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Reposted by Rita Lucarelli

Seth L. Sanders

@nabalkattu.bsky.social

Film criticism aside, Emily Wilson's review of the Odyssey concerned me because it misrepresents Late Bronze Age history and reinforces an old Eurocentric pattern of dismissing the experiences--and reality--of ancient peoples other than the Greeks.

Nolan’s other major addition to Homer’s narrative is the repeated reference to threats to ‘our civilisation’ from ‘the sea peoples’ – a now debunked 19th-century theory about maritime tribes who were thought to have attacked Egypt around 1200 BCE and to have also been responsible for the roughly coeval collapse of Mycenaean Greek culture. ‘Our civilisation is under attack,’ Penelope wails. Odysseus comforts her by saying that ‘Bronze Age civilisation’, including literacy, will rise again from the ashes. The current consensus, as Nolan clearly knows, is that there was no such thing as ‘the sea peoples’, and that the Greek-speaking world’s shift away from the more centralised, literate palace culture of the Mycenaeans in the 11th century BCE towards the fragmented social formations of the early Greek Iron Age was caused by a range of factors, including climate change, earthquakes and internal unrest. Nolan uses these competing historical theories to create a characteristic narrative twist about the identity of ‘the sea peoples’, which I will not spoil, though you can probably guess it.

July 29, 2026 at 1:04 PM

Rita Lucarelli

@ritaluc.bsky.social

We are hiring! Come working at UC Berkeley and help curating and supporting our amazing Museum!

www.higheredjobs.com/admin/detail...

Executive Director, Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology (0422) 82247 - HigherEdJobs

Jobs in higher education. Faculty and administrative positions at colleges and universities. Updated daily. Free to job seekers.

www.higheredjobs.com

November 15, 2025 at 9:53 PM

Reposted by Rita Lucarelli

AAUP

@aaup.org

We call for the immediate release of former Columbia University grad student Mahmoud Kahlil, a legal permanent resident of the US. His abduction is an assault not only on basic immigration law but on our 1st Amendment protections of freedom of speech & assembly.

www.aaup.org/news/aaup-co...

AAUP Condemns Trump Administration’s Punitive Weaponization of Federal Grant Funding at Columbia

The Trump administration has taken the unprecedented move of cancelling $400 million in federal contracts and grants to Columbia University in alleged response to “inaction by Columbia’s administratio...

https://www.aaup.org/news/aaup-condemns-trump-administration’s-punitive-weaponization-federal-grant-funding-columbia

March 11, 2025 at 5:02 PM