Recent work – Page 2

July 18, 2018July 23, 2018 latinnow Inscriptions, Recent work, Schools

Cursive and Curses!

By Janie Masséglia

The second half of June proved to be a busy one for the LatinNow Project with more than 200 visitors and students taking part in our new workshops and activities in less than a fortnight.

JM with St Ebbes

Since we put together our LatinNow Outreach Events Menu 2018, two of our most popular activities have been about Old Roman Cursive and writing curse tablets.

Our trusty cardboard shrine to Sulis accompanied me to the Family Discovery Day at the University of Nottingham, to two in-school sessions at the Iris Classics Centre at the Cheney School in Oxford, and then again – this time with Alex making a trio – to the History and Archaeology Festival at Nottingham’s Lakeside Arts. For this activity, as well as having the chance to handle replica writing instruments of various kinds, people were encouraged to decipher mock lead-tablets describing the loss or theft of various items, before writing their own and dedicating it to Sulis. I had been initially disappointed to discover that the small squares of scratch paper I hoped would replicate child-friendly lead plaques were not available in silver, but only in rainbow effect. Sometimes the quest for absolute authenticity doesn’t lead to the best visitor experience – our visitors (especially the younger ones) have been drawn to the bright colours and have loved experimenting with Old Roman Cursive when it gives such an eye-catching result. We’ve embraced it and are determined from now on to ‘be more unicorn’.

shrine at cheney diptych

One of the unexpected highlights of the History and Archaeology Festival was the chance to meet re-enactors of various periods. We talked about writing techniques with a medieval Benedictine, and even faced an invasion of Iron Age Celts who came up to tell us they didn’t like the Romans much, and they had no intention of learning about Latin! Once Alex was able to reassure them we loved Celtic too, and even showed them some Celtic words hidden in a Latin contract we had on our stall, we managed to broker a peace. Now that’s community engagement.

JM with Benedictine

Our other popular session has been our military ‘codebreaking’ for Primary school pupils, an activity that Alex, Joshua Ward-Penny and I successfully road-tested on 250 children and their parents for the IntoUniversity programme last March. This session, focussing on the different languages spoken in the empire and how the Roman army sent its messages, always ends with a race to translate a secret message and save a Roman legion from an attack from marauding Britons. Last week, the pupils of St Ebbe’s Primary did a fantastic job, and a little girl named Mahisa stormed to victory several minutes before her classmates. It’s a pattern that we’ve started to notice, that children who speak more than one language are especially adept at codebreaking cursive, and it’s been great to talk about multilingualism with young people who really understand what we mean.

July 17, 2018August 3, 2023 Alex Mullen Latin Now Inscriptions, Names, Recent work

Pisa Conference – Variation and Contact in the Ancient Indo-European Languages

By Francesca Cotugno

On 19-20^th of April the University of Pisa – which is also my alma mater – hosted an international conference entitled Variation and Contact in the Ancient Indo-European Languages: Between Linguistics and Philology. It was the first stage of the two-part colloquia followed by the conference held at St. Hilda’s College, in Oxford, on May 17-18 2018.

The aim of both of these events was to discuss the nature of contact, variation and change in ancient Indo-European languages by bringing together scholars at any stage of their career to encourage an interdisciplinary dialogue and to provide a special forum to foster new lines of research and collaborative endeavour. The Pisa colloquium featured two dozen speakers. It offered me the opportunity to present our project with a paper: Latinization of the north-western provinces: sociolinguistics, epigraphy and bilingualism. The Germanies.

The conference proved to be an ideal setting for debating the appropriate framework for analysing the nature of the linguistic changes taking place in the Iron Age and Roman period as two, seemingly local Indo-European languages, Germanic and Celtic, both well-attested since the Iron Age, were gradually interacting with and then partially superseded by Latin during a period of change that would see Latin emerge in several respects as the dominant language by the end of the imperial period. My paper provided an overview of the possible sociolinguistic variables symptomatic of language change in the Germanies and a discussion of their connection to other social phenomena.

My case studies were chosen to study phonological difference from Classical norms as a way of revealing the interaction between Germanic, Celtic and Latin. Among the broad range of inscriptions those featuring personal and deity names are particularly relevant and the diffusion of theonyms can provide insights into the interaction of Roman and local religious traditions.

The first stage of analysis has shown that it is virtually impossible to draw a clear cut linguistic division between Celtic or Germanic languages. Instead I have been creating gradient maps in order to chart Celtic and Germanic features. Crossing-referencing these elements together with the archaeological evidence, it seems that in the Rhineland area, for example, for the most part personal names show a increased level of Celtic features, whereas theonyms often have Germanic features and are linked to Germanic words (e.g. the matres ‘the mother goddesses’, as we have Matronis ALAGABIUS (CIL XIII 8529, Koln) or [Mat]ri BVS SVebis Jethungabus (CIL XIII 8225, Deutz, Köln) or matres Alaferhviae, Alaterviae und Alat(e)ivia from Aachen).

As the project develops I will explore further how linguistic variation and change may, or may not, correlate with local population groups and their histories, and explore further possible local, provincial and imperial interactions.

April 19, 2018August 3, 2023 Alex Mullen Latin Now Inscriptions, Recent work, Writing equipment

Roman writing equipment at the Roman Archaeology Conference

I’m just starting to draw breath after a fun and busy few days in Edinburgh last week at the Roman Archaeology Conference (RAC). I’d relatively recently been in Edinburgh giving a keynote at an interesting conference on theorizing contacts in the Roman world, but that was in December and the darkness meant I hadn’t appreciated any of the striking topography and monuments that make Edinburgh so special. It’s a beautiful city! RAC was brilliantly run by Ben Russell and his colleagues and there were over 400 delegates from several different countries. It felt inclusive and international.

I was at RAC to run a panel on writing equipment for the LatinNow project. As part of our study of the Latinization of the north-western Roman provinces, we are looking at archaeological finds of writing equipment as a possible proxy for Latinization. I kicked off the session with a talk which outlined the exciting scope of what we hope to do and the depressing realities (issues of identification and interpretation of material, very patchy data etc.), before going into some detail on one of our provinces, Britannia, for which we can cautiously use some pretty impressive datasets, for example from the Portable Antiquities Scheme and the Rural Settlement of Roman Britain project. The results from the latter project underline the importance of road networks, status, urban centres, and the economy in the spread of literacy and Latin.

RSRB — Find spots of Roman-period writing equipment from rural excavations (data from Rural Settlement of Roman Britain project, map by Michael Loy)

The second speaker was Javier Alonso from Mérida who presented both a global view of the Roman-period writing equipment from Hispania and a case-study from Emerita. His work over many years has tried to impress the importance of recognizing and publishing this material on archaeologists, museum staff and academics and shows what interesting work can be done if the material is carefully assessed in context. The third speaker was Oriol Olesti from Universitat Autònoma Barcelona who zoomed in on numerous sites in north-eastern Spain in the second and first centuries BC. The key messages from this paper were that the economy was an important driver in the uptake of literacy and that many sites, including those referred to as ‘Roman outposts’, with writing equipment seem to produce only Iberian graffiti in this period rather than Latin, which complicates the use of writing equipment as a proxy for Latinization in this area and period. I want to know more about this gap in the epigraphic record: is it ‘real’? LatinNow’s Noemí Moncunill, who was at RAC to present a poster created jointly with MJ Estarán Tolosa, will continue to work with Javier and Oriol as we try to understand the material from Hispania.

Oriol graffiti — Iberian graffiti from Ca l’Arnau (150-75 BC), a ‘Roman outpost’ (Sinner and Ferrer 2016)

Next we moved east and heard from Sylvia Fünfschilling about the fascinating material from Augusta Raurica (Augst) in the context of Roman Switzerland. Sylvia impressed on us the large number of types of object that could be used for writing, some of which were beautiful, for example this inscribed stylus, which is similar to a find from the Bloomberg excavations.

stylus Augst — Inscribed stylus from Augusta Raurica

Hella Eckardt from Reading discussed the various types of identities that may have been associated with writing equipment in the Roman world and looked particularly at the use and display of metal ink-wells across the Roman world. She highlighted the fact that writing equipment in graves of the very young could be aspirational rather than a reflection of what they had done in life. The next paper by Josy Luginbühl, Bern, followed on neatly and presented some of the material from her PhD thesis. We were treated to some intriguing examples of writing equipment deposited in Roman-period graves. Josy is interested in the fact that women are rarely directly identifiable as writers of our epigraphic materials, but appear in images with writing equipment and with this material in burial contexts. We look forward to hearing more as she continues her research! I think that more women in the Roman period are literate than we generally assume and LatinNow will be exploring this in more detail.

Colin Andrews of the Open University finished off the session with a close analysis of seal boxes, presenting the very latest finds and more evidence to back up his view that they were, in Roman Britain at least, and probably elsewhere, used to protect the seals that were used on the strings around bags which contained, e.g. money. In my view, though this means seal boxes cannot be taken as a direct proxy for literacy (we previously thought they sealed strings around stylus tablets), it does show the use of symbols and writing in administering the economic world, which, as it became increasingly complex in the Roman period, relied on literate systems for its control.

painting writing equip and coins — A wall painting from the House of Julia Felix, Pompeii, showing the close association of writing and the economy

The LatinNow team is looking forward to continuing our collaboration with experts on writing equipment and is very grateful to all the speakers and the audience at RAC. We would also like to thank Alex Smith and Tom Brindle for help with the RSRB data, to Scott Vanderbilt and Michael Loy for maps and support, and to Lacey Wallace for help with PAS data.

March 11, 2018August 3, 2023 Michael Loy GIS and data, Recent work

Sociolinguistics meets archaeology: the LatinNow GIS

One of the planned outputs for LatinNow is a publicly accessible GIS. This will be an easily navigable web-based interface (similar to tools produced by ORBIS or EngLaId), which will display, amongst other things, inscriptions of the north-western Roman provinces as points on a map. Users will be able to search for inscriptions, filtering the data by e.g. location, date, and inscribed material; and then be able to display the text of the target inscription.

Fig01 — Public-facing GIS tools from ORBIS and EngLaId

The data for the Latin and Greek inscriptions in this GIS comes from EAGLE, and comprises over 180,000 inscriptions marked up (largely through an automated process) with EpiDoc. With the help of our European Special Advisor Pietro Liuzzo, we obtained a collection of all the EAGLE files relevant to our provinces of study — i.e. the collection of ‘Classical’ language inscriptions which we can use in our GIS. However, it is not simply a case of dumping these files straight into a GIS: the collection contains multiple appearances of the same inscription in different Epigraphic corpora (e.g. Epigraphic Database Clauss Slaby; Epigraphische Datenbank Heidelberg; Roman Inscriptions of Britain), or even different editions/readings of the same text from the same corpus. We have also identified some problems with the automatic EpiDoc’ing process. For example, some of the files were EpiDoc’ed without geographic co-ordinates — essential references for displaying the data geospatially — and much work is therefore needed to make the data ‘GIS’ ready, either by manually adding in co-ordinates or linking the data up with Pleiades (where possible). The GIS team is currently dedicating most of its time to the cleaning and processing of the material in this way.

Fig02 — Multiple entries for the same inscription from different Epigraphic *corpora*. Entries with the same ‘tmID’ refer to the same inscription.

We do, however, already have a ‘dirty’ research version of the GIS, for use by the project team. We have been playing around with search queries, and have started to look for spatial patterns in the inscriptional record. As an example, here is a search which brought up inscriptions from Britain dated between AD 50–100 and written on wood. In addition, we have been visualising our inscription points against freely available GIS data from other projects (e.g. OxRep, PAS), in order to think about the social factors

Fig03 — Screenshot of the ‘dirty’ data, from the Germanies, Noricum, and Raetia.

which might have affected the uptake and use of Latin. For example, do we find more stone inscriptions the closer we go to quarries? How does the epigraphic habit change with the movement of the military? What does the distribution of writing equipment tell us about literacy and Latinization in the various provinces? The quality of the data available is necessarily different across provinces, but the GIS allows us to ask questions about Latinization at various scales across the whole project area.

Fig04 — Example query run on the inscriptions of Britannia. Here, inscriptions dated AD 50–100 and written on wood (missing, for example, the Bloomberg tablets, which have not yet been published online).

Work on the project GIS is ongoing. The main priorities at the moment are the cleaning of the EAGLE data; the addition of the non-Classical language inscriptions, and the input of more contextual data alongside our inscriptions.

February 1, 2018August 3, 2023 latinnow Iberian Peninsula, Inscriptions, Recent work

An epigraphic mission to Illiberis (Elne), crossroad of cultures at the foot of the Pyrenees

By Noemí Moncunill Martí

In December I had the chance to travel to the beautiful town of Elne, in southern France, in order to study its interesting corpus of inscriptions, together with Jérôme Bénézet, archaeologist in the «Service Archéologique du Département des Pyrénées-Orientales».

Elne museum warehouses

Research work carried out at the museum and archaeological warehouses of Elne.

Located between the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean Sea, on the Roussillon plain, Elne has been a land of passage and meeting point for different cultures since ancient times. Proof of this is the variety of its epigraphic record, including some inscriptions in Greek and Latin, but especially in the local language(s), Iberian and maybe as well Gaulish. As a matter of fact, the local identity of the ancient inhabitants of this area has long been discussed and it is still the subject of controversy among specialists: while some scholars think that Iberian was the vernacular language of this region –and Iberians its peoples–, others consider this language was merely used as a lingua franca to facilitate commercial interactions with the Iberian Peninsula. Be it as it may, the study of the sources directly written by the inhabitants of Elne from the 4^th century BC till the Roman period remains an essential element in order to understand the cultural and linguistic substrate of the region along with its evolution till the final Latinization.

elne elerbas Elne Gaulish

Pictures showing two different graffiti from Elne, both of them written in Iberian script. Whereas the first bears an Iberian name, Elerbas, the second, which reads ]nuetiri, might be interpreted as the Iberian adaptation of a Gaulish anthroponym Con-uectirix.

The epigraphic mission is part of one of the main Work Packages of the LatinNow project, “Documenting the Provinces”, aimed at gathering data and materials which are relevant for the study of Latinization in the north-western provinces. In this case, we have carried out the revision of the whole corpus of inscriptions of the site and we are currently working on the interpretation of these texts, with a special focus on the cultural environment in which they were produced. To this end, the linguistic analysis will be put together with the archaeological contextualization of the finds and the study of the writing materials, which will allow us to progress on the dating of the inscriptions and the social contextualization of the writing practices in ancient Elne.

November 6, 2017August 3, 2023 Alex Mullen Latin Now Iberian Peninsula, Inscriptions, Recent work

A whistle-stop tour of LatinNow!

By María José Estarán Tolosa

Last monday I had the great opportunity of sharing a part of my research with some members of the Faculty of Classics of the University of Oxford, in the presentation of LatinNow in the Epigraphy Seminar organized at the Ioannou Centre. The room was crowded, and I think that the point that we wanted to adress was clear: the questions we want to answer in the next five years were posed, the method we want to follow was described, the sociolinguistical contexts of each region were explained, and the members of the team were introduced to the academic community… In less than an hour!

My contribution to the project, as a research affiliate of LatinNow, is to produce research on Latinization of the Iberian Peninsula, together with Noemí Moncunill, who is leading the work on that region as a research fellow of the project. I am focusing on sociolinguistical issues, carrying out a comparative study of the Latinization of the texts on coins and on epigraphy, taking into account the political context and the historical events.

My presentation for the Epigraphy Seminar consisted of Saguntum, an amazing case study given the rich epigraphic and archaeological materials preserved. The siege of Saguntum and its strong loyalty to Rome (see the dedicatory inscription to Scipio for the liberation and reconstruction of the city, inscribed in early Imperial times! Fig.1) derived in the landing of the Roman army in 218 BC in Spain.

Fig. 1: Inscription CIL II/14 327 (early Imperial times). Honorific inscription dedicated to Publio Scipio for the liberation of Saguntum. Picture: http://www3.uah.es/imagines_cilii/CILII/tarrac2.htm

In order to show outwardly this strong link to Rome, Saguntum produced bilingual coins, in Latin and Iberian, with the type of the prow between 130 and 72 BC.

cabeza galeada

Proa

Fig. 2: Bilingual coin from Saguntum (130-72 BC). Picture: http://rgonzalez.blogspot.es/1261559340/monedas-arse-sagunto-descripcion-imagenes/

The interesting point is that, although Saguntum produced many lapidary inscriptions in Republican times, all them are written in in Iberian language and script. These documents indicate that Saguntum lived a situation of societal bilingualism in Republican times, and that their elites likely chose Latin to perform their Romanitas outwardly, since coins obviously circulated more widely than inscriptions on stone.

Fig. 3: Languages timeline, Saguntum (MJET).

After that, I explained a completely different case study from the other side of the Iberian peninsula, so I could illustrate the linguistic and epigraphic heterogeneity of Hispania: the case of linguistic retention in the religious inscriptions of Lusitania. This hypothesis is based only on epigraphy, not in coins. We can infer that there was a sort of linguistic retention of the local language for religious matters thanks to two mixed inscriptions (heading in latin mentioning the author of the inscription, then commemoration of sacrifices / offerings in Lusitanian) and also thanks to c. 20 Latin dedicatory inscriptions where the theonym has Lusitanian morphology.

Fig. 4: Lusitanian inscription from Lamas de Moledo, Sabugal (Portugal). Picture: Monumenta Linguarum Hispanicarum IV L.2.1.

My stay in Oxford was more than a presentation of this promising project: teamworking with LatinNow members (Alex, Francesca and Noemí) and preparing the next events of the project was really exciting and constructive!