Oxford Studies in Ancient Documents – serie

In late summer 2017, ongoing Turkish excavations at the site of Teos in Ionia uncovered one of the largest and most important Greek inscriptions to have been discovered this century. It records, in thrilling and moving detail, the assistance provided by the Teians in the repopulation and rebuilding of their daughter-city, Abdera in Thrace, after its sack by the Romans in 170 BC during the Third Macedonian War. The new text, published here for the first time, is startling testimony to the ancestral friendship- and support-networks that existed between Greek poleis in the Hellenistic world, and includes (among other things) the longest surviving description of an honorific statue to survive from the ancient world. In the light of the new inscription, the authors offer a full reassessment of the epigraphic and literary evidence for relations between Teos and Abdera, thereby providing a comprehensive long-term history of the two cities, from the sixth to the second century BC. The book also includes major new editions of the 'Teian Dirae' (public curses at Teos and Abdera in the early fifth century BC) and the second-century decree of Abdera for the Teian ambassadors Amymon and Megathymos, as well as two further new texts from the sanctuary of Dionysos at Teos.

The Material Dynamics of Festivals in the Graeco-Roman East explores the various ways in which the experience of civic festivals in the Graeco-Roman East was created and framed by material culture. By the second and third centuries AD, Greek festivals were thriving across the eastern Mediterranean. Much of our knowledge of these festivals, and their associated processions, rituals, banquets, and competitions, comes from material culture-- inscriptions, coins, architecture, and art-works. Yet each of these pieces of material evidence was the result of a conscious act, of what to record, and where and how to record it, with varying patterns discernible across different areas, and in different media. This volume draws attention to the choices made in a variety of different forms of material culture relating to Greek festivals from the Hellenistic to Roman periods, and unpicks the ways in which they encode or forge particular social relationships and power structures, as well as creating senses of community or communication between different groups. These helped to fix ephemeral events into public memory, to present particular views of their significance for the wider community, and to frame the experience of their participants.

The Uley Tablets is the first full publication of the eighty Roman lead writing-tablets found in the excavation of a Romano-British temple in the Cotswolds, the temple of the god Mercury at Uley, Gloucestershire, together with two from the nearby site of Tarlton. Like those found in the hot spring at Bath, they are 'curse tablets', so called because they seek divine intervention against the writer's enemies, who are mostly thieves unknown. They complain of farm animals being stolen or bewitched, even a stolen beehive (the first document of bee-keeping in Britain), the theft of clothing such as gloves, cloaks and gaiters, woman's underwear, the theft of rings and sums of money ranging from two 'mites' to a hundred thousand denarii. In formalised language they ask the god to recover their property and punish the thieves with ill health or the 'greatest death'. These tablets are the richest collection of manuscripts from the countryside of Roman Britain, unique as a written witness to the social and economic history of the province since they were not found in the usual urban or military context. They are a major new source for studying the language, whether written or spoken, of the civil population. The Uley Tablets provide a practical lesson in how to decipher Roman handwriting, and in this volume, they are transcribed and translated with detailed commentary, each inscribed face illustrated with a photograph and line-drawing. These texts are preceded by eleven introductory chapters which outline their context and content, the way in which the god was approached, the language and handwriting employed, and the implications for the study of literacy in Roman Britain. The Uley Tablets offer a vivid contribution to ancient history with a disturbing modern echo.

Asia Minor and the Third Century CE: The Epigraphic Continuity of Civic Life in a Changing Roman Empire examines the inscriptions of southern and western Anatolia from the accession of Septimius Severus to the rise of Diocletian (193-284 CE). During these years of pivotal transition between the High and Late Roman Empire, scholarship has often characterised the period as one defined by systemic crisis and civic decline. It is frequently argued that such instability eroded the foundations of local governance, leaving provincial populations either unwilling or unable to sustain the financial and political burdens of civic life. However, this study moves beyond a binary attempt to confirm or deny the existence of a 'third-century crisis'. Instead, it provides a comprehensive analysis of the diverse testimonies that these political communities under Roman rule continued to produce and display publicly. By situating this habit within its broader socio-political context, the work undertakes a significant re-evaluation of the epigraphic evidence alongside related materials, including coins and literary sources, from cities and regions such as Ephesus, Aphrodisias, Termessos, Lydia, or Pamphylia. Rather than witnessing a collapse of traditional structures and civic mindsets, the available record reveals a notable resilience in communal action across Asia Minor. Ultimately, this analysis invites a reconsideration of the third century CE, highlighting the enduring vitality of a region that proved fundamental to a changing Roman Empire.

Known from ancient authors such as Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plato, and more than 2,500 inscriptions, proxeny (a form of public guest-friendship) is the best attested interstate institution of the ancient world. Proxeny and Polis offers a comprehensive re-examination of our evidence for this important Greek institution and uses it to examine the structure and dynamics of the interstate system of the Greek world, and the way in which they were transformed as a result of the establishment of the Roman Empire.Based on a detailed analysis of the function of the formulaic language of honorific decrees, this volume presents a new reconstruction of proxeny and explores the way in which interstate institutions shaped the behaviour of individuals and communities in the ancient world. It draws extensively on proxeny lists, which have not been systematically exploited before, to reconstruct the proxeny networks of Greek city-states. This material reveals the extraordinary density of formal interconnections which characterized the ancient Greek world before the age of Augustus and allows us to reconstruct the patterns of trade and political interactions which resulted in these institutional networks. The volume also traces the disappearance of both proxeny and the broader institutional system of which it was part. Drawing on nuanced analysis of quantitative trends in the epigraphic record, it argues that the Greek world underwent a profound reorientation by the time of the Roman Principate, which fundamentally altered how Greek cities viewed relations with each other.

Scribal Repertoires in Egypt from the New Kingdom to the Early Islamic Period deals with the possibility of glimpsing pre-modern and early modern Egyptian scribes, the actual people who produced ancient documents, through the ways in which they organized and wrote those documents. While traditional research has focused on identifying a 'pure' or 'original' text behind the actual manuscripts that have come down to us from pre-modern Egypt, the volume looks instead at variation - different ways of saying the same thing - as a rich source for understanding the complex social and cultural environments in which scribes lived and worked, breaking with the traditional conception of variation in scribal texts as 'free' or indicative of 'corruption'. As such, it presents a novel reconceptualization of scribal variation in pre-modern Egypt from the point of view of contemporary historical sociolinguistics, seeing scribes as agents embedded in particular geographical, temporal, and socio-cultural environments. Introducing to Egyptology concepts such as scribal communities, networks, and repertoires, among others, the authors then apply them to a variety of phenomena, including features of lexicon, grammar, orthography, palaeography, layout, and format. After first presenting this conceptual framework, they demonstrate how it has been applied to better-studied pre-modern societies by drawing upon the well-established domain of scribal variation in pre-modern English, before proceeding to a series of case studies applying these concepts to scribal variation spanning thousands of years, from the languages and writing systems of Pharaonic times, to those of Late Antique and Islamic Egypt.

The Ptolemaic period in Egypt (332-30 BC) is one of the most well-documented periods of the Hellenistic age: in addition to the papyrological record there are more than 600 surviving Greek and Greek/Egyptian bilingual and trilingual inscriptions, ranging from massive public monuments, such as the Rosetta Stone, to small private dedications, funerary plaques, and metrical epigrams for the deceased. This volume offers a series of detailed studies of the historical and cultural contexts of these important inscriptions and is intended to complement the multi-volume Corpus of Ptolemaic Inscriptions edition, in which the Greek and Egyptian texts will be presented together for the first time. The subjects discussed in the twelve chapters range widely across a variety of sub-disciplines, from advances in new technologies of image-capture, the juxtaposition of Greek and Egyptian elements in the layout and iconography of the monuments, and the palaeography of the Greek texts, to the history of the acquisition and study of the great bilingual decrees voted by the priests of the indigenous Egyptian cults, the introduction of Greek civic administration and communal associations in the cities and villages, and the role of the military in monumental commemoration. Particular attention is given to the role of indigenous and Greek religious institutions in Alexandria and the towns and villages of the Nile Delta and Valley, in which commemorative dedications to divinities of temples and statues by the monarchs and by private individuals are numerous and prominent. In a period shaped by the interplay between Egyptian and Greek culture, the existence of public and private inscribed monuments was a vital element of dynastic control. The unique insights offered by this thorough examination of the epigraphical landscape of Ptolemaic Egypt are invaluable to understanding the ways in which the Greek immigrant rulers and population established and reinforced their social and cultural dominance of an indigenous population which had its own long-established and traditional written and iconographic mode of public and private communication.

The birth of the Greek alphabet marked a new horizon in the history of writing, as the vowelless Phoenician alphabet was borrowed and adapted to write vowels as well as consonants. Rather than creating a single unchanging new tradition, however, its earliest attestations show a very great degree of diversity, as areas of the Greek-speaking world established their own regional variants. This volume asks how, when, where, by whom and for what purposes Greek alphabetic writing developed. Anne Jeffery's Local Scripts of Archaic Greece (1961), re-issued with a valuable supplement in 1990, was an epoch-making contribution to the study of these issues. But much important new evidence has emerged even since 1987, and debate has continued energetically about all the central issues raised by Jeffery's book: the date at which the Phoenician script was taken over and adapted to write vowels with separate signs; the priority of Phrygia or Greece in that process; the question whether the adaptation happened once, and the resulting alphabet then spread outwards, or whether similar adaptations occurred independently in several paces; if the adaptation was a single event, the region where it occurred, and the explanation for the many divergences in local script; what the scripts tell us about the regional divisions of archaic Greece. There has also been a flourishing debate about the development and functions of literacy in archaic Greece. The contributors to this volume bring a range of perspectives to bear in revisiting Jeffery's legacy, including chapters which extend the scope beyond Jeffery, by considering the fortunes of the Greek alphabet in Etruria, in southern Italy, and on coins.

This is the first of three volumes of a Corpus publication of the Greek, bilingual and trilingual inscriptions of Ptolemaic Egypt covering the period between Alexander's conquest in 332 BC and the fall of Alexandria to the Romans in 30 BC. The Corpus offers scholarly editions, with translations, full descriptions and supporting commentaries, of more than 650 inscribed documents, of which 206, from Alexandria and the region of the Nile Delta, fall within this first volume. The inscriptions in the Corpus range in scope and significance from major public monuments such as the trilingual Rosetta Stone to private dedicatory plaques and funerary notices. They reflect almost every aspect of public and private life in Hellenistic Egypt: civic, royal and priestly decrees, letters and petitions, royal and private dedications to kings and deities, as well as pilgrimage notices, hymns and epigrams. The inscriptions in the Corpus are drawn from the entire Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt, from Alexandria and the Egyptian Delta, through the Fayum, along the Nile Valley, to Upper Egypt, and across the Eastern and Western Deserts. The Corpus supersedes older publications and other partial collections organised by specific region or theme, and offers for the first time a full picture of the Greek and multilingual epigraphic landscape of the Ptolemaic period. It will be an indispensable resource for new and continuing research into the history, society and culture of Ptolemaic Egypt and the wider Hellenistic world.

During the Second World War the Bodleian Library in Oxford acquired a set of Aramaic letters, eight sealings, and the two leather bags in which the sealed letters were once stored. The letters concern the affairs of Aršāma, satrap of Egypt in the later fifth century. Taken with other material associated with him (mostly in Aramaic, Demotic Egyptian, and Akkadian), they illuminate the Achaemenid world of which Aršāma was a privileged member and evoke a wide range of social, economic, cultural, organizational, and political perspectives, from multi-lingual communication, storage and disbursement of resources, and satrapal remuneration, to cross-regional ethnic movement, long-distance travel, religious practice, and iconographic projection of ideological messages. Particular highlights include a travel authorization (the only example of something implicit in numerous Persepolis documents), texts about the religious life of the Judaean garrison at Elephantine, Aršāma's magnificent seal (a masterpiece of Achaemenid glyptic, inherited from a son of Darius I), and echoes of temporary disturbances to Persian management of Egypt. But what is also impressive is the underlying sense of systematic coherence founded on and expressed in the use of formal, even formalized, written communication as a means of control. The Aršāma dossier is not alone in evoking that sense, but its size, variety, and focus upon a single individual give it a unique quality. Though this material has not been hidden from view, it has been insufficiently explored: it is the purpose of the three volumes of Aršāma and his World: The Bodleian Letters in Context to provide the fullest presentation and historical contextualization of this extraordinary cache yet attempted. Volume I presents and translates the letters alongside a detailed line-by-line commentary, while Volume II reconstructs the two seals that made the clay bullae that sealed the letters, with special attention to Aršāma's magnificent heirloom seal. Volume III comprises a series of thematic essays which further explore the administrative, economic, military, ideological, religious, and artistic environment to which Aršāma and the letters belonged.

During the Second World War the Bodleian Library in Oxford acquired a set of Aramaic letters, eight sealings, and the two leather bags in which the sealed letters were once stored. The letters concern the affairs of Aršāma, satrap of Egypt in the later fifth century. Taken with other material associated with him (mostly in Aramaic, Demotic Egyptian, and Akkadian), they illuminate the Achaemenid world of which Aršāma was a privileged member and evoke a wide range of social, economic, cultural, organizational, and political perspectives, from multi-lingual communication, storage and disbursement of resources, and satrapal remuneration, to cross-regional ethnic movement, long-distance travel, religious practice, and iconographic projection of ideological messages. Particular highlights include a travel authorization (the only example of something implicit in numerous Persepolis documents), texts about the religious life of the Judaean garrison at Elephantine, Aršāma's magnificent seal (a masterpiece of Achaemenid glyptic, inherited from a son of Darius I), and echoes of temporary disturbances to Persian management of Egypt. But what is also impressive is the underlying sense of systematic coherence founded on and expressed in the use of formal, even formalized, written communication as a means of control. The Aršāma dossier is not alone in evoking that sense, but its size, variety, and focus upon a single individual give it a unique quality. Though this material has not been hidden from view, it has been insufficiently explored: it is the purpose of the three volumes of Aršāma and his World: The Bodleian Letters in Context to provide the fullest presentation and historical contextualization of this extraordinary cache yet attempted. Volume I presents and translates the letters alongside a detailed line-by-line commentary, while Volume II reconstructs the two seals that made the clay bullae that sealed the letters, with special attention to Aršāma's magnificent heirloom seal. Volume III comprises a series of thematic essays which further explore the administrative, economic, military, ideological, religious, and artistic environment to which Aršāma and the letters belonged.

This is the second of three volumes of a Corpus publication of the Greek, bilingual and trilingual inscriptions from Ptolemaic Egypt covering the period from Alexander's conquest in 332 BC to the fall of Alexandria to the Romans in 30 BC. This volume contains 221 numbered items (some covering multiple short texts) from the Fayum and Middle and Upper Egypt (including the Thebaid). It presents up-to-date scholarly revisions of the texts with translations, full descriptions, and commentaries, drawing on material originally collected by the late P. M. Fraser. The inscriptions from the Fayum illustrate the development of towns and villages in a region which was particularly re-shaped by Greek immigrants, while the texts from Upper Egypt and the Thebaid reflect the persistence of indigenous Egyptian traditions and their interaction with the impact of Greek culture. The inscriptions range from copies of major priestly and royal decrees, civic administrative documents, and asylum petitions involving Egyptian and Greek temples and cults, to dedications to gods, monarchs, and private individuals, funerary texts, pilgrimage notices, and verse inscriptions including re-editions and reassessments of the Isis hymns from Narmouthis and the Herodes funerary epigrams from Edfu together with their Hieroglyphic counterparts. The Corpus supersedes older publications and other partial collections organised by specific region or theme, and offers for the first time a full picture of the Greek and multilingual epigraphic landscape of the Ptolemaic period. It will be an indispensable resource for new and continuing research into the history, society and culture of Ptolemaic Egypt and the wider Hellenistic world.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.Latinization is a strangely overlooked topic. Historians have noted it has been 'taken for granted' and viewed as an unremarkable by-product of 'Romanization', despite its central importance for understanding the Roman provincial world, its life, and languages. This volume aims to fill the gap in our scholarship. Expert contributors have been selected to create a multi-disciplinary volume with a thematic approach to the vast subject, tackling administration, army, economy, law, mobility, religion (local and imperial religions and Christianity), social status, and urbanism. They situate the phenomena of Latinization, literacy, and bi- and multilingualism within local and broader social developments and draw together materials and arguments that have not before been coordinated in a single volume. The result is a comprehensive guide to the topic, which offers original and more experimental work. The sociolinguistic, historical, and archaeological contributions reinforce, expand, and sometimes challenge our vision of Latinization and lay the foundations for future explorations.This volume will be accompanied by two further volumes from the European Research Council-funded LatinNow project: Latinization, Local Languages, and Literacies in the Roman West, and Languages and Communities in the Late-Roman and Post-Imperial Western Provinces.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.The patchwork of local languages which existed across the western provinces in the Iron Age was radically reconfigured by the rise of Latin. Latinization, Local Languages and Literacies in the Roman West offers a detailed anatomy of the local and regional patterning across Britain, Gaul, the Germanies and the Iberian Peninsula primarily from the later Republic to the end of the Principate. The chapters draw on a combination of various sets of evidence and an interdisciplinary perspective--historical, archaeological, sociolinguistic, and epigraphic--to uncover local voices, tracking 'differential Latinization', and revealing the probable survival of local languages, alongside, or even to the exclusion of, Latin in some communities in non-Mediterranean areas. The results underscore the variety of factors involved in language change and the importance of sensitivity to local communities. By including everyday writing in their epigraphic evidence, the volume reveals regionality in the varieties of Latin used and disparities in engagement in both the epigraphic habit and broader literate practices. New data enable the description of types of literacies, and movement away from debates on provincial percentages of literacy and from generalizations about associated social dynamics. Contributors to the volume grapple with the 'characterful' datasets they have created and collated, the careful treatment of which enables the exploration of a range of themes vital for understanding provincial life. The complexity uncovered by these studies will be a starting point for future investigations.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.Languages are central to the creation and expression of identities and cultures, as well as to life itself, yet the linguistic variegation of the later-Roman and post-imperial period in the Roman west is remarkably understudied. A deeper understanding of this important issue is crucial to any reconstruction of the broader story of linguistic continuity and change in Europe and the Mediterranean, as well as to the history of the communities who wrote, read, and spoke Latin and other languages. Languages and Communities in the Late-Roman and Post-Imperial Western Provinces offers the first comprehensive modern study of the main developments, key features and debates of the later-Roman and post-imperial linguistic environment, focusing on the Iberian Peninsula, North Africa, Gaul, the Germanies, Britain and Ireland. The chapters collected in this volume help us to understand better the embeddedness, or not, of Latin, at different social levels and across provinces, to consider (socio)linguistic variegation, bi-/multi-lingualism, and attitudes towards languages, and to confront the complex role of language in the communities, identities, and cultures of the later- and post-imperial Roman western world.This volume will be accompanied by two further volumes from the European Research Council-funded LatinNow project: Social Factors in the Latinization of the Roman West and Latinization, Local Languages, and Literacies in the Roman West.

Greek Personal Names in Egypt provides a comprehensive overview of Greek onomastics in Egypt from the Ptolemaic to the Late Byzantine period, highlighting the rich and diverse onomastic landscape and paying special attention to diachronic change. The work explores naming practices and their intersection with the social and cultural history of Egypt over a long chronological span, foreign names, and cross-cultural exchanges. It also explores current research questions and future directions in onomastic studies in Graeco-Roman and Late Antique Egypt. The papers offer a range of different perspectives and approaches in the field, with contributions by specialists from the fields of Greek Papyrology, Egyptology, Coptology and Ancient History.

The ink and stylus tablets discovered at the Roman fort of Vindolanda are a unique resource for scholars of ancient history. However, the stylus tablets in particular are extremely difficult to read. This book details the development of what appears to be the first system constructed to aid experts in the process of reading an ancient document, exploring the extent to which techniques from Artificial Intelligence can be used to develop a system that could aid historians in reading the stylus texts. Image to Interpretation includes a model of how experts read ancient texts, a corpora of letter forms from the Vindolanda text corpus, and a detailed description of the architecture of the system. It will be of interest to papyrologists, researchers in Roman history and palaeography, computer and engineering scientists working in the field of Artificial Intelligence and image processing, and those interested in the use of computing in the humanities.

Our oldest archival records originate from the Near East. Systems of archival record-keeping developed over several millennia in Mesopotamia before spreading to Egypt, the Mycenean world, and the Persian empire, and continuing through the Hellenistic and Seleucid periods. Yet we know little about the way archival practices were established, transmitted, modified, and adapted by other civilizations. This interdisciplinary volume offers a systematic approach to archival documents and to the societies which created them, addressing questions of formal aspects of creating, writing, and storing ancient documents, and showing how archival systems were copied and adapted across a wide geographical area and an extensive period of time.

A collection of essays, by leading international scholars, on the history of the Greek theatre, and on the wider context of festival culture in which theatrical activity took place in the Greek world. The emphasis is on the documentary material - inscriptions, archaeological remains and monuments - which provides so much of our 'hard' evidence for the activities of the theatre. Much of the important material discussed here is unknown except to specialists, and these studies offer access to its interpretation to a wider audience. They cover a wide range of time and place, from the earliest days of the Greek theatre to the Roman period, with special emphasis on the neglected Hellenistic period, which is especially rich in documentary evidence.

Spirits of the Dead examines the importance attached to preserving the memory of the dead in the Roman world, and explores the ways in which funerary inscriptions can be used to reconstruct Roman lives, however fragmentarily and imperfectly. It is the only study to examine epigraphic, historical, and archaeological evidence in order to gain insight into the way Romans used funerary texts to establish a dialogue with their own society. Maureen Carroll brings together a large body of material from many geographical areas, shedding light on provincial and regional variation in funerary commemoration and even on the differences between funerary traditions of neighbouring towns.

The Roman Empire was based on law, and it was vital for rulers and ruled that laws should be understood. They were often given permanent form in stone or bronze. This book transcribes, translates, and fully illustrates with photographs, the inscription (more than 155 lines, in its damaged state) that carries the regulations drawn up over nearly two centuries for the customs dues of the rich province of Asia (western Turkey). The regulations, taken from Roman archives, were set up in Greek in Ephesus, and the book provides a rendering of the text back into Latin. The damaged text is hard to restore and to interpret. Six scholars offer line-by-line commentary, and five essays bring out its significance, from the Gracchi to Nero, for Rome's government and changing attitudes towards provincial subjects, for the historical geography of the Empire, for its economic history, and for the social life of Roman officials.

This book examines the contribution that petitioning and litigation made to the maintenance of the social order in Roman Egypt between 30 BC and AD 284. Through the analysis of the many hundreds of documents surviving on papyrus, especially petitions, reports of court proceedings, and letters, Kelly focuses on how the legal system achieved its formal goals (that is, the resolution of disputes through judgments), and discusses in detail the contribution made by the litigation process to informal methods of social control. With particular emphasis on the roles that this process played in the transmission of political ideologies, in the maintenance of family solidarity, and in the fostering of 'private' mechanisms of dispute resolution, the book argues that although the legal system was less than successful when judged by its formal aims, it did have a real social impact by contributing indirectly to some of the informal mechanisms that ensured order in this province of the Roman Empire. However, arguing that, on occasion, one can also see petitioning and litigation being abused for the pursuit of feud and vengeance, Kelly also recognizes that the social impacts of petitioning and litigation were multifaceted, and in some senses even contradictory.

Spirits of the Dead examines the importance attached to preserving the memory of the dead in the Roman world, and explores the ways in which funerary inscriptions can be used to reconstruct Roman lives, however fragmentarily and imperfectly. It is the only study to examine epigraphic, historical, and archaeological evidence in order to gain insight into the way Romans used funerary texts to establish a dialogue with their own society. Maureen Carroll brings together a large body of material from many geographical areas, shedding light on provincial and regional variation in funerary commemoration and even on the differences between funerary traditions of neighbouring towns.

This volume richly illustrates the multiple ways in which epigraphy enables historical analysis of the postclassical polis (city-state) across a world of geographically dispersed poleis: from the Black Sea and Asia Minor to Sicily via the Aegean and mainland Greece. The collection of 16 papers looks at themes such as the modes of interaction between polis and ruling powers, the construction of ethnic and social identity, interstate and civil conflict and its resolution, social economics, institutional processes and privileges, polis representations, ethics, and, not least, religious phenomena. The contributions range from 'hard epigraphy' to sophisticated conceptual studies of aspects of the postclassical polis, and approach the inscriptions both as textual objects and as artefacts. The aim of this volume is to identify the postclassical polis both as a reality and as a constructed concept, not only a monolithic block, but a result of tension in the exercise of different kinds of powers. All the individual contributions of this collective volume show that the postclassical polis, both as a reality and as a representation, is the result of negotiations, ancient and modern; but they also illustrate how much of our understanding of the polis is built on patient, painstaking work on the inscriptions.

Inscriptions and their Uses in Greek and Latin Literature offers a broad set of perspectives on the diverse forms of epigraphic material present in ancient literary texts, and the variety of responses, both ancient and modern, which they can provoke.This collection of essays explores the various ways in which ancient authors used inscribed texts and documents. From the archaic period onwards, ancient literary authors working within a range of genres, such as oratory, philosophy, poetry, and historiography, discussed and quoted a variety of inscriptions. They deployed them as ornamental devices, as alternative voices to that of the narrator, to display scholarship, to make points about history, politics, individual morality, and piety, and even to express moral views about the nature of epigraphy.

This volume reconstructs the history of documentary practice in pharaonic Egypt from the early Old Kingdom to the major administrative changes imposed by the colonizing regimes of the Graeco-Roman period. Relating administrative and legal practice to the physical practicalities of the media used for writing, and through the close reading of primary textual sources, it examines how different types of documents - private and official - were created and used. It explores the ways in which the writing of documents was embedded deeply in the interactions between customary social practices, which were essentially oral, and in the penetration of outside hierarchies into local government.Eyre argues that the potential of the written document as evidence or proof was never fully exploited in the pharaonic period, even though writing was a powerful symbol and display of hierarchical authority. He presents the government as a system rooted in personal prestige and patronage structures, lacking the effective departmental hierarchies and archive systems that would represent a true bureaucratic system.