Ancient History

Rubina Raja, Member (2019) in the School of Historical Studies, has received one of the Carlsberg Foundation’s Research Prizes for 2024. She was honored, in part, for work conducted at the ancient city of Palmyra, Syria. 

The Institute’s Krateros Project is launching a new, exploratory effort to further unlock the text of ancient Greek inscriptions by applying optical character recognition technology to its 30,000-strong collection of epigraphic squeezes.

Rubina Raja, past Member in the School of Historical Studies (2019), was praised by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung award committee for her cross-disciplinary work, located at the interface between classical archaeology and religious studies.

Angelos Chaniotis, current Faculty in the School of Historical Studies, discusses the significance of Pope Francis' recent decision to donate fragments of the Parthenon sculptures held by the Vatican to Greece, and looks at whether this serves as an example for the British Museum to take similar action.

A cross-discipline analysis of ancient genomes by a team of geneticists, archaeologists, and historians from institutions across Europe, Asia, and North America—with Professor Emeritus Patrick Geary as one of four principal investigators—has answered questions about the mysterious Avar population whose origins have remained enigmatic for 1,400 years. 

Angelos Chaniotis, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, joins Andrew Keen to revisit the origins of democracy for an episode of How to Fix Democracy, a collaboration of the Bertelsmann Foundation and Humanity in Action. The two discuss why...

Glen W. Bowersock, Professor Emeritus in the School of Historical Studies, reviews Josephine Crawley Quinn's In Search of the Phoenicians for the New York Review of Books, writing, "What people call themselves speaks to us memorably about their...