By Alex Mullen
The LatinNow team has been busy putting together the Manual of Roman Everyday Writing on and off over the past few months. Volume 2, on writing equipment, written by Anna Willi and turned into an eBook by Janie Masseglia, jumped the queue and came out earlier this summer. We’re hoping Volume 1, Scripts and Texts, co-written by Alan Bowman and me, will generate similar interest. Just one of its figures, a table of cursive scripts from corpora ranging from first-century Pompeii to sixth-century Ravenna, has taken me days to create: I wrote out the cursive letter forms in the cells literally 5,000 times before getting it right. The thought that someone, one day, might possibly find it useful inspired me to keep going!
One of the reasons for choosing the eBook format was the fact that we could use as many images as we liked and could even embed videos. We’ve made three new videos for Volume 1, which you can watch now as a kind of sneak-preview trailer for the book, which is coming out in a couple of weeks. They are designed for people new to RTI.
The first is a feat of multitasking skill. Our senior scientist Janie, from the University of Leicester wrote it, starred in it, shot it and produced it all on her own. All in a day. I’m in awe. In the video she explains how we can use RTI to help us to read worn inscriptions – in this case the epitaph of a Victorian couple on a tombstone from a Leicestershire village.
Video 2 is more of a team effort. Scott Vanderbilt shot the footage in Blythe House in London in summer 2019 when we were capturing the unpublished stylus tablets from Vindolanda with the superdome RTI machine. It features a noisy RTI dome, me (out of breath because I’m pretty pregnant with LatinNow baby #7), Richard Hobbs from the British Museum, and some rather special tablets. The legible marks on the stylus tablets are exceptionally hard to read and work is still underway to try to decipher their texts. It’s a case of ‘watch this space’…
The third video is about deciphering a tricky-to-read text on the base of a pot from East Farleigh in Kent and it accompanies the section on ‘How to read cursive texts’ in the manual. It shows how we can use the RTI technique demonstrated in the other two videos to read a text that hasn’t been read for 1800 or so years.
The LatinNow team has been doing quite a bit of RTI over the course of the project: training others to use it and getting involved in some new adventures imaging understudied collections in museums. We’ll blog about some of these soon.
If you are interested in fuller details about how RTI works, these can be found in chapter 8 ‘Modern technologies for reading everyday texts’ in the Manual (we’ll let you know when it is published online), including how you can do it yourself without the expense of a dome. Do contact us if you know of a Roman collection that needs deciphering!
