The Origins of Writing

I found a fun short piece from the BBC on the origins of writing around the world which I thought people might enjoy.

I finished my Art History midterm today. I think it went well, but one never knows. Lots of Plato to read for tomorrow.

More on Self-Guided Education

I have been reading Horace (selected poems in Latin, see my reading list) and Euripides' Medea with friends. Although I do not read as quickly or as well as I would like, it is a wonderful and enjoyable experience and it's amazing that skype has enabled me to talk and coordinate with people in totally different places.

But today a fell in love again with the Berkeley webcast website. Today I have listened to the first four lectures of "History 5: European Civilization from the Renaissance to the Present" (well, I'm listening to the fourth one right now). Although his voice is kind of annoying, Thomas Laqueur, the professor, is thoroughly engaging and intelligent. He seems to be a Foucault-influenced scholar with an interdisciplinary approach that involves finding the narratives of power and legitimacy in history an analyzing their progression. I wanted to listen to this for the most part because Cerinthus and I have been debating over Romanesque verses Gothic architecture (he likes Romanesque, I love Gothic) and specifically of the historical quoting and power of religion built into the architecture itself. If anyone wants to share their thoughts for one side or the other for the debate feel free to comment (we would love to have some new ideas to discuss)

Unfortunately, most of the courses do not have any links to their course material, since the material is now contained on b-space, which I believe is a Berkeley-students-only website. A few of them do and the lectures do provide a vast amount of the information so it is still an effective teaching tool.

One other thing that I found recently is a set of free e-books "sold" by Amazon that cover high school math and science from the CK-12 Foundation. This is not very advanced, although the math does go through calculus, but I think it's incredible that a company it making them accessible to students who want to get ahead, review, or just learn on their own. The coolest one is CK-12 21st Century Physics: A Compilation of Contemporary and Emerging Technologies, which intends to introduce high school students to the marvels of modern physics rather than forcing them into only learning the advancements of the 19th and first half of the 20th century. I have not read much of the book itself, but the purpose looked great.

I am continually amazed at the resources out there for self-teaching. It is very cool. It reminds me of the food blog network, from which I taught myself to make bread. It is amazing that people are willing to provide their experience to a public and talk about the techniques for cooking. That is very cool.

I Can Read That, uh, I Think...

Until a few days ago, I had never been to the Getty Villa. With a combination of it being far away and requiring an appointment, even when I was in the same city, I never got around to it. Until this time. It was incredible.

Getty Villa picture from Wikimedia Commons [1]

The floor plan is based on the Villa dei Papyri in Herculaneum, which got its name for the well over 1,500 papyrus scrolls found there. The Getty Villa is stunningly beautiful. The Roman architecture is paired with wonderful landscaping, pools of water, and replica bronze statues and murals.

Inside, I found an incredible collection of Greek pottery and statues, as well as Roman and Etruscan artifacts. The first room that I went into was an incredible time-line of pottery in these three civilizations. I was with my parents, and I was able to point out and describe the different pots, especially since I have been studying this recently (see my blogpost). We then moved into another room that displayed a mixture of Attic pottery and Roman pottery. Some of the attic red figure vases were incredible.

A few of the vases had names scratched above the characters depicted upon them. I went over and said "I can read this" and then I froze for a second. The words were in capitals with no accents. My mind went blank even looking at words that I clearly recognized. Fear just was struck into my heart. The same thing happened when I looked at the Latin inscription on a young girl's sarcophagus. Although the Latin turned out to be really easy, I froze. I think this comes from a combination of pushing myself into a Greek class I was not entirely ready for when I started college and a sense of extreme pride that hates passionately being wrong. My first class, on the Bacchae, I would not have given up for the world. It was amazing. However, it taught me a combination of bad habits: always assuming I was behind the curve (which often prevented me from moving out of this position), spending a lot of time on the Perseus Project instead of with a paper dictionary and a grammar (which I began work toward fixing in my junior and senior year), and getting bothered and antsy when translating took too long instead of enjoying the process of reading.

I have promised myself that I will fix all of these before I go to graduate school. I hope I am going to make it! The applications are a nightmare.

Endnotes

1. Wikimedia Commons

Cerinthus Reports: Octopus=Awesome

Sulpicia Asks: Could you send me some awesome photos.

Cerninthus Answers: Look! An octopus!
(Just kidding. Cerinthus actually responded by sending 93 incredible photos from Crete but this one is totally my favorite)

 This is Minoan. Other than that I don't know. I think Cerinthus saw it in a museum on Crete. More information forthcoming.

Update (09/14/10):

This is known as the "Octopus Jar" and is from the late Minoan period. The Stanford Humanities lab website says: 

"At the end of the Middle Minoan era the Kamares style has been relegated to background and a new style stealing from wall paintings of this period was developed. This new style delt mainly with vivid representation of human and animal figures in dark colors on light colored clay. This trend of naturalism is extreamly short lived however. The return to the formulated decorative patterns and stylized plant forms returns and is the basis for future styles."

This jar was made circa 1500 BCE found at the palace at Knossos and now sits in the Herakleion Museam, Crete (Saskatewan University).