Bret Devereaux

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

And of course I do that as a historian, but it isn't like archaeologists aren't already making those broader connections or that philologists can't (in many cases I came to those texts because philologist mentors said, "oh, you think that's cool, look at *this*)... 13/15

So I don't know where the field needs to go. It's tricky because I think we do need to evolve as a field towards a broader vision, but we also need to do so without opening the doors to forces which would just abolish departments and jobs and replace them with nothing. 14/15