Bret Devereaux

...and also non-state peoples in Spain, Gaul, etc. I think we can identify a more-or-less interconnected region, including much of Europe, the Near East, and North Africa, as a functional, useful unit of study (ofc with connections outside to other places!) 5/15

And that's what I mean when I say I study the 'Broader Mediterranean.' I've tried to express in my scholarship, where I aim to treat the different component societies (state and non-state) of this Broader Mediterranean with equal weight, in so far as the evidence allows. 6/15

So my diss./book project is pointedly comparative discussing military costs and systems. Likewise, "Strategy and Cost" (https://doi.org/10.25162/historia-2020-0020 …) is trying to get us to think at the First Punic War in a more equal way that allows Carthage more agency. 7/15

I can imagine in my mind what a Classics department aiming to embody that approach might look like; rather than dismantling existing institutions, it might seek to widen them to include more fully new texts and new languages. 8/15

At the graduate level, maybe rather than mandating Greek and Latin, it might present a number of languages (Greek, Latin, Egyptian, Akkadian, etc) and base requirements on a 'choose two' system. No less linguistic rigor, necessarily, but a broader base of languages. 9/15

Since, for now, specialists in ancient near eastern languages are scarce, it might be worthwhile - since we all know how to teach remotely now - at first for departments to band together to provide those learning opportunities. 10/15

And of course it means that, in undergraduate teaching, pulling non-Greek and Roman texts (in translation) into teaching. Which there are enough translations to begin doing! (the more we teach it, the more the need for teaching texts will motivate new translations). 11/15

I've taught with chunks of the Book of the Dead (Egypt), the Epic of Gilgamesh (Sumerian/Akkadian), the Enuma Elish (Babylonian), the Song of Kumarbi (Levantine), the Code of Hammurabi (Babylon again) and the Kadesh Inscription (Egypt), alongside Homer, Hesiod, Livy, etc. 12/15