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Commemorating the decipherment of Linear B and the discovery of Mycenaean Greek.
Get PDFIncludes image: 'St Cecilia', 1938.AbstractLinear B is the writing system used by the Mycenaean Greeks dur ing the Late Bronze Age, roughly between 1450 - 1200 BCE. Clay tablets inscribed in the Linear B script had been unearthed at the excavations of Knossos, Crete, in the early 1900s and subsequently at Pylos and Mycenae on the mainland of Greece,1 but they had remained largely unreadable for decades, until a British architect by the name of Michael Ventris, who had always had a keen interest in languages, announced on a BBC radio pro gramme, that was aired on 1st July 1952, that he had deciphered Linear B and that it represented the earliest surviving form of the Greek language.2 This was a major breakthrough, complementing the archaeological inves tigations of the time by giving scholars access to the textual information recorded in the Linear B tablets about the socio-political, economic and religious facets of life in the Mycenaean world. This paper commemorates the 60th anniversary of this important achievement in two ways: first, it outlines the unique contributions of the four main pioneers involved in the decipherment (Michael Ventris, Alice E. Kober, Emmett L. Bennett, Jr. and John Chadwick); second, it focuses on a small section of Linear B tablet PY Ep 704 in order to illustrate the detailed information contained in these texts and to consider the diachronic development of the Greek language by pointing to several key similarities and differences between Mycenaean and Modern Greek
How Minoan was Akrotiri? : the architectural evidence
No full textTypescript (photocopy)Thesis (MA) -- University of Melbourne, Faculty of Arts, 1997Includes bibliographical references (leaves 118-131
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The ra-wa-ke-ta, ministerial authority and Mycenaean cultural identity
Get PDFtextThe ra-wa-ke-ta is a key authority figure in Mycenaean society. The traditional
interpretation of this official as the military commander of the state was based primarily
on the etymology of his title (whose verbal element is often taken as ag ‘lead’) and on
early readings of the Homeric l os as a military group. The ra-wa-ke-ta was therefore
conveniently interpreted as the ‘military leader.’ However, the precise nature of the
Mycenaean *ra-wo (*l wos) has always been problematic, and the contexts in which the
ra-wa-ke-ta appears in the Linear B tablets suggest a wider role.
This official is often mentioned in non-palatial contexts and with groups and
individuals of relatively moderate to low status, who are occasionally designated by
toponymics or other terms highlighting their ‘otherness.’ Such details offer insights into
the cultural make-up of Mycenaean society and the construction of Mycenaean identity.
Drawing on anthropological research related to the formation of group identities, it is
proposed that the ra-wa-ke-ta served as the representative of a subordinate group, made
up of locals and non-locals, identified as the *ra-wo.
The textual, archaeological and ethnographic evidence examined in this study
supports the view that the ra-wa-ke-ta could have served as a ‘liaison’ between the
privileged (palatial élite and local landowners) and the less privileged ‘others’ in the
community. The etymology of *ra-wo provides another clue: an Indo-European base root
*leh2- is suggested by the Hittite lah (h )uwai-, lah (h )u- meaning both ‘to pour’ and ‘to
flow.’ The numerous cross-cultural images, or metaphors, in which the notion of
‘flowing’ is used to describe outsiders or newcomers to a region (e.g., English ‘flood’ or
‘tide’ of immigrants) suggest that a similar original meaning, and not the specifically
militaristic one, may lie at the heart of the Mycenaean *ra-wo. Still, the connection
between military service and marginalized groups is well attested: warfare is commonly
used by states to integrate their subject populations via a common struggle for defence
which reinforces overall group unity (Brumfiel and Fox 1994). It is argued that military
service was one of several mechanisms, agricultural labour being another, through which
the ra-wa-ke-ta mediated the integration of ‘outsiders’ into Mycenaean society.Classic
ILSE SCHOEP: The Administration of Neopalatial Crete. A Critical Assessment of theLinear A Tablets and their Role in the Administrative Process. Minos SupplementaryVolume no. 17. Salamanca 2002, pp. 230.
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Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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