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SASA continues our archaeogaming playthroughs this January with Assassins Creed Origins; Curse of the Pharaohs! This time we will be taking a deep dive into ancient Egypt, exploring the myths, misconceptions, and mysteries of the setting while taking in the sights, sounds, and swords of our enemies. This playthrough will be 6/7 weeks long, beginning on Jan. 14th @ 2pm EDT via Twitch with Dr. Briana Jackson. Find out more at our Twitch channel! Our playthrough will be managed by our showrunners, Alex and Kate, and played through by Briana Jackson. Briana has just finished the main quest in the game and has not played the Curse of the Pharaohs expansion before, so will be going in blind with minimal exposure to the game content. She is looking forward to seeing zombified versions of everyone’s favourite (or at least some notable) pharaohs and visiting the ancient sites of Amarna, Thebes, and Hermopolis in Ubisoft’s rendition of the game - Tune in to see how well these versions hold up to historical fact, and to see how well Briana’s Assassin in-game can fend off hordes of mummies with little more than a poisoned axe and a bath towel!

We at SASA would like to extend our warmest congratulations to Dr. Tine Rassalle for being awarded her PhD in the field of Ancient Mediterranean Religions, with her dissertation focusing on coin deposits found in synagogues in Late Antique Palestine. More information on her dissertation can be found at https://www.ancientsynagoguecoins.com, so if you or someone you know has an interest in coins, synagogues, or simply loves to learn, Tine's website is a great start. For more on Tine and her personal achievements, check out her academic profile at https://tinerassalle.web.unc.edu/. Tine came to the US in 2014 as a first-generation college student to pursue her academic passion for the ancient world. She joined SASA in the Spring of 2020, hoping to share her academic knowledge worldwide with anyone who shares her passion - an outlook that we all support. Now that she has graduated, Tine is searching for a job that will allow her to continue this mission. She hopes to find work in a museum or public humanities center from which she can continue her research on the Ancient Near East while educating the public on why it is so important to cherish and preserve our shared history. Tine has led SASA’s Fundraising team for over a year and has been key in helping us secure a range of funding and grants to support our projects and mission. We owe her a huge amount of thanks for her passion and support during our early stages and for helping us reach our recent milestones too. To Tine - thank you for all your hard work, and congratulations on the well-deserved Doctorate!

The Archaeological Institute of America and the Society of Classical Studies are running their joint annual meeting from the 5th to the 10th of January, 2022, in a virtual format, where we are hosting a virtual booth! SASA is honoured to have the opportunity to represent our interests and continue our mission of reversing the downward trend in ancient studies by engaging the public and bringing interested parties together to share their passion for the ancient world to inspire a new generation of students. For more information on how we are hoping to achieve this, please check the information on our virtual booth. Thank you to SCS for their continued partnership with us.

We are pleased to introduce our first administrative hire at SASA, Corey Loftus. Corey is joining us as an Executive Assistant. She will be working closely with our Founder and Director to manage our workflow and administrative tasks - a vital role that keeps our teams working as smoothly as possible! We look forward to working closely with Corey and hope that this will be the first step in providing more paid roles and improving the work we do in every direction. A little bit about Corey - She has both a BA and an MA in Art History, focusing on 20th-century Art of the Americas with research interests in themes of embodiment and epistemology. Prior to her time at SASA she was the Fall 2021 graduate curatorial fellow at the Asheville Art Museum. This role gave her the opportunity to assist with an extensive digitization project of the museum’s Black Mountain College Collection and curate a spotlight exhibition on the relationship between the short-lived but hugely influential college and the regional landscape of Western North Carolina. She has also worked for a number of museums and non-profits including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, the Barnes Foundation, and the Arthur Ross Gallery. These experiences and her academic work galvanized her interest in the democratization of access to archives, public collections, and scholarship. While not a conventional ancient studies scholar like many of our team members at SASA, she has an optimistic, can-do attitude and looks forward to learning more about the subject while working with us. Our mission to promote the humanities, increase accessibility to materials, and to preserve and promote ancient studies stood out to her and drew her aboard - proof that SASA’s mission transcends subject areas and that anyone can make a difference.

SASA would like to thank our latest group of interns for all their hard work and contributions to the wider life and prosperity of SASA. Without their work and support, our mission would be impossible. As such, we want to highlight some of the great work they have done and the projects that they have contributed to! Our interns have been working at the heart of our mission, contributing throughout the organization. Their work has featured in a range of campaigns, most notably in our archaeogaming team! As SASA’s latest project, the Archaeogaming team has attracted a lot of attention and as such needs a lot of hands to make light work of it! This project has taken the exciting medium of video games and is cooperating with educators to create video game oriented educational modules that require no prior familiarity or experience with the games to impart valuable historical lessons to groups of learners. We firmly believe that these modules allow for a relatable and engaging glimpse into the past that will keep learners interested in the past as they progress through their education. Of course, not all our interns were devoting their time to finding the latest, greatest, and most accurate portals to the past in video games. Our wonderful interns also applied their skills elsewhere; our outreach work, broader research into the downward trend of engagement, and SASA’s Inspire Campaign all saw support from our interns. These contributions keep the broad spectrum of SASA running, ensuring that we continue to deliver our message far and wide, all the while identifying and determining the impact of the downward trend, and what we can do to counter it. Simply put, we could not continue our work without the support of our interns. Our wonderful Fall 2021 interns Habiba Hussein, Cairo University, Egyptology - Inspire Campaign Emily Browning, Purdue University, Classics and Art History - Archaeogaming Team Jackson Reinhardt, Vanderbilt University - Communications Team Kaitlyn McGann, Liverpool University, Egyptology - Outreach Team Jack Chandler, University of Reading, Museum and Classical Studies - Access Team Dylan Gibson, University of Stellenbosch - Archaeogaming Team Sylvie Cooper, University of Memphis - Archaeogaming Team Logan Davis, West Chester University - Research Team. Alexandra Deimel, Roanoke College - Communications and Live Events Team. Stephanie Cappello, University of Edinburgh - Access Team. Emily McElroy, Carleton University, Classics - Archaeogaming Team. So, to Habiba, Emily, Jackson, Kaitlynn, Jack, Logan, Alexandra, Dylan, Sylvie, Stephanie, and Emily - thank you for all your hard work and commitment in the past months. We are incredibly grateful to you. For more information on our interns, please visit our website.

Save Ancient Studies Alliance (SASA) is delighted to announce that we have received two grants to support our free online Text-in-Translation Reading Groups program for January 2022 and Summer of 2022. Our January Reading Groups are funded in part by an $800 grant from the Society for Classical Studies as part of their outreach grant program, Ancient Worlds, Modern Communities. Our Summer Reading Groups will be supported in full by a $10,000 grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. These grants will support a full slate of exciting Reading Groups, as we seek to attract excellent young scholars to lead the discussion groups and to expand to new topics and a variety of areas of the Ancient World, and to provide groups in multiple languages. The grant provided by SCS will fund five reading groups starting in January 2022, allowing for close-reading work led by a subject expert. Our reading groups provide a meaningful and accessible way of engaging with ancient texts, irrespective of institutional access. These reading groups take a specific culture or theme within ancient studies and gather in online group discussions to tackle these themes. The groups are diverse in origin, background, age, and education levels. Working together, the groups will be led by a subject expert - the Reading Group Leader - to explore broad-ranging ideas or intricate details and work through these ancient texts to elevate their understanding of the rich themes that run throughout. Our goals and ethos align well with those of the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, which promotes a studia humanitatis that is available to all in a world where deeper educational material is often inaccessible. Likewise, our work incorporates a broad spectrum of topics from within history, archaeology, literature, language, and arts, as we aim to make all aspects of the past, whether material or cultural, accessible to a new generation and enable them to engage in further study of our rich human past. Free Online Text-in-Translation Reading Groups The ancient world has a wealth of textual material that allows us to understand and appreciate the minds, thoughts, and motives of the past and present, as their influence echoes throughout time. However, access to these texts is increasingly limited as universities have begun to shutter their ancient studies departments. In response to this, SASA is providing free access to introductory engagement with ancient texts through our Online Reading Groups. At these groups, participants are led by the Group Leader in a discussion of ancient texts that they have read in translation into modern languages. This relaxed, warm, informal educational context empowers students and enthusiasts by providing an accessible entryway for them to study these texts, irrespective of financial, geographical, or educational access that they may otherwise lack. Our Reading Groups create small, collaborative communities that furnish opportunities for intellectual growth for any participant, from the enthusiast to the high schooler, to the budding undergraduate scholar, to the graduate student in a related field. Our reading groups have been attended by over 250 participants in the past two summers and January. They have been incredibly well-received, as 100% of survey respondents said they would recommend the group to a friend, with an overall 4.7/5 rating for our groups. This educational model allows for informal discussion of historic texts while approaching the content and themes in the wider context of the modern world, assessing contemporary issues with the help of themes within the text. The informal learning model fosters an atmosphere of creativity, collaboration, and innovation, and ultimately improves engagement - an essential factor as we work to counter the downward spiral of disengagement in ancient studies. The SCS funding will go towards funding staff working on the program, including the program coordinator and assistant, as well as the group leaders - PhD students and early career scholars that we will recruit for their expertise and leadership. The funds will also cover overhead and advertising costs to ensure it attracts participants from our primary target audience. These reading groups are integral to the work that SASA does and help us meet our objective of inspiring interest in the Ancient World while broadening the community of scholars. At heart, SASA aims to proliferate connections to the richness of deep human history and culture amongst all people, and we are proud that the Society of Classical Studies is supporting us in this cause. For this January, SASA seeks five (5) Ancient Studies PhD Students or Early Career Scholars for the paid role of Reading Group Leader for our January 2022 Mini-Reading Groups. The position, formally known as a “SASA Educational Ambassador,” is to lead a weekly discussion group of 3 weekly hour-long sessions in January 2022 on an ancient topic of the Group Leader’s choice. Compensation for each Reading Group is in the sum of $160, funded through a grant from the Society for Classical Studies through their program, Ancient Worlds, Modern Communities. Please see this Job Description for more information and for details on how to apply. Check out the schedules of the January Reading Groups and of the Summer 2022 Reading Groups this spring.

Save Ancient Studies Alliance (SASA) and HeyGo are excited to announce a new partnership! HeyGo is a virtual tourism company that delivers live streamed, on-site tours by real tour guides through their phone, supported by their own bespoke streaming platform! This platform allows for interactive live chat between participants and the tour guide, so you really get a feel for the site and the knowledge of the guide, offering you a truly personalized experience. If you’ve ever wanted to see the world but are too busy with work, or don’t have the spare cash for that last minute trip to Greece, then HeyGo is perfect for you. Their customers have called HeyGo an “amazing opportunity” and a “great way to travel”, offering us a new way to explore and experience the world without breaking the bank. We have partnered with HeyGo to help raise the profile of sites and sights that are teeming with fascinating historical information and contexts but may be otherwise inaccessible to many. In our current age, our world is more interconnected than ever before, but it remains closed off enough to many of us, due to an array of limitations, especially under current restrictions. That is why we are so excited to partner with HeyGo to ensure that such exciting knowledge and exploration can be made accessible to anyone with the passion to see something new! Initially, SASA and HeyGo will deliver a number of tours together, with our target start date in late winter/early spring. Our current dates are as listed below; December 16th - Petra, One of the 7 Wonders - Trail III December 18th - Sambisari Temple: a Holy Place that was Once Buried This partnership is part of a new project SASA initiated this past summer 2021 to begin offering Live On-Site Tours produced in collaboration with partners and volunteers. Our first series was led by Dr. Darius Arya, who showed us around three amazing sites in Rome. Check out the videos here. In addition to our collaboration with Heygo, we are planning a collaboration with Travelusion, another virtual tour company, to organize a series of Live On-Site Tours at medieval sites in Britain this coming March.