Early Inscriptions Research Articles

Bating the Lobster

This essay considers the lobster of Samuel Beckett’s early story “Dante and the Lobster” as what disturbs the count. Assumed to be dead, only to then be revealed alive when it is about to enter the cooking pot, the lobster here is an “incalculable factor” that unsettles narrative consciousness and time. The author reads various aspects of this disturbance, and particularly how the lobster’s “nervous [. . .] life” as encrypted in two small terms of the story—“cruel pot” and “neuter creature”—emerges as an early inscription of a trapped or unvoicable “I” foretelling the self’s dispossession in Beckett’s later writings.

The personal names on the Loveden Hill urn and the Watchfield case fitting

This paper deals with graphophonematic and onomastic problems arising from two early English runic inscriptions. Since Pre-OE /ā̆/ and /ɔ̄̆/ were apparently graphemicized as ᚪ a2 and ᚩ a3 at (about) the same time during the late fifth century, it is possible to identify rune no. 6  on the Loveden Hill urn as a variant of theāc-rune ᚪ,  (~ ). Thus, the initial runic sequence there, sïþa1ba2d, renders a correctly shaped male name Pre-OESīþæbad(= WFranc./Hispano-Goth.Sendebadus). The Watchfield case fitting is at least 50 years younger, and the first part of its inscription, ha1riboki, may have undergone sub-phonemic umlaut (/hæribōki/ phonetically [ˈhærɪˌboːcɪ] or [ˈhεrɪˌbøːcɪ]?). The second sequence, wusa1, represents a female nickname Pre-OEWusæ‘that one who bustles about’, a name which has an exact male counterpart in Langob.Vuso.

‘When Going to Saint James’: An Old Russian Graffito from the 12th Century in Aquitania

In 2015 in Pons, in the former province of Saintonge, an Old Russian pilgrim graffito was found on the wall of the parish church of St. Vivien, a monument of the mid-12th century. It is the second graffito found in France after the one discovered at St. Gilles Abbey. The town of Pons is located on the westernmost route of Santiago de Compostela (via Turonensis) and is noteworthy because of the preserved pilgrim almshouse of the latter half of the 12th century. On the walls of its long archway are horseshoe drawings made by medieval pilgrims, the latest of which, dating from the 16th–17th centuries, bends around a name that is also apparently written in Cyrillic script. The earlier inscription, which appears at the base of the northern end wall of the original façade of the St. Vivien church, is made in the name of one Ivan Zavidovich: “Ivano ps[а]lo Zavi|doviche ida ko | svętomu Ię|kovu” (= ‘Ivan Zavidovich wrote this when going to Saint James’). The most probable palaeographic dating is in the 1160s–1180s. As suggested by birch bark manuscripts, the name of Ivan’s father, Zavid, was popular among Novgorod boyars. Novgorod is also the place with the greatest indirect evidence of the occurrence in Old Russia of the western cult of St. James. This well preserved inscription is an important epigraphic discovery, but its main value lies in the direct evidence of pilgrimages by Russians to the shrine of St. James in Galicia.

Early Inscriptions of Āndhradeśa: Results of fieldwork in January and February 2016

Early Inscriptions of Āndhradeśa: Results of fieldwork in January and February 2016

Opinion of French nephrologists on renal replacement therapy: survey on their personal choice.

BackgroundIn France, like in most developed countries, peritoneal dialysis (PD) is less used than haemodialysis (HD). This is not based on medical evidence supporting HD superiority. As the practitioner's opinion is important to patients and may influence their treatment choice, we conducted a survey among French nephrologists to determine which renal replacement therapy (RRT) they would choose if they had end-stage renal disease (ESRD).MethodsWe e-mailed a self-administered questionnaire to all members of the French-speaking Nephrology Society between 19 October 2008 and 12 January 2009. We then selected from the French Renal Epidemiology and Information Network (REIN) registry a reference population of 20- to 64-year-old patients with ESRD who began RRT [HD, PD or pre-emptive transplantation, (PT)] in 2008.ResultsThe survey response rate was 17.8%. Results showed that 59.6% of respondents chose early inscription on the transplantation waiting list in view of PT, 20.2% selected HD and 20.2% selected PD. When dialysis was the only choice, 50.2% chose HD and 49.8% chose PD. Younger nephrologists (≤44 years old) selected PD more frequently than older nephrologists (≥45 years old) (58.9 versus 40.5%; P < 0.01). Similarly, PD was chosen more often by nephrologists from regions with ‘more PD’ than from regions with ‘less PD’ (79.0 versus 48.8%; P < 0.05). The nephrologists' choices were different from the RTT distribution among the reference population: 81.7% HD, 10.1% PD and 8.2% PT.ConclusionOur survey on the theoretical choice of RTT suggests that the low PD rate in France cannot be explained by a negative opinion of PD among French nephrologists.

‘The Goddess of Liberty was Impure’.

According to Foucault, classical authors ‘occupy a “transdiscursive” position’; in this sense, classical tradition emerges as a reference culture at different historical moments, while deriving from a shared historical a-priori, that of ancient Greece and Rome. The earliest inscriptions of ‘the classic’ defined the ‘genteel language’ of a social class (the classicii) as the ideal language for a first-class writer. This connection between privileged language and class reflects an early link between aesthetics and politics, the more so as ideas about ‘the classical’ re-emerge over time. However, as Foucault makes clear, discourse can also function as a means of resistance. In Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Margaret Fuller draws on her classical knowledge to assert the need for women’s representation in the antebellum era.

Measurement of grating visibility of a fiber Bragg grating based on bent-spectral analysis.

In this study, a technique for measuring the grating visibility of the fiber Bragg grating (FBG) based on bent-spectral analysis is proposed. From varying ac and dc coupling coefficients at different bending radii, the grating visibility is estimated with the aid of a simple mathematical model. The investigation begins with the estimation of the grating visibility from the transmission spectra of the FBG during the inscription process. After that, the FBGs are subjected to a bending test with reducing radii, and again the transmission spectra are recorded. It is shown that the estimated grating visibility is in agreement with the result determined from the earlier inscription process.

Eine Inschrift von Ti. Claudius Paulinus aus Pannonien? Abschrift einer Römerzeitlichen Base Oder Eine Neuzeitliche Fälschung

An Inscription of Ti. Claudius Paulinus from Pannonia? A drawing of an unpublished Roman statue base from Tát came to light together with several archaeological (mainly medieval) finds in a 19th-century (?) booklet in Esztergom, according to the record the drawing was prepared in 1814. The inscription of the statue base describes a senatorial career and the person can be identified most probably with Ti. Claudius Paulinus, governor of Lower Britain in 220 (PIR2 II 231 Nr. 955 cf. RIB 311, 1280, CIL XIII 3162). As the text follows almost exactly his earlier inscription from Britain (RIB 311) and it contaminates a Pannonian funerary text from Sárisáp (RIU 769), it is highly likely that the drawing is a 20th-century forgery.

English

The boundary stone between the territories of Aquileia and Emona, discovered near Bevke to the southwest of Ljubljana (Slovenia), and most probably dated to the period of Augustus, has confirmed the previously argued hypothesis that Emona belonged to Italy from the very beginning of its existence as a colonia Iulia. Two important arguments speak in favour of an early dating of the boundary stone. It is made of Aurisina limestone, quarried in the hinterland of Tergeste, from which only the earliest inscribed monuments in the Nauportus and Emona regions were manufactured, while the letters closely resemble those of the early inscriptions. Pliny’s location of Emona in Pannonia should be taken as mere geographical data and should not be understood in terms of Roman administration.

On the syntax and semantics of the past perfect participle and gerundive in early New Indo Arian Evidence from Eastern Pahari

AbstractThe article discusses the earliest attestations of participial tenses in early Eastern Pahari and the obligative pattern based on the gerundive. The data consist of a collection of inscriptions from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries found in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, inscriptions found in western Nepal, and early Western Pahari inscriptions found in the Chamba state of Himachal Pradesh in India. Despite the highly formulaic and repetitive language of these inscriptions, they constitute some of the earliest attestations of constructions which gave rise to contemporary ergative and obligative patterns. The two types of construction are dealt with against the background of the emerging postpositional system. The case-marking of the main arguments is analyzed and compared with other contemporary New Indo Aryan languages, and verbal forms based on the -ta participle as well as conjunctive participles that appear in the texts are investigated with regard to their control properties. The agreement patterns had already started to diverge in the earliest stages of NIA, and we can observe the transitional phase of a language in which alignment is far from stable.

Blue, Half-Forgotten Hills: Journeys into the Western Galilee, in Ilyas Khouri's Gate of the Sun and A.B. Yehoshua's The Liberated Bride

The epicentre of the Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua’s The Liberated Bride and the Lebanese novelist Ilyas Khouri’s Gate of the Sun is located in the Western Galilee and in Southern Lebanon. Both lie at the heart of the PalestinianUr-narrative of the War of 1948. If we look at satellite images of the region, we notice how seamlessly the Great East African Rift Valley melds into the rougher, coarser landscape of Southern Lebanon.1 Topography is theatre here: many of the Palestinians dispossessed in April 1948, as part of Tochnit Dalet or, later on, in October 1948, during Operation Hiram, crossed from the Galilee into southern Lebanon in their flight from war and despoliation.2 And then they tried to cross back again, across the fence: the most primitive form of irredentism. The essential connectedness of Northern Israel/Palestine and Lebanon is as ancient as the history of the peoples of the Near East. From ancient Ugarit, on the Lebanese coast, with its proto-alphabetic cuneiform script, to the early Aramaic inscriptions in Tel Dan, we are looking at an age-old continuum of conquest and settlement and reconquest. Armies and the objects of their malign attention have been wandering back and forth between Southern Lebanon and Northern Palestine/Israel from time immemorial. It is reasonable to argue that what Israel gained in 1948 in the Western Galilee, with its kibbutzim, moshavim and other towns and settlements, mirrors what Palestine, with its small towns and villages, lost in 1948. In the modern Galilee, the remnant of the Palestinian population lives within a patchwork of Arabicand Hebrew-speaking Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Druze

A Fragment from the Reign of Tausret Reused at Medinet Habu

A sandstone fragment in the blockyard at Medinet Habu (MH bl. 0936) shows two stages of carving on adjoining faces, the later of which, bearing the names of Ramesses III, is part of a frieze from the destroyed inner chambers of his mortuary temple. The earlier inscription is found to contain the name and royal titles of Tausret, with cartouches erased but not reinscribed, and it is shown that this block must originally have come from her destroyed mortuary temple. This piece thus demonstrates for the first time that Tausret’s temple was dismantled for building material and its blocks reused in the Medinet Habu complex early in Ramesses III’s reign.

‘Giving’ and ‘Making’ in Early Runic Epigraphy

A survey of the early Germanic etymological semantics of 'giving' and 'making' is presented in light of the recent reaffirmation that early Nordic *taujan is etymologically related to Old Norse tœja 'grant, bestow, help, assist'. Contextualising the early runic fabricatory and dedicatory inscriptions in terms of sociological, textual and anthropological theory, a new interpretation of early runic pragmatics is developed. The new approach to early runic performance proferred seeks to explain the broader function (and context) of epigraphic production, not merely the most logical reading of individual texts. The early runic pragmatics of 'giving' and 'making' are employed as an analytical frame in which to analyse the socio-cultural as well as linguistic meaning of a series of both functionally and textually related, often significantly stylised Iron Age epigraphs found on a range of early Scandinavian media: runestones, moor finds and migration-era amulets.

Transmutações da escrita em suporte digital

This article aims to go the path of writing from its earliest inscriptions on media, then through the paper and the advent of the printed book, the Gutenberg era, whose culture reigned with sovereignty for several centuries, until the digital revolution when writing jumped from printed paper to electronic screens. At this point writing changes its nature, because the computer allows the seamless blending of the three matrices of language: verbal, visual and audible. It also allows the subdivision of information into portions that are connected according to the user´s agency, which creates a new kind of language: hypertext and hypermedia.

A monument of Ramses VII in the area of the Ramesseum?*

Publication of a doorjamb bearing a dedication of Ramses VII to his father Ramses VI found during the 2010 excavation season in the Ramesseum's Small Temple. Traces of an earlier inscription survive indicating reuse. It may have been the jamb of a house built in the vicinity of the Ramesseum. Although the counterpart to this doorjamb was found by B. Bruyère in Deir el-Medina in 1924, this recent discovery in the Ramesseum, and the nature of its earlier inscription, are sufficient grounds for identifying the temple of Ramses II as the place in which the ‘monument' dedicated by Ramses VII to his father could have been erected.

The Concatenate Poetics of Slavery and the Articulate Material of Dave the Potter

The Concatenate Poetics of Slavery and the Articulate Material of Dave the Potter Michael A. Chaney (bio) “traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel.” —Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” (1936) As the foundation for an economic order based on flexible accumulation and agrarian capitalism, the antebellum slave occupied a pivotal if dichotomous role. Politically mute but commercially hypervisible, even the slave artisan whom W. E. B. Du Bois called the “quasi-slave” remains voiceless in the archive (177–79).1 Yet to discern an exception comes as no surprise. Dave the Potter, an antebellum exemplar of African American exceptionalism, nearly approximates the utopian disconnect from chattel status that Du Bois imagined the skilled, wage-earning quasi-slave to enjoy over field hands. But it is not disconnection that Dave the Potter’s astonishing expressivity seeks. Rather, in its fusion of literacy and materiality, the work of Dave the Potter aspires to a solidity of author and text that always disappears. Some folklorists refer to David Drake (ca. 1800–1874) as Dave of the Hive, since he worked for the newspaper The Hive, where Abner Landrum presumably taught him literacy before he was sold to Lewis Miles, a pottery works owner in the Edgefield district of South Carolina.2 Beyond these apocryphal points of biography, three salient facts anchor Dave the Potter’s exceptionality: first, his writing was a public affair, vaunted by the same slave-owning class that so vehemently prohibited slave literacy; second, he became such a skillful turner of clay that his vessels are among the largest recorded of the era; and third, he signed and dated his ceramics (Fig. 1), even incising anecdotal writing onto their walls. Characterized by phonetic spelling and irregular capitalization, many of these inscriptions are dedicational (“this Jar is to Mr Segler . . .” of 1858 or “for Mr. John monday” of 1857); others are self-reflexive, announcing the vessel’s purpose for storing meats (“Great & Noble Jar/hold Sheep goat or bear” from 1859). A few moralize about feeling “the need of—Grace” (1858) in keeping with the evangelizing rhetoric of most inscribed craftworks of the period from quilts to plateware. Others combine materialist braggadocio and the proverb to muster such unexpected pronouncements as “Cash Wanted” (1852) and “I made this Jar = for cash—/though its called = lucre Trash //” (1857, with equal signs, dash, and double back slashes in the original inscription). Many of these messages are signed (“Dave”) beneath the inscription, indicating the writing to be worthy of acknowledgement, and most are clearly formulated as heroic couplets. Few scholars of American or African American literature, however, address them as literature.3 In the following analysis, I will explore the ways in which Dave the Potter’s hybrid assemblages of material and literary expression complicate our understanding of slave authorship. Central to this investigation is the interplay of the signature and the inscriptive practices that help to call forth and call away the subject that the signature endeavors to name. My own designation of that subject throughout this essay—Dave the Potter rather than David Drake—registers respect for the manner in which the texts explored here were originally signed, as well as skepticism for the hegemonic effects of ascribing an exceptional singularity to that figure.4 Whatever we call the author, we must likewise be cautious when naming the text, lest the poetry overshadow the pottery or vice versa. Both clay and its embellishing marks work together, and [End Page 607] sometimes against each other, to produce a combinatory articulation in which words, names, dates, bases, apertures, walls, necks, handles, surfaces, and markings come together to reject the separation of one part from the other. The term that Dave the Potter seems to have preferred for this trope of convergence is “catination” or “concatination,” two of his earliest inscriptions. In its arresting vocality and refusal of anatomization, Dave the Potter’s aesthetic exemplifies a tactic of transatlantic, nineteenth-century theatricality that Daphne Brooks refers to as “spectacular opacity”: “opaque performances of marginalized cultural figures [that] call attention to the skill of the performer who, through gestures and speech as well as...

Sublime monuments and sublime ruins in ancient aesthetics

The Greeks and Romans produced monuments – monumental buildings, temples, tombs, inscription-bearing slabs and other structures – as a way of projecting themselves into their own present and into the future of others. Monuments are reminders, in enduring material, of the achievement of a collective, even when they appear to commemorate an individual. They are collective expressions with ideological force. This paper explores the interaction between materiality, language and architecture in a Greek tradition of the sublime that exalts monuments and their ruins. The paper begins by proposing an aesthetics of early sepulchral inscriptions; it then looks at selected Hellenistic epigrams. It culminates in Hellenistic poetics, Vitruvian architecture and the Longinian sublime, which looks directly back to earlier developments in the same tradition of verbal architecture. The sublime is generated at the nether ends of the spectrum that monuments can occupy – at their moment of greatest possible expansion (at the limits of the cosmos) and at the moment of their imminent collapse. From Homer to the postclassical eras, the traditions of sublime monuments and their ruins are ways of confronting and expressing the fragilities of time, matter and existence under changing cultural circumstances in a cumulative and self-reflexive fashion.

Monasteries, Monasticism, and Patronage in Ancient India: Mawasa, a Recently Documented Hilltop Buddhist Complex in the Sanchi Area of Madhya Pradesh

This paper presents data from a recently documented hilltop Buddhist complex called Mawasa, in the Raisen district of Madhya Pradesh, central India, about 15 km to the east of the UNESCO World Heritage site of Sanchi. It was documented during the Sanchi Survey Project, a multi-phase exercise aimed at relating the histories of Buddhist monasticism and urbanism as represented by the sequences at Sanchi and nearby Vidisha respectively to archaeological patterns within their hinterland. The dataset at Mawasa offers a well-preserved and representative sample of many of the main architectural types found at Phase II (c. 2nd - 1st century BC) Buddhist sites in the study area. It includes a well-preserved stūpa, a carved slab with an early and unusual Brahmi donative inscription, and a group of interesting platformed monasteries with well-preserved internal details. All of these provide important new insights into the nature of patronage and the history and chronology of Buddhist monasticism and monastery architecture during this early period of Buddhist propagation. Further, an enigmatic structure, the precise function of which remains unclear is located within the site. It may be a very early shrine of a hitherto unstudied form, and thus has potential relevance for the wider history of early temple architecture.

Audible identities: passing and sound technologies

At the March 2008 conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections held at Stanford University, audio historians played what they claim is the first recording of the human voice. It is a presumably female voice singing Au clair de la lune, though the distorted quality of the 10-second recording renders the words no more decipherable than the singer's gender to an untutored ear.1 The recording was made in Paris in April 1860 on a 'phonautograph' invented by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville (aka Leon Scott), nearly 20 years before Thomas Edison patented the phonograph in 1877. Sound waves captured by a horn attached to a diaphragm vibrated a stiff brush that inscribed the pattern of waves on blackened paper. Scott wanted to produce a visual inscription of human speech but had not yet conceptualised sound as something that could be audibly reproduced; that would be Edison's contribution when he replaced Scott's paper with a more pliable and durable substance: tin foil and later wax cylinders.2 The recent recovery of Scott's early inscription foregrounds the historicity of listening itself. As many scholars have pointed out, audition is organised differently by sound technology so that how we hear, not just what we hear, changes. Hearing becomes historical not just physiological; listening becomes technique. A new form of listening entails a new concept of sound itself. 'Phonautograph' means, literally, sound writing itself (which is the subtitle of Scott's 1878 book); thus the term ignores the very machine that is reproducing the voice. 'Phonautograph' suggests that the sound is literally there, textually inscribed on the blackened paper, and thus, technically, is not a re- production. Embedded in Scott's nomenclature is the germ of the debates that sound technology has aroused in the modernist era over the relative value of - and indeed, the very distinction between - original and copy, live and recorded, authentic and mechanically produced, sincerity and fakery, reproduction and representation. The confusion of those borderlines is graphically presented in the image of the dog with his ear to the horn of the gramophone listening to 'his master's voice' (a trademark first acquired by the London Gramophone Company in 1898 and used by Emile Berliner from 1900), as well as in anecdotes, cartoons, photographs and advertisements from the time in which people mistake the talking machine for a person talking, the mimetic representation for the 'real thing'. That slippage between the Uve and the recorded, the original and the copy, is precisely the achievement of sound technology; it is not a mistake but what makes it work. In that slippage lies the key to a new, modernist understanding not just of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, but of subjectivity itself. That kind of slippage is one that I have explored elsewhere in terms of 'passing'.3 Passing has conventionally been understood, especially in the United States, as a social practice whereby an individual assumes an identity that does not by rights belong to him or her.4 Most commonly, it refers to light-skinned African Americans living, or at least socialising, as white, which is how modernists would have understood the term. More contemporary usage expands the concept to include many different kinds of identifications across apparently distinct identity boundaries. The term is often deployed in a pejorative sense, as passing is likely to be associated with impersonation, appropriation or deception. Metaphorical uses of the term (for example, as in 'he's passing as a feminist') might seem to elide the particular historical conditions that motivated passing in its first cultural sense, such as laws against miscegenation, segregated public spaces and community-sanctioned violence. Even in its original historical meaning, however, passing was far more complicated than the notion of adopting a fraudulent identity would suggest. Passing was not just a response to rigidly imposed racial boundaries; it exposed those boundaries - social, legal, corporeal - as cultural, discursive and permeable. …

Odda's chapel, Ealdred's inscriptions? The Deerhurst inscriptions in some continental contexts*

This article examines the inscriptions associated with Odda's chapel, Deerhurst, in the light of a quantitative analysis of terminology in early medieval lapidary inscriptions in Rome, western Germany and Normandy, and in the Liber Pontificalis. It suggests that they were the first fruits of a campaign by Bishop Ealdred to revive the practice of installing correctly formulated dedicatory inscriptions in churches in England, but that the campaign petered out as a result of the Norman Conquest.