In a paper just published in the Journal for the History of Astronomy, Stašo Forenbaher (Institute for Anthropological Research, Zagreb) and Alexander Jones (ISAW) announce the discovery of ivory fragments of a Hellenistic astrologer's board in a part of a cave in southern Croatia that was sealed off towards the end of the first century BCE after having served as a cultic sanctuary. The board, which an astrologer would have used to display to his client the arrangement of heavenly bodies in a horoscope, is the oldest such object known to exist. It witnesses the rapid spread of Greek horoscopic astrology, which came into existence as a fusion of Mesopotamian and Egyptian astral divination with Greek cosmology probably not long before 100 BCE.

Nakovana Cave overlooks the Adriatic Sea from a ridge near the western tip of Pelješac Peninsula, 100 kilometers northwest of Dubrovnik. Some of the most important Adriatic sea-lines of antiquity pass through the channels below the cave. The Nakovana Project (directed by Timothy Kaiser and Stašo Forenbaher) began work at the cave in 1999, and towards the end of the field season a hitherto unknown extension of the cave was discovered. Fragments of pottery vessels were lying about, most of them Hellenistic finewares datable to the last four centuries BCE, evidently the accumulated remains from cult offerings. The ivory fragments were discovered among this material.

When complete, the board had twelve arc-shaped ivory plates forming a complete circle and representing the twelve signs of the zodiac. An astrologer would have displayed a horoscope by placing colored stones standing for the Sun, Moon, and planets in the places they occupied in the zodiac on a particular date, for example a client's birthdate. It is not clear whether the board was actually used where its remains were found in Nakovana cave or whether it was deposited there as a precious offering.

ISAW will host the Linked Ancient World Data Institute (LAWDI) from May 31st to June 2nd, 2012 in New York City. Applications are due 17 February 2012.

LAWDI, funded by the Office of Digital Humanities of the National Endowment for Humanities, will bring together an international faculty of practitioners working in the field of Linked Data with twenty attendees who are implementing or planning the creation of digital resources.

More information, including a list of faculty, and application instructions are available at the LAWDI page on the Digital Classicist wiki.

In recent days two of ISAW's flagship online resources — the Ancient World Image Bank and the Pleiades gazetteer — significantly advanced our mission to connect and contextualize information about the ancient world on the web. Photos posted by ISAW and other AWIB collaborators on the Flickr.com photo sharing website are now directly linked with Pleiades place resources and vice versa.

Many people have worked to make this a reality; the heavy lifting was done by Nate Nagy and Iris Fernandez on AWIB, Sean Gillies on Pleiades, and Daniel Bogan at Flickr.  Their work makes it easy to feature thumbnails and lists of related images on individual Pleiades pages and to provide historical-geographic context to photos on Flickr.

You can read more about how all this works in two blog posts by Sean Gillies: one on the Pleiades News Blog and another (a guest blog post) on the Flickr Code Blog.

ISAW is happy to announce the launch of ISAW Papers, an open-content scholarly journal that publishes article-length works on any topic within the scope of ISAW's scholarly research. The first paper has just been published: "A New Discovery of a Component of Greek Astrology in Babylonian Tablets: The 'Terms'", by Alexander Jones and John M. Steele.

Oleksandr V. Symonenko, ISAW Visiting Research Scholar 2009-10, has just published a new book in Russian entitled The Roman Import from the North Pontic Sarmatians (St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg State University Faculty of Philology Press, 2011). Dr. Symonenko is the 2011-12 Glassman Holland Research Fellow at the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. He is also Chief Research Fellow of the Institute of Archaeology at the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences.

The tax account occupies more than 50 pages of a codex in the British Library, long known but never published. Its more than 1500 lines give us the names of landowners and the amounts of money they paid for the land tax in 546/7. Rich and poor, men and women, living people and estates, institutions and individuals all appear, giving us a close look at how wealth was divided in an entire village and at the workings of the taxation system.

The volume, A Sixth-century Tax Register from the Hermopolite Nome, has just been published by ISAW Director Roger Bagnall together with James G. Keenan and Leslie S. B. MacCoull in American Studies in Papyrology. It is available from the David Brown Book Company (US) and Oxbow Books (UK).

Gilles Bransbourg, an ISAW Research Associate and Assistant Roman Curator at the American Numismatic Society, has written an article published in the current edition of Newsweek Magazine on what Ancient Rome can teach us about the current debt crisis and the euro. Click here to read the online edition. For more information on Dr. Bransbourg, visit his ISAW profile here.

The latest issue of ISAW’s newsletter is now available.  Issue 5 includes introductions to our new faculty, scholars, and graduate students, fieldwork and research updates, and exhibitions and academic event listings for Fall 2011 and beyond.  To download an electronic copy of the newsletter, click here.

Dr. Deborah Klimburg-Salter is Professor for Asian Art History at the Institute for Art History, University of Vienna. She has also been a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Oxford, The Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes, and Wellesley College. She specializes in South and Central Asian art history and is the author of numerous books and articles including Tabo Monastery: Art and History (2005) , Tabo: a lamp for a kingdom: Early Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Art in the Western Himalaya (1997), and The Cultural History of Western Tibet (ed. with Junyun, Tauscher, and Yuan 2008). She is a member of the European Association of South Asian Archaeologists in Western Europe (EASAA) and since 2007 has directed the research project "The Cultural History of the Western Himalaya from the 8th Century" at the National Research Network, sponsored by the Austrian Science Fund.

Dr. Klimburg-Salter will be presenting a lecture at ISAW on Tuesday, November 8th at 6pm on "New Archaeological Discoveries in Afghanistan: Mes Aynak, Tepe Naranj and the Buddhist Art of the Kabul River Valley".

The qualified candidate will act as a key member in the Exhibitions Department, which curates and organizes two major loan shows per annum, with at least one of these based upon international loans. Working directly with the Exhibitions Director, the position’s main responsibilities will be grounded in overseeing all logistical aspects of implementing both in-house and traveling exhibitions.

More information is available on the Exhibition Registrar job page.

ISAW Senior Fellow Marianne Bergmann will be giving the Fifth Annual Leon Levy Lecture on Tuesday, Nov. 1st at 6pm on "A Greek Statuary Complex at the Sarapieion of Memphis and the Early Ptolemaic Kings."

Until 2008, Professor Bergmann was the director of the Archaeological Institute at the University of Goettingen, where she also taught classical archaeology. She has published on Roman portraits of the 3rd century AD and other questions of Roman portraiture, on theomorphic representations of Hellenistic, and Roman rulers, and on late antique mythological sculpture. In recent times she has concentrated on problems of Greco-Roman Egypt. With M. Heinzelmann (University of Cologne), she excavates at Schedia near Alexandria.

RSVP is required to isaw@nyu.edu. Reception to follow.

In recognition and support of Open Access Week, this post lists digital resources currently available from ISAW and its collaborators under the terms of open licenses:

Each year the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, makes about 7-10 appointments of visiting research scholars. We are now accepting applications for fellowships beginning in fall 2012. ISAW's scope embraces the history, archaeology, and culture of the entire Old World from late prehistoric times to the eighth century AD, including Asia and Africa. Projects of a theoretical or comparative nature relevant to this domain are also welcome. Academic visitors at ISAW should be individuals of scholarly distinction or promise in any relevant field of ancient studies who will benefit from the stimulation of working in an environment with colleagues in other disciplines. Applicants with a history of interdisciplinary exchange are particularly welcome. They are expected to be in residence at the Institute during the academic terms for which they are appointed and to take part in the intellectual life of the community.

For details about the categories of fellows, financial support, and the application, please visit http://isaw.nyu.edu/academics/visiting-scholars. The deadline for applications is December 10, 2011. New York University is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer.

On 28 September 2011, The Ancient World Online (AWOL) posted an entry on Zephyrvs, a Spanish journal of archaeology and Prehistory. With this entry AWOL's index of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies reaches the milestone of one thousand titles.

We first assembled the Alphabetical list of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies in observance of Open Access Week 2009, just under two years ago. It was based on journals cited in AWOL since its beginning in January 2009 . At that time the list included more than two hundred titles - a surprisingly large number - or so we thought at the time. In an effort to make the List canonical and comprehensive, we began adding in groups of twenty titles additional journals, all (or nearly all) of which had been accessible via Abzu for varying lengths of time. At the same time, we continued to add newly discovered and newly emerging titles to the list, constantly verifying older links and repairing broken ones. On February 17, 2010 the list reached six hundred titles, on July 7, 2010 the list reached seven hundred titles, and on May 5, 2011, with the addition of Engramma, the list reached nine hundred titles.

• Ancient World Digital Library Book Viewer - The first fruits of an effort to accelerate and enhance access to the emerging global library of digital publications on the ancient world, the AWDL Book Viewer lets users read and search digitized copies of previously printed scholarly materials.
• Ancient World Online - Find out about all the latest online and open-access material relating to the ancient world, regardless of where it's published.

and

• Abzu - A guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world.

Those interested can subscribe to receive AWOL updates by email.  Enter your address in the form here.  Updates are also posted regularly to the ISAW Library Facebook page, and on Twitter @ISAWLibrary.

We provide a variety of ways for you to follow the latest news from ISAW. Whenever you like, you can visit our news blog online. If you prefer to have news delivered to you, just subscribe to news updates via webfeed (RSS) or via email (just fill out the simple form, courtesy of Feedburner). Or you can follow us on Twitter or "like" us on Facebook. Whichever approach you take, you'll stay up to date on the full spectrum of research, publication, and outreach activities at ISAW.

Daniel Caner is one of nine new visiting research scholars at ISAW for 2011-12. Dr. Caner’s home institution is the University of Connecticut, Storrs where he is Associate Professor in History and Classics. He specializes in the social and religious history of late antiquity, more specifically Christian monasticism in the Roman World. Recently his focus has centered on the complex issues of gift-giving and religious wealth. At ISAW he is working on a book entitled The Rich and the Pure: Christian Gifts and Religious Society in Early Byzantium. He will be giving the first Visiting Research Scholar Lecture of the year on Tuesday, October 4^th at 6pm on “Christian Wealth and the Challenge of Charity in Early Byzantium.”  For more information on Dr. Caner and his upcoming lecture, visit http://isaw.nyu.edu/events/visiting-research-scholar-lecture.

The latest exhibition at NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World opens today: Edge of Empires: Pagans, Jews, and Christians at Roman Dura-Europos. It runs through January 8, 2012. Admission for individuals is free. Hours are 11am - 6pm (11am - 8pm on Fridays), closed Mondays.

The exhibition illustrates the international, indeed pluralistic character of Dura-Europos, highlighting objects that demonstrate the coexistence of multiple religions — including polytheistic cults, Judaism, and Christianity — the great variety of languages employed by its population, and its role as an international military garrison.

More information is available on ISAW's Exhibitions webpage.