I just uploaded a new mobile-capable lecture, called “Legal Principles and the Administration of Justice in Ancient China and Egypt.” This is part of my ongoing project comparing the social, legal, and economic institutions of Ancient China and Egypt. It compares legal principles of the two civilizations and looks at actual cases concerning robbery and fornication.
Today, my latest book was released in two volumes by Brill. The book Law, State, and Society in Early Imperial China: A Study with Critical Edition and Translation of the Legal Texts from Zhangjiashan Tomb No. 247 represents eight years of work for myself and my collaborator, Robin D.S. Yates of McGill University. It is over 1,500 pages long. The first volume is a detailed study of the legal texts excavated in 1984 from a tomb in south China and the legal system they describe. The second volume contains an annotated translation of those texts, with complete introductions. Click on the link earlier in the post for more detailed information, or to purchase a copy.
I just uploaded a new mobile-capable lecture, called “Telling a Story with Pictures: Modes of Early Chinese Narrative Illustration.” This is one of my favorite lectures of all time, though I have only given it on a few occasions. It is based on research conducted while I was a PhD student in Art History at Princeton. It explores different modes of illustrated narrative in Greece, Rome, and India as a way to understand the development of narrative illustration in Han and Six Dynasties China. Several entertaining early Chinese stories are introduced, including the “Shun Cycle,” and the tales of filial sons like Lao Laizi, Yuan Gu, and Dong Yong. The PowerPoint slides are annotated with dynamic markers like arrows and spotlights to highlight aspects of the illustrations.
I have just uploaded two lectures to my website. The first is called “Artisans of Ancient China,” and is a summary of the research that went into my award winning book, Artisans in Early Imperial China. It was recorded from a talk given at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 2009. The lecture will run on computers or mobile devices.
The second lecture is called “Burning the Books and Killing the Scholars” and was delivered at UCLA in 2008 as part of an endowed lecture series. The three videos, hosted on the UCLA website, contain excerpts from the lecture, along with an interview I did with Chinese literature scholar David Schaberg.
My son Jordan and I are working on a project I have been meaning to get to for a long time. I have well over one thousand books in my faculty offices. Most of these are about China or Egypt, and they are in a variety of languages. It has become harder each year to remember where each of them is located in my offices. Also, I tend to loan books to students for project on a regular basis, and I loose track of who has my books.
So, Jordan and I are entering all of my books into a computer book database called Readerware (www.readerware.com). We then print Library of Congress spine labels for each book, and stamp the inside with a custom stamp that reads “Scribe of History” (left) in a combination of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Chinese characters. Now, I will be able to look up my books from anywhere, since the program also has a mobile app, and I can record which ones I have loaned out to students.
As a residential scholar at the Getty Research Institute in 2011, I created this virtual museum videogame called “Artifacts of the Ancient World in 3D.” It includes objects from Ancient China, Greece, Iran, and Mesopotamia housed in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, as well as some objects from Chinese museums.
Click here to go to the description page, and play the demo today!
As part of my research in Egyptology, I have used my computer reconstruction skills to make an interactive tomb model of Theban tomb no. 1, the tomb of Sennedjem, one of the first unplundered tombs ever discovered in Egypt, back in 1885. This “first-person” game allows one to explore the Nile, deserted villages, and a beautifully decorated tomb in the hills.
Click here to go to a description of the reconstruction, with image gallery, a video walkthrough of the game, and a link to a playable (but incomplete) version of the game.
On Friday October 16, 2015, I spent half a day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York studying the representations of scribes in Egyptian art, and the tools that the scribes used to practice their craft. I was guided by Assistant Curator of Egyptian Art, Niv Allon, who is also very interested in scribes in the New Kingdom and their culture.
Of special interest to me were the practice boards used by scribes for school texts, one of which contains corrections from a teacher and another text underneath the visible one which had been whitewashed over.
I was also studying the scribal palettes which held the ink and reed brushes of scribes. These usually had two depressions, one for red and one for black ink, but those used by painters might have six or eight depressions for different pigments (see left). These palettes were also found in the tombs of non-scribes, who sometimes had them made out of stone or other materials (below right) as a non-working representation of a scribe’s palette, thus a marker of cultural literacy and its attendant power. 
A very famous object on display was the scribal statue of Horemheb, from before he became Pharaoh. It probably dates to the reign of Tutankhamen. Horemheb is seated as a scribe reading (or writing on) a papyrus, a pose which goes back to the Old Kingdom.
Back in 2008 I created these 3D models from standout objects of Chinese art in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. These include a Han Dynasty ceramic horse, a large bronze Buddha, and a Tang figurine of a woman falconer.
Click here to view the full description page and gallery.
Professor Barbieri-Low has recorded some of his best classroom and public lectures and posted them to this site for anyone to enjoy. These include lectures on the tomb of the First Emperor of Qin, with his famous terra-cotta warriors, a lecture on the tombs at Mawangdui, and another on the use of material culture and inscriptions to rewrite early Chinese history. Enjoy!