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Meet me in Ankh-Morpork at Sator Square
Feb. 8th, 2011 11:08 pmOn Saturday, I was confronted with a mystical word square from the third century, a palindrome intended to confuse demons:
"Arepo" is not a real Latin word — or, at least, it is a hapax legomenon, a word that appears in no other known context — so it is generally taken to be a proper name. If the square is translatable at all, it probably means something like "Arepo the sower supports the wheels with care." The letters can also be rearranged to form two PATERNOSTERs in a cross, with two AO (read: alpha and omega) pairs left over, which leads some people to think it's a Christian symbol.
I think some people are wishful thinkers. But it's a very cool word puzzle, whatever it means.
This Sator Square was at the McMullen Museum at Boston College, which all this semester will be displaying artifacts (like that one) from Dura-Europos. The exhibit was arranged by one of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
adfamiliares's colleagues, which meant she and I got an invite to the pre-opening reception for donors, where we were plied with dates and perfectly dressed lamb chops and baklava and given a chance to explore the exhibit before anyone else. We saw fragments from many religions, all jostling shoulder-by-jowl: Roman temples and Persian friezes and a Mithraeum and a synagogue and a Christian house church.
For sitting through an endless parade of thank-yous, we were rewarded with three-minute condensed lectures from scholars who've studied the site, the most rewarding given by rock star Simon James of the University of Leicester. He'd reconstructed a daring and gruesome story of mining and counter-mining between the Roman garrison and the Persian invaders, which ended when the Persians poisoned the Romans with the smoke from a fire of sulfur and bitumen — early chemical warfare, learned from the Greeks. The Persian who'd set the fire fell dead, one single nameless Persian skeleton found in a tunnel among twenty Romans, and his very helmet was on display in the museum upstairs. Chilling. (For more on this story, see this article.)
I felt very underdressed — it was ostensibly black-tie, and I do not really own a tie of any color, excepting fish — but I'm glad K. dragged me along.
R O T A S
O P E R A
T E N E T
A R E P O
S A T O R"Arepo" is not a real Latin word — or, at least, it is a hapax legomenon, a word that appears in no other known context — so it is generally taken to be a proper name. If the square is translatable at all, it probably means something like "Arepo the sower supports the wheels with care." The letters can also be rearranged to form two PATERNOSTERs in a cross, with two AO (read: alpha and omega) pairs left over, which leads some people to think it's a Christian symbol.
I think some people are wishful thinkers. But it's a very cool word puzzle, whatever it means.
This Sator Square was at the McMullen Museum at Boston College, which all this semester will be displaying artifacts (like that one) from Dura-Europos. The exhibit was arranged by one of
adfamiliares's colleagues, which meant she and I got an invite to the pre-opening reception for donors, where we were plied with dates and perfectly dressed lamb chops and baklava and given a chance to explore the exhibit before anyone else. We saw fragments from many religions, all jostling shoulder-by-jowl: Roman temples and Persian friezes and a Mithraeum and a synagogue and a Christian house church.For sitting through an endless parade of thank-yous, we were rewarded with three-minute condensed lectures from scholars who've studied the site, the most rewarding given by rock star Simon James of the University of Leicester. He'd reconstructed a daring and gruesome story of mining and counter-mining between the Roman garrison and the Persian invaders, which ended when the Persians poisoned the Romans with the smoke from a fire of sulfur and bitumen — early chemical warfare, learned from the Greeks. The Persian who'd set the fire fell dead, one single nameless Persian skeleton found in a tunnel among twenty Romans, and his very helmet was on display in the museum upstairs. Chilling. (For more on this story, see this article.)
I felt very underdressed — it was ostensibly black-tie, and I do not really own a tie of any color, excepting fish — but I'm glad K. dragged me along.
