Each month, I will be sharing a roundup of the coolest classics events happening across the UK, with a focus on arts and culture.
If you'd like to include an event, exhibition, or something similar in a future roundup, please email me at [email protected].
Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Ancient Egypt
British Museum, London
Now booking until February 2023
For centuries, life in ancient Egypt was a mystery. We could only glimpse into this hidden world, until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone provided the key to decoding hieroglyphs, allowing us to read this ancient script. The breakthrough expanded our understanding of human history by some 3,000 years.
Marking 200 years since the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, this major exhibition takes you through the trials and hard work that preceded, and the revelations that followed, this ground-breaking moment.
Sing in me, Muse: The Classical, the Critical, and the Creative
Goldsmiths, University of London / Online
From 3 November 2022
This series will bring together scholars and students from a variety of disciplines with creative writers and other artists, to examine how the literary and material cultures of ancient Greece, the Near East and Rome have been adapted and rewritten at later times and other places.
On 24 November, Marina Warner will give a lecture on ‘Viral Spiral: Multiple Shape-shifting from Ovid to Covid‘, exploring stories of multiple transformations in and out of different bodies, and reflect on their significance in relation to today’s concerns with fluid identities and interspecies contact and contagion.
The Rosetta Stone, Champollion and Ancient Languages
British Museum, London – online only
10 November 2022
This discussion explores how and why, some 200 years ago, the exciting race developed between French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion and England's Thomas Young to decipher the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone.
Join exhibition curator Dr Ilona Regulski as she introduces this event – and the Rosetta Stone. Dr Irving Finkel, British Museum, will then chair other distinguished experts to consider the momentous discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 and why it was so important in the decipherment of ancient languages.
African American Feminism and the Discipline of Classics with Dan Orrells
King's College, London / Online
17 November 2022
In this talk, Dan Orrells will trace the deeply-embedded desire for a ‘Classical body’ which was racialised as White in the emergence of the discipline of Classics. The talk will first examine the work of a so-called 'founding father' of Classics, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose 1764 book is seen as an inaugural moment in the history of Classical scholarship. It will then explore Black feminist responses to this racialization of antiquity, in particular by focusing on the award-winning 2015 poem Voyage of the Sable Venus by American poet Robin Coste Lewis.
From the Mersey to the Nile: Studying the Rosetta Stone in Liverpool
University of Liverpool / Online
19 November 2022
This year, is the 200th anniversary of the decipherment of Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Join the Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at the University of Liverpool as we focus on a pivotal artefact in this subject: the Rosetta Stone, discovered in Egypt in 1799.
This remarkable object features text inscribed in ancient Greek, and also in ancient Egyptian (the Hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts), and therefore enabled scholars to make a huge breakthrough in understanding the ancient Egyptian language.
Troy Story: Age of the Hero
Keble O'Reilly Theatre, Oxford
23 – 26 November 2022
Sing Muses, Sing of the Wrath of Achilles – but wait, is that really the best place to start?
An adaptation of Homer's Iliad, Troy Story: Age of the Hero follows the beginning and end of the war in Troy – a story with heroism, sacrifice, and duty at its core – and a battle for glory and legacy.
Featuring an original pop-rock soundtrack, written by students Sav Sood and Tallulah Knowles, Troy Story is a retrospective of the epic woven with contemporary interpretations of the text.
An Evening with Mary Beard, Classics for All
Linklaters, London / Zoom
30 November 2022
Join Classics for All live at Linklaters (Silk Street, London) or online (via YouTube) for a privileged insight into Mary’s lifelong love affair with classics.
Expect wide-reaching conversation on Mary’s personal classics journey, her experience of being a woman in classics, key influences on her life and career, and the contemporary relevance of classics now - and its future. An audience Q&A will follow, giving you the opportunity to put your burning questions to Mary.
Book tickets / free online tickets are available for members of The Chorus.
Kitty is currently doing an MPhil in Classics at Cambridge. She is focusing on travel narratives and cultural identity in Roman Greece, particularly in the work of Pausanias, Apuleius and the extant Greek novelists. She is an active member of The Chorus and sits on the student steering committee.