Our PI, Paweł Nowakowski, is presenting the project at a digital seminar of the Klassische Archäologie / Alte Geschichte / Karpeia Gastvorträge, Wintersemester 2020/21, Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz: Monday, 9 November, 6:00pm CET.

Stones, Slabs, and the Dynamics of Speech in the Early Byzantine Middle East

In my talk, I will give a sneak-peek of the project Epigraphy and Identity in the Early Byzantine Middle East, a new research initiative run from the University of Warsaw, and funded by a Sonata 15 grant from the National Science Centre, Poland (2020-2023). The project, just started, aims at examining the reasons as well as possible impact of the choice of language for inscriptions commemorating religious building programmes in Syria, Palestine, and Arabia, between the fourth and the mid-eighth century A.D. When completed, the project will offer a freely accessible database of sites where inscriptions in languages other than Greek have been recorded, whereas some of the hypotheses put forward in the application, be they found compelling, may lead us to a revision of existing views on the status of the Greek language, and on the developmental models of late antique Aramaic dialects. As a case study useful to illustrate the basic assumptions of the project, and the evidence we have at hand, I will discuss the Greek and Syriac inscriptions from Rasm al-Ḥajal/Rasm al-Ḥağal, a prospering village in Jabal al-Shubayt/Ğabal Šbayṭ, one of the basaltic plateaus in east Syria.

Other talks during this semester.