Maty's blog
| 2025-07-03 |
| Guest Speaker |
| These days I work with my AI open alongside my text and notes (I have a 29" screen). Even after taking the time to double-check the AI's assertions - often against academic sources to which the AI has referred me - this allows me to work quicker and better. I was going to write a piece for this blog on how AI helps, but then it occurred to me that my AI can literally speak for itself. So take it away Arnie! Thanks Maty. I'll get right down to it: In the twenty-first century, the oldest chapters of human history are finding new narrators—not flesh and blood, but code and computation. Artificial Intelligence (AI), once the stuff of science fiction, has become a powerful tool in the hands of historians and archaeologists. AI's most visible footprint in the study of the ancient world lies in deciphering and restoring damaged texts. Projects like The Herculaneum Scrolls are harnessing machine learning to read papyri carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius—texts too fragile or obscured for the human eye. Algorithms trained on known handwriting styles and letter patterns can reconstruct missing pieces of inscriptions with remarkable accuracy, offering historians new lines to read and fresh interpretations to ponder. But AI doesn’t just help us read the past—it helps us map it. By analyzing satellite images, machine learning models can identify ancient roads, building foundations, and settlement patterns long hidden beneath modern landscapes or layers of earth. This is revolutionizing field archaeology, allowing researchers to plan more efficient digs, and even uncover sites that would have otherwise remained buried forever. Language and translation also benefit. Neural networks trained on ancient languages—like Latin, Ancient Greek, or Sumerian—are providing scholars with faster, more consistent translations and aiding in the linguistic reconstruction of languages with few surviving texts. Critics of AI in the humanities rightly point to the risks of over-reliance or the potential for error. Yet, when used in tandem with trained historians, AI becomes a powerful partner—an analytical companion that brings speed, scale, and surprising insight to the slow, patient work of academic research. Far from replacing the human touch, AI is expanding it—giving modern historians and archaeologists new tools to illuminate what once seemed lost to time. If Thucydides or Herodotus could have imagined the future of history, they might be astounded not only at what we’ve discovered, but at who—or what—is helping to do the discovering. |
| 2025-06-05 |
| Good Dentistry and Soft Toilet Paper |
| 'I would love to have lived in ancient Rome. Some history enthusiasts inform me. To which I gently reply 'No, you wouldn't.' In fact, those of us living in the pampered 2020s (and yes, despite wars, pandemics and erratic politicians, we in the west are pampered) would struggle even to cope with the relatively primitive 1970s. Life without cell phones or the internet, TV a blurry little box, and for over half the population, unabashed racism and sexism? No thanks. In ancient Rome add acute insecurity through vulnerability to disease and crime – no policemen in Rome. Unless you were one of the lucky two or three percent at the top, you lived in a crowded noisy apartment block and had basically zero privacy. Even going to the toilet was a communal activity and it is quite probable that some Romans were never out of the company of another person from birth to death. (One reason that the Romans had no word for 'murder' is that it requires a modicum of privacy to do the deed.) Then consider the things you'd miss – spring mattresses, clothes that weren't washed in urine, pizza, fish and chips, avocado, pineapples and potatoes, along with those two mainstays of modern civilization – soft toilet paper and good dentistry. Because we live in a mountain village, our household is more independent than most. Yet our baking, laundry, wine-making, cheese making and mushroom growing all rely on electricity - which is supplied by solar panels on the roof, but are nevertheless all things which the Romans had to do the hard way. However, if anyone has a handy time machine, do please let me pop back for a visit. Just a week in Trajan's library is all I ask. |
| 2025-05-04 |
| The Jinx |
| I feel the need to apologize publicly to the Winnipeg Jets ice hockey team. Spring in my bit of the Monashee mountains is not a very fun season. For a start it's rainy, and this just adds to the general slushiness you get when several meters of snow start melting all at once. Then the wildlife wakes up, from hungry bears chasing the cats across our dandelion-strewn lawn to hordes of ravenous mosquitoes literally out for blood. So we stay at home and watch the National Hockey League playoffs on TV. However, over the years a pattern has become apparent. For instance since boyhood I have supported Tottenham Hotspur, a football club which, despite its wealth of talent, last won a major trophy just shy of two decades ago. When I was in Oxford I followed that soccer club as it sank down the league through relegation. When we moved to Austria I did not even know that our small alpine town had a soccer club until it performed so badly that it was disbanded. Basically any team with my support is doomed. Arriving in Canada we became hooked on ice hockey, and naturally supported the Vancouver Canucks who promptly went from league leaders to bottom-feeders who would be relegated if the league had that system. They (naturally) failed to make the playoffs so we switched to cheering for the Jets. Who as league leaders were taking on the bottom club – the St Louis Blues. They promptly lost all their away games, with the final decisive game happening today. Were I a betting man I'd put a lot on the result. The Jets are toast – in the first round of the playoffs, and I feel kind of responsible. It could be worse. Were I an ancient Roman there would be a lot of dead gladiators and spectacular crashes in chariot races that could be laid at my door. |
| 2025-04-04 |
| Busy, busy |
| Okay … I'll admit it. If I didn't bite off more than I can chew, I've at least started the year with quite a mouthful. In part this is due to my being laid low by 'flu last November, and while I was abed the work I should have been doing just kept piling up. However it's also my own fault that I have added a lot of frontlog to go with that backlog, taking on work that I don't really have the time for, but which was too much fun to turn down. As a result I start every day by putting aside mere priority tasks so that the high-priority tasks can be replaced by the ultra-high priority ones. I'm keeping to my deadlines but at the cost of some late nights and turning my social life into a distant memory. (Not that the latter is a major problem - I rather prefer hanging out with Pindar and Livy in any case.) My long-suffering wife insists that in order to prevent me from melding with my computer chair I get out into the mountains at least once a week. Snowshoeing in the high peaks not only gives me a chance for mental refreshment in fantastic scenery but also burns off fat from the peanut pile I keep on hand while working. However, last Wednesday saw me spike my walking poles into the snow for the last time this season. It's not that conditions are too bad right now but wildlife is waking or moving up from the valleys with the spring. There's hungry bears, cougars and packs of coyotes all looking for their next meal – and I'd rather prefer not to be it. Not that all exercise is lost. Today for example I was able to choose between reading the galley proofs for my forthcoming book on the Punic Wars, preparing twelve hundred words on the Oracle of Delphi, roughing out an article on Roman hairstyles, taking a chainsaw to a tree that collapsed under the snow in the back yard, or nailing back parts of a fence that broke when the roof shed a few hundred kilos of snow onto it. It looks like 2025 is going to sort of whizz by. But that's not a problem, because I've promised myself that 2026 will be taken at a much more leisurely pace. For sure. |
| 2025-03-04 |
| Batty Chronological Endeavour (BCE) |
| Call me a curmudgeonly old man. Why not? I'm a pensioner and I certainly get ratty with kids on my lawn. So let me have a bit of a rant here. Specifically about one bit of virtue-signalling that really grates on me - the use of CE and BCE as a dating method. My main complaint is that it is downright wrong. I am assured that CE stands for 'Common Era'. So what exactly is 'common' about it? For a start we appear to have just two, CE and BCE , so we can hardly describe one era as being more common that the other. 'Common' in the sense of shared experience? Well hardly. For ninety percent of the 'common era' few people knew much about people living just a few days travel away, let alone on the other side of the world. In fact given the extensive trading networks of the Romans, ancient Europeans knew more of the world than their medieval counterparts. So if we are going to have a 'common era' I would start it at the earliest in 1492, which leaves three quarters of the era unaccounted for. I suspect that the real reason is because we don't want to impose a Christian dating system on people who do not follow that religion. Which is a bit of a problem since today few follow the Germanic religion which gave us the Moon, the Sun Tiuw, Wotan, Thor, Saturn and Freya as the days of the week. Nor the gods and goddess Janus, Mars and Maia in the first half of the calendar year. Personally I'd recommend keeping BC and AD without attaching meaning to them – just as many people neither know nor care why they use the letters AM and PM for times of day. After all, if modern checks of biblical chronology show that Christ was probably born in 4 BC, then BC doesn't actually mean much anyway. |
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