Iron Age IIB Culture in the Liminal Zone of Ancient Judah...OH WAIT!

[:1]OH WAIT! This isn't Guild Wars Lore, this is real world archaeology!

Hello everyone,

Sorry to hijack your forum for a few minutes Leon!

I hope you are all doing well. I stopped by today to attend to a private message from a member of Blade and Rose, and I thought drop into my old halls of esteemed learning in the Lore Forum to see how you are all doing.

As the title of this thread illustrates in jest, I am now a real archaeologist!--well, at least an archaeologist graduate student.

Currently, I'm a researcher at a museum, specializing in Greek and Roman antiquities, and specifically in symbolism and inscriptions on Greek and Roman numismatics.

I'm also a fellow for the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) and have been given a grant for my first archaeological dig! I'll also be published for the first time this fall/winter in ASOR's annual bulletin of archaeology, so if you are in an academic institution with access to ASOR's journals, look for my name sometime this fall/winter.

In a few days, I will be leaving for Israel to participate in my first real excavation at Tel Zayit. If you are a follower of archaeology, you may have heard that the oldest Hebrew abecedary was discovered there in 2005, dating to 950 BCE, challenging what we thought we knew about the timeline of literacy in the ANE. If you have two hours to kill, check it out, we are featured on the PBS Nova special "The Bible's Buried Secrets", which is available to watch online in entirety for free on PBS's website.

Believe it or not, many of the talents I fostered here at the Lore Forum, I am now using in the real life field. So, I have to say thank you to all of you for the years of great academic debate we shared.

So, feel free to drop me a private message sometime. They go right to my email, and I promise I'll respond in a timely manner. I'm glad to see you are all still dedicated to the lore of Guild Wars, keep those developers honest!

And if you ever need an inscription translated from Latin or ancient Greek, feel free to give me a call |||Congrats! Sounds like you're doing well.

Maybe you can make some money on the side properly translating tattoos for people...|||Oh man. Ignorance is bliss they say. I have a friend who speaks Japanese and Chinese, and he loves to laugh at people who think they have a tattoo that says something like "brave" or "dragon" but actually says something like "stupid" or something worse.|||The GW lore master becomes a RL lore master, huh... |||Quote:








The GW lore master becomes a RL lore master, huh...




Not all too surprising. Many lore lovers I've talked to in game ends up going into topics of various kinds of history. I'm a history fanatic myself (I particularly love mythology - mainly norse mythology), so other lore-lovers ("masters" or otherwise) being interested in historical knowledge is actually rather expected in my view.|||Yeah, after all, we play the game ideally as a reflection of who we are. So, it isn't surprising that what you do in game reflects who you are in the real world.

Of course, we probably shouldn't take this line of thought too far, haha.|||Happy to hear you are doing well; and right in the thick of it!

If you find Joko in any digs around Egypt, be sure to phone me first . Seriously though, welcome to graduate academia (academia just gets better and better as one continues on imo); does archeology have a "longer" Doctoral program or do they split it up with a Masters first? Just curious, I have a friend working on Anthropology whose program was a "combined" (2 years one would have gone for Masters was added to the time) Doctoral program right out of high school; I think some other fields do the same.|||Depends on the program. My field is not archaeology, per se, but Religious Studies. I'm doing archaeology to have a better understanding of the phenomenology of religion and how it fits into both the historical and modern cross-section of the sociocultural construct.

My PhD work is going to be focusing on the phenomenon of synchronization in modern American religious culture, with my essential argument being that Americans are not a "Christian" nation, but an essential deist nation that has developed a "popular" religion that is not neatly confined within the definition of any current Western religion but is closer to the religious landscape of Asian nations, specifically Southeast Asia. Tel Zayit is in the Liminal Zone of ancient Judah so it is a perfect example of cross pollination of between Philistine and Judahite/Jewish culture in the ancient world which fits a very similar model to what is happening currently in the US and Europe.|||Interesting thesis.|||Yes, well, we'll see how it plays out. If there is one thing I've learned about research it's that no matter how great your idea is going in, it will always get more complex by the end. I'm just happy to be doing what I love.