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  If you were looking for Patrick Hunt as a young boy, you would have often found him high up in a favorite tree with a book. He discovered Bach as a young teenager and taught himself to play Bach’s TWO-PART INVENTIONS on a rickety piano because his family could not afford music lessons. Now his love of teaching and creative ventures form a strong signature for his life.

Patrick is indebted and grateful to hundreds of students young and old over the years in many places who have taught him just as much as he has taught them. He realizes how
 

very lucky he is to be doing what he loves and knows many people have helped him along the way.

Patrick has followed several of his life-long dreams – archaeologist, writer, composer, poet, art historian – while teaching the last eighteen or so years at Stanford University.

Some of the courses he has taught at Stanford accommodate his breadth of interests in the Humanities, the Arts, Ancient History and Ancient Technology as well as Archaeological Science. He has lived in London, Athens and Jerusalem as well as annual time spent in Switzerland, France, Italy every year since 1994, among many other countries, and has also conducted archaeological research in Spain and North Africa (Egypt and Tunisia) and in Peru on Inca sites and on Olmec, Maya and Aztec cultures in Central America.

As a musician and composer, among classical music works, he has written piano, choral and chamber and orchestral music and is a Full Writer member of ASCAP since 1980 when some of his choral songs were published along with a movie score he composed. In 1999, a Duke University musical group performed his SONGS OF EXILE: By the Rivers of Babylon in Washington, DC, Raleigh and at Duke. Three arias from his opera in progress, BYRON IN GREECE, were performed in London in March, 2005 and in Switzerland in 2006 and his several William Blake poems set to choral music were performed at Stanford in February, 2005 and again in Palo Alto in 2007, with new concert recitals forthcoming in 2010.

Patrick illustrated Richard Martin’s MYTHS OF THE ANCIENT GREEKS (New American Library-Penguin, 2003) and has illustrated his prior book of poems, HOUSE OF THE MUSE: Poems from the British Museum, published in the summer of 2005. His poetry publications include poems in YOUNG AMERICAN POETS (1978), POET LORE (1978) and CLASSICAL OUTLOOK (1991), PENGUIN BOOK OF CLASSICAL MYTHS (2008) and AKOUÉ (2009), among others. He is also translating Greek poets like Sappho and encyclopedists like Theophrastus and Roman epigrams from Martial.

Patrick has directed Stanford’s Alpine Archaeology Project since 1994, conducting high altitude research in the Great St. Bernard pass between Switzerland and Italy. In 1996 he found the 9000 ft. high quarry for the Temple of Jupiter in the Fenetre de Ferret pass adjacent to the Great St. Bernard Pass and directed a team that found a Roman silver coin hoard in the Swiss Alps in 2003. Another of his research interests has been to track Hannibal who crossed the Alps in 218 BCE with an army accompanied by elephants. He has led annual teams across at least ten Alpine passes in search of topographic clues matching the texts of Polybius and Livy who wrote about Hannibal nearly two millennia ago, including multiple Stanford teams between 1996 and 2009.

Patrick has been published on diverse topics such as monuments like the Pantheon, ancient notables such as Gyges and Herodotus, linguistics, biblical studies, the origin of Byzantine Silk, studies in Hebrew poetry and literary wordplay, Latin epigrams, Roman monuments in operas, calendrical megaliths, Olmec and Maya sculpture, iconography on Greek vases and myth palindromes, nautical exploration, art history, Egyptian stone working and Phoenician lore and topograhy and geoarchaeology, among other topics. His academic publications include journal and encyclopedia entries in peer-reviewed articles such as WORLD ARCHAEOLOGY (1989), BULLETIN OF THE INSTITUTE OF CLASSICAL STUDIES, London (1988), PAPERS OF THE INSTITUTE OF ARCHAEOLOGY, London (1990), STUDIA PHOENICIA (1991), BEITRAGE FUR ERFORSCHUNG DES ALTEN TESTAMENTS UND DES ANTIKEN JUDENTUMS (1992 & 1996), JOURNAL OF ROMAN ARCHAEOLOGY (1998), VOLCANOES, EARTHQUAKES AND ARCHAEOLOGY published by the Royal Geological Society (2000), ACTA of the XIIIth International Bronze Congress at Harvard University (2003), ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE ANCIENT WORLD (2003) and GREAT EVENTS IN WORLD HISTORY (2004), GREAT LIVES IN HISTORY (2008, 2009), Wiley- Blackwell ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ANCIENT HISTORY (2009), AFRICAN ARCHAEOLOGY REVIEW (2009) and RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY (2007, 2008). He has been an elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society since 1989, named by the Biblical Archaeology Society to WHO'S WHO IN BIBLICAL STUDIES AND ARCHAEOLOGY (1993) and he has also served as President of the Archaeological Institute of America’s Stanford Society since 1995. Patrick's primary archaeology books of 2007 were titled TEN DISCOVERIES THAT REWROTE HISTORY (Penguin-Plume) and ALPINE ARCHAEOLOGY (Ariel).

Along with monographs, novellas, and other writing, Patrick recently wrote CARAVAGGIO, an art historical biography and critical book on the Baroque genius painter, published in London in 2004. It has been highly acclaimed in reviews including the ART NEWSPAPER International in London (December 2004) where it was described as “first-class” and “a rattling good yarn.” He was invited to the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference in August, 2005, where he presented the genre of new myth fable and again in August, 2008 on his book Ten Discoveries that Rewrote History and also on Ancient Olympics. His art history book on REMBRANDT: His Art and Life (Ariel) was out in second edition in 2007.

Patrick's selected books for 2008 include POETRY IN THE SONG OF SONGS (Peter Lang) and RENAISSANCE VISIONS: MYTH AND ART (Ariel) respectively. His new book of 2009 is a book of poetry, CLOUD SHADOWS OF OLYMPUS: Collected Poems from 2006-2009.

   


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