To read the complete article by Lauren Goodchildin the Guardian go to: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/dec/09/museums-greece
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Eros: From Hesiod’s Theogony to Late Antiquity
10 December 2009 - 5 April 2010
Museum of Cycladic Art: Eros: From Hesiod’s Theogony to Late Antiquity

Some 272 objets d’art, including masterpieces from more than 50 international museums which date from the 6th century BC to the 4th century AD, tell the story of love in antiquity. The exhibition has sought to survey the changing perceptions of Eros from the 8th century BC, when he is seen as a powerful god, to Roman times when, less potent, under the name of Cupid he becomes a mere companion to Venus.

Eros, the great loosener of limbs, was many things: irresistible, tender, beautiful, excruciating, maddening, merciless and bittersweet. Eros is the Greek god of love and fertility. In early mythology, Eros is a primeval god, born of Chaos. It was Eros who brought together Uranus, sky, and Gaia, earth, the original father and mother. In later traditions, Eros is the son of Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual love and beauty. Some myths say that Eros’s father was Ares, god of war.In earlier art and literature, Eros was depicted as a strong, athletic, young man. However, he was gradually portrayed as younger and younger, until in Hellenistic times, he was being portrayed as a child or baby, with wings, and a bow and arrow.

Attic red-figure krater depicting the abduction of Europa.  Zeus, transformed into a white bull, carries the Phoenician princess on his back.  Hermes leads, showing them the way to the island of Crete, while the winged Eros accompanies them.

From: The Daily Mail

Ancient figurines were toys not mother goddess statues, say experts as 9,000-year-old artefacts are discovered

By David Derbyshire
Amazing artefacts: Many of the figurines resemble animals like sheep and goats

They were carved out of stone and squeezed out of clay 9,000 years ago, at the very dawn of civilisation. Now archaeologists say these astonishing Stone Age statues could have been the world’s first educational toys.

Nearly 2,000 figures have been unearthed at Catalhoyuk in Turkey - the world’s oldest known town - over the last few decades. The most recent were found just last week. Made by Neolithic]] farmers thousands of years before the creation of the pyramids or Stonehenge, they depict tiny cattle, crude sheep and flabby people.

In the 1960s, some researchers claimed the more rotund figures were of a mysterious large breasted and big bellied “mother goddess”, prompting a feminist tourism industry that thrives today. But modern day experts disagree. They say the “mother goddess” figures - which were buried among the rubbish of the Stone Age town - are unlikely to be have been religious icons.

Many of the figures thought to have been women in the 1960s, are just as likely to be men.

Archaeologist Prof Lynn Meskell, of Stanford University, said: “The majority are cattle or sheep and goats. They could be representatives of animals they were dealing with - and they could have been teaching aides. “All were found in the trash - and they were not in niches or platforms or placed in burials.”

Out of the 2,000 figurines dug up at the site, less than five per cent are female, she told the British science Festival in Surrey University, Guildford. “These are things that were made and used on a daily basis,” she said. “People carried them around and discarded them.”

Catalhoyuk is one of the most important archaeological sites in the world. Established around 7,000 BC, it was home to 5,000 people living in mud brick and plaster houses. Their buildings were crammed so tightly together, the inhabitants clambered over the roofs and used ladders to get into their homes. The town dwellers were early farmers who had domesticated a handful of plants and kept wild cattle for meat and milk. Cattle horns were incorporated into the walls of their homes.

The town contains the oldest murals - paintings on plastered walls. Unlike later towns, there is no obvious hierarchy - no homes for priests or leaders, no temples and no public spaces. The dead were buried in spaces under homes, rather than in cemeteries. Some researchers believe it was an equalitarian society.

The town survived for around 2,000 years. It is not known what happened to its inhabitants, but they may have been killed by invaders or driven away by the loss of nearby farmland.

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I also recommend the book:

The Myth of the Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future

“SNOOT (n) (highly colloq) is this reviewer’s nuclear family’s nickname a clef for a really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to look for mistakes in Satire’s column’s prose itself. This reviewer’s family is roughly 70 percent SNOOT, which term itself derives from an acronym, with the big historical family joke being that whether S.N.O.O.T. stood for “Sprachgefuhl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance” or “Syntax Nudniks of Our Time” depended on whether or not you were one.”

Full essay: Tense Present. Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage by David Foster Wallace.

Die Welt des Orients http://www.v-r.de/de/zeitschriften/500045/?sn=o5ojkpmo29cjc3cntm9rem4t94

To be continued …

William Caraher on The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World reflects on the importance of academic blogging, and how it relates to other academic writing.

He makes reference to Why Blog? / Does Blogging Matter? posted on the Ancient World Bloggers Group at the end on May, which refers to many other interesting links and comments.

pmci42abs8

Impressions of Ancient Mesopotamia

by Alan Lenzi
Gorgias Press, 2006
English
Cloth
ISBN: 1593332262
Your Price: $34.00
www.eisenbrauns.com/item/LENIMPRES

About the CDLI online sign list

The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) sees as one of its major goals the implementation of an online sign list for the early phases of cuneiform, ca. 3300-2000 B.C. This represents a period of often rapid development in both the graphic form, and the semantic or phonetic referents of individual signs of the cuneiform repertory that has, due to a number of reasons, not been well documented in the published Assyriological literature. D. O. Edzard’s article “Keilschrift” in Reallexikon der Assyriololgie vol. 5 (1976-1980) pp. 544-568 presents the currently most comprehensive overview of early cuneiform development, and includes pp. 557-558 a list of published photographs of 4th and 3rd millennium cuneiform tablets recommended by the author in any attempt to clarify graphic sign development of that period of writing.

Copies are offered of the major sign list publications for the various historical phases of early Babylonia as these are understood in the general Assyriological literature.

Currently available relevant publications:

Late Uruk period (Uruk IV-III), ca. 3300-3000 B.C.

• A. Falkenstein, Archaische Texte aus Uruk ( Archaische Texte aus Uruk 1; Berlin-Leipzig 1936)
• M. Green/H. J. Nissen, Zeichenliste der Archaischen Texte aus Uruk (ATU 2; Berlin 1987)
• R. K. Englund/H. J. Nissen, Die lexikalischen Listen der archaischen Texte aus Uruk (ATU 3; Berlin 1992)
• R. K. Englund/J.-P. Grégoire, The Proto-Cuneiform Texts from Jemdet Nasr (Materialien zu den frühen Schriftzeugnissen des Vorderen Orients 1; Berlin 1991)

Proto-Elamite period, ca. 3100-2900 B.C.

• P. Meriggi, La scrittura proto-elamica. Parte IIa: Catalogo dei segni (Rome 1974)

Early Dynastic I period, ca. 2800-2700 B.C.

• E. Burrows, Archaic Texts (UET 2; London 1935)

Early Dynastic IIIa (Fara) period, ca. 2600-2500 B.C.

• A. Deimel, Liste der archaischen Keilschriftzeichen (WVDOG 40; Berlin 1922)

Early Dynastic IIIb (Old Sumerian, pre-Sargonic Lagash) period, ca. 2500-2340 B.C.

• Y. Rosengarten, Répertoire commenté des signes présargoniques sumériens de Lagash (Paris 1967)

Old Akkadian period, ca. 2340-2200 B.C. (no current sign list available)

Ur III (neo-Sumerian) period, ca. 2120-2000 B.C.

• N. Schneider, Die Keilschriftzeichen der Wirtschaftsurkunden von Ur III … (Rome 1935)

John Heise lists approximately 350 signs on his Website, neatly ordered in searchable lists.

The sign list contains at least three items:

• a number from Borger’s book: Babylonisch-assyrische Zeichenliste
• the cuneiform sign in New Assyrian orthography
• the name of the sign or one of its values.

Index of Cuneiform Pages>>

ETCSL signlist

Sign name: KU Values: bid3, bu7, dab5, dib2, dur2, duru2, durun, gu5, ku, nu10, su?5, še10, tukul, tuš, ugu4

The basis for this list is the transliterations in the ETCSL (including proper nouns, but excluding numerals), and it only contains signs and values found in the ETCSL. In some cases the sample form given for a sign predates the corpus, highlighting differences between signs which can be less clear-cut in the period of the corpus.

To the ETCSL Signlist >>