tumblr app updated and somehow removed the options to interact with posts. awesome
studying ancient history & archaeology is awesome because you get to follow citations like a little trail of breadcrumbs π and when you reach the end you realize everyone else has been playing the worlds worst game of telephone
I would personally love to hear about the dipylon oenochoe!
well, iβm glad you asked! [opens can of worms]
this is my best friend, the dipylon oinochoe. its a beautiful little wine jug from the late geometric period. 22cm tall. you may know it from such hits as βpaper talking about the early greek alphabet,β or βpaper talking about the early greek alphabet,β etc etc. iβve been researching him for a project lately. and i think iβm the only one who understands him now.
anyways itβs one of the oldest longer inscriptions we have from the late 8th/early 7th cent BCE. everyone and their mother wants to translate this little guy. theyβre all reading it and going βoh wow! its got a perfect hexameter at the start! βwhoever of the dancers dances most delicately!β" and then they all go "Wait What Do Those Last Signs Mean.β
there are 24 different interpretations. but thats fine. whatever. beef over the last signs seems normal enough. you see that a lot. personally i think its too broken to really tell for certain (those fractures are a bit unfortunately placed tbh) but i fear i am also just a very skeptical guy when it comes to definitive translations so my take on that should be considered with a grain of salt.
but because im researching this oinochoe, i'm reading all these articles arguing over what it Means and what the Implications Are. and you would thinkβ¦ its 2025β¦ weβve kinda all agreed βpots arenβt peopleβ for several decadesβ¦ surely thereβs an analysis somewhere that focuses Solely On This Potβs Context... idk like trying not to focus solely on its inscription for once???
but no. no, this is too much to ask for apparently. everyoneβs going βwell it must've belonged to a dancer! lets talk about dance competitions and homer and the gymnasium how this is all reflected in this one jug!β someone even dropped this one line theorizing it was βpassed around at a party,β like it has just been consistently assigned as belonging to a dancer you cannot escape this idea. i tried to find any different ideas. i could not.
so iβm stuck here going βWhere Is The Contextβ because it seems to be, uh, Not Discussed Anywhere. every article is citing back towards stephanos koumanoudes (the guy who purchased it in 1880) but they are Also saying βyeah it was found in 1871! source: koumanoudes!β But Heβs Not The Guy That Excavated It, Guys, Where Is It From? nobody is giving me the answer. my favorite one is culhed, he just says βunder obscure circumstances,β which is quite possibly the least helpful way to describe this somehow nebulous provenance. but then culhed offhandedly cites someone else. just in the footnotes, as you do. and that someone is yannis galanakis, my new hero.
now yannis galanakis (2011) does not give a single flying fuck about the dipylon oinochoe. he is here for one thing and one thing only: an unpublished stirrup jar that was bought by a totally different guy. most of his article is just concerned about this stirrup jar, how it was sold with a skull (??), and Who Sold That Skull. but galanakisβ stirrup jar is, coincidentally, from this same excavation in 1871. so in his article, where heβs referencing all these people associated with private excavations northeast of the dipylon gate (around modern-day plateia eleutherias), galanakis casually drops the line βamong the finds associated with these excavations are some of the most important examples of late geometric pottery, like the dipylon oinochoe.β this is 1) more than Literally Everyone Else I Have Been Reading has been saying and 2) PROVIDING PRIMARY SOURCES FOR THIS DIG?
and these sources.... these primary sources have never been mentioned in Any Other Publications re: the dipylon oinochoe??? except MAYBE one from 2013 (couliΓ©) thats in french, apparently only available in print, and the nearest copy is a library 2hrs away from me (so i cant actually verify what she says yet). but every other article about the dipylon oinochoe is basically like βyeah, see powell 1988β -> βyeah, see koumanoudes 1880β -> βi bought this from some guy named ioannes, lolβ and its just created this Massive Echo Chamber where the provenance is "Koumanoudes" and the context is "Dancer." when... we have... two publications... written by people who were actually involved in this private excavation (which to be clear here was very much illegal at some points, but ioannes palaiologos do not care abt the government saying Stop Excavating Please). these two sources are hirschfeld (1872) and rayet (1888).
the provenance that these 1870s/80s accounts are providing isnt Actually That Detailed, but there are parts that line up pretty well (ie, swords/spears/knives being found in the graves, murex on top, several layers of successive tombs) which are Totally Absent from later articles talking about the purpose of this vessel, of its inscription, and of its owner/transcriber (which i dont think can be determined Anyways [cf Arrington 2024, this is just a Normal Take i think] but like whatever i guess Pots Are People Now, according to Powell 1988+Binek 2017+Osborne 2006). i phrased it in my paper and my presentation as βits like this oinochoe been totally disconnected from its contextβ and its to the point where its so egregious that someone will, in one article, drop a reference to galanakisβ research on the excavation of 1871 (where he cites two eyewitness accounts) and not. Not Once have they looked into it.
because if they had. and this is the fucking crazy part ok this is where i Lost My Shit For A Solid Week. there is, in hirschfeld 1872, an identical oinochoe (number 48, page 147 in this journal) with the same damn height (22.5cm; powell 1988 says the dipylon oinochoe is about 23cm) and decoration (a grazing deer) and concentric lines its a goddamn identical piece just judging from the description of it (and hirschfeld very unhelpfully did Not include this jug among his plates). deers grazing arent very common in late geometric pottery, its mostly just the dipylon workshop cranking them out AND theres only a few oinochoe attributed to dipylon workshop so This Is Quite Possibly The Same Vessel (or so i thought, we'll get to that). the one problem is that this vessel is just NOT from dipylon??? its from the old military hospital in athens??? which was built south of the acropolis in 1834??? and they found roman mosaics during that construction??? so this mentioned vessel could actually have been found in the 1830s??? and again nobody has said jack fucking shit about this connection, afaik i am the only one who has ever actually sat down with these Implications all lined up in a row, so i had to try and disprove myself on my own like it was 5d chess. i was the βI Want To Believeβ meme but if it was about the dipylon oinochoe being from somewhere near dipylon.
and i'm digging through as many sources as i possibly can find to prove there's a mysterious second jug that might be from this hospital area (which, granted, was still a funerary space during the geometric period). i went through all of hirschfeld's references to alexander conze's plates showing pottery shapes, but they just ended up also being oinochoe, which made me lose my mind even more. hirschfeld would be like "yeah this deer was in this position from conze taf VII-2" and you go "ok so whats conze taf vii-2 look like? oh my fucking god its a GRAZING ANIMAL AGAIN." at some point i ended up reading a phd dissertation from the national and kapodistrian univerisity of athens to know more about this military hospital?? and then i switched gears and went searching through coldstream 1968βs list of geometric pottery (it might be outdated now, but it was the only thorough source i could find atp) and went through Every Single Oinochoe from the dipylon workshop and almost every single one was totally different. like they just could not be this mystery oinochoe (in which case, I Would Have Some Really Bad News About The Dipylon Oinochoe).
until i found my second best friend. munich CVA 3 taf 112. who literally nobody except me gives a shit about. its taf description is 2 paragraphs long. its the exact same height as these two aforementioned oinochoe. it has the exact same deer grazing motif. fuck it, its even got an unknown provenance because it was acquired from Some Guy Named Paul in 1907 (who also has connections to people like furtwΓ€ngler [most unfortunate last name ever], another guy who wrote about the dipylon oinochoe in 1881). so in my quest to achieve some sort of emotional resolution here i possibly found a sister vessel to the dipylon oinochoe??? and maybe even that jug's provenance. who knows. i dont wanna say anything definitive yet. also if anyone has access to paul julius arndt's personal papers and especially his financial records, hit me up, because where the fuck did he get this identical looking jug.
however. most modern scholarship about the dipylon oinochoe does not care about munich cva 3 taf 112 (and its similarities to the dipylon oinochoe), or the few references to the 1871 excavations at palatia eleutherias several blocks northeast of the dipylon gate (and what little context/descriptions they provide of funerary remains), because they do not care about the dipylon oinochoe. they care about the letters inscribed on it, and they want to debate the meanings of those letters in a self-inflicted vacuum devoid of all other evidence beyond 35 legible signs and 11 fragmentary/illegible ones.
this seems to me to be a futile endeavour, especially seeing as everyone just keeps citing each other as to where the vessel came from & who to look at for more information & cutting it all off at koumanoudes (or, slightly better, galanakis). and i cannot for the life of me fathom why they have all stopped at koumanoudes or galanakis, if they're so desperate to find this concept of a person behind the oinochoe, because they could actually gain some possible insight into that person through the few grave descriptions provided. but they're only citing others who are citing others who are going off of koumanoudes' limited description from an article's addendum in 1880. and i'd argue that this sort of circular discussion strangles any attempt to actually examine the Dipylon oinochoe in a meaningful sense.
Op I seriously hope you publish this. This is what scholarship is all about!
when I was like 14 I used to reblog these posts on here that were like "YOUR 20S ARE NOT AN IMAGINARY RACE YOURE DOING JUST FINE!!" just to be positive towards my older mutuals even though i didn't really get what they were about and I'd be in the tags like "#so true!! #everyone does things at their own pace!!" and now im 24 I'm thinking back to it and it's like Oh of course the imaginary race. Which im losing
this is one of the funniest pages i've seen from the umineko manga because in context it makes sense but out of context it really looks like they did the most basic arithmetic possible and then talked about how smart they are for it, topped off by battler saying that actually he had no real idea and was just guessing
6 + 5 15 11!
tv pitch: a completely average workplace sitcom except that itβs established at the end of the pilot that it takes place on the 90th floor of the world trade center in 2000. every episode the date is shown, just to build the sense of impending doom. the show is otherwise a completely generic the office ripoff. the intro sequence is a montage of airplanes taking off.
at the end of the second season, we reach 9/10/01. after six months of waiting, season 3 drops. now itβs 9/12/01. nothing has happened. the characters carry on as normal. fans of the series go insane. the show never explains what happened, and continues to pretend itβs a normal sitcom.
my daily affirmation as an author
Sick ass adventure wizard investigates native crustacean with his supportive but easily spooked familiarΒ
It came to me in a vision
its really annoying that its like apparently impossible to explain to men that "sexual assault is not the Default State of women in distress and it's ReallyFhucking Stupid that this is literally the go-to when writing a conflict involving a woman" without it being interpreted as "writing about rape is bad and all suggestions of it as a reality for some women must be avoided at all costs" like i mean really really really annoying
like there are stories involving sexual assault where its inclusion gives you a more intimate understanding of the world and characters that would be objectively diminished by treating it with kid gloves and whitewashing it out of existence. and there are stories involving sexual assault where its inclusion makes it Incredibly Obvious the guy writing it just cannot fathom any scenario in which a woman could experience a struggle of Any Kind that does not ultimately involve rape .
the boss fight version of this is when its both and the inclusion of sexual assault is necessary for the reality of the situation to be portrayed with any sense of honesty or integrity but also the way its presented is in such poor taste that it feels like youre being held hostage by the most obnoxiously self-important nerd on the entire planet