Reading Ancient Schoolroom

The Reading Ancient Schoolroom welcomed more than 100 participants to campus on 27th and 28th January. Groups from Farnborough Hill School, Leweston School, St Gabriels School, and Langley Academy, as well as numerous families and individuals, learned how to act like Roman children. Participants also read Homer from papyrus scrolls, wrote with styluses on wax-coated tablets, learned how to do mathematical calculations on an abacus and Roman counting board, wrote with reed pens and ink on ostraca, studied Latin from a textbook used by ancient Greek speakers to learn Latin, learned the Greek alphabet the way a Roman would have learned it, and recited poetry from memory. There were also opportunities to handle objects in the Ure Museum.

Participants ranged in age from 4 to 18, and all reported having a great time. Volunteers, who included numerous first-year undergraduates as well as graduate students and staff, also had terrific fun; this is good as no-one is paid for work on the schoolroom. So we are EXTREMELY grateful to all our hard-working volunteers!

More detail on the event, and more photographs, can be seen at http://readingancientschoolroom.com/2016-schoolroom/Writing 15

Reading Ancient Schoolroom returns on 27th and 28th January

Our wildly popular ‘Experiencing Ancient Education’ event, run last year as part of the Being Human festival, returns this year as a stand-alone event on 27th and 28th January. Staff and students are busy trimming pens and studying poetry in preparation for welcoming several hundred local and not-so-local participants to this historically accurate re-enactment of an ancient classroom. Participants will immerse themselves in antiquity, not only dressing as Romans and using papyri, wax tablets, and ostraca to write on, but also acting like Roman children and doing the type of exercises that they would have done. There are still a few places; if you would like to come, contact E.Dickey@reading.ac.uk.

For more information, see www.readingancientschoolroom.com.

 

Schoolroom in action 3

Research Seminars – Spring Term 2016

We are delighted to invite you to the following research seminars during Spring Term 2016:

Jan 13 Sam Mirelman (ISAW, NY), ‘Mesopotamian Music Theory and Notation Texts’ – NB, this starts at 5pm

Jan 20 Youssri Abdelwahed (Minia), ‘The Illumination of Lamps for Athena/Neith in Sais/Esna in Graeco-Roman Egypt’

Jan 27 Bill Beck (Reading, Penn), ‘Lost in the Middle: Discourse Time and Story Time in the Iliad

Feb 3 Mick Stringer (Reading), ‘Impensae, operae and the pastio uillatica. Investment appraisal in the Roman agricultural treatises’

Feb 10 Classics Meets CeLM

Feb 24 Hella Eckardt (Reading), ‘Writing in practice: metal inkwells, literacy and identities in the Roman world’

Mar 2 Emmanuela Bakkola (Warwick), ‘Where are the Erinyes in Aeschylus’ Oresteia?’

Mar 9 Oriol Olesti (Barcelona), ‘The Land Surveyors experiences in Roman and Byzantine Hispania: new documentation’

Mar 16 Lynette Mitchell (Exeter), ‘Disremembering Cyrus and Tomyris’

All seminars, unless otherwise stated, will be held at 4pm in HumSS G25 on Reading’s Whiteknights Campus.

All Welcome!