Epigraphic Documentation Research Articles

New Greek inscriptions from Akmoneia and its territory

This paper publishes nine new inscriptions copied during the archaeo­logical surveys conducted in the Phrygian city of Akmoneia and in its territory between 2014 and 2017. Even though there have been no systematic excavations to date, the city is remarkable due to its rich epigraphic documentation. The new finds make a notable contribution to this. Of the nine inscriptions published here, one (No. 1) concerns the erection of the statues of Koros, the goddesses, as well as of the sacred council, by a certain Hierokles, the priest and the agonothete of the Great Asklepieia. In another inscription (No. 2), a woman called Flavia Hedeia, the daughter of Flavius Montanus of consular rank and the wife of Sallius Aristainetos of consular rank, is honoured by her foster-parents. We attempt to identify Flavius Montanus through some related inscriptions already published from the city and thereby propose a dating in the mid-3rd century AD. Nos. 3–6 are grave inscriptions and they all date from the Roman Imperial period except for No. 6. Even though the remaining inscriptions (Nos. 7–9) consist of fragmentary texts carved on architrave blocks, they still provide valuable information, such as proving the existence of a gymnasium, as well as a fountain house in Akmoneia.

La panégyriarchie dans les carrières civiques

Panegyriarchy in Civic Careers In ancient Greek cities, the organization of festivals generated its own institutional system, with various officials involved in various aspects of the celebration. One of these officials was the panegyriarch, in charge of the market that took place during the festival. On the basis of a systematic survey of the epigraphic documentation, this paper aims at defining the profile of the individuals attested as panegyriarchs. It presents the chronological and geographical distribution of the evidence, studies the offices associated with that of panegyriarch within civic careers and reflects on the level of prestige of this specific magistracy.

Dorothy Mackay: A Forgotten Female Pioneer in Archaeology

In 2022, the author of this paper came across four letters regarding epigraphic documentation of some elite tombs in the Theban necropolis, Egypt, written by Dorothy Mackay and addressed to Alan H. Gardiner, at the archive of the Griffith Institute, University of Oxford. The author of the letters was the wife of Ernest Mackay (1880–1943), a British archaeologist best known for his later work on the Indus Valley Civilisation, who was excavating on the Theban west bank between 1913 and 1916. However, as further investigation revealed, Dorothy, until recently an obscure figure, was an accomplished scholar in her own right, who worked together with her husband, acted as a curator of two museums, and published extensively in times when it was far from easy for women to obtain an education, let alone conduct research. Despite that, the only recent sources discussing Dorothy and her scholarly accomplishments lack some vital details on her life. The aim of this contribution is to provide some further information and context on Dorothy Mackay and her research in the first half of the twentieth century.

Aenigmatic Names

Abstract The corruption of personal names in Arabic, especially those borrowed from foreign languages (such as Greek), goes back to the specific features of its script and often results in the multiplication of historical figures and hagiographic characters. In this article, is analysed the orthography and functional features of the name of the Jewish king of Ḥimyar Yōsēf called Y(w)sf/’s’r/Yṯ’r in the South Arabian epigraphic documentation and Yūsuf Dhū Nuwās in Arab Islamic tradition. The article deals with several sobriquets and epitheta, under which he is known in Eastern Christian historiographical and hagiographical traditions and some of them have received new interpretations. The derivation of the unusual Ethiopic form of his name Ṭamnus is attested in the Chronicle of John of Nikiu. It can be identified as “Dimnos” found in the Chronography of John of Malalas (c. 491–578). The same name in the form Dīmnōn appears in the Chronicle of Ps.-Dionysius of Tel-Maḥrē (sed. 818–45). In the article it is cautiously suggested that these three similar names came into being as a result of a corruption of the Greek “δαιμων” or “demon”. The title nəgusä aḥzab, which the Jewish monarch bears in the Chronicle of John of Nikiu, proves to be very close to the original title of Yōsēf, the mlk/kl/’š‘b-n, viz. “the king of all the communities” (Arab. malik al-shu‘ūb). The author proposes an assumption that this is rare evidence of the influence of South Arabian historical tradition upon Byzantine historiography.

Dictator: The Evolution of the Roman Dictatorship by Mark B. Wilson

Reviewed by: Dictator: The Evolution of the Roman Dictatorship by Mark B. Wilson Jeffrey Easton Dictator: The Evolution of the Roman Dictatorship. By Mark B. Wilson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2021. Pp. 470. Wilson's book chronicles the history and vicissitudes of Roman dictatorship, an institution that fascinates modern observers just as it did historians of the late republic, who sought retrospectively to schematize its features and define its potency.1 In this account, dictatorship may have represented a temporary bestowal of unfettered authority [End Page 171] to a man with no colleague, but it was hardly a "constitutional" aberration. It turns out that the institution of dictatorship, which consisted of enlisting the right man for the right crisis, was as fundamental as the senate or the assemblies to the proper functioning of the government, until it slipped into desuetude and was then reduced to a tool of autocracy by the first-century warlords. Wilson's excellent book belongs less to the technical genres of legal, administrative, or military history—although he skillfully navigates each area—than to a social history of the interactions between Roman society and the individual men to whom the office was entrusted. The book consists of sixteen chapters and five appendices that catalogue all the Roman dictators and address specific problems of scholarship ancillary to the main text. Within this organization, four cornerstones of Wilson's model emerge. The first (Chapters One and Two) tracks the disjointed, and mostly theoretical, later written traditions and the problematic epigraphic documentation of Roman dictatorship from its origins to its final transformation under Caesar. Wilson rightly argues that the most comprehensive portrayals reveal a discomfort with the one-man rule that became normalized in the first century and coalesced under the principate. The tendency was to project the disdain for Sulla and Caesar back onto the whole history of the office; the historian's job is to separate this ideological antipathy from the specific features that can be recovered from the narratives (28–30). This approach pays off in the second part of the book, which establishes Wilson's model of the "archaic" dictatorship that occurred eighty-five times from 500 to 202. Chapters Three, Four, and Seven form the core, while Chapters Five to Twelve detail technical issues such as the rituals of appointment, the character of the officeholders, the symbols of office, and the selection of the magister equitum. Working from exempla about the first three "primordial" dictators, Wilson offers a new interpretation of the conditions that made the appointment of a dictator palatable to the senators and the populace, as well as of the norms every archaic dictator was to embrace upon accepting his authority. When a problem emerged, the consuls had to be unable to confront it because of absence, illness, or lack of the necessary acumen, or because the task demanded a manager whose authority to act was unchecked by a consular colleague (intercessio) or by the appeal of a tribune of the plebs (provocatio). The thread that bound the whole arrangement was the all-important mandate by which the senate restricted the dictator's field of action to one task (causa). The earliest dictators were military fixers, equipped with the mandate rei gerundae causa (78). By the middle of the fourth century, dictators were increasingly assigned domestic tasks, proving effective in conflict resolution and discharging consular-level juridical, electoral, and religious duties throughout the third century (77–87). For Wilson, the second important dimension of the mandate was the dictatorship's defining feature. Completion of the assigned task could take as long as necessary, but the dictator was expected to abdicate immediately after its resolution. This model resolves a dissonance in later narratives on the dictator's authority, namely, that the consuls seemingly continued operating independently even after the appointment of a dictator. Some readers, however, may question the model's reliance on the benevolence of those who entered the office, which assumes that most of them were "men of character," who would strive to uphold some early version of Cicero's concordia ordinum and operate on behalf of all Romans rather than...

Alieni in Corduba, Colonia Patricia: desde la fundación de la ciudad hasta la Antigüedad tardía

This paper aims to provide an overview of the immigration of extra-Peninsular origin recorded in Colonia Patricia (Córdoba, Spain) based on the analysis of the available literary and epigraphic documentation. Starting from the foundation of the Roman city and its subsequent conversion into a colonia civium Romanorum, we will carry out an analysis of those individuals who, from the 2nd century BC, arrived in the city from non- Hispanic territories. We will deal with important aspects such as the regions and cities of origin of these immigrants, their professional occupations, the causes that determined their mobility and the activity they developed in Corduba after their arrival. Chronologically, our contribution covers the long period of time between the foundation of Corduba in the 2nd century BC by the consul M. Claudius Marcellus and the 5th century AD, which is the date of the latest case of mobility we have documented

Papyri to the rescue: reconstructing Hellenistic male-female couple relationships through papyrological documentation

The relationships of ordinary male-female couples in Antiquity remain a field of research still little explored, especially regarding the study of feelings, emotions, real-life experiences, and couple dynamics through everyday life. Thus, it is essential to look into this theme, both in the Greek and Roman worlds, in a diachronic and synchronic perspective; this is the purpose of a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) project at the University of Lausanne, entitled “Couple relationships in Antiquity”. My PhD thesis, as part of this project, intends to explore couple relationships during the Hellenistic period, in Greece, Asia Minor, and Ptolemaic Egypt, through literary, epigraphic, and papyrological documentation.
 In this context, Greek papyri provide notable elements, that can complement and counteract the data issued from literary sources and inscriptions whose one of the biases is to present an idealized or incomplete vision of couples’ relationships; nevertheless, we must keep in mind that papyri suffer from their own specific biases.My aim in this paper is to show how possible it is to integrate different types of papyri – letters, marriage contracts, wills, complaints, etc – as part of a study on couples’ real-life experience, while identifying some of the key methodological aspects necessary for this type of analysis, by presenting excerpts from several documents. Furthermore, the addition of an adequate methodological canvas allows going beyond the cultural and/or typological filters and biases inherent to this type of documentation, and its inclusion in the global corpus of my thesis, in which most documents are from the ‘classical’ Greek world.

Tracios en Hispania

Este trabajo tiene como objetivo principal la recopilación y estudio de la documentación epigráfica relacionada con la presencia de inmigrantes de origen tracio en la península ibérica. Pretendemos ofrecer un catálogo epigráfico actualizado y una síntesis de esta emigración. Entre otros elementos se estudiarán las causas que motivaron los desplazamientos, la onomástica de los inmigrantes detectados y la actividad que desarrollaron en Hispania.

The Cult of the Founder in the Epigraphic Documentation Some Observations

This paper focuses on the very scarce epigraphic evidence related to the cult of the ‘founders of colonies’, that means, more precisely, on the votive inscription of Mnasithales to Antiphamos, from Gela, and the inscribed dedications from the archegesion of Anios, in Delos. These highly interesting documents allow us to discuss about the roots of the heroic status of the founders and about the relationship between the cult of the founder and the votive inscriptions.

Le texte épigraphique à l'épreuve de l'art. Style, date, attribution

The Interest among medievalists for the social and anthropological implications of written culture since the mid-1990s also concerns the study of medieval inscriptions, especially in the field of art history. Inscriptions are considered as a source of information for art historians, and their content is used as an evidence or a scientific argument for dates, attributions, or stylistic qualifications. Inscriptions are also considered as proper objects whose presence inflects or transforms the work of art. In order to testify to the convergence of historical questions regarding visual, textual and material cultures, this article first presents the main historiographical trends of the encounter between art history and medieval epigraphy. The Lazarus capital in Moissac shows, in a second part, the richness of the discourses produced at the crossroads of the sculpted image and the inscription. Finally, it presents some research perspectives for further studies of medieval epigraphic documentation.

Tácito, el templo romano de la c/ Morería (Córdoba) y el origen del culto provincial en Baetica

Since the late nineteenth century, the origins of provincial imperial cult in Hispania Ulterior Baetica –and in its capital, Colonia Patricia-Corduba– has been one of the most discussed historiographical issues by the specialists of the Hispanic Antiquity. Traditionally addressed from the analysis of literary and, above all, epigraphic documentation, in recent decades the development of archaeological research in the city of Córdoba (where the remains of a monumental area dominated by a large marble temple, known as forum novum, have been found) has highlighted the need to also consider the material evidence for advancing towards its resolution. Taking into account a controversial text of Tacitus (Ann. IV, 37) as well as the information related to the mentioned forum novum and its colossal temple, this contribution raises the possibility that the provincial, or if preferred supralocal, cult was established in Baetica, as in the other two Hispanic provinces, shortly after Augustus’ death.

Jean Clédat à Meir (1899–1901)

Summary This paper introduces Jean Clédat (1871–1943) and his years of work on the site of Meir in Middle Egypt as well as his unfulfilled plans for publication based on the manuscript now housed in the Louvre Archives. The French Egyptologist, particularly known for his excavation works at Bawit (1901–1905), left an extensive artistic and scientific estate. His remarkable drawing skills made iconographic and epigraphic documentation a prominent aspect of his research. As a member of the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale since 1899, Clédat worked on various archaeological sites in Egypt. The study of the Necropolis of Meir was central to his work between 1899 and 1901. Meir was intended to be one of Clédat’s major projects but remained incomplete and never made it to publication.

P. Aelius Peregrinus Rogatus et le gouvernement de la province de Maurétanie césarienne

Amongst the equestrian career of P. Aelius Peregrinus Rogatus under Septimius Severus and Caracalla, his office of procurator ducenarius of Mauretania Caesariensis is especially well-known, through a profuse epigraphic documentation coming from this Roman province. The dossier has never been the subject of a comprehensive survey. Through its full re-examination, we propose to focus on the role of this equestrian officer in Mauretania Caesariensis. The documentation emphasizes the diverse aspects of his government and also provides a concrete testimony about provincial governors activity in general.

Intensive survey in the territory of Salamanca: aerial photography, geophysical prospecting and archaeological sampling

Salamanca lies on the right bank of the river Tormes, a tributary of the Douro, on the northern sub-plateau of the Iberian peninsula (fig. 1). Although hardly mentioned in Roman historical sources, it is a reference point for work on Roman territory because the surveyor Frontinus (De Agrorum Qualitate [ed. Thulin 1971] 1–2) used Salmantica (in Lusitania) and Palantia (in Citerior) to exemplify ager per extremitatem mensura comprehensus, the system of land organization characteristic of stipendiary cities. Frontinus was writing in Flavian times, but the creation of ager mensura comprehensus in Lusitania occurred in the Augustan period, as is confirmed by remarkable epigraphic documentation. In N Lusitania, a total of 11 boundary-stones (termini Augustales) are known, nine from the reign of Augustus (and two of these provide explicit reference to Salmantica) and two from that of Claudius. The dates provided by Augustus’ tribunicia potestas allow us to date the surveying operations delimiting the urban territories to between A.D. 4–5 (the inscriptions from Peroviseu and Ul) and A.D. 5–6 (the inscriptions from Sao Salvador, Ledesma, Ciudad Rodrigo, and the new one from Jarandilla de la Vera). The Augustan ager mensura comprehensus may have conditioned the model of the subsequent rural settlement by creating a framework for territorial occupation being organized around the villa from the Flavian period on. The villa would dominate the rural countryside, until it disappeared around the first decades of the 5th c. as part of a process that can be associated with the breaking down of imperial authority and the arrival of the Germanic peoples in the year 409. Almost nothing is known about Salamanca’s territory during the Islamic occupation until the first official repopulation took place under the king of Leon, Ramiro II, in 939–49. The lack of attested settlements in the Douro valley between the 8th and 10th c. is a key question for the organization of the border area between the Islamic state of Al-Andalus and the kingdom of Leon, but scholars generally reject the thesis formulated in 1966 by C. Sánchez Albornoz, which tended to present the lands of the Douro valley as practically depopulated.

Carolingian Verse Inscriptions and Images: From Aesthetics to Efficiency

Epigraphic inscriptions are very common in early medieval art and have been studied in a an abundant bibliographic production since the last quarter of the twentieth century in research on text/image interactions in medieval artistic culture. Insofar as verse inscriptions were used everywhere in Carolingian epigraphic documentation, and insofar as they coexisted with many texts in prose, why did images always use metrics? What kind of links connected iconic construction and poetic composition? To propose answers to these questions, this paper explores some different approaches to epigraphic tituli on early medieval works of art. By limiting its scope to metrical texts, it highlights some salient features of this very rich epigraphic documentation without separating the form and meaning of the text from the material. The symbiosis of these three primordial elements actually allowed the creation of a kind of “Carolingian aesthetics” and gave efficiency to the interactions between texts and images.

Chronique: Results of the Bonn Mission to the rock-necropolis of Qubbet el-Hawa, 1959-1984

Review article of E. Edel, K.-J. Seyfried & G. Vieler, Die Felsgräbernekropole der Qubbet el-Hawa bei Assuan. I. Abteilung (Paderborn, 2008). Three major questions are addressed: 1. Does the new report contain information on all the tombs presently known? 2. Does it provide a complete and reliable epigraphic documentation of all the decorated tombs? 3. What is the quality of the archaeological and architectural documentation? Appended is a lengthy series of bibliographical notes, organized in six sections: Early explorers and excavators of the site; Work of the Bonn mission; General sources on the necropolis; Notes on specific tombs; Excavations undertaken since 1984; Coptic remains.

« Un modèle d’une belle république fédérative » ? Montesquieu et le système politique des Lyciens, de la genèse de l’Esprit des lois aux découvertes épigraphiques les plus récentes en Asie Mineure méridionale

“ Un modèle d’une belle république fédérative” ? Montesquieu and the political system of the Lycians, from the genesis of l’Esprit des Lois to the most recent epigraphic discoveries in Southern Asia Minor. In the work published by Montesquieu in 1748, the reference to the Lycian model (IX, 3) turns out to be a late addition, since the manuscript in the Bibliothèque nationale de France does not contain it. Probably following a (re) reading of the book XIV of Strabo (through La République of Jean Bodin at first ?), this choice of Lycia instead of the “ société des Achéens” – thus vaunted by Polybius – seems to come from the fact that the brief description of the Lycian systema gave an image both simpler and more positive of an authentic federal state. This does not, however, save Montesquieu from a partially faulty interpretation of the text – Latin rather than Greek – of its source, an institutional misunderstanding that compromised the success of the Lycian model in the eyes of the Fathers of the American Constitution. On the other hand, as we can foresee today thanks to a significant increase in the epigraphic documentation, the fate of the Lycian Confederation – from the time of its formation (early second century BC) to the reduction of Lycia into a Roman province (in 43 AD) – has finally been equally dramatic than those of the Achaean Confederation. Nevertheless, the Lycian example remains one of the most interesting of all the history of ancient federalism. (English translation by A. Rufin Solas and W. Pillot.)

Elites baleares: epigrafía y movilidad socio-geográfica durante el siglo II dC

Balearic elites: epigraphy and social-geographic mobility during the 2nd Century A.D. This work analyses several cases of social-geographical mobility as witnessed by the epigraphic documentation of the Balearic Islands and Tarraco during the 2nd Century A. D. In a first step, the mobility takes place in the Islands local civil elite, then progresses, for the most outstanding members of the group, into the provincial elite.

The Shaft Tomb of Menekhibnekau at Abusir – Season of 2008

Abstract During the autumn season of 2008, the epigraphic work and photographic documentation of the relief decoration in the burial chamber of Menekhibnekau (uncovered in April 2007) continued, together with the cleaning and conservation of its side walls. In cleaning the surface layers of sand on the eastern and southern sides of the main shaft, a number of items have been found, among them numerous fragments of a large basalt statue of a walking cow (representing the goddess Hathor), originally protecting a small figure (of Menekhibnekau?) standing in front of her. At the same time, examination of the embalmer’s cache adjoining the main shaft of Menekhibnekau continued. In addition to numerous large pottery storage jars and other pottery pieces, some of them inscribed with short texts written in hieratic, fragments of embalming instruments were also obtained. In a summarizing table, hieratic inscriptions discovered so far on the vessels in the tomb of Menekhibnekau at Abusir are listed.

Les patrimoines fonciers des sénateurs dans l’Italie républicaine : l’apport des sources épigraphiques

The studies devoted to senatorial property during the Republic have shown, on the basis of the litterary sources, the creation of a gap between two fortune levels in the 1st century BC. The epigraphic documentation confirms this evolution. It is possible to identify senatorial properties through five criteria: the name of the fundus; a local magistrature (the Tarent law requires from a magistrate to be proprietor in the city); an epitaph located on a rural estate; an honorific inscription brought to light in a city where a senator was proprietor; slaves or freedmen who give the cognomen of their senatorial owner. The catalogue of Republican senatorial properties reveals that the senators who held provincial commands possessed fundi in Latium and Campania. On the contrary, recent senators were proprietors in peripherical zones. These senators were introduced into the curia by the imperatores, and some of them made profit on the Sullanian proscriptions. Few were able to escape the Civil Wars, and to hand down their properties to their heirs.