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Inscriptions in Lucian’s True Stories (April 6)

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Michele BRUNET edited this page Sep 26, 2017 · 6 revisions

Inscriptions in Lucian’s True Stories (April 6)

April 6, 2016: 17h00-18h15 CET

Michèle Brunet (University Lumière Lyon 2) and her Students

Aim of the session:

A lot of work has already been done about intertextuality and the use of computational methods to discover imitative textual allusions and citations. With the help of Lucian's True Histories, that is to say from the standpoint of someone living in the Ancient world, this session aims to provide a very gentle introduction to the definition and study of (greek) inscriptions : how were they made and written ? What were they designed for ? In which circumstances were they used ? Where could they be displayed ? Drawing on these questions, we will see how digital tools and on line resources can be used for the study of inscriptions with are both texts and artefacts but also for the commentary of an ancient text. Lucian's story, a parody of travel tales, and of the very first one, Homer's Odyssey, is based on a very clever concept, quite pedagogical: he ensures his readers that everything he says and writes about is not true, in order to make his reader search for some truth in his narrative. All along his journey among books, with allusions and false quotations, Lucian wakes up the reader, makes him laugh and think. Thus, looking carefully to Lucian's fake inscriptions is a good mean for further investigation about real ones, and for addressing more theoretical issues as: typology, metadata, controlled vocabularies, authority lists, etc.

Required reading and tools:

Lucian's Verae Historiae, True History I and II, in greek and/or translation, can be consulted in the

Further reading and consulting:

  • David Bamman, Gregory Crane (2008), The logic and discovery of textual allusion. Proceedings of the 2008 LREC Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage Data (LaTeCH 2008)Read online or download
  • David Bamman, "Intertextuality Beyond Words", blog post February 17, 2014 Read online or download with many references at the end of the post
  • Laurent Coulon, Frederik Elwert, Emmanuelle Morlock et al. (2015), "Towards a TEI compliant interchange format for Ancient Egyptian-Coptic textual resources", Communication to the Annual Meeting of the TEI Consortium: Connect, Animate, Innovate, Lyon october 2015, View online or download (for comparison)

Essay title

Explain why the question of metadata and taxonomy is a central one for the study of ancient inscriptions, considering them as communication devices: at the same time archaeological artefacts and texts.

Exercise

As a possible assignment, the students will have to

  1. find the false inscriptions in Lucian's books (searching for them in Greek or in translation)
  2. using the categories as classified on the Eagle Vocabularies page, define the material, object type, type of text characterizing Lucian's false inscriptions
  3. search for parallels for texts in the PHI databaseof Greek Inscriptions or any other on line corpus, for ex. The Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania, or Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua XI
  4. search for parallels for inscribed monuments using Flickr or Wikimedia (cf. Sunoikisis DC 2016 Session 6)
  5. Compare the references and parallels (real inscriptions) with Lucian's fake inscriptions
  6. Comment the results !
  7. Optional (additional possibilities) Treebank and mark up Lucian's false inscriptions in EpiDoc using Oxygen, cf. Sunoikisis DC 2016 Session 5
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