Tom Elliott

Be advised. This is now a Sak Tahn Waax stan account!

Scholarly paper: Rossi, Franco D., David Stuart, and Heather Hurst. “The Identification and Work of an Eighth-Century Maya Mathematician.” Antiquity, July 14, 2026, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2026.10378

News reporting: Simms, Chris. “Mathematics Formula Found on Maya Wall Rivals Insights of Ancient Masters.” Nature, ahead of print, July 14, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-02170-8

In this article, we present a newly deciphered calendrical formula; designated Text 19, it is located within a chamber of wall paintings at the site of Xultun, Guatemala. Text 19 records a unique set of astronomical calculations that were attributed to an individual named Sak Tahn Waax (‘White-chested Fox’). Unlike the units of time grounded by historical context that are commonly recorded in formal inscriptions, Text 19 presents a sequence of dates with calendrical intervals as a mathematical exercise associated with idealised numbers. Its nested cycles encode ...

me: [ out on porch brandishing a corn broom ] GET OFF MY WEBSITE YOU FILTHY BOT SUCKERS!

Emily Lime. “Artificial Lighting Systems in Pompeian Gardens and Baths.” Peopling the Past, April 10, 2026. https://peoplingthepast.com/2026/04/10/blog-120-artificial-lighting-systems-in-pompeian-gardens-and-baths-with-emily-lime/.

> In his 1855 manuscript documenting the excavations at Pompeii, Ernest Breton describes a square niche lined with marble in the House of Queen Carolina (VIII.3.14), which was “closed by a pane of glass and contained a lamp, the smoke from which issued through a little terracotta chimney”. These architectural features—known as enclosed lighting systems or lamp tunnels—are found throughout Pompeii, mostly in baths, but also in corridors and gardens ...

#archaeology

#AAH2026 Kaine Byrne (UCSB), “Please Leave Your Gender at the Border: The Mutual (Non-) Permeability of Greek, Han, and Nomadic Masculinities”. Applies the "going gender" theoretical framework of Stenbacka 2020 in reading ancient Greek and Han descriptions of Asian Steppe nomads, where their performance of masculinity is both representated and evidently incompatible in some ways with the expectations of the receiving audience. Key texts in the case study: Herodotus 4.78 and 4.80.5, passages from Ban Gu, Han shu 68.2959-60, 68.2962, 54.2458, 94B.3834, and Sima Qian, Shi ji 110.2902.

#AAH2026 Ashlyn Patterson (ASU), “Early Christian Food Culture: Impacts of Judaism and Food as a Tool of Social Separation”. Food was a major area in which Chrstian's detached themselves from Judaism. Christianity's origins in Judaism can be seen in the importance of ritualizing food for sacrificial purposes (e.g., the eucharist).

#AAH2026 Marios Anastasiadis (NYU), "Diagnosing Value: Medicine and the Greek Slave Market" begins by addressing evidence (legal, epigraphic) concerned with the sale of infirm enslaved people and the potential for fraud in misrepresenting the health status of enslaved individuals presented for sale. He adduces more evidence to demonstrate that doctors, midwives, and other kinds of healers were active participants at slave markets, played a structural role in the slave trade, and popularized themes leading to the medicalization of encounters at slave markets.

#AAH2026 Christian Borgen (University of Chicago), “Harvest contracts from the Old Babylonian, Middle Assyrian, and Neo-Assyrian periods”. Pushing back, with receipts, on the early 20th century communis opinio that these contracts (primary those in Old Babylonian, all from Sippar) represent or imply usurious loans, financial precarity, and potential for indenture and labor coercion.

Sippar: https://pleiades.stoa.org/places/894089

Who are the good, fair, non-Nazi custom sticker fulfillment folks in the US these days?

#AAH2026 was a fantastic conference. Uniformly engaging and knowledge-expanding papers, excellent timing with extended breaks for informal interaction, good venues. Huzzah to the organizers and all presenters.

#AAH2026 Naomi T. Campa (UT-Austin), “Formally Comparing Migrants as Method”. Toward a systematized way of comparing migrants in ancient Greece with each other and with their modern counterparts. Proposing a formal schema/topology for migration in the ancient Greek world. Planned database of ancient migration events (collaborators sought).

#AAH2026 Steven Tuck (Miami University of Ohio), “Movement and Cultural Differences Among Survivors of Vesuvius in Their New Communities”. Move beyond "Escape from Pompeii". Movement: 12 of 48 checked communities for survivors. People from Herculaneum tend to cluster with each other than from Pompeii (vast majority went to Neapolis). Pompeii survivors are much more scattered and many are further away. Method for cultural difference and integration (using UNHCR metrics and applying them to the historical data).

Tuck is author of https://global.oup.com/academic/product/escape-from-pompeii-9780197678220?cc=us&lang=en&

#AAH2026 William M. Owens (Ohio University), “The Apocryphal Acts, the Greek Novels, and the Representation of Slavery”. Non-canonical Acts of Peter is critical of and articulates protests against slavery while mixing and contrasting notions of "real" and "otherworldly" slavery and the rhetorical functions of both in e.g., Varro's instrumentum vocale. Constrast Paul in the Letter to the Ephesians.

#AAH2026 Stanley Burstein (CSU-LA), “Greek Historiography and the Book of Judith”:."A genuinely strange book, on which scholars are in wide disagreement (other than that it is a complete fiction)." Recent scholarly work has moved away from the idea of a lost Hebrew original to address the idea that the Septuagint largely preserved a Greek original by a presumably Jewish author. SB notes it presents a unique variant thread on many aspects of Jewish history, with some details drawn from Greek historical tradition, rather than Hebrew. SB suggests the author's agenda is to offer a Jewish "alternative history if the Jews had not sinned and what could be Jewish history if they don't sin."

#AAH2026 Jeremy Simmons (U. Chicago), "The Hellenistic Far East and Global Antiquity". Starts with changes in the modern historiography of central Asia vis-a-vis the Mediterranean environs. Will concentrate on the "Hellenistic East". Begins with documentary and numismatic evidence in Elamite, Aramaic, and other languages.

#AAH2026 Alejandro Quintana (Yale University), “Mobility Makes States: Ideology and Legibility in Roman Egypt” argues that human movement was a "structuring fact" of ancient society. He begins with the edict of Vibius Maximus as praefectus of Egypt in 104 concerning a census, enjoining all migrants to "return to their homes that they may perform the customary business of registration and may apply themselves to the cultivation of the land, as is their proper duty." https://droitromain.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/Anglica/Aegypti29_johnson.htm

https://papyri.info/ddbdp/p.lond;3;904

Further discussion of Roman attempts to address (and/or exploit the rhetoric of) tax flight by clamping down on migrants and their behaviors backfired in various ways, increasing flight, demographic collapse, and local rebellion.

#AAH2026 Sarah Brucia Breitenfeld (Pitt), “Archives of Prostitution in Classical Athens and Colonial Bridgetown” examines the archival record, primary a court speech attributed to Apollodorus, "Against Neaera". They demonstrate the degree to which sensationalism in the speech (concerning prostitution, purported enslaved background etc) hides the realities and personhood of Neaera's life and that of the people Neaera herself enslaved.

#AAH2026 Lingyun Zhao, “From παῖς to Shaonian: Translational Drift and the Aesthetic Afterlives of Greek Love in East Asia”

#AAH2026 severe weather may interfere with this evening's keynote address