The Cyrus Cylinder at the Villa

From 10/2 to 12/2, the famous "Cyrus Cylinder" will be on display at the Getty Villa, which records in cuneiform conquest of Babylon in 539 BCE by the Cyrus of Persia. We will be planning a trip to the Getty Villa for Saturday, 11/9 to see the cylinder and the rest of the collection.

The Cyrus Cylinder

For more information on the history of the cylinder and its cuneiform script, including a fascinating video on writing in cuneiform, read through the great post on the Getty's blog.

Sounds in Oaxacalifornia

The 18th Street Arts Center is currently hosting an exhibition called Prospecting Notes About Sound by Gala Porras-Kim through September 7.  While the indigenous language Zapoteco isn't Indo-European, I'm excited to have a look at it.  Her project is linguistic-based and explores the musical quality of the tonal language, and so could provide some interesting parallels to the pitch-based Ancient Greek.  Additionally, I gather that Zapoteco has several dialectal features, much like Greek did.

I'm also curious to learn whether I can do something similar around Latin, asking students to craft a project that uses the sounds of Latin artistically.  Perhaps it could help students to get a better understanding of how the language sounded, though I think that it'll be more difficult doing a project along these lines with a dead language.  More to come, and I'll have more ideas after I see the exhibition.