Details, details....

On Friday they took us down into the bowels of the British Museum to look at some 'artefacts'. There surrounded by rows of staggeringly beautiful Athenian vases, we looked at loom weights and perfume bottles, bits of text and jewellery. They asked us all to think about what they were and and how old they were. The idea was that we should get our hands on the material which is the bedrock of any arguments we might make. That theoretical interest is fine, but for me the overwhelming feeling was that I was finally confronting 'the stuff'. It was the same when in our first seminar about ancient Greek religion, we were confronted with a recently discovered inscription from Thessaly, and asked to construe it [not linguistically, as we had a translation, although even so there were words which nobody can understand]. After decades of trying to find out 'what the experts think' this was exhilarating; we were looking at the moment. when no-one knew. And weird it was: 'rules' for a a cult of an unnamed goddess, with strange gods, peculiar provisions, including a ban on sacrificing pigs, and a lot of stipulations about 'purity'. Here as at the BM, we were being asked to make our own judgments. And the devil, as always, is in the details...

So the BM stuff was calculated to jar our preconceptions: of 2 loomweights, the coarser was older, but more likely to produce fine cloth, while the Roman sealstone with the 'better' engraving was actually a more mundane object that the rock crystal Minoan version, which was clearly a top person's possession.

But I'm a romantic and always will be, so you can imagine how I felt when confronted with an iron arrowhead, from the beach at Marathon

New world, ancient world

Today, after more than 40 years, I have become a student again, on an MA course in Classical Art and Archaeology at King's College London. I've been working round the edges of the academic world of the classics for quite a long time, but this is a quite different proposition.
For one thing, everything is a lot sterner, more businesslike than I remember. There's a lot more emphasis on TURNING UP, on completing assignments, and meeting deadlines. It's all coursework, so there's no chance of winging it in the exam, and there's a special programme to identify plagiarism when you submit your work online.
However what's really exhilarating, as I have found in learning to navigate the library system is the sheer scale of what's accessible: vast searchable databases,  a huge range of electronic books and journals - the entire world at your fingertips.
The question is of course, will I be able to make use of it all? In 30 years in television, I've made lots of films about the ancient world, but in almost all cases I was reporting on other people's conclusions, and evidence was largely there for illustration rather than proof. As one friend put it I was jumping from the top of one ladder of inference to another like a demented gibbon. Now I will have to create those ladders myself. I think that will be quite testing, and a lot of hard work. But fascinating too, of course.
The next question is what to study? In TV I've done a lot of work on religious issues as well as history, so I'm hoping to concentrate on how ancient religion worked. It may be that myexperience will help with this. I certainly hope so. But it maybe that it points me in all the wrong directions. We shall find out.
I'm off now, for the initial meeting with my tutor. I hope to bring you more about this later on, and perhaps more interesting, stuff about what I am studying.