Cornell’s Coin Collection comprises almost 1800 gold, silver and bronze coins from ancient Greece and Rome, and ca. 300 coins from the Byzantine Empire, with some additions from Lydia, Persia, the Sassanid Empire, China and modern Europe. The completion of the database is in progress.Investigators:Annetta AlexandridisProject Website:http://antiquities.library.cornell.edu/coins
Cornell University once owned a collection of plaster casts of sculptures, gemstones and inscriptions from different cultures and periods such as the ancient Near East, ancient Egypt, ancient Greece and Rome (the majority), the European Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the 19th century. In addition, architectural models and details of architectural sculpture from the above-mentioned periods formed part of the collection together with more abstract drawing models for art students. This collection must have comprised about 800 pieces (excluding the ca.
Classics faculty have sponsored the digitization of many teaching collections: casts, gems, squeezes, coins. Some faculty also engage in Digital Humanities. Through these many projects Classics students can get an introduction to some of the tools of the digital humanist.Discover more about our digital projects using the links on the right.
Surface survey began in 1988 and excavations followed at Halai (1990-1992, 1996). In 2004 Cornell Halai and East Lokris Project (CHELP) also collaborated with the Greek Archaeological Service and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in excavations at the Bronze Age islet of Mitrou. Investigations at Halai’s acropolis have been divided between the Neolithic village and the fortified city center of Greco-Roman times that lies above it. Field-schools and other training are an important part of the work. Preliminary reports, Ph.D. dissertations, M.A.
The Harvard-Cornell Exploration of Ancient Sardis originated in 1958 under the direction of George M. A. Hanfmann, Harvard University, and Henry Detweiler, Cornell University, succeeded by Crawford Greenewalt Jr., University of California, Berkeley, and currently Nicholas D. Cahill, University of Wisconsin, Madison.
The Project for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies (Project ArAGATS) is a collaborative American-Armenian research initiative that has been conducting archaeological investigations in the environs of Mt. Aragats, in central Armenia, since 1998. As a co-director of this project, my research to date has centered on the mid-first millennium BC settlement at Tsaghkahovit. Our excavations have explored everyday material and spatial practices in this semi-subterranean mountain town of the Achaemenid Persian Empire (ca. 550-330 BC).
The Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments (KAMBE) Project, a collaborative research venture between Cornell University, the University of British Columbia, the University of Chicago, and the University of Toronto, takes an interdisciplinary approach to investigating the relationships between architecture, social interaction and social change in Late Bronze Age Cyprus. It uses geophysical survey, pedestrian survey and archaeological excavation, combined with digital recording and 3D modeling, in an effort to shed light on the urbanscapes of this transformative period.
Faculty and emeritus faculty in the Cornell Classics Department currently direct or are active members of five major archaeological projects covering Armenia, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, and Turkey. These projects can provide Cornell students with the opportunity to participate in archaeological fieldwork and research. The projects variously focus on periods from prehistory through the Roman and later periods and can expose students both to cutting-edge archaeological research and the chance for a unique immersive cultural experience.
Andrew Hicks’ research focuses on the intellectualhistory of early musical thought from a cross-disciplinary perspective that embraces philosophical, cosmological, scientific and grammatical discourse in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and spans the linguistic and cultural spheres of Latin, Greek, Persian, and Arabic. His first book, Composing the World: Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos(Oxford University Press, 2017), won the ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson book award (2018) and the Society for Music Theory's Emerging Scholar book award (2018). He collaborated with Fr. Édouard Jeauneau on John Scottus Eriugena’s Commentary and Homily on the Gospel of John (CCCM 166, Brepols 2008), and he is currently preparing the first editions ofWilliam of Conches’Glosulae super Priscianum(Brepols) and (with Irene Caiazzo) the Glosae super Macrobium (Brepols). His published essaysrange across the history of music theory, late ancient and medieval Pythagoreanism, the reception of Martianus Capella, textual criticism, and musical metaphors and modalities in Classical Persian literatures. He won the 2018 Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin for research on his next book titled The Broken Harp: Listening Otherwise in Classical Persian Literature.
Athena Kirk's new book, “Ancient Greek Lists: Catalogue and Inventory Across Genres,” argues that the list form was the ancient mode of expressing value through text, examining the ways in which lists can “stand in for objects, create value, act as methods of control, and approximate the infinite.”
Kim Haines-Eitzen (Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1997) isa Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Religions with a specialty in Early Christianity, Early Judaism, and Religion in Late Antiquity in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. Her most recent book is Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks and What It Can Teach Us (Princeton University Press, 2022), a project that traces how desert sounds shaped early Christian monasticism and includes field recordings she has made in desert environments. She is the author of Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (Oxford University Press, 2000), a social history of the scribes who copied Christian texts during the second and third centuries; and The Gendered Palimpsest: Women, Writing, and Representation in Early Christianity, which deals with the intersection of gender and text transmission (Oxford University Press, 2012). She is a member of the programs in Religious Studies, Jewish Studies, Medieval Studies, and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell. For the 2024-25 academic year, she is a Fellow at the National Humanities Center where she is working on a new project, tentatively entitled Earth, Wind, and Fire: A Field Guide to the Apocalypse. To learn more about her recent work and her media appearances, visit her website: http://kimhaineseitzen.wordpress.com
Griggs completed her PhD in Quaternary Geology in 2006, focusing on dendrochronology in both northeastern North America (Pleistocene to Present) and the northeastern Mediterranean region (Malcolm and Carolyn Wiener Laboratory for Aegean and Near Eastern Dendrochronology). For over 20 years, she has dated buildings, paintings, and instruments (“any old thing”), and has reconstructed precipitation back 900 years for northeastern Greece into north-central Turkey. Currently she is managing the lab, and working on samples found buried in stream beds and bogs in NE NA that will provide both a regional climate and terrestrial radiocarbon record of the Late Glacial period. This research will add to our understanding of changes in solar irradiation and climate over time.
Barry Strauss, professor of history and classics, says that a glance at ancient Rome may help in trying to understand Putin and the subject of war crimes.
Kathryn Gleason is Professor of Landscape Architecture and a specialist on the archaeology of ancient Roman designed landscapes and landscape architectural history. Her scholarship explores how ancient gardens and parks (virid[i]aria) can be recovered archaeologically. Her particular focus is on how archaeological remains preserve traces of the work of the original designer, reconstructing not just the garden original appearance, but the practices by which lands were transformed into gardens that choreographed practices of political power, fealty, resistance, and daily life around the Roman Empire. The Romans had the equivalent of today's landscape architect: the topiarius, who, like architects and engineers, was typically a slave or freedman in charge of the design and ongoing oversight of large projects. Drawing on early work in Tunisia, Italy, England, and Turkey, Professor Gleason has pioneered excavation methodologies for ancient designed landscapes around the Mediterranean, notably the palaces of Herod the Great of Judea, of Aretas IV at Petra, of the Flavian court at Horace's Villa at Licenza, and most recently, in the region of Mt. Vesuvius at the Villa Arianna at ancient Stabiae.She is currently co-directing a new CIAMS project at the Casa della Regina Carolina withcolleague Caitlin Barrett and Annalisa Marzano (University of Reading) at the Casa della Regina Carolina at Pompeii. She has edited The Archaeology of Garden and Field (with Naomi F. Miller, 1994), A Cultural History of Gardens in Antiquity (2013), the Final Report of the 2008-2012 Excavations of the Great Peristyle of the Villa Arianna (with Thomas Howe et al, 2018), and The Gardens of the Roman Empire (2018), which has received the 2020 Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Award for Landscape History from the Society of Architectural Historians. She is a Fulbright Scholar, Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and of the American Society of Landscape Architects, and since 2016 has served as a Senior Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks.
My research focuses on understandings of slavery, freedom, and ownership in Roman legal, literary, and philosophical texts.My book, The Mind of the Slave: The Limits of Ownership in Roman Law and Society, is being published by the University of Michigan Press. I am currently embarking on a new project on letters of enslavement.
Cornell Classics graduate students Hana Aghababian and Sarah Epplin both welcomed babies recently: Lily, born in late December, and Simon, born in early February.
