Gleanings
IT’S NO SECRET THAT BERKELEY’S BANCROFT LIBRARY HOUSES a trove of ancient Egyptian papyri. But how did it end up there? The answer lies in reptile carcasses. It seems the ancient Egyptian priests had a problem: their mummified crocodiles, intended as offerings to the croc god Sobek, would not keep their shape. So they stuffed them with scraps of used papyri, the ancient precursor to our paper. Centuries later, in 1899, a team of archaeologists, funded by Berkeley benefactor Phoebe A. Hearst, stumbled across these papyri-stuffed, mummified crocs while on a dig in Umm el-Baragat, Egypt, site of the ancient city of Tebtunis. When the researchers discovered the scraps of letters, bills, and other banal records, they realized they had hit on something big: a paper trail into everyday life in Tebtunis, including such humdrum artifacts as tax documents, contracts, petitions, and complaints. In one example, an ancient villager wrote to a village official petitioning for help after “an attack was made upon my dwelling by Arsinoe.” As Andrew Hogan, postdoctoral fellow at the Bancroft’s Center for the Tebtunis Papyri, told Berkeley News, working with these papyri texts allows researchers to “[peel] away below the 1 percent. So, you’re getting IT’S BEEN MORE THAN A YEAR since Berkeley moved to the vast majority of the lived experience to remote learning, but students, staff, and faculty for most people in the ancient world.” at Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design While Hogan focuses on the quotidian need look no further than their computer screens history of ancient Egypt, Professor Rita Lucarelli, faculty curator of Egyptology at the to get a taste of their pre-pandemic lives. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, is working A team of VR specialists and students led by on a virtual reality museum experience. Aptly Berkeley architecture Professor Luisa Caldas crenamed “Return to the Tomb,” the headsetated Virtual Bauer Wurster, a program that allows enabled tour transports viewers into the users to visit the beloved architecture building realm of the ancient dead. Lucarelli said the without leaving home. Via avatar, students and VR exhibit allows viewers to “have the expefaculty can stroll through studio spaces, chat with rience of entering a tomb, walking around a each other over Slack or Zoom, examine docucoffin, and interacting with these beautiful ments pinned to digital whiteboards, and upload funerary texts and images.” work to their desks. The project stems from a push to digitize museum artifacts from around the world in From March to May, Virtual Bauer Wurster hopes that one day they may be returned to even held its first public exhibition: Building for a the tombs, villages, and towns from which Decarceration Nation, which included a gallery talk they were taken. and Q&A session. Project coordinator Chris Hoffman told The virtual space will likely survive after camBerkeley News, “We’re doing something pus reopens. Vishaan Chakrabarti, dean of the quite groundbreaking, in terms of building CED, said he hopes that, in addition to providing “a an immersive virtual reality experience that
Architecture Students Interact in VR Home
is authentic, in using scholarly content and making it available to many more people while preserving artifacts.” — C.P.
stopgap for the pandemic circumstances,” the project will also “help create new possibilities for the future of online learning.” — Nathalia Alcantara
Trypophobia
Are you freaked out by sponges? Do honeycombs send you over the edge? You might have trypophobia, a condition that causes one to have a fear of small, clustered holes. While not officially recognized as a medical disorder, trypophobia has gained traction across the internet as more and more people self-diagnose. One study found that 16 percent of participants were repulsed by the ghastly sight of a lotus pod.
Cute aggression
OK, so your brain can handle holes. Congrats! But have you ever seen something cute—think kittens or babies—and instantly felt an urge to: a) eat it, b) squeeze it, or c) crush it in your hands? First described by researchers at Yale, that emotion is now called cute aggression, and it is estimated that 50 percent of the population have experienced the phenomenon. According to UC Riverside psychologist Katherine Stavropoulos, “Cute aggression appears to be a complex and multi-faceted emotional response that likely serves to mediate strong emotional responses and allow caretaking to occur.”
Psychedelic chaplaincy
An irrational fear of holes and a strange yearning to crush cute things. Hmm. It’s safe to say that our brains produce some very odd states of mind. If you’ve ever thought about delving deeper into the back alleys and byways of your consciousness, you might consider contacting a psychedelic chaplain to help guide you. Researchers are refamiliarizing themselves with the potential of psychedelics to treat conditions ranging from addiction to PTSD. Psychedelic chaplains can help prepare patients for their journey. For more on the subject, tune into episode 10 of our podcast, The Edge, “A Shroom of One’s Own.” — C.P.
CROCODILE: STEFANBANEV; EGYPT: PHOEBE A. HEARST MUSEUM OF ANTHROPOLOGY, UC BERKELEY, 15-18884
ANCIENT EGYPT COMES ALIVE AT BERKELEY
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