Events archive 2008

See also: 2007 event archive

Public lecture

The Classics & Archaeology public lectures showcase research of excellence undertaken by scholars in classics and archaeology as well as visiting scholars from around the world. These lectures are free and open to the public.

The annual H. W. Allen Memorial Lecture:
Erotes on the Euphrates: redecorating the wall of a Hellenistic house in North Syria

Heather Jackson
ARC Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre for Classics and Archaeology, University of Melbourne

Recently-discovered fragments of a stucco figured frieze from the wall of a house at Jebel Khalid, in North Syria, stimulated this attempt to reconstruct the appearance of the original wall, which dates from the Hellenistic period and was contemporary with the famous tomb paintings of Macedonian sites and the highly decorated walls in rich houses on Delos. Examples of Hellenistic wall decoration from the Near East are very rare and this figured frieze is unique. The discovery raises questions about the prosperity of the inhabitants of the house, their cultural heritage, their use of the Greek tetrachrome palette and adherence to a Greek mythical motif.

Since 1995, Dr. Heather M. Jackson has been Field Director of an excavation of a whole insula of houses at Jebel Khalid on the Euphrates in North Syria and Co-Director, with Professor Graeme Clarke of ANU, Canberra, of the on-going Jebel Khalid campaigns. She is co-author of Greek Vases in the University of Melbourne (1999), the National Gallery of Victoria's Handbook of Antiquities (2003), and author of Jebel Khalid on the Euphrates, Volume Two: the Terracotta Figurines (2006).

Date: Wednesday, 9 April 2008
Time: 8:15pm
Location: Kaye Scott Room, Ormond College, University of Melbourne

Seminars

Free seminar: Beginners' Classical Syriac
Monday 28th January through Thursday 21st February 2008

The Centre for Classics & Archaeology at the University of Melbourne invites you to participate in this unique opportunity to study, FREE of charge, the richness and beauty of original texts in their original language.

Classical Syriac is both an ancient and living language. It is one of the main and enduring dialects of Aramaic, which spans 3000 years of history and literature, was the language of Jesus, and includes foundational texts for both Judaism and Christianity.

This 4-week seminar aims to equip participants with the grammar, syntax, and lexicography necessary to read Classical Syriac. The seminar will focus on reading the Early Syriac versions of the Gospels, especially, the Peshitta, which is still in use today and is one of Syriac’s earliest, most poetic, and most significant texts.

Further information

Ancient World seminars

27th May
Ancient World Seminar
The Big Nowhere: A mistress of animals in the Throne Room in Knossos?

20th May
Ancient World Seminar
Fire Next Time: The plan of Zeus in Euripides’ Helen

13th May
Ancient World Seminar
The Case of the Missing Sense of Humour: The historian Livy

6th May
Ancient World Seminar
The Timaeus: Plato's prose hymn to the cosmos

29th April
Ancient World Seminar
‘Liposkenia’: Staging comic evasions

22nd April
Ancient World Seminar
Industry in Classical Athens: A microeconomic approach

15th April
Ancient World Seminar
Who Named Me?’: Identity and status in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus

8th April
Ancient World Seminar
The Pella Bronze Age Temple Precinct: A conspectus of recent work (1997-2007)

1st April
Ancient World Seminar
Opium for the Masses: Psychoactive consumption in the Bronze Age East Mediterranean