Epigraphic Texts Research Articles

DESCRIPTIVE TERMINOLOGY IN UKRAINIAN EPIGRAPHY: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF SYNONYMOUS TRIPLET “ГРАФІТІ”, “НАПИС”, AND “ЗАПИС”

The main goal of our study is to analyse the descriptive terminology used in academic discourse dedicated to Ukrainian epigraphy employing a corpus-based approach. Using the BootCat tool and custom tuples such as “епіграфіка графіті напис” and “корпус Україна графіті” we scraped the Web and generated a sample corpus containing Ukrainian texts related to Epigraphy. Our goal was to analyse the variety of epigraphic terms circulating the digital domain and the peculiarities of their usage. Our findings reveal variations in term usage in Ukrainian epigraphic texts, offering insights into their academic application. The case study showcased how synonyms can not only enrich a language, but also impose challenges in standardising terminology due to linguistic variations and the influence of individual scholars. The findings emphasise the need for a nuanced approach to developing standardised vocabularies, considering the linguistic, historical and cultural contexts. This study serves as a valuable example of how digital tools can aid in understanding and addressing the complexities inherent in preserving and studying cultural heritage in the digital age.

Inscriptions in stone, literacy in question: The confusion between <b> and <v> in inscriptions from Roman Africa

AbstractIn this paper, a quantitative and qualitative analysis is conducted on the <b>/<v> alternations found in the epigraphic texts from three representative subsets of Roman African inscriptions from both urban centres and more peripheral areas (1st century BCE – 7th century CE). The distribution of the confusion has been related to the dating and provenance place of the inscriptions and the level of literacy of those involved in their crafting. The results show a difference in the distribution of <b>/<v> confusions in the three areas examined, with a higher incidence in later inscriptions from Sabratha. Thus, it is discussed whether the different distribution of the <b>/<v> confusions observed in the different regions might be a cue for internal diatopic variation.

LE DOSSIER EPIGRAPHIQUE DU REGNE D’HELIOGABALE EN MESIE INFERIEURE

The epigraphic file of Heliogabalus’ reign in Moesia In ferior. The author realizes an inventory of the epigraphic file in Moesia Inferior under Heliogabalus. He emphasizes that the inventory is poor and he tries to ex plain it through the lack of building initiatives (due to a relative peace at the Low er Danube) and through the destruction of other epigraphic texts as an effect of damnatio memoriae. The author compares the texts with other reigns and he thinks that the destruction process was not more considerable that in the time of the barracks-emperors.

A reassessment of a misinterpreted oracularenquiry from Dodona (=Lhôte,

The purpose of this study is to reassess an oracular enquiry preserved on the front of a leaden plate and to reinterpret the last line of the text. The lamella was found during excavations conducted by Demetrios Evangelides at Dodona, and was first published by him in 1935. Since then, the epigraphic text and its dialectal features have been given relatively little attention, and the problematic last line has not yet received a satisfactory reinterpretation.

Pilgrimage in Pre-Islamic Arabia: Continuity and Rupture from Epigraphic Texts to the Qur’an

Abstract References to the pilgrimage in the Qur’an, called ḥajj and ʿumra, are often very brief, but recent studies have shown that most of what is gleaned from the Qur’an about the practice can find parallels in pilgrimages to other sites in Arabia. In this article, I read the Qur’anic data on ḥajj and ʿumra in the light of Arabian inscriptions that mention pilgrimage rituals. In particular, the annual pilgrimage to the Awām Temple in Ma’rib in South Arabia, about which we know a great deal, can shed light on the larger context of the ritual in pre-Islamic Arabia. I argue based on a discussion of Qur’anic and epigraphic materials that the ḥajj and ʿumra of the Qur’an share many elements with other Arabian pilgrimages, but the Qur’an clearly expresses discontent with certain practices of pre-Islamic pilgrimage such as ritual hunt while endorsing or approving others such as the procession between the hills of al-Ṣafā and al-Marwa. Most importantly, I contend that the Qur’an attempts to decouple pilgrimage and animal sacrifice especially due to the latter’s strong association with physical objects of veneration called awthān and nuṣub in the Qur’an.

Religious Excitement in Ancient Anatolia: Cult and Devotional Forms for Solar and Lunar Gods by Iulian Moga. Translated into English by Alina Piftor

This book is a contribution to the growing body of scholarship on Anatolian cult practice, focusing on the distinctive regional cults that flourished in the interior of Anatolia during the Roman era. The work owes its origins to a doctoral dissertation developed at Alexander Ioan Cuza University in Iaşi, Romania, and defended at the University of Angers, France. The author’s objective is to examine Anatolian cults of the Roman Empire period that use solar and lunar symbolism. The work is divided into two broad sections. The first describes the Anatolian deities that the author identifies as solar and lunar gods and discusses their rituals and the place of their cults in Anatolian society. The second contains a compilation of the literary testimonia and epigraphical texts that furnish the primary data for solar and lunar cults in Anatolia.

On (Not) Reading Inscribed Objects in Latin Comedy

Abstract: This paper examines the performance dynamics of onstage texts in Plautus’ comedies and, in the process, argues that an audience-level viewpoint is essential to understanding Latin stage comedy. Examples of rare epigraphic texts are compared with the more common motif of in-play “perishable texts.” The perishable type were performed by actors as though verbatim and transmit novel information to the audience. In contrast, epigraphic texts are paraphrased and so require specific knowledge. Each kind of text thus does different dramatic work, and the difference originates in the different material “entanglements” of each medium in the lives of ancient Italians. As such, Plautus’ audiences understood comic theater through its extra-textual elements as much as through “the text” as we have it. To understand Roman comedy, scholars must also account for how ancient objects were entangled in Roman culture.

Describing Inscriptions of Ancient Italy. The ItAnt Project and Its Information Encoding Process

This article discusses the challenges addressed in the digital scholarly encoding of the fragmentary texts of the languages of Ancient Italy according to the TEI/EpiDoc Guidelines in XML format. It describes the solutions and customisations that have been adopted for dealing with the peculiarities of our epigraphical documentation and with the formalisation of epigraphical information deemed interesting for data retrieval in a historical linguistic perspective. The making of a digital corpus consisting of new critical editions of selected inscriptions is a work carried out in the context of the project “Languages and Cultures of Ancient Italy. Historical Linguistics and Digital Models”, which aims to investigate the languages of Ancient Italy by combining the traditional methods, proper to historical linguistics, with methods and technology proper to the digital humanities and computational lexicography. More specifically, the purpose of the project is to create a set of interrelated digital language resources which comprise: (1) a digital corpus of texts editions; (2) a computational lexicon compliant with the Web Semantic requirements; (3) a relevant bibliographic reference dataset encoded according to the FRBRoo/LRMoo specifications. Additionally, selected textual data and scientific interpretations will be encoded using CIDOC CRM and its extensions, namely CRMtex and CRMinf. The present contribution thus tackles one of the main aspects of the project, and proposes significant innovations in the encoding of critical editions for epigraphic texts of fragmentary languages, which will hopefully foster future interoperability and integration with other external datasets, a paramount concern of the project.

Chiselled in rock, printed on paper: Francesco Quaresmio and the epigraphy of the Holy Land

The substantial two-volume work Terrae Sanctae Elucidatio (1639) by the Franciscan friar Francesco Quaresmio (b. Lodi, Italy, 1583–1656) is known as a veritable encyclopaedia on the Holy Land. It is also an itinerary of pilgrimage through the sacred sites, taking their monumentality and graphic landscape into account. Quaresmio was especially attentive to the Latin inscriptions made by the Crusaders, here copied by him as autoptic testimonies. This is part of a more general phenomenon. From the fifteenth century through to the seventeenth, in Europe this period is sometimes called the “Age of Inscriptions”, during which epigraphy was recognized as a source of ancient history on a par with philology and archaeology. The overall aim of the present article is to show how Quaresmio, while continuing a medieval tradition of Franciscan scholarship, improved upon epigraphical study by deploying a specific technology, namely the visual rendering of uncial inscriptions in printed form. His rigorous observations, however, would have come to naught without the technical mastery of the Flemish printer-typographer Balthasar Moretus (1574–1641). Following previous developments in pilgrimage literature, where inscriptions – especially the Crusader epitaphs at the foot of Calvary – were commonplace, Quaresmio studied inscriptions not only as texts, but also considered their formal and material aspects. Ultimately, the present study argues that these Latin epigraphic texts played a role in the man’s theological argumentation and in the defence of the loca sancta as Latin possession.

Writing on the world beyond the page: medieval inscriptions as facta and ficta

From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries texts proliferated upon the surfaces of objects, monuments and architecture, ensuring that medieval people lived with texts, even if they never turned a page. Examining a series of inscribed objects, monuments, and buildings, this article focuses upon three constitutive features of this large-scale dynamic: epigraphic prosopopoeia, the use and effects of deixis in medieval inscriptions, and the device of the banderole. It concludes by examining the twelfth-century Bridekirk baptismal font: an epigraphic monument in which all three devices are skillfully deployed, to remarkably self-reflexive ends. The article aims to show how the design of epigraphic texts added not only new textual-material facts to the world, but also textual-visual ficta or fictions.

From stone to silicon: technical advances in epigraphy

Through the annals of time, writing has slowly scrawled its way from the painted surfaces of stone walls to the grooves of inscriptions to the strokes of quill, pen, and ink. While we still inscribe stone (tombstones, monuments) and we continue to write on skin (tattoos abound), our quotidian method of writing on paper is increasingly abandoned in favor of the quick-to-generate digital text. And even though the stone-inscribed text of epigraphy offers demonstrably better permanence than that of writing on skin and paper—even better than that of the memory system of the modern computer (Bollacker in Am Sci 98:106, 2010)—this field of study has also made the digital leap. Today’s scholarly analyses of epigraphic content increasingly rely on high-tech approaches involving data science and computer models. This essay discusses how advances in a number of exciting technologies are enabling the digital analysis of epigraphic texts and accelerating the ability of scholars to preserve, renew, and reinvigorate the study of the inscriptions that remain from throughout history.

Some linguistic criteria for the relative dating of the primary sources within the complex text of the «Basic Annals of the first emperor of Qin» in the Sima Qian’s «Records of the Grand Historian»

This paper examines the division of the complex heterogeneous source text, namely the 6th chapter of the Basic Annals in the Sima Qians Records of the Grand Historian, into parts according to linguistic criteria. Also the paper analyzes the problem of distinguishing boundaries and differences between the primary sources included in the text of the examined source. We employed the identification of the grammatical characters in the text as a way of linguistic analysis based on the A.M. Karapetiants method, compiling the frequency dictionaries of grammatical characters and selecting the fixed set of the most frequent ones. Comparison of the figures obtained for the Records of the Grand Historian 6th chapter with the similar figures obtained for some epigraphic texts from Shuihudi (that is, the grammatical characters percentage within the whole text and the set of the most frequent ones) allows us to propose a hypothesis that explains the differences between the data due to the fact that authors of the texts come from different cultural fields. Thus, the results of the study allow us to distinguish the differences in the cultural fields producing the historical sources from chronological differences indicating dissimilar (or similar) times of texts creation.

A Walk Through the History and Exploring the Conservation Project of Lalbagh Kella, an Incomplete Mughal Fort of Dhaka, Bangladesh

Lalbagh Fort was possibly the most significant construction project performed by Dhaka’s Mughal kings. Despite the fact that the complex was named “Lalbagh Fort” because of the huge defensive fortifications and gates, the masterplan and layouts of the structures that now survive bore little or no resemblance to other Mughal settlements in Bangla or elsewhere in India.The complex’s development lasted just a decade before it became uninhabited for unknown reasons. The brief history of the fort had been buried since 1688, and it remains unfinished to this day. Many efforts have been made to bring this monument’s legacy back to life after decades of oblivion. The main challenge appears to be the incomplete nature of the construction, as well as the scarcity of archaeological materials, literary evidence, and epigraphic texts available to architectural historians. Filling up this gap with these seemingly inconspicuous materials has undoubtedly confounded the existing conversation about this monument.This confusion characterizes Lalbagh’s architecture today. It raises a slew of concerns about its initial master plan, function, and construction history, to which we have yet to offer definitive answers due to the telescopic distance. This research attempts to investigate and evaluate many competing hypotheses concerning its architecture and the continuing conservation process. The fundamental goal is to depict the architecture and examine the conservation process.

Roman Quaestors/Proquaestors in Pro Praetore Status: Lucius Antonius (50—49 BC)

The article analyzes information from sources about the quaestorship and proquaestorship of Lucius Antonius, during which he was empowered with pro praetore, namely, epigraphic texts (inscriptions from Ephesus, Magnesia on the Sipylos and Pergamun) and narrative texts — letters of Cicero and the writings of Josephus Flavius “Antiquities of the Jews”. The author considers points of view on the issue under study by R. Merkelbach, K. Eilers, E. Kondratieff, F. Pina Polo and A. Diez Fernandez and other researchers, does not agree with the dating of Lucius Antonius quaestorship of 49 BC, attributing it to 50 BC, consequently, recognizing that Lucius Antonius received an imperium in the rank of quaestor pro praetore, and then retained it for some period of 49 BC in the rank of proquaestor pro praetore. It is concluded that the sources consistently reflect the official status of Lucius Antonius during his stay in the province of Asia, his actions as the bearer of imperium and his observance of the one-year term of the magistracy of the quaestor.

Becoming Roman? Two-Sided Stelae in Lucus Augusti and its Hinterland

In this article we analyze the two-sided stelae of Lucus Augusti and its hinterland, unique pieces throughout the Roman Empire, with the aim of compiling the information we have about them and analyzing them from the perspective of postcolonial romanization theories. To this end, Bourdieuʼs theory of habitus is fundamentally used, understanding habitus as a generator of principles of social behavior. The use of the toga in the representations of these stelae and their link with Roman citizenship are key to understanding who commissioned these funerary monuments, as well as the correct interpretation of the themes on the reverse provide us with new data. The analysis of the granite blocks allows us to know that they were not large stelae or with an epigraphic text that is now lost, but that it was a conscious choice which they did not have text rather images on both sides. The two-sided stelae are the reflection of a local custom, that is, part of a new hybrid culture: the provincial Galician-Roman culture.
 *This article was supported by a PhD fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Universities called “Ayudas para la Formación de Profesorado Universitario” (FPU19/00148). This research was conducted within the framework of the R+D+i project “Nuevas bases documentales para el estudio histórico de la Hispania romana de época republicana: ciudadanía romana y latinidad (90 a.C. – 45 a.C.)” (PID2019-105940GB-I00) (4 years).

Le rôle judiciaire des archontes des cités grecques d’Asie Mineure pendant les époques hellénistique et romaine

The archons, representing one of the highest civic magistracies in several Greek cities of the Anatolian peninsula, enjoyed numerous attributions in various fields. Based mainly on epigraphic texts, this study analyses the judicial prerogatives of the archons in the Greek cities of Asia Minor during the Hellenistic and Roman periods. It thus constitutes a contribution to the political-institutional history of the Greco-Roman world.

Parole di pietra. Epigrafia, studio dell’antico e nuove architetture nel Rinascimento meridionale

This article presents the first results of an ongoing research on inscriptions in southern Italy in the late medieval and early modern periods and analyses three different ways in which inscriptions were used to make a façade ‘speak’. In first instance, it analyses two significant examples of ‘written’ buildings, where epigraphic texts played a central role in the overall ‘all’antica’ design of the façade; it subsequently considers those cases in which a monumental and long inscription traversed the entire facade; and finally it focuses on the inscriptions connected to city gates and palace portals, as well as on those cases in which it is the door itself to speak in first person.
 The cases presented allow us to recognise the ‘speaking façades’ created in the Kingdom of Naples as a self-aware phenomenon which relied on a consolidated tradition regarding the study of local antiquities and on a sense of continuity with both the classical and medieval past.

Aesthetic values of decorative inscriptions and epigraphic texts in contemporary ceramics in Kurdistan region

Historically, ceramic art is one of the most important arts that has emerged in all civilizations as an artistic value and a philosophical concept of the movement between material and tangible objects or between the ambiguity and clarity of the structure of the elements of works of art that were carried out as a human activity through its artistic output, in showing the same aesthetics of ceramic works of art in terms of form and decoration The Kurdish artist also benefited from the works surrounding him historically, philosophically and artistically, so the culture and history of Kurdish art has an important value in identifying the implicit concepts that the artist enriches aesthetically in his works, and this contributes to the neighborhoods of Kurdish culture and the development of cultural values intellectually and aesthetically, to achieve modern and contemporary art, so the student will research on "the aesthetic values of decorative inscriptions and texts in contemporary ceramic Kurdistan region", Here, the researcher highlights the problem of research embodied in the following question: Has the value of aesthetics become a cause for the transfer of artistic ideas in the presentation of ceramic artwork or just decorating and filling spaces with decorative inscriptions and drawings without aesthetic value? This research is a description and analysis of the works of Kurdish artists. The first chapter consists of the general framework of research that includes (problem, importance, objectives, boundaries) and then the definition of terminology, while the second chapter consists of three investigations. The first topic deals with: the definition of the philosophy of the values of beauty in art, and the second topic dealt with the realization of aesthetic values in the work of art, but the third research is about showing decorative inscriptions and biblical texts in Kurdish fine art, and the third chapter dealt with a research society, while the fourth chapter consists of the results of the research.

Chochkitam: A New Classic Maya Dynasty and the Rise of the Kaanu'l (Snake) Kingdom

Thanks to many epigraphic references compiled in the last 35 years, there is a growing consensus among Mayanists that a hegemonic state existed in the Maya Lowlands during the Classic period headed by the Kaanu'l royal dynasty and based at Dzibanche and Calakmul. Many aspects of its organization are still poorly documented, however. Important questions that remain unanswered include how power was exerted and passed on within this political system in ways that might differ from those found in an average-sized Maya kingdom. In this article we present new archaeological and epigraphic data from Chochkitam, a little-known site in northeastern Peten, Guatemala. Although this was a center of average size, the epigraphic texts reveal its political standing as a royal city with important connections with the Kaanu'l and other regional powers at various significant junctures during the Classic period, including before, during, and after the Kaanu'l hegemony. These historical reconstructions, although fragmentary, provide important data to validate emerging hypotheses regarding how the Kaanu'l kings managed their domain.

Лексические особенности дальневосточного региолекта

The paper aims to identify lexical features of the Far Eastern regiolect. The article describes the specificity of the Far East, namely, Primorsky Krai residents’ everyday speech practice. The scientific originality of the research lies in the fact that it introduces new regional material: recordings of the Far East residents’ oral speech in the situations of informal communication and epigraphic texts provided an empirical basis for the research. As a result, specific lexemes to mark the Far Eastern regiolect have been identified; the factors which determine these features of the Far East residents’ everyday speech have been revealed.