Author: latinnow

By Morgane Andrieu

For a month now, I have been working with the LatinNow team and leading a new research project in Lyon, the capital of Gallia Lugdunensis. The systematic census of the inscriptions (graffiti) found on the ceramic tableware of the ancient city is an essential component to complete Lyon’s epigraphic collection of Latin and Gaulish inscriptions. Their interest primarily lies in the fact that they are the main and perhaps the only written testimonials of daily life, most of the other perishable supports having disappeared. This documentation, studied for the first time ever as a whole, is a precious source of knowledge for archaeology and epigraphy. While we mainly know well the writing of the elites in the official and funeral texts of the city, this corpus – destined to become one of the world’s largest Roman graffiti corpora – will allow us new perspectives, not only on the writing of everyday life (giving us Gaulish and Latin names, dedications, prices, provenance and content indications, etc.), but also on the penetration of Latin and its diffusion in the different contexts (domestic, religious, commercial, etc.).

A Roman colony founded in 43 BC, Lugdunum (Lyon) became the capital of the province of Gallia Lugdunensis, the seat of imperial power for the three Gallic provinces (Belgica, Aquitania, Lugdunensis) and Caput Galliarum, or “Capital of Gaul”. Located at a strategic junction, at the confluence of the river Saône and the Rhône, this Gallo-Roman city quickly became an important port and the centre of the Gallic road network. In contact with the whole Empire, Lyon was a commercial hub, welcoming visiting emperors and hosting a long-lasting centre for the production of imperial coinage from the late first century BC. Being a bustling place of passage and mixing, it is expected that the city will deliver many epigraphic testimonials, far more numerous than those currently recorded.

The project first consists of identifying all the graffiti from the collections, followed by their identification, their analysis and the creation of an illustrated catalogue (drawing and photography) as well as an open access database.

This material, largely ignored until now, allows us to ask new questions. How does Latin express itself in the different contexts of the city? What role did it play in this effervescent environment? The recording of the graffiti will help us to understand the effects of Latinization and exposure to Roman culture on the population of the capital, the core of which was originally Gaulish-speaking. But this case study does not only benefit our knowledge of ancient Lyon. Its importance applies to different levels of analysis employed in the LatinNow project, and beyond, including comparison with other settlements, detailed sociolinguistic analysis and the exploration of the nature of literacies across the north-western provinces. It may also serve as an example for conducting the same investigations elsewhere and will allow us to broaden our knowledge of languages and writing in the Empire.

As an associate researcher to the ArAr laboratory, Archéologie et Archéomètrie, based in Lyon (UMR 5138), I am benefiting from the experience of several senior archaeologists and researchers such as Michel Feugère, Armand Desbat and Cécile Batigne (Director of the laboratory) as well as working with other scientific members from the Lugdunum museum, the archaeological service of Lyon (SAVL), INRAP, Eveha and Archeodunum which have all been responsible for archaeological operations in the city.

It is an honour to be part of LatinNow which provides the opportunity for interdisciplinary exchanges of knowledge and results at an international level. It is also a great opportunity for the old civitas capital to contribute to our better understanding of the Latinization of the north-western Roman provinces. This new research project has the potential to launch a scientific dynamic in favour of the systematic study of all forms of writing whatever the size or value of their material support. The graffiti not only reflect life in Lugdunum and beyond, but carry the voices of the inhabitants of one of the largest and most important cities of the Empire, the capital of Gaul.

By Pieter Houten

The multicultural and multilingual nature of the Iberian Peninsula is intriguing. As Díaz-Abdreu and Keay once put it: “Iberia is Europe in microcosm. It represents a juxtaposition of north, south, east and west and mirrors a heterogeneous multicultural, multilingual Europe.” (Díaz-Andreu & Keay 1997, 1). It is indeed interesting to realise how diverse the peninsula has been and still is. Despite its nature as one of the meeting places for many Mediterranean cultures, historians define it as finis terrae: the end of the world.

This ambiguity has intrigued me from the very beginning of my studies into this part of the Mediterranean. As a masters student at Utrecht University, I embarked my journey into the fascinating ancient history of the Iberian Peninsula. It is at this time I first encountered its languages and scripts. They seemed too difficult to understand and at that point, I thought, not directly relevant for my studies, which focussed on the Celtiberian cities. Following my MA thesis, I started my PhD research within the ERC-project: “An Empire of 2000 Cities” at Leiden University. The principal aims of my thesis Civitates Hispaniae are to provide a comprehensive reconstruction of the urban systems of the Iberian Peninsula during the High Empire and to explain why these systems looked the way they did. Key themes include continuities and discontinuities between pre-Roman and Roman settlement patterns, the geographical distribution of cities, and the role of cities as nodes in road systems and maritime networks. In addition, I argue that a considerable number of self-governing communities in Roman Spain and Portugal were polycentric rather based on a single urban centre.

As part of the research into the nature of urbanism in the High Empire, I had my first encounters with epigraphy and numismatics as sources. Again, the complexity of the pre-Roman languages and their continuity in the republican period grabbed my attention. In order to understand the development of urbanism in the different parts of the peninsula I studied the different peoples and their urban development and realised that their languages, often studied by a different group of scholars, needed to become part of my research world.

I had to respond when the opportunity rose to study the socio-linguistic kaleidoscope of the Iberian Peninsula in its historical context. As the LatinNow-project collaborates with two experienced linguists studying the Palaeohispanic languages up to the Late Republican period, I will focus on the period of the High Empire. My research will focus on the who, how, why, and where of learning, or not, to speak and write Latin in the diverse communities of the imperial-period Peninsula. As part of this investigation I will be exploring the scarce remnants of the Palaeohispanic languages in Latin epigraphy, for instance the local genitive plural for the tribal affiliation in Latin inscriptions, as found in the votive to Mars by Cantaber of the Elguismicos (CIL II 3061): Cantaber / Elguism/iq(um) · Luci · f(ilius) / Marti / Magno / v(otum) · s(olvit) · a(nimo) · l(ibens) · How long did these mixed forms and names continue? Moreover, can we establish specific areas with conservative naming practices? And what does this tell us about the people giving these names to their children? In order to answer these questions we have to step out of our comfort zone and use insights from across the Roman world and from other fields such as modern sociolinguistics.

Another dimension important for LatinNow is the assessment and exploitation, where possible, of not just all forms of written remains, but also writing equipment, to think about Latinization and literacy. I’m interested in exploring writing equipment to investigate the urban/rural and literate/illiterate dichotomies. Following the standard ideas on these dichotomies, we should find literate people in urban areas. On the Iberian Peninsula, we expect to find more evidence for literacy in the valleys of the Ebro and Guadalquivir as these are the urban cores of the Hispaniae. However, the often-considered non- or less urbanised regions such as the three north-western conventus, have an urban epigraphic habit following the standard practices in the major centres. This less clear distinction between urban and rural begs the question of whether the literacy dichotomy might also be false.

I look forward to studying the Latinization of the Iberian Peninsula and working with our Spanish colleagues and the LatinNow team to expand our understanding of the spread of Latin in this historically highly multilingual region and its similarities and differences with the rest of the Roman west.

By Simona Stoyanova

Working with epigraphic material has always been an interdisciplinary endeavour – involving knowledge of language(s), history, archaeology, palaeography, and increasingly, in the last decade or so, a certain amount of awareness of developments in digital humanities. This is why, after a classical philology degree at Sofia University, I decided to combine further epigraphic practice with dedicated digital humanities training at King’s College London. I have worked on a number of digital epigraphy projects both in London and Leipzig, the main goal of which has been the publication of existing and new corpora of inscriptions, providing users with different pathways through the material, rich indexing and multifaceted browsing based on text encoding in EpiDoc XML. Part of this work has involved training and dissemination of the EpiDoc standard, publishing practices and project management strategies.

Simona teaching EpiDoc in Palermo

I am very happy to be joining the LatinNow team as a specialist in digital epigraphy. My main responsibility will be managing the epigraphic database assembled by the team, amounting to well over 180,000 files derived from the EAGLE-Europeana project and a range of other sources, including the expanded Roman Inscriptions of Britain online, which is currently having multiple epigraphic corpora added to it (e.g. the Vindolanda and Bloomberg tablets) by Scott Vanderbilt as part of LatinNow. All this epigraphic data will be leveraged for the specific research purposes of LatinNow and will be enhanced with new data produced by the researchers. We are looking to standardise vocabularies for metadata and indexing features, such as type of object, material and dating format, which vary in modern language and expression throughout the corpora we use. We will enrich the information available for local ancient languages and linguistic features, so that we can trace changes in literacy and language use more effectively and consistently. I will be working closely with our developer Scott Vanderbilt and will liaise frequently with the other team members to provide training, help and advice on working with the database. An integral part of my work will be supporting the team in adding sociolinguistic data to our material and facilitating their use of the database following user-experience feedback.

An entry from Scott’s Roman Inscriptions of Britain Online

A very exciting part of this process for me is the use, reuse and further enhancement of already existing digital epigraphic corpora. So far, I have worked on producing such resources rather than mining and manipulating data from them for new research. Reuse and repurposing of open access data forms a key part of sustainability of electronic resources, helps us avoid reinventing the wheel and ensures longevity and wider dissemination of  research. We are very grateful to our colleagues from a range of different projects (for example, EAGLE, Hesperia, AELAW) for their invaluable help and generosity.

Simona with the marmor Parium

In addition, being part of LatinNow will give me the opportunity to gain experience working on epigraphic material from the western provinces, as my own research and work to date has focused more on the eastern provinces. There are many parallels to be drawn in terms of multilingual competence of local populations, however I am curious to explore the differences and specific sociolinguistic factors in the changes of language use in the west.

By Anna Willi

Interdisciplinary research can be daunting. It forces us to look beyond our expertise, to leave our comfort zone, to embrace those white areas on the map of our knowledge. But as new physical boundaries seem to be created all around us, it is more important than ever to keep an open mind, and interdisciplinary research forces us to do just that. It breaks up boundaries, opens up pathways to collaboration and renders shared features visible. Crucially, it can prove very fruitful for difficult research questions for which we rely on tricky evidence.

Anna deciphering a milestone inscription

The potential of this kind of approach is what has always motivated my research questions. When I started studying Latin Literature and Linguistics at the University of Zürich (Switzerland), I soon felt that by studying texts alone I was missing something, so I chose Ancient History and Classical Archaeology as minors. Ever since, I have been convinced that combining written and material evidence opens up new perspectives and allows us to ask new and intriguing questions. LatinNow uses an interdisciplinary approach to ask a number of such questions, and I am excited to be joining the team as a Research Fellow for Germania superior.

Germania superior is my home province, as it were. I grew up in Switzerland where I studied and wrote my PhD-thesis at the University of Zürich. For my PhD-thesis, I combined literary, epigraphic, juridical and material evidence to investigate the use and performance of irrigation in Roman western Europe. This research has left me with a strong awareness of the way in which people shape their environment, and for social and economic factors in this process. It is however the second focus area of my work that has me particularly excited about working with LatinNow: Epigraphy. I have been lucky enough to collaborate in a number of epigraphic projects since being an undergrad, including fieldwork that took me as far as Bulgaria and Cyprus. Most recently, however, I have mainly worked on inscriptions in Germania superior, for the new edition of CIL XIII.

Anna inside the Albarracin-Cella aqueduct

Inscriptions will be central to my research for LatinNow, and in my opinion they are a particularly fascinating kind of evidence. They are at the same time textual and material, and because they have not been copied numerous times over the centuries, they provide a window into the past that feels very immediate. Unlike the literary texts we know from school, inscriptions also come in various shapes and size. We find them on stone altars, pieces of leather, wooden tablets, bronze votives, drinking cups, bread and brothel walls. They were incised, scribbled, scratched, stamped and painted, they were conceived and written by people from all walks of life – and they can to some extent betray the linguistic reality in which their writers lived.

In Germania superior, this reality must have been rather diverse. Covering parts of modern Germany, Switzerland and France, the province was established under the emperor Domitian to comprise areas that had previously been part of Gaul and under Roman rule for some time, but also a stretch of the very edge of the empire along the German limes, where military presence was strong. Its population included people with Italian, Germanic or Celtic heritage as well as soldiers from other parts of the empire. Various languages must have been spoken in the streets of Mogontiacum, Argentorate or Augusta Raurica. However, our written evidence hardly does this diversity justice: with a few exceptions, to our knowledge the language commonly used for writing was Latin (though it sometimes contains traces of other languages in it). This makes literacy an important factor in studying the spread and use of Latin in Germania superior, and this is where new insights can be expected from the combination of epigraphic evidence with material evidence of writing equipment such as styli or ink pots. One particularly exciting part of my work with LatinNow will be to contextualise such finds within the epigraphic landscape.

The inscription of Togirix

Grasping language use without being able to ask speakers about it is less than straightforward. We may never know why the owner of a 2^nd century villa near Bern decided to adorn the walls of their cryptoporticus with inscriptions that contain Greek, Gaulish and Latin language material (AE 2004, 991-995), or which language a certain Togirix from Eburodunum, who has a Celtic name and set up a dedication for Mercurius, Apollo and Minerva in Latin, spoke with his parent Meta (CIL XIII 5055). But looking at social and other phenomena that define this part of the Roman empire, there are other questions that we can ask. What role did Latin play in this multilingual environment and how did it come to play this role? How did different kinds of settlements, the diverse population and military presence influence the spread and use of Latin? And how is it different from what we know about Roman Britain or Spain? I look forward to delving into such questions, and to breaking up boundaries, opening up pathways to collaboration and rendering common features visible as part of an international and interdisciplinary team, collaborating to investigate a part of complex history that we all share.