2020.01.31 | By Gregory Nagy §0. My brief comments here connect with what I noted in the previous posting, Classical Inquiries 2020.01.24, about scribal exchanges of letters between Polycrates, tyrant of Samos, and Amasis, pharaoh of Egypt. Here I explore further examples of such scribal activity, this time involving the dual kings of Sparta. Read more
2020.01.17 | By Gregory Nagy §0. The picture I show here, which is a photograph of a legal document composed in the Aramaic language and written on papyrus, illustrates a point I hope to make on the occasion of an event planned for the future. The event, organized by Giulia Sissa, will take place in the spring of 2020 at the Johns Hopkins University. Papers written in honor of Marcel… Read more
2020.01.10 | By Gregory Nagy §0. This posting for 2020.01.10 picks up from where I left off in the posting for 2020.01.03, where I analyzed some aspects of ongoing research by experts who study the practices of scribes using the Linear A and Linear B scripts in the Minoan and Mycenaean worlds of the second millennium BCE. There I focused on a scribal practice, as reconstructed by these experts, of… Read more
2020.01.03 | By Gregory Nagy §0. In an earlier work, Nagy 2011 (in the Bibliography), where I studied traces of dialectal variation in the Greek language as spoken in the Mycenaean era and as written by way of the so-called Linear B script, I argued that the scribes who used this script in that era could write their texts not only on sunbaked clay tablets but also on parchment, that… Read more
