Clarice from Calvino’s Invisible Cities, as drawn by Karina Puente.
In the last decade the digital humanities have built an ethics of stewardship around two frameworks: FAIR and CARE.
Data, we’re told, should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable; its use should uphold Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, and Ethics. These principles have given structure to a once-couture, even cowboy, practice. They taught us that visibility is a virtue, that openness can be an act of justice. They made data management legible—something one could rate, certify, or defend.
Yet legibility is never neutral. FAIR presumes that clarity is the highest good; CARE assumes that control can be cleanly assigned. Both, however gently, rest on the dream of completeness: that if we organize our data well enough, we might finally see the whole.
APEX lives where that dream dies. The inscriptions I trace resist closure. They are fragmentary, re-inscribed, half-lost. Every dataset carries the tremor of its source—a chipped delta, a missing ‘alep, a surface that refuses to yield. The data, like the stones themselves, is frail.
I’ve begun to imagine a third paradigm: one that keeps FAIR’s discipline and CARE’s ethics but admits that in the humanities, stability is fictional. Call it FRAIL: Findable, Reproducible, Accountable, Interpretive, and Liminal.
Findable—disappearance helps no one.
Reproducible—others should be able to retrace our steps, even if they find another path.
Accountable—provenance and responsibility cannot be dispensed of.
Interpretive—ambiguity, when recorded, becomes part of the evidence itself.
Liminal—some knowledge dwells on thresholds: certainty and speculation, artifact and idea.
FRAIL doesn’t replace FAIR or CARE but grows from them. It asks what stewardship looks like when the object of study is itself uncertain, when our task is to hold the fragment without pretending it is whole.
At this point I keep returning to Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In “Cities and Names 4,” he writes of Clarice, a city that forever rebuilds itself from the shards of its earlier selves:
“Only this is know for sure: a given number of objects is shifted within a given space, at times submerged by a quantity of new objects, at times worn out and not replaced; the rule is to shuffle them each time, then try to assemble them. Perhaps Clarice has always been only a confusion of chipped gimcracks, ill-assorted, obsolete.”
Clarice is every archive we have ever built. Its fragments persist, rearranged with each generation, their order provisional, their meaning renewed by use. FRAIL data lives in that same condition: never whole, yet never lost—structures of care built from what survives. The humanities have always been a discipline of rebuilding Clarice.
To keep data FRAIL is therefore not to weaken it but to recognize its true strength: the capacity to bear transformation without disowning its past. Rigor becomes a form of tenderness. Reproducibility includes hesitation. The dataset, like the inscription, becomes layered, self-aware, and open to rereading.
In APEX I try to move toward that kind of data: technically precise yet narratively honest, transparent about its mediation, willing to show its seams. The goal isn’t immortality but traceability—to make each decision legible without pretending it ends the story.
Perhaps that is what stewardship finally means: not to eliminate fragility, but to hold it safely, as one holds a fragment of Clarice—knowing it has already been broken, and still believing it can be assembled again.
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.
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.
Mycenaean Greek is the earliest recorded form of the Greek language, written in the Linear B syllabary and preserved primarily in administrative documents from palatial centers like Knossos and Pylos. This toolkit collects the core resources I use for studying the language, writing system, and historical context of Mycenaean. While it’s not a language most people “read” in the same way as Homeric or Classical Greek, it’s foundational for understanding the development of the Greek language and the Aegean Bronze Age.
To Get Started
Hooker – Linear B: An Introduction A concise and accessible introduction to the Linear B writing system, Mycenaean phonology, and key vocabulary. Useful for getting oriented before diving into transcriptions or corpora. Read online
Chadwick – The Decipherment of Linear B An essential historical account of how Linear B was deciphered, written by one of its key figures. While dated in some linguistic details, it’s an engaging entry point into the script and its rediscovery. Read online
Digital Tools
Palaeolexicon: Mycenaean Greek Word List A searchable online lexicon of Mycenaean Greek, based on attested forms and reconstructions. Includes syllabic spellings and interpretations. Useful for quick lookups when reading inscriptions. Access online
LiBER (Linear B Electronic Resources) An extensive online resource that includes a searchable corpus, transcriptions, sign lists, and links to digitized tablets. Maintained by the University of Cambridge. Access online
Advanced Topics
Ventris & Chadwick – Documents in Mycenaean Greek The foundational reference edition of Linear B tablets, with transcriptions, translations, and commentary. Volume I covers the grammar and lexicon; Volume II includes full texts. Read online
Duhoux & Morpurgo Davies (eds.) – A Companion to Linear B: Mycenaean Greek Texts and Their World A more recent scholarly collection covering writing practices, administrative function, linguistics, and interpretive issues. Indispensable for research-level study. Read online [Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3]
Aura Jorro – Diccionario Micénico A comprehensive lexicon of Mycenaean Greek, keyed to Linear B spellings. In Spanish but used internationally by specialists. Read online [Volume 1, Volume 2]
Conclusion
Mycenaean Greek is not a reading language in the traditional sense, but it offers unparalleled access to the earliest phase of Greek—its phonology, morphology, and vocabulary in situ. For linguists, epigraphers, and anyone curious about the Bronze Age Aegean, these tools provide a clear entry into the world of palace records and early writing.
This list includes the materials I’ve found most dependable in my own work. If you’ve found other resources—especially for working with the tablets themselves—I’d love to hear what’s missing.
This post collects the top resources I rely on when reading Homeric Greek, especially the Iliad and Odyssey. While much of the grammar overlaps with Classical Greek, Homeric Greek has distinct forms, vocabulary, and meter that call for specialized tools. The following resources—ranging from primers to advanced philological references—are what I return to again and again when working with epic.
To Get Started
Pharr – Homeric Greek: A Book for Beginners An older but remarkably focused introduction built around Iliad 1. Includes grammar notes specific to Homeric forms, extensive vocabulary, and progressively annotated readings. Read online
Benner – Selections from Homer’s Iliad An excellent annotated reader of Iliad Books I–VI, with extensive grammatical commentary keyed to each line. Ideal for intermediate readers. Read online
Cunliffe – A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect Still the standard Homeric dictionary. Organized by root and form, with citations from epic texts and brief semantic notes. Read online
Digital Tools
Logeion Cunliffe’s Homeric Lexicon is fully searchable on Logeion alongside LSJ. You can easily compare definitions across lexica and check frequency data within the epics. Access online
Perseus Word Study Tool Input any inflected form and receive morphological analysis with links to lexicon entries and usage examples across a wide corpus of Greek texts. Access online
Top 500 Homeric Words Deck Compiled by Chicago, these are the most common vocabulary items in Homer’s epics, and knowing them makes for an efficient path to smooth reading. Access online
Greek Particles Deck Compiled by a Quizlet user, this deck contains over 80 of the most common and important Greek particles to know. Access online
Perseus Digital Library Includes the full texts of the Iliad and Odyssey with parsing tools, English translations, and links to grammatical and lexical resources. Access online
Chicago Homer Tailored specifically for Homeric epic. Offers side-by-side Greek and English translations, word-by-word morphological data, and metrical annotation. Access online
Advanced Topics
Monro – A Grammar of the Homeric Dialect A classic reference that systematically treats the phonology, morphology, and syntax of Homeric Greek. A bit dense, but indispensable for serious linguistic inquiry. Read online
Buck – The Greek Dialects: Grammar and Selected Readings A valuable reference for understanding the dialectal features present in Homeric Greek, which blends primarily Ionic forms with traces of Aeolic. While not focused solely on Homer, this book helps clarify unusual forms and offers broader context for the epic language tradition. Read online
William S. Annis – An Introduction to Greek Meter Offers a clear and concise explanation of dactylic hexameter with scansion exercises and helpful mnemonics. Read online
Hexameter.co An interactive site that gamifies learning dactylic hexameter. Offers scansion tools for Homer (and 3 Latin authors too). Helpful for developing aural sensitivity and fluency in poetic rhythm. Access online
Conclusion
This toolkit focuses on materials that prioritize Homeric Greek as a distinct linguistic system—neither a dialect nor a transitional phase, but a carefully stylized literary register. Whether you’re reading your first lines of the Iliad or preparing to write on Homeric formulae or meter, these tools offer a dependable path forward.
This list isn’t exhaustive, but it covers the resources I’ve found most useful in my own studies. Are there others you swear by for Homeric Greek? I’d love to hear what’s missing.
Perseus’s result for ἱκνέομαι: a quick parser, giving form and summary of corpus occurrences.Partial Logeion result for the same word: collates detailed results from nine separate dictionaries with a 10th tab for corpus occurrences.
For anyone studying Latin or Ancient Greek—whether casually, academically, or obsessively—two digital tools stand out as indispensable: Perseus and Logeion. I use both almost every day. While they serve overlapping purposes, each has its own strengths, and learning to navigate between them has made my reading smoother, faster, and more precise.
Perseus, formally known as the Perseus Digital Library, is one of the earliest and most ambitious digital humanities projects in the field of Classics. It provides access to a massive collection of Greek and Latin texts with built-in parsing tools, dictionary links, and (often outdated but still helpful) English translations. Its strength lies in contextual reading—hovering over any word in a text will generate a parsing suggestion and a link to its dictionary entry, which makes it incredibly useful when working through a new author or a grammatically complex passage. The Word Study Tool allows you to input any inflected form and get a list of possible morphological analyses and dictionary headwords, with links to example passages. However, it’s important to note that these parsings are generated by algorithms and are not always reliable, especially for ambiguous forms. The interface can also feel a bit dated, and not all texts are equally well formatted, but for quick reading and parsing, Perseus is great.
By contrast, Logeion is a sleek and powerful lexicon aggregator developed by the University of Chicago. Unlike Perseus, it doesn’t offer complete texts, but it excels at lexical depth. When you enter a word—either in Latin or Greek—Logeion pulls results from multiple dictionaries at once, including LSJ, Middle Liddell, Autenrieth, Lewis & Short, Elementary Lewis, Frieze-Dennison, and others. You also get frequency data, example passages, and, in some cases, idiomatic usages or English-to-Greek reverse entries. Logeion doesn’t parse for you, so you need to know or guess the dictionary form of the word. But once you do, the definitions it offers are more precise and informative than any single dictionary alone. I often use it to compare lexical nuance across genres or authors, and it’s especially helpful when I want to confirm the meaning of a word I already sort of “know.”
The way I use these two tools in tandem is pretty straightforward. When I’m reading through a text, especially something new or poetic, I usually begin in Perseus. I use the on-hover parsing and the Word Study Tool to get oriented, especially with verbs and particles. Once I have the base form, I switch over to Logeion to dig deeper into meaning, idiom, or usage across contexts. Logeion becomes especially helpful when I’m writing, translating, or thinking more syntactically. In many ways, Perseus is like a field guide with helpful margin notes, while Logeion is the serious reference work you turn to when you want to be exact.
If you’re just starting out, don’t feel pressured to master everything at once. But learning to toggle between Perseus and Logeion will give you a huge advantage—especially if you’re not always reading with a print dictionary on hand or don’t have institutional resources. I’ve used these tools for years—they’ve remained central across every stage of my study. They’re fast, free, and surprisingly deep once you know where to look.
If you’ve found tricks for using them more efficiently, or if you have a favorite feature I didn’t mention, let me know what’s missing.
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.
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.
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.
Though this is technically Linguistics for All, 2, this post is about NYU League of Linguistics’ first discussion group of the semester—I’m posting it now because a few people asked for the recap, and I’m more than happy to oblige.
The conversation focused on typological features found in endangered languages—many of them rare in the languages of the world and very unexpected (to English speakers, that is). We took a fast but focused world tour: Austronesian syntax, Mayan phonology, Bantu morphology, and more. The goal wasn’t comprehensiveness, but curiosity. What kinds of things can human languages do? And what’s at stake when we lose examples of those things?
Some of the questions that came up:
How do syntactic constraints shift when the verb comes first? When the object comes before the subject?
Why might a language have a vast and highly irregular consonant inventory? Why might sound changes that are quite unique cross-linguistically emerge?
What’s it like to speak a language where every noun has to fit into one of twenty classes, each with its own agreement pattern?
The point was to slow down and marvel at the extent of linguistic diversity, and just what we’d lose if those languages went extinct. These features are beautiful, in my opinion, but they’re also systemically instructive. They tell us what’s possible in the “design space” of language, and how they resist the tidy models that formalists sometimes prefer.
For those who couldn’t attend, the slides are linked here along with a short primer on the pre-event readings & videos, plus a folder of journal articles and book chapters in a shared Google Drive. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to record the session, but I’m hoping to incorporate some of this material into future blog entries or curriculum tools.
And if this is your first time hearing about the League, drop me a line at tfavdw@nyu.edu—we meet semi-regularly and welcome anyone curious about language in any form. NYU affiliates and non-NYU people can both attend.
Stay tuned for our next session: a hands-on cryptography and forensic linguistic game using real linguistic data, running during midterms as a low-stakes puzzle night (with some surprise mechanics). It’ll be at 10 Washington Place, NY, NY, at 6:30pm on April 1st. More details are available at nyulol.org, and a recording of the presentation portion, delivered by a leading forensic linguist, will be posted shortly after the event.
To Wake the Dead 