From the Director (Spring 2019)

This article by Alexander Jones first appeared in ISAW Newsletter 24, Spring 2019.

ISAW's Leon Levy Director Alexander Jones toasting ISAW's 2019 graduates. The study of antiquity has sometimes been characterized by a real or perceived divide between “text people” and “object people,” scholars whose interest concentrates respectively on written records and compositions, and on sites, artifacts, and other physical remains. The dichotomy is not a benign one; in archaeology in particular, where to neglect evidence is often to destroy evidence, it can stand in the way of both knowledge and collegiality. In the late 19th-century, adherents of Henry Rawlinson, the pioneer of deciphering cuneiform, alleged that Austen Henry Layard, the pioneer of excavating Mesopotamian sites, allowed inscribed tablets found at Nimrud to be discarded as worthless fragments of pottery. Conversely, Egyptologists have complained that in six seasons excavating tens of thousands of papyri at ancient Oxyrhynchus in Egypt around the turn of the last century, B. P. Grenfell and Arthur Hunt paid inadequate attention to the physical context of their discoveries. Both accusations were unjust, but they reflect the truth that, where both are available, texts and artifacts are complementary and indeed inseparable means of learning about the ancient world.

This complementarity—which in fact involves not two but three approaches, through text, image, and object—has been a fundamental trait of ISAW from its founding. In our research and teaching we routinely incorporate whichever of them have something to offer, and in such a small community we can’t help learning from each other about ways of inquiry that are radically different from the ones we were trained in. I had a vivid reminder of how much more interesting a multipronged engagement with antiquity can be when I took part in the conference Materia III: New Approaches to Material Text in the Ancient World, which ISAW hosted last April (see p. 10). Spread over an intense day, we had a remarkable variety of insights on how the physical dimension of ancient texts—mostly from the Greco-Roman world but also from China—can tell us much more than the texts themselves taken in isolation: what it may mean for a text to be laid out in a certain visual format, on a certain medium, as part of a certain object or site—and also how texts-as-objects could be transformed through reuse for functions not envisioned by their creators. How remote this was from how I was introduced to Classics years ago, primarily through the mediation of modern printed editions!

Like every issue of the ISAW Newsletter, this one offers a fresh sampling of the manifold activities that have been happening here in recent months; and it also celebrates several transitions in our community: new staff members (pp. 6-7), faculty promotions (p. 7), and most proudly of all, this year’s doctoral graduates (pp. 4-5). I hope you will enjoy these texts and images almost as much as we have enjoyed the experiences that they commemorate!