Sempre avanti! as the Italians say. Never look back! Archaeology Odyssey is now in the middle of its seventh year, and we are looking ahead (paradoxically by looking back into deep antiquity) to a series of exciting issues—beginning with the one you hold in your hands.
There’s something inspiring about art historian Ingrid Rowland’s meditation on Etruscan women (“Etruscan Women: Dignified, Charming, Literate and Free”). In a legacy of images, some sculpted in stone and some painted on the walls of tombs, our ancient female ancestors dine with men, read from folding wax tablets (ancient books) and participate in athletic events—all done vigorously and gracefully, without apology. It seems that more than 2,000 years ago Etruscan women enjoyed a freedom of movement and thought denied to many women even today.
Any conversation with Homeric scholar Gregory Nagy (“Is Homer Historical?”), on the other hand, is an intellectual tonic. Nagy has helped to revolutionize Homeric studies by carrying on the tradition of his predecessors Milman Parry and Albert Lord, who was Nagy’s teacher at Harvard. After studying performances of oral poets in the Balkans in the early 1930s, Parry and Lord suggested that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey originated as a collection of oral poems that was passed from generation to generation by traveling bards. By examining different linguistic dialects embedded in the epics, as well as other historical clues, Nagy traces this history over more than a thousand years, from about 1400 B.C. to 150 B.C., fundamentally changing our sense of how Homer’s poems were composed.
Our final two features are about as different as the sublime and the ridiculous. To celebrate its 100th anniversary, the Cairo Museum has mounted an exhibition of artifacts that had remained forgotten in the museum’s storage rooms. Photographer Kenneth Garrett has miraculously captured the drama of these neglected, shadow-haunted figures, relief carvings, ceramic objects and scarabs (“The Cairo Museum: Celebrating a Century of Finds”). Never again, it’s fair to say, will it be possible to overlook them.
Back to earth we come with Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow’s “Roman Latrines: How the Ancients Did Their Business.” In this funny, information-packed, matter-of-fact excursus on Roman hygiene, we learn just how important the Roman invention of the channel-flushed public toilet was—perhaps not a legacy you’d like to be known for, but an immense service to humanity.
And this issue is just the beginning! In August, the Olympic Games are returning to Greece, where they were first held around the eighth century B.C. We are devoting the entire July/August 2004 issue of Archaeology Odyssey to the ancient games: where they were held, who participated in them, and who watched them (the philosopher Plato, for one). The issue will also include a detachable booklet titled Archaeology Odyssey’s Guide to Sites in and Around Athens, a complete list of archaeological sites for (actual and armchair) visitors to Athens.
For future issues, we are now preparing articles on Etruscan forgeries, the mysterious Persian capital of Persepolis, the Athenian Acropolis, the Celtic invasion of southern Europe and Anatolia, child-sacrifice at the Carthage Tophet, King Narmer and the first Egyptian dynasty, the enigmas of Zoroastrianism and elephants in Spain—and that’s only the beginning, too.
Sempre avanti! as the Italians say. Never look back! Archaeology Odyssey is now in the middle of its seventh year, and we are looking ahead (paradoxically by looking back into deep antiquity) to a series of exciting issues—beginning with the one you hold in your hands. There’s something inspiring about art historian Ingrid Rowland’s meditation on Etruscan women (“Etruscan Women: Dignified, Charming, Literate and Free”). In a legacy of images, some sculpted in stone and some painted on the walls of tombs, our ancient female ancestors dine with men, read from folding wax tablets (ancient books) and participate in […]
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