A Letter from Ted Kenney to Shackleton Bailey

One of the happier aspects of living in a university town is the quality of its bookstores. This is especially true in Ann Arbor, where we are quite spoiled by the wide reaches of Dawn Treader and deeper waters of Motte and Bailey. To the virtues of the latter is added that it came into

Linear B and the Destruction of Pylos: A Response to Recent Claims

Among other things, this past year saw the publication of a new corpus of the Linear B tablets from Pylos: Les Archives du Roi Nestor (ARN), edited by Louis Godart and Anna Sacconi. Featuring pictures, drawings, and transcriptions — but no translations or commentary — it's an austere work: He had also bought a gift

A Child’s Letter (P.Mich.XMAS)

As I was tidying papers from the semester, a small slip fell from the pile and caught my attention. Picking it up, I realised it was the transcription of a papyrus I'd rescued from my office at the beginning of lockdown and subsequently completely forgotten. I'd found the papyrus in the early winter among unpublished

Fleecing a Discipline

Mike Sampson's new article on the provenance of P.Sapph.Obbink ('the newest Sappho', containing the Brothers Poem) is a magnificent bit of detective work, which, like all developments in this case, leads in some ways to more questions than answers. This is an attempt to explore some of those questions, and tease out the implications of

Looting and Faking

This post is rather a departure from the Mycenological material typically presented here, and was born out of recent Twitter conversations that required responses of greater depth than 280 characters allow.  I am not, of course, a papyrologist, though being at Michigan I have been lucky to meet and learn from many; nor am I

The Tacitean Trump

Pagnion of an April's night. in ea tempestate accedit ad imperium princeps haud credibilis, gente natus divite se ipsum peperisse prosperitatem abritratus: magnae opes isti inopum vindici. adeo sapiens ut, quod pro venatione veneficarum habuit ipsas veneficas semper invenisset. sed alitus non solum per populos plebesque, sed cultores eius senatores, obstrincti tanto amori iudicium. suffragatores eius

A Phaistos Disk Primer

The Phaistos disk is something of an embarrassment to students and scholars of the Aegean Bronze Age.  Its celebrity has given it an inordinately central position on the discipline, the extent of its fame something like inversely proportionate with its evidential value to scholars, to say nothing of certain knowledge.  Only Atlantis can vie with

A Lost Mycenaean Record

When I arrived in Ann Arbor this fall, word eventually made it to me that the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology had in its holdings an old photograph, terribly faded, of what appeared to be some sort of inscription.  My own interest in Linear B being well known, I was able to get a look at

A Cucurbitaceous Linear B Inscription

I set off home from the Kelsey Museum of Classical Archaeology last night under a drooping dusk, the streetlights just flickering into life as the leaves tumbled in their autumnal dance.  The air was cold, and a firm wind seemed to find my face no matter which way I turned.  Tucking in my chin, I

Linear B Translated: MY V 659

Another tablet in translation for your reading pleasure (you can find a full index here). This one is fairly well served in modern handbooks (it's in Documents and the more recent Companion to Linear B), but there remain some differences in interpretation -- and it's a personal favourite.  It was found in the West House at Mycenae, outside of