Happy New Year!
It is January, the Janus month, so we look back on the old year and towards the new.
2025 saw the release of the wonderfully silly Ephedrismos:
Ephedrismos was made for Locus Ludi as part of that project's exploration of the culture of play and games in antiquity. It was made from a cup in the Musées Royaux in Brussels, Belgium (vase no. R327) that depicts this wonderful piggy-back procession. If you would like, find out more about the world of ephedrismos on the animation's webpage.
In 2025, we also brough you Ball Games, featuring a woman playing ball and (spoiler!) the goddess Iris:
Ball Games is another Locus Ludi animation, madefrom a vase in The State Collections of Antiquities at the Antikensammlungen and Glyptothek Museum in Munich, Germany (vase no. DV73). Ball Games also come with its own webpage featuring extra information and a downloadable PowerPoint; feel free to explore: https://www.panoply.org.uk/iris-ball-games .
You may well remember that 2024 saw the publication of our free-to-download book of lesson plans and other resources related to the Our Mythical Childhood animations: Teaching Ancient Greece. We have been delighted with the feedback on the book - it's lovely to know that people have been finding it useful and applying it to their own circumstances. It was also very gratifying to see it reviewed thoroughly and glowingly in the Journal of Classics Teaching.
Throughout 2025 we were also working on something a little bit different, with nary a vase in sight! Along with Jewish Studies scholars Sami Everett, Anoushka Alexander-Rose, Anastasia Badder, and others, we have been exploring the life of the philosopher and rabbi Maimonides, through the project Maimonides From Scratch. Maimonides lived the the late 12th - early 13th centuries CE. His works are still influential and some of the actual letters that he wrote still survive! As a team, we developed an animation together, based on Maimonides' medical work. Rather than featuring pottery, Panoply's Steve Simons has made the animation in a cartoon style, using his own illustrations and featuring one of Maimonides' letters. The animation, Maimonides the Healer, was shown for the first time at a conference of the European Association of Jewish Studies. It will be released online on the Panoply website on 11th February 2026, the same day it open in an exhibition at the Manchester Jewish Museum, another wonderful partner in this project. Look out for that soon - not long now!
That's plenty to keep you going... and, fear not, we will also bring you more animated vases this year too. Happy New Year and all the best for 2026 :)
