I've been doing an AMA all day on r/AskHistorians if you care to jump in:

Greek chorus vs Oompa-Loompas.

Lately my teenage son and I have been playing chess just before bedtime. Tonight I got the first ever en passant mate in my life. After ..Bh5, the final moves were g4 hxg4#.

💀 Le 9 octobre prochain paraîtra mon livre Terry Pratchett et la Mort : Mourir en majuscules (@edlatalante.bsky.social). La mort est un sujet central dans l’œuvre et la vie de Pratchett, une évidence qu’il a longtemps cherché à comprendre et non à craindre. 1/4 www.l-atalante.com/catalogue/la...

Some days are just like this.

Here's a really good site for hosting academic papers without ads, without spamming your and your colleagues' inboxes, and without signing away all manner of rights. Zenodo is operated by a European institution (CERN) and, best of all, is named after an ancient Homer scholar.

Potential workaround if you're already logged in and get prompted by the ToS notification: opening this "privacy policy" link www.academia.edu/privacytakes you to a page where you can access the drop-down menu and reach "account settings." From there I was able to delete my account without agreeing.

I'm sorry, worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable permission to my voice and likeness? For what now? In any manner for any purpose??? This is in academia/.edu's new ToS, which you're prompted to agree to on login. Anyway I'll be jumping ship. You can find my stuff at hcommons.org.

Favourite take of the day, as a reaction to seeing some really dumb stuff in classic Who:

INDO-EUROPEAN #1: *h₁ey, *knh₃ck *knh₃ck INDO-EUROPEAN #2: *kʷo's *thh₂re? IE 1: *Larry IE 2: *Larry *kʷo? IE 1: Laryngeal! 😁 IE 2: ... IE 1: *gh₂ddit? 🤣 IE 2: that was so bad I think we need to all get in our chariots and head out in all directions just to get as far away as we can from you

My last living musical hero is still my hero but unfortunately no longer living. RIP to the great, great Mr. Tom Lehrer.

I have a piece out on the invention of the Trojan War in Ancient History Magazine 55. 'The Trojan War belongs to the era of the Argonauts, Perseus and Medusa, and Heracles: it belongs to the era of myth.' (Not an academic magazine, but I'd be saying the same thing if I were still in academia!)

Oof. Made it past the winter solstice. More daylight, here we come. Kia pai te Matariki!

Normal Greeks: “emergency exit procedure.” Me, a late antique Hellenist: “liturgy of the exodus of danger.”

There's a Spanish prose translation of the Odyssey that has some notable features, but I can't track down who the translator is. Might anyone know? The first line runs: Cuéntame, Musa, la historia del hombre de muchos senderos... It's fairly widespread, but I can't find the translator credited.

Mmmmm that's a Doctor Who villain I'd not mind if they had just been forgotten forever.

It's too soon to tell, but we would not be surprised if this story started getting media attention soon. Researchers at the University of Zurich used AI-based accounts to try and manipulate users without seeking consent or informing the community. www.reddit.com/r/changemyvi...

It's fascinating to watch the popular reputation of the 'library of Alexandria'. The biggest shift came in 1980: Carl Sagan's largely fictitious account in 'Cosmos'. But the subsequent history is intriguing too. A superb article on the library's pre-1980 reputation: www.jstor.org/stable/2709356

@yaelrice.bsky.social and I co-authored this piece precisely to combat misguided work like this so people don't have to constantly rehearse the arguments about why it's specious. We laid it all out here for you! hyperallergic.com/604897/how-s...

Some calendars, and how much they drift relative to the solar year: Athenian calendar (Metonic cycle): 37.375 days per century Julian/Alexandrian calendars (Kallippan cycle): 0.783 days per century Gregorian calendar: 0.00033 days per century

Today is the 756,130th day since the Julian calendar began (1 January 45 BCE), and the 161,591st day since the Gregorian calendar began (15 October 1582). Here's a handy converter which, unusually, gets the transition from Julian to Gregorian in 1582 right. ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/jdc/#/jd

There's just one bit of Latin in the film 'Conclave': the speech that the Dean (Ralph Fiennes) makes right before the final vote. This won't be obvious to people who can't hear the difference between Italian and Latin, and the subtitles don't indicate it.

Seeing a lot of comments that Matt Damon's Odysseus should have Mycenaean armour. But... Odysseus is not a Mycenaean figure. He is a character in an Archaic Greek epic. Insisting that his armour should reflect the Bronze Age is glossing over all sorts of complexity www.standard.co.uk/culture/film...

for the cycle of responses to images from Nolan's Odyssey production

Leeds Classics is deeply sad to learn that our colleague Malcolm Heath died peacefully yesterday. Since his retirement in 2022 he had unfortunately been in ill health, but he was well supported by friends and family, and when colleagues from the department visited in November he was in good spirits.

Just in case you thought that removing DEI criteria would mean that everyone is competing equally: NIH is removing grad students from underrepresented backgrounds from the applicant pool altogether. Their applications will not be considered. Other students, not from these backgrounds, will be.

Regarding Wes Huff words on Ancient Greek on that one podcast: We *absolutely* know how Ancient Greek was pronounced. We know how it was pronounced in multiple dialects. We know how it was pronounced across multiple centuries. There is no debate on this. #biblicalgreek

How to opt-out of Cambridge University Press emails inviting authors and editors to allow their work to be given to provides of AI (heading usually includes "AI subsidiary aggregation addendum") Open the email and then follow these steps: (1/3)

What is the #History of ‘Yule” as the holiday and name? From early calendars to festive celebrations, @kiwihellenist.bsky.social has a great answer on the topic.

Why is modern Christmas imagery stuck in the Victorian era? While many traditions and images are far more recent then you might think, /u/lord_mayor_of_reddit goes back to the start to gift us this great thread. #Christmas

The invention of Santa Claus in 1800s New York: a history. St Nicholas was a Christian bishop who lived in Anatolia in the 200s-300s. Historically he's best known for his involvement in the Council of Nicaea in 325, and for an incident there where he punched the heretic Arius in the face. 1/

Periodic table colored by lickability. 😛

I just read a magazine article that referred to 'the human mind' in the title, except I read it as 'the Hurrian mind' and thought there was nothing odd about that. Halfway through I finally started to wonder why it wasn't saying anyhing about the Bronze Age. I guess I'm still not over jet lag.

The Christmas market at the Munich Residenz is looking nice, and the air smells of sugar. (Though I must say the Feuerzangenbowle is better at the medieval market - here it isn't even on fire)

I recently heard Bach's Passacaglia and Fugue on a pedal harpsichord. Today, I heard it arranged for two accordions. And played beautifully. I had heard Bach violin sonatas played on accordion before -- I helped out, indeed (on keyboard) -- but this version of the passacaglia is new to me.

Feeling a little bit Orff after a Covid booster. estuans interius ira vehementi in amaritudine loquor meae menti. (Sephiroth! Sephiroth!) factus de materia cinis elementi, similis sum folio de quo ludunt venti. (I am a leaf on the wind...)

Someone sent us some posts containing some Discourse (both positive and critical!) about our moderation policies today. We don't want to pile onto people innocently skeeting about the place, but it does strike us as an aspect of who we are we haven't introduced here yet. And so! 🧵🧵🧵...

Today the NZ government decided to end the country's only source of public funding for humanities and social sciences research. The decision came with no warning, and was a complete surprise to all tertiary education institutions.

Just found out from @maklelan.bsky.social about a (new?) lunatic theory on social media: the reason Jesus was swaddled and put in a manger is because 1st century Judaeans regularly swaddled sheep and put them in feeding troughs. I am now crying with laughter.

Benjamin Jowett as tourist attraction. (Walsh, Handy-book 640f., quoted in James Sutherland 1975, The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, 254)

The Troad as depicted by Jean-Baptiste Le Chevalier in 1791. archive.org/details/desc... He argued that Homer's Troy had been in a separate location from classical Troy, at Pınarbaşı. He got both locations wrong. This created centuries of confusion over whether Troy is really 'Troy'.

New Herculaneum scroll scan just dropped, with letters immediately visible: open.substack.com/pub/scrollpr...

The Troad as depicted by Jean-Baptiste Le Chevalier in 1791. archive.org/details/desc... He argued that Homer's Troy had been in a separate location from classical Troy, at Pınarbaşı. He got both locations wrong. This created centuries of confusion over whether Troy is really 'Troy'.

Let's talk about the Mary Rose bows and their draw weights. Most people, if they know anything about the MR bows, know that they had very heavy draw weights, and that they've been used to represent medieval longbows used for military purposes, commonly called "warbows" by many modern authors. /1

A while back I spent some time getting an AI to generate images of Odysseus and the Cyclops in various styles. These are the more successful efforts. Most of the time, something strange went wrong. (Below: Pissarro; Futurama; 'cheesy rom com'; 1930s film actors)

In honour of @steampowered.com joining Bluesky, here's a classical-themed game: Kottabos VR. Now you, too, can play this ancient Greek sympotic drinking game, with a VR headset, and without making a mess! Published by Emory University's Center for Digital Scholarship. #digitalclassics