The annual meeting of the Australian Society for Classical Studies was held in Canberra this year, at the start of February. As well as bringing many visitors to the Pompeii exhibit at the National Museum of Australia (which we absolutely recommend!), the range of papers lead to a jam-packed week of research and networking. From the relationship between history and game in tabletop gaming books, to the identification of marginalised identities in Roman frescoes, from Bronze age archaeology to Renaissance receptions, there was something of interest for everyone. But what really amazed me were the presentations of our postgraduates, whose amazing works inspired thought and passion! Below, Jaymie Orchard and Elizabeth Leaning (runner up and winner of this year’s OPTIMA (Outstanding Postgraduate Talk In a Meeting of ASCS) prize, respectively) present their amazing research.

(un)winding History: Queer Time and Fulvius’ Fasti

Jaymie Orchard (they/them) (University of Otago)

My paper entitled “(un)winding History: Queer Time and Fulvius’ Fasti” used queer approaches to temporality to explore the earliest attested Roman fasti, which exists now only in citations and quotations from later authors. This fasti, a Roman calendar, is attested to have been written by Marcus Fulvius Nobilior in the first decades of the 2nd century BCE. Though the study of this fasti has the potential to tell us about the development of later Roman fasti my talk focused on what it might tell us about the construction and experience of time during the mid-Republic.

Traditionally, scholarship has grappled with the combination of cyclical and linear time as represented in the fasti. However, as many queer understandings of time do not take linear chronologies as granted, their use allowed me to reintegrate previously discordant understandings of the calendar. The original combination of linear and cyclical elements was unprecedented at the time the fasti was written, and I thus, I demonstrated that viewing them as separate overlooks the important developments made in Fulvius’ fasti.

Queer time theories unsettle normative conceptions of linear time. They allow us to make visible the way institutions and social conventions influence individual’s use and experience of time. This allowed me to problematise the presentation of the calendar as reflecting a neutral vision of time and instead demonstrate how Fulvius’ fasti reinforced societal expectations of elite men’s life paths. By considering the constructed nature of time I was able to discuss how viewers of the fasti with different positionalities may have understood the calendar within their own experience of time.

My talk was a part of a panel which I co-organized entitled “‘An Open Mesh of Possibilities’ Queer Theory in Classics and Ancient World Studies,” and though my paper was a stand-alone talk, its success is deeply indebted to my fantastic co-panelists. Together Tobias Fulton, Trish Springer, and I showcased a wide range of applications of queer theories and highlighted the many benefits of their application to the study of the ancient world. Through a very intentional and extended collaboration we were able to present three papers that were much more than the sum of their parts. We created resonances across the three papers, laying theoretical groundwork for each other, returning to themes, and reframing previous conclusions. By queering the traditional panel structure we demonstrated how to put queer methodologies into practice. Through co-creation and collaboration we presented the audience with an open mesh of possibilities and invited them to lean into what is possible, rather than clinging to what is certain.

Meteor Showers and Cosmic Dust: Retranslating the Technical Terms of the Pyramid Texts

Elizabeth Leaning (she/her) (University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau)

Presenting at ASCS as an Egyptologist is always a heavy commitment. While steps have been taken in recent years to make the conference accessible, there is certainly a feeling among Egyptologists (and other scholars in non-traditional fields) that we have to go to extra lengths to make our work both understandable and appealing to the Classicists. This year, I presented on the part of my thesis I thought would best meet these criteria – a lexicographical study. Though Egyptology has its own unique quirks when it comes to lexicography (the visual element of communication springs to mind), it seemed the best way to explain my research to a non-specialist audience, as lexicographical research is very common in Classical philology. However, the lens with which I conducted this lexicographical study was not so commonplace at ASCS, nor in academia as a whole. After all, “archaeoastronomy” is not a field many people have heard of. However, as the study of ancient history increasingly looks towards interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, fields such as archaeoastronomy are beginning to shift from the peripheries of academia and into the limelight.

Archaeoastronomy – described by Clive Ruggles as “a field with academic work of high quality at one end but uncontrolled speculation bordering on lunacy at the other”¹ – is the study of how ancient cultures observe and understand the night sky. A relatively recent field of study, archaeoastronomy combines an understanding of a culture’s literature, art, and architecture with mathematical and astronomical knowledge of the celestial phenomena that they were observing and reflecting. It struggles against preconceived notions of “astronomy = astrology”, theories about alien interference, and the ever-present colonial overtones that relegate complex astronomical thought to European cultures. My PhD thesis finds its place amongst this new and complex, but fast-growing, field of study – examining the astronomical data encoded in the ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts.

The Pyramid Texts are a corpus of mythological data that date back to the 24th century BC. They were inscribed on the walls of eleven tombs (six kings and five queens), and provide evidence of the earliest mythologies and beliefs of ancient Egyptian culture. However, while being inherently religious and mythological, it is a celestial afterlife for kings and queens that they depict. Amongst metaphors of ascending on falcon’s wings and devouring the gods, archaeoastronomers can find references to meteor showers, cosmic dust, and other astronomical events. The Pyramid Texts are an expansive corpus that are probably the most-studied text in Egyptology (so a terrible choice for a PhD thesis). However, since their discovery and publication in the 1840s, only five publications have considered their astronomy. There is a stunning dearth of scholarship on just how much astronomy ancient Egyptians encoded into this undeniable astronomical text.

The paper I presented at ASCS explored one of the ways in which I am attempting to uncover this “hidden” astronomical knowledge. Using lexicographical methods I examined the ancient Egyptian words traditionally translated as “iron of the sky”, “lake” and “horizon”, arguing that in the astronomical context of the Pyramid Texts they were better translated as “meteor shower”, “cosmic dust” and “syzygy of sun and earth”. In cases where these astronomical phenomena were documented in the Pyramid Texts, I suggest that the astronomical data is not so much “hidden” and “encoded”, but merely obfuscated behind the use of technical terms. After all, no modern scientific text that discusses “accretion disks”, “event horizons” and “black holes” could be accused of deliberately secreting away the astronomical knowledge behind these apparently mundane terms. This paper sits sits both in conversation with the interdisciplinary scholarship² and Egyptological community³ of Australasia. Both it and my broader PhD thesis aim to network these influences together into what I can only hope is a coherent methodology through which to explore the astronomical knowledge of ancient Egypt.

1. Quoted in Carlson, J. (1999). “A Professor of Our Own”. Archaeoastronomy & Ethnoastronomy News 33. ↩︎
2. Postgraduate students in particular are crossing disciplinary barriers to see the ancient world through new lenses. At ASCS46 this included but was by no means limited to those papers by Jemima McPhee (Australian National University), Jaymie Orchard (University of Otago), Shona Edwards (University of Adelaide), Haydn Lea (Australian Catholic University), Fenella Palanca (University of Melbourne) and Chelsea Schwartz (University of Adelaide). ↩︎
3. Particular thanks must be given to Dr. Julia Hamilton, who provided guidance both for my ASCS paper and for this write-up! ↩︎