Bryaxis Hecatee

On the latest threads button (again), I wonder if part of why so many of us members were disoriented might not be because the button is on the bottom of the page and not on the top right side, where it was easy to reach when we connected... Also the top right corner feels a little crowded right now, with the manage ignored users and manage friends button taking space while they could have been under "my settings" and/or "my profile". And I presume that a "my blog" link could be put there alongside with "my gallery". Just my usability 2 cents

The date issue is solved only on the front page, others pages are still affected (for exemple go to "forum peregrini - archeology : the world" to see the issues remaining, other sections also being affected. Otherwise I approve of all those that'd like a true "view unread posts" function back

All's in the titles, and the details are on this bulgarian newspaper article

well the earliests talks of the Iberians are found in Herodotus, who speak of the kingdom of Tartesso in Southern Spain. Then you'll have some more greek texts (but not many), before going to Rome, who does not really talk about the iberians before the second punic war. Livy will provide you with quite a few informations linked to the persistant warfare in the area but speaks mainly of the roman generals of course... You'll have Sertorius' allies too who'll get mentionned, and you might find some informations in pseudo-Caesar's book but it's mainly about the fights against other romans so we don't have all the informations he gives on Gaul... later on, I doubt you'll find much outside of Pliny. That's about all I can think about in the ancient litterary sources, for more you'll have to go to epigraphy and archeology, which is quite productive in the country.

Gentiles are a regular roman army unit made up of barbarian born soldiers, mostly laeti (hereditary soldiers working for Rome in exchange for the right to stay in the Empire with their family after their terms, even getting lands, an individual deal between the soldier and the state), which must be clearly distinguished from the foederati (whole barbarian tribes who have a "contract" with the empire, fighting for it in exchange for land where they can be ruled according to their own laws and customs). Laeti seems to have been made of mainly defeated barbarians or their heirs, only those surviving a full term of service with the army being given roman citizenship

that's a map of late empire defenses in Germania I and Belgium I. In black are known remains or textual mentions, in white supposed sites Translations as follow : round symbol : fortified city, town, crenaleted symbol : fortifications square symbol : smaller fortifications bridge like symbol : river fortifications dotted line : main roads round symbol with small white circle inside : capital city black triangle : oppidum/hilltop fortification white triangle pointing up : refuge white triangle pointing down : rural/campaign defenses flag : headquarter of the Letes, Gentiles and Sarmatians helmet symbol : weapon production and storage capitale de cit

The Greek did build it but the Ptolemies did use a lot of egyptian sculpture in their buildings (for exemple in front of the Pharos were two colossal statues) and we find a lot of fragments of egyptian architecture into the sea. So I'm not that surprised of the reconstruction shown in the movie. But of course we don't know for sure

I read the book about two weeks ago and must fully concur with Ursus : the book is fun. Yet while it does provide an indepth look at the issue of biological and chimical warfare (taken in a very large meaning), it is not without some issues not raised by our previous reviewer. The use of myth made by Ms Mayor is a good idea because, as said by Ursus, even if it does not relate facts, the myth does give us a view on the general attitude of the period on a specific topic. But the question is for which period are these ideas or attitudes valid for, since there is no real discussion of the evolution of the ideas, and not much critical evaluation of the sources, the lack of text meaning Ms Mayor uses all that's availlable without looking much into what's the text history, what his goals are, etc. And this is there that lies the main default of Ms Mayor's book, for she lets mistake go through which should not have been passed over, like using the passage of Polyanus talking of "Caesar's elephant", known for long to be a mistake and a confusion between Julius Caesar and Claudius' campaigns : not having taken the time to criticise her sources, Ms Mayor followed blindly their texts and thus wrote mistakes in her book. Also the small amout of texts she could rely upon means she usually generalise her conclusion without consideration for changing technical, political or philosophical conditions. But it must be said despite this that she did probably produce a book which is close to the best book one could have written on the topic and that will be the main source on this subject for at least 25 to 50 years !

A recent article on the blog "Cog and Galley" takes a look at the ancient sea trade between India and western nations (western to India of course, thus it includes Mesopotamia and Egypt), the articles sums up the opinion of various scholars and gives the sources in order to provide further research. A good ressource to start digging in this complex issue. http://nestmitchtri.blogspot.com/2010/08/i...-with-west.html

I have not read this specific book but it does not surprise me much, I've seen the same kind of things in her "Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion bombs", she uses her sources without always checking them and does no quellenforshung. For exemple she does the common mistake of following Polyen when he speaks of an elephant being used by Cesar in his second invasion of the UK, where it's clearly a confusion with Claude's campaign.

ten days since I last came here, inbetween I've been (amongst others, and only speaking of roman places) to Simione (the place remembers me of Capua but less nice), Desenzano (nice roman villa and late palace), Padova (museum is intersting, and Giotto's chapel is splendid), Zuglio (nice mountain roman forum, a shame that the best pieces found there are in Cividale del Friule), Aquilea (roman vestiges not well put into evidence, and the forum split in two by the road is a shame, but the port was very nice), Trieste (roman theater worth seing, not much left of the forum and the basilica though), Venice (not roman but still nice and some fine roman scultpures in the Correr museum), Este (all there is to see is the museum, really), Ferrara (very fine collection of greek potery), Rimini (lots of roman bits everywhere in the city and strange museum opening hours, but the archeological museum is well thought and has nice pieces), Ravenna (of course it's all from the time of Justinian or the Goth before him, but still very fine). Tomorow will be Parma and either Placentia or Modena (I've had to drop both my main target, the roman town of Velleia, and my alternate target, the Etruscan city of Mazobotto) and sunday will be for Bologna, before going back to belgium and posting all the pictures (2500 to 3000 before cleaning) online for you guys

Looking at your review I know that it's a 20 years old book and thus the theories it suggests, which were indeed dominant at the time, are now dated. But the fact that it was one of the most modern book that you could find also shows that the current view of the english speaking world on these areas (especially nothern Gaul, Germany and Belgica) is missing about two or even three decades of research born, amongst other, from emergecy archeology. The discoveries made in such research, notably for the high speed train TGV/Eurostar/Thalys/ICE networks have allowed in depth archeological study of narrow but very long strips of land on hundreds of kilometers and discovered hundreds of settlements, necropolis, etc. which modified our view on thing. Studies on cities like Trier or K

They had the builders in for some light renovations and you know what happens then... ? well, yes of course but still either their are things the article does not tell (say some julio claudian money or structure) or the jump seems a bit too big, does it not ? especially if Pliny did speak of a bustling place...

i'm a bit surprised because if it's truly 200AD+ then it can't be the one Pliny does speak about since he died in 79...

Yes, the ancients did separate the two, as we can also see from Thucydides for exemple, who gives us the detailled diet of the Spartan on Sphacteria during the negociations, and they ate barley (if barley is the french "orge", no time to check right now...). Romans and Greeks had different tastes in that area, and even amongst greeks we find differences.

And if I'm not wrong Maize (which is, I believe, ma

I'm leaving Verona today for the Lago di Garda area and the roman remains of Desenzano and Sirmione, including the remains of "Catullus' villa" which some of you did point me toward. Yesterday was spent half in Verona and half in Mantova, birth city of Virgil where unfortunately few roman remains are to be found...

for those who do read French, a daily account of my travel is availlable at http://www.encrier.org/texte.php?id_hist=2100 . Still no solution for pictures, they may have to wait for my return home.

Ok, second night in Italy and first day of travel, one foot is already bleeding and both legs are aching, shirt full of salt from walking too much under the too hot sun (it was still 30

"Between Rome and Carthage: Southern Italy during the Second Punic War" seems exceptionaly interesting !

oh they are massive incentives, with a good deal of the EU research budget going into this realm (try managing a whole set of countries with at least 20 langages without some level of automatic translations) : that's how Systran and SGML/XML were born/made really public, thanks to EU money ! Without these I can assure you there would be much fewer linguists in university's departements, and linguistic would be far less advanced than it is now. My university did fail a fairly big project in that realm end of the 80's/start of the 90's. But what one has to bear in mind is that translation is truly the matching of two different linguistic fiels : grammar and semantics and both need specific attentions. The current efforts in ancient languages for treebanks (i.e. http://nlp.perseus.tufts.edu/syntax/treebank/ ) and automatic word analysis (ie. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W08/W08-2117.pdf ) are done because they are areas for which the grammar 1) is stable 2) is well studied by about 400 years of science. But often even with these dictionnaries, grammars, etc. the system are really efficient on corpus they've been trained for (like a specific author, or litterary genre, or texts on a specific topic). Typically a system who has to translate a text like "the artefact was a long, slim, piece of bone. I identified it as a fibula" (to use a recent topic of UNRV) could either relate to a human bone or a clothing device, depending on wheter we are reading medical description or archeological texts... Statistical analysis of the potential sementic value of words in the same area, along with semantic analysis of the structure of the document (like determined in TEI http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml or EpiDoc http://epidoc.sourceforge.net/ text format) might help the system to determine the lexical area in light of which the text must be translated, but even that isn't sure and requires human help. That's why Google, who was the first to have enough data for modern languages analysis, used the statistical approach and offered to translate any page, then asking for eventual human corrections from it's users : it does give Google a very good wy to improve it's statistics in a cheap way. According to the test we ran during my course on automatic language processing, Google performed about 60% above other tools, but was more efficient in short texts due to their lower morphological and grammatical analysis.

I did follow courses on this particular topic, going deep into the way those tools work and indeed a lot of tools can't be trusted because they often work on very large corpora and can't determine semantic values except when the corpora is limited : they are very good for exemple to translate medical knowledge bases. One exception is Google Translate who does not use grammars and lexica rules like everyone else but statistical analysis, which is one of the main reasons of some of their projects like google books.

the article was very nicely written on an unusual topic, proof than sometimes there are still some good investigatives journalists

it remembers me of the Ashkelon find of some years ago, where the baby's bodies where found in a sewer if I remember well, under a building that had also been called a brothel. Still, 97 bodies must have meant quite some ladies in residence... .

Well one little Lumix TZ7 with two cells and a 8Go memory card and about 5 hours in the place did the trick