Classics & Archaeology Library

The Classics & Archaeology discipline within SHAPS has a unique resource for its researchers: our Classics & Archaeology Library. Housed mainly in Arts West 511 West Wing (the Classics Reading Room), the Library is a boutique non-lending research library for academic staff, honorary fellows, postgraduates, Honours students, and academic visitors.

The C&A Library collection began in the 1970s as a combination of departmental libraries from Classics and the former department of Near Eastern Studies (formerly Middle Eastern Studies, and known before that as Semitics). It was housed in the Old Quadrangle Building from 2002 to 2016, before being reduced in size and relocated to the Arts West Building.

A large portion of the collection is housed in locked glass cabinets in the Research Lounge (Arts West 5th floor North Wing). But our pride and joy is the Classics Reading Room, which contains over 3000 books on Latin and Ancient Greek language and literature, ancient history, archaeology, and art history, including work on the Bronze Age, Byzantine studies, Reception studies, Ancient Egyptian studies (including hieroglyphs), and Akkadian and Syriac Aramaic languages.

New acquisitions are purchased regularly with funds from the Classics Library Trust (from a generous anonymous donation from 2007), and from a Library fund within SHAPS. As of August 2019, we have purchased almost 700 new books for the Classics Reading Room since November of 2017.

As a result, we have a complete set of Loebs (those red and green books that have Latin or Ancient Greek texts on the left pages, and English translations on the right pages); Oxford Classical Texts (OCTs); Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics (yellow-and-green commentaries aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students); an almost-complete set of Budés (just like Loebs, but with French translations); Teubner editions of classical texts, and the Aris & Phillips Classical Texts series.

We have a complete set of the PIR (Prosopographia Imperii Romani) series for the Roman historians, the Duckworth Companion to Greek and Roman Tragedy series for the classicists, and most of the volumes of the Aegaeum series for the Bronze Age archaeologists. We have Greek and Latin lexicons, including the 2018 edition of the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (DMLBS), and the 2015 Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek; and complete runs of the journals Ramus: Critical Studies in Greek and Roman Literature (which was first published in Australia), Aegean Archaeology, and the Journal of Prehistoric Religion.

Other highlights include a complete Pauly-Wissowa (a.k.a. Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, or RE), a complete Cambridge Ancient Histories, Jacoby’s Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (FrGH), the Ante-Nicene and Post-Nicene Christian Fathers (in English), and the Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae.

For enquiries about accessing the Classics Reading Room for research, contact Dr K.O. Chong-Gossard