Like Loebs? Every fall semester, I like to remind people that while Perseus has many free Loebs sectioned up into book and chapter, if you want to download and read the public domain Loebs (277 of them) as PDFs or txt files, Duke U's very own Ryan Baumann created _Loebolus 📗📕_. ryanfb.xyz/loebolus/

Now that the secret is out, it's time for historians to start learning about CIDOC

Cara Ellison@caraellison.bsky.social · 7d ago

We were watching that silly new Tom Hiddleston reenactment of the disaster of Pompeii and he was like ‘we have amazing new tech that allows us to track people through this disaster’ and I was oh no he’s going to say it’s an AI brain or something and then he said…. ‘Its a spreadsheet’ and I CHEERED

New office!

Sorry Gilgamesh lovers, the right answer is ludlul bel nemeqi, directed by Robert Eggers

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele.com · last wk.

ok let's do a discourse: what historical text absolutely needs the big budget film treatment, AND will create the need for a review by a scholar in a prestige publication? for medieval Europe, either: -- Song of Roland -- Book of Margery Kempe

Moving is exhausting not only through the act of packing, but also from the gymnastics of finding suitable places to rest your filled boxes

There are two problems with waving off 'the sea peoples' as a nonexistent "debunked 19th century idea": the ancient sources and modern archaeology. Egyptian, Ugaritic, Hittite, Aramaic, and Canaanite sources all mention population groups that emerged in the Eastern Mediterranean around this time.

Great opportunity for PhD students, folks who have finished their Masters or any brilliant college graduates interested in building up their portfolio for graduate school programs:

Andrew Mark Henry@andrewmarkhenry.bsky.social · 2w ago

Full info here: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Hiring a Research & Content Assistant for Religion for Breakfast: remote, part-time (15 hrs/week, $25/hr). Script development, sourcing images/b-roll, short-form video production, social content. CV + cover letter → religionforbreakfast@gmail.com

illik elīni kima paspasu eli malāhi illik

Arabic Proverbs@arabicproverbs.bsky.social · 2w ago

If someone passes by without greeting you, you can say: "He went past us like a duck passing a sailor." 🦆 yamurru ʿalaynā kamā yamurru al-baṭṭu ʿalā al-mallāḥ

Not quite Mesopotamia but still brilliantly Sam & Julia

As a field, Assyriology doesn't talk about butts nearly enough—especially considering it's right there in the name! Well, we're rectifying that this week on Ancient Sayings with a fine selection of patootie-related proverbs. Enjoy!

Parchment & Clay@parchmentandclay.bsky.social · 3w ago

DID YOU KNOW that ancient Mesopotamians had butts, just like us? They did, and they also liked to talk about them! Welcome to Butt Week on #AncientSayings! Ancient Sayings #71: Butt week! On being amply supplied with dubious resources https://youtu.be/5a3jnV2GX54

Any recommendations on how to spend a morning in Zurich? I'll be coming and going from the HB 🚆

Explore the new 2026 issue for the Journal of Cuneiform Studies, featuring articles such as: Three New Kings of Assyria; An Old Babylonian Tablet with a Collection of Sumerian Hymns; A Hurro-Hittite Ritual for Kingship?; and more. View the Table of Contents here: buff.ly/tJ56SEx #Cuneiform

One of many interesting Babylonian omens (“šumma immeru…”) relating to sheep slaughter that I came across while browsing the Leiden Middle Eastern library a couple days ago (Cohen 2020)

A few days before Christmas 2016, a grey Land Rover paused in front of a bank of mirrored windows at this checkpoint on the border between France and Switzerland. What happened next revealed just how looted art worms its way into museums. A 🧵 about my article: hyperallergic.com/why-do-so-ma...

😏 if you haven't yet seen the groundbreaking work set for his upcoming cookbook, check out www.tableofgods.com. It's been an incredible honor to work with Arim and his team:

Stone Cold Steve Urkel@toytowns.bsky.social · last mo.

@aandeloucas.com I didn't know you were collaborating with Table of Gods!! I am so excited I mean I was already excited for this cookbook but now I'm REALLY excited!! www.tableofgods.com

Got feedback from a coauthor asking for revision on 18 sentences I analyzed two years ago and, after feeling sick with myself for getting so much mixed up, checked the revision-to-no-comment ratio: it's 2.8% (18/632). That's fine!!!

Huge surprise in today's map tap: The Sumerian Game!!!!

Another one today on BMCR "Impaired Consciousness in Ancient Medical Texts" sounds fascinating it would be really interesting to look at cross-cultural descriptions of these mental phenomena (see: @moudhy.bsky.social), oh wait, it's only ancient Greek texts... (NB: the reviewer does point this out)

M. Willis Monroe@willismonroe.com · 5mo ago

I'm once again asking scholars of Greco-Roman antiquity not to use "Ancient World" for book titles when what they really mean is ancient Greece and Rome... Fabian Horn's recent book (reviewed on BMCR today) looks like a fascinating collection of chapters looking at Conceptual Metaphor Theory, but...

I don't want to be crass for the comparison, but cuneiform fragments look like cookies and Chex

New Scientist@newscientist.com · last mo.

Scrolls from the Roman library of Herculaneum that were carbonised by a volcanic eruption have been read in their entirety for the first time, thanks to scans and AI software

We have a physical copy!

Featuring @jhu.edu prof Alice Mandell's new book Canaanite Scribal Creativity and the Making of Cuneiform Culture in the Amarna Age www.routledge.com/Canaanite-Sc...

Canaanite Scribal Creativity and the Making of Cuneiform Culture in the Amarna Age

Canaanite Scribal Creativity and the Making of Cuneiform Culture in the Amarna Age offer a nuanced exploration of the scribal practices behind the Canaanite Amarna Letters and wider scribal culture of...

routledge.com

This so-called museum is a romantic image and argument made by Woolley that @moudhy.bsky.social details in her book "Between Two Rivers". This was not a museum as we experience these institutions today. Rather, cuneiform culture and its millennia of history had always been important for elites.

c0nc0rdance@c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · last mo.

Called "Ennigaldi-Nanna's museum", it was a small building in the temple & palace complex where even older objects were on display, along with clay cylinders imprinted with information ABOUT the object. Museum labels. Dating to 530 BCE. A collection of antiques from an empire already 2000 yrs old.

In 1925, archaeologist Leonard Woolley was excavating the temple complex at the ancient city of Ur. That's the ziggurat in the background. As the excavation proceeded, he found something quite surprising: artifacts hundreds of years older than Ur itself. Let's talk about the oldest known museum.

It’s here 📖 ✍️ “Scribal Worlds: Scholarship and classification in cuneiform cultures” is out today from UCL Press— in print & free open access PDF. Co-editing it with Jay and Eduardo, in honor of Niek Veldhuis, has been one of the most meaningful projects. uclpress.co.uk/book/scribal...

Scribal Worlds

Scribal Worlds: Scholarship and classification in cuneiform cultures delves into the history of the earliest writing cultures of the ancient Middle East, bridging disciplines that include ancient hist...

uclpress.co.uk

New from Akkadica: "Priests and Profits" The issue "foregrounds the temple as both a centre of ritual expertise and an institution embedded in economic life ... [whose profit] took the form of entrusted responsibilities, endowed incomes, & prestige." Open-Access: akkadica.ugent.be/issue/26908/...

This week on Civ VII my team of historians took some time to do an AMA of player questions this week! They had a lot of fun answering; you can check out the Reddit link to the full AMA on Steam here

From the civ community on Reddit: We Answered 35 of Your Civ VII History Questions

Explore this post and more from the civ community

reddit.com

An issue with data here is that we have many chefs: some chefs safeguard ingredients (the texts), whereas others do not provide their recipes (scholastic effort). So how do we actually know how much has been so studied and what remains to be investigated, i.e. what's been cooked already?

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu.bsky.social · 2mo ago

This goes double for both Mesopotamian cuneiform and early Medieval Jewish mss, the extreme ends of my interests--here the problem isn't having the texts but sharing and interpreting them. We've got more data about these literatures than meaningful ideas about them!

I understand the excitement about technology “rediscovering lost texts.” I do, & I get the media hype. But I wish people knew that there are hundreds of thousands of “lost” texts just sitting in manuscripts in libraries, which have never been published outside of those single manuscripts. 1/n

Sonja Drimmer@sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 2mo ago

What I said here about an earlier project still holds. 2/n bsky.app/profile/sonj...

The cuneiform sign for 'marsh' is ambar (𒆹), which depicts water (𒀀) within the container sign lagab (𒆸). A contained body of water sounds plenty 'mere-ish'!

Dr Danny Bate@dannybate.com · 2mo ago

Noticed on this 17th-century map the spelling "mershe" for 'marsh' – this is the older spelling, before the 'ER > AR' sound change that affected 'starboard', 'darling' and the pronunciation of 'sergeant' too. The change obscures the etymology of 'marsh': as literally 'mere-ish', a lake-like thing.