

This correspondence are the first items made online from PASP’s William C. Brice collection.  This small series of correspondence consists of twenty-two letters, the bulk of which were written by Gwynn to Brice. All material was processed following PASP’s guidelines for processing digital materials. I scanned letters to NARA guidelines, read each item, and created the metadata for Texas ScholarWorks as per their Dublin Core schema.

Related material to this correspondence can be found in the Emmett Bennett Jr. Collection, also housed and made accessible online through Texas ScholarWorks. Letters from Beatrice Gwynn to Emmett Bennett on the same subjects, in the same time frame as these letters, highlight Gwynn’s collaboration with the very brightest in Linear B studies. In addition, letters from Chadwick and Bennett in the same period (mid 1960s) make mention of Gwynn’s efforts.

Item Summary

In the letters, Gwynn introduces herself to Brice as a student of Mycenaean scripts. From there, the letters shed light on her Linear A and B research and Brice’s feedback.

The following letters and themes will be most intriguing to scholars:

BGtoWB19680804, BGtoWB19681114: Gwynn articulates her understanding of the Minoan libation formula.

BGtoWB19680911, BGtoWB19690105: Gwynn on the value of the fraction L7.

BGtoWB19681020, BGtoWB19700222, BGtoWB19700320, BGtoWB19700426, BGtoWB19700524: Gwynn lays out her ideas on the relationship between Crete and Greek mainland, Linear A and B, Enkomi script, and Phaistos Disk. Also significant in this regard is her comparative table of scripts.

BGtoWB19690706, BGtoWB19700222: Her transcriptions of the Enkomi tablets.

In her letters, Gwynn emerges as a woman who presents her own strong arguments and views on the decipherment of Linear B. She provides detailed explanations of her disagreements with Brice.  Gwynn’s letters to Brice are yet another valuable resource to those interested in the history of Linear B studies, especially the contribution of women to its decipherment.

Conclusion

This project helped me understand and practice digital processing of metadata.  The fact that the content was obscure and rich only added to my learning and pleasure.

Check back soon. More from William C. Brice’s collection, including his correspondence on the failed publication of Scripta Minoa III, and with scholars like Michael Ventris, Emmett Bennett, and Sinclair Hood will appear online at TSW throughout 2018.

Updated on February 9, 2018 by Garrett R. Bruner. garrettbruner@utexas.edu

December 2017
Visit Report by Regina Dürig and Christian Müller

Regina and Christian were visiting scholars at PASP during the month of October 2017. In their research for a literature-and- music project, they focused on the Alice Kober Papers.

Read their report to their work at PASP here. And check out the reports to other visiting scholars on the side bar!

Updated on December 14, 2017 by Garrett R. Bruner. garrettbruner@utexas.edu

November 2017
“Dear Bennett, Dear Miss Kober” by Kevin Lee

During September and October I worked under PASP archivist Garrett Bruner preparing the correspondence between Emmett Bennett, Jr. and Alice Kober for online publication. The Bennett-Kober correspondence is now online for open access at Texas Scholarworks.

Overview

This correspondence is part of the E.L. Bennett Jr. Papers. I followed the guidelines set by PASP on processing all digital material. With the scanning already completed, my job was to go through each item, letter by letter, to create metadata for Texas ScholarWorks based on their Dublin Core schema. Garrett provided the schema of this sheet and I added the necessary entries.

The Story Told

The tale that emerges is the evolving collaboration between Kober and Bennett on the decipherment of Linear B. Each enters the arena armed with a different dataset. Kober was assisting Sir John Linton Myres on the publication of the Linear B tablets recovered by Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos. Bennett, who played a comparable role for Carl Blegen, tackled the palace archives excavated at Pylos. The collaboration between Kober and Bennett moves from sharing and correcting their transcriptions of various tablets each has access to, to meeting in person to bring together and standardize classification references to Linear B words. The latter picks up towards the end of 1948, after Myres and Blegen agreed to allow mutual access of their materials, and continues through Kober’s declining health and eventual death in May of 1950.

The Bennett-Kober letters are of a largely technical nature, as one would expect with this kind of work. Shop-talk about classification systems, edits, and proposals for edits orbit around a score of Linear B transcriptions. This is an invaluable collection for those interested in history of scholarship and the mechanics of Linear B’s decipherment. There are two crucial letters for understanding this collection:

1. The first letter in the series, AKtoELB19450114, in which Kober explains her punch-card system.

2. AKtoELB19481122, in which Kober briefly explains both her classification system and statistical methodology.

Reading those first will give the reader a greater sense of the rest of their letters. Another note of warning is that we have more letters penned by Kober than Bennett; we can only guess at what Bennett mentioned in missing letters from Kober’s responses.

In all, however, it is easy enough for a non-specialist such as myself to follow along with the unfolding tale of scholarly cooperation and discovery. For instance, in letters before June 1948, Kober wavers on whether or not the Pylos script is in fact Linear B. But following “the rules of evidence” where they lead, she becomes convinced that the Pylos tablets write the same language as those from Knossos.

The Dramatis Personae

In addition, as per usual, the letters act as windows to their writers, and aspects of their characters flash through. Both begin addressing each other with the formal “Dear Mr. Bennett” and “Dear Miss Kober.” In June 1948, however, Kober says she is finally getting tired of using “Mr. Bennett.” We do not have Bennett’s response to her, but thereafter her letters are addressed “Dear Bennett.” Bennett himself maintains the formal “Dear Miss Kober” throughout. In ELBtoAK19480604, Bennett expresses the traditional academic embarrassment with commerce when he shows off a custom-made set of Linear B stamps in order to “sell…or rather, in keeping with academic dignity, and my own inclination, to show you something I got for myself, and which you might like for yourself.”

Academic exasperations we know today were equally present then. In AKtoELB19490212, Kober expresses irritation at how out of date her transcriptions of the Knossos Tablets, which she was proud of two years before, have become, and the problems that has caused. In AKtoELB19490216 she states, in the context of sharing an office with four other teachers, “[a] city college is no place for scholarly research, I’ve found to my cost.”

Furthermore, Kober has a rueful humor to her. In AKtoELB19451230, after a 3-page litany of questions re: her transcriptions of the Pylos tablets, she writes “I could keep this up all night, but I’ll spare you.” In an earlier letter, dated January 14 of the same year, she deadpans “It’s harder to get articles published in Europe during the war than it was to get military secrets…”

The Mystery Letters

This project has been a good review and expansion of skills I picked up at a previous archiving position. It also involved detective skills I’ve enjoyed putting to use. There were for instance two misdated letters at the end of the collection; one from Kober to Bennett dated December 5, 1950, and another from Bennett to Kober, undated save assignation to 1950.

In the case of the former, the date was obviously incorrect, for Kober died in May of that year. The problem sprang from the fact that (1) Kober simply dated the postcard as “Tuesday,” and (2) the post office stamp indicating the date of receipt was incomplete, leaving out the year. The post office worker must have noticed this and assumed he didn’t stamp hard enough, for there is a second stamp over the first with exactly the same problem, leaving a palimpsest. Examining it up close, I found that there is a faint “1” between the “DEC” and the “5.” This indicates Kober’s local post office in Brooklyn received her postcard on December 15th. I checked the calendars for the years of the Kober-Bennett correspondence, and only in one of them – 1948 – did December 15th fall on a Wednesday, the day after which Kober dates her postcard. Furthermore, the text of the card squarely places it in this year, for it was in the winter of 1948 and 1949 that Kober and Bennett travelled back and forth between New York and New Haven to examine each other’s material, and this postcard contains Kober’s instructions to Bennett for using the subway to get from Penn Station to her office at Brooklyn College. I appropriately renamed it AKtoELB19481214, and you can find it in the collection under that title.

Regarding our other mystery letter without a date, internal clues hint at the time of its writing. In this letter (now titled ELBtoAK19490214), Bennett mentions that his three children have come down with illness, and that he plans to come down to New York “Thursday or Saturday of next week, the 24th or 26th.” This gave some context for me to go off from. Kober, in her February 16, 1949 letter, expresses her hope that Bennett’s children recover. Also, in February of 1949 the 24th and 26th of the month fell on a Thursday and a Saturday, respectively. This gives us the terminus ante quem. To further narrow down the date, in her February 12th letter Kober took Bennett to task for a bad numbering method, which he leads off his mystery date letter with a response to. There’s thus a four-day period in which Bennett could have written this letter. He likely wrote it Monday the 14th or Tuesday the 15th, given the usual time between their correspondence.

The Briefest Conclusion

In toto, this project has been an excellent experience. I am proud to have contributed to the open access publication of this correspondence. It provides a crucial glimpse into the scholarly ground-pounding required to advance Linear B to the point it could be deciphered.

Updated on November 22, 2017 by Garrett R. Bruner. garrettbruner@utexas.edu

October 2017
Bennett Correspondence now on UT ScholarWorks

A batch of correspondence from PASP’s Emmett Bennett Jr. collection are now online and accessible through the University of Texas ScholarWorks (TSW) digital repository. Like all collection material uploaded to Scholarworks, it is open access, free to the public. You don’t need an account to access collection material through Texas ScholarWorks!

The letters were scanned at a high resolution and converted to PDFs by Classics graduate students. Some PDFs, like typewritten letters, were scanned with OCR to allow users to copy and search within the documents. The correspondence follows a set of Dublin Core based metadata elements, which improves their access, searchability and organization. This metadata ensures the collection materials’ endurance in the digital realm as it can be transferred to any platform or updated to the infrastructural changes within ScholarWorks.

The Bennett Correspondence can be accessed by here:

This correspondence presents a general view of authors Bennett had professional contact with over several decades (1940s-1990s). The bulk of the letters are written between 1950 and 1965. They span a range of Linear B subjects in the years leading up to its decipherment: classification of tablets for publication (Pylos, Mycenae and Knossos), readings of tablets and ideograms, discovery of new tablets, classification and publication of tablets, and controversies surrounding the decipherment. Classicists, linguists, archaeologists, and students make up much of Bennett’s correspondents. Of particular interest are Bennett’s letters with Sir John Myres, John Chadwick, and Carl Blegen.

The bulk of the Myres letters document Bennett’s trip to Crete in 1950 and the publication of Scripta Minoa II. At the Heraklion museum in Crete, Bennett took the place of the late Alice Kober to set a classification system for the Knossos tablets based on Evans’ numeration of them. This work would be critical for the publication of Scripta Minoa Volume II. The results can be seen in Scripta Minoa Volume II in the “Concordance” pages. As Myres handwriting can be difficult in itself to decipher, we offer transcripts of these letters in plain text files. They can be accessed at the item level of each letter between Myres and Bennett. The transcriptions and metadata for Sir John Myres’ letters were completed by Amanda Rodriguez in July 2017.

A very rich source of information on the decipherment comes from John Chadwick’s letters with Bennett. Chadwick letters cover a range of subjects, like readings of tablets and their classification, publication news and reviews, and convention recaps. As Michael Ventris’s collaborator in the decipherment of Linear B, a significant yet tragic letter is Chadwick’s informing Bennett of Ventris’s death two days after Ventris’s fatal car crash. Following Ventris’s death, Chadwick would relate to Bennett his defense of Ventris’s decipherment against critics like A.J. Beattie and Ernst Grumach.

Chadwick’s letters can be accessed here

Letters between Beattie and Bennett also document a coldness between the scholars deciphering Linear B.

Bennett’s letters also bring to light the attention Kober brought to women in the archaeology field. In a letter with A. H. Hahn, Bennett investigates Kober’s biography for an article in Notable American Women, 1607 – 1950. The following response from Hahn provides more information on her efforts to uncover Kober’s life from her family and friends.

We are very excited to make these documents accessible and open access. They supply very unique information on the lives of Linear B scholars, the times they worked in, and their breakthroughs in Linear B decipherment.

Currently, as of October 2017, PASP aims to digitize the remaining Bennett correspondence and provide the same open access availability to them through Texas ScholarWorks. Correspondence between Bennett and Kober is being immediately processed by PASP Assistant Kevin Lee.  These will be uploaded by November 2017.

Updated on October 26, 2017 by Garrett R. Bruner. garrettbruner@utexas.edu