The International Etruscan Sigla Project

This paper makes a beginning of a joint project of the University of Milan and Florida State University, aiming to investigate the potential for communication in markings commonly referred to as \u201cEtruscan sigla\u201d. Hundreds of these markings have been discovered at numerous Etruscan archaeological sites, including cemeteries, habitation sites and sanctuaries, dating from around 700 BCE to the first century BCE. They normally consist of one or two letters, numbers or symbols, scratched (\u201cgraffiti\u201d), incised, painted or stamped on objects of many different types made of clay, metal, bone, ivory and stone. Sometimes two different kinds of sigla will be found together or a siglum may occur in combination with a text. Little understood but frequently regarded as nonverbal, these markings are often relegated to the background in Etruscan studies in favor of letters that form words and can therefore be studied from a linguistic perspective. The presenters, having worked independently on Etruscan sigla, have now begun a joint undertaking to integrate their past different experiences. The International Etruscan Sigla Project, gathering a team from the US and Italy, will create a semantic network that enables to integrate different data to recognize and group similar items to verify the existence of recurrent associations among similar sigla, between sigla and their location on the artifact and between sigla and their archaeological contexts. The international team will develop terminology, methodology and software in multiple languages for the new systematic tool. This paper will present some of the preliminary results of the collaboration and will suggest directions for future research

A collaborative knowledge management system for analyzing non-verbal markings in the ancient mediterranean world

This paper presents the results of an international archaeological project aiming to the study of non-verbal markings, named sigla, found on objects discovered in different excavation sites distributed in the Mediterranean area. The project is based on the involvement of an interdisciplinary team of experts from American and Italian universities and its aim is to develop a collaborative knowledge management system for formulating new hypotheses about the meanings, functions and roles of sigla stored in distributed archives. The paper analyzes knowledge integration problems and describes the design the environment supporting collaborative activities among archaeologists. For analysis purposes, the system integrates multimedia information retrieval strategies for recovering sigla according to certain conditions of similarity and taking into account other factors such as date, provenance and context. The conditions of similarity are based on possible recurrent patterns of sigla, connections and their layout merging from archaeologists\u2019 descriptions or drawings of sigla

Transformation through a Mirror: Moses in 2 Cor. 3.18

The odd juxtaposition of beholding God in a mirror and transformation in 2 Cor. 3.18 has incited many commentators to grasp for some parallel from Greek magic (R. Reitzenstein), catoptromantic ritual (H. Achelis), Dionysian mysteries (C. Wagner), Wisdom traditions (M. Thrall), Jewish hydromancy (J. Scott), ‘vision mysticism’ (A. DeConick), or Greco-Roman mythology (A. Weissenrieder). All of these proposals, it is contended, fail to note the key importance of Moses in 2 Cor. 3. Ancient Jewish exegetical traditions based on Num. 12.6-8 portray Moses seeing God through a mirror on Mt Sinai (Lev. Rabb. 1.14; Philo, Leg. All. 3.99-101). Although most commentators note an allusion to Moses in another famous Pauline reference to a mirror (1 Cor. 13.12), the allusion to the Mosaic mirror in 2 Cor. 3.18 has not been explored. Using the Mosaic mirror traditions, this article argues that Paul knew and used Mosaic mirror vision as the model for Christian catoptric seeing in 2 Cor. 3.18. The Mosaic model indicates that the Christian vision through a mirror was thought of as both clear and involving a Mosaic-like metamorphosis into glory (Exod. 34.29-35)