Category: Archaeology

Reconstructing Ancient Greek Music

Ancient_Greece_Music_Lesson

After studying attic and koine Greek for years in college and graduate school, I always wondered what their sing-song language would have actually spoken if I could have “Bill and Ted’ed” it back into ancient Greece.

This is pretty amazing…

One of D’Agour’s colleagues, David Creese, from the University of Newcastle, managed to play a song inscribed on a more than 2,000-year-old marble column. The tune is credited to Seikilos, and Creese played it on a zither-like instrument he constructed. 

via Classicists Reconstruct the Sound of Greek Music – Archaeology Magazine.

How Gorillas Got Their Name

Learn something every day…

Gorilla – Wikipedia: “The American physician and missionary Thomas Staughton Savage and naturalist Jeffries Wyman first described the western gorilla (they called it Troglodytes gorilla) in 1847 from specimens obtained in Liberia. The name was derived from Greek Γόριλλαι (Gorillai), meaning ‘tribe of hairy women’, described by Hanno the Navigator, a Carthaginian navigator and possible visitor (circa 480 BC) to the area that later became Sierra Leone.”

Hanno was a fascinating person (as were many Carthaginians).

There’s even a crater on the moon named after him.

Here’s the source that started my Sunday afternoon rat-hole into the life of Hanno…

A History of Ancient Geography Among the Greeks and Romans: From the Earliest Ages Till the Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume 1 (on Google Books for free).

Happy Holidays from a Point of Pale Light

One of my favorite pages on Wikipedia (and yes, our planet is going to get real interesting in a few hundred thousand years):

Timeline of the far future – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “Due to its northward movement along the San Andreas Fault, the Californian coast begins to be subducted into the Aleutian Trench. Africa will have collided with Eurasia, closing the Mediterranean Basin and creating a mountain range similar to the Himalayas.”

My 7th grade students frequently ask me how humanity will do with the sun going supernova and all in about 5 billion years. I remind them we’ve got bigger problems much much sooner than that (climate change, rising sea levels, gamma ray bursts, meteorite strikes etc).

Carl Sagan was, as usual, spot on about our pale blue dot. So let’s do the best we can with the time/space we have, while we can.

via Kottke.org

Indiana Jones, UChicago and an Amazing Tale of Misplaced Mail

So insanely awesome (and yes, I will DRIVE up to Chicago for the Indiana Jones exhibit):

UChicago College Admissions, Mischief Managed For those of you who have…: “According to Paul, this package was en route from him in Guam to his intended recipient IN ITALY (registered mail confirmation attached) when it must have fallen out of the package in Hawaii.”