Due to the protracted weather threat presented by Hurricane Sandy and the associated shutdown of all New York area public transportation, ISAW facilities will remain closed on Tuesday, 30 October 2012 and all public events are canceled.

ISAW students, staff, and faculty are urged to monitor the weather situation closely and to remain alert for further communications from ISAW, NYU, and community leaders.

Because of expected weather conditions and public transportation shutdowns, ISAW will be closed Monday 29 October 2012. All seminars and public events that day are canceled.

ISAW Director Roger Bagnall was presented with Papyrological Texts in Honor of Roger S. Bagnall at a surprise champagne reception held at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris on October 16, with colleagues from France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, and the UK present to celebrate. The book will appear later this fall as American Studies in Papyrology, volume 53. It contains papyri and ostraca in various ancient languages edited by fifty papyrologists from Europe and North America.

The Fall 2012 issue of ISAW’s newsletter is now available.  Issue 7 includes  alumni news,  an exploration of our Echoes of the Past exhibition, research updates from the ISAW community, and event listings for Fall 2012 and beyond.  To download an electronic copy of the newsletter, click here.

Smithsonian.com has just published a short article on recent collaborative work to enhance online mapping of ancient sites and online linking of related archaeological, photographic, textual, numismatic, and museological resources. It highlights the role of the multi-institutional Pelagios project (for which our Pleiades project provides the geographic data) in creating a free, online base map for the ancient world and in joining together the contents of over 15 (and growing) important websites for antiquity.

In coming months, you can expect more exciting developments in the area of online ancient geography from the ISAW Digital Programs team and our extramural partners, including Pelagios, UNC's Ancient World Mapping Center, Harvard's Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization, Tuft's Perseus Digital Library, the Alexandria Archive Institute, Johan Åhlfeldt's Regnum Francorum Online, the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, and the British Museum.

ISAW faculty have recently approved a statement on research assessment (PDF), which has been published on the ISAW website. As ISAW was founded to support research in the ancient world, this document lays out our philosophy for pursuing and rewarding excellence in research projects and in the variety of ways—in print, online, and in person—they are communicated to both scholars and the general public. As such, this statement provides context for the rich and growing spectrum of research, publication, and exhibition activities that call ISAW home.

This monograph, published in the series Ancient Art and Architecture in Context from the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, considers the painted frieze on the façade of Tomb II at Vergina (ca. 330-280 B.C.) as a visual document that offers vital evidence for the public self-stylings of Macedonian royalty in the era surrounding the reign of Alexander the Great. The hunting scene on the frieze reflects the construction of Macedonian royal identity through the appeal to specific and long-standing cultural traditions, which emerged, long before Alexanders reign, out of a complex negotiation of claims to heroic and local dynastic pasts, regional ideals of kingship, and models of royal behavior provided by the East.

Hallie M. Franks is an Assistant Professor of Ancient Studies at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and a Visiting Research Scholar at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World.  She currently excavates with the American Research Center in Sofia and the NIAM-BAS at the Macedonian site of Heraclea Sintica in south-west Bulgaria. Her next project looks at the metaphorical connections between movement through architecture and travel in ancient Greece.

Hunters, Heroes, Kings: The Frieze of Tomb II at Vergina

by Hallie M. Franks

Ancient Art and Architecture in Context 3
250 pp, 62 col. & b/w figs., 1 col. fold-out
9.5" x 11.5"
Cloth, ISBN: 978-0-87661-966-7
Publication Date: Fall 2012
Retail Price $75
It will be available for sale here: BUY NOW

Roger Bagnall, director of ISAW, was one of two papyrologists asked to examine the fourth century papyrus fragment recently identified by Karen L. King, Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard University. Written in Coptic and only 4 by 8 centimeters, it contains the phrase 'Jesus said to them, my wife', sparking controversy in the scholarly world and reporting from various news media across the globe. After examining the piece with AnneMarie Luijendijk of Princeton University, Prof. Bagnall believes the fragment to be authentic.

Below find a link to the Harvard Divinity School website containing images and a translation of the text, along with a draft of Prof. King's article.

http://www.hds.harvard.edu/faculty-research/research-projects/the-gospel-of-jesuss-wife

The following article has just been published and is available online: Elliott, Thomas, Sebastian Heath, and John Muccigrosso, "Report on the Linked Ancient World Data Institute," Information Standards Quarterly, 2012 Spring/Summer, 24(2/3): 43-45 [ http://www.niso.org/publications/isq/2012/v24no2-3/elliott/ ].

Abstract:

From may 31 to June 2nd, 2012, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University hosted the Linked Ancient World Data Institute (LAWDI), an internationally attended workshop funded by the National Endowment for Humanities' Office of Digital Humanities (grant number: ht5004811). this three-day event mixed longer presentations by invited speakers with presentations by twenty applicants who had submitted statements of interest on why their work would benefit from intensive interaction with colleagues also pursuing digital publication of scholarly resources on the public internet.

ISAW is delighted to announce a one-day, public conference entitled The Reception of Antiquity: China and Europe, which will begin on Friday, 28 September 2012 at the Institute. Due to space limitations, RSVP is required via email to isaw@nyu.edu. Complete information is available on the conference website.

Description

Antiquity has its prolonged life through memories and imaginations that were shaped by textual and visual remains. Antiquarianism, which became an intellectual trend in China in the 11th century and in Europe in the 14th century, has captured much scholarly attention. Not limited to antiquarianism, this conference will explore more broadly the reception of antiquity in Chinese and European contexts. It will investigate questions such as what is antiquity? How did collections shape the notions of antiquity, or vice versa? How did the fascination with antiquity trigger new modes of cultural production? What is the role of antiquity in the modern era? This conference is intended to break down chronological, geographical, and disciplinary boundaries, bringing together a diverse and stimulating group of scholars who otherwise might not exchange ideas on the same platform.

ISAW is seeking current NYU students for part-time work as "IT Support Wizards" for the coming academic year. Eligible NYU students can view the job description and apply online via the NYU CareerNet system offered by the NYU Wasserman Center for Career Development (job id 866757). We regret that applications cannot be taken by other means.

James Cowey and Rodney Ast (Institut für Papyrologie, Universität Heidelberg) have just issued the second number in their series "Bulletin of Online Emendations to Papyri." The bulletin, which is freely available online in PDF format, lists all textual emendations that have been entered online at papyri.info and vetted by members of its scholarly editorial board. These emendations have not previously appeared in print. Fifty-one texts on papyri and ostraka are addressed in this issue.

Papyri.info is an open-access papyrological information system built and operated by ISAW and NYU Digital Library Technology services in collaboration with Duke University, Heidelberg University, the University of Kentucky, King's College London, and other institutions and scholars world-wide. In addition to institutional support and scholarly volunteer labor, papyri.info is supported by major funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

ISAW is pleased to announce the appointment of Fiona Kidd (ISAW Visiting Research Scholar 2011-12) as Assistant Curator in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art beginning September 4, 2012.

For the past year Dr. Kidd has been working at ISAW on her research project, Beyond the Boundaries: Identifying Exchange Relations in Central Asian Visual Art Based on the Akchakhan-kala ‘Portraits’, and presented a lecture on the topic as part of the ISAW Visiting Research Scholar Lecture Series in March 2012.

Dr. Kidd received her PhD in Central Asian Archaeology at the University of Sydney in 2005 with a dissertation entitled The Samarkand region of Sogdiana: figurines, costume and identity; 2^nd-1^st century BCE – 8^th century CE. Since 2008 she has held an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Syndey where she was working on ancient Central Asian wall painting, specifically Chorasmian mural art. She has published articles and book chapters and has several forthcoming and in-preparation publications, including her first monograph on Central Asia. She is also currently working with ISAW Professor Sören Stark as co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Central Asian Archaeology. Since 1997 she has been involved in several fieldwork projects in Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Syria.

We are excited that Dr. Kidd will be working at such a distinguished institution so near to ISAW and look forward to her continued involvement in the ISAW community in the coming years.

Newly added to the Ancient World Image Bank group photo pool on Flickr:

• Site photos of Marea in Egypt by Iris Fernandez (via the isawnyu account on Flickr)
• Artifact photos from Alezio in Italy by AWIB collaborator Dan Diffendale (via his own Flickr account)

There is more information (and more photos!) on the Ancient World Image Bank page.

On the 17th of July, the American Numismatic Society announced the launch of Online Coins of the Roman Empire (OCRE), a major new tool to aid in the identification, research and cataloging of the coins of the ancient world. Produced in collaboration with ISAW, OCRE presents, in an easily searchable form, all the varieties of the coinage issued by the emperors of ancient Rome. The initial phase covers the coinage of the first emperors, from Augustus to Hadrian (27 BC – AD 138).

ANS database developer Ethan Gruber, who built OCRE, explains how it has been designed from the beginning to use a Linked Data approach to deliver added functionality:

OCRE is built on Numishare, an open source suite of applications for managing and publishing numismatic collections on the web.  The underlying data model of the collection is the Numismatic Description Standard (NUDS), a linked data-influenced XML ontology for coins.  NUDS enables the linking of coin types in OCRE to numismatic concepts represented on Nomisma.org as well as linking to web resources that describe physical specimens, such as those in the ANS' own collection.  Data about these specimens­–images, weights, findspots–can be extracted for statistical and geographic analyses in OCRE.

OCRE linked data is published in a standard format specified by the Pelagios project, which means that other websites -- like ISAW's collaborative geographic database Pleiades -- can automatically link to all the coins found or minted at a particular location. See, for example, the Pleiades place resource for Emerita Augusta (modern Merida, Spain), where you will find a link to 15 coins minted at Emerita Augusta in the right-hand column, under the subheading "Pelagios Annotations from Online Coins of the Roman Empire."

OCRE project manager and Roman specialist Gilles Bransbourg, who is an ISAW Research Associate, describes the advance that is heralded by OCRE:

OCRE is a leap forward for the numismatists, historians and archaeologists alike. Until now, any research into Roman imperial coinage had to rely on paper-based catalogues, online auctions or the very few collections available online. OCRE offers a single central online catalogue that allows users to view download and organize digitized information that aims at covering the entire history of the Roman imperial coinage. The attraction of OCRE is that it is built as an open system. Any significant public or private collection may now link itself to OCRE and make its coins available to the wider public. Coin types will be connected to a growing number of examples from an ever-expanding number of sources. The digitized availability of relevant information like weights, modules, materials, legends, images, issuers, mints, location of find, and finally pictures, opens vast fields of research in many different directions and will hopefully inspire other areas in numismatics and beyond.

You can read the full ANS press release about OCRE online in PDF format. It includes more information about OCRE's creation and capabilities.

Twenty new, open-access images have been added to the Ancient World Image Bank.

These photographs of the Serapeum of Alexandria, taken by AWIB's managing editor Iris Fernandez, can be viewed online and downloaded via ISAW's Flickr account. They are also featured in our collaborative Ancient World Image Bank group.

Users of the Pleiades website -- our joint geographical project with the Ancient World Mapping Center at the University of North Carollna -- will find that these images, along with many others, are linked from the Pleiades "place page" for Alexandria.

The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Daniel T. Potts as Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology and History, effective January 2013. Dr. Potts comes to us from the University of Sydney where he was Edwin Cuthbert Hall Chair of Middle Eastern Archaeology for over twenty years. Dr. Potts received his PhD in Near Eastern Archaeology from Harvard University in 1980 and then taught at the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Copenhagen, where he completed his Habilitation in 1991.

Although his research interests are wide-ranging, the majority of his scholarly work has focused on the cultural developments in Iran, Mesopotamia and the Arabian Peninsula, as well as relations between these regions and their neighbors. Chronologically his span is far-reaching; from the Neolithic to late antiquity, but his main focus has been on the transition from pre-history to the Bronze Age in Mesopotamia and Iran, especially the 3^rd millennium BCE.

Dr. Potts has led and participated in numerous excavation projects in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. He is the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Arabian Archaeology & Epigraphy, a Corresponding Member of the German Archaeological Institute and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is he author of the books In the Land of the Emirates: The Archaeology and History of the UAE (2012), Mesopotamia, Iran and Arabia from the Seleucids to the Sasanians (2010), Mesopotamian Civilization: The material foundations (1997), and The Archaeology of Elam (1999), among others, and has authored and edited a vast number of other books, volumes, chapters, and articles. Most recently he was the editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Iranian Archaeology (2013).

Dr. Potts will begin offering seminars  in the Spring 2013 semester. Please join us in welcoming him into the ISAW community.

ISAW is pleased to announce the research scholar roster for 2012-13. In addition to working on the listed research project, each scholar will participate in ISAW seminars and present a public lecture. Please join us in welcoming them to our community this fall!

One-year Visiting Research Scholars:

Victor Alonso Troncoso (University of Corunna) - Spring 2013
The Zoology of Kingship in the Hellenistic Age: From Alexander the Great to the Epigonoi (336 - c.250BC)

Jan Bremmer (Emeritus, University of Groningen)
The Ancient Mysteries: A History

Tosha Dupras (University of Central Florida)
Bioarchaeological Analyses of the Kellis 2 Cemetery Population in the Dakhleh Oasis, Egypt: Reconstructing Life Histories

Dorota Dzierzbicka (PhD, University of Warsaw)
Wine Consumption in Graeco-Roman Egypt: Cultural Transformation and Economic Change

Michael Frachetti (Washington University, St. Louis)
Ancient Inner Asia and the Pulse of Stateless Civilization

Hallie Franks (New York University, Gallatin School)
Traveling the World, in Theory: Metaphor and Movement in Greek Architecture

Richard Payne (Mount Holyoke College)
"States of Mixture": Cosmology, Irreligion, and Society in the Iranian Empire, 224-636 CE

Marja Vierros (PhD, University of Helsinki)
SEMATIA: Linguistic Annotation of the Greek Documentary Papyri? Detecting and determining contact-induced dialectal and stylistic variation in the Greek papyri

Li Zhang (PhD, Peking University)
Wind from the West: Early China and Eurasian Interactions

Two-year Visiting Assistant Professors

Emily Hammer (PhD, Harvard)
Dynamics of Settlement and Transhumance in Agricultural Peripheries on the Fringes of Ancient Mesopotamia

George Hatke (PhD, Princeton) - continuing
Africans in Arabia Felix: Relations between Ethiopia and South Arabia in Late Antiquity

Sarah Laursen (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) - continuing
Unearthing the Ancient Craft: The Art of Goldsmithing in Early Medieval China

Mathieu Ossendrijver, one of ISAW's visiting research scholars in 2010-11, has published a new book entitled Babylonian Mathematical Astronomy: Procedure Texts, part of the Sources and Studies in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences series from Springer. The book contains a new analysis of the procedure texts of Babylonian mathematical astronomy. These cuneiform tablets, excavated in Babylon and Uruk and dating from 350-50 BCE, contain computational instructions that represent the earliest known form of mathematical astronomy of the ancient world. The book includes new translations of all 108 available tablets accompanied by commentaries and color photographs of the tablets. The preceding chapters are devoted to documentary, lexical, semantic, mathematical and astronomical aspects of the procedure texts. Special attention is given to issues of  mathematical representation, a topic that had previously been largely ignored. Mathematical concepts are presented in a didactic fashion, setting out from the most elementary ones (numbers and elementary operations) to more complex ones (algorithms and computational systems). Chapters devoted to the planets and the Moon contain updated and expanded reconstructions and astronomical interpretations of the algorithms.

From: http://www.springer.com/mathematics/history+of+mathematics/book/978-1-4614-3781-9