M. Willis Monroe

Ooh which one, we got a Jøtul installed last winter it's been a game changer. We love the local NB hardwood sawdust bricks, so cheap and we're burning a byproduct of a local industry (plus no bugs in the house!).

INDEFATIGABLE

An image from the end of the article showing the team involved.

I want to highlight the team members: Dr. Kelly is a world expert on the Proto-Elamite world, archaeology and language. Dr. Born is a wizard with Python and all things linguistic. Dr. Sarkar understands the interaction of language and data and an insatiable curiosity for the ancient world.

We've derived some novel insight on Proto-Elamite itself (hence the article) but also generated new methods in the field of computational-linguistics. There's a real give and take relationship here that has been fostered over many years of collaboration.

In this article we summarize some of the work we've done (along with others) over the last five years towards understanding Proto-Elamite. This is highly interdisciplinary work involving specialists in Proto-Elamite, archaeology, the cuneiform world, and importantly computational-linguistics.

A screenshot of the front page of an article on Proto-Elamite

Breaking news for you Proto-Elamite fans: our team just had a new article come out in the journal Near Eastern Archaeology (88.4) on our recent progress towards deciphering "one of the few remaining undeciphered scripts from the ancient world".

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Would 100% be sharing my Oracc Wrapped.

As in, in our discussion and working out alternate arrangements indicated to her that renewed effort would pay off, and it did!

Yeah, I've wondered about this. Anecdotally, I had a student bomb a test earlier this semester. For the next one I had her take it in a separate room supervised by the TA w/ extra time (we discussed this strategy together), and she did much better. Maybe it's just the attention that matters?

A white board with lines drawn across it. Each of the lines represents a division of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Students drew the lines and were asked to divide the epic into three parts.

I asked my students in my Gilgamesh class to divide the epic into three parts on their summary test. Afterwards, in class we all drew them on the board. We talked about how the second division has more salience than the first (i.e. more people agreed on where the second division should go).

They could still tag and take notes in the web interface I think. But they wouldn't be able to highlight with the built-in pdf reader.

We re-watched after finishing Andor, and I'd agree. It didn't hold up, but I'm glad it existed.

Fascinating use of "insain" here, must be meaning 4 here: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/insane

Rogue Scientist Has Own Scientific Method

Rogue Scientist Has Own Scientific Method https://theonion.com/rogue-scientist-has-own-scientific-method-1819568501/

This is a fun exercise to do with the students, it's mostly student led, I inject a little guiding oversight here and there. But at the end I point out that given a couple hours in the library they could assemble this data themselves and make a concrete historical point about ancient Egypt!

It is true the tombs get a bit larger over the course of the New Kingdom, and kings have larger tombs than queens and princes. It's also clear that there's a typological progressions between bent-axis (earlier) and straight-axis (later) tombs.

A scatter plot (x-y graph) showing individual tombs in the valley of the kings. The x-axis is years BCE, the y-axis is the number of rooms. Each tomb is plotted indicating if it's a king, queen, or prince.

A scatter plot (x-y graph) showing individual tombs in the valley of the kings. The x-axis is years BCE, the y-axis is the total volume of the tomb. Each tomb is plotted indicating if it has a bent or straight axis.

Then we graphed the results on the whiteboard (apologies for the glare) and lo and behold our hypotheses were born out by the data:

Two hypotheses about the valley of the kings, tombs get bigger over time and kings have bigger tombs than others.

With this information available we thought about what sort of hypotheses we could test with the data. The students came up with some simple but important ideas: 1) Tombs get bigger over time and 2) Kings have larger tombs than queens and princes. The students divided up and each looked at a tomb

Students pointed out that there was numerical information like the dimensions, including total volume (which we agreed was important). Then we thought about how we could date them (the year the occupant died?). What sort of status they had (most are kings, some are princes and/or queens).

Screenshot of the Theban Mapping Project website

On my way to Boston for ASOR and AAR/SBL... Had my students this morning do a really fun exercise in class. We started off by looking at the Theban Mapping Project (thebanmappingproject.com) an amazing website hosted by ARCE. We thought about what sorts of data was available for each of the tombs.

Just checked in for a flight and for the first time (that I'm aware) as part of the check in process there was a hold put on my credit card in case I brought a bag that I didn't pre-check to the gate. The fine print said it would be released once I was admitted onto the flight...

Insight from a baller and a scholar... Why do left wing parties again and again move right only to lose to further right parties? What if the voting public has malleable positions that are influence by people speaking (well) and actually standing for something?

I social network of the Old-Babylonian copper merchant Ea-naṣir drawn by students from his dossier.

This week were were thinking about how the combination of good archaeology and well provenanced texts can tell richer stories. Ea-naṣir's house and letters provide an excellent case-study, a 4,000 year old micro-history of one merchants life and work in the ancient city of Ur.

In class today my students created a social network of (meme-famous) Ea-naṣir based on the letters in his dossier. It coincided with the most recent episode of the Thin Edge of the Wedge. An excellent roundup by great colleagues on everything we know about Ea-naṣir and his historical context...

Click here to support Chance Bonar's story *AncientGazanLitTranslation *spotfund is the easiest place to create beautiful and free online fundraisers. It takes just minutes to start raising money today.

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I'm writing an intro & sourcebook on late ancient Gazan literature for Dar al-Kalima University Press. The press and I plan to produce an Arabic translation to make Gazan literature more accessible to Palestinians. Help me compensate the Gazan translator!

spot.fund/dn8t744sc

New: Braille Resources for Reading Ancient Languages [Photo by me. Tactile graphic by Crystal Peng.]   I recently created a new section of my website, which provides educational resources for anyone who wants to read ancient Middle Eastern and North …

Today I published a new section of my website with resources for those who wish to learn, study, and/or teach ancient languages using braille. It rests on work we did over the past year to expand screen reader access to these languages through the LibLouis library. Check it out and share around!

I hadn't seen this mentioned yet, but I garden for all of those reasons and also to reduce my reliance on fossil fuel shipped fruits and veggies. It's so nice to eat a fresh cherry tomato from my backyard rather than something that came from halfway across the planet.

I am quick at playing board games; I have nine skills; I forget runes slowly; the book is a preoccupation with me and also craftsmanship. I am able to glide on skis; I shoot and I row so that it makes a difference; I am able to understand both: harp-playing and poems. — Earl Rognvald of Orkney, trans. Judith Jesch.

Weirdly enough I was telling my first-years about "warrior ethos" last week.

Here's the skill set of a Top Viking, as set out by a dude who'd have gone through anyone using the phrase "warrior ethos" like a well-aimed axe.

800 Years of English Handwriting - Google Arts & Culture Google Arts & Culture features content from over 2000 leading museums and archives who have partnered with the Google Cultural Institute to bring the world's treasures online.

This exhibit from the Derbyshire Record Office hosted on Google Arts and Culture is really cool! Beautiful images of handwriting throughout the last 800 years. Relevant because I just finished teaching lectures on cuneiform and its change over time...

artsandculture.google.com/story/800-ye...

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Charlie Kirk and those who have canonized him.

archive.ph/2025.09.16-2...