Apple's iPad will start arriving in customer's hands on April 3rd, and at least some of them will end up in the hands of Mediterranean archaeologists. That sounds like an opportunity so I've spent the last few days playing around with ePub software.
I can quickly say that all the desktop readers that I've seen are terrible. Adobe Digital Editions? Ugly. The Stanza desktop version? Ugly and doesn't show my images. Lovely Reader looks OK but does a bad job of laying out text and image.
The Stanza reader on the iPhone is decent and that's what I've been testing against.
The most useful application is far-and-away Calibre. Once I figured out to install the command-line tools, converting xhtml to epub is a single step. There are lots of options to play with, but the basic idea is simple.
So... I spent a little time simplifying the xslt stylesheets that convert the database for Greek, Roman and Byzantine Pottery at Ilion into xhtml. Then I pointed Calibre at the resulting file. You can download an early version of the results here. Don't expect too much. No TOC, bad spacing so it's hard to distinguish catalog entries, other varied problems. But all will improve over time.
To get this on an iPhone you need to load Stanza on to it. Then "Get Books" -> "Downloads" -> "Edit" -> "Download Book from URL". Typing a long URL is a pain on the iPhone so enter this: http://bit.ly/troyepub.
Again, it's super-preliminary so keep an eye out for improvements. And if anybody gets this onto an iPad, let me know how it looks. I'll try it myself soon enough but not right on April 3rd.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
SPARQL Based Navigation of RDFa Encoded Named Entities
This is a quick heads up on a new feature at Nomisma.org, the ANS-hosted project assigning stable URIs to numismatic concepts.
At http://nomisma.org/id/lyttus you'll find a very brief representation of the ancient site of Lyttus in Crete. It links to the relevant Wikipedia article and Barrington Atlas ID so it should be unambiguous which site we mean and it should be easy to find out further information. As a convenience, and to make it easy to put a dot on the map, the page also has latlong info.
This post is about the list of URIs prefaced by the text "The following Nomisma IDs refer to this ID:". If you click on http://nomisma.org/id/igch0151, you'll get a description of a hoard of coins as published in Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards.
Nomisma.org uses RDFa so the markup of the hoard includes the snippet: <span rel="nm:mint" resource="lyttus">Lyttus: 1 dr.</span> . You can click on "Show Markup in Page" to see this.
All the descriptions of numismatic concepts are collected in a single RDFa file at http://nomisma.org/nomisma.org.xml and as RDF-XML at http://nomisma.org/nomisma.org.rdf. That one snippet from igch0151 will produce the triple:
<http://nomisma.org/id/ich0151>
<http://nomisma.org/id/mint>
<http://nomisma.org/id/lyttus>
So... visiting http://nomisma.org/id/lyttus queries http://nomisma.org.rdf with a SPARQL statement of the form
Bottom line: Simple markup achieves meaningful results using pre-existing standards. I wrote none of the tools to make this work. It will be fun when I get around to turning that list of IDs into a map, which will be simple using the Google Maps API. Then we will have a geographic front-end to "SPARQL-based Navigation of RDFa Encoded Named Entities".
Note: all of the RDFa patterns are in the process of being defined and the entries are in the process of being markedup. I.e., this is all in alpha stage.
At http://nomisma.org/id/lyttus you'll find a very brief representation of the ancient site of Lyttus in Crete. It links to the relevant Wikipedia article and Barrington Atlas ID so it should be unambiguous which site we mean and it should be easy to find out further information. As a convenience, and to make it easy to put a dot on the map, the page also has latlong info.
This post is about the list of URIs prefaced by the text "The following Nomisma IDs refer to this ID:". If you click on http://nomisma.org/id/igch0151, you'll get a description of a hoard of coins as published in Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards.
Nomisma.org uses RDFa so the markup of the hoard includes the snippet: <span rel="nm:mint" resource="lyttus">Lyttus: 1 dr.</span> . You can click on "Show Markup in Page" to see this.
All the descriptions of numismatic concepts are collected in a single RDFa file at http://nomisma.org/nomisma.org.xml and as RDF-XML at http://nomisma.org/nomisma.org.rdf. That one snippet from igch0151 will produce the triple:
<http://nomisma.org/id/ich0151>
<http://nomisma.org/id/mint>
<http://nomisma.org/id/lyttus>
So... visiting http://nomisma.org/id/lyttus queries http://nomisma.org.rdf with a SPARQL statement of the form
' SELECT ?id WHERE { ?id ?refersto <http://nomisma.org/id/lyttus> }'. This just binds "?id" to a list of the ids that refer to Lyttus.Bottom line: Simple markup achieves meaningful results using pre-existing standards. I wrote none of the tools to make this work. It will be fun when I get around to turning that list of IDs into a map, which will be simple using the Google Maps API. Then we will have a geographic front-end to "SPARQL-based Navigation of RDFa Encoded Named Entities".
Note: all of the RDFa patterns are in the process of being defined and the entries are in the process of being markedup. I.e., this is all in alpha stage.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
The Relative Value of Oil and Wine in the Talmud
For the last week I've been following Daf Yomi, the 7 year cycle by which Orthodox Jews read the entire Talmud. It's part of my "Echoes of Late Antiquity" hobby and so far I'm having fun. Take this translated quote from Sanhedrin 31a
FWIW, the legal principle here is that you need two witnesses. Since the value of the oil is higher, there are only two witnesses to the loan of the value of the barrel of wine.
If one witness attests [the loan of] a barrel of wine, and the other, of a barrel of oil: — such a case happened, and it was brought before R. Ammi, who ordered him [the defendant] to repay a barrel ofSo a "barrel" of oil is worth more than the same of wine. That's nice to know. Of course, I'm relying on the translation from halakhah.com and that's always a worry.
wine out of [the value of] the barrel of oil.
FWIW, the legal principle here is that you need two witnesses. Since the value of the oil is higher, there are only two witnesses to the loan of the value of the barrel of wine.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Coming to terms with HTML 5
I haven't heard much talk among digital humanists about HTML 5. If I've missed something please let me know.
I will admit that for a long time I sort of ignored it. I was interested in xhtml 2 but that's dead. And when the html 5 discussions began, xhtml seemed like a barely tolerated intruder. That's clearly less so currently. Then there was the dismissive attitude of the "5" folk towards RDFa. Everybody seems to be talking now and that's good.
So it looks like there will be an XHTML5 that directly supports RDFa. I'm assuming that means in the DOM as it's made available to Javascript. (Somebody tell if I'm wrong about that).
With this in mind, I spent the day catching up with developments in the html 5 community. Sometimes focusing on integration with RDFa but also just catching up.
This series of articles by "boblet" was well-written and useful. On the RDFa front, I read Mark Birbeck's discussion about tokenizing RDFa. Likewise interesting. And see the RDFa section of the Microformats.org HTML5 page.
I like that html 5 supports structures along the lines of:
Not all is perfect. I've always been bummed that the title element goes in the head of an (x)html document. That means that if you want it to show up in the document part of a browser window, you have to repeat it. There's some silliness there. Why can't a title element go anywhere? And would it it really be a problem if a document had more than one title in it? I can think of use-cases where that works: more than one article in a single html file, or a list of objects that have titles.
And there's still no preferred way of doing footnotes. The section in the spec 4.6.26 is sort of a punt. The boblet articles suggest <aside> for footnotes but that isn't encouraged in the spec. I see that there's a "note" value for the rel attribute on the WHATWG RelExtensions page. That list is an official part of the html 5 spec (see "Other Link Types"). But the spec is totally vague on how a proposed rel moves to actual approval.
And anybody using xhtml is still going to have lots of decisions about what goes in class attributes and how to specify lots of basic things like 'author'. That smacks of being proprietary. How much can Dublin Core help with this?
So... it was a day of mostly reading. I added a little bit of xhtml 5 to the git repository under an xhtml5 branch but only just a hint of what I should do to really "commit" to such a big change.
I will admit that for a long time I sort of ignored it. I was interested in xhtml 2 but that's dead. And when the html 5 discussions began, xhtml seemed like a barely tolerated intruder. That's clearly less so currently. Then there was the dismissive attitude of the "5" folk towards RDFa. Everybody seems to be talking now and that's good.
So it looks like there will be an XHTML5 that directly supports RDFa. I'm assuming that means in the DOM as it's made available to Javascript. (Somebody tell if I'm wrong about that).
With this in mind, I spent the day catching up with developments in the html 5 community. Sometimes focusing on integration with RDFa but also just catching up.
This series of articles by "boblet" was well-written and useful. On the RDFa front, I read Mark Birbeck's discussion about tokenizing RDFa. Likewise interesting. And see the RDFa section of the Microformats.org HTML5 page.
I like that html 5 supports structures along the lines of:
<html>Add in more xhtml 1.0 bits and you can really think about doing a nice job of publishing prose works digitally with the html5 vocabulary. And don't forget the '<article>' element. That looks interesting as well.
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<section>
<summary></summary>
</section>
<section>
<h1>Introduction</h1>
<p></p>
...
</section>
<section>
<h1>Next section</h1>
<p></p>
...
</section>
</body>
</html>
Not all is perfect. I've always been bummed that the title element goes in the head of an (x)html document. That means that if you want it to show up in the document part of a browser window, you have to repeat it. There's some silliness there. Why can't a title element go anywhere? And would it it really be a problem if a document had more than one title in it? I can think of use-cases where that works: more than one article in a single html file, or a list of objects that have titles.
And there's still no preferred way of doing footnotes. The section in the spec 4.6.26 is sort of a punt. The boblet articles suggest <aside> for footnotes but that isn't encouraged in the spec. I see that there's a "note" value for the rel attribute on the WHATWG RelExtensions page. That list is an official part of the html 5 spec (see "Other Link Types"). But the spec is totally vague on how a proposed rel moves to actual approval.
And anybody using xhtml is still going to have lots of decisions about what goes in class attributes and how to specify lots of basic things like 'author'. That smacks of being proprietary. How much can Dublin Core help with this?
So... it was a day of mostly reading. I added a little bit of xhtml 5 to the git repository under an xhtml5 branch but only just a hint of what I should do to really "commit" to such a big change.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
OpenCyc + Wiki/DB-Pedia and Ancient World References
This is another post in the Ancient World RDFa series.
I'm writing now because I have two questions in mind, one fairly general and one very specific:
The "opencyc" namespace maps to "http://sw.opencyc.org/". You can read about OpenCyc at http://www.opencyc.org, where you'll be told that OpenCyc is an "ontology containing hundreds of thousands of terms, along with millions of assertions relating the terms to each other, forming an ontology whose domain is all of human consensus reality." Even accounting for "commericial-speak", this could be useful. And yes, it's based on a commercial product, but CC-Licensed versions of the whole thing can be downloaded from http://www.opencyc.org/downloads.
The landing place for PublicOffice is http://sw.opencyc.org/2009/04/07/concept/en/PublicOffice. "Mayor" and "Ambassador" are example instances of PublicOffice so I'm comfortable using it as the type for Strategos. But "Strategos" iteself is not in OpenCyc. I think this will be a common situation: knowledge bases intended for the modern world will have many useful analogs for concepts that appear in Ancient World scholarhip, but the specific vocabulary will be missing.
OpenCyc has entries forYou can replace many narrowly scoped namespaces with these and other concepts that appear in OpenCyc.
But again, no "Strategos". This is where Wikpedia (via DBPedia) comes in. Here's the Wikipedia article. I map that into the Semantic Web via DBPedia.
So here's a basic principle: OpenCyc is the default ontology, DBPedia is the default vocabulary. I think that plays to the strengths of each resource.
Neither is complete for the Ancient World. That's probably more of a problem for the use of OpenCyc. DBPedia doesn't have a page for the ceramic type "Eastern Sigillata A". If I write one for Wikipedia, that will eventually migrate to DBPedia. OpenCyc doesn't have an easy route for community-based editing. Will the concepts "Excavation Unit" or "Survey Collection Unit" be necessary? Probably. That means coming up with or finding an ontology for those.
I'm writing now because I have two questions in mind, one fairly general and one very specific:
- Is there a pre-existing ontology that I can use to identify concepts found in Ancient World scholarship?
- How can I indicate the office of "strategos" that was held by the sophist Polemon.
Polemon also appears as strategos on coins of Hadrian...Again, how to mark the text "strategos" so that it is identified as the ancient office. Here's what I have so far:
<spanThat give the following RDF/Turtle
id="id8296"
about="#id8296"
typeof="skos:Concept opencyc:PublicOffice"
rel="owl:sameAs"
resource="[dbpedia:Strategos]"
property="rdfs:label"
>strategos</span>
<http://example.org/ajn2006-smyrna.html#id8296>In short, this says that there's an instance of a public office and that office is "strategos".
a opencyc:PublicOffice, skos:Concept ;
owl:sameAs dbpedia:Strategos ;
rdfs:label "strategos"@en .
The "opencyc" namespace maps to "http://sw.opencyc.org/". You can read about OpenCyc at http://www.opencyc.org, where you'll be told that OpenCyc is an "ontology containing hundreds of thousands of terms, along with millions of assertions relating the terms to each other, forming an ontology whose domain is all of human consensus reality." Even accounting for "commericial-speak", this could be useful. And yes, it's based on a commercial product, but CC-Licensed versions of the whole thing can be downloaded from http://www.opencyc.org/downloads.
The landing place for PublicOffice is http://sw.opencyc.org/2009/04/07/concept/en/PublicOffice. "Mayor" and "Ambassador" are example instances of PublicOffice so I'm comfortable using it as the type for Strategos. But "Strategos" iteself is not in OpenCyc. I think this will be a common situation: knowledge bases intended for the modern world will have many useful analogs for concepts that appear in Ancient World scholarhip, but the specific vocabulary will be missing.
OpenCyc has entries forYou can replace many narrowly scoped namespaces with these and other concepts that appear in OpenCyc.
But again, no "Strategos". This is where Wikpedia (via DBPedia) comes in. Here's the Wikipedia article. I map that into the Semantic Web via DBPedia.
So here's a basic principle: OpenCyc is the default ontology, DBPedia is the default vocabulary. I think that plays to the strengths of each resource.
Neither is complete for the Ancient World. That's probably more of a problem for the use of OpenCyc. DBPedia doesn't have a page for the ceramic type "Eastern Sigillata A". If I write one for Wikipedia, that will eventually migrate to DBPedia. OpenCyc doesn't have an easy route for community-based editing. Will the concepts "Excavation Unit" or "Survey Collection Unit" be necessary? Probably. That means coming up with or finding an ontology for those.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Ancient World Digital Publishing Test Suite
This post is just a brief notice that I have begun a test suite of xhtml+rdfa and related documents to facilitate my work on digital publication for ancient world scholarship. It's very much "pre-release" at this point so I'm putting the suite out there for the sake of sharing, not because it's useful in its current state.
Right now, there are a few files in a git repository at http://github.com/sfsheath/awdp-test/. To download, try http://github.com/sfsheath/awdp-test/archives/master.
As the files become more useful, I'll talk more about what I'm trying to achieve with this project.
Right now, there are a few files in a git repository at http://github.com/sfsheath/awdp-test/. To download, try http://github.com/sfsheath/awdp-test/archives/master.
As the files become more useful, I'll talk more about what I'm trying to achieve with this project.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
RDFa Patterns for Ancient World References
I am continuing to experiment with semantic links within digital publications relevant to the Ancient World. Here's a snippet from the same article I drew from in the last post.
As before, I'm using RDFa. In a future post, I'll explain this choice and talk about what RDFa and RDF are, but for now I'm diving right in.
The relevant namespaces that I'm using are:
Polemon
The reference to Polemon now looks like:
With the '<head>' of the document including '<base href="http://example.org/ajn2006-smyrna.html"/>', that RDFa gives the following RDF/turtle:
The pairing of 'id' and 'about' attributes means that I can identify a span of text and then say things about it.
I then give that span a type. Here I say that it's a skos:Concept and a foaf:Person. Which concept and which person? http://dbpedia.org/resource/Polemon_of_Laodicea. 'skos:Concept' will be used on all named-entities, and their nature will be further qualified when it's useful.
Why "owl:sameAs'. Here I follow the usage of dbpedia.org. If you look at the Polemon page, you'll see the same construct used to make the link to freebase. 'owl:sameAs' also underlies sameas.org (see the n3 for Hadrian).
The metaphor here is that I am instantiating Poleman as a concept and person present in the text. That should be recognizable and actionable. There is some redundancy in how I go about doing it, but that is in the spirit of convenience for future processors of this data.
"In 124"
This looks like:
But I am probably on less-firm ground here. I use FRBR because it's an LOC approved standard. I annotate the event with an RSS Event property and that's a little weak. And it might seem odd to equate the event with the dbpedia representation of the year 124. If you follow through to the wikipedia version, that does refer to Hadrian's trip east, which is the setting for Polemon's speech. In the case of a better known event, I think I'd prefer to link to a representation of that, for example http://dbpedia.org/page/Sack_of_Rome_(455). The 'owl:sameAs' on that page will eventually redirect you to the right Wiki page.
Here's the RDF/Turtle produced by the above RDFa:
References
There are two inline references at the end of the sentence. The first is to a primary source, an inscription at Smyrna as published in Petzl, G. (1982). Die Inschriften von Smyrna. Bonn: Habelt. The second is to Barbara Burrell's Burrell, B. (2004). Neokoroi: Greek cities and Roman emperors. Cincinnati classical studies, new ser., v. 9. Leiden: Brill.
Here's the RDFa for the second:
Here's the RDF/Turtle:
The RDFa for the epigraphic reference looks like:
It's also important that I'm referring to the publication of the inscription, not the inscription itself. When a digital surrogate becomes available, I can point to that. In the meantime, a way of standardizing references to parts of a work would be useful. But I don't think you can just tag on a fragment identifier, as in http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/8935414#no.%20697, since the implication there is that such an ID actually exists. And it might be rude to put the same after a '?'. Something to ponder...
Instead of continuing on with each named entitiy, here's the whole sentence with RDFa visible:
Some of these constructs deserve more comment but this post is getting long. The only thing to add is that fairly soon I will publish a javascript toolset that starts making use of these patterns.
In 124, Polemon had spoken before Hadrian and persuaded him to make a gift of money and grant a series of honors to Smyrna, not least of which was a second temple to the imperial cult (IvS 697; Burrell 2004: 42-48).The "things" I want to identify are:
- The year 124 as an event.
- The sophist Polemon
- The emperor Hadrian
- The imperial cult
- And the two citations
As before, I'm using RDFa. In a future post, I'll explain this choice and talk about what RDFa and RDF are, but for now I'm diving right in.
The relevant namespaces that I'm using are:
- xmlns:dbpedia="http://dbpedia.org/resource/"
- xmlns:cito="http://purl.org/net/cito/"
- xmlns:ev="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/event/"
- xmlns:ex="http://example.org/"
- xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
- xmlns:frbr="http://purl.org/vocab/frbr/core#"
- xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#"
- xmlns:owl="http ://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#"
- xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
- xmlns:skos="http://www.w3.org/2008/05/skos#"
- xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
Polemon
The reference to Polemon now looks like:
<span id="id2209"
about="#id2209"
typeof="skos:Concept foaf:Person"
resource="[dbpedia:Polemon_of_Laodicea]"
rel="owl:sameAs cite"
property="rdfs:label">Polemon</span>With the '<head>' of the document including '<base href="http://example.org/ajn2006-smyrna.html"/>', that RDFa gives the following RDF/turtle:
Some observations:
<http://example.org/ajn2006-smyrna.html#id2209>
owl:sameAs dbpedia:Polemon_of_Laodicea ;
a skos:Concept, foaf:Person ;
<http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite> dbpedia:Polemon_of_Laodicea ;
rdfs:label "Polemon"@en .
The pairing of 'id' and 'about' attributes means that I can identify a span of text and then say things about it.
I then give that span a type. Here I say that it's a skos:Concept and a foaf:Person. Which concept and which person? http://dbpedia.org/resource/Polemon_of_Laodicea. 'skos:Concept' will be used on all named-entities, and their nature will be further qualified when it's useful.
Why "owl:sameAs'. Here I follow the usage of dbpedia.org. If you look at the Polemon page, you'll see the same construct used to make the link to freebase. 'owl:sameAs' also underlies sameas.org (see the n3 for Hadrian).
The metaphor here is that I am instantiating Poleman as a concept and person present in the text. That should be recognizable and actionable. There is some redundancy in how I go about doing it, but that is in the spirit of convenience for future processors of this data.
"In 124"
This looks like:
<span id="id3724"Same basic process. I isolate some text as individually addressable. I say what is, in this case a FRBR Event. Here I also embed a machine-readable property, the start date, into the document , but retain the inline text as the label.
about="#id3724"
typeof="frbr:Event"
rel="owl:sameAs"
resource="dbpedia:124"
property="ev:startdate"
datatype="xsd:year"
content="124">In 124</span>
But I am probably on less-firm ground here. I use FRBR because it's an LOC approved standard. I annotate the event with an RSS Event property and that's a little weak. And it might seem odd to equate the event with the dbpedia representation of the year 124. If you follow through to the wikipedia version, that does refer to Hadrian's trip east, which is the setting for Polemon's speech. In the case of a better known event, I think I'd prefer to link to a representation of that, for example http://dbpedia.org/page/Sack_of_Rome_(455). The 'owl:sameAs' on that page will eventually redirect you to the right Wiki page.
Here's the RDF/Turtle produced by the above RDFa:
<http://example.org/ajn2006-smyrna.html#id3724>As above, the goal is for this to be usable in a number of contexts.
owl:sameAs <dbpedia:124> ;
ev:startdate "124"^^xsd:year ;
a frbr:Event, skos:Concept .
References
There are two inline references at the end of the sentence. The first is to a primary source, an inscription at Smyrna as published in Petzl, G. (1982). Die Inschriften von Smyrna. Bonn: Habelt. The second is to Barbara Burrell's Burrell, B. (2004). Neokoroi: Greek cities and Roman emperors. Cincinnati classical studies, new ser., v. 9. Leiden: Brill.
Here's the RDFa for the second:
<span id="id4616"This is similar markup as previously, except I'm not instantiating it as a 'skos:Concept'. I am using the CITO ontology to indicate the relationship between the works, but note that I'm currently making up the type 'ex:Citation'. Perhaps I could use 'cito:Document' but that doesn't seem quite right. I really want to mark this span of text as being a citation but haven't found just the right RDF vocabulary. I looked at BIBO but, like CITO, it doesn't have the exact class I want. BIBO is linked with Zotero so I'd like to use it. For now, CITO has a more detailed set of relationships between citing and cited documents so I'm going with that. Worldcat also isn't great because there's confusion about the 'terms of use' but it will do for this experimental phase.
about="#id4616"
typeof="ex:Citation"
rel="cito:citesAsAuthority cite"
resource="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/53013513"
property="rdfs:label">Burrell 2004: 42-48</span>
Here's the RDF/Turtle:
<http://example.org/ajn2006-smyrna.html#id4616>
cito:citesAsAuthority <http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/53013513> ;
a ex:Citation ;
<http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite> <http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/53013513> ;
rdfs:label "Burrell 2004: 42-48"@en .
The RDFa for the epigraphic reference looks like:
<span id="id9773"The main difference here is that I'm also making up the 'ex:citesAsPrimarySource' value for the rel attribute. The concept of "Primary Source" and references thereto is important for the Humanities and we need a way of indicating its usage.
about="#id9773"
typeof="ex:Citation"
rel="cito:citesAsAuthority ex:citesAsPrimarySource"
resource="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/8935414"
property="rdfs:label"><i>IvS</i> 697</span>
It's also important that I'm referring to the publication of the inscription, not the inscription itself. When a digital surrogate becomes available, I can point to that. In the meantime, a way of standardizing references to parts of a work would be useful. But I don't think you can just tag on a fragment identifier, as in http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/8935414#no.%20697, since the implication there is that such an ID actually exists. And it might be rude to put the same after a '?'. Something to ponder...
Instead of continuing on with each named entitiy, here's the whole sentence with RDFa visible:
<span id="id3724" about="#id3724" typeof="skos:Concept frbr:Event" rel="owl:sameAs" resource="dbpedia:124" property="ev:startdate" datatype="xsd:year" content="124">In 124</span>, <span id="id2209" about="#id2209" typeof="skos:Concept foaf:Person" resource="[dbpedia:Polemon_of_Laodicea]" rel="owl:sameAs cite" property="rdfs:label">Polemon</span> had spoken before <span id="id5130" about="#id5130" typeof="skos:Concept foaf:Person" rel="owl:sameAs cite" resource="[dbpedia:Hadrian]" property="rdfs:label">Hadrian</span> and persuaded him to make a gift of money and grant a series of honors to <span id="id39156" about="#id39156" typeof="skos:Concept geo:SpatialThing" rel="owl:sameAs cite" resource="http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/550771" property="rdfs:label">Smyrna</span>, not least of which was a second temple to the <span id="id4168" about="#4168" typeof="skos:Concept dbpedia:Religion" rel="owl:sameAs cite" resource="dbpedia:Imperial_cult_(ancient_Rome)]" property="rdfs:label">imperial cult</span> (<span id="id9773" about="#id9773" typeof="ex:Citation" rel="cito:citesAsAuthority ex:citesAsPrimarySource" resource="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/8935414" property="rdfs:label"><i>IvS</i> 697</span>; <span id="id4616" about="#id4616" typeof="ex:Citation" rel="cito:citesAsAuthority cite" resource="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/53013513" property="rdfs:label">Burrell 2004: 42-48</span>).And here's the RDF/Turtle:
<http://example.org/ajn2006-smyrna.html#id3724>
owl:sameAs <dbpedia:124> ;
ev:startdate "124"^^xsd:year ;
a frbr:Event, skos:Concept .
<http://example.org/ajn2006-smyrna.html#id2209>
owl:sameAs dbpedia:Polemon_of_Laodicea ;
a skos:Concept, foaf:Person ;
<http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite> dbpedia:Polemon_of_Laodicea ;
rdfs:label "Polemon"@en .
<http://example.org/ajn2006-smyrna.html#id5130>
owl:sameAs dbpedia:Hadrian ;
a skos:Concept, foaf:Person ;
<http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite> dbpedia:Hadrian ;
rdfs:label "Hadrian"@en .
<http://example.org/ajn2006-smyrna.html#id39156>
owl:sameAs <http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/550771> ;
a geo:SpatialThing, skos:Concept ;
<http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite> <http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/550771> ;
rdfs:label "Smyrna"@en .
<http://example.org/ajn2006-smyrna.html#4168>
owl:sameAs <dbpedia:Imperial_cult_(ancient_Rome)]> ;
a dbpedia:Religion, skos:Concept ;
<http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite> <dbpedia:Imperial_cult_(ancient_Rome)]> ;
rdfs:label "imperial cult"@en .
<http://example.org/ajn2006-smyrna.html#id9773>
ex:citesAsPrimarySource <http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/8935414> ;
cito:citesAsAuthority <http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/8935414> ;
a ex:Citation ;
rdfs:label "<i>IvS</i> 697"^^rdf:XMLLiteral .
<http://example.org/ajn2006-smyrna.html#id4616>
cito:citesAsAuthority <http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/53013513> ;
a ex:Citation ;
<http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite> <http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/53013513> ;
rdfs:label "Burrell 2004: 42-48"@en .
Some of these constructs deserve more comment but this post is getting long. The only thing to add is that fairly soon I will publish a javascript toolset that starts making use of these patterns.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Referring to People and Places
Another title for this post could be "How can I achieve something by doing nothing?"
Back in 2006 I published the article 'A Box Mirror Made from Two Antinous Medallions of Smyrna.' American Journal of Numismatics Second Series 18 (2006), 63-74. It contains the following sentences:
BTW, pictures of the mirror are at http://numismatics.org/collection/2005.19.1.
In terms of well-known identifiers, here's the "low hanging fruit" that I see in the sample text:
You'll note that I'm using the English Wikipedia for most of my identifiers and Pleiades for Smyrna. There is a Wikipedia article for that ancient site, but I do want to situate myself within the discipline of ancient geography. I think using the Pleiades reference meets that goal. On a slightly different topic, I was tempted to use dbpedia references – as in http://dbpedia.org/resource/Polemon_of_Laodicea – but think it's probably better practice to give the Wiki URI and let harvestors, etc. derive the dbpedia URI if they want to. Is it a disadvantage to tie the URI to a particular language?
Moving along... how to embed these references in the text? That does require an initial choice: RDFa embedded in xhtml. Here's a possible snippet that links an implicit identity with the relevant unambiguous identifier:
Why do I think I've achieved that? If I point an RDF parser – I use rapper – at this text, I get the following triples:
I think this represents progress towards using a well-known standard that allows a third-party tool to extract the semantic meaning in my text. Expanding the markup I'm using, here's the whole sample text with embedded RDF:
Which produces the following RDF:
By way of a few observations, note that I type "Smyrna" – here id128979 - as a mint using the URI http://nomisma.org/id/mint, which is a reference to an incipient numismatic vocabulary. I don't type Hadrian as a Roman emperor. 'Smyrna' can be used in many ways so I want to be clear that I'm referring to it as a mint (in the broad numismatic sense). Hadrian's role as emperor is explicitly stated in the Wiki article and in its dbpedia equivalent. I don't think I need to repeat that here.
I'm also adding 'cite' to the rel attributes. 'cite' is one of the W3 sponsored relationships and I like how generic it is but also want to use the more specific 'skos:sameAs'.
This post is not a finished product and I don't mean to suggest that the above is the best way to achieve my goal. I welcome comments along the lines of "You should be using pre-existing standard http://...." or "What you suggest is sort of (barely?) OK but here's an improvement...". Is there a better RDFa pattern?
Back in 2006 I published the article 'A Box Mirror Made from Two Antinous Medallions of Smyrna.' American Journal of Numismatics Second Series 18 (2006), 63-74. It contains the following sentences:
The reverse type on this piece is one of four images — showing either the female panther on this piece, a bull, a sheep, or a ship’s prow — that appear on a series of medallions struck at Smyrna in honor of Antinous and naming Polemon as issuer. These two individuals are both historical figures and their biographical information provides the framework for dating the issue. Antinous was the companion of the emperor Hadrian who drowned in the Nile in late AD 130.I am currently thinking about how to represent links from the "named entities" embedded within texts such as this to well-known identifiers for those concepts. That's what I want to achieve. The "doing nothing" part of my alternate title is an off-hand way of indicating that I want to make as few choices as possible. To again rephrase, the bottom line is that I'm hoping to use pre-existing standards.
BTW, pictures of the mirror are at http://numismatics.org/collection/2005.19.1.
In terms of well-known identifiers, here's the "low hanging fruit" that I see in the sample text:
- Smyrna: http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/550771. This is a Pleiades identifier for the ancient site.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nile
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polemon_of_Laodicea
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinous
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadrian
You'll note that I'm using the English Wikipedia for most of my identifiers and Pleiades for Smyrna. There is a Wikipedia article for that ancient site, but I do want to situate myself within the discipline of ancient geography. I think using the Pleiades reference meets that goal. On a slightly different topic, I was tempted to use dbpedia references – as in http://dbpedia.org/resource/Polemon_of_Laodicea – but think it's probably better practice to give the Wiki URI and let harvestors, etc. derive the dbpedia URI if they want to. Is it a disadvantage to tie the URI to a particular language?
Moving along... how to embed these references in the text? That does require an initial choice: RDFa embedded in xhtml. Here's a possible snippet that links an implicit identity with the relevant unambiguous identifier:
<span id="id7474" about="#id7474" typeof="foaf:Person" rel="owl:sameAs" resource="http://dbpedia.org/page/Polemon_of_Laodicea">Polemon</span>With this markup I am trying to say, "the characters 'Polemon' refer to a person and that person is the same as the person represented by the URI 'http://dbpedia.org/page/Polemon_of_Laodicea'."
Why do I think I've achieved that? If I point an RDF parser – I use rapper – at this text, I get the following triples:
<http:/example.org/AJN2006-Heath.html#id7474>
<http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type>
<http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person> .
<http:/example.org/AJN2006-Heath.html#id7474>
<http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polemon_of_Laodicea> .
<http:/example.org/AJN2006-Heath.html#id7474>
<http ://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#sameAs>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polemon_of_Laodicea> .
I think this represents progress towards using a well-known standard that allows a third-party tool to extract the semantic meaning in my text. Expanding the markup I'm using, here's the whole sample text with embedded RDF:
The reverse type on this piece is one of four images — showing either the female panther on this piece, a bull, a sheep, or a ship’s prow — that appear on a series of medallions struck at <span id="id128979" about="#id128979" typeof="geonames:Feature nm:mint" rel="skos:sameAs cite" resource="http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/550771">Smyrna</span> in honor of <span id="id49178" about="#id49178" typeof="foaf:Person" rel="skos:sameAs cite" resource="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinous">Antinous</span> and naming <span id="id7474" about="#id7474" typeof="foaf:Person" rel="cite skos:sameAs" resource="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polemon_of_Laodicea">Polemon</span> as issuer. These two individuals are both historical figures and their biographical information provides the framework for dating the issue. Antinous was the companion of the emperor <span id="id876873" about="#id876873" typeof="foaf:Person" rel="skos:sameAs cite" resource="http://en.wikipedia.org/en/Hadrian">Hadrian</span> who drowned in the <span id="id5726" about="#id5726" typeof="geoname:Feature" rel="skos:sameAs cite" resource="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nile">Nile</span> in late AD 130.
Which produces the following RDF:
<http:/example.org/AJN2006-Heath.html#id128979>
a nm:mint, geonames:Feature ;
<http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite> <http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/550771> ;
skos:sameAs <http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/550771> .
<http:/example.org/AJN2006-Heath.html#id49178>
a foaf:Person ;
<http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinous> ;
skos:sameAs <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinous> .
<http:/example.org/AJN2006-Heath.html#id7474>
a foaf:Person ;
<http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polemon_of_Laodicea> ;
skos:sameAs <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polemon_of_Laodicea> .
<http:/example.org/AJN2006-Heath.html#id876873>
a foaf:Person ;
<http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite> <http://en.wikipedia.org/en/Hadrian> ;
skos:sameAs <http://en.wikipedia.org/en/Hadrian> .
<http:/example.org/AJN2006-Heath.html#id5726>
<http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nile> ;
skos:sameAs <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nile> .
By way of a few observations, note that I type "Smyrna" – here id128979 - as a mint using the URI http://nomisma.org/id/mint, which is a reference to an incipient numismatic vocabulary. I don't type Hadrian as a Roman emperor. 'Smyrna' can be used in many ways so I want to be clear that I'm referring to it as a mint (in the broad numismatic sense). Hadrian's role as emperor is explicitly stated in the Wiki article and in its dbpedia equivalent. I don't think I need to repeat that here.
I'm also adding 'cite' to the rel attributes. 'cite' is one of the W3 sponsored relationships and I like how generic it is but also want to use the more specific 'skos:sameAs'.
This post is not a finished product and I don't mean to suggest that the above is the best way to achieve my goal. I welcome comments along the lines of "You should be using pre-existing standard http://...." or "What you suggest is sort of (barely?) OK but here's an improvement...". Is there a better RDFa pattern?
Thursday, December 17, 2009
New URL Pattern at American Numismatic Society
At the ANS, we are currently assigning hierarchical categories to all the objects in the database. You might think this had already been done, but in the pre-web world, when most of our 550,000 records were entered, it wasn't really necessary. If you wanted to find Byzantine Seals or Contorniates, you just went to the right tray and there they were.
In a webbie world, we want users to be able to navigate by well-known numismatic categories in order to access individual records, examination of which can suggest searches that will help one find what one is looking for. Keeping that goal in mind, our categories need to be sensible and recognizable, but do not need to carry an undue interpretive burden. It's OK that a user might question how we've arranged things, so long as we've helped her find what she's looking for.
Some examples:
Notes:
'--' separates the components of a category.
The URL prefix is http://numismatics.org/search/category/ . We're trying to make these search-engine friendly. We do intend for these to be stable, but aren't quite making the guarantee that we do about URLs of the form http://numismatics.org/collection/1944.100.81154. Those should work for as long as the DNS/URL paradigm is around.
Appending "/images" to a URL will show only records with images.
In the future, I expect that extensions such as ".atom", ".json", ".kml" will also have the desired result.
Again, the reason we're doing this is to ease the user experience. See the description of the ANS Roman collection for a preliminary deployment of these links in the real world. We hope it's a convenience that our Italic coins, for example, will be one click away.
In a webbie world, we want users to be able to navigate by well-known numismatic categories in order to access individual records, examination of which can suggest searches that will help one find what one is looking for. Keeping that goal in mind, our categories need to be sensible and recognizable, but do not need to carry an undue interpretive burden. It's OK that a user might question how we've arranged things, so long as we've helped her find what she's looking for.
Some examples:
- http://numismatics.org/search/category/roman--republican
- http://numismatics.org/search/category/roman--republican/images
- http://numismatics.org/search/category/roman--provincial/images
- http://numismatics.org/search/category/roman--imperial/images
- http://numismatics.org/search/category/roman--italic/images
- http://numismatics.org/search/category/roman--imperial--contorniate/images
- http://numismatics.org/search/category/usa--pre-federal
- http://numismatics.org/search/category/usa--pre-federal--continental+currency
- http://numismatics.org/search/category/usa--federal/images
- http://numismatics.org/search/category/usa--federal--large+cent/images
- http://numismatics.org/search/category/usa--federal--small+cent/images
- http://numismatics.org/search/category/byzantine--seals/images
- http://numismatics.org/search/category/medals--indian+peace+medals
Notes:
'--' separates the components of a category.
The URL prefix is http://numismatics.org/search/category/ . We're trying to make these search-engine friendly. We do intend for these to be stable, but aren't quite making the guarantee that we do about URLs of the form http://numismatics.org/collection/1944.100.81154. Those should work for as long as the DNS/URL paradigm is around.
Appending "/images" to a URL will show only records with images.
In the future, I expect that extensions such as ".atom", ".json", ".kml" will also have the desired result.
Again, the reason we're doing this is to ease the user experience. See the description of the ANS Roman collection for a preliminary deployment of these links in the real world. We hope it's a convenience that our Italic coins, for example, will be one click away.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Museums Explain Their Databases
It's a good thing that museums are increasingly putting their curatorial databases online for public browsing and searching. A minor aspect of this trend is the language institutions use to explain the state of their data. This post collects some examples of the genre.
The Brooklyn Museum has the following on its opening search page:
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston shows this to start:
The Metropolitan Museum in New York has the following:
Overall, these texts represent a mode of sharing data that is welcome. Better to make slightly incorrect or outdated data available than to hold on tight to it. That's especially the case when there are images of the objects as well.
The Brooklyn Museum has the following on its opening search page:
The material presented here represents only a fraction of that rich collection. The Museum is committed to making its collections accessible to the widest possible audience, and this site is an important part of that process. It is, however, a work in progress. We intend to continue to expand the number of works of art included on the site and to update information currently posted. We are making every effort to ensure that the information provided about our collection is accurate and up-to-date, but the nature of scholarship is that there are sometimes changes in information and new discoveries. If you believe you have information we should have about any of the works you find here, we would be happy to hear from you.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston shows this to start:
Note that some of the electronic records indicate that they have not been reviewed recently by curatorial staff and might need revision; also, please note that a small percentage of the MFA’s collection is not presently searchable online.The indicated MFA records have this:
This electronic record was created from historic documentation that does not necessarily reflect the MFA's complete or current knowledge about the object. Review and updating of such records is ongoing.That text is essentially identical to what appears on the Yale Art Gallery site
Note: This electronic record was created from historic documentation that does not necessarily reflect the Yale University Art Gallery's complete or current knowledge about the object. Review and updating of such records is ongoing.In turn, that's not so far off from the Harvard Art Museum text:
This record was created from historic documentation and may not have been reviewed by a curator; it may be inaccurate or incomplete. Our records are frequently revised and enhanced. Please contact the curatorial department listed above for more information.[[Note that I don't give a link into the Harvard website. The (almost unbelievable) explanation is that if you click on http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/collection/detail.dot?objectid=289448 you get a blank page. I clicked on the link from a search results page and saw information about a sherd of Roman pottery. Is it really possible that Harvard is checking a session id or the referrer and only displaying the info as part of an existing visit to the site? If so, that's highly (highly!) lame.]]
The Metropolitan Museum in New York has the following:
Due to the extremely large number of objects in the Museum's permanent collection, not all artworks are currently available in the Collection Database. Furthermore, information contained in the database records is, in some cases, incomplete, and all information is subject to change according to ongoing research and new acquisitions.The British Museum just puts "Noticed a mistake? Have some extra information about this object? Please contact us." on its individual object pages. That's in the same spirit as the more extended explanations from other institutions.
Overall, these texts represent a mode of sharing data that is welcome. Better to make slightly incorrect or outdated data available than to hold on tight to it. That's especially the case when there are images of the objects as well.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Mediterranean Ceramics Reference Stability Report, Number 8
The MCRSR first appeared in October, 2007. This is the first new installment since April 2008.
As I noted then, the JSTOR link to number 2 takes me to a login page. I still find it odd that no indication of the title of the work is given. When I am logged into JSTOR via UPenn, the link works.
Number 10, which was the Perseus Project Vase Catalog, is now part of the Persues Project Art and Archaeology Artifact Browser. The old URI does not work on the main Perseus site.
No new references have been added.
I have seen that some of these resources have improved URIs, meaning they are shorter and with fewer '?','&' and '=' characters. That's a welcome development and I will update the addresses next time round.
1. Walters' Catalogue of the Roman Pottery in the Departments of Antiquities, British Museum from Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=M2UEAAAAYAAJ
2. Robinson's Agora V from JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/i285178, previously http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1558-8610%281959%295%3C%3E1.0.CO%3B2-3 [noted April 2008].
3. Lattara 6: http://www.lattara.net/LATTARAPUB/PUBLAT/LATTARA6/lattara6.html
4. K. Greene's AJA article on Early Roman lead glazed pottery: http://www.ajaonline.org/pdfs/111.4/AJA1114_Greene.pdf
5. Heath and Tekkök, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Pottery at Ilion (Troia): http://classics.uc.edu/troy/grbpottery/
6. Vessel from Çatalhoyuk (via Flickr): http://www.flickr.com/photos/catalhoyuk/971964416/
7. A Late Minoan III Pyxis from the Metropolitan Museum of Art: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/03/eus/hod_1999.423.htm
8. An undocumented ARS Hayes 70 bowl from the dealer Classical Numismatics Group: http://cngcoins.com/Coin.aspx?CoinID=86618
9. Fifteenth Century Mosque Lamp from Jerusalem now in the British Museum: http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/me/m/mosque_lamp.aspx
10. The Perseus Project Vase Catalog: now part of http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/artifactBrowser, previously http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0043 [noted December 2009].
11. Wikimedia Commons Image of a Greek Geometric Skyphos in the Louvre: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Skyphos_birds_Louvre_CA3822.jpg
12. Sagalassos from Pleiades: http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/639087
13. Inscribed pot from Aphrodisias (HTML): http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007/iAph150353.html
14. Inscribed pot from Aphrodisias (XML): http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007/xml/iAph150353.xml
15. Hellenistic lamp from Assos, Turkey at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: http://mfa.org/collections/search_art.asp?recview=true&id=199476&coll_keywords=&coll_accession=84%2E110&coll_name=&coll_artist=&coll_place=&coll_medium=&coll_culture=&coll_classification=&coll_credit=&coll_provenance=&coll_location=&coll_has_images=&coll_on_view=&coll_sort=2&coll_sort_order=0&coll_view=0&coll_package=0&coll_start=1
16. Open Context record for Halaf period jar from Domuztepe, Turkey: http://www.opencontext.org/database/space.php?item=14926_DT_Spatial
17. Abbasid Ceramics from the Museum With No Frontiers: http://www.discoverislamicart.org/exhibitions/ISL/the_abbasids/exhibition.php?theme=5
18. Roman Amphorae: a digital resource: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/resources.html?amphora2005
As I noted then, the JSTOR link to number 2 takes me to a login page. I still find it odd that no indication of the title of the work is given. When I am logged into JSTOR via UPenn, the link works.
Number 10, which was the Perseus Project Vase Catalog, is now part of the Persues Project Art and Archaeology Artifact Browser. The old URI does not work on the main Perseus site.
No new references have been added.
I have seen that some of these resources have improved URIs, meaning they are shorter and with fewer '?','&' and '=' characters. That's a welcome development and I will update the addresses next time round.
1. Walters' Catalogue of the Roman Pottery in the Departments of Antiquities, British Museum from Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=M2UEAAAAYAAJ
2. Robinson's Agora V from JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/i285178, previously http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1558-8610%281959%295%3C%3E1.0.CO%3B2-3 [noted April 2008].
3. Lattara 6: http://www.lattara.net/LATTARAPUB/PUBLAT/LATTARA6/lattara6.html
4. K. Greene's AJA article on Early Roman lead glazed pottery: http://www.ajaonline.org/pdfs/111.4/AJA1114_Greene.pdf
5. Heath and Tekkök, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Pottery at Ilion (Troia): http://classics.uc.edu/troy/grbpottery/
6. Vessel from Çatalhoyuk (via Flickr): http://www.flickr.com/photos/catalhoyuk/971964416/
7. A Late Minoan III Pyxis from the Metropolitan Museum of Art: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/03/eus/hod_1999.423.htm
8. An undocumented ARS Hayes 70 bowl from the dealer Classical Numismatics Group: http://cngcoins.com/Coin.aspx?CoinID=86618
9. Fifteenth Century Mosque Lamp from Jerusalem now in the British Museum: http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/me/m/mosque_lamp.aspx
10. The Perseus Project Vase Catalog: now part of http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/artifactBrowser, previously http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0043 [noted December 2009].
11. Wikimedia Commons Image of a Greek Geometric Skyphos in the Louvre: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Skyphos_birds_Louvre_CA3822.jpg
12. Sagalassos from Pleiades: http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/639087
13. Inscribed pot from Aphrodisias (HTML): http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007/iAph150353.html
14. Inscribed pot from Aphrodisias (XML): http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007/xml/iAph150353.xml
15. Hellenistic lamp from Assos, Turkey at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: http://mfa.org/collections/search_art.asp?recview=true&id=199476&coll_keywords=&coll_accession=84%2E110&coll_name=&coll_artist=&coll_place=&coll_medium=&coll_culture=&coll_classification=&coll_credit=&coll_provenance=&coll_location=&coll_has_images=&coll_on_view=&coll_sort=2&coll_sort_order=0&coll_view=0&coll_package=0&coll_start=1
16. Open Context record for Halaf period jar from Domuztepe, Turkey: http://www.opencontext.org/database/space.php?item=14926_DT_Spatial
17. Abbasid Ceramics from the Museum With No Frontiers: http://www.discoverislamicart.org/exhibitions/ISL/the_abbasids/exhibition.php?theme=5
18. Roman Amphorae: a digital resource: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/resources.html?amphora2005
Aegean Amphora at Dura Europos
As a follow up to the last post, here's a 3rd to 5th century AD Middle Roman Amphora 7 from Dura, now at Yale. It's essentially uncataloged but there's no doubt about what it is.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Dura Europos Pottery at Yale
This is just a brief post to say that I've been enjoying looking at images of the pottery from Dura Europos that is now at the Yale University Art Gallery. At the time of writing, you can get to it by following this link. If that doesn't work try "Syrian, Dura-Europos" in the culture field and "Containers - Ceramic" in the classification field.
The Gallery's database is pretty nice. I'll give its URLs for addressing individual records a B+. Here's an example: http://ecatalogue.art.yale.edu/detail.htm?objectId=3432 . It would be better if that were something like http://art.yale.edu/objectid/3432 , but I'm a quibbler for good looking identifiers.
Sometimes the information is limited. For example, 1938.5011 is definitely Eastern Sigillata A, and 1938.4969 looks to be African Red Slip. I do hesitate to identify from images, but again 1938.4980 sure looks like ARS.
The above is not a complaint. Similarly to many online museum databases, Yale displays the following text with each record:
The Gallery's database is pretty nice. I'll give its URLs for addressing individual records a B+. Here's an example: http://ecatalogue.art.yale.edu/detail.htm?objectId=3432 . It would be better if that were something like http://art.yale.edu/objectid/3432 , but I'm a quibbler for good looking identifiers.
Sometimes the information is limited. For example, 1938.5011 is definitely Eastern Sigillata A, and 1938.4969 looks to be African Red Slip. I do hesitate to identify from images, but again 1938.4980 sure looks like ARS.
The above is not a complaint. Similarly to many online museum databases, Yale displays the following text with each record:
Note: This electronic record was created from historic documentation that does not necessarily reflect the Yale University Art Gallery's complete or current knowledge about the object. Review and updating of such records is ongoing.It's great that museums aren't hiding their data just because it's incomplete or incorrect. It's more useful just to put it out there so interested folk like me can have fun browsing.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Protecting Archaeology in Italy, Now by Email
Yesterday I wrote about the upcoming Nov. 13th meeting of the Cultural Property Advisory Committee. I am now getting reports that people have sent in their letters by fax. This is great. I have also heard that messages sent by regular mail will take weeks to arrive. That makes e-mail a good alternative. The address is culprop@state.gov. Attaching a word document to that address is a good idea. Or the fax number is (202) 632–6300 .
Some relevant links.
In 2001 the US and Italy signed a Memorandum of Understanding. You can read that here as a PDF:
http://exchanges.state.gov/heritage/culprop/itfact/pdfs/it2001mou.pdf
Article II of the MoU was amended in 2006. Here's a link:
http://culturalheritage.state.gov/it06agr.html
And as a pdf:
http://exchanges.state.gov/heritage/culprop/itfact/pdfs/it2006mouext.pdf
Here's the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affair's (ECA) page for the agreement with Italy:
http://exchanges.state.gov/heritage/culprop/itfact.html
And, finally, the page for the Cultural Property Advisory Committee:
http://exchanges.state.gov/heritage/culprop/committee.html
If you're interested in the topic, it is worthwhile to poke around the ECA site. There is lots of good information there.
But to emphasize my main point, please write a letter. The deadline is Monday, November 2nd so that the culprop@state.gov may be the best way to communicate. If you have letterhead and no fax machine, make a scan at 8-bit 100 dpi and attach that. Here's the e-mail again: culprop@state.gov .
Some relevant links.
In 2001 the US and Italy signed a Memorandum of Understanding. You can read that here as a PDF:
http://exchanges.state.gov/heritage/culprop/itfact/pdfs/it2001mou.pdf
Article II of the MoU was amended in 2006. Here's a link:
http://culturalheritage.state.gov/it06agr.html
And as a pdf:
http://exchanges.state.gov/heritage/culprop/itfact/pdfs/it2006mouext.pdf
Here's the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affair's (ECA) page for the agreement with Italy:
http://exchanges.state.gov/heritage/culprop/itfact.html
And, finally, the page for the Cultural Property Advisory Committee:
http://exchanges.state.gov/heritage/culprop/committee.html
If you're interested in the topic, it is worthwhile to poke around the ECA site. There is lots of good information there.
But to emphasize my main point, please write a letter. The deadline is Monday, November 2nd so that the culprop@state.gov may be the best way to communicate. If you have letterhead and no fax machine, make a scan at 8-bit 100 dpi and attach that. Here's the e-mail again: culprop@state.gov .
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Protecting Archaeology in Italy, Nov. 2nd Deadline
The primary US mechanism for regulating the trade in illegally excavated antiquities is a series of agreements with other countries that specify what can be imported and how the two countries are going to co-operate to promote the preservation of cultural patrimony.
On Nov. 13th, the Cultural Property Advisory Committee, which helps draft and review such agreements, is meeting in Washington, D.C. to consider the Memorandum of Understanding with Italy.
The full-text of the agreement can be found here
http://culturalheritage.state.gov/it06agr.html.
The call for the meeting is here:
http://culturalheritage.state.gov/whatsnew.html. Follow the link at
the top right for more specifics.
The announcement of the meeting includes the following:
"With respect to comments on the interim review of the Memorandum of Understanding Between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Republic of Italy Concerning the Imposition of Import Restrictions on Archaeological Material Representing the Pre-Classical, Classical and Imperial Roman Periods of Italy, concluded on
January 19, 2001, and extended in 2006, oral comments must be limited to Article II of this MOU."
Article II concerns actions that both the US and Italy are supposed to take to implement the MoU. I am writing now to encourage readers either to write a letter to CPAC commenting on Italy's actions under Article II.
Letters that address specific actions by Italy that fall under Article II and which benefit or affect the writer are the most useful. But the bar is low, so to speak. If you excavate in Italy, have conducted research there, have seen Italian material on loan to American museums, or have used such material in your teaching, that counts.
Discussion of loans is particularly important. Museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Getty Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Princteton University Art Museum, the Morgan Library in NYC, the Meadow Museum at Southern Methodist University and others have Italian material on loan. If you have seen these objects and enjoyed them, please write.
Letters do not need to be long. Without meaning to provide too much unnecessary advice: the opening sentence should say you're writing about the Memorandum of Understanding between the US and the Republic of Italy. Give a brief introduction (I am a teacher/professor/student/archaeologist/member of the public), and then a few examples of personal impact. End with a call for continued co-operation between the two countries.
DEADLINES: letters need to be received on Nov. 2. They can be faxed to (202) 632–6300 or sent to
Cultural Heritage Center,
SA–5, Fifth Floor,
Department of State, Washington,
DC 20522–0505.
Every letter counts so please write if you can.
On Nov. 13th, the Cultural Property Advisory Committee, which helps draft and review such agreements, is meeting in Washington, D.C. to consider the Memorandum of Understanding with Italy.
The full-text of the agreement can be found here
http://culturalheritage.state.gov/it06agr.html.
The call for the meeting is here:
http://culturalheritage.state.gov/whatsnew.html. Follow the link at
the top right for more specifics.
The announcement of the meeting includes the following:
"With respect to comments on the interim review of the Memorandum of Understanding Between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Republic of Italy Concerning the Imposition of Import Restrictions on Archaeological Material Representing the Pre-Classical, Classical and Imperial Roman Periods of Italy, concluded on
January 19, 2001, and extended in 2006, oral comments must be limited to Article II of this MOU."
Article II concerns actions that both the US and Italy are supposed to take to implement the MoU. I am writing now to encourage readers either to write a letter to CPAC commenting on Italy's actions under Article II.
Letters that address specific actions by Italy that fall under Article II and which benefit or affect the writer are the most useful. But the bar is low, so to speak. If you excavate in Italy, have conducted research there, have seen Italian material on loan to American museums, or have used such material in your teaching, that counts.
Discussion of loans is particularly important. Museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Getty Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Princteton University Art Museum, the Morgan Library in NYC, the Meadow Museum at Southern Methodist University and others have Italian material on loan. If you have seen these objects and enjoyed them, please write.
Letters do not need to be long. Without meaning to provide too much unnecessary advice: the opening sentence should say you're writing about the Memorandum of Understanding between the US and the Republic of Italy. Give a brief introduction (I am a teacher/professor/student/archaeologist/member of the public), and then a few examples of personal impact. End with a call for continued co-operation between the two countries.
DEADLINES: letters need to be received on Nov. 2. They can be faxed to (202) 632–6300 or sent to
Cultural Heritage Center,
SA–5, Fifth Floor,
Department of State, Washington,
DC 20522–0505.
Every letter counts so please write if you can.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Anglican Options in the UK
The continuing echo of late antiquity in the modern world is of interest to me. This comes to mind in light of the announcement from the Vatican that it will allow Anglicans to convert while "preserving aspects of their Anglican spiritual and liturgical heritage". I note that there is an alternative that looks back further than the reformation.
The document British Orthodox Heritage Resurgance starts with the paragraph:
The document British Orthodox Heritage Resurgance starts with the paragraph:
For a thousand years, from AD37-45 to AD1054-66, the people living in the British Isles believed and worshipped God as an integral part of the undivided Orthodox Church. That Church was governed world wide by five Patriarchs, those of Constantinople (the Ecumenical Patriarch), Rome, Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria. The Church in the British Isles was a local expression of the common Christian Faith held throughout the world. The great saints of the British Isles such as Saint Aidan, Saint David, Saint Patrick, Saint Alban, Saint Chad, Saint Cuthbert, Saint Boniface, Saint Dunstan etc., were all members of that Orthodox Catholic Church in the British Isles which continued for a thousand years.AD 1054 is, of course, the year of the so-called Great Schism, one of a series of events that lead to the remarkable variety of christian liturgy and doctrine that exists today. While I don't mean to comment on the historicity of the document, I do like the living offering of the pentarchy as a model for modern church government and self-description. Can't we just go back to the Middle Ages?
Brief Thoughts on EPUB Books at Google
I've been playing with downloading epub books from Google. EPUB is a format for digital publication targeted to portable readers. That's not what I care about right now. It is cool that it uses plain old xhtml and standard image formats to represent the contents of a book. That means if you can unpack an EPUB file, which is very easy, you have access to text and images in readily consumable form.
I'm not the first to point this out. See Greg Crane What do you do with a Million Books for early thinking on the large scale implications of Google's work.
In terms of playing, here's what's fun. If you go to the G Books page for H. Chase's Catalogue of Arretine pottery from the MFA, you'll see a link to download the "EPUB" version.
Once you've downloaded that file, it's easy to unpack. I'm a Mac/Linux user. If you are too, and you like the command line, 'unzip Catalogue_of_Arretine_pottery.epub' will do the trick. Otherwise, change the extension to ".zip" and double-click on the file. I'm sure something similar will work in Windows.
Once unpacked, you have two directories, 'OEBPS' and 'META-INF'. The first is the one with all the goodies in it. Open 'OEBPS/images' and you'll see the plates from the book. Those files aren't hi-res, but better than nothing.
The text is the in 'Content-###.xml' files. These can be opened in a browser directly.
As people like Greg have noted, cool things will happen when communities, such as scholars/enthusiasts of the ancient Mediterranean world, take these files and add value to them. In the meantime, I like being able to get at the images, and to have the text on my hard-drive so its available for searching. On the Mac, Spotlight does a good job of indexing the Content files. It also indexes the compressed archives when their extensions are ".zip". It seems to ignore the ".epub" files but I bet that will change soon enough.
I'm not the first to point this out. See Greg Crane What do you do with a Million Books for early thinking on the large scale implications of Google's work.
In terms of playing, here's what's fun. If you go to the G Books page for H. Chase's Catalogue of Arretine pottery from the MFA, you'll see a link to download the "EPUB" version.
Once you've downloaded that file, it's easy to unpack. I'm a Mac/Linux user. If you are too, and you like the command line, 'unzip Catalogue_of_Arretine_pottery.epub' will do the trick. Otherwise, change the extension to ".zip" and double-click on the file. I'm sure something similar will work in Windows.
Once unpacked, you have two directories, 'OEBPS' and 'META-INF'. The first is the one with all the goodies in it. Open 'OEBPS/images' and you'll see the plates from the book. Those files aren't hi-res, but better than nothing.
The text is the in 'Content-###.xml' files. These can be opened in a browser directly.
As people like Greg have noted, cool things will happen when communities, such as scholars/enthusiasts of the ancient Mediterranean world, take these files and add value to them. In the meantime, I like being able to get at the images, and to have the text on my hard-drive so its available for searching. On the Mac, Spotlight does a good job of indexing the Content files. It also indexes the compressed archives when their extensions are ".zip". It seems to ignore the ".epub" files but I bet that will change soon enough.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Another Video of Upenn Roman Pottery
I'm still enjoying using my phone to shoot video in museums. And I've upgraded my copy of iLife so I can put the clips together with iMovie. That's seems to be good enough for my skill level. The latest product is overviews of a display at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
As I note in the opening frame, these are totally unofficial and personal works. Yes, I'm a Consulting Scholar in the Mediterranean Section and that's why I find myself in the galleries. But I'm just messing around here so don't think worse of the institution because of my low production values.
I'm also still playing around with how to do captions, etc. This time I tried adding "freeze frames". When I get comfortable with what I can do, I'll start adding more informative copy.
I have clips of Upenn Dressel 1's and a Dressel 20 handle/body sherd. And I went to the Brooklyn Museum last weekend. In the past they've had a little bit of Roman pottery on display. But the Egyptian displays keep growing at the expense of later material. I shot some of that and some Bronze Age Cypriot and Minoan vessels. I'll compile and upload those eventually.
As I note in the opening frame, these are totally unofficial and personal works. Yes, I'm a Consulting Scholar in the Mediterranean Section and that's why I find myself in the galleries. But I'm just messing around here so don't think worse of the institution because of my low production values.
I'm also still playing around with how to do captions, etc. This time I tried adding "freeze frames". When I get comfortable with what I can do, I'll start adding more informative copy.
I have clips of Upenn Dressel 1's and a Dressel 20 handle/body sherd. And I went to the Brooklyn Museum last weekend. In the past they've had a little bit of Roman pottery on display. But the Egyptian displays keep growing at the expense of later material. I shot some of that and some Bronze Age Cypriot and Minoan vessels. I'll compile and upload those eventually.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
The Chronology of Phocaean Red Slip (LRC) Hayes 1 and 2
The chronology of Phocaean Red-Slip (LRC) Hayes forms 1 and 2 is turning out to be very important for the work Billur Tekkök and I are doing at Troy/Ilion, in particular when it comes to dating late 4th century building activity at the site. No real surprise there. In the grand scheme of things, Phocaea is near Troy so we should expect to have a fairly complete range of vessels, especially through the early to mid 6th century when the city is still in pretty good shape. An earthquake hits in c. 525 +/- and things seem to get rapidly worse after that. A few PRS Hayes form 10's and a little bit of African Red-Slip, including a Hayes 91d, show that there was ongoing activity at the site but it seems clear that things slow down over the course of the 6th century AD.
In terms of forms, we have lots of Hayes 1s, plenty of Hayes 2's, and many Hayes 3's. We also have a few 5's, vessels near form 6, 8's, a single 9, and a few 10's.
This post isn't about quantities so I'm intentionally using very vague terms. It is about chronology, or rather about the current thinking on the early chronology of the ware. It's just an opening shot so I hereby invoke all the informality that comes with a blog post.
Hayes defined the most widely used typology in 1972 in his Late Roman Pottery (worldcat). He described 10 forms with various subtypes and made frequent reference to his work at the Athenian Agora. Picking from his combination of explicit dating and narrative discussion gives the following date ranges for early PRS (p. 325-329):
And while we're at it, here are some profile drawings:
Hayes 1a/b from Troy (I17.0647:5)
Hayes 2a from Troy (I17.0647:1)
For more examples go to http://classics.uc.edu/troy/grbpottery/.
Since 1972, the start of form 2 has at times been moved later. This has been done partly on the basis of excavations at San Giacomo degli Schiavoni in Molise (Italy), which documented PRS from a rich early fifth-century cistern fill. The full reference is U.Albarella , V.Ceglia & P.Roberts, S.Giacomo degli Schiavoni ( Molise ): an early fifth century AD deposit of pottery and animal bones from central Adriatic Italy. Papers of the British School at Rome, LXI, 157-230. I'm writing this from home but I do have a photocopy of that article. (Note: why isn't PBSR online? Really, it should be. Or is it and I just don't know about it.)
Jumping ahead a little bit, J. Hayes in his 2009 Agora volume on the imported fine-wares (about which more below), writes of this deposit that it is "coin-dated" (p. 85). Roberts in the article itself writes, "No coins were found, but abundant dating evidence was provided by imported finewares..." (p. 163). Earlier, Albarella writes, "Continuity of occupation through the Imperial period is well documented by and coins...". Question: is there a subsequent publication of a coin from (or clearly dating) the cistern fill? Hayes only references the PBSR article so may overstate the case by calling it "coin dated". Regardless, it's a large deposit (435 vessels identified), with various imports including 33 African Red-Slip (7.5%) and 13 PRS (3%). It certainly shows ARS and PRS circulating together in the early fifth century but I'm not sure it needs to be read as indicating a later start for Hayes 2.
I could offer more references, both to Albarella et al. and to other deposits but I'll instead return to Hayes 2009 (worldcat). Pages 83-88 discuss PRS and offer a substantial update on the chronology presented in LRP. To go along with the narrative, catalog entries 1229 to 1419 are all PRS and there are many profile drawings and a selection of photographs. It's a "don't miss" selection of information about the ware.
Looking to turn Hayes' prose into some relevant dates - some represented as numbers -, I come up with the following:
Those are just a few quotes from Hayes' prose introduction to the ware. Turning to the catalog, here are synopses of/snippets from some of the entries that stand out as useful for our work at Troy:
I've assembled the above tables because when I read the prose introduction, I became concerned that the phrase "the stamped forms 2 and 3 both originated close to the turn of the century" could be become hardened into something like "forms 2 and 3 appear after 400." While this is true for Hayes form 3, I think the appearance of Hayes 2 needs to be kept a little earlier.
As noted, saying so goes against one stream of discussion of form 2. For example, when reviewing C. Abadie-Reynal's volume on the Roman pottery from Argos (worldcat) for BMCR, K. Slane wrote, "Recent work in Corinth confirms that LRC forms 1 and 2 are prevalent in the first half, perhaps even second quarter of the fifth century, rather than in the fourth." I quote the review first because it's readily available online. More in depth discussion can be found in two Hesperia articles: K. Slane and G. Sanders, Corinth: Late Roman Horizons Hesperia 74 (2005), 243-297 (online). To quote:
In the catalog of this article no. 1.10 on page 251 and fig. 3 is a Hayes 2c similar in profile to Agora XXXII no. 1243, which is said to be from a "Context of mid- to late 4th century." So it looks like the first appearance of 2c at Corinth may post-date its appearance at Athens by 50 years. That's a big gap.
Slane has also published The End of the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore on Acrocorinth Hesperia 77 (2008), 465-496 (online). The most relevant paragraph is the following:
As noted above, Slane's BMCR review is of the Roman pottery volume from Argos. What's is going on there. In her introduction to PRS, Abadie-Reynal writes:
[Quickly checking the catalog of A. Ivantchik Un puits d'époque paléochrétienne sur l'agora d'Argos BCH 126 (2002), 331-404 (online), gives 2 Hayes 3's and a 4 of the mid-fifth.]
OK. What does all this have to do with Troy/Ilion? We have a Hayes 2 sealed in the construction of a columned portico that was added to an earlier building in the late fourth or early fifth century AD. It's the example illustrated above. The same deposit produced 2 Hayes 1a/b rims, a Hayes 1a base, an ARS H50, and an ARS H53b. I'm repeating two drawings from above, but here they all are together.
Hayes 1a from Troy (I17.0647:4)
Hayes 1a/b from Troy (I17.0647:5)
Hayes 1a base (I17.0648:6)
Hayes 2a from Troy (I17.0647:1)
Hayes African Red-Slip 50a (I17.0647:2)
Hayes African Red-Slip 53b (I17.0647:3)
It's a nice group and its date matters. Building the portico is part of a larger resurgence of activity after a lull in the fourth century. If things don't get going again until after 400, that affects our understanding of how quickly Ilion responded to large-scale phenomena such as the increasing population of Constantinople. Consider this and other issues local, regional and Mediterranean-wide and the date of PRS Hayes 2 matters. Especially if it's after 400 and is the latest dateable sherd in that deposit.
Right now, partly on the basis of I17.0647 and on the basis of the Argos catalog, I think Hayes 2 begins before 400. On a related matter, I think the transition from Çandarli to ESC is a smooth one and that Ilion, even if the fourth century isn't a high-point, continues to receive finewares from the south throughout this transition. But I'm adopting a somewhat informal tone in offering this initial conclusion because I've gathered the evidence as notes on secondary literature and as consideration of the material at Troy. I haven't pursued the dialectic between those sources to a firm end. I'm comfortable I've read pretty much everything but I need to do more photocopying/photographing so that I can get everything in front of me at the same time. More importantly, I think the work will be strengthened if I ask for comments now, so that's mostly what I'm doing.
In terms of forms, we have lots of Hayes 1s, plenty of Hayes 2's, and many Hayes 3's. We also have a few 5's, vessels near form 6, 8's, a single 9, and a few 10's.
This post isn't about quantities so I'm intentionally using very vague terms. It is about chronology, or rather about the current thinking on the early chronology of the ware. It's just an opening shot so I hereby invoke all the informality that comes with a blog post.
Hayes defined the most widely used typology in 1972 in his Late Roman Pottery (worldcat). He described 10 forms with various subtypes and made frequent reference to his work at the Athenian Agora. Picking from his combination of explicit dating and narrative discussion gives the following date ranges for early PRS (p. 325-329):
| Hayes 1a | "late fourth-early fifth century." |
| Hayes 1b | "early-third quarter fifth century." |
| Hayes 1c | "uncertain, perhaps first half of fifth century" |
| Hayes 1d | "early-third quarter fifth century" |
| Hayes 2a | late fourth (370) to 450 |
| Hayes 2b | No explicit dates are given for the start of this variant, end falls under the general rubric that form 2 ends by 450. |
| Hayes 2c | Early variant, "with mid-late fourth century material". |
And while we're at it, here are some profile drawings:
Hayes 1a/b from Troy (I17.0647:5)
Hayes 2a from Troy (I17.0647:1)
For more examples go to http://classics.uc.edu/troy/grbpottery/.
Since 1972, the start of form 2 has at times been moved later. This has been done partly on the basis of excavations at San Giacomo degli Schiavoni in Molise (Italy), which documented PRS from a rich early fifth-century cistern fill. The full reference is U.Albarella , V.Ceglia & P.Roberts, S.Giacomo degli Schiavoni ( Molise ): an early fifth century AD deposit of pottery and animal bones from central Adriatic Italy. Papers of the British School at Rome, LXI, 157-230. I'm writing this from home but I do have a photocopy of that article. (Note: why isn't PBSR online? Really, it should be. Or is it and I just don't know about it.)
Jumping ahead a little bit, J. Hayes in his 2009 Agora volume on the imported fine-wares (about which more below), writes of this deposit that it is "coin-dated" (p. 85). Roberts in the article itself writes, "No coins were found, but abundant dating evidence was provided by imported finewares..." (p. 163). Earlier, Albarella writes, "Continuity of occupation through the Imperial period is well documented by and coins...". Question: is there a subsequent publication of a coin from (or clearly dating) the cistern fill? Hayes only references the PBSR article so may overstate the case by calling it "coin dated". Regardless, it's a large deposit (435 vessels identified), with various imports including 33 African Red-Slip (7.5%) and 13 PRS (3%). It certainly shows ARS and PRS circulating together in the early fifth century but I'm not sure it needs to be read as indicating a later start for Hayes 2.
I could offer more references, both to Albarella et al. and to other deposits but I'll instead return to Hayes 2009 (worldcat). Pages 83-88 discuss PRS and offer a substantial update on the chronology presented in LRP. To go along with the narrative, catalog entries 1229 to 1419 are all PRS and there are many profile drawings and a selection of photographs. It's a "don't miss" selection of information about the ware.
Looking to turn Hayes' prose into some relevant dates - some represented as numbers -, I come up with the following:
| First appearance of PRS in Agora | "...later fourth century, but regular importation seems to coincide with the marked slump seen here in African imports around 390-400... (p. 85) | |
| Form 2 and 3 | Citing Italian and other sites, "it seems reasonable to conclude that the stamped forms 2 and 3 both originated close to the turn of the century as replacements for two popular African products..." (p. 85) | |
| Form 3f and 3g | In Beirut earthquake horizon of 551.(p. 86) | |
| beginning of Form 10 | "...the evidence from Lejjun (Jordan) hints at ca. 550..." (p. 86) | |
| "...the continued presence of PRS ware until the mid-7th century seems assured..." (p. 86) |
| 1230 | A "forerunner" to Hayes 1 dated to the late 3rd/early 4th. This piece is useful for documenting transition from Çandarli/ESC to PRS. |
| 1326 + 1327 | Form 1 variant. From "Grynnion" workshop? No join between sherds so perhaps not same vessel. "4th Century or later". |
| 1231 | Form 1 from "Context of second half of 4th century. |
| 1229 | Hayes 1. "Early(?) variant, in probable Çandarli fabric./Late 4th century. Context of Same date." |
| 1232-1236 | Main series of Hayes 1's, from first half of fifth or residual in later context. |
| 1237 | Hayes 2a from "Context of ca. A.D. 400. |
| 1238 | Hayes 2a dated "Ca. A.D. 400-425." |
| 1239 | Hayes 2a/b from "Context of ca. A.D. 400+." |
| 1240 | Hayes 2b "Date later than 1239? Context of ca. A.D. 460-475" |
| 1242 | Hayes 2c dated "Ca. A.D. 400 to mid-5th century." |
| 1243 | Hayes 2c from "Context of mid- to late 4th century." |
| 1244+1245 | Small Hayes 2's both from "Context of late 4th century." |
| 1246+1247 | Small Hayes 2's both dated to "Ca. A.D. 400 or later." |
As noted, saying so goes against one stream of discussion of form 2. For example, when reviewing C. Abadie-Reynal's volume on the Roman pottery from Argos (worldcat) for BMCR, K. Slane wrote, "Recent work in Corinth confirms that LRC forms 1 and 2 are prevalent in the first half, perhaps even second quarter of the fifth century, rather than in the fourth." I quote the review first because it's readily available online. More in depth discussion can be found in two Hesperia articles: K. Slane and G. Sanders, Corinth: Late Roman Horizons Hesperia 74 (2005), 243-297 (online). To quote:
Assemblage 1 marks the earliest appearance of LRC at Corinth: Hayes forms 1 and 1A, 2B and C, 3.32, and 4 (or 3/4) appear in small quantities with coins of the second quarter and middle of the fifth century and with fifth-century AfRS. Although the amount of AfRS is sharply reduced from what it had been in the fourth century, it is still two or three times as common as LRC. (p. 283)At the end of the same paragraph, assemblage 1 is dated to 450 or 460. By extension, LRC 1, 1a, 2b, 2c first appear at Corinth in 450 to 460.
In the catalog of this article no. 1.10 on page 251 and fig. 3 is a Hayes 2c similar in profile to Agora XXXII no. 1243, which is said to be from a "Context of mid- to late 4th century." So it looks like the first appearance of 2c at Corinth may post-date its appearance at Athens by 50 years. That's a big gap.
Slane has also published The End of the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore on Acrocorinth Hesperia 77 (2008), 465-496 (online). The most relevant paragraph is the following:
No additional Late Roman C was identified in the reexamination of the context pottery. The single piece found in the sanctuary remains an intact saucer of form 1D (120, Fig. 2) from the debris overlying the floor of the Roman Propylon (lot 2240).Although progress has been made in establishing that LRC was manufactured at several sites south of Pergamon, including Phocaea,the published dates of LRC still depend heavily on the Athenian deposits.In the West, LRC is rare until ca. 470 and most common in the first half of the 6th century. Earlier forms appear ca. 430 in southern Italy (San Giovanni di Ruoti, San Giacomo degli Schiavoni), and the same forms appear at Benghazi. At Corinth, in the area northThat's a long quote, I admit. But it makes for a good read and it is worth following the footnotes if you have access to the article online or in print. For my immediate purpose, it makes no definitive statements about the start of production of PRS Hayes 2, only about its appearance at Corinth.
of Buildings 1–7 east of the Theater, LRC forms 1 and 2 occur in approximately equal numbers with form 3B–C, suggesting that importation occurred through most of the 5th century; assemblage 1 from the same area contained form 2 and an early example of form 3.40 The most likely date for 120 therefore remains 425–460. Unfortunately, it is not from what we term “destruction debris.” Because it is intact, I had suggested that it was from one of the late graves, but none were identified so far west on the Middle Terrace. Perhaps it can be associated with the dismantling of the Roman Propylon, which would thus be dated ca. 430–460.
As noted above, Slane's BMCR review is of the Roman pottery volume from Argos. What's is going on there. In her introduction to PRS, Abadie-Reynal writes:
La chronologie établie par J. W. Hayes parait généralement confirmée par les trouvailles ultérieure. La date d'apparition de cette production a été fixée dans la seconde moitié du IVe siècle, autour des années 370. Cette production continue jusqu'au VIIe siècle. (p. 176)Catalog nos. 288, 289, and 290 (17.1.2-4) reference sherds of Hayes 2a, b and c from early fifth century deposits. Cat. no. 292 (17.2.2) is identified as the foot of a Hayes 2. Here's the discussion:
Un exemplaire provient d'un context daté de la fin du IVe siècle. Il est importante car c'est le seul fragment de la forme Hayes 2 qui ait été trouvé à Argos dans un contexte de cette époque. Il confirme donc bien que cette forme a commencé à être utilisée à la fin du IVe siècle, même si la majorité des fragments proviennent d'ensembles du Ve.This offers a correction to Slane's statement in the BMCR review that "Abadie-Reynal is explicit that all examples of LRC form 2 are found in contexts of the fifth century or later, but a few examples of form 1 seem to be transitional from Çandarli." A foot is not as good evidence as a rim, however.
[Quickly checking the catalog of A. Ivantchik Un puits d'époque paléochrétienne sur l'agora d'Argos BCH 126 (2002), 331-404 (online), gives 2 Hayes 3's and a 4 of the mid-fifth.]
OK. What does all this have to do with Troy/Ilion? We have a Hayes 2 sealed in the construction of a columned portico that was added to an earlier building in the late fourth or early fifth century AD. It's the example illustrated above. The same deposit produced 2 Hayes 1a/b rims, a Hayes 1a base, an ARS H50, and an ARS H53b. I'm repeating two drawings from above, but here they all are together.
Hayes 1a from Troy (I17.0647:4)
Hayes 1a/b from Troy (I17.0647:5)
Hayes 1a base (I17.0648:6)
Hayes 2a from Troy (I17.0647:1)
Hayes African Red-Slip 50a (I17.0647:2)
Hayes African Red-Slip 53b (I17.0647:3)
It's a nice group and its date matters. Building the portico is part of a larger resurgence of activity after a lull in the fourth century. If things don't get going again until after 400, that affects our understanding of how quickly Ilion responded to large-scale phenomena such as the increasing population of Constantinople. Consider this and other issues local, regional and Mediterranean-wide and the date of PRS Hayes 2 matters. Especially if it's after 400 and is the latest dateable sherd in that deposit.
Right now, partly on the basis of I17.0647 and on the basis of the Argos catalog, I think Hayes 2 begins before 400. On a related matter, I think the transition from Çandarli to ESC is a smooth one and that Ilion, even if the fourth century isn't a high-point, continues to receive finewares from the south throughout this transition. But I'm adopting a somewhat informal tone in offering this initial conclusion because I've gathered the evidence as notes on secondary literature and as consideration of the material at Troy. I haven't pursued the dialectic between those sources to a firm end. I'm comfortable I've read pretty much everything but I need to do more photocopying/photographing so that I can get everything in front of me at the same time. More importantly, I think the work will be strengthened if I ask for comments now, so that's mostly what I'm doing.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Attitudes toward Pottery
Partially as a note to myself, here are a few passages from early Christian literature that reveal attitudes towards ceramic vessels:
More complete in terms of its range of material culture is the following from the so-called Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus:
That's the somewhat archaic sounding translation of J. B. Lightfoot as found on the excellent Early Christian Writings website. The Greek text is available from The Christian Classics Ethereal Library, which is also a terrific resource.
Many more such passages could be cited so take the above as just a small taste from an abundant feast.
[Romans 9:21] hath not the potter authority over the clay, out of the same lump to make the one vessel to honour, and the one to dishonour?
[Timothy 2:20] And in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth, and some to honour, and some to dishonourI'm using Young's Literal Translation because it's out of copyright and because its approach is useful.
More complete in terms of its range of material culture is the following from the so-called Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus:
See not only with thine eyes, but with thine
intellect also, of what substance or of what form they
chance to be whom ye call and regard as gods.
2:2 Is not one of them stone, like that which we
tread under foot, and another bronze, no better than
the vessels which are forged for our use, and another
wood, which has already become rotten, and another
silver, which needs a man to guard it lest it be
stolen, and another iron, which is corroded with rust,
and another earthenware, not a whit more comely than
that which is supplied for the most dishonourable
service?
2:3 Are not all these of perishable matter? Are they
not forged by iron and fire? Did not the sculptor make
one, and the brass-founder another, and the
silversmith another, and the potter another? Before
they were moulded into this shape by the crafts of
these several artificers, was it not possible for each
one of them to have been changed in form and made to
resemble these several utensils? Might not the vessels
which are now made out of the same material, if they
met with the same artificers, be made like unto such
as these?
That's the somewhat archaic sounding translation of J. B. Lightfoot as found on the excellent Early Christian Writings website. The Greek text is available from The Christian Classics Ethereal Library, which is also a terrific resource.
Many more such passages could be cited so take the above as just a small taste from an abundant feast.
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