Principal Investigator: Pippa Steele

Pippa is a Senior Research Associate at the Cambridge Faculty of Classics, and Senior Research Fellow at Magdalene College. She has previously published widely on the writing systems and languages of ancient Cyprus and the Aegean, and recently led an ERC-funded five-year project on Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS, Horizon 2020).

Pippa’s VIEWS project research is going to look at issues such as direction of writing and text layout in inscriptions around the eastern Mediterranean area and far beyond, using comparative perspectives to try to understand the motivations for these choices related to the visual appearance of writing. This will include the ancient Aegean, Cyprus, Anatolia, north Africa and the Near East… but the research will also look globally, for instance towards the Americas and Far East, for comparanda.

Research Associate: Jordan Miller

Jordan is a Research Associate in the Faculty of Classics at Cambridge. Before joining VIEWS, he completed a DPhil in Egyptology at the University of Oxford, with a thesis on composite figures in ancient Egyptian religious imagery. He has published on Egyptian palaeography, material culture, and religion between the fourth and second millennia BCE, as well as relationships between Egyptology and anthropology.

He previously contributed to a sub-project of Seshat: Global History Databank and has served on the board of the Early Text Cultures research network.

Jordan’s VIEWS research will consider how the ontology of images may impact sign forms, inventories, and the design of inscriptions in ancient Egyptian and Maya hieroglyphic traditions. If visual images (whether pictorial or written) are understood as active beings in the world, writing is then a powerful resource for interrelating gods, sacred landscapes, and the humans who traverse, view, and create inscribed spaces. Jordan will look at how these potentials were navigated in Egyptian and Maya contexts, aiming to develop a more nuanced approach to ‘visual’ taxonomies of writing systems.

Research Associate: Colton Siegmund

Colton Siegmund (PhD University of Chicago) is a Research Associate in the Faculty of Classics. He is currently a post-doctoral research associate on the VIEWS projects acting as a cuneiform specialist. He received his PhD with honors in Cuneiform Studies – Assyriological Focus from the University of Chicago in 2023 (Thesis: “The Morphological Means for Coding Modality in the Sumerian Verbal Complex”).

Previously, he double majored in Classics and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University where he received a Bachelor of Arts with honors in 2016. He also received a Master of Arts in Cuneiform Studies in 2018 from the University of Chicago.

His research interests include mood and modality, socio-historical linguistics, bilingualism, the origins of scripts, interactions between visual culture and scripts, Sumerian morphology, and analyzing Akkadian and Sumerian texts with corpus-based approaches. Stemming from his general interest in digital humanities, he is interested in the use of computational linguistic models within Assyriology. He has teaching experience in the Sumerian and Akkadian languages and cultures. 

Research Associate: Philip Boyes

Philip is a Research Associate in the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge. He was previously a member of the CREWS project, where he published a monograph and several articles on the relationship between writing and society in Late Bronze Age Ugarit, as well as co-editing three volumes of conference proceedings. As an archaeologist, he has worked in Tunisia, Turkey, Italy and the UK, and produced a PhD thesis on social change in ‘Phoenicia’ between the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages.

Philip’s VIEWS work focuses on developments in the form of the early alphabet in the Levant, especially the appearance of ‘cursive’ visual features around the beginning of the Iron Age. He is particularly interested in how such changes in script form relate to wider changes in visual culture, display and socio-cultural context in general.

VIEWS PhD Student: Merten Wiltshire

Merten Wiltshire is seeking to pursue doctoral research on the writing of the Aegean Bronze Age with the VIEWS studentship. He has followed rather a roundabout path to this point, after studies in many disparate fields. He began with a Bachelor of Arts in history and linguistics and a following fourth-year degree in theoretical linguistics, oriented towards cognitive science, which remains of interest but which did not lend itself to further research. Studying classical languages and mathematics in the years of the pandemic, he became interested in the archaeology and languages of the Bronze Age Aegean and coincidently acquainted with the then-ongoing work of the CREWS project at Cambridge. 

Completing a Master of Arts at Leiden University in comparative Indo-European linguistics with an emphasis on Mycenaean philology and Anatolian languages, his dissertation on aspects of Mycenaean Greek grammar stressed the importance of constraining challenging questions of linguistic interpretation with the strongest evidence of archaeological context and of the visual structure of the Linear B texts. Establishing a writer’s practice in arranging headings and text in relation to commodity signs, for example, gives much clearer guidance as to the nature of the words found therein. Alongside this philological work, he has maintained a great interest in the tangled question of identifying non-Indo-European elements in the Greek language, long contested amongst scholars for want of a controllable method of study. In relation to this question, he explored the possibilities for better dealing with supposed ‘substrate words’. 

In joining the VIEWS project, his interests shift from Mycenaean Greek to the forms of language that gave it its system of writing and to the material in which they are found, compelled by the prospect of exploring what can be better understood of this phenomenon in spite of the indecipherability of the writing in question.

Project Manager: Sarah Lewis

Sarah previously worked at Regent’s University London, where she was a Data and Research Officer, and then worked with Pippa as project manager for the CREWS project, before joining the VIEWS team in 2022. She enjoys working for a project that has many links to her broader interest in languages, sociolinguistics and language development.

Sarah studied at the University of Manchester, BA (Hons) in English and Linguistics, followed by an MA (Hons) in Applied Linguistics from the University of Sheffield in 2006. The MA had a particular focus on language development and the social context of language use in L1 and L2 learners.

See also the Visiting Fellows page for further information on the wider VIEWS family, and there are other opportunities to collaborate with VIEWS through the Endangered Writing Network. Any opportunities to work as part of the VIEWS team will appear on the Vacancies page.

Image at top of page: Model of a procession of offering bearers from the tomb of the royal chief steward Meketre, 12th Dynasty, c. 1981–1975 BCE. Met Museum New York, Rogers Fund and Edward S. Harkness Gift, 1920.