Henry P. Colburn

If I were to give an award for the weirdest job ad, there would be a new contender as of today.  I won’t name names, but I will quote the ad itself, which is for an ‘Assistant Professor with specialization in Mediterranean Identity and Race in Antiquity,’ and it will be obvious that the position is at a Canadian university:

The Ideal candidate will be someone, who can design and teach courses such as “Ancient Colonization and Diasporas,” “Warfare in the Ancient world” and “Slavery in the ancient Mediterranean,” which emphasize the strategies all cultures involved developed for mutual interaction, connection and inclusion.  The successful candidate – Ideally a qualified scholar from an equity-seeking group – will be expected to initiate a high-quality research program on Greco-Roman interaction with the diverse indigenous populations of the Mediterranean, exploring parallels with the Canadian indigenous experience.  This research, which is competitive for funding through Canada’s tri-council awards, will have independent facets, but also entail collaboration with colleagues in another field or fields, such as Art History, Gender Studies Geography, History, Languages Literatures and Cultures, Linguistics, Religious Studies and Sociology.  By involving students, the research will further enhance the Department’s strong emphasis on experiential learning.

This ad is for a unicorn. If they fill this position with someone who actually meets all of these qualifications, I’ll eat my hat. Of course, they may already know of someone who meets these qualifications, but this is how rumors get started…

Here is a discount flyer (30% off when you order direct for my book Archaeology of Empire in Achaemenid Egypt, which will be available in November. Buy it today! (Well, buy it in November.)

I am sorry to say that I have just submitted my first job application of the 2019-20 season. It was a damnably depressing thing to do, even if the job itself is a good one. I don’t have any reason to be optimistic, and that’s because I’ve come to learn that hiring decisions are functionally random. I don’t mean to say that the name of the successful candidate is simply pulled out of a hat, but rather that it is impossible to predict or gauge the selection criteria. ‘Merit’ is ill-defined and subjective, and sometimes, but not always, it loses out to cronyism and/or good looks. I’ve seen many seemingly under-qualified candidates get picked over me for jobs, and as a result the older I get the less I understand the market. The only comfort I’ve received is that I now know that if my wife gets a job before I do I’m going to narrow my search to focus on her new employer’s location. It’s more important for us to be together than to try to game the system somehow for an ideal position — after all, you can’t game a system that is functionally random!

I have just received the proofs for my essay “Ancient Iranian Art: From Grand Narratives to Local Perspectives,” which will be published in Testing the Canon of Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology, edited by Amy Gansell and Ann Shafer (Oxford University Press), sometime this winter. I’m even getting a couple of color images for my essay, which is very exciting.

I have a great fondness for this essay because it was the first thing I wrote that made me feel explicitly like a scholar of ancient Iran, and not just a peripheral classicist (though I still feel like a peripheral classicist). In many respects it marked my transition from working on Egypt to working on Iran, though of course I continue to produce scholarship on Achaemenid Egypt (I agreed to another one yesterday). This essay also helped me to get my current position at the Met, for which I am enormously grateful, and it informs the work I do every day on the planning for the re-installation of the Ancient Near Eastern galleries.

So buy the book! I’ll tell you how when it’s published.

Novae Famae, the vitriolic, un-moderated successor to Famae Volent, the classics job message board, has gone the way of the dodo. In its place has risen, phoenix-like, Novae Famae 2019-20, which, from the comments posted on its landing page, seems to aim to restore some order, with the restoration of moderators and the re-establishment of rules addressing slander, hate speech and naming names. Most significantly, NF19 (my own coinage!) insists on user IDs for commentators. If I understand correctly these are still functionally anonymous, but they will permit such things as responding to specific posters or even banning them if necessary.

In my view the death of Novae Famae is a good thing; it will not be missed. However, I learned one very important thing from it: classicists are not in the vanguard of humanistic studies the way they once were. Rather, it seems that a significant subset of them are trying desperately to maintain a fossilized academic field, on the premise that the Greeks and Romans are somehow more special than any other ancient (or modern) peoples, which is very foolish. I was distressed to find out how vocal, and oftentimes bigoted, this subset is. It has furthered the alienation I feel from the classics, a topic which I have studied for more than half my life (and I say this as a 36-year-old).

I don’t have any moralizing notes on which to end, save for my usual refrain that I think classics is doomed, and rightly so.

Ahdaf Soueif has published a brief discussion of the reasons for her recent resignation from the board of trustees of the British Museum. I think she makes some very important points about the role of encyclopedic museums in modern society, and I highly recommend reading her piece.

Last night I received the sad news that Professor Matthew Trundle of the University of Auckland died a few days ago from leukemia. I first encountered his scholarship on Greek mercenaries when I was writing my ANS Summer Seminar paper. One of the topics I dealt with was whether or not imitation Athenian tetradrachms were struck in order to pay Greek mercenaries, which is the standard. In his handy and concise Greek Mercenaries, Matt makes a key point, namely that mercenaries were generally in no position to make demands of their paymasters, and were thus grateful to receive payment in any form. (Incidentally, this question has been given a definitive treatment by Peter van Alfen in the Revue belge de numismatique 2011.)

Armed with this crucial tidbit I made my argument about the role of coinage in the political economy of Late Period Egypt, and in the fall of 2011 I presented it at my first specialized international conference, which took place at Macquarie University. And that’s when I met Matthew in person.  He was very friendly and supportive, and we had some interesting conversations about coinage and social history in the ancient world.

Several years later I received an email advertising a talk he was giving at the Classical Studies department at Michigan. When I turned up for the talk he immediately greeted me warmly, as if it had only been a few weeks since the Macquarie conference, not years. Over the few weeks that he spent in Ann Arbor (I don’t even remember why he was there) we went to the bar several times (where he picked up many tabs), and we had wonderful wide-ranging discussions, and not only on academic topics. He really liked American football, for example. And I wasn’t the only one — he befriended several other Michigan students during his brief stay there. He was good at making people feel welcome, even though he was far from home.

I can’t claim to have known him especially well. But I enjoyed his company and his intellect a great deal, and I very much appreciated the way he treated me and my fellow grad students like colleagues. I am very sad that I won’t run into him again at another conference or on another university campus. The field has lost one of the people who helped to make it human, and not solely academic.

I highly recommend Nathanael Andrade’s recent piece in Eidolon entitled “Voices In The Margins: Classics’ Suppression of Ancient Roman Writers of Color.” Although I am broadly sympathetic to its goals and standpoint I am not a frequent reader of Eidolon (I don’t have time to read anything that isn’t scholarship or science fiction), but Andrade’s essay, which I encountered quite by accident, eloquently expresses concerns that I share, using the racial identity of Lucian as his case study.

Frankly I have always imagined Lucian as a white guy, because, well, he quacks like a duck, so to speak. Andrade effectively demonstrates a few things. First, historically Lucian has been regarded not as ‘white’ but as ‘Oriental.’ Second, my unconscious perception of Lucian as white has nothing to do with what I know of his upbringing or what I read in his work, and everything to do with the nature of Classics as a discipline. I only ever read Lucian in the company of white people, and since the topic of race was never raised in any of my classes or in Lucian’s own work I simply defaulted to an image of whiteness.

I heartily agree with Andrade’s call to normalize diversity in Classics. I’m not really sure how to do it, but I think that recognizing my own unconscious assumptions about race is a good place to start.

My book is now on the Edinburgh University Press website! Here’s the cover:

It’s very exciting, but it will be even more exciting once I’ve checked the proofs and compiled the index.

Having a crappy day? I have just the thing: J. M. Rogers’ review of Surveyors of Persian Art: A Documentary Biography of Arthur Upham Pope and Phyllis Ackerman, edited by Jay Gluck, Noël Silver and Sumi Hiramoto Gluck (Ashiya: SoPA, 1996). As Rogers puts it:

“What did they do to deserve this volume, which at 680 pages is a severe test of one’s patience? Despite the inordinate length and the obtrusive egos of their self-obsessed informants, the repetitiveness, and the leaden, and often irrelevant interpolations by Jay Gluck they manage to present an unrelievedly disagreeable picture.”

He goes on to say:

“The scale on which Pope dealt — he claimed in 1932 (p. 167) to have purchased, i.e. sold, more than three quarters of a million dollars’ worth — suggests, however, that ‘Purveyors of Persian Art’ would also have been an apposite title for this volume.”

And:

“Though Phyllis Ackerman’s papers are for the moment inaccessible in Shiraz she emerges as more awful than Pope. The marriage, which she appears to have engineered, may have been less fulfilling than she hoped, which may explain her almost comical obsession with sexual symbolism in middle age.”

Finally:

“With friends like this enemies are superfluous, and Jay Gluck’s admission (p. 573) that everyone connected with the couple had a love-hate relationship with them almost suggests that it is unconscious revenge. As a work of reference, moreover, the volume suffers severely from an absence of explanatory notes and relevant bibliography. Few will need to peruse it, but for the present reviewer it has been a lowering experience.”

It brings a smile to my face every time I read it. The review is published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Third Series 7 (1997), 455-8. Enjoy!