The website also features worksheets and toolkits for educators to replicate our activities. The Ashmolean Education team will continue to offer Latin Adventure and self-guided AshLi materials for schools that visit the museum.

After 5 years the Ashmolean Latin Inscriptions project is coming to an end. We have made plenty of new discoveries. We have staged a Roman funeral and been pelted with polystyrene sling bullets. We’ve installed new displays and shared our love of inscriptions with diverse audiences.

While the active phase of the project is now over, this means that you can now enjoy the fruits of our labour! Many thanks to everyone who has worked on our project over the years and all the people who have participated in our events and engaged with us online. 

We wanted to look at how words and objects work together in Latin inscriptions, and give participants a chance to explore the objects as fully as possible. Many of our inscriptions (including moulds and stamps) were used by Romans to make marks and almost all of them would have been easier to touch in ancient times. To try out this kind of relationship with objects, we decided to use replicas.

Scanning the altar

We commissioned 10 high quality replicas from three brilliant makers to get a variety of kinds of objects to touch, draw, and experiment with. Graham Taylor made pottery replicas by hand (along with their moulds and stamps) that let us explore how Romans could mass produce things with beautiful decoration, as well as a set of pan pipes that we could play for ourselves. Tanya Bentham made real bronze copies of a ring and a votive tablet, letting us see (and try on) the personal dimensions of Roman religion. Finally, we teamed up with ThinkSee3D to 3D print copies of some of our favourite objects, including the altar of Lucius Marcius Pacatus and the tombstone of Alexander the beef seller.

Stamps for making a terra sigillata bowl

Participants came up with some brilliant interpretations of the ancient objects, and we want to share a few with you.

This painting reconstructs the altar of Lucius Marcius Pacatus, taking inspiration from another snake fighting scene that archaeologists have reconstructed. It brings to life the bright ancient colours the altar might have originally had:

Reconstructing the colours on the altar

Our Hercules dedication plaque inspired some brilliant personal messages, like this one cut out of newspaper:

A tabula ansata collage, with the artist’s own phrase.

And this intricate textured version using string:

A textured tabula ansata collage with a personal message

This brilliant market stall takes inspiration from Alexander the beef seller, to imagine selling pottery like the replicas we had been handling:

A market stall selling Roman pots

We had a great time and we are delighted with the art that everyone has produced. Congratulations!

You can book a close encounter with Roman objects now by contacting the Ashmolean Education department. The new replicas are available for schools and other booked groups.

What does it feel like to hold a Roman sling bullet?

What can we learn about the Romans from a little lump of terracotta?

How can cartoons bring ancient Rome to life?

What was a Roman funeral really like?

These are some of the questions we’ve been exploring with our Sutton Scholars. We’ve teamed up with Warwick University’s Sutton Scholars programme  to give a lively group of students a taste of university-style learning and to experiment with some different ways of getting to know the Romans.

Choice words on mock sling bullets

Along the way, we’ve been behind the scenes at the Ashmolean to handle real Roman objects. Scholars have learned enough Latin to insult each other on sling bullets and read Latin inscriptions for themselves. They’ve critiqued our Roman funeral video and had a go at doing a better job writing eulogies

Real Roman objects at a special Ashmolean Museum handling session.

Scholars picked out an object from the AshLI catalogue at the beginning of the project to research in-depth. They’re working on a giant poster and a presentation to show it off. We can’t wait to see what they’ve come up with.

P.S. Sutton Scholars: if you’re reading this, the comments are a great place to pick our brains and ask for tips!

This is one of our sling bullets from the battle of Perusia. Last year we explored how Roman soldiers would write messages to the enemy on their sling bullets. Experts have found this inscription difficult to read, and a number of possible interpretations have been proposed over the years. Thanks to close examination by the project team, we have come up with a new reading that is more plausible and far ruder.

You can find out the answer from our latest podcast (warning: strong language in both Latin and English):

There were lots of great guesses. @JAugust7 rightly guessed that the message was a rude one, and makes the plausible suggestion that it was about Fulvia, one of the major figures in the siege of Perusia.

Something mean about Fulvia? https://t.co/a03tp7oS1o

— Julia August (@JAugust7) December 14, 2016

@llewelyn_morgan was the runaway winner, correctly reading the last word as OCTAVI, and then going to the Ashmolean in person to see the rest:

@cornwell_hannah @LoveArchaeology @wmarybeard @holland_tom C Caes Octav?

— Llewelyn Morgan (@llewelyn_morgan) December 15, 2016

@cornwell_hannah @AshmoleanLatin Well I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked! But still foxed by the Latin. It doesn't read FELLAS, does it?

— Llewelyn Morgan (@llewelyn_morgan) December 16, 2016

Special mention goes to @perlineamvalli:

A sort of 'whssshhhhtttt!' as it goes past your ear, unlike the 'weeeeeee!' of the Burnswark shot https://t.co/boLuue9Qw7

— Per Lineam Valli (@perlineamvalli) December 16, 2016

for making us laugh. You can find out about the whistling sling bullets from Burnswark here. They are a great example of how sling bullets could be a sophisticated psychological weapon, as well as doing physical harm.

You can see this bullet in our new displays in the Ashmolean’s Reading and Writing gallery.

Dr Abigail Baker has joined the team as a Research Fellow. She will be running education and outreach activities and working on completing the web catalogue. She has a background in museum studies and archaeology and used to work for the British School at Athens’ Knossos Curation Project.

Both Hannah and Jane have exciting new jobs. Hannah has started a new Leverhulme-funded research project at the Institute of Classical Studies on the production of space as a means to understanding diplomacy as a social practice in the Roman world. Jane is now a Lecturer in Ancient History at Leicester University. We wish them both all the best in their new roles.

It is going to be a busy few months at the Ashmolean Latin Inscriptions Project. We’ll be taking activity days to local primary schools and putting more resources on the web for everyone to use. The final touches are being put on our displays in the Ashmolean galleries and we are finalising the online catalogue.

You can keep up with news from the project on Twitter and Facebook. In the mean time, if you have any questions, comments or suggestions, you can get in touch with us at ashli@classics.ox.ac.uk.

As our corpse, we chose Tiberius Claudius Abascantianus, a name familiar to us from a beautiful inscribed funerary-urn in the Ashmolean collection, which we had recently put on display in our new columbarium installation. Now you can hear the lightening talk that Prof. Alison Cooley gave that night, explaining what we know about the real Abascantianus:

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas,

The AshLI Team

Visitors were offered a series of free activities, including tours with Alison Cooley, workshops on how to read a Roman tombstone with Janie Masséglia, lectures from Keeper of Antiquities Paul Roberts, and Roman object-handling with Hannah Cornwell. The AshLI team members were all helped by postgraduates from Warwick and Oxford Universities, who all showed their dedication to their subject by wearing Roman costume.

Colleagues from the Ashmolean Education department ran a craft session involving inscription-writing attended by more than 200 children, Helen Ackers guided groups around the Roman portraits in the Cast Gallery, and professional Living History expert Tanya Bentham offered Roman story-telling and costume demonstrations. Young actors from Gruffdog Theatre’s production of Julius Caesar also dropped in to give a lunchtime performance in the grand setting of the Randolph Gallery. At the end of a very busy day, with each activity being repeated several times, the museum estimated that around 1500 people had taken part directly in the day’s events.

[See image gallery at blogs.ashmolean.org]

A cast of twenty, in full costume, including lictors, musicians, mourners, an Archimimus, a funeral director and members of the Roman household, laid to rest the body of Tiberius Claudius Abascantianus, a Roman commemorated in a fine ash-urn in the Ashmolean’s collection. The event was the result of months of preparation, which included making costumes, building a funerary couch complete with corpse, creating an ash urn (with the help of Amy Chaplin, on work experience with us from Cherwell School), learning to play Roman musical instruments, and casting wax imagines from the team’s own faces.

The funeral was repeated twice during the evening, with each performance including an introduction to the cast, excerpts from the Twelve Tables on Roman funeral practices, a eulogy for the deceased, an off-stage cremation and, finally, the installation of Abascantianus’ remains in the family tomb, all accompanied by the sounds of a cornu, an aulos, and team of enthusiastic professional mourners. The museum, packed with over 4,000 visitors, perfectly evoked the bustle and noise of a Roman funeral, with the procession winding its way through the crowds, and with more following along behind.

The funeral was masterminded by AshLI to celebrate the recent installation of new Roman displays in several galleries, and in particular a hand-painted columbarium in the Reading and Writing Gallery housing the original ash urn of the real Abascantianus. The decoration of the niched tomb, with its display of funerary plaques, inscribed ash chests and pierced libation ‘table’, was inspired by the columbarium at the Villa Doria Pamfilii in Rome, and handpainted by Oxford-based designer Claire Venables. Head of the AshLI project, Prof. Alison Cooley, was on hand with a series of short talks to introduce visitors to the new columbarium display and tell the story of the real Abascantianus who had first inspired the event.

New columbarium (‘dovecote’) tomb in the Ashmolean Museum, installed by AshLI and hand painted by Claire Venables of Giraffe Corner.