Brill Studies in Greek and Roman Epigraphy – serie

Cult and Koinon in Hellenistic Thessaly examines the territorial expansion of the Thessalian League ca. 196-27 BCE and the development of the state religion of the League. Individual chapters trace the adoption of a common Thessalian calendar by new members of the League, the establishment of new regional festivals, the elaboration or reorganization of older cults, and League participation in a network of international festivals; cult could equally well enact alternatives to this political arrangement, however, and older religious traditions continued to be maintained both within new League territories and especially at Delphi. The result is a fresh portrait of the politics of cult on the Greek mainland in the later Hellenistic period.

This book collects eighteen papers which make original contributions to the study of the inscribed laws and decrees of the city of Athens, 352/1-322/1 BC, the most richly documented period of the city's history. Originally published in academic journals, conference proceedings and Festschriften between 2000 and 2010, they lay groundwork for the author’s new edition of these inscriptions, IG II³ Part 1, fascicule 2. The papers, which are based on fresh comprehensive autopsy of the stones and study of squeezes, photographs and early transcripts, report important epigraphical findings (e.g. new readings, restorations, joins and datings), and include studies of onomastics and of the chronology and the history of the period.

Over the past 20 years, Boeotia has been the focus of intensive archaeological investigation that has resulted in some extraordinary epigraphical finds. The most spectacular discoveries are presented for the first time in this volume: dozens of inscribed sherds from the Theban shrine of Heracles; Archaic temple accounts; numerous Classical, Hellenistic and Roman epitaphs; a Plataean casualty list; a dedication by the legendary king Croesus. Other essays revisit older epigraphical finds from Aulis, Chaironeia, Lebadeia, Thisbe, and Megara, radically reassessing their chronology and political and legal implications. The integration of old and new evidence allows for a thorough reconsideration of wider historical questions, such as ethnic identities, and the emergence, rise, dissolution, and resuscitation of the famous Boeotian koinon.Contributors include: Vassilios Aravantinos, Hans Beck, Margherita Bonanno, Claire Grenet, Yannis Kalliontzis, Denis Knoepfler, Angelos P. Matthaiou, Emily Mackil, Christel Müller, Nikolaos Papazarkadas, Isabelle Pernin, Robert Pitt, Adrian Robu, and Albert Schachter.

When one thinks of inscriptions produced under the Roman Empire, public inscribed monuments are likely to come to mind. Hundreds of thousands of such inscriptions are known from across the breadth of the Roman Empire, preserved because they were created of durable material or were reused in subsequent building. This volume looks at another aspect of epigraphic creation – from handwritten messages scratched on wall-plaster to domestic sculptures labeled with texts to displays of official patronage posted in homes: a range of inscriptions appear within the private sphere in the Greco-Roman world. Rarely scrutinized as a discrete epigraphic phenomenon, the incised texts studied in this volume reveal that writing in private spaces was very much a part of the epigraphic culture of the Roman Empire.

The volume The Politics of Honour in the Greek Cities of the Roman Empire, co-edited by Anna Heller and Onno van Nijf, studies the public honours that Greek cities bestowed upon their own citizens and foreign dignitaries and benefactors. These included civic praise, crowns, proedria, public funerals, honorific statues and monuments. The authors discuss the development of this honorific system, and in particular the epigraphic texts and the monuments through which it is accessible. The focus is on the Imperial period (1st-3rd centuries AD). The papers investigate the forms of honour, the procedures and formulae of local practices, as well as the changes in local honorific habits that resulted from the integration of the Greek cities in the Roman Empire.

This book collects twelve papers which make original contributions to the historical interpretation of inscribed Athenian laws and decrees, with a core focus on significant historical shapes and patterns implicit in the corpus of the age of Demosthenes. Following a synthetic Introduction, two chapters analyse locations and selectivity of inscribing, four explore the implications of the inscriptions for Athenian policy and for developing attitudes to the past, three for aspects of Athenian democracy. The volume concludes with two studies of specific inscriptions. Some of the papers have appeared elsewhere in conference proceedings and Festschriften, some are published here for the first time. The volume complements the author’s previous collection, Inscribed Athenian Laws and Decrees 352/1-322/1 BC: Epigraphical Essays.

As the first extensive survey of the ancient Greek painters’ practice of writing nonsense on vases, The So-called Nonsense Inscriptions on Ancient Greek Vases by Sara Chiarini provides a systematic overview of the linguistic features of the phenomenon and discusses its forms and contexts of reception.While the origins of the practice lie in the impaired literacy of the painters involved in it, the extent of the phenomenon suggests that, at some point, it became a true fashion within Attic vase painting. This raises the question of the forms of interaction with this epigraphic material. An open approach is adopted: “reading” attempts, riddles and puns inspired by nonsense inscriptions could happen in a variety of circumstances, including the symposium but not limited to it.This book is the winner of the 2018 Géza Alföldy Publication Prize awarded by the AIEGL (Association Internationale d’Épigraphie Grecque et Latine).

Written by an international cast of experts, The Materiality of Text showcases a wide range of innovative methodologies from ancient history, literary studies, epigraphy, and art history and provides a multi-disciplinary perspective on the physicality of writing in antiquity. The contributions focus on epigraphic texts in order to gauge questions of their placement, presence, and perception: starting with an analysis of the forms of writing and its perception as an act of physical and cultural intervention, the volume moves on to consider the texts’ ubiquity and strategic positioning within epigraphic, literary, and architectural spaces. The contributors rethink modern assumptions about the processes of writing and reading and establish novel ways of thinking about the physical forms of ancient texts.

In From Document to History: Epigraphic Insights into the Greco-Roman World, editors Carlos Noreña and Nikolaos Papazarkadas gather together an exciting set of original studies on Greek and Roman epigraphy, first presented at the Second North American Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy (Berkeley 2016). Chapters range chronologically from the sixth century BCE to the fifth century CE, and geographically from Egypt and Asia Minor to the west European continent and British isles.Key themes include Greek and Roman epigraphies of time, space, and public display, with texts featuring individuals and social groups ranging from Roman emperors, imperial elites, and artists to gladiators, immigrants, laborers, and slaves. Several papers highlight the new technologies that are transforming our understanding of ancient inscriptions, and a number of major new texts are published here for the first time.

In Greek Epigraphy and Religion Emily Mackil and Nikolaos Papazarkadas bring together a series of papers first presented at a special session of the Second North American Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy (Berkeley 2016). That session was dedicated to the memory of Sara B. Aleshire, one of the leading Greek epigraphists of the twentieth century. The volume at hand includes a combination of previously unpublished inscriptions, overlooked epigraphical documents, and well known inscribed texts that are reexamined with fresh eyes and approaches. The relevant documents cover a wide geographical range, including Athens and Attica, the Peloponnese, Epirus, Thessaly, the Aegean islands, and Egypt. This collection ultimately explores the insights provided by epigraphical texts into the religious beliefs and practices of the ancient Greeks, but also revisits critically some entrenched doctrines in the field of Greek religion.Contributors are: Francesco Camia, Jan-Mathieu Carbon, Laura Gawlinski, Yannis Kalliontzis, Stephen Lambert, Andronike Makres, Georgia Malouchou, Elena Martín González, Angelos P. Matthaiou, Maria Mili, Fred Naiden, Adele Scafuro, Kazuhiro Takeuchi, Jenny Wallensten, Michael Zellmann-Rohrer.

The goal of this inscription-based study is to shed new light on Hellenistic and Roman Delphi by placing inscribed honours at the front and centre of the investigation. This book provides, for the first time, a comprehensive and coherent discussion of the Delphic gift-giving system, its regional interactions, and its honorific network. It employs both conventional and new scientific methods, including an analysis of quantitative trends in the epigraphic records and a Social Network Analysis (SNA) approach. The volume also addresses a broad spectrum of epigraphic topics and discusses current research questions as well as future perspectives.

The Language of Objects sheds new light on the sub-genre of Greek descriptive epigram, focusing on deictic reference as a springboard to understand three different approaches to the materiality of texts: imagination-oriented deixis, pointing to referents conjured in the reader’s mind; ocular deixis, addressing perceivable referents; displaced deixis, underscoring the subjective response of readers/viewers. Uniquely combining overlooked verse-inscriptions and well-known literary and inscribed texts, which are freshly re-examined through a cognitive lens, this volume explores the evolution of deixis in descriptive epigrams dating from the pre-Hellenistic period to Late Antiquity. With its original analysis, the book pushes forward the study of Greek epigram and current understanding of deixis in ancient poetry.

Can we study the social and legal practices related to families in an ancient society even in the absence of relevant literary and legal sources? In Lycia, thanks to our rich corpus of inscriptions, and the regional funerary epigraphic habit, we can.This book brings together for the first time the full range of Lycian epigraphic evidence, examines it in a systematic way, and investigates three central elements of familial life in the Hellenistic and Roman periods: marriage, children, and inheritance practices; in doing so it briefly touches on a number of prosopographical, demographic, and anthropological questions. The book makes an innovative contribution not only to the history of Lycia but also to the wider study of ancient families.

Inscriptions are a major feature of the Greek and Roman worlds, as inhabitants around the Mediterranean chose to commit text to stone and other materials. How did the epigraphic habit vary across time and space? Once adopted, how was the epigraphic habit variously expressed? The chapters of this volume analyze the epigraphic cultures of regions, cities, and communities through both large-scale analyses and detailed studies. From curse tablets in Britain to multilingual communities in Judaea-Palestine, from Greece to Rome to the Black Sea, and across nearly a millennium, the epigraphic outputs of cities and individuals underscore a collective understanding of the value of inscribed texts.

This book challenges prevailing models of the ways formerly enslaved individuals in Ancient Rome navigated their social and economic landscape. Drawing on the rich epigraphic evidence left behind by municipal freedmen and freedwomen, who had been owned and manumitted by the communities of Roman Italy, it pushes back against ameliorating views of slavery as a temporary condition and positive notions of a prosperous and consciously proud Roman freedman class. Manumission was a far more complex process, and it did not always put former slaves and their descendants on the straight and narrow path of upward mobility.