To Wake the Dead

Tag: archaeology

  • Tools of the Trade, 9: Meta-Tools: Networking in Undergrad (Without Faking It)

    One of the most frequent pieces of advice given to undergraduates is: “network.” But for students in the humanities—especially those who want to study ancient languages, inscriptions, or museum work—that advice often feels vague, awkward, or transactional. This is definitely a conceptual hurdle that I’ve had to overcome.

    This post is my attempt to reframe that word into something more grounded: building relationships, but not performatively. Rather, I strive to do so through shared questions, good conversations, and sustained curiosity. I’m not an expert on this at all, but I’ve built a small but meaningful network of scholars who know what I care about, who challenge and support me, and who have helped shape the work I do. This is how I’ve approached it, and what I’d tell someone starting out.

    Start Local, Then Reach Out

    The best place to start is with the people at your own institution. NYU, being so big, has been a wonderful place for this—with 60,000 students and some 6,000 instructors, it’s a goldmine for people who know what they’re talking about.

    But the following advice applies to any school. Go to office hours. Take professors’ classes—not just because the syllabus looks good, but because you’re genuinely interested in how they think. Even if the class isn’t squarely in your area, getting to know the professor might lead to mentorship, research opportunities, or simply perspective you didn’t know you needed. I talked about this in the last post, but it can’t be stressed enough.

    Before going to office hours, do your homework. I usually read at least two of a professor’s articles in advance—preferably recent, but not necessarily—and do a deep first pass early on, then a quick skim again right before the meeting to refresh my memory. I come with questions not just about the content, but about the field: how did this approach emerge? What debates is it part of? What’s happening at the edge of this subfield right now, and who’s leading it?

    If someone you’d like to connect with isn’t at your institution, email is a powerful tool—when used well. Keep it short, be deferential, have a clear purpose, and make it easy for them to see how they can help. Mention a mutual contact if you have one, such as if they were in the same PhD cohort as a professor at your school or have a student from your undergrad program in their graduate school. However, even a lighter connection—“I came across your work while reading X’s article on…”—can do a lot. You can also ask for an introduction from a professor, but I’ve even gently-warmed cold emails have worked just fine for me.

    Follow Up (without Hovering)

    It’s easy to get caught in the anxiety of “now what?” after a good meeting or email exchange. My best advice: space it out. A thank-you email goes a long way, especially if you reference something specific they shared. After that, I keep a simple handwritten list of who I’ve contacted, what we discussed, and whether they asked me to follow up.

    If you’re working on a long-term project—like my alphabet transmission project, APEX—then sending a short update every month or so when you hit a milestone is a great way to keep people in the loop without overwhelming them. Scholars are busy. Respect their time; this lets you build a slow, steady relationship.

    Bring Something to the Table

    This doesn’t mean showing off. It means coming into conversations with curiosity and initiative. If you’ve had an idea while reading someone’s work—an application, a parallel, a method they might not have used—bring it up gently and frame it as a question. “Have you ever tried applying X to your corpus?” can be a meaningful way to signal that you’re not just a reader, but a thinker too.

    One of the best questions I’ve learned to ask: “Are there any scholars or articles you’d recommend I look at to get a better sense of the field?” When you’re in multiple disciplines, the literature is bottomless. A suggestion from someone experienced can save you weeks of guesswork—and deepen the conversation at the same time.

    Use Clubs and Events to Build Connections

    One of the unexpected benefits of running the League of Linguistics is that it’s allowed me to reach out to scholars in a semi-official capacity. If you’re organizing an event, moderating a panel, or just planning a syllabus, you have an excuse to email someone you admire—not for yourself, but on behalf of a community. Sometimes they’ll help. Sometimes they’ll become contacts down the line.

    Just make sure you’re doing this in good faith. The event should serve your members first. But if it opens up a conversation with someone you’d like to work with, that’s a bonus worth nurturing.

    Know What You’re Asking For

    Always have a purpose when reaching out. Want to talk about their recent article? Ask for feedback on a related idea? Get advice about graduate programs? Whatever it is, make it clear in the first few lines. Don’t make them guess what you want. And don’t send them a novella. Long emails are a fast way to get ignored—not because professors are rude, but because they’re busy, and clarity is a form of respect.

    At the same time, everyone’s different. Some scholars love a detailed intro. Others would rather get three lines asking for a Zoom call and figure out the rest in conversation. When in doubt, start concise—and adjust based on the cues they give you.

    Etiquette

    Until you’re told otherwise, when you’re in undergrad, always address someone as Professor Lastname. If they sign off with initials, play it safe. Only switch to a first name if they clearly invite it—either in their signature, or later in the conversation. Respect for titles isn’t just about hierarchy—it’s about showing that you’ve taken care in reaching out.

    And if they don’t respond? It’s okay. Let it go. Especially if they’re at another institution, or heading multiple research projects, or simply overwhelmed, it’s not about you. If the connection’s meant to grow, you’ll have other chances. If not, trust that others will say yes. I’ve found academics on the whole to be extremely generous with their time, resources, and knowledge. You’ll find your people.

    Final Thoughts

    The best conversations I’ve had didn’t come from trying to impress someone; they came from being honest about what I care about, what I don’t know, and what I’m trying to figure out. Humility, curiosity, and gratitude are perhaps the most winning combination—especially when you’re early in your career. You don’t need to have all the answers, you just need to be a person worth talking to again.

    And one last thing: projects help. If you’re working on something—an independent research blog, a digital tool, a language revitalization game—it gives you a way to reach out that feels natural, not forced. “I’m building something, and I thought of you” is often a more compelling opener than a plain “Can we talk?”

    If you’re trying to build up these kinds of contacts, I hope this helps. If you’ve already started, I’d love to hear what’s worked for you. And if you’re not sure where to begin—reach out. I’m still learning too.

  • Tools of the Trade, 8: Meta-Tools: Courses for Aspiring Philologists and Archaeo-Linguist Hybrids

    I frequently get asked what classes to take if you want to work with ancient languages, inscriptions, museums, or language technology. This post is a reflection—not a blueprint—on how I’ve built a courseload that supports interdisciplinary work in epigraphy, historical linguistics, and digital tools, and what I’d recommend to others just starting out.

    Start with the Languages (But Be Strategic)

    If you’re reading this, chances are you already love ancient languages. So yes—take Latin. Take Greek. But if you have more than one on your list, resist the urge to take them all at once. Instead, start with one—preferably the one with the strongest institutional support—and stagger the rest. I did Latin in high school, Greek in my first year of college, and Akkadian in my second. That pacing gave me room to go deep into each one without burning out. Now, with that foundation, I’m able to handle several languages at the advanced level without losing clarity or joy.

    If it interests you, try to take—or propose an independent study in—a language that uses a non-alphabetic script early on. Whether it’s cuneiform, hieroglyphs, or Linear B, working with a writing system that doesn’t map neatly onto speech will sharpen your sense of what writing is, how it encodes meaning, and how it changes across time. It will also raise questions—paleographic, technological, cognitive—that you may find yourself returning to long after the class ends.

    Take Linguistics Early (You’ll Use It Constantly)

    I’m biased—I’m a linguist—but even if you don’t plan to major in it, an intro to linguistics course will radically shift how you read ancient languages. You’ll start spotting things like vowel gradation, phonological assimilation, and case alignment everywhere. Once you’ve got the basics, courses like historical linguistics, syntax, or phonology can help you engage more confidently with scholarship and identify patterns in inscriptions, dialect variation, or reconstructed forms. Even if you don’t go further in formal coursework, just knowing the lingo goes a long way—and will keep paying off, quietly and consistently, across everything else you study.

    Follow the Inscriptions and Those Who Teach Them

    If you want to work with writing systems or epigraphy, find the people who do that at your institution. In this field, people often matter more than courses. Research your professors. Read what they’ve written. Faculty bios will give you a general idea of their focus, but their CVs are often more revealing—long, yes (I’ve seen them run 50 pages), but worth scanning for article titles and projects that align with your own interests.

    Getting close to those key people might mean enrolling in something tangential—say, an intro to Greek art—just to build a relationship. Or asking if you can do an independent study reading inscriptions in translation. Some of my best classes weren’t labeled “epigraphy” at all—they were seminars where I was encouraged to bring paleographic questions into the final project. In one case, that was Data Science for Archaeology with Prof. Justin Pargeter, a course that shaped my thinking far beyond its original scope.

    Think Across Disciplines, but Choose a Home

    You’ll need a home base—a department that knows you, supports your work, and can write you letters. Having an intellectual anchor like that is not only strategic, it’s also deeply grounding. That said, your course list doesn’t have to stay confined to one department—and honestly, it probably shouldn’t. Academia is moving ever more toward interdisciplinary inquiry, and the best course of study often cuts across traditional boundaries.

    Some of my most formative classes have been outside my major—art history, computer science, even religious studies (Akkadian lives in Judaic Studies at NYU). Let your questions guide you. If you’re wondering why Phoenician letters look the way they do, or what it means to “revive” a dead language, go find the classes that give you tools to explore those questions, wherever they live.

    Just make sure you’re also building depth somewhere. Breadth can open doors—but it’s depth that gets you through them. Grad schools, mentors, and collaborators alike are looking for people who know how to ask big questions, but also how to sit with them for a long time.

    Study Abroad, If You Can

    There’s no substitute for learning ancient languages in place—or at least near the landscapes, museums, and excavation contexts where they come alive. Study abroad isn’t just about location; it’s about intensity, continuity, and community. My time in Greece, especially on digs and museum visits, made Greek less abstract and more human. It exposed me to a range of paths in classics and gave me access to resources—like fragmentary inscriptions in drawers—and rhythms, like reading in the field, that continue to shape how I think about epigraphy and transmission.

    If you’re aiming for grad school or museum work, study-abroad experience shows initiative. It signals that you’ve navigated other academic systems, worked across language barriers, and engaged directly with material culture. If your program includes language immersion—even better. Even if the modern language isn’t your focus, it sharpens your ear and re-situates ancient texts as living inheritances.

    If funding is a concern, don’t write it off. Many programs offer scholarships, and departments often quietly support students who ask early. At big schools like NYU, the key is often finding the right person—the one who knows how to unlock the support already available.

    Don’t Be Afraid of Skill-Based Classes

    If you’re anything like me, it’s easy to stay in the comfort zone of ancient texts and theoretical conversations. But some of the most valuable courses I’ve taken have been hands-on: digital humanities, data science, archaeological methods, computer science. These classes taught me how to manage a dataset, build a research tool, and think across evidence types. They’ve led directly to portfolio projects, study opportunities, and unexpected collaborations—and they’ve made my work in the ancient world more dynamic and durable.

    Leave Room to Be Surprised

    Some of my most formative classes were ones I hadn’t planned to take: a seminar on the topography and monuments of Athens (Prof. Robert Pitt), a deceptively simple primer in Greek archaeology that opened into real depth (Prof. Hüseyin Öztürk), and a course on the structure of the Russian language (Prof. Stephanie Harves). These were spaces where I tested my assumptions and rewired my thinking. Try to leave room in your schedule each year for one course that isn’t strictly “on track,” but that speaks to something curious or unsettled in you. That’s often where real questions begin.

    Last Word: Plan Backwards

    If you’re thinking about grad school or a research career, try working backwards. Look at the programs you might apply to—what do they expect? What languages, methods, or subfields appear in course requirements or faculty research? Then take classes that prepare you for those conversations. The goal isn’t to become someone else’s version of a scholar—it’s to become the version of yourself who belongs in the rooms you want to be in.

    Closing

    When in doubt, ask people. Older students, professors, internet strangers who study Linear B. This path isn’t something I mapped out alone—almost every turning point in my academic life has come from a conversation, an offhand recommendation, or a generous reply to a cold email. I’ve built my way forward through the advice of others, and I’m always happy to pay it forward.

    In a follow-up post, I’ll share how to structure independent study: designing personal projects, sustaining long-term reading, and building a research portfolio beyond the classroom. Done well, this kind of work lets you follow your own questions, test your interests, and create something distinctly your own. It’s also one of the clearest ways to show grad schools and mentors that you know how to learn without a syllabus.

    Stay tuned. And as always, if you’re not sure where to start, I’d love to hear what you’re thinking about.

  • Adventures in Materiality, 2: Carving the Flood: An Amateur Attempt

    Image of the Flood Tablet as stored in the British Museum: accession number K.3375.
    Lineart of the Flood Tablet as documented in the CDLI: accession number P273210..

    0. Prologue: Why Copy the Flood Tablet?

    Replication has become one of my favorite hobbies. I love artifacts, but as any archaeologist or collector will tell you, the barriers to actually owning them are steep—financial, legal, and ethical. How do you store them? protect them? justify having them at all? But when you make something yourself—when you replicate an ancient object by hand—you bypass all that. You get the closeness—a heightened closeness, I’d say—without the risk.

    That’s what drew me to recreate the Flood Tablet. Buying a cast would’ve set me back about a hundred dollars. But I wanted to see what I’d learn if I made one myself. Not just held it, but shaped it. Because creating a replica doesn’t just mimic an object—it stages a kind of encounter. You begin with a clean surface, unlike the fragmentary originals, or those replicas that emerge fully formed, and fully unformed, from the get. But when you make it yourself: every crack, every slip, every flaw is something you have to introduce yourself. You get to know the object from the inside out—not just what it looks like, but how it resists you.

    I picked this Flood Tablet precisely because it’s ambitious. It’s one of the most iconic inscriptions in the ancient world—a kind of cultural Rosetta Stone, linking Mesopotamian, biblical, and classical traditions. In fact, upon its discovery in the nineteenth century, its similarity to the later Abrahamic tradition sent shockwaves through the scholarly community—truly, its impact cannot be understated.

    What’s also beautiful and moving about it is its subject: survival, memory, and catastrophic loss. And it’s been copied, again and again, across centuries. To replicate it now is to take part in that long chain of transmission. It’s not just a story of a flood. It’s a story about what writing saves.

    1. The Original: Tablet XI and Its Aura

    A tablet subsequently discovered, containing the same story, approx. a millennium older than this tablet. Now in the Morgan Library: accession number 225906.

    Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh is arguably the most famous cuneiform text in the world. It tells the story of a great flood, a chosen survivor, a divine warning, and a boat filled with life—centuries before the Book of Genesis recorded a similar arc. In the narrative, Utnapishtim recounts to Gilgamesh how he escaped destruction, was granted immortality, and ultimately became the bearer of a knowledge that even kings could not command. It is one of the clearest points of contact between Mesopotamian myth and later Near Eastern and Mediterranean traditions. Read a translation here.

    Found in Nineveh (in the north of modern Iraq, on the Tigris River) on May 7, 1873 by archaeologist George Smith, the tablet is a large, convex slab of clay, its surface densely packed with tight, disciplined cuneiform lines. The edges are broken, some signs lost.

    But it’s not a draft or a throwaway. It was meant to endure. To try to recreate it is, in a small way, to step into that intention. The curvature, the spacing, the subtle tilt of each wedge: all these formal features speak not just to aesthetics, but to the technical mastery of the scribes who made them. This isn’t just a myth we inherited. It’s a craftwork that once held it.

    2. The Process

    I started with two pounds of grey air-dry clay and rolled it out to a thickness of about ¾ of an inch. I wanted enough depth to accommodate firm impressions without risking breakage—a balance between durability and responsiveness.

    Once I had a smooth surface, I printed a to-scale lineart of one side of the original tablet and laid it directly over the clay. Using a potter’s knife, I cut around the outline to form a proper slab.

    I then scored the signature cleft line that bisects the original tablet. That line helped me rule the text. After that, to mark where each line of writing would begin and end, I took a needle and, with the paper still on top, pricked small bounding dots at the start and stop of every line. This gave me a grid of sorts—not formal ruling, but a subtle framework for spacing. I used actual cuneiform signs from the standard text, fitting in as much as I could per line (which, as I’ll tell you shortly, turned out to be not very much at all).

    For the inscription itself, I used a homemade stylus made from a square wooden dowel. I had sanded down one corner to create a slightly beveled edge that let me grip it more naturally—pinching it between thumb and middle finger, with my index finger guiding from above. In the course of things, I ended up using two styli. The first began to dull mysteriously partway through, possibly due to the water I kept brushing onto the clay to keep it soft. The wood was porous, and the repeated wetting may have softened or blunted its edges. I hadn’t expected tool fatigue quite so early in the process.

    3. Difficulties: Scale, Fatigue, and the Limits of Enthusiasm

    What surprised me most was just how big my signs ended up being. Between the bluntness of my stylus and the limits of my own control, I found I could only produce cuneiform signs that were two to three times the height of the original inscriptions—and at least twice the width. The clay itself wasn’t the issue. If anything, it was a pleasure to work with: I kept smearing water across the surface with my fingertip, especially over unused areas, and that seemed to make the impressions cleaner and more precise. The medium was surprisingly forgiving, an example of an erasure using this technique is given above, in the green circle. My hands were not as pliant.

    I started at the top of the right-hand side of the tablet, and you can tell. My signs grew noticeably larger over time as fatigue set in. I spent around two hours just pressing wedges into the clay, and by the end I was feeling it. Not just in my hand, but in my attention span. I’d wildly underestimated how much text I could fit on the slab at the scale I was working—I probably would’ve needed to double the size to get anywhere close to the full line count of the original.

    By the end, I had learned what I came to learn—and felt ready to let it rest. I don’t plan to do the other side or fill in any missing fragments. This was enough to teach me what I wanted to know: how hard it is, how slow it is, how deliberate every single wedge has to be. The work left me with admiration, exhaustion, and just enough satisfaction to call it finished.

    4. Why It Was So Hard—And What That Tells Us

    This was the smallest scale of replica I’ve ever attempted, and still, my signs were roughly 2.5 times the size of the originals. And even at that inflated scale, I’m not confident I could accurately draw what I carved just by looking at the replica. That tells me a lot. It explains, viscerally, why there was an elite scribal class in Mesopotamian society, and why their training was so extensive. It wasn’t just about memorizing hundreds of signs—though that alone is a feat, especially for scribes working in multiple languages. It was about navigating a medium that added layers of challenge: spacing, shaping, texture, tool wear, and fatigue.

    I’ve long wanted to understand what made cuneiform so difficult—not just as a writing system, but as a practice. Even after studying the language on paper, I didn’t fully grasp the physical demands until I tried it myself.

    I wish we had spent even a single thirty-minute session in Akkadian I making tablets, especially at a small scale like this. The pedagogical value would’ve been enormous. You suddenly understand not just the abstract difficulty of the writing system, but the labor infrastructure around it—the apprenticeship, the specialization, the patience. This little experiment gave me a glimpse into that world, and for that, I’m genuinely grateful.

    5. Closing: A New Kind of Knowing

    I ended up with a lopsided, oversized, and incomplete tablet. But also: textured, hard-won, and deeply instructive. In the end, as it turns out, this wasn’t really about copying Tablet XI. It was about spending time inside its logic—its weight, its line spacing, its forgiving-but-not medium—and learning something I couldn’t have understood from a textbook.

    If you’re studying cuneiform, or even just curious about ancient writing, I can’t recommend this kind of tactile experiment enough. Make a stylus. Roll some clay from your local art-supply store. Try a single line. Your respect for those scribes will double. And you’ll probably come away, as I did, with something small and slightly ridiculous to keep on your shelf—a cracked echo of something monumental. Decidedly not a replica. Rather a kind of conversation.

    Here’s the “finished” product:

  • APEX Updates, 3: Encoding Decisions

    Process for entering the metadata of a given inscription in the GUI I’m designing.

    Before APEX can tell us anything about the shapes of letters, we have to tell it what those letters are—where they came from, when, how confidently we know that, and why we think so. Each traced form in the database is embedded in metadata, and each metadata field is a choice. Or, more accurately, a battleground between competing demands: standardization vs. specificity, precision vs. honesty, completeness vs. clarity.

    This post is about how those choices get made.

    Metadata is Never Neutral

    In paleographic projects, metadata is often treated as scaffolding: a tidy column of site names, dates, scripts, and references that supports the real work of analysis. But metadata is also where the most important theoretical decisions live. Is this letter from “Attica” or from “Athens”? Is it dated to “c. 750 BCE,” to “the mid-8th century,” or to “LG I”? Is the script “Euboean” or “Eubo-Cypriot” or just “Greek”? And what happens when those terms carry more ambiguity than certainty?

    Each of these choices folds a story into the dataset. A story about geography, chronology, authority, and classification. And once the data is encoded, those stories begin to function as fixed facts—however uncertain or contingent they might actually be.

    The Problem of Uncertainty

    Uncertainty is endemic to early alphabetic evidence. Sites are excavated unevenly. Inscriptions are fragmentary. Provenance can be speculative. Paleographic dating relies on a mix of typological comparison and stratigraphy, both of which are prone to revision.

    But digital systems, including APEX, are uncomfortable with uncertainty. The data model wants a number, not a range; a site name, not a narrative; a script label, not a conditional. This means encoding decisions often involve collapsing complexity into legibility. The trick is to do this transparently, and to leave enough of a trail that the uncertainties can still be seen.

    To that end, I’m building out APEX metadata with fields for:

    • Date (range + confidence + reason for): e.g., “750–725 BCE (medium confidence) (archaeological strata)”
    • Provenance (text + category): allowing freeform notes alongside structured site-region-place data
    • Script classification (source + variant): to distinguish between modern typologies and how scripts were likely conceived by ancient users
    • Notes: a catch-all for uncertainty flags, alternate readings, or disputed attributions

    This structure still imposes a frame, but it tries to make the cracks visible.

    Metadata as Narrative

    Every field in APEX is a decision, and every decision reflects a point of view—whether archaeological, linguistic, technological, or historiographic. That makes the metadata not just a scaffold but a narrative: a set of assumptions about what kind of thing the alphabet is, how it moves through space and time, and how we can know what we know. As the project scales, that narrative will shape what kinds of conclusions are possible. So I want to make it visible now, while it’s still under construction, as part of the work.

    In the next update, I’ll cover the baseline nature of the pipeline and what makes it so difficult—but also so precise.

  • APEX Updates, 2: What is the Transmission Problem? A Brief History of My Research Question

    Nestor’s Cup (Pithekoussai, modern Sicily) & Dipylon Inscription (Athens), both dated just after 750 BCE.
    Three famous Phoenician inscriptions, of various dates, to compare letterforms to the above.

    If the first APEX post was about tracing letters, this one is about why those traces matter. Underneath every variant alpha or eccentric epsilon is a deeper question: when, how, and under what conditions did the Greek alphabet emerge from its West Semitic predecessor? This question, which is known in the scholarship as the transmission problem, lies at the core of alphabetic studies, and despite over a century of scholarship, it remains fiercely contested. To map alphabetic transmission is not just to track graphical similarity, but to reckon with how cultures borrow, adapt, forget, and reimagine the systems by which they make language visible.

    At its simplest, the transmission problem asks: When did the Greeks adopt the Phoenician script? But the real terrain is messier. Did the transfer happen once or multiple times? Was it sudden or gradual? Coordinated or ad hoc? Which region of the Greek-speaking world was first? Exactly which Semitic script was the donor—or was there a confluence of models? And what kind of evidence—linguistic, paleographic, archaeological—should we privilege when our sources conflict?

    Historically, the debate has followed disciplinary lines. Scholars trained in Semitic philology and Near Eastern studies tend to favor a high date for the transmission: sometime in the 11th or 10th century BCE, before the traditional Greek Geometric period (in older scholarship, referred to as the “Greek Dark Age”). This camp emphasizes the strong formal similarities between early Greek and Phoenician letterforms, arguing that Greek epichoric scripts most closely resemble Phoenician forms from around 1050 BCE, not the later shapes one would expect if transmission occurred in the 8th century. Joseph Naveh, for instance, in his landmark Early History of the Alphabet (1982), argued that the Greek system must have branched off before major innovations appear in the Phoenician script, such as the angular mem or evolved forms of shin. Naveh saw the Greek alphabet as a snapshot of an earlier Semitic system—evidence, in his view, of early contact and early borrowing.

    On the other side of the debate, Classicists and archaeologists tend to argue for a low date, favoring the 8th century BCE. Their reasoning draws primarily from stratified archaeological contexts: the earliest securely datable Greek inscriptions—such as the Dipylon oinochoe and the Nestor’s Cup from Pithekoussai—belong to the mid-to-late 8th century. Rhys Carpenter was among the earliest and most forceful voices in this camp. In a 1933 article, he wrote that “the argumentum a silentio grows every year more formidable and more conclusive,” referring to the continued absence of any Greek alphabetic inscriptions predating the eighth century (“The Antiquity of the Greek Alphabet,” AJA 37 [1933]: 8–29, at p. 27). For Carpenter, the lack of material evidence was not a gap to be explained away, but itself a powerful datum: if earlier use had existed, we would likely have found traces by now.

    This school is generally skeptical of typological comparison, pointing out that letterforms evolve unevenly and can be conservative in certain contexts. Archaeological absence, while never conclusive, is taken seriously—especially when paired with the sudden, near-simultaneous appearance of inscriptions across disparate sites in the 8th century, suggesting a relatively rapid uptake of a recently acquired script. Later scholars, such as Barry B. Powell, built on this foundation. In Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet (1991), Powell controversially argued that the Greek alphabet was deliberately invented for the purpose of recording Homeric verse, dating the invention to around 750 BCE. Though widely criticized for its teleology and lack of evidence for such a top-down design, Powell’s theory exemplifies the kind of interdisciplinary crossfire that defines this problem: where linguistic function, archaeological data, and cultural ideology all collide.

    Roger D. Woodard, in Greek Writing from Knossos to Homer (1997), pushed back against Powell while still supporting a relatively late date. Woodard views the alphabet’s adaptation as a process shaped not only by contact with Phoenician traders but also by internal Greek developments—especially the memory of Linear B and broader shifts in literacy practices. He emphasizes the complex interplay between tradition and innovation, seeing the Greek vowel system as a structural solution that could only emerge in a linguistic environment receptive to phonological precision.

    The question remains open, but APEX offers a different kind of approach. Rather than anchoring the debate to a single origin point, I focus on regional trajectories and graphical evidence: how letterforms vary, travel, and settle. If the Semitic party line reads the Greek alphabet as a photograph of Phoenician forms from 1000 BCE, and the archaeological model sees it as an emergent public tool of the 8th century, then I want to understand how specific graphemes move through space and time. Which forms remain stable across centuries? Which mutate rapidly? And what can that tell us about the process of transmission, rather than the moment of origin?

    In fact, the most immediate goal of the APEX project is to evaluate whether the Greek letterforms do, in fact, most closely resemble the Semitic models from around 1000 BCE—as the high-date camp maintains—or if their nearest parallels lie elsewhere in the Phoenician typology. The intention is to move beyond qualitative comparisons and scholarly intuition, toward a quantitative, statistically grounded assessment of letterform similarity. By measuring and modeling these visual relationships systematically, APEX aims to provide a more objective foundation for dating the moment of greatest resemblance between the Greek and Phoenician scripts.

    Rather than jumping straight into letterform similarity metrics, though, the next update will take a detour—one that’s no less crucial. Before the vectors can speak, they must be named, contextualized, and organized. APEX Updates, 3: Encoding Decisions will explore how I’m structuring the metadata that surrounds each traced letter: what counts as “context,” how information is tagged, and why every dataset is also a narrative. As it turns out, deciding how to describe a letter may be just as revealing as deciding how to compare it.

  • Marginalia, 2: On Diaspora and Scholarship

    The Parthenon/Elgin Marbles as in the British Museum, London.

    Diaspora means a scattering—but not just away from. It’s also a scattering into: people of yours wherever you go. There’s dislocation in that, but also a strange kind of belonging. You’re never quite at home, but also never entirely foreign. We are at home wherever we are, as the Jewish Bundists say.

    I come from the Armenian diaspora. Much of the history I now hold came to me late, in fragments I had to gather myself. So much so that when my family went to Armenia for the 100th anniversary of the genocide, I misunderstood the purpose of our trip. I didn’t yet know what had been left unsaid. I learned the truth online months later. A strange inheritance: delayed, then all at once.

    That moment formed something in me—something about responsibility, memory, and the ethics of knowing. I now see myself as a banner-carrier of the diasporic experience—not just for Armenians, but in solidarity with all displaced and fragmented peoples. Diaspora isn’t a single story but a way of listening, noticing, and asking better questions.

    Ironically, none of the languages I study are mine. I never learned Armenian. I was meant to attend an immersion program in Yerevan in 2020, but it didn’t happen for the obvious reasons. The language now feels like an island—real, reachable, and still far away. It’s typologically unusual and hard to access. And emotionally, I’ve kept it at a distance—not for lack of interest, but for fear of doing it harm.

    Still, the connection shows up. It’s in the care I bring to other people’s histories, in my reverence for displaced traditions, in my work with Semitic languages—speech communities so often marked by rupture. I haven’t yet studied heritage material from my own background, but I carry the stakes of diasporic scholarship into every archive. Distance doesn’t cancel care, it clarifies it.

    My sense of scholarly ethics—especially around archaeology and epigraphy—grows directly from this. I believe in repatriation, in collective self-determination and the right of communities to steward their past. Yes, nations are imagined, but so are all our systems of meaning. So long as national identity structures the world, its claims must be taken seriously.

    Museums, of course, complicate things. Scattering brings both access and erasure. Greek artifacts in London, Mesopotamian seals in New York—these too live in diaspora. There’s value in broader visibility, especially for those who can’t travel. But there’s loss, too: of voice, of sovereignty, of situated knowledge. I think about this often. I haven’t resolved it.

    I don’t just want a life in the library. I want antiquity to be for everyone. I want the past to feel shared, common, alive. I want to show people that our inheritance—linguistic, cultural, intellectual—is truly ours. The more we realize that, the more fully we can meet the present. That’s the gift of diaspora: a way of being scattered that still insists on connection.

    The Parthenon Marbles as in the Acropolis Museum in Athens. Every time I’ve visited, it’s struck me as a monument to loss.

  • Tools of the Trade, 1: Epigraphy: The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece by L.H. Jeffery

    Jeffery’s summary table of all epichoric scripts at the end of LSAG.
    It is foundational for any work on early regional Greek scripts.

    There are very few books I consider truly irreplaceable in my research. Lilian H. Jeffery’s The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece is one of them. First published in 1961 and revised in 1990 with A.W. Johnston, this book remains the reference for regional variations in the Greek alphabet during the archaic period. It’s where I first learned to read epichoric inscriptions with the eye of a paleographer rather than a Classicist alone.

    The book is very hard to find, and I only got my copy at an even remotely affordable price after months of scouring secondhand sellers. While copies still circulate among libraries and the used book market, I wanted to make it more accessible to others working in this area. So I hunted diligently before finding it on the Internet Archive. You can read or download it here:
    The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece (1990 ed.) – Internet Archive

    Jeffery’s study remains foundational for any work on early Greek writing—not just in Athens or Ionia, but across the full spectrum of regional scripts: Corinthian, Euboian, Attic-Boeotian, Cretan, Cycladic, and others. It includes extensive commentary, maps, and an invaluable inscriptional catalogue organized by region, with drawings and typographic transcriptions. The 1990 revision added important corrections, expanded references, and additional illustrative material. For those of us studying alphabetic transmission, especially the Phoenician-Greek interface or the evolution of letterforms over time, this book is indispensable.

    What makes Local Scripts especially useful is that it bridges the gap between paleography, archaeology, and linguistics. Jeffery doesn’t just chart when and where a particular variant of alpha or epsilon shows up—she explains what those variations might imply for chronology, influence, and contact. And although her typology has been revised and challenged in places (especially with the discovery of new inscriptions), her system remains a critical baseline for almost every study that’s come after.

    Whether you’re interested in early Greek literacy, the transmission of the alphabet, the sociopolitical meaning of epigraphy, or just want to be able to tell the difference between Laconian and Euboian chi, this is the book to start with. I hope having it freely available will be helpful to others navigating this fragmentary and fascinating material.

    Do you have other resources you pair with Jeffery? I’d love to hear what we can supplement LSAG with.

  • APEX Updates, 1: Building a Dataset

    Every big project starts with a deceptively small question. For me, it was: how do you turn a carved letter into data?

    APEX (Alphabetic Paleography Explorer) is my attempt to map how the Greek alphabet developed and spread—first across Greek-speaking regions, then into other scripts entirely. But before I can compare, model, or visualize anything, I need something more fundamental: a dataset that doesn’t just record letters, but understands them. That’s where things get tricky.

    Step 0: Drawing the Inscriptions

    Most corpora don’t offer clean, high-res images. They give us facsimiles—drawn reconstructions, often made by epigraphers decades ago. I tried using automated skeletonization on those, but the results were messy and inconsistent. So I went manual: scanning documents and tracing letters by hand on my iPad.

    It’s slow. But it gives me clean, consistent vector forms that reflect how letters were actually drawn—and forces me to look closely at every curve, stroke, and variation. In a sense, this is my own kind of excavation.

    What I Track

    Each inscription gets logged with basic info: where it was found, what it was written on, when it was made (as best we can tell), and how damaged it is. But the real heart of the project is the letters.

    For each character, I record:

    • Visual traits (curvature, symmetry, stroke count, proportions)
    • Layout (spacing, alignment, writing direction)
    • Function (sound value, graphemic identity)
    • Notes on ambiguity or damage

    From this, I can start comparing how different regions handled the same letter—Did their rho have a loop? Was their epsilon closed?—and whether that tells us something about cultural contact or local invention.

    The Workflow

    The data entry pipeline looks like this:

    1. Scan + trace the letterform
    2. Enter the inscription’s metadata
    3. Manually mark letter positions and reading direction
    4. Extract geometric features automatically
    5. Save everything as structured, nestable JSON

    It’s part computer vision, part field notes, and part quiet staring at a very old alpha until you start to feel like it’s looking back.

    Why This Level of Detail?

    Because I want to ask big questions—how alphabets travel, which paths are innovations vs. imitations—but I don’t want to ask them fuzzily. Too much work on writing systems either leans purely qualitative or strips out the messiness for the sake of clean data. APEX is an attempt to hold both: interpretive richness and formal structure.

    This dataset—AlphaBase, soon to be expanded to other open-access museum collections and public domain corpora—is the scaffolding. It’s how I’ll test transmission models later on. But even on its own, it’s already revealing things—like which letterforms stay stable across centuries, and which are quick to splinter under pressure.

    APEX begins here: not with theory, but with tracing. With building a system that doesn’t just store letterforms, but actually listens to what they’re doing. That’s what this first trench is for. Now I get to start digging.

  • Adventures in Materiality, 1: Wax Tablets at Home

    I’ve made a couple of these tablets, experimenting with form and function. I’ve been learning a lot about historical writing surfaces, woodworking, beeswax temperaments, and the tactile oddities of stylus-based writing. Below is a brief history of the form followed by a quick how-to, with some practical notes from my own experiments at the very end. All pictures are my own, except where attributed.

    A History

    Woman with wax tablets and stylus (so-called “Sappho”), Fresco, 50-79 CE. World History Encyclopedia.

    Wax tablets have roots that go back over three thousand years. Archaeologists have found bronze styli with pointed tips and flat spatula ends in Bronze Age Anatolia, and by the time of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods, it’s likely that wax tablets were being used for both cuneiform and the emerging Aramaic alphabet—showing them to be a flexible medium that could adapt to multiple writing systems. From there, the technology spread west via the Arameans and Phoenicians, eventually reaching the Greek world. The Greek word for a wax tablet, δέλτος, is actually a Phoenician loanword—ultimately from the Akkadian daltu, meaning “door.”

    Wooden Writing Tablets, Coptic, 500–700 CE. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

    They’re particularly fascinating if you’re interested in letter forms. Because the stylus incises the wax, it encourages different motor habits and line qualities: straighter lines, more angular forms, and simpler geometries. That might be part of why early Greek inscriptions on stone look the way they do: the wax tablet was probably the everyday tool behind the scenes, shaping how people thought letters should be formed.

    At the same time, wax tablets allowed for quick, informal writing which makes them a crucial counterpart to the largely composed inscriptions that endured to today—the outcome of the ‘preservation bias.’ These tablets were a bridge between ephemeral thought and durable text, and working with them now offers a glimpse into how alphabets lived before fossilizing on stone.

    How-to

    0. Materials and Tools

    Tablet components:

    • 1 or 2 wooden panels with an inset well (Google “Cradled Wood Painting Panel” to find these)
    • Beeswax (at least 2 lbs to be safe, but adjust for size, naturally; here are the pellets which are on the softer side that I used for second tablet)
    • Optional hardware (examples that I used on larger tablet linked): closure, small lock with key, corner protectors

    Tools to melt the wax:

    • Pot
    • Something to melt wax in, ideally a Pyrex measuring cup or a glass bowl that sits atop the pot
    • ~1 liter of water
    • Spoon to mix beeswax as it melts (speeds up the process)

    Specifically for notebook-style tablets:

    • 2 small hinges and screws
    • Screwdriver (and drill if your wood is hard or your screws are large)
    • Ruler, for measuring hinge placement

    For the stylus:

    • A wooden dowel (ideally ~6mm or ¼ inch in diameter, this is most comfortable to hold and is the size of a standard pencil, meaning mechanical/electric sharpeners will be able to handle it)
    • Pencil sharpener or sharp knife
    • Sandpaper, ideally 40 or 80 grit (note: smaller the number, the rougher the grit)
    • Saw to cut the dowel, or strong hands to snap it
    • Optional: you can also just buy a bronze stylus which comes with flat “eraser” end

    1. Prepping the Wax

    First time around, I bought a 2-lb block of beeswax and used a hammer and stone-carving chisel to break it up—doable, but kind of a pain. It was also a hard wax, which made writing more difficult. Second time, I used pre-softened pellets from Amazon (linked in section above)—much easier to melt and work with.

    2. Melting and Pouring the Wax

    Use a double boiler setup (I used a Pyrex inside a pot of simmering water). Estimate the amount of wax needed by filling your wooden well with solid wax first, then dumping it into the Pyrex. Add about a third more than this, since melted wax takes up less space. Wait to pour the wax until it is fully liquefied, as below.

    IMPORTANT: Pour continuously! If you pause for even 10–15 seconds, you’ll get visible layers that don’t bond well.

    3. Cooling the Wax

    Let the wax cool on a level surface. You can refrigerate to speed things up—about 15 minutes for a thin layer, but I’d give it 30 minutes to be safe.

    This image on the left shows what fully hardened wax looks like.

    4. Assembly (For Notebook/Diptych Style)

    Measure hinge placement at ¼ and ¾ along the side where the panels meet. Center the hinge’s barrel over the seam. Use a drill for cleaner pilot holes if needed.

    If you’re using optional hardware like a latch or corner protectors, now’s the time. These can help disguise slight asymmetries or keep a wonky tablet shut.

    5. Making a Wooden Stylus

    Cut the dowel to your preferred length. I usually break it by hand, then sand the edge smooth. Sharpen one end to a point using either a pencil sharpener or a knife.

    If you’re using a knife:

    • Always cut away from your body
    • Consider using safety glove (this can be found at hardware and kitchen supply stores, not to mention online—I personally use Wüsthof’s)
    • Be most mindful of your body from elbow to fingertip—this is where most injuries occur in manufactury (shoutout to my friend at Dow Chemical for that tip).

    6. Writing, Erasing, and Experimenting

    Try varying your pressure and angle. Deeper strokes are easier to read but leave behind more excess wax. Shallower strokes are neater but harder to see. Softer wax helps a lot with both legibility and tactile feel.

    For erasing, you can use the flat end of a bronze stylus (mine is shaped like a little rake) or just warm the surface slightly (one of the pictures below has me using a pottery smoothing tool and a long-handled lighter) and smooth it over.

    First go at writing—note how much excess wax is kicked up.
    After sweeping excess away—significantly more legible, though not perfectly so.
    Example message cut into the first tablet, with the harder wax, with a read_me.txt.
    The amount of excess wax generated by scraping the wax cold to erase it with that wooden tool (as you can see, the message was still faintly visible).
    The lighter method—prevents wax loss and leads to smoother surface.

    My Observations

    • Wax hardness really matters. The softer wax is dramatically more forgiving (particularly when it comes to erasing) and is significantly more legible.
    • Depth vs. visibility is a real trade-off. Carving deeper makes your letters clearer but creates more crumbly debris and texture. Shallower strokes are neater but vanish in dim light, you really need to hold it at an angle so as to get a “raking light” angle.
    • I think it’d probably have been best as a personal memory tool. The writing isn’t super legible to others, and it can’t hold a ton. I’d think abbreviations would’ve been common, for the sake of economy—which would further ‘personalize’ the tablet and make it harder for another person to read.

    If you try this yourself, I’d love to hear about your materials and results—feel free to email me at tfavdw@nyu.edu!

    Finished small tablet, pre-inscription.
    Same tablet, closed.
  • Monthly Reads, 1: March 2025

    Monthly Reads, 1: March 2025

    There’s no single unifying theme to this list—but there is a feeling. I’m reaching, at once, toward the origins of writing and the frontiers of language technology. It’s structure that’s defining me at the moment: how systems encode meaning, whether that’s Greek orthography or neural networks. And in between, I let myself breathe with fiction—stories that play with form, time, and voice themselves.

    Recently Finished:

    • Epigraphic Evidence
      A technical addition to my current work on inscriptions. Like black coffee: not always easy to imbibe, but quite efficient.
    • Data Science (MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
      A clean introduction—refreshing for thinking about data both ancient and modern.
    • Ripley’s Game (Patricia Highsmith)
      Cold, elegant, amoral. Hilarious at points. A good palate cleanser between denser texts.
    • The Sequel (Jean Hanff Korelitz)
      Read this mostly for plot, not language—but I love thinking about narrative structures and the great Second Novel Problem.
    • The English Understand Wool (Helen DeWitt)
      Sharp, strange, and delightful. I love a novel about an out-of-touch eccentric navigating the world.

    Currently Reading:

    • Kairos (Jenny Erpenbeck)
      A novel about political and personal time, and a very complicated affair. Thorny for sure.
    • Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries (Kory Stamper)
      The theme of choice made at all stages of lexicography deeply resonates with me as I encode my own systemic information. Chapters like “Bitch” and “Posh” capture this especially well.
    • Writing and the Origins of Greek Literature (Barry B. Powell)
      I keep coming back to this one in small sips. Chapters go down easy.
    • Greek Writing from Knossos to Homer (Roger D. Woodard)
      Foundational for understanding the transmission of the Greek alphabet. Very well written and thoroughly researched.
    • Algorithms (MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
      A manageable way to reframe my thinking on rules and structure—not unlike real-life syntactical derivations.
    • Machine Learning (MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
      Challenging. Still finding where I fit in here. Hoping I can apply to my APEX project by Stage 3.
    • JSON for Beginners
      Very practical for APEX, which is structured with JSON and makes heavy use of standoff annotation. This allows me to encode uncertainty and multiplicitous readings, lowering the amount of assumptions baked into the dataset.
    • Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI (Ethan Mollick)
      For someone working on ancient inscriptional data, the future of coworking with AI is too relevant to ignore.

    I wouldn’t call this a reading list so much as a reading state, a snapshot of what it feels like to be in the thick of things: academic work, blog writing, thesis planning, and whatever this slow journey toward modern spoken French is shaping up to be.

    Picture: I’ve been stacking my recent reads as a kind of personal monument—hoping to match my own height before summer.