Videos

Classical Latin went extinct, yet we still know how to pronounce it. Proof! Take a trip with me back to Catholic school, then back even further to old Rome. We'll see what Latin pronunciation did - and did NOT - sound like in the mouths...

My favorite example of how odd Cuneiform became as it was passed from civilization to civilization. Thanks, rampant Sumerianization! Cuneiform languages took Sumerian very seriously, even after it was long dead. That’s how Akkadian and...

In this lecture presented at The Explorers Club in New York, BAS Director of Educational Programs Sarah Yeomans examines a recently excavated, as-yet unpublished archaeological site that has substantially contributed to our understanding...

Courtney Ann Roby, PhD, from the Dept. of Classics at Cornell University presents, "Gladiatorial Medicine in the Roman Empire." In this lecture, Dr. Roby examines the career of Galen of Pergamum, a celebrity physician of Rome whose patients...

This video is a brief description and overview of ancient Roman medicine.

Did one original language shatter into many? The Tower of Babel, the evolution of languages and the quest for Proto-World. The Tower of Babel is one of humankind's early attempts to explain the variety of languages spoken across the earth...

The Aztecs didn't call him Montezuma. Nor Moctezuma. They didn't call chocolate "chocolate". Heck, they didn't even call themselves Aztec! Though they were an oral culture, we have an idea of what their language really sounded like. Here's...

Ancient Mexico was a hotbed of language mixing. Aztecs and Maya spoke completely unrelated languages, but a Mesoamerican linguistic mindmeld tied them together in surprising ways. Here's the grammar. I'll start with the things that stood...

Your vowels were invented in Greece, giving birth to the first "true" alphabet. Watch as your new toga-clad friend turns your consonant abjad into a consonant-vowel alphabet. It's such a useful mapping of letters to sounds that neighbor...

The story of a Greek town that I'm told still preserves the Spartan tongue. I explore why they don't speak like the rest of Greece and dig into their connection to ancient Sparta. Will their Tsakonian language survive? Ancient Greece was...