Illustration of St. Luke in an Armenian Gospel manuscript | WMS Armenian MS no.1, dated to 1495 | Image Source

On AJR

The New Year’s first Book Note! Derek Krueger and Robert S. Nelson (eds.), The New Testament in Byzantium (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016)

Walsh: “This volume, replete with color images and detailed charts, is both a resource and an invitation for further research. The range of expertise offered by the volume’s contributors testifies to the interdisciplinarity that animates Byzantine Studies, and aptly demonstrates that, as the editors put so well, ‘Byzantium’s Bible was a Bible before print, a Bible so diverse, multifarious, multitudinous, that it cannot be easily imagined, explained, or encapsulated by one accounting’”

Michael Papazian reviews the Armenia! Exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art closing this week

“Along with the political events unfolding in Armenia, this 2018 exhibition has brought attention to this often-overlooked nation and its history. The MET Exhibit treats Armenia not as an afterthought of Late Antiquity, but as an artistic and scholarly crossroads in which diverse cultural and artistic forms were embraced and shaped. Armenia! showcases some of the artistic beauty and historical breadth that Armenia has to offer”

Bonus Year in Review here: Revisit the top ten articles of 2018!

Articles and News

Dan-el Padilla Peralta reflects on blackness, race, and the problems with Classical Studies.
Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies releases its winter newsletter.
Getty Research Institute digitizes a collection of several thousand Ottoman-era photographs.
Matthew Gillis talks Gottschalk, ninth-century Carolingian religious dissent, and church realpolitik.
A reminder of the five-year Coptic Magical Papyri project and its online presence.
The excellent British Library Hebrew manuscript digitization project continues, with five more downloadable datasets.
Preview of the ambitious open source Patristic Text Archive now online.
Online version, with audio reading, of Ishtar’s Akkadian Descent to the Netherworld.

Twitter

Read more proverbs in Akkadian and Sumerian that feature women, and that may have been authored by women, in “Women’s Writing of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Anthology of the Earliest Female Authors” by @SaanaSvard and @CharlesHalton pic.twitter.com/gvtiGlJFXD
— Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid (@Moudhy) 9 January 2019

Alumni of our fellowship program published a spate of books in 2018. Here is just a taste.https://t.co/Y4alU17LNh pic.twitter.com/iWLzNJMs9c
— Katz Center (@katzcenterupenn) 8 January 2019

LOOK HOW BEAUTIFUL THIS SNAIL IS #HebrewProject Add MS 11639, The Northern French Miscellany https://t.co/KX6WMfFYAR pic.twitter.com/0BsbOqqVnn
— BL Hebrew Project (@BL_HebrewMSS) 10 January 2019