ASGLE Newsletter 11.1, 15 May 2007

Posted on 2007-06-01 by Tom Elliott

The latest issue of the American Society of Greek and Latin Epigraphy Newsletter has arrived. Paul Iversen (secretary-treasurer) informs us via email that he hopes to begin posting newsletter issues, including back issues, on the ASGLE website beginning fall 2007.

Table of contents:

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Babylonian month name in 6th century Greek inscription?

Posted on 2007-06-01 by Tom Elliott

In a post to the ANE-2 list, Chris Bennett is trying to get more information on a cryptic assertion made by a colleague; namely, that there exists “an inscription of the 6th century BC which gives a Babylonian month name in Greek.”

Can any CEp readers confirm this assertion and provide publication details?

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New Acquisitions: ASCSA/BSA April 2007

Posted on 2007-06-01 by Tom Elliott

The Ambrosia Union Catalog of the libraries of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the British School at Athens facilitates searches for recently acquired works of interest. The following list (for April 2007) was assembled from the results of a keyword search for “( blg0407 or gen0407 or bsa0407 ) and ( epigraph? or inscription? )”:

Previous post: New Acquisitions: ASCSA/BSA March 2007

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Epigraphic Books for review at BMCR

Posted on 2007-06-01 by Gabriel Bodard

A few titles of possible interest to epigraphers have been reproduced below: see the BMCR website for the full list of titles available this month.

BMCR 2007.05.44, BMCR Books Received (May).

Titles marked by an asterisk are available for review. Qualified volunteers should indicate their interest by a message to classrev@brynmawr.edu, with their last name and requested author in the subject line. They should state their qualifications (both in the sense of degrees held and in the sense of experience in the field concerned) and explain any previous relationship with the author.

  • Orlandi, Silvia, Epigrafia anfiteatrale dell’occidente romano. VI. Roma. Anfiteatri e strutture annesse con una nuova edizione e commento delle iscrizioni del Colosseo. Vetera, 15. Roma: Quasar, 2004. Pp. 600; pls. 28. EUR 84.00 (pb). ISBN 978-88-7140-265-9.
  • Panciera, Silvio, Epigrafi, epigrafia, epigrafisti. Scritti vari editi e inediti (1956-2005) con note complementari e indici. 3 vols. Vetera, 16. Roma: Quasar, 2006. Pp. 2187. EUR 270.00. ISBN 978-88-7140-306-9.
  • *Tataki, Argyro B., The Roman Presence in Macedonia. Evidence from Personal Names. MELETHMATA, 46. Paris: De Boccard, 2006. Pp. 667; map 1. EUR 88.00 (pb). ISBN 960-7905-30-X.
  • *Edmondson, Jonathan, Granite Funerary Stelae from Augusta Emerita. Monografi/as Emeritenses 9. Me/rida: Artes Gra/ficas Rejas, S. L., 2006. Pp. 303. (pb). ISBN 84-8181-313-3.
  • *Fourrier, Sabine, and Antoine Hermary, Amathonte VI: Le sanctuaire d’Aphrodite. des origines au de/but de l’e/poque impe/riale. E/tudes Chypriotes XVII. Paris: De Boccard, 2006. Pp. 218; figs. 508, pls. 50, plan 1. EUR 100.00 (pb). ISBN 2-86958-220-X.
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Roman military diploma at Brigham Young University library

Posted on 2007-05-31 by Tom Elliott

The Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah (U.S.A.) has installed a display featuring a Roman military diploma issued to one Marcus Herennius Polymita during the reign of the Emperor Trajan (dating to 109 CE), along with a replica of the diploma for visitors to handle, as well as other items. The exhibition (March 2007 – March 2008) is entitled “Two Ancient Roman Plates: Bronze Military Diplomas and Other Sealed Documents” and has been accompanied by significant coverage online:

Two articles about the diploma were published in BYU Studies (I cannot tease out volume and year because of the way the website is arranged):

Provenance and editions

The online, free access materials are not explicit on this matter, saying only that the diploma was discovered in Dacia and its metallurgical makeup is consistent with ores mined in Sardinia and the Iberian peninsula and smelted during the first century of the Roman Empire. It would appear to me, however, that this diploma was cataloged in:

  • M. Roxan, Roman Military Diplomas 1985-1993, London, 1994, ISBN: 090583334 (worldcat record; fulltext PDF online via the BYU exhibition website), no. 148 (text and commentary).

According to Roxan, the diploma was discovered in 1986 at Ranovac (now in Serbia and Montenegro), ca. 30km south of the Roman legionary fortress at Viminacium (modern Kostolac = BAtlas 21 D5), “allegedly with three others.”

The diploma is also registered in the Epigraphic Databank Heidelberg (text, bibliography), albeit without a reference to Roxan:

I am not aware of an online translation of this diploma.

Readers may also be interested in the now venerable (1998!), website for the Roman Military Diploma from Slavonski Brod, which includes photographs, text and discussion of another diploma for which the original seals (and protective covering) are preserved.

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Two articles on Egyptian inscriptions in JJP

Posted on 2007-05-30 by Gabriel Bodard

Thanks to Gregg Schwender at What’s New in Papyrology who points out the two following
(easily missed) epigraphic titles from Journal of Juristic Papyrology 36 (2006):

  • Tomasz Derda & Jacques van der Vliet, ‘Four Christian Funerary Inscriptions from the Fayum (I. Deir el-CAzab 1–4)’, 21-34.
  • Włodzimierz Godlewski & Adam Łajtar, ‘Grave Stelae from Deir el-Naqlun’, 43-62.

The full table of contents of JJP 36 available in PDF, or at Gregg’s blog.

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Keegan reviews Hasegawa’s Familia Urbana

Posted on 2007-05-30 by Tom Elliott

Recently in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review:

  • BMCR 2007.05.37: Peter Keegan reviews Kinuko Hasegawa, The Familia Urbana during the Early Empire: A Study of Columbaria Inscriptions, BAR International Series 1440, Oxford: Archaeopress, 2005, ISBN: 1841718769 (worldcat record for book).
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Unpublished Roman Graffiti in basement of US Embassy

Posted on 2007-05-30 by Gabriel Bodard

Mark Handley writes to the Late-Antique discussion list to ask:

Trawling the web looking for information on late antique graffiti I came across a project run out of the Swedish Institute at Rome on a building now in the basement of the American Embassy. This building has produced Christian and Jewish graffiti of Late Antique date which were being studied by Anna Blennow (see http://www.isvroma.org/projects/graffiti.html). I can not find any information on these (as far as I know unpublished) graffiti other than a short one page note in the US State Department’s Newsletter in September 2003 (see http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/23769.pdf at page 15).

Does anyone know more about these graffiti, or have the contact details for Anna Blennow? Any help greatly appreciated.

Do any CE readers have any information on these graffiti? Please reply either to Mark Handley, or leave a comment to this post.

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BES News ns 17 (Spring 2007)

Posted on 2007-05-24 by Gabriel Bodard

The BES Newsletter for Spring 2007 has been circulated today. The newsletter is in PDF and back issues (from 9 through to 15) can be downloaded from http://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/bes/Newsletter.htm. The Contents for the current issue include:

Announcements

News of members & other notices
Forthcoming Events, incl. AGM

Reports

BES 10th AGM
Cambridge Epigraphy Day
Joint BES / SPHS Meeting
Argos Archive Lecture, Oxford
BES Spring Colloquium

Society matters

BES Subscription and Gift Aid Forms

(Note: some of the reports have previously appeared in this blog.)

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Festschrift Anne Helttula

Posted on 2007-05-21 by Kalle Korhonen

Ad itum liberum. Essays in honour of Anne Helttula (eds. O. Merisalo – R. Vainio), Jyväskylä 2007. ISBN 978-951-39-2807-0. Distributed by the Department of Languages, University of Jyväskylä, Finland; contact joutsen [at] jyu.fi

Epigraphy-related papers:
Silvio Panciera: “Tarracina: comptum non compitum”
Reija Pentti-Tuomisto – Pekka Tuomisto: “Un bollo laterizio dell’Isola sacra”
Heikki Solin – Pekka Tuomisto: “Appunti su Battista Brunelleschi epigrafista”
Antero Tammisto: “Epigraphic identifications of birds and the identification of owls in Pompeian graffiti and bird drawings”

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A Virtual Research Environment for the Study of Documents and Manuscripts

Posted on 2007-05-17 by Gabriel Bodard

Charles Crowther points out a VRE award closely related to the Image, Text, Interpretation e-Science award posted yesterday.

A Virtual Research Environment for the Study of Documents and Manuscripts

The Humanities Division at Oxford University has been awarded two years of funding by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/) as part of the second phase of its Virtual Research Environments Programme to develop a VRE for the Study of Documents and Manuscripts (VSDM).

The VSDM project aims to create an integrated environment within which documents, analytical and collaborative tools, and scholarly resources will be available to users as a complete and coherent ensemble. The research resources around which the VRE will be built are, in the first instance, ancient documents on various media (inscriptions, wooden tablets, papyri, lead tablets, etc.), but the tools and the structure of the environment are intended to be suitable for the study of a wide variety of types of documents and manuscripts across humanities disciplines. Within the VSDM environment documents are treated not as disembodied texts but as artefacts with an original archaeological or physical context which can, in principle, be recovered or reconstructed. VSDM will be collaborating closely with the VERA archaeological VRE project at the University of Reading (https://vera.rdg.ac.uk).

The VSDM project builds on previous work undertaken as part of the Building a Virual Research Environment for the Humanities project (BVREH: http://bvreh.humanities.ox.ac.uk), and is led by Alan Bowman, Charles Crowther, Michael Fraser (Principal Investigators), and Marina Jirotka (Co-Investigator), with a team comprising Ruth Kirkham (Project Manager), John Pybus (Technical Manager) and an additional developer (to be appointed).
Initial results of the project will be presented at both the XXV International Congress of Papyrology (Ann Arbor, July 29 – August 4 2007) and the XIII International Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy (Oxford, 2-7 September, 2007).

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13th Epigraphy Congress, urgent accommodation and programme news

Posted on 2007-05-16 by Gabriel Bodard

Circulated by AIEGL:

13th Epigraphy Congress – urgent accommodation and programme news

Dear Colleagues

We should like to urge you to complete your booking arrangements for the 13th International Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy, 2-8 September 2007. The lower-price accommodation is St Edmund Hall is now almost entirely reserved, and there is only a limited number of double rooms still available at Christ Church. For these reasons we strongly advise you to complete your reservations now. The Congress registration fee is £100.

Congress Programme – Epigraphy and the Historical Sciences

We are delighted with the full programme, which will provide a comprehensive overview of the state of scholarship in Greek and Latin epigraphy at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

  • There will be 14 plenary lectures by leading scholars concerned with major historical themes in Greek and Latin epigraphy: ancient government, religion, population and demography, language, and economics.
  • Lectures on the roles of information technology, paedagogy and the presentation of epigraphic texts in museum collections.
  • Plenary sessions will report the progress of the major international epigraphy projects.
  • Plenary meeting of the International Epigraphy Association (AIEGL) concerning elections and future organisation
  • There will be 42 thematic panels containing over 160 presentations.
  • Five panels are devoted to the epigraphy of Attica, and two each to the epigraphy of the Black Sea region, Rome’s north-western provinces, Roman military epigraphy, Greek Christian epigraphy, and instrumentum domesticum.
  • Other panels cover the Latin inscriptions from the Balkans, Ephesus, Greek cult, ancient accounting, customs and tolls, the Roman administration of Asia, new inscriptions from Greece, memory and identity, and many other topics.
  • More than 50 posters have been accepted to date.

Supporting programme and activities

  • Reception hosted by Oxford University Press
  • Musical concert
  • Exhibition of epigraphic manuscripts in the Bodleian Library
  • Visits and excursions to country houses near Oxford
  • Expert guided tours of Oxford
  • Access to the Bodleian and Sackler Classical libraries
  • Full conference handbag containing summaries of lectures and other literature
  • Displays and discounted sales by leading Classical publishers, including OUP, CUP, De Gruyter and Blackwell publishing.

Accommodation and Catering

The charges for accommodation in St Edmund Hall and Christ Church cover the cost of bed, breakfast and lunch for each day of the Congress. The cost of this accommodation, including the meals provided, is cheaper than in Oxford hotels and guest houses. Accommodation in Christ Church offers outstanding facilities; please check the college’s own web-site, http://www.chch.ox.ac.uk/. You will be located in the heart of the city and will have a guaranteed experience of life in one of Oxford’s most famous and historic colleges.

  • Extensive en-suite rooms
  • Access to Oxford’s 12th century cathedral
  • Breakfast and lunch in the hall made famous by the ‘Harry Potter’ films
  • Free access to the Christ Church picture gallery
  • Use of computer and internet facilities

Please check these and further details, and complete your registration and accommodation bookings as soon as possible on the Congress web-site http://ciegl.classics.ox.ac.uk/.

If you have any questions regarding the booking arrangements, please contact Jackie Bowman (jackie.bowman@classics.ox.ac.uk).

We look forward to seeing you in Oxford in September,

Yours sincerely

Professor Stephen Mitchell

Chairman, Congress Organising Committee

Posted in AIEGL, CIEGL, events | 2 Comments