Farewell CREWS Display

Our special display on ancient writing systems at the Fitzwilliam Museum finished two weeks ago, and I went along to the museum for the display’s de-installation. It was sad seeing it removed – it feels more like five minutes than five months since it was installed in January. But the de-installation was actually very interesting, and was a great way of rounding off my experience of being involved with a museum display.

Our Ancient Writing Display, and Other Ancient Writing at the Fitzwilliam Museum

Today is International Museum Day, a good day to celebrate the stellar work done by museum staff to make museums the places of learning and inspiration that we all know and love. It has been a real privilege to witness this in action through our special writing-themed display at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (a collaboration between the CREWS project and the Fitzwilliam and British Museums).

If a display on ancient writing sounds interesting, do come and visit – it finishes on 10th June so there is still some time left. You can find it in the Cypriot Gallery at the Fitzwilliam. If coming to Cambridge isn’t easy for you, on the other hand, I hope you can have a sort of virtual tour by looking through our blog posts on each item: the whole list is HERE.

CREWS Display: A Cypriot Seal with a Fish-man

We have finally come to the last object in our special display at the Fitzwilliam Museum. Don’t be too sad yet though, because there is still more than a month to come and see it (until 10th June 2018) if you have a chance to visit Cambridge.

This week’s object is a little stamp seal from ancient Cyprus, featuring a fish-man with Cypriot Syllabic writing behind him to the top-left, probably 7th-6th C BC. At just 2.1 x 1.2 cm, it’s the second smallest item of our set. Now part of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s own collection, we do not know exactly where it came from but its Cypriot provenance can be confirmed because of its Cypriot Syllabic inscription.

CREWS Display: Replica Linear A Tablet

Our series of blog posts on objects in our special writing-themed display at the Fitzwilliam Museum is drawing to an end, with just three objects left. This week the spotlight is on a replica clay tablet inscribed in Linear A, which I made as part of a practical writing experiment.

Come and see the CREWS display!

Natalia and Philip have made a video about our special display on ancient writing at the Fitzwilliam Museum, to explain what it is about – and to encourage you to come and have a look while you can if you have a chance to visit Cambridge!

The display is free and is on until 10th June, and you can find it in the Cypriot Gallery at the Fitzwilliam Museum.

CREWS Display: A Cypriot Figurine with a Greek Alphabetic Inscription

Our next object, from our special CREWS-themed display at the Fitzwilliam Museum, has a privileged position in the Cypriot gallery: standing in its own cabinet in the centre of the room. At first glance, you wouldn’t guess why this Cypriot statuette is included in an exhibition about writing, but if you move around it, you may see that it has some scratches on the back side.

Although it would seem that these are random damage to the stone, they conceal a votive inscription written in the Greek alphabet. This is the perfect excuse to talk about the presence of the Greek alphabet in Cyprus and also about how epigraphists work with problematic inscriptions like this one to untangle the text behind them.

CREWS Display: Par(a)menon’s Tombstone

Pippa has already told us about the decipherment of the Cypriot syllabaries. With the next item of our display at the Fitzwilliam museum, I have the opportunity to outline how they were used to write in the Greek language.

This is an inscription engraved on a stone that indicates the burial of a man. It was found in Marion (in the north west of the island) and dated around the 5^th – 4^th centuries BC.

CREWS Display: A Babylonian Tablet

For the third of our posts looking at the objects in the CREWS Display at the Fitzwilliam Museum, we’re going to turn our attention to probably the oldest item we have on display: this cuneiform tablet.

CREWS Display: Aphrodite’s cup sherd

It is time to talk about another item from our CREWS display at the Fitzwilliam Museum. This one is an inscription in the Greek alphabet on the foot of a cup.

This alphabet looks very straightforward compared to the other writing systems present in our display. That’s because our own alphabet comes indirectly from the Greek one.

CREWS Display: The Idalion Bilingual

Welcome to the first in a series of posts on the objects taking part in our display at the Fitzwilliam Museum. You can read more about the setting up of the display, which is an exciting collaboration with the Fitzwilliam and the British Museum, in our previous post. The idea is to use a small set of objects from these museums (plus two replicas made by the CREWS team) to highlight what we are working on and to tell some of the stories behind writing in the ancient eastern Mediterranean.

One of the stars of the show is this limestone statuette base found in the remains of a religious complex at Idalion in Cyprus, known as the Idalion Bilingual, which is on loan from the British Museum for our display (you can see its BM listing HERE). This is inscribed with a dedication written in Phoenician (Phoenician consonantal alphabet) and Greek (Cypriot syllabic script). The Idalion Bilingual was the inscription that provided the vital key needed to decipher with Cypriot syllabic writing system, and is sometimes thought of as the ‘Rosetta stone’ of Cyprus.