José Luis García Ramón, Professor of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics at the Universität zu Köln, visited PASP and UT Classics for two weeks October 29-November 12.

Professor García Ramón offered four seminar sessions in Tom Palaima’s Mycenaean seminar on the following topics:

Mycenaean onomastics: Personal names (and oxen names).

• Recognition, interpretation.
• Greek personal names: Word formation.
• Greek personal names: Meaning, naming motives.
• Personal names and Mycenaean society.
• Personal names and Greek Poetry
• Oxen names.

Mycenaean onomastics: Religious names

• Recognition, interpretation.
• Formal aspects.
• Mycenaean religious names attested in 1st millenium.
• Mycenaean religious names not attested in 1st millenium.

Mycenaean onomastics: Geographical names

• Recognition, interpretation.
• Mycenaean place names and 1st millenium place names.
• Greek place names: word formation.
• Greek place names: meaning, naming motives.
• Non-Greek geographical names: word formation.
• Place names and Greek prehistory.

Mycenaean Onomastics: the new Theban Texts.

He also offered a departmental colloquium entitled:

“The Mycenaean Bechtel: New Developments in Early Greek Onomastics.”

José Luis offered an extra evening seminar on Greek dialects, and joined Prof. Palaima in offering a final special two-hour seminar on Interpretations of the Thebes Tablets.

José Luis also met at length with:

(1) dissertators Dimitri Nakassis (Pylian Prosopography and Agency Theory) and Stephie Nikoloudis (the Mycenaean ra-wa-ke-ta) to discuss problems relating to their research work;
(2) discuss with Dimitri Nakassis and Joanne Gulizio their article in progress on Greek and non-Greek deities;
(3) Prof. Paula Perlman to discuss Cretan historical dialect issues and inscriptions;
(4) Profs. Carole Justus and Sara Kimball, and Prof. Emeritus Winfred Lehmann to discuss Hittite and Indo-European matters; and he attended Prof. Bridget Drinka’s talk at the UT Linguistics Circle.

Despite such a rigorous academic schedule, José Luis managed to:

(1) visit San Antonio;
(2) examine items in the forthcoming Harry Ransom center Exhibition on “Technologies of Writing”;
(3) attend a UT women’s basketball game (where he learned the Hook ‘Em Horns sign that he cannot use in his native country unless he wants to start a fight);
(4) sit with Clifford Antone and blues piano legend Pinetop Perkins listening to Alvin Crow and his band and club owner James White perform hard core country music at the Broken Spoke;
(5) hear Ruthie Foster, Sara Brown, Carolyn Wonderland and Cindy Cashdollar perform women’s blues at Antone’s;
(6) catch another evening of Austin music at the Continental Club.

José Luis’s stay at Adams House B&B in Hyde Park placed him in a warm and friendly and attentive atmosphere.

We thank Richard Lariviere, dean of Liberal Arts, for supporting our distinguished visiting scholar program. Special thanks to Leslie Crooks in the dean’s office, Classics department administrative associate Stephanie Scott, Kurt Heinzelman and Elizabeth Garver of the Harry Ransom Center, Stephie Nikoloudis of PASP, associate athletics director Chris Plonsky, and Classics chairperson Cynthia Shelmerdine.

Thanks also to Christina Skelton for taking photos.

Jörg Weilhartner visited PASP and UT Classics from October 25th to November 22nd and worked on the Mycenaean material. He holds a research fellowship at the University of Salzburg/Department of Classical and Aegean Archaeology, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).

Jörg reports:

My research at PASP focused on my work concerning a structural analysis of the Linear B logograms and abbreviations. This work benefited greatly from the rich inventory of the library housed at PASP including publications (including offprints from many decades back) which are not easy to access elsewhere and an archive of photos in the scale 1:1 of all Linear B tablets. Additional support was provided by the kind courtesy of Tom Palaima and his readiness to furnish me with a lot of files that are of invaluable help for further research. Next to my proper research I took the unique advantage of reading the correspondence of Alice E. Kober and Emmett L. Bennett that gives insight into the crucial state immediately before the decipherment on a very personal and touching level.

In addition, I participated in the teaching of the Mycenaean seminar and offered two seminar sessions on Mycenaean religion and on the logograms and abbreviations of the Linear B script. This afforded an opportunity to share and discuss ideas on Mycenaean topics with Tom and his graduate students. I also offered a general talk to the classics department and related faculty on Arthur Evans’ contribution to the understanding of Linear B and I attended Prof. Thür’s talk about Law in the New Hypereides Fragment.

During my stay I met at length with Tom Palaima and Cynthia Shelmerdine to discuss my work and many other Mycenaean topics for which I am very grateful. I also met with Mary Jane Cuyler to discuss possible patterns within the abbreviations.

The general life , and weather, in Austin was wonderful. Everyone was welcoming, and I have good memories of American Halloween, the Austin parks and botanical gardens, and dinners with faculty and students.

I am much obliged to Tom Palaima and his students and the staff of the Classics Department at UT Austin for providing a pleasant stay and an unforgettable experience.

In September Jerry Eisenberg, editor of Minerva, visited and worked with the unpublished material on the Phaistos Disk in the Bennett archives. Here is Dr. Eisenberg’s report:

It was a great pleasure to have the opportunity of working with the archives of Emmett L. Bennett, Jr., housed at your Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory, during my visit this past week. They were invaluable for my work on the Phaistos Disk – a good deal of the material that I unearthed will be presented in a paper that I will be giving at the International Conference on the Phaistos Disk that I will be chairing in London on October 31-November 1 at the Society of Antiquaries.

I was so pleased to find so many documents on the disk in Bennett’s files, including some surprising discoveries in the unpublished manuscripts that were sent to Dr. Bennett over the years. A good number were contributions from scholars that were not represented in my already extensive files.

Your own participation in the forthcoming Conference on the Phaistos Disk will obviously be a great asset and I am certain that your paper on some of the intriguing decipherments of the disk from the unpublished manuscripts in the Bennett archives will prove to be of considerable importance to the scholars who attend.

I was overwhelmed by the extent of the holdings that you have brought to the university, especially the archives of Dr. Bennett and those of Alice Kobler. Your incredible enthusiasm for your work and in the progress of your students in their studies speaks for itself. Needless to say, I now know the meaning of the much-touted Texas hospitality and hope to have the pleasure of doing further research at the Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory in the near future.

Sincerely,

Jerome M. Eisenberg, Ph.D.
Editor-in-Chief, Minerva, The International Review of Ancient Art & Archaeology,
and
Chairman, The International Conference on the Phaistos Disk
New York, New York 10022

Vassilis Petrakis visited PASP and UT Classics from March 26th to April 30th and worked on the Mycenaean material for his current projects on Linear B monograms, analysis of references to kingship ideology and preparation of the Linear A ‘archive’ of Kato Zakros for final publication. Dr Petrakis was also actively engaged in the Linear B seminar directed by Professor Tom Palaima.

Vassilis reports:

My visit to the Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory has been a most exciting opportunity to visit what is arguably the current ‘cosmological center’ of Linear B studies.

The excellent facilities, the abundance of research resources (including the proximity of the Classics and PCL library collections) and, most importantly, Tom Palaima’s keen interest and natural hospitality made my 5-week stay a most memorable time and one of my most intense periods of research in the field of Aegean writing systems.

My project on the Linear B monograms, which is planned to result in a monograph under the working title Monogrammata Mycenaea, benefited directly from my access (a) to the archives of Emmett Bennett Jr, particularly those few unpublished notes for articles that were never fully developed, and (b) from the examination of the excellent 1:1 photographs of tablets from Pylos, Knossos and Mycenae. The latter particularly reduced my need to have autopsies of the documents down to a few problematic cases. I was also able to test a few ideas from this forthcoming word on the Linear B seminar.

During my stay here, I was able to pursue my interest in Mycenaean kingship through discussions and presentations. It is always a rare opportunity and honor to be able to discuss this specific topic in the UT Classics Department, which hosted my stay.

I participated in the Spring Colloquium of the Classics Department with a talk on ‘Changing Perspectives on Late Bronze Age Aegean kingship: Anthropology, Mycenology and Aegean Archaeology‘ (April 8th, 2011), which served as a basis for testing the impact of some new ideas and a great opportunity to get precious feedback. Extended sessions with Tom Palaima on the ‘Minoan’ components of what we have come to consider as the ‘Mycenaean’ kingship ideology were particularly stimulating for me.

Although this was not planned from the outset, I was also able to use PASP’s facilities to lay down some basic work towards the final publication of the Linear A ‘archive’ from the Minoan palace of Kato Zakros. This project, which will be ascribed within my participation in the Zakros study seasons directed by Lefteris Platon (University of Athens), will be supported by the Institute of Classical Studies (University of London) through the Michael Ventris Memorial Award for Mycenaean Studies (2011-2012).

My participation in the Linear B seminar directed by Tom Palaima lasted over 5 sessions (each for the relevant weeks of my stay here). In these, I was able to present topics on religion, economy/ trade and warfare and discuss extensively with students.

During my first session (March 28th), issues of craft-specialization, socio-economic structure and Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age were addressed, focusing on the survival (or non-survival) of the Linear B technical and political terminology into the 1st millennium BC alphabetic testimonia.

For the next two sessions (April 4th and 11th), I made a short presentation on the evidence for theonyms in the Linear B records, discussing their use, distribution and later Greek survivals. Specific tablets were discussed in order to present a method of working with Mycenaean texts through photographic corpora, transcriptions and lexica. We also focused on the semantic nuances of some specific terms, such as po-ti-ni-ja.

The fourth session (April 18th) was devoted to a short presentation on ancient trade and some theoretical approaches to it, leading into a discussion of the infamous ‘gap’ in direct references to ‘trade’ in the Linear B records. Various topics, including evidence for loanwords and the use of ‘foreign’ ethnic adjectives were brought up a propos student reports read at the seminar.

My last session (April 25th) with the Linear B seminar included a presentation of Mycenaean warfare. We discussed some iconographic, archaeological (including osteoarchaeological) evidence for war and violence, before focusing on certain patterns in the texts which imply the military concerns of the Linear B administrations. We commented somewhat more extensively the Pylos ‘o-ka tablets’ and the records of chariot parts.

In all the above cases and with the constant help of Tom Palaima, many topics were covered so as to help students towards their final papers. The students themselves had a wide range of interests, including anthropology, field archaeology, Homer, Semitic studies and Indo-European languages. My participation in the Linear B seminar has been an unforgettable experience, which is even more valued since the opportunities to actually teach Linear B become fewer and fewer world-wide.

Over lunch, dinner and between other activities, I was especially pleased to be able to talk with colleagues about their current and future research. I discussed the social significance of drinking in early Greece with Adam Rabinowitz and various topics with Jamie Aprile, Stephen White and Nicolle Hirschfeld.

It was a particular pleasure to be able to talk extensively with Aren Wilson-Wright and Will Bibee on Semitic loanwords and possibilities (or probabilities) of ex Oriente transfer of ideology and practice into the Aegean.

Outside of PASP, I managed to ‘catch’ glimpses of really nice Austin weather (usually comfortably warm and only occasionally humid) and, especially, to attend some truly wonderful musical experiences, like hearing Jimmy LaFave at Threadgill’s south of the river and the LP’s playing at Ten Thousand Villages on SoCo.

These were always accompanied with exquisite Texan flavors. I will be sorry to miss some morning coffee rituals at Quack’s Cafe, which typically heralded the beginning of a productive day. Two visits to Polvos on South First Street helped me understand what a Tex-Mex taverna is like.

None of the above would have been conceivable without Tom Palaima’s amazing hospitality, which in a miraculous way made you only do things you already wanted to do. Tom created an ideal environment for me to work and this is a true luxury, and one that is becoming hard to find.

Although this may sound like one of those typical ‘acknowledgement’ comments, I do, however, feel obliged to note that his role in the promotion of Mycenaean studies is undeniably seminal, as it was evident to this visitor that the success of PASP has been achieved through the personal commitment and skill of its director. This reflects on the University’s academic reputation enormously and is more than anything else responsible for the excellent impression UT Austin made on me.

I also want to thank students and staff who helped make my stay so rewarding: Dygo Tosa and Kelly McClinton in PASP, Beth Chichester, who handled computer and audiovisual matters, Gina Giovanonne and Joe Sosa in the Classics Library, Maree Norfleet Williams in the Classics Department administrative offices, and the chair of the department Stephen White.

I do carry with me back in Greece the memory of a special experience and will always feel privileged to have been invited here.

Finally a special thank to Julie Strong and her husband Stuart who made my living in Austin so pleasant.