Epigraphic material provides fascinating insights into “Byzantium beyond Byzantium”. Marked by broad chronological and geographic variations, it offers unmediated evidence for the development of writing habits, for strategies of public (self-)display, and for linguistic and cultural diversities. Its potential to challenge and refine existing taxonomies, not least those associated with the designation ‘Byzantine,’ is second to none. Our Round Table and Thematic Session explore epigraphic contexts attesting to the presence of two or more languages and their scripts in close physical proximity to each other. Our aims are as follows: 1) to identify epigraphic patterns, connections, and mutual influences; 2) to examine how language choices shape intended messages, and to explore the broader socio-cultural implications of this relationship, and 3) to highlight the role of language choice in the production of inscriptions and to assess the linguistic competence of carvers and stonecutters. Our participants are early- and middle-career scholars as well as senior academics. They are epigraphy specialists working on multilingual (Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Hebrew, Arabic, Slavonic, Ottoman) inscriptional traditions from cross-/intercultural and comparative perspectives. They will approach inscriptions diachronically and with an interdisciplinary (literary, historical, religious) focus while also closely engaging with any extant visual and material evidence. Both our sessions will be sponsored. We will aim to cover the expenses of the contributors to both the Round Table and the Thematic Session. The proceedings will be published in the newly established series Studies in Byzantine Epigraphy.
Early Byzantine epigraphy (4th – 8th centuries CE) has yielded thousands of inscriptions, conventionally termed “magic,” that enrich our knowledge of the complexities of religious life, ritual practice and mentality. This paper examines a smaller subset that also attest multilingualism and language choice. Textual amulets on metal sheets, for example, occasionally mix Greek and Aramaic,…
Like any port, Berenike (Red Sea coast, Egypt) was a cosmopolitan place. Not surprisingly, excavations there have uncovered multiple bilingual dedications in a range of languages. The more exotic among them are in Greek and Tamil, Greek and Brahmi-Sanskrit, Greek and Ge’ez, and Greek and Palmyrene-Aramaic. One question that inevitably arises when studying such texts…
The phenomenon of bilingualism is manifest in Christian inscriptions from late antique Rome. The material assembled in ICUR, IGUR, CII, and processed in the Epigraphic Database Bari, documents the co-presence of Greek and Latin from the third to the eighth century in over five hundred instances, attesting both to the durability and to the diversity…
The very first monumental inscriptions commissioned by the Sasanian kings were all trilingual, with versions in Middle Persian, Parthian and Greek. These date from the mid-third century CE: the Parthians had been overthrown, and the nascent Sasanian dynasty was establishing itself as the dominant military and political force in the Near East and on the…
In the multilingual environment of the early Byzantine eastern Mediterranean, inscriptions offer a crucial lens through which to explore the interplay of language, identities, and craftsmanship. While previous scholarship has primarily addressed the linguistic and textual dimensions of bilingual or multilingual inscriptions, thereby highlighting aspects of intercultural contacts and exchange, their material production, and the…