Roger Tomlin

Last updated
Roger Tomlin

FSA
Born1943 (age 7778)
Academic background
Academic work
Discipline
  • Archaeology
Sub-disciplineRoman Archaeology
Classical Archaeology
Greek and Latin text
Institutions
  • University of Durham
  • University of Oxford
  • Wolfson College

Roger Simon Ouin Tomlin FSA (born 1943) is a British archaeologist specialising in the translation of Latin text and epigraphy. Tomlin is an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. [1]

Contents

Early life

Tomlin first studied Honour Moderations (Mods) at Oxford University before continuing onto study Literae humaniores (Greats). His college tutor was Peter Brunt, the Camden Professor of Ancient History. [2]

Career

After graduating Tomlin worked in the US for a couple of years before returning to take up a post at the University of Oxford teaching Late Roman History. He succeeded Richard Wright as editor of the Roman Inscriptions of Britain project and started working intensively on translating inscriptions. [2] Tomlin published the first translation of the curse-tablets from the Roman Baths at Aquae Sulis (Bath, UK) in 1988. [3] Tomlin translated the Bloomberg tablets, a collection of 405 wooden tablets inscribed with ink found between 2010 and 2013 during excavations for the Bloomberg building in London. [4] In 2019, a stylus from Roman London was translated by Tomlin; it was found to contain a humorous message to give to someone as a souvenir. [5]

He is a member of the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents. [6]

Awards

Tomlin was elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London on 5 May 1976. [7]

In March 2017 he received the István Hahn prize and gave an honorary lecture at Eötvös Loránd University. [2]

Tomlin had a Festschrift dedicated to him in 2019, titled "Litterae Magicae: Studies in honour of Roger S. O. Tomlin". [8]

Select publications [lower-alpha 1]

Note

  1. As of 2019 Tomlin had 127 published works attributed to him

Related Research Articles

Verulamium Ancient town in Roman Britain

Verulamium was a town in Roman Britain. It was sited southwest of the modern city of St Albans in Hertfordshire, England. A large portion of the Roman city remains unexcavated, being now park and agricultural land, though much has been built upon. The ancient Watling Street passed through the city. Much of the site and its environs is now classed as a scheduled monument.

Calleva Atrebatum

Calleva Atrebatum was originally an Iron Age settlement, capital of the Atrebates tribe, and subsequently a town in the Roman province of Britannia. Its ruins lie to the west of, and partly beneath, the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Silchester, in the county of Hampshire. The church occupies a site just within the ancient walls of Calleva, although the village of Silchester itself now lies about a mile (1.6 km) to the west.

Aquae Sulis Town in Roman Britain on the site of Bath, England

Aquae Sulis was a small town in the Roman province of Britannia. Today it is the English city of Bath, Somerset. The Antonine Itinerary register of Roman roads lists the town as Aquis Sulis. Ptolemy records the town as Aquae calidae in his 2nd-century work Geographia.

Barry Cunliffe

Sir Barrington Windsor Cunliffe,, known as Barry Cunliffe, is a British archaeologist and academic. He was Professor of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford from 1972 to 2007. Since 2007, he has been an Emeritus Professor.

London Mithraeum

The London Mithraeum, also known as the Temple of Mithras, Walbrook, is a Roman mithraeum that was discovered in Walbrook, a street in the City of London, during a building's construction in 1954. The entire site was relocated to permit continued construction and this temple of the mystery god Mithras became perhaps the most famous 20th-century Roman discovery in London.

Roman Baths (Bath) Roman site in the city of Bath, England

The Roman Baths are a well-preserved thermae in the city of Bath, Somerset, England. A temple was constructed on the site between 60-70CE in the first few decades of Roman Britain. Its presence led to the development of the small Roman urban settlement known as Aquae Sulis around the site. The Roman baths—designed for public bathing—were used until the end of Roman rule in Britain in the 5th Century CE. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the original Roman baths were in ruins a century later. The area around the natural springs was redeveloped several times during the Early and Late Middle Ages.

Sulis Celtic water deity

In the localised Celtic polytheism practised in Great Britain, Sulis was a deity worshiped at the thermal spring of Bath. She was worshiped by the Romano-British as Sulis Minerva, whose votive objects and inscribed lead tablets suggest that she was conceived of both as a nourishing, life-giving mother goddess and as an effective agent of curses wished by her votaries.

Tiberius Claudius Cogidubnus was a 1st-century king of the Regnenses or Regni tribe in early Roman Britain.

Ancient Celtic religion Religion practiced by ancient Celtic people

Ancient Celtic religion, commonly known as Celtic paganism, comprises the religious beliefs and practices adhered to by the Iron Age people of Western Europe now known as the Celts, roughly between 500 BCE and 500 CE, spanning the La Tène period and the Roman era, and in the case of the Insular Celts the British and Irish Iron Age. Very little is known with any certainty about the subject, and apart from documented names, which are thought to be of deities, the only detailed contemporary accounts are by hostile Roman writers, who were probably not well-informed.

Curse tablet Small tablet with a curse written on it from the Greco-Roman world

A curse tablet is a small tablet with a curse written on it from the Greco-Roman world. The tablets were used to ask the gods, place spirits, or the deceased to perform an action on a person or object, or otherwise compel the subject of the curse.

Sheppard Frere

Sheppard Sunderland Frere, CBE, FSA, FBA was a British historian and archaeologist who studied the Roman Empire. He was a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

David Mortier Eduard Fraenkel was a German-British philologist.

Greek Magical Papyri

The Greek Magical Papyri is the name given by scholars to a body of papyri from Graeco-Roman Egypt, written mostly in ancient Greek, which each contain a number of magical spells, formulae, hymns, and rituals. The materials in the papyri date from the 100s BCE to the 400s CE. The manuscripts came to light through the antiquities trade, from the 1700s onward. One of the best known of these texts is the Mithras Liturgy.

Vindolanda tablets Roman writing tablets found in England

The Vindolanda tablets were, at the time of their discovery, the oldest surviving handwritten documents in Britain. They are a rich source of information about life on the northern frontier of Roman Britain. Written on fragments of thin, post-card sized wooden leaf-tablets with carbon-based ink, the tablets date to the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. Although similar records on papyrus were known from elsewhere in the Roman Empire, wooden tablets with ink text had not been recovered until 1973, when archaeologist Robin Birley, his attention being drawn by student excavator Keith Liddell, discovered some at the site of Vindolanda, a Roman fort in northern England.

Common Brittonic was a Celtic language spoken in Britain and Brittany. It is also variously known as Old Brittonic, and Common or Old Brythonic.

Ring of Silvianus

The Vyne Ring or the Ring of Silvianus is a gold ring, dating probably from the 4th century AD, discovered in a ploughed field near Silchester, in Hampshire, England, in 1785. Originally the property of a British Roman called Silvianus, it was apparently stolen by a person named Senicianus, upon whom Silvianus called down a curse.

Romano-Celtic temple

A Romano-Celtic temple is a sub-class of Roman temple found in the north-western provinces of the Roman Empire. Many may have had roots in the late Iron Age either in direct relation to pre-Roman structures or on sites with pre-Roman activity.

Bath curse tablets Collection of Roman era curse tablets

The Bath curse tablets are a collection of about 130 Roman era curse tablets discovered in 1979/1980 in the English city of Bath. The tablets act as a request for intervention of the goddess Sulis Minerva in the return of stolen goods and to curse the perpetrators of the thefts. Inscribed mostly in British Latin, they have been used to attest to the everyday spoken vernacular of the Romano-British population of the second to fourth centuries A.D. They have also been recognised by UNESCO in its Memory of the World UK Register.

Stephanie Mary Dalley FSA is a British scholar of the Ancient Near East. She has retired as a teaching Fellow from the Oriental Institute, Oxford. She is known for her publications of cuneiform texts and her investigation into the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and her proposal that it was situated in Nineveh, and constructed during Sennacherib's rule.

Bloomberg tablets Ancient tablets

The Bloomberg tablets are a collection of 405 preserved wooden tablets that were found at the site of the Bloomberg building in the financial district of London. Excavations of the site took place between 2010 and 2013, after which the current Bloomberg building was constructed on the site of the archaeological dig.

References

  1. "Roger Tomlin". Wolfson College. Retrieved 9 April 2020.
  2. 1 2 3 Czeti, I.; Seres, D. (2019). ""I try to publish whatever turns up" Interview with Roger S.O. Tomlin". In Sanchez Natalia, Celia (ed.). Litterae Magicae: studies in Honour of Roger S. O. Tomlin. Libros Porticos. pp. 19–28.
  3. Jordan, D. ""Curses from the waters of Sulis" review of - ROGER TOMLIN , "THE CURSE TABLETS" (suggested abbreviation: Tab. Sulis). Chapter 4 in B. CUNLIFFE (ED.), THE TEMPLE OF SULIS MINERVA AT BATH, II: FINDS FROM THE SACRED SPRING (Oxford University Committee for Archaeology, monograph 16, 1988, distributed by Oxbow Books, Park End Place, Oxford)". Journal of Roman Archaeology. 3: 437–441. doi:10.1017/S1047759400011314.
  4. "UK's oldest hand-written document 'at Roman London dig'". BBC News. 1 June 2016.
  5. "This Ancient Roman Souvenir Stylus Is Inscribed With a Corny Joke". SmithsonianMag. 1 August 2019. Retrieved 9 April 2020.
  6. "Dr Roger Tomlin, MC Member". Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents. Retrieved 9 April 2020.
  7. "Roger Simon Ouin Tomlin". Society of Antiquaries of London. Retrieved 9 April 2020.
  8. Sánchez Natalías, Celia, ed. (2019). Litterae Magicae: studies in Honour of Roger S. O. Tomlin. Libros Porticos.
  9. "Curse Tablets of Roman Britain". Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents. University of Oxford. Archived from the original on 8 June 2021. Retrieved 6 July 2021.