People who are mad about The Odyssey already got their representation in a previous adaptation

If you are a polytheist and by some chance have any money left over, consider throwing a little to Kynthia, who is really struggling to keep afloat and just had to renew Hellenic Faith hellenicfaith.com/2026/07/16/i...

is there anyone here who has any of these books to hand and could scan like 1-2 pages? (those with Pighi's edition/translation of Claudius' hymn to the Moon) -Pighi, La poesia lirica latina (1945) -Pighi, Lyra Romana (1946) -Poeti latini tradotti di scrittori italiani contemporanei (1993)

is there anyone here who has any of these books to hand and could scan like 1-2 pages? (those with Pighi's edition/translation of Claudius' hymn to the Moon) -Pighi, La poesia lirica latina (1945) -Pighi, Lyra Romana (1946) -Poeti latini tradotti di scrittori italiani contemporanei (1993)

Weird how none of the Odyssey discourse is about this

Going to mute the word "fanfiction" so I never have to read "Vergil wrote Homer fanfiction" on this website again

If you are a polytheist and by some chance have any money left over, consider throwing a little to Kynthia, who is really struggling to keep afloat and just had to renew Hellenic Faith hellenicfaith.com/2026/07/16/i...

Does anyone know how to read this kind of musical notation? Or where to turn to learn how to read it myself?

Firmicus Maternus has a line that's literally "they aren't women but they want to be believed to be women" and that was the point where I abandoned my academic training that goes "well don't use modern labels" because he just fucking said it

fantastic thread

This is, in fact, an imperalist logic: that English speech can encompass any word from any language, all cultural space. The post itself shows this doesn't work: English speakers don't know how to type umlauts (it's Türkiye), they also don't know how to pronounce them (they still say Turkey-eh).

People who think this: Do you really think the rest of the world refers to other countries by their autonyms? That non-English speaking countries use the words "England" or "United Kingdom"? Or are you suggesting they're all uncivilised for it but that you expect this country to rise above the norm?

The rest of this thread is great but depicting God as Zeus is absolutely not what poisoned the imaginary. People in the Renaissance who cared about Zeus knew that his iconography is symbolic and the deity is non-gendered. Why are we putting the ignorance of modern Christians on paganism/humanism?

this is one of those poems you read and immediately become part of your personal canon. thank you @martiana.bsky.social :)

it’s very much worth noting that not all ancient authors did this! Philodemus of Gadara’s epigram for Trygonion consistently genders her as a woman, its only modern translators who have decided that it must be transphobic! archive.org/details/a-fu...

i do find it really funny that everyone transhistoricizes cis genders ([cis] man/woman) and heterosexuality and homosexuality but it's transfemininity specifically that has this bizarre burden and discourse of being a frame that one "should not" transhistoricize

Few joys in my life as pure and simple as making diplomatic transcriptions from Latin manuscripts. Resolving abbreviations and emending a text is often extremely frustrating. Simply taking in all the misspellings and mysteriously placed punctuation is calming. Communion with the human spirit

Exactly as you can make a compound noun from "riot" and "goblin" in English - to wit, "riot goblin" - so you can make a compound noun from "Randale" and "Kobold". That does not make it "a German word" in the sense that anyone knows or uses it.

"The Letter Z in Light of Latin Inscriptions (First to Seventh Centuries AD)"-- this is what I'm here for!

this is the biblical hermeneutics I come to Bluesky to see

EVERYONE STOP. Briefly marvel at the fantastic craftsmanship of this handsome terracotta pig!

This is virtually the opposite of how I want to be treated as a reader

The episode of Byzantium & Friends where I discuss my book is now available!

I forgot how much culture influences how you engage w/ media. Someone said to me "Its only natural to want the main character to win & be disappointed when they lose" Like, no, I'm used to Jewish storytelling aka "Come look at the trials & tribulations of a dipshit, can he get out of this? Haha no"

The Revenge of Juno 👸❇️🪿🦚

Instead of Harry Potter in Latin, some actual literature that's been translated into our language: the Rigveda, the Upanishads, the Ramayana, the Analects, the Qur'an, the Divine Comedy, Don Quijote, the poetry of Goethe and Schiller

I did hear this language from a trans person IRL, but in like 2010, and I saw arcane variations on it online later, but in the last decade at least, it's been exclusively from cis people. It cedes too much to cissexism, so of course we rejected it and of course cis people love it

I couldn’t believe it got cancelled. One of the most interesting, imaginative, weird and engrossing things on television. It ticked all the boxes for me.

Also, are folks interested in an intro Akkadian group? @keeganosinski.bsky.social was making noises about it, and it would be fun to get back into. We’d be using Huehnergard, which I can share. Time unsure but am flexible. Reply/DM if interested, and share!

Recently, at a bilingual exhibition, I saw "Ha-Shem" in the English text rendered as "Ha-Shern" in the German

Holm, Tawny L. 2026. Aramaic literature from Egypt and the Levant (Writings from the Ancient World 30). Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.

Never mind, I just remembered German compound verbs 😔

English-speakers treat the German spelling of compounds as single words as something really alien and bizarre, but it means you never have to waste time thinking about "video game" vs "videogame", "health care" vs "healthcare", let alone figuring out the hyphen in a three- or four-word compound

#MedievalSky is there any scholarship looking at vernacular glosses holistically, rather than specific texts/languages?

I really don't like the term "Christian myth" in reference to the crucifixion, etc. Mythology is its own kind of discourse, which was firmly rejected by the Church fathers, so a concept of mythology that includes their theology is necessarily so broad, it loses what is distinctive about mythology.

reject modernity (online r*pe academy), embrace tradition (the Beit Midrash telling a man to die)

Nota bene: Tironian note for "trans"

My father had a bad fall today - it seems he narrowly avoided serious damage, but perhaps those of you who worship might pray to Asclepius and Lycurgus (or any god) for him tonight.

good scholarship and art is mostly just realizing whom and what you can become, given all available constraints, whose form of expression is meaningful there is fundamentally no competitive component whatsoever; competitive art isn't art, competitive thought isn't thought

the second challenge is trying to remember, despite all ideology to the contrary, that, if your scholarship and art is real and of any value, it is necessarily a social phenomenon, a fundamentally social gesture, and not at all any kind of token of individual merit or ability

It should have been the first day of a wonderful conference in Baghdad today - the first time ever that the International Association of Assyriology assembled in Iraq for its annual meeting. This conference was to be the culmination of 4 years of hard work by Iraqi and international colleagues. 1/4

Not having an "original copy" of an old text does not mean the version we have is unreliable. It can be, but not for that reason. (Just think of modern publishing: is there some kind of inviolate original that you could go check for any book you own? has that ever occurred to you as a problem?)

Who brings the Easter eggs? At various times & places these have been: - hare - rabbit - fox - cuckoo - stork - flying church bells - crane - lark - 'heavenly hen' - 'the red-egg bird' - Paschalia the Easter Spirit - flying old man - St Nicholas - God

time is real but clocks are fake

Bluesky ate the link for this one:

I know this pales in comparison to the human toll, but I keep thinking about an unedited work by Ibn Waḥshiyyah, written over a thousand years ago, whose only known copies are kept in Tehran. It is too easy to imagine the servants of empire destroying these libraries out of sheer spite.

Pet peeve, but I think it's really annoying to cite fragmentary Greco-Roman authors by like "fr. 17" (in one particular edition, which may be hard to access / too speculative / a myriad issues) and not give the actual primary source (of which you can usually find a text/translation online)

I used to think Satanism (as depicted in media) was a projection of the *repressed* evils of Christian churches, but increasingly it seems to be a mirror of the *avowed* ideals of conservative Christianity: "those evil Satanists abuse our kids — also good pastors should be allowed to abuse kids!"