Here are some posts I enjoyed around the web this week:
Roman writing tablets found in London mud. One of them has the earliest reference to Londinium (Roman name) from about AD 65-80. Another shows how quickly London revived economically after Queen Boudica’s revolt. Mud, which blocks out oxygen, preserved the wood. These tablets would have had a layer of black wax on them through which the letters were scratched to reveal a white layer below. The wax is now gone, but fortunately the scratching process leaves traces on the wood which can be deciphered with a lot of tricky photography from different angles and a brilliant decipherer, who says it’s a lot like code breaking. The video clip is fun in this post (once the rah, rah about Bloomberg company is over, but yes we do appreciate the preservation) Hittites and other people well before the Romans used similar wax and wood tablets. Kind of the paperback or notepad of the ancient world, light, portable and good for quick note taking. Hittites had “wood scribes” who specialized in writing on these rather than on clay tablets. The Romans, of course, had scrolls not clay as the alternative to the wood tablets. Makes me appreciate my keyboard. To think there was a time when I thought I’d never compose on a typewriter or some weird computer thing my then boyfriend (now husband for millennia) was trying to talk me into using. I was going to stick with those yellow pads for all first drafts. At least I wasn’t scratching through wax and stacking ever higher piles of wooden tablets around me as I worked. Click here for “2,000-year-old handwritten documents found in London mud.”
This may sound like something interesting only to writers, but any engaged reader of fiction will also love this one. I’ve been asked this a bunch of times. Way good answer here:
What makes fiction literary or commercial? Donald Maass takes on this old question. He analyses “scenes” vs “postcards” as the building blocks of the two genres. One of his conclusions: “If you’ve ever wondered how commercial fiction comes to feel literary, and thereby gain extra respect, now you know: it sometimes acts to illuminate as much as to advance a plot.” Read this post to see how to “illuminate.” As often with Maass, he has the mechanics clearly broken down. (You have to mix in the brilliance.) Click here for Writer Unboxed “What makes fiction literary: Scenes versus Postcards”
Here’s a highly accessible, written-for-anyone website entirely devoted to curse tablets in Roman Britain. If you’d like to know how a juicy Roman curse went, what these (mostly lead) tablets looked like, why this crazy thing exists in the first place, etc. this is your click through. Lots of fun. Hittites were way more complicated with their cursing. The Romans democratized the whole process and got down and dirty. Feels frighteningly like current American politics, if you ask me. Click here for Curse Tablets from Roman Britain
And then sometimes not… Some writing humor with some help from Snoopy via Janet Rudolph Click here for Mystery Fanfare Cartoon of the Day: Writer
The world’s earlier “computer,” a mysterious mechanism, was brought up from a 1st century BC Roman shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera. It’s not an easy place for divers to explore and the wreck was originally found in 1900. The death of one of the early divers brought an end to the first explorations. Jacques Cousteau returned in the 1970’s. Now with much superior equipment the site is being thoroughly surveyed and explored again this summer, continuing the work Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute began in 2012. And they have a blog that you can follow their progress. Armchair underwater archaeology! Sounds perfect for the summer. Click here for Return to Antikythera (They’re also on Twitter )
Want to know more about the Antikythera mechanism, often called the earliest analog computer, dating to the 1st century BC? Here’s the website of the researchers working on it from multiple institutions and countries. Click here for The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project