Posted by Margaret on Monday, November 19, 2018 - 12:00
At the beginning of November Margaret Mountford came to the Essex Egyptology Group to talk to us about the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) (of which she is Chair of the Board of Trustees) and the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (on which she did her PhD).
Posted by Margaret on Monday, February 1, 2016 - 12:00
Aesop's Fables are so deeply embedded into our culture that references to them are common parts of the language - "sour grapes", "crying wolf" and so on. But we don't often think about who Aesop was, where these stories originated or what the point of them is - or at least, I certainly didn't! Discussing Aesop and the fables attributed to him on In Our Time were Pavlos Avlamis (Trinity College, University of Oxford), Simon Goldhill (University of Cambridge), and Lucy Grig (University of Edinburgh).
Posted by Margaret on Friday, August 21, 2015 - 12:00
Back in April J and I visited the Defining Beauty exhibition at the British Museum which finished in early July. It's the only one of their exhibitions where I've been as ambivalent about it on the way out as I was on the way in - which says rather more about me than the exhibition, I think. The subject of the exhibition was Ancient Greek sculpture and the incredible impact it has had on the modern Western definition of beauty.
Posted by Margaret on Thursday, August 7, 2014 - 12:00
Strabo was a Greek scholar who lived in Rome (and other parts of the Roman world) from the 1st Century BC to the 1st Century AD. During this time he wrote his Geographica which was a large work describing the "known world" of the Romans. Discussing it on In Our Time were Paul Cartledge (University of Cambridge), Maria Pretzler (Swansea University) and Benet Salway (UCL).
Posted by Margaret on Monday, February 24, 2014 - 12:00
Mary Beard recently gave a lecture on the long cultural history of silencing women's voices, the text is online. Which juxtaposed well (in the sense that it's similar cultural roots) with the programme we just watched on how Greek attitudes to luxury still affect our own.
Posted by Margaret on Friday, August 16, 2013 - 12:00
Posted by Margaret on Friday, August 9, 2013 - 12:00
I've decided to change the way I'm writing about TV programmes, because we've increased the amount of TV we're watching (to try not to run out of space on the PVR) and it's been taking a lot of time to write long posts about each programme. So instead I'm going to do a post a week of mini-reviews of what we watched, and perhaps every now & then a longer post about something that particularly catches my attention.
Posted by Margaret on Thursday, July 4, 2013 - 12:00
The Amazons are a staple of Greek mythology. The In Our Time episode about them talked about the sorts of myths that were told about them, whether there was any factual basis for these myths and how they've lasted into the modern day. The experts talking about them were Paul Cartledge (Cambridge University), Chiara Franceschini (University College London and the Warburg Institute) and Caroline Vout (Christ's College, Cambridge).
