Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
The polymath Thomas Young (1773-1829) — physicist, physiologist, physician and polyglot, among several other things — became hooked on the scripts and languages of ancient Egypt in 1814, the year he began to decipher the Rosetta Stone. He continued to study the hieroglyphic and demotic scripts with variable intensity for the rest of his life, literally until his dying day.
By Brett Rogers and Benjamin Stevens
Early in Ridley Scott’s science fiction (SF) film Prometheus, archaeologists discover a cave-painting of what seems to be a human figure pointing at a group of stars. Having gathered strikingly similar images from ancient and prehistoric cultures around the globe, the archaeologists take this most recent discovery as confirming their theory about the origin of humankind: we were placed here, created, by extraterrestrials. The archaeologists refer to those extraterrestrials as ‘Engineers’ (“What did they engineer?” asks another character. “They engineered us.”).
Nobody ever planned to create a state that would last more than a millennium and a half, yet Rome was able, in the end, to survive barbarian migrations, economic collapse, and even the conflicts between religions that had grown up within its borders. Today we have an image and myth of the indestructible empire. But this view is shifting as new research reveals small details about the life of Romans — emperor to slave — and how the empire survived. We sat down with Greg Woolf, author of Rome: An Empire’s Story, to discuss the enduring appeal of Ancient Rome and the latest breakthroughs in scholarship.
By Lydia Carr
The path of the biographer is littered with terrors. Few, to be fair, match the risks listed on the fieldwork forms put out by various Institutes of Archaeology, those exhaustive documents intended to pinpoint every potential danger (and indemnify the sponsoring department against paying for more than a reasonable number of snakebite treatments). But as I’ve often said, biographic research, at least regarding twentieth-century subjects, resembles nothing as much as the first five minutes of a Doctor Who episode, or the last five pages of a M.R. James story.
By Greg Woolf
Edward Gibbon, the English historian dedicated to the study of the Roman Empire, chose to entitle his seminal masterpiece The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire because for him, as for others at the end of the eighteenth century, it was decline and fall that was the real puzzle. Yet our question today is not ‘why did it fall?’ but ‘why did it last so long?’
By Chris Stray
When we are unsure of the meaning of a word, or want to know when it was first used, or what alternative spellings it has, we consult the dictionary. People often refer to “the dictionary,” in fact, as if there were only one, or as if it didn’t matter which one was consulted. But then most households probably only have one dictionary of any size, though consultation via computers, tablets, or smartphones is becoming increasingly common.
By Emily Wilson
April, says Eliot famously in the Wasteland, is the cruellest month, “breeding / Lilacs out of the dead ground, mixing/ Memory and desire”. Spring, in this shocking reversal of common tropes, is bad for precisely the reasons we usually think it good: because it involves a rebirth of what had seemed dead. Eliot’s poem, which will itself enact the rebirth or zombie resuscitation of many greatest hits of western literary culture, begins with a recognition of how horrible, and how spooky, this process is. You try to bury the dead, but they won’t stay in the grave.
In these videos, John Reader, author of Missing Links: In Search of Human Origins talks about the treasure hunt that is the search for the missing link.
By Adrian R Bell and Richard S. Dale
Pilgrimages, saints, shrines, indulgences and miracles were central to western medieval culture and religious experience. Yet, although much has been written, what has often been overlooked by historians is the economic underpinning of medieval religious beliefs and practices.
By Brian Cummings
Like many people I first came across the Book of Common Prayer in a church pew; I must have been in my late teens. But it felt as if I already knew the book: many things in it were already familiar, like the marriage vows ‘for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.’
By Christian Meier
Hesiod and Homer brought order to the world of the gods for the Greeks, describing their genealogical connections, allocating honours, powers, and areas of responsibility among them, and giving them distinct appearances. This is how Herodotus put it.
By David Potter
The streets are packed. People are singing and shouting. They are wearing team colors; they are drinking, eating, fighting and betting. These fans are not in Green Bay, East Lansing, Philadelphia or Madison. They are in Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire in 500 AD.
By John Reader
A blaze of media attention recently greeted the claim that a newly discovered hominid species, , marked the transition between an older ape-like ancestor, such as Australopithecus afarensis, and a more recent representative of the human line, Homo erectus. As well as extensive TV, radio and front-page coverage, the fossils found by Lee Berger and his team at a site near Pretoria in South Africa featured prominently in National Geographic, with an illustration of the three species striding manfully across the page. In the middle, Au. sediba was marked with twelve points of similarity: six linking it to Au. afarensis on the left and six to H. erectus on the right. Though Berger did not explicitly describe Au. sediba as a link between the two species, the inference was clear and not discouraged. The Missing Link was in the news again.
Paul Woodruff
As thousands continue their march on Wall Street for a fifth straight week, an ancient story has much to tell us about the demands of justice.
The occupation of Wall Street is about a colossal failure of justice. When justice fails, anger grows into rage. And rage can tear a community into shreds. When a few people reap huge rewards they do not deserve, while others get nothing but insults — even though they have worked hard and been loyal to their workplace –- justice has failed. Bankers carry away huge bonuses, while more and more of the workers who do the heavy lifting are laid off.
This Day in World History – While hiking through the Alps on the Italian-Austrian border, Erika and Helmut Simon, a German couple, spotted a brown shape in a watery gully below them. Scrambling down to investigate, they realized that they were looking at a human head and shoulder. Assuming the body was a climber who had been killed in a fall, they reported their find to authorities. The body was removed with a jackhammer and tourists made off with some of its clothing and the tools that were found with it.
By Louis René Beres
In Plato’s Republic, a canonic centerpiece of all Western thought, we first read of the “philosopher king,” a visionary leader who would impressively combine deep learning with effective governance. Today, almost 2400 years later, such leadership is nowhere to be found, either in Washington, or in any other major world capital.