To Wake the Dead

Tag: history

  • 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.

  • Tablets and Tribulations, 1: Lapse and Return

    2023: Tablet replica I made from a drawing in Huehnergard’s grammar.

    I first took Akkadian a few years ago. Since then, the language has been sitting in a kind of suspended animation: just far enough away to feel unreachable, just close enough to make me feel guilty.

    This post kicks off Tablets and Tribulations, a new series chronicling my return to Akkadian. I’ll be using it to track my progress, share insights, and reflect on what it means to study something this complex, this demanding, and this strange.

    Why Akkadian?

    Akkadian sits at the intersection of my academic obsessions: Semitic linguistics, the history of writing systems, and the psycholinguistics of script. It’s a dead language, but not a fossilized one. The more you read it, the more it pulses: with bureaucracy, with poetry, with prayer. And the writing system—a sprawling, phonetically polyvalent syllabary riddled with ideograms—is completely unlike the tight alphabets I’m used to. It demands patience, pattern-recognition, and grit.

    There’s also no shortage of material, with estimates of the number of excavated Akkadian texts reaching as high two million—meaning it quite possibly has the most documents of any ancient language; in fact, according to my professor Ronald Wallenfels, more documents than all ancient languages combined. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

    I’m also drawn to it because I’m not naturally good at it. Greek and Latin came to me more intuitively, their logics familiar in a way I hadn’t expected. Akkadian doesn’t let me do that. It forces me to slow down, to wrestle with my perfectionism, to train my brain in new ways. And I love that. I want to get good at something hard. I want to overcome the mental blocks that have held me back before.

    What’s Changed

    Since that early study, I’ve broadened my exposure to Semitic linguistics and become more confident working with both the script and the medium. I’ve also made peace with how humbling this language is. Once, I even told a syntax class—confidently—that Akkadian had no demonstratives, only to moments later fact-check myself and discover that it had three distinct tiers of them. I then had to publicly correct myself and told them to pray for me… as I had a quiz on Akkadian pronominals the next period.

    I’m now studying with two grammars, Huehnergard and Caplice, using Labat’s sign list as my main reference. I’m also switching from just drawing signs to pressing them into clay, and my wax tablets—less sketchbook, more scribal. I’ll be posting more about that process (and my tablet replicas) soon.

    What to Expect from This Series

    Tablets and Tribulations will be part language log, part material exploration, and part meditation on what it means to study a language with no living speakers and a script that defies modern intuition. Future posts will likely include:

    • Syntax deep dives (word order, case, verb chains, etc.)
    • Close readings of texts (legal, literary, magical, bureaucratic)
    • Reflections on learning signs and navigating polyvalence
    • Notes on scribal training and cuneiform technique
    • My own experimental archaeology: pressing and firing tablets
    • Anecdotes from the museum and the classroom
    • Psycholinguistic musings on how syllabaries shape cognition
    • Occasional moments of crisis and triumph

    This is going to be hard. But I want that. I want to stretch, stumble, and get back up. That balance—rigor with joy—is what I’m working toward. Each week with Akkadian reminds me how study disciplines the self—not just the mind.

    So here’s to the first step. The tablets await.

  • 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.

  • 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.