Current Epigraphy
ISSN: 1754-0909

British Epigraphy Society Student Travel Bursaries for the BES Autumn Colloquium 2011

The British Epigraphy Society is pleased to announce a number of student travel bursaries to help with attendance at the BES Autumn Colloquium on 19 November 2011. The value of each bursary is £50. To apply for one of the bursaries, please write to the BES Secretary by e-mail at u.roth@ed.ac.uk, providing the following information:

1. Your name and institutional affiliation
2. Degrees awarded and current programme of study/research
3. A brief description of how attendance at the Autumn Colloquium would benefit your studies/research
4. The name and e-mail address of one referee whom the BES may contact
5. An estimate of travel costs to and from London

The deadline for applications is 1 September 2011.

The programme for the colloquium, and the registration form, can be found on the Society’s website: http://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/BES/Events.htm

The BES gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, and the Classical Association towards these bursaries.

Ulrike Roth
Honorary Secretary, The British Epigraphy Society

The British Epigraphy Society
Autumn Colloquium and AGM 2011

Saturday, 19 November 2011
Institute of Classical Studies
Senate House, London (G22/26)

10.00-11.00 Registration and Morning Coffee
11.00-12.00 Morning Session I
Prof. Robin Osborne (Cambridge), The epigraphic history of Thespiai

12.00-13.00 Morning Session II
Prof. Silvia Orlandi (Rome), Re-editing CIL VI, Inscriptiones in Amphitheatro Flavio repertae: new methods and results

13.00 Lunch Break

14.00 Epigraphic talks in the British Museum (choice of one):
a) The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, 9th c. BC (Dr K. Radner)
b) The bronze mirror showing Herekele and Mlacuch, 5th c. BC (Dr J. Clackson)
c) The Oscan inscription from the Porta di Nola at Pompeii, 2nd c. BC (Prof. M. Crawford)
d) The ossuary of Nikanor of Alexandria, c. 1st c. BC/ 1st c. AD (Dr M. Williams)
e) Two imperial letters to Ephesus, 2nd c. AD (Dr B. Salway)

14.30 AGM (Members only)

15.00 Afternoon Session I
Prof. Thomas Corsten (Vienna), Epigraphic sidelights on the history of Lycia
16.00 Virtual Epigraphy
- Dr Karen Radner (UCL): ‘SAA Online’
- Prof. Silvia Orlandi (Rome): ‘EAGLE/EDR’
- Dr Gabriel Bodard (KCL): ‘IOSPE (Black Sea)’
16.30 Afternoon Tea

17.00 Afternoon Session II
Prof. Michael Crawford (UCL), Does Diocletian’s Prices Edict tell us anything about the ancient economy?

18.00 Field Epigraphy
- Dr Nicholas Milner (Beckenham): ‘News from Oinoanda’
- Prof. Thomas Corsten (Vienna): ‘Epigraphic news from the Kibyratis’

18.30 Finale: Young epigraphy – Posters and drinks

Programme and registration form

A Practical Epigraphy Workshop is taking place for those who are interested in developing hands-on skills in working with epigraphic material. The workshop is aimed at graduate students, but other interested parties are welcome to apply, whether or not they have previous experience. With expert tuition, participants will learn the practical aspects of how to record and study inscriptions. The programme will include the making of squeezes; photographing and measuring inscribed stones; and the production of transcriptions, translations and commentaries. Space on this workshop is limited by the size of the available study area to eight places, and on this occasion we shall be offering Roman epigraphy only. Instructors will include Roger Tomlin and Charlotte Tupman.

Course fees will be in the region of £70 – £90 but, as in previous years, we hope to be able to offer a number of generous bursaries. Participants on the course will stay in Bed & Breakfast accommodation in Corbridge (we will book this for you but regret that the cost is not included in the course fee).

If you wish to apply for a place on this course, or for further details, please contact Charlotte Tupman by e-mail as soon as possible: charlotte.tupman@kcl.ac.uk

The closing date for applications is 6th May.

The Practical Epigraphy Workshop is sponsored by the British Epigraphy Society, an independent ‘chapter’ of the Association Internationale d’Épigraphie Grecque et Latine.

Epigraphic Saturday in Cambridge on 19 March 2011: a day of lectures and shorter presentations in Room G.21 of the Classics Faculty Building, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge.

Full details online.

Could anyone interested in attending please let Dorothy Thompson know by e-mail (djt17@cam.ac.uk).

The British Epigraphy Society is pleased to announce a small number of
Student Bursaries of up to £100 to help with attendance at the BES
Autumn Colloquium in Cambridge on November 20.

Students wishing to apply for one of the bursaries should contact the
Secretary by e-mail (u.roth@ed.ac.uk) by November 1st with the
following information:

1. Name and contact details
2. Programme of study/research
3. A brief description (max. 200 words) of how attendance at the
meeting would benefit their studies/research
4. The name, position and e-mail address of one academic referee who
is happy to be contacted by BES
5. An estimate of expenses

Full information of the programme for the Autumn Colloquium can be
obtained from the BES website.

There is also a special student introductory offer for BES membership
available until November 30, 2010.

Inscriptions and Construction
& XIV ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING

Saturday 20 November 2010

The Autumn Colloquium of the British Epigraphy Society has been organised by Dr. Michael Scott, and will be held at The Old Library, Darwin College, Silver Street, Cambridge, CB3 9EU.

Many of the inscriptions from the Greek and Roman worlds are related to the processes of constructing those worlds: the naming of benefactors, awarding of contracts, listing construction work still to be done, laying out of plans, etc. Such inscriptions play a crucial role not just in revealing the processes of ancient building and the socio-economic worlds of those involved in building them, but also in the formation of the perception and meaning of the structures themselves, as well as of the politics and economics that surrounded them at the time of their construction, repair and eventual decay.

The British Epigraphy Society website contains the full programme along with details of how to register.

(Paper given at the British Epigraphy Society Spring Meeting, Dublin, April 24th, 2010. Brief report by Charlotte Tupman.)

Formality and informality in Attic epigraphy

Graham Oliver

In the first paper of the day, Graham Oliver applied the theme of the colloquium (formality and informality in epigraphy) to a selection of inscribed materials ranging from the Archaic to the Imperial period. Noting that the method of categorising inscriptions in traditional corpora tends to prevent us from fully examining the potentially complex nature of those inscriptions, Oliver introduced three topics through which we might begin to interpret the subject of formal and informal epigraphy: authority, institutions and location; the formalities of formal and informal epigraphy; and genre.

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Practical Epigraphy Workshop

FINAL CALL

22-24 June 2010, Great North Museum, Newcastle

A Practical Epigraphy Workshop is taking place for those who are interested in developing hands-on skills in working with epigraphic material. The workshop is aimed at graduate students, but other interested parties are welcome to apply, whether or not they have previous experience. With expert tuition, participants will learn the practical aspects of how to record and study inscriptions. The programme will include the making of squeezes; photographing and measuring inscribed stones; and the production of transcriptions, translations and commentaries. Participants may choose to work on Latin or Greek texts.

The course fee is £100 but we hope to be able to provide bursaries to participants to assist with the cost. Accommodation will be extra, but we are arranging B&B nearby for around £30-40.

If you wish to apply for a place on this course please contact Dr Charlotte Tupman by e-mail immediately. The closing date is 31 March but we shall consider applications which have been received by 10.00 a.m. on Tuesday 6 April.

For further details please contact Dr. Charlotte Tupman: charlotte.tupman@kcl.ac.uk.

The Practical Epigraphy Workshop is sponsored by The British Epigraphy Society, an independent ‘chapter’ of the Association Internationale d’Epigraphie Grecque et Latine.

Saturday 24 April, 2010
Trinity College Dublin

(In)formal epigraphy
This meeting examines formality and informality within epigraphic culture. What different types of formality and informality can we detect in epigraphic material and to what extent is this affected by the survival and recording of material? How does the use of space (where do we find epigraphic writing?), agency (who writes? who publishes?), or interaction with the inscriptions (who views them and why?) construct notions – or undermine them – about formality/informality? How do these ideas affect the reuse and reception of inscriptions, ancient and modern?

10.30-11.00: Coffee & registration
11.00-11.45: Dr Graham Oliver (University of Liverpool): Formality & informality in Attic inscriptions
11.45-12.30: Dr Jennifer Baird (Birkbeck College, London): Graffiti & inscriptions in Dura-Europos
12.30-1.00: Lunch
1.00-1.45: Dr Amanda Kelly (NUI Galway): Informal invective: inscriptions on sling shots
1.45-2.30: Short reports
2.30-3.30: Travel to UCD (Coffee on arrival)
3.30-5.00: Prof. Andrew Smith (UCD): Tour of the epigraphic collection in the UCD Classical Museum

Colloquium fees
Registration including tea, coffee, and the sandwich lunch:
€15.00 (BES/AIEGL members), €10.00 (BES student members), €25.00 (non-members).

Registration without lunch:
€10.00 (members), €5.00 (student members), €20.00 (non-members).

Taxi fare from TCD to UCD (for museum trip)
Between €5 and €20 one way (depending on how many people share a taxi. Please bring cash to pay the taxi driver).

For further information, or to reserve a place at the colloquium and a sandwich lunch, please contact Dr Claire Taylor (claire.taylor@tcd.ie). The deadline for registration is 9 April 2010.

(Download a poster of this announcement)

Paper delivered at the British Epigraphy Society Autumn Colloquium, November 21st, 2009, Oxford. Report by Emma Rix.

‘Inscriptions, Landscape, and the Built Environment in the Eastern Mediterranean and Iran in Late Antiquity’ (Oxford, November 2009)

Matthew Canepa, Oxford, November 21

In this paper, Professor Canepa demonstrated how the rulers of the Sassanian Empire used monumental sculpture and inscriptions to create and emphasise their cultural and racial decent from the Achaemenids, as well as simultaneously interacting with and differentiating themselves from their more recent predecessors, the kings of the Hellenistic Seleucid empire. A crucial feature of this interaction and hence of Canepa’s study was the way in which rock reliefs and other inscriptions interact with and become part of the landscape or building on which they are placed; this interaction can be a key part of their significance.

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Paper delivered at the British Epigraphy Society Autumn Colloquium, November 21st, 2009, Oxford. Report by Charlotte Tupman.

Claiming Space and Memory: the Development of Priestly Inscriptional Practices in Late New Kingdom Egypt (ca. 1190-715 BC)

Elizabeth Frood, Oxford, November 21

Dr. Elizabeth Frood of St. Cross College, Oxford, began with a paper which showed that although “epigraphy” does not exist as a discrete discipline within Egyptology, and there are elements to the study of Egyptian texts which do not pertain to the study of inscriptions in Greek and Latin, there is much that is familiar to the classical epigrapher.

Frood introduced a new project, currently in its development phase, to study the epigraphy of Egyptian temple environments. There were three elements to Frood’s paper: an overview of epigraphy in a temple context; a description of the nature and range of this inscribed material; and a case study of one particular inscription that could affect the way in which we understand Egyptian temple environments.

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Paper presented at the British Epigraphy Society Autumn Meeting. (Brief Report by Philip Davies)

The Earliest Runic Inscriptions: Problems of Language and Interpretation

Elizabeth Solopova, Oxford, November 21st, 2009

In keeping with the theme of the British Epigraphy Society’s Autumn Colloquium, (‘Epigraphy, but not as we know it’) this interesting paper took us away from the familiar territories of the Mediterranean to consider the Runic alphabet (or, to give it its proper name, futhark) used by Scandinavian and Germanic peoples from the second century through to, in the case of Scandinavia, the early modern period. Specifically, her paper examined the difficulties of interpreting ‘older runes’, these being the futhark as extant from approximately the 2nd to the 6th centuries AD. After this the futhark entered a phase of transition, developing and diversifying into regional variations, known collectively as ‘younger runes’.

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Reports given at British Epigraphy Society Autumn Meeting, November 21, 2009. (Brief summary by Gabriel Bodard)

1) Nicholas Milner on recent work at Oinoanda

Nicholas reported on the ongoing epigraphic work at the Oinoanda excavations (where he has been resposible for new inscriptions since 1994), funded by the DAI. New finds since 2007 include:

• several inscriptions on an octagonal tower in the Hellenistic wall including references to Apollo Hypsistos; the tower seems to have been an outdoor shrine to the Sun, and seems to settle the taxing question of which god was referred to by Hypsistos at this site;
• an inscription marking the foundation by C. Iulius Moles of a temple to Caesar, which appears to belong to the reign of Augustus;
• in 2009, a base bearing a verse inscription to Nemesis and a sundial;
• an inscribed lintel block from an early Christian church.

2) Ulrike Roth on Albert Rehm

Ulrike (incoming BES secretary) addressed the meeting with a question rather than a report. Albert Rehm was a German school-teacher and ancient historian (known for his epigraphic work), active in the periods before and after the Second World War, and was outspoken on the subject of the Nazi approaches to ancient history. He described himself as a “Third Humanist”, although this clearly meant something different from Werner Jaeger’s use of the same label. Rehm believed firmly in the importance of working in the field (where Jaeger was reluctant to sully his view of the ancient world by visiting modern Greece), hence his epigraphic research. Ulrike is looking for information, even stories and anecdotes, about Rehm’s fieldwork, in the hope that this might cast light on his vision of “Third Humanism”.

3) Jonathan Prag on financial inscriptions from Taormina

Jon described a collaborative project to republish and analyse 13 financial inscriptions from the Sicel city of Taormina (which was allied to Rome in the Second Punic War), that have been published in scattered publications of variable quality. (8 of the inscriptions are in IG 14; 4 were published by Manganaro from inadequate photographs.) The inscriptions reveal many details of the city’s finances and administration in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC: there are changes over time in the math used, as well as in the administration, the calendar, and the currencies in use. One text in particular offers a thorny problem of dating: it is written in Greek, so should be from before the Roman colony in 27 BC; the reference to the month of  “Quinctilis” should be from before 46; the reference to “duoandres” should be after 44. Manganaro suggests that the text may date from the period when Sextus Pompeius governed the city between 44 and 36, but much remains unclear. The new publication will make new joins between some of the text fragments, and will also thoroughly address issues with the provenance of the inscriptions, some of which are moved and only partially recorded in the excavation reports.

Paper presented at British Epigraphy Society Autumn Meeting. (Brief report by Gabriel Bodard)

Writing in Cypro-Minoan: Beyond Decipherment.

Silvia Ferrara, Oxford,  November 21, 2009

In this paper, Ferrara introduced the audience to problems in the decipherment and interpretation of inscriptions in the Cypro-Minoan script. Since there are only some 217 documents (comprising 4000 signs) in this script, decipherment is difficult if not impossible, and so identification of the language and context of the texts will depend more upon quantitative elements, the objects themselves, their distribution and other archaeological information.

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British Epigraphy Society Autumn Colloquium

FOREIGN EPIGRAPHY
or “Epigraphy, but not as we know it”
&
XIII Annual General Meeting

Saturday, 21 November 2009, MBI Al Jaber Building, Corpus Christi College, Oxford

10.30 (coffee) – 17.30 (close)

Full programme at BES website (although older events seem not to be archived, so this may disappear).