suprime, musa, querellas: muse, stop my whining

Mar, 20s, she/her. This is an Ancient Mediterranean/Classical Studies sibeblog. Main: @blootooth. The cat in the header photo is one of my two cats. Her name is Lilly.   

[zmaragdos]

hiiiii

im gonna be taking a break from tumblr for a while!

see you in a few months!!

xoxo mar

[specialagentartemis]

ngl I keep forgetting that Hobby Lobby is a real store that people go to. That people actually think of it as a craft store and not as a crazy Christian mass artifact smuggler. I google "Hobby Lobby" and get a page full of results that make me go "wtf is this craft supplies and operating hours shit, I thought we all knew this place for smuggling looted cuneiform tablets out of Iraq"

[specialagentartemis]

#sorry what??? #I knew them as the store with the Christian right wing owners that refused to pay for employee birth control as part of health insurance #what is this about cuneiform tablet looting

They are also that! And it comes from the same place.

Since 2009, the billionaire owners of Hobby Lobby started taking advantage of the wars in Iraq to buy stolen and looted cuneiform tablets and clay artifacts from ancient Mesopotamia. A lot of them were suspected to have been stolen from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad in the chaos of the US invasion in 2003. The Hobby Lobby owners used HL profits to smuggle these artifacts into the US (taking them out of Iraq is illegal so they listed them as tile samples from Turkey and Israel, more friendly nations to the US). Eventually the customs officials seized them, and the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in 2017 when the news really broke about just how many ancient Middle Eastern artifacts were smuggled into the country. They were doing this to stock their "Museum of the Bible" that purports to prove the literal truth of the Bible... using stolen Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, somehow. Idk.

They also had sixteen Dead Sea Scrolls that turned out to be forgeries but that's only tangentially related.

Hobby Lobby and its owners were fined and ordered to return, again, thousands of artifacts back to Iraq. For years they KEPT finding more artifacts of Hobby Lobby's that turned out to be stolen, looted, and smuggled. It's one of the biggest artifact smuggling scandals in recent history. And it separated artifacts from their context and permanently damaged the ability to learn new things from them, even though archaeologists subsequently have been trying.

The court case was called "United States v. Approximately Four Hundred and Fifty Cuneiform Tablets."

[thoodleoo]

what it feels like when you finally drag yourself through translating a difficult passage

[willgrahamscock]

Do you look your age? (according to other people)

Yes, generally people guess correct

People guess that I’m older

People guess that I’m younger

I’m not sure

Voting ended onJun 12, 2024

Add in the comments if you think you look your age and what others guess

[plasmapop]

20/04/20 • title is the subject line of an email about middle egyptian classes. italics are ‘quotes from my middle egyptian prof that i happened to write down’ 

[hortensius-deactivated20240909]

clearly being a vates requires you to be undead to some degree. horace came back wrong from philippi. the first eclogue makes us wonder whether vergil is alive at all. ovid probably thought he was built different but then he got exiled and boom, undeath achieved. it is not optional

[girlnephew]

[idionymon]

Wish I was a late bronze age girl

I would have my homeland invaded by the sea peoples. I would be lain siege to by the sea peoples. My cities would be sacked by the sea peoples. I would make bronze tools and pottery. My shores would be invaded by the mysterious sea peoples. I would be mustering my armies to fend off the sea peoples.

[screaming-weevil]

[postarcadian]

ok hear me out but the thing is that time in the Aeneid is linear and teleological and time in the Metamorphoses is nonlinear and unpredictable and time in the Bellum Civile/Pharsalia is circular and inescapable

[postarcadian]

this is why Vergil does nostalgia and the other two really don't - nostalgia is only a workable concept in a linear temporality. for Ovid the timeline is always at risk of rupture and therefore nostalgia is inherently unstable. and for Lucan the past is horror and the present is horror and the future is horror, so there's no point in longing for a past that's going to come around to hurt us again anyways

[museum-of-artifacts]

A carnelian frog amulet. From Egypt, ca. 1540-1296 BCE, now housed at the Cleveland Museum of Art

[whatmarvellousthings]

@zmaragdos

[1five1two]

'The Hours'. Edwin Austin Abbey. C. 1904.

[hexjulia]

so i wondered what material this was painted on, it has an interesting texture-- i assumed maybe paper? I thought it would be fairly small. I was very wrong! It is a study for a ceiling painting. And the study itself is also very large;

https://artgallery.yale.edu/research-and-learning/conservation/conservation-projects/conserving-abbey

The actual painting on the ceiling has a slightly differently shaped sun and seems even larger. He did a lot of studies, some of them much smaller. I always enjoy seeing early studies for huge, hard to archieve works because you can see the process start in a far more reachable place. Large, complicated things need time to grow.

[hortensius-deactivated20240909]

happy out of touch cicero thursday

[catilinas]

gnaeus pompeius ‘big boy’ magnus

[thecollectibles]

[horreurscopes]

my beautiful girlfriend libby who lives in my phone and tells me many tales and stories

[cuties-in-codices]

16th c. musical instruments

marginal illustrations from a gradual (a liturgical songbook) containing four-part vocal pieces, composed by manfred barbarini lupus, illuminated by kaspar härtli, st. gallen, 1562

source: St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 542

[hortensius]

The senators are gossipingggg (ft. Marcus Tullius Cicero & Marcus Caelius Rufus)

Background credit: 1st cent. BC fresco from the House of Augustus on the Palatine Hill in Rome. Picture taken by me.