The epigraphers and papyrologists and numismatists do the work everyone else relies on, and it's really quite difficult to train new ones. Preach.
Replies
I deeply admire and greatly fear all three sets. Especially numismatists. /How do they do the coin magic?/
jul 27, 2025, 3:35 am • 5 0 • view
Oh, so very much so. I took paleography and epigraphy coursework and still, honestly, I can only understand epigraphers and papyrologists as some kind of wizards. "Oh, this 13 character gap must be *these specific words*" 🙃 Even more so numismatics, where I didn't do a lot of coursework.
jul 27, 2025, 3:38 am • 8 0 • view
I once did a presentation for a Mystery Cults class on the sanctuary at Eleusis, and a particularly important article I read did so much with a tiny reference to Athens paying for bricks for the sanctuary. It was terrifying. (I guess archeologists kinda terrify me in general, in a good way.)
jul 27, 2025, 3:40 am • 6 0 • view
But numismatists are like another step beyond that. Especially once I learned how they could date specific coins by the different rates at which the top and bottom plates wore out when striking them. Dear god, it makes dendrochronology look straightforward and trivial. Numismatists! Terrifying!
jul 27, 2025, 3:41 am • 8 0 • view
Numismatics is dark wizardry.
jul 27, 2025, 11:37 pm • 1 0 • view
"You see, this figure is holding a thrysus which means this coin is recalling the stylistic motif of this other coin two decades earlier, suggesting the moneyer had a connection to... Me: Wait, you can *see* what is in his hand?
jul 27, 2025, 3:40 am • 11 0 • view
And also that. I cannot make out /anything/ on coins. Like, there's a... figure? I guess? And maybe some letters? (And now I'm remembering a whole article that was clearly one stage in an extended academic slapfight over the expression of the infant about to be sacrificed in Carthaginian art.)
jul 27, 2025, 3:43 am • 4 0 • view
I'm really into an idea I got out of Mary Caruthers's Book of Memory that "the literature" includes the community who used it. I don't know if that resonates but i imagine it takes a huge amount of reading, related to reconstructing that community.
jul 26, 2025, 7:07 pm • 2 0 • view