If you have reached this pages is because, for some reason or another, you have heard about Tholos Converter… If so, welcome! I am very exciting about the release of this app, a personal project I have been thinking about for quite a long time. The premise is very simple: for many of us working on archaeology or ancient texts it is very common to encounter references to ancient measuring systems. This is a topic I have been always curious about, because the way you measure the world determines how you conceive and interpret it. And in ancient times there were many ways of measuring things… That is why I have created Tholos.
Tholos is an app designed for converting to and from different ancient measuring systems. The name derives from the circular structure called Tholos located in the Athenian agora, which, around 500 BCE, contained an official set of weights and measures against which the merchants were required to test their sets. This version includes basic units for measuring length, weight, area, and dry volume for the metric system, the 5th c. BCE Attic system (widely used in Athens and its empire), and the late republic- early empire Roman system (c. 2nd c. BCE to 2nd c. CE).
Just a quick post to encourage all of you to have a look at the first of I hope many episodes on the work of a fantastic research group I hope I could be collaborating with in the future: Tracing the Potter’s Wheel.
Like and subscribe, because I am sure they will be featuring very interesting stuff!
There is a long time I do not post about pottery making, perhaps because I expend my days writing about that for my dissertation, and sometimes it is just too much clay around. But after finding this video on YouTube I knew I had to stop writing about historical contingency and ceramic ecology and prepare this post. This fantastic video has been published by English Heritage, as part of the “Neolithic Houses” experimental work near Stonehenge. Graham Taylor, the potter of the video, does a great job describing the process of making this groove pot, and there is nothing much I can add. I just added some comments after the video of a couple of things that I find especially interesting. But first enjoy this video:
Last 29th of April has been International Tabletop day, a day to celebrate boardgames around the world. I love playing boardgames. Computer games are great too, no doubt, but there is something about rolling the dice with your hands, moving figures around in the board, exploring magical dungeons or chasing zombies in a Midwest town. The friends, the socialization, the drinks in between rolls… A lot of fun. And of all the events, all the internet posts and YouTube videos to celebrate this event, the best, without any doubt, is the one I am presenting you today: the Royal Game of Ur play-through with Tom Scott and Irving Finkel, the curator of the British Museum who discovered the rules on a cuneiform tablet.
The Royal Game of Ur (British Museum image 120834).
Parece que a miña entrada sobre o LibreOffice non vai rematar nunca, con tantos proxectos incribles coma hai na rede. Desta volta é a reconstrución musical de como a Odisea de Homero podería haber soado cando fora cantada no século VIII AEC. Alí é nada.
Fai algún tempo escribín unhas poucas liñas sobre a melodía grega máis antiga que foi preservada, o breve pero fermoso epitafio de Seikilos. Naquel texto mencionei as dificultades de reconstruír música antiga, e o erro inconsciente que facemos cando non nos decatamos de que a música non só estaba en todas partes, pero que, ademais, en moitos dos traballos literarios que temos preservados ata hoxe a música xogou un papel central que agora non apreciamos. É por esta razón que unha iniciativa coma esta por parte de Georg Danek da Universidade de Viena e Stefan Hagel da Academia de Ciencias Austríaca, é tan fascinante. Nos últimos anos teñen desenvolto unha técnica para cantar épica de Homero baseada en como tradicións orais similares foron cantadas, axustadas, por suposto, ás métricas preservadas na lírica grega.
ArchaeoStuff 