 Hello everybody. Welcome to Teaching and Studying the Classics Today, a faculty and student round table. Thank you to all of you joining us here in person and online. I'm Dr. Maria Neutrinfor for those of you who don't know me. I'm a Central Collection Library for Rare Books. And I'm thrilled to be welcoming all of you and introducing today's event. Before I dive in, just a few logistics. Respirants and water are past the elevators and to your left. I'm going to introduce the speakers in pairs before each pair presents. And then we'll open up the conversation to Q&A at the end of all the presentations. And at that point, or after Q&A, there will also be time for you to explore the materials in the front of the room if you're interested, which we know you will be. And these are all materials that will be discussed during today's presentation. You'll be reminded again later, but if you do come up, please leave your belongings at your seat. And there will also be, there are surveys on the back table. And a link to a survey will be put in the chat for those of you joining online. Please take a minute before you leave to complete a survey. Your feedback is very valuable to us. And so on to the main event. The inspiration for this round table was multiple collaborations that I've had with classes, students, and faculty over the past few years. I'm excited by this research and teaching projects, and so I want others to know more about them. I've been doing these rounds of roles for the past few years, and I'm very grateful to all of those who agree to speak and share their expertise and help me and others to better understand the materials in our collection. These materials are collected and preserved to be used, and anyone can get in contact with me to request access or more information or to discuss ideas for future collaborations or projects. Please don't hesitate. So the presentations are going to proceed more or less chronologically, so we'll begin with Dr. Corey Crawford. Dr. Crawford is Associate Professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies. His research is broadly focused on the intersection of text, space, and material culture, as well as on questions of gender and authority in ancient West Asia or the Near East. He earned his PhD at Harvard University and has written on a variety of topics, including on sacred space, the visuality, gender, and the modern reception of the Bible. He was named University Professor in 2014 and held a year-long fellowship at the Biblical Archaeology Institute at the University of Tubingen, Germany. Dr. Crawford is an active archaeologist, digging at the ancient Canaanite city of Hazor. Professor Crawford will be presenting with Hayley Renwick, Hayley is a Classical Civilizations graduate. She hopes to continue her study in Classics and continue on to graduate school to study to be a Roman historian. Good. So, please. Crawford. I don't want to download that. No, you're good here. Okay. Great. Thank you so much. Dr. Intritor, and everybody who has put work into this roundtable, and I'm really happy to talk about my experience in engaging with these materials and with Dr. Intritor and the library because it is one of those things that makes the university a really special place, is that these collaborations can happen and just a plug for any administrator listening to keep supporting them. So, I'm just going to run through really briefly my connection to the materials and then how students got involved and it starts with, if I can do full screen. Anyway, it's fine. This is an email, take my word for it, that I went back and found back in 2017, Dr. Intritor emailed me and said, hey, I want to introduce myself and we have some stuff that you might be interested in for your courses. She had gone through and looked at the courses I was teaching and I was in the throes of tenure and eventually got back to her. And so we went and we looked at the Bible that Dr. Bernstein is going to talk about today. And kind of as I recall as an afterthought, she said, oh, we've got these other things that you might be interested in also, which are these objects here. Cuneiform tablet, Egyptian scarab, probably Egyptian scarab stamp seal and a cylinder seal. And I about fell out of my chair because I had been here already for eight years or something and never in a million years would have thought we had a Cuneiform tablet. And I studied these objects in grad school, these kinds of objects. And so that led me to ask a bunch of questions. And we opened the collaboration, I guess, on these objects. And so I wanted to publish them eventually, but also to analyze them and get them translated where possible and things like that and also preserve them. The library had already had some initiatives underway. The CT scan, micro CT scans and 3D printing is a great video on it. And you see both Miriams in the picture there as the tablet is going into the micro CT scanner, which enabled the production of 3D printed models of these objects so that even the ones that are that are sort of friable fragile could be engaged with. I helped coordinate a, in 2022, a visit to Dr. Catherine Fornash's lab in geological sciences. So we could run some scanning electron microscopy studies of these objects, which yielded not only close up images, but also tells us about how they were manufactured, but also the composition. We did some x-ray scatter analysis that showed us that maybe some of the documentation was not accurate that came with the objects themselves. So the question of provenance became also really, really important. Where did these come from? And they were sold to the university by this guy Alfred Stites. So this is an example of a certificate that came along with, I believe this is OU's version of this certificate. Sold by this guy Alfred Stites, a real character, lived to be 94, died in 2016. And he packaged and sold many of these collections to universities across the country, and not just universities also, libraries and presumably individuals, but those are hard to find. And so of course Miriam was instrumental in sort of digging up this information. And she also found that there was this guy Arthur Askins, a professor, an emeritus professor who in 2007 had just retired from UC Berkeley. So he had been trying to reassemble pages from a late medieval Spanish manuscript, which I say Portuguese because some people, it was mismarked as some of the leaves were mismarked as Portuguese. And he had dug in to this group or this company that Alfred Stites had restarted called Folio Files. And he had left, Arthur Askins had left two boxes of notes in the Bancroft Special Collections Library at UC Berkeley. So he had done a lot of the background work into who purchased these collections because he was trying to reassemble these pages. So I supported by my department and I think some HTC funds. I went in September 2022 to the Bancroft Library, such a rough trip to go into California and enjoy the good weather. And look at these boxes and photograph lots and lots of the pages of research that he had compiled and left there in the Special Collections. So that gave us a lot of information about who had purchased similar lots of items. I also met some old friends in this Special Collections visit. This is an email from Arthur Askins to Miriam Shadis at Ohio University asking about our late medieval manuscript leaf, which we had. So we helped collaborate on that project and it was fun to run into her. He published or he circulated the results of his endeavor. This is just a word document and I believe it was published in a journal as well. And then he also summarized Askins, summarized what he had found out about Alfred Stites, this dealer. He had actually met him, gone out to visit him and find out Stites incidentally graduated from Denison up the road in 1944. So I came back from that trip in the middle of the semester and I mentioned to my students where I had been and how exciting it was. And three students approached me independently and said I really want to be a part of this, including two of the students. Well, this is Liliana who was going to be here today, but she's ill. Maggie Bennett and Haley Renwick, who's not pictured in this particular photo, who is going to speak to us in just a second. So we developed the objective, an independent study to find and document the pages from the past sets starting from Askins's research and then to build a survey instrument to send out to libraries to figure out what is the current condition, if known, of the objects that other libraries purchased like the ones that we have. Hopefully the idea, my idea was to build and publish a corpus of these items, trying to figure out maybe what dealer had been used in the acquisition of these objects. We created, we shared, collaborated with a Google sheet and sort of broke up the group, broke up the institutions by the number of people that we had, did some internet research, and then we looked at the objects, here's the three students and Dr. Intritor looking at the objects of the documentation. We also were trained in RedCap, which is a survey instrument that OU is contracted with. And we developed a survey that Haley, this is Haley here, she's going to speak to us in just one second, that Haley, she picked up the software really fast and was sort of the architect. We all collaborate on the language and the flow. And as of this semester, we have a survey that we're about to start to send out to libraries and other institutions to try to track down some of these items, hopefully to get them also published and preserved. So, once again, a plug for collaboration, here are some of the credits of people that have been involved that we've interacted with directly, and a big thank you to those and to the students. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Haley. And I think she's here, yes, to talk about her experience. Oh, yeah, okay. Did where'd she go? Oh, oh, there we are. Okay. We can see you Haley. Perfect. Okay. As Professor Crawford stated, my job primarily was doing the technical skills of making the survey. Everyone, you know, participated in building the questions up, but my job was to make the survey look nice and function properly. This project, as Professor Crawford mentioned, deals a lot with some of the ethics and issues of like, you know, the provenance of these objects, there are beautiful artifacts that we've had for decades that almost nobody knows we have them, which is really unfortunate because they are amazing. We dealt with a lot of questions of how to best, you know, present these objects, both academically with these other universities and libraries, and possibly with publishing. And we all have, you know, come to really care for these objects. And we hope that this project will help bring them more into the light and that by continuing this work will be able to kind of put all these pages and tablets back together. Well, not physically but digitally that anyone who's doing research on say the Cuneiform tablets or the Spanish manuscripts can be able to access them. I mean, there's a lot of issues that have been involved that plague all of the classics studies of provenance and the ethics of trading artifacts, especially back before there was more strict laws. So anything back in the 60s like we have found in this particular project. We hope that, you know, by doing this study that it can help address some of these issues, maybe not would not be fully, of course, but we can start looking at the issues that arise in this kind of project of where they came from the issues that come from the study of them. And at the very least, we hope that by doing this project that these beautiful artifacts will be better preserved that we can get the funding and people to help make sure that not only our tablets and manuscripts and scarab seals gets taken care of and preserved as is our duty by having these artifacts. But the other ones that are spread out throughout the country. So I hope that, you know, by the next steps we get to find where more of these are. I'm excited to see, you know, if they have more images and 3D scans of them, they're fascinating objects. And I'm looking forward to the next steps. I hope that, you know, we get a lot of good replies from the other universities and libraries. Thank you. Awesome. Hailey. Thank you so much, Dr. Crawford and Hailey. So next we have Neil Bernstein, a professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies where he's taught since 2004. He's been a distinguished scholar and resident at Western University, London Art Auditario, a National Humanities Center fellow in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and a Fulbright lecturer at National Taiwan University in Taipei. His books include Silius Italicus, Puneca, I shouldn't try to pronounce these, Rome's More of a Hannibal, and most recently A Translation of Claudium's Complete Works for Rutledge. Professor Bernstein was going to be presenting with Lily on a maze, but unfortunately she is not going to be able to make it today. She is a fourth year in English and Classical Civilizations. After graduation, she hopes to take two years to complete an art history master's before going on to law school to concentrate on cultural heritage, art, and museum law. She's president of the OU Classics Club and vice president of the Comparative Religions Club and Edda's Sigma Phi Honors Society. I need to thank Miriam twice. First, for the exceptional introduction. Secondly, for making what I'm going to talk about today possible, she encouraged Kyle and me to put our learning, our scattered learning about individual manuscripts and the manuscripts of collection together in a package that's accessible to others. Without her inspiration and guidance, we would not have been able to do this. And until just take a little bit to talk about what the manuscripts are, and then I want to talk about how this came about. Okay, so what the manuscripts are, the Ohio University of these special collections is the grateful recipient of another person's generosity. Dr. Farfel was a physician who, as a hobbyist, collected a great number of manuscript leads, individual leads, such as this one, and he left were grateful that he left extensive notes on how he acquired them what he thought they were, which enabled us to begin cataloging them, presenting them on the website. So for many, many, many years, Miriam gave generously of her time to let me bring students in to the special collections library and actually see these things in person. And this really helped me teach Latin students the context of the language that they were learning. How do we come to have the words on the page in front of them that were reading in their Latin books? And then how do people use them? Okay, I'm not sure how big I can get on the screen. Yeah, I can get big enough that you can see a little hand pointing to a... And then you see another person has gone in script, you know, with these neatly lined margins that someone can scribble in, right? You get a whole nother view of these manuscripts when you see actual users interacting with them, leaving their marks on them. Also, I don't know about you, but after many years of studying, I still find this Gothic script hard to read, right? It's not what we're used to. So, as I say, for many years, Miriam gave very generously of her time, allowing me to bring classes in and present and discuss the manuscripts with the class. Thank you, pandemic. And while it was unfortunate in many, many other respects, it was fortunate that just the previous semester, I've been up in Canada as Kyle's guests. So there we were in spring of 2020, having just had a semester together in fall of 2019 when I was a visitor up there. And then we were both, you know, there in the spring of 2020, dreading the fall of 2020 when we would have to start teaching without a classroom, right? And he is even more into manuscript study than I am. I do it mainly as a teaching tool to help students better appreciate the Latin language if they're learning the contents in which these Latin words were produced and consumed. So we put our heads together and said the same kind of things we've been doing in that room. Could we do them in a series of online tutorials? And Miriam said, yes, you can. And as I say, it gave us the structure and the format for what became ultimately five tutorials. One presented by Miriam on the prize item of Latin manuscript collection, a Bible. This is the one millionth volume, right, presented to a high university celebrate the acquisition of the one millionth volume. I am not going to touch it. It is a very rare and precious object. It is the combination of thousands of human hours of work, so producing the animal skin substrate that's written on, copying the Bible out by hand, and then doing what we call illumination. In other words, not just why write a letter P when your letter P could take up the entire left margin, really calling attention to the beauty and craftsmanship that has gone to this object. The sort of thing you can kind of get on the screen, but it's not really the same as turning it page by page and seeing how much human labor went into this beautiful display object. Okay, so the first tutorial gives some of those excellences. Then Kyle and I wrote the succeeding four. We start with things that we hope are familiar. This is a printed leaf in the farful collection. It is not handwritten. It was printed on an early printing press. And so it ought to be familiar. The series of four tutorials works from most familiar to least familiar. So even though this is quote familiar, I don't think a lot of you have seen a text laid out in this in most of the books that you read, right? It's a particular 15th century way of presenting text and reading it. So by working from most familiar to less familiar, in other words, here's another printed book, but someone's gone and written a pointer in it, right? And we see that remember the manuscript I showed you at the beginning with all the pointing fingers? We see that habits of thought, habits of using books that began when manuscripts were copied by hand still carry over into the age of print. Okay. Finally, in the second half of the tutorial series, well, we get to the harder stuff. Again, working from most familiar to least familiar. We start with a handwritten text, but one that looks very familiar to us if we're based on current printed type. Think of your time's new Roman that you change your computer setting, you change your word processor setting to when you need a particular thought. Well, this is where it comes from, from the humanist hands of the 15th century. So our collection is not large. But thanks in part to Dr. Farrell's collecting and other kinds of acquisitions like the pages from the past, we are able to trace the history of first copying text by hand, and then the transition into print. I hadn't planned to talk about this because I did not know about site Alfred sites until today. But he had his counterpart in this Latin manuscript collection. Sorry, how do we get out of this? So the counterpart Alfred sites who presented primarily mainly 3D objects, right? No? Primarily. Primarily things. Okay. Okay. To which he added about this. Okay. Otto F. Edger, who thought of the art institute in Cleveland, did very similar things with pages from Latin manuscripts and made no secret about what he was doing. His job was to break apart books and present individual leads to universities and individuals who wanted to acquire a selection. So we talk about Edger as well and the practice of book breaking. And finally, well, we have to face it eventually. We get to the most unfamiliar and most difficult text to read the oldest manuscripts. So, yeah, not the easiest to read. That's the thing I can't advance these, but we get to ones where there are different layouts that were used to different abbreviations that were used to and different scripts. So by the time you are all done, you have a sense of what the Latin manuscript collection looks like, even if you were not able to get into this was a pandemic project. So how do we use it now? Well, here is where I hoped to hand over to Lily. Let me pretend to be here for a second. In other words, now that we have the benefit of these tutorials to work with before we send before we as a class go to the manuscript room and look at these objects. Instead of being exposed to them and having to learn all these ways of looking at them on the spot immediately. We do the tutorials in advance and let's have a higher level interaction with manuscripts when we get there. Next, another person I have to thank is Dr. Charles Buchanan of the Interdisciplinary Arts Program, who generously gave of his time and energy consulting on particularly the illuminations to be found in these manuscripts. Because we now are coming in with a little more experience, I would like to see the Latin manuscript. He's gladly contributed his time each year to talk about illuminations, both in our collection and famous ones such as a manuscript of the poet Virgil Heldin-Baden Library. So that's what we're up to to, as I say, supplement the learning of Latin to say, how is this stuff being used? How, when you know the language, what can you begin to understand about how the words that you are reading come to you? How are they preserved and how are they used by the people to preserve them? Thanks very much for your time. Professor Regula, sorry, the Charles J. King Professor of Humanities and Professor of Classics. He's the author of two books and several scholarly articles and book chapters and specializes in the history of ancient Rome. As director of the King Institute, he works to support the teaching of the humanities at Ohio University and across the state, working to support the high school teachers with programming in the humanities. Dr. Regula will present with Emma Campbell, a sophomore majoring in classical civilization. After graduation, she hopes to attend graduate school to continue her studies in classical history. This past spring, I had the privilege of being an intern in the Mons Center with Dr. Miriam Intertor and studying the classics collection that they hold. So I completed the internship with Miriam and I began the semester with 81 books in their classical collection that had not been previously researched. And I researched them and put eight on display in a digital exhibit. I wrote a weekly reflection on what I found, what I learned, what I thought about it, and how I was going to proceed with my project. And I finished it with a blog post that went into more depth with what I found, my research process, which parts I enjoyed the most and what I learned from the experience as a whole. This is my process. I went through each individual book and looked at each individual page and documented everything that I found on a spreadsheet from every little note that any owner had marked in the margins to flowers that they left pressed or anything similar. I then researched each signature that I found and documented that on a Word document as well as on the spreadsheet. I went over my research and narrowed down which books I was going to exhibit. And then I went back and tried to find any extra information on the owner, where they were from, where the book was printed, who printed it, etc. And I constructed my exhibit based on the location of the owner and the year of publication. And I got to write a blog to go into more depth about this process. And I just wanted to go through and highlight a few books that I found the most interesting or I thought had the most hold-in when we were talking about today. So this is the first one. This book is from Chatsworth, England. It's an anthology of the poems of Horace by the author of this book. There are no names written in this book, but it's from 1594, so we can see how far back the study of classics has gone. This is the second book. It's from Hamilton County, Ohio, and it's a compendium of Greek grammar. The previous owners of this book that I found were Joshua Wilson and Henry Bond. Not much could be found about either of them, but they left some fun messages in the pages of the book for us to find. As you can see, on this page and a few other pages, and one of the books up here, they scribbled back and forth to each other, arguing over whose book it was and who it belonged to, and scribbling out each other's names, as well as a few funny drawings. This is a book from Boston, Massachusetts, published in 1809. It's a book on the truth of the Christian religion. The owner of this book is archaeologist Oric Bates. He was a well-known archaeologist for the Peabody Museum of Harvard, and he is known for his work in Egypt and Sudan under George Reisner. He was another renowned archaeologist. In the picture you can see, this is the book plate that he had pasted in the beginning of the book. This is a book from Athens, Ohio. It's another compendium of Greek grammar. And the previous owner of this book is someone named DJ Patterson. We don't know much about him except that he lived in Athens and passed away here, and is buried somewhere in Athens. This book is from Ohio University, actually, and it's a collection of the complete works of Gaia Celusius Crispus. He was a Roman historian and politician. There are no specific previous owners, but there's a book plate in the front that places it in the original Ohio University and Athens County Library, the Carnegie Library of Ohio University, which is right next door and is now Scripps Hall. These are just my thoughts about my project. I was really excited to research these books. I felt a really strong connection to all of the people that I researched, knowing that we all pursued the same knowledge in different centuries and thousands of years apart. The thing that I still use and think about every day is that people have and always will be people. So often people think of ancient people as stuffy and uptight and serious all the time, but as we can see, especially in the Joshua Wilson and Henry Bond book, people are always going to be people. And it just really helped me form a connection to them and feel really excited to continue my studies knowing that so many people who were so similar to me studied these all throughout history and will continue to study them throughout history. All this was a really lightning project for me. I learned a lot not just about these people and myself, but thanks to Dr. Mayhem and Jator, I learned a lot about how to work with special collections from our books and how to handle the items in those collections and what it means to be an archivist and how much work actually goes into that field. I should call up my notes. I'm afraid I feel a bit like a poser up here. I'm Fred Gugula. I did very little of the work here, virtually none. This is all Emma's work. Emma and Dr. Intratour worked on this together. I was fortunate to spend some time working with Emma on it on some of the translations, and we talked about it, but it was all her work. So I feel a little bit wrong being up here. I certainly don't mean to be presenting her work, but rather to comment on how wonderful an experience it is and how projects like hers show the connections of our academic studies to the real world. In the College of Arts and Sciences, especially in our department in Classics, we are focused on preparing our students, their minds, to interpret, to understand, to read critically, to argue. But people often ask, well, where's the connection to the real life? Where's the connection to the job? How do you get outside of the classroom? And this kind of experience that Emma did, I find is an excellent example of just that. One of the phenomenal things is that books, and I imagine if you are here on a Monday afternoon, you are a fellow bibliophile, and you just love books for themselves and recognize that books are living entities that go through history just the way that we do. And I think this is one of the things that Emma's work caught exceptionally well, is that books are not just objects without a character. They take on the character of whoever possesses them, whoever interacts with them. The scribblings of the two fellows in the book is absolutely hilarious as you go through page by page, and you can see a real relationship, a lived life in there as it goes through. And so I think the study of the books that she brought up finding out, we spent time googling who were these people, trying to understand who they were, how the books got here, especially in the earliest days of Ohio University. Why were these books chosen was a fascinating aspect of it. And so one is the human life, the human connection, the human interaction with books as they go through. Two, another aspect that I thought her project was uniquely good at was really shining a light on the early study of academic fields at Ohio University. Especially people living today, especially some of our students who are spent their whole lives in the information age, it may seem odd to pause and think I wonder if the library has a copy of Horace or of Salist. And one of the things that we talked about when looking through the books that were available is understanding the severe limitations on finding books. And the fact that almost all of the books in the departments, classic departments, original library were all second hand, third hand, fourth hand or more, that you couldn't just go on Amazon and get a copy of Salist. You had to find one. The collection had to be built from other people and tracing the history of these books as a lesson in and of itself of the role that books play in human history, human education and in the education of the institution. The third and last point that I'd like to make on this, and again I want to keep the focus on the work that Emma did, but is the interaction, as I said, with academic learning and the real world practice that she was able to get through the Man Center. And for this I am tremendously grateful to Dr. Intrattor, to Alden Library and to the Man Center in particular, because it is this kind of specific, tangible work that they get to do with real objects that is a whole new aspect of their education. This is something, you know, in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies, we focus on reading texts and thinking about texts and understanding the texts and the authors' intentions and the big ideas that they contain and how these ideas come through history. But the Man Center working on projects like this brings an entirely different kind of focus. And a lot of our students are interested in just this, not just studying the past but touching it and seeing that Salist is not just a historian who lived 2,000 years ago. He lives in books that have actually been going through hands and people have been reacting to for centuries and that there's a real fascinating pool of work to be done here. So I am immensely grateful to Dr. Intrattor, to the Man Center and to the Library, and I am grateful just to get to comment on this wonderful project that Emma did. So I'm going to leave it at that. Thank you. All of the presenters today, first of all, please share your time and knowledge. From anyone in the room or anyone online, if there's anything in chat, do you have any questions? Actually, sorry, do you all want to come sit in the front? Maybe we can turn the light on and I'll get Hayley back up. Sorry about that. Can you leave? Yeah, okay. Okay, go ahead, please. Well, it started out with just Googling the name to see what would come up. And I spent probably a few hours, every one of these names, because so much came up with a lot of the names. I went through like death records, unary records, like cemetery records, stuff like that, school records, anything I could find with these names on them and kind of compare to see which ones were, the person I was actually researching and which ones were just repeats of the name. Well, if I can add to that, one of the interesting things that I think her work touched upon is why these editions of the books, so that sometimes Emma would say, you know, what exactly is this edition? You know, and I did not know. So we would Google some of these looking. I mean, these are the deliberate choices that the people who are building Ohio University's library. It's fascinating. Why did they want this author? Why did they want, is it all they could find? Or was there something in particular? So we looked at, for instance, on the truth of Christian religion. We looked at that for a while, trying to figure out what this book was, you know, what collection was it a part of? So it's interesting, watching the choices that the early faculty and librarians at the university named. Yeah, I'm curious about the, to me, a foreign tablet. Were we given information on what particular language it's in, what it's a text of its date. And if so, can we verify anything? Yeah, this is part of, this is part of my question. Also, I myself, I studied at Katie in grad school, but I don't work in actively in translating tablets. And so, so we're working on getting somebody to translate it. But the information, I'm glad you asked this question because the information that came with these, we have an example here of one of the boxes that was created. I'm not exactly sure what the relationship is, this particular box, but some of the documentation that came with it was pretty boilerplate. And so, so it said Babylonian clay tablet with, you know, some generic sort of date reference. It looks to me like, like it's probably in the Katie and tablet, it's written in the Katie and could well be Babylonian. But if we did some, we could do some testing to see, testing the clay itself to see where the affinities of the chemical composition of the clay lie geographically. So that's something we could do that costs some money. But we are suspicious of the documentation that it came with. Because, for example, the cylinder seal says that it was Babylonian cylinder seal circa 1700 BC excavated on wash, which was the site that I had never heard of. And it's almost certainly not the place that came from. It says that one of the documents said it was stone, it's not stone. Probably it's finance or a synthetic quartz, which the scouting microscope helped us to block out. And it probably is about dates to about a thousand years later than the documentation says. So that's, we're trying to answer that. But partly this is why we looked into the provenance and the broader corpus. Because the, we hope that that can give us more information about maybe if a dealer purchased a lot that came from a certain place that was narrow down the place. As of now, we don't like the information is not secure as to where specifically these things came from. But we can, we can have it translated and we're working on that. We haven't done that yet. Are there any questions in the chat? Wait, there might be. Not right here. No. Any other questions in the room? Gentlemen. Go ahead. First of all, thanks for organizing this. I didn't know that, I know it's a small collection of artifacts. But I tried to read like, again, like a small collection of everything. But like, I'm interested to know about the ethical tracing of the movement of this small collection from its original countries. And I know that it's known that we wanted from a dealer what happened before the dealer do have information about what happened before the dealer. And if we write this and did this effort, I'm thinking about it. I don't know if it exists or not exists. It will be happy to know that the university is abide by even with this small time connection with the bigger movement related to the ethical handling of artifacts. Like, I don't know about, like in general, how we handle the ethical approach of artifacts from other civilizations and other countries in our university. Yeah, thank you. I'll give my piece of the answer and then maybe I'll let Dr. Andrew to respond. But this is exactly one of the questions that we were asking. And one of the questions that the students Haley mentioned in the students were wrestling with. We decided that the first thing we have to do is to figure out exactly where it came from. We can't even talk about repatriation until we know the patria that it that it needs to go back to. And that's also way above my pay grade. But coincidentally, at the same time that we were running this independent study, the Freakonomics podcast came out with a three part series on this exact question. So we could listen to it and engage those ideas. I personally would be in favor of repatriation. And that's just me speaking for me. But I also am pessimistic that we'll be able to locate exactly which modern country these objects came out of because it's very, very difficult to know. We don't have any information about where Alfred Stites purchased these objects. We're still looking, but but it's very, very difficult. And so that's part of the question that we're trying to answer. And I can tell you that the students themselves that I need to let Haley speak. Sorry. Ask these very questions. Haley, go ahead. Yes. Similar to what Professor Crawford says. I'm all in favor for repatriation. It's one of the things we discussed and wrestled with in this project is how would we go about that if that's an option since the provenance of these objects is questionable at best. You know, we often start and discuss, you know, all four of us of like, should we, you know, wrestle the question of should we even have these artifacts at all. I remember Professor Crawford compared it to having the one ring from Lord of the Rings. You kind of want to keep it, but you know you shouldn't. It's very similar in that way. We want to be able to, you know, put it back where it belongs. But again, with it being so long ago that we acquired them and the lack of records of where they were from. It's really hard to be able to give these pieces back to people who should have them. A lot of our projects, you know, was kind of accepting that and moving on to try to find any information we could on them so that if the option arose, we could repatriate them. But a lot of it was, well, if we can't figure that out, you know, what do we do? And I feel that, you know, we probably shouldn't have them, but we do. So it's our duty to make sure that they are preserved and kept in the best state possible and protected until hopefully one day we will be able to find out that answer and give them back. And in the meantime to disseminate them through public access on websites and these scans allow people to touch them. And I will also add that this came up for me in a more personal way because I was about to start work on publishing the cylinder seal. But there's this debate in my field about whether that is even an ethical thing to do, right, because it encourages the illegal excavation and the theft of cultural heritage and things like that. Although, you know, so there's this tension built in even to something that is well intentioned, like publishing, helping the public understand more. I think I have pretty well nailed down where, when this was produced. Now he's not where and why and the story that goes along with it. But, you know, in doing so am I crossing an ethical line. So we discussed that at some greater level too. I just wanted to talk very briefly about the related set of issues with an individual leaf from what was once an actual book. Somebody broke this book up. It said because it was perfectly legal at the time it was an ethical. Secondly, you look at the library catalog for where these leaves and manuscripts come from and they'll give names like Italy and France. Neither of which existed at the time these objects were created. Italy was not even a big country until 1870 and parts of France did not become what we call France today until a similar time. Therefore, go ahead, the right to sell this cultural patrimony. Furthermore, these manuscripts were held in the libraries and monasteries of cities that were routinely sacked by invading armies and captured as plunder their prize objects that conquerors value. So just to say, well, because these are countries that can demand their cultural patrimony just because we have a point of contact and a dealer doesn't mean they came to be in our hands by ethical means either. Yeah, I just was going to really briefly add that that again is part of the reason for the survey is that if there's a larger body of artifacts that are related it might make it easier to figure out more of the history of problems. But also just to give an example, Professor Bernstein mentioned the Fartful collection and how Dr. Fartful very carefully documented his purchases. Where he got them from whom and when and digitizing these materials as part of all this because we digitize the Fartful collection. And there is a university in I think it was Switzerland who found one of our leaves online and they had documentation as to its being removed from a book that had been part of a monastery that was now part of the university library. And they knew the dealer that had broken the manuscript and dispersed it. And because of Dr. Fartful's notes, we knew that he had purchased it from that dealer. And so we had all the information and we did indeed return that leaf to the university. So when we have the information and that's another huge benefit of having these materials online is people can find them and we can learn so much more about them. So one more question. Anything final thoughts or comments? Just to wrap up that last conversation, I have to say again, this is one of the reasons why the opportunities that students get in the man's center is so invaluable. We got amazed who couldn't be here with us today. But I know you mentioned she's going to law school specifically to look at repatriation law and interest that she developed working on these projects and working with these artifacts and is now interested in pursuing a career in that very question. And it's an opportunity she got with this material. Yeah, thank you. Miriam, we love to come up and yes, just hold on. Thank you. Thank you all one more round of applause. Thank you all for coming. Thanks to those of you online for coming. You are very welcome. We'll turn the lights on and you can come and view the items.