Feel good about my AIA paper today, which means I will feel bad about it tomorrow, good again on Wednesday, and then inevitably bad on Thursday when actually presenting it.

A single word, even a single letter, can mean a lot more when it's in a classic work. A little papyrological rediscovery and some time-travelling detective work (literary rather than literal) by @theonash.bsky.social has unearthed evidence of medieval misunderstanding & meddling in Homer's Odyssey.

New issue of the Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists, edited by @sofiatorallas.bsky.social , with contributions on literary papyri from @theonash.bsky.social and myself.

Real-world Quellenforschung: identifying which AI system a student used to write their essay.

Elite private universities are actually a pretty American phenomenon.

'sit' is, I believe, the only English word to preserve all of its original IE ablaut grades: 0: nest e: set long e: seat o: sat long o: soot

I am reminded, reading this, of the anecdote about Shackleton Bailey refusing to attend a conference entitled 'What is Philology?' on the grounds that he would rather be doing it. To its practitioners, the project is so self-evident that introspection becomes heresy.

This would be the end of international PhD students in America: www.chronicle.com/newsletter/l...

Chicago Classics as Rorschach blot, and ‘divide and rule’ in the 21st-century university. thesphinxblog.com/2025/08/29/r...

The American School of Classical Studies seems to have removed the traditional exam for the Regular Year, opting instead to interview students: www.ascsa.edu.gr/programs/reg...

What Big Grammar won’t tell you is that the semicolon has completely starved out the good old-fashioned colon, a much more interesting piece of punctuation.

replies full of slop-pologists falling over themselves to claim this text doesn't say what the literal words say

Holy shit (It’s real: genai.umich.edu/resources/st... )

The University of Michigan is now claiming that students have an ‘ethical responsibility’ to use AI.

magnanimously? munificently?

More conservatively, it shows that the paradigm hadn't yet been levelled from /hen/, /hem-os/ to /hen/, /hen-os/. The fact that Mycenaean never writes final nasals makes this essentially unprovable, even with the possibility of future discoveries.

41. The reason we can likely be confident of this is because the Linear B syllabogram 𐀛 <ni> is also used ideographically for figs, and is also used in Linear A and so probably assigned by the acrophonic principle. This was first pointed out by Günter Neumann in Glotta 36 (1957) 156–158.

40. The only word in Ancient Greek that we know (in my opinion) that we can be *absolutely* certain to have been borrowed from a language related to the one the Minoans spoke is νικύλεον, a kind of Cretan fig according to Hermonax in Athenaeus's Deipnosophists 76e.

And Indiana Jones wept. A list of languages I've taken at the University of Chicago: Akkadian Aramaic Ugaritic Classical Hebrew Rabbinic Hebrew Modern Hebrew Ancient Greek German All of them were important for my work, and I wasn't in any those departments.

People don't even realize the Oriental Institute's importance. Even in popular culture. They are murdering Indiana Jones. I knew things were bad when I read the mealy-mouthed stuff I get as an alumnus but this is just disgusting. So sad.

This isn’t an impoverished regional school – this is the University of Chicago. Devastating.

Hence my favourite opening sentence in a preface, from Woodman’s commentary of the latter half of Velleius Paterculus’ second book:

Sad to share the Penelope Mountjoy, the doyenne of Mycenaean pottery, has passed away.

Time for the @cacscec.bsky.social

More Vesuvius Challenge sorcery: they got the title of P.Herc. 172. ΦΙΛΟΔΗΜΟΥ ΠΕΡΙ ΚΑΚΙΩΝ Α. More here: scrollprize.substack.com/p/60000-firs...

Roberta Mazza's Stolen Fragments reviewed without a single mention of Dirk Obbink: curious. bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2025/2025.04...

Back to real life, soon.

Our Visiting Fellow @theonash.bsky.social gave us a seminar on regionalism in Linear B this week. You can watch on YouTube if you missed it! youtu.be/pOeTV0wvSEc

Please tune in! (Or, even better, make the trek to Cambridge so you can join us for a beer afterwards.)

Our Visiting Fellow @theonash.bsky.social will be giving a seminar in hybrid format on Wednesday 12th March at 16.30 GMT: "Regionalism in Mycenaean Writing: Comparing Writing Practices at Mycenae and Thebes" Zoom reg: cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/regi... #anciebtbluesky

My review of Philippa Steele's (@viewsproject.bsky.social) latest, Exploring Writing Systems and Practices in the Bronze Age Aegean, has just been published in JAOS and can be read on Academia.edu: www.academia.edu/127918039/Re...

My review of Philippa Steele's (@viewsproject.bsky.social) latest, Exploring Writing Systems and Practices in the Bronze Age Aegean, has just been published in JAOS and can be read on Academia.edu: www.academia.edu/127918039/Re...

ἄστρων κάτοιδα νυκτέρων ὁμήγυριν

‘But those were small things: a sixteenth-century member of the college, dropped in the first court now, would be instantaneously at home. And we felt it. However impervious one might be to the feeling of past time, there were moments when one was drugged by it…

Sigh — another bridge…

Sometimes, life is good.

Not much text yet, but substantial progress has been made on ‘unrolling’ Scroll 5: open.substack.com/pub/scrollpr...

Harshest critic.

‘For Tolkien fans put off by a stream of ersatz offerings, from Amazon’s Rings of Power to the animated War of the Rohirrim, The Collected Poems offers up the pleasure of Tolkien’s creativity unalloyed.’

It’s me! Come along on March 12th to hear about the trainee scribe at Mycenae who just can’t get the dative right!

The state of archaeology: excavations completed in 1950, no major publications until the 1990s, and significant work is still needed in the 2020s.

I do enjoy Bluesky, but the iPad experience is… a little bit wanting.

Deeply saddened by the news of Arthur Pomeroy’s death. He was the cornerstone of the Victoria University Classics Department for many years, an excellent teacher, and a warm, avuncular figure. He will be sorely missed.

AIA/SCS bound — hope to see some of you there!

Twitter is once again alight with Odyssey Discourse (TM). No matter how we sideline Greek and Latin, Homer never seems to go anywhere: substack.com/home/post/p-...

Twitter is once again alight with Odyssey Discourse (TM). No matter how we sideline Greek and Latin, Homer never seems to go anywhere: substack.com/home/post/p-...

The cold was a result of the colossal eruption of Mt Tambora in 1815, leading to the ‘Year Without a Summer’ in 1816. This also gave the colour to the sky in Munch’s Scream and inspired Byron’s Darkness.

My Christmas pome from last year, with thanks to @readliberties.bsky.social

At risk of being a terrible pedant, the entire point of the Ring is that it cannot be resisted: even Frodo failed and was spared only by an act of grace. Tolkien would later connect it with the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’ Frodo was tempted and delivered.