Roundup of Archaeology and History August 11 – August 17

Here are some posts I enjoyed this week:

I’ll share this discovery because everyone needs a cheerful pebble mosaic of cupids playing games with swans and dolphins. In northern Greece in the town of Arta, they’ve been excavating a theater, under which, apparently, there was a bathhouse dating to the 4^th century BCE with lovely, playful scenes of watery fun. This does win the prize for best use of white, gray and black pebbles. All those bathrooms I’ve noticed lately that use “river rock” as an attractive but relatively plain surface should go hide in shame. They could have featured water fowl and cute demi-gods. Click here for Archaeology News Network “Pebble mosaic dating to 4th century BC discovered in northwestern Greece”

What makes a life immersed in cuneiform and other ancient topics worth living? Silly fun like this. Observation: cuneiform tablets look like pop tarts. Result: a baking spree with delicious but less legible results than desired. Conclusion:“The dream of pop-tarblets, breakfast of Assyriological champions, was sadly not to be.” Many thanks to Philip Boyes for this adventure in “ancient” baking. Click here for Crews Project “Further Experiments in Ancient Baking Pop-tarblets”

There’s a Briseis/Iliad novel by Booker prize winner Pat Barker coming out in September that sounds excellent. I’ve put in a request for review copy, but here’s the Evening Standard’s discussion of it and its emphasis on “‘who gets to tell the story’ of the foundational battle of European literature” and “the cultural underpinnings of misogyny, the women throughout history who have been told, by men, to forget their trauma.” I always enjoy finding new ways of looking at the Homeric tradition, new novels that focus on the same characters I’ve written but in quite different ways. There’s clearly a fair amount of overlap with my novel thematically, but, overall, I think this one will be quite different. I’m looking forward to reading it. My Briseis novel, Hand of Fire, by the way, is getting back in print and will shortly be available in both ebook and print versions again. Click here for the Evening Standard “The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker – A Review: a re-telling of the story of Troy’s captured women”