This chapter investigates the interplay of textual and non-textual features in the marking systems of three types of clay products widely used in Roman Italy during the first three centuries CE ‒ fine tableware (sigillata), shipping containers (amphorae), and bricks and tiles. The semiotic flexibility of the footprint as a polyvalent sign indicating both authorship and identity is illustrated by its use as a stamp on Roman tableware. The marks employed on amphorae to identify different phases of the manufacture, transport, and distribution of the vessels or their contents reveal a well-defined taxonomy of textual and atextual signs differentiated according to medium, placement, and stage of application. Brickstamps on larger bricks at Rome combined texts with semantically distinctive figured symbols (signa) in complex messages that identified brickyard owner, manufacturer, and origin; smaller bricks, when marked, bore distinctive patterns of atextual designs created by matrix. Atextual marking systems operated both together with and independently of textual markers, offering different advantages of utility (visual comprehensibility without need of literacy) and facility (being easily constructed out of everyday objects) in return for less semantic precision and differential range.

This chapter presents practices of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing that differ from regular hieroglyphic writing by their difficulty and their visual otherness. In a variety of settings, hieroglyphic writing that is altered visually or made deliberately difficult to read is exposed, designed to entice through its otherness and virtuosity, and often boldly affirmative. In other settings, altered writing is additionally withdrawn from view: even without a beholder or reader, altered writing here establishes, through its very otherness, an indexical contiguity with another world. Combined, these practices illustrate how Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was conceived of, and played with, by some of its most proficient ancient users on two defining levels: visually and in its orientation to reading. As implicit metadiscourses, they tell of native Egyptian conceptions of the functions and nature of hieroglyphic writing: not along ideologies of a transparency of writing to meaning or direct access to information, but instead of a writing carrying denser significations and with inherent performative potential. In the inscriptions presented here, writing obfuscates but does notconceal. It entices, it dazzles, it absorbs. Through such delays, significations beyond the words are made experienceable, in and through writing itself, and writing itself is made transformative.

What is the most virtuous form of Christian life and the best path to perfection? And what is the best form of social organization and context to achieve this? This chapter addresses these questions by bringing together three different sets of sources for Egypt and Palestine in the fourth to seventh centuries: normative monastic treatises on the desirable and undesirable ways to achieve spiritual perfection, hagiographical narratives that praise the “hidden sanctity” of laypeople, and descriptive historical sources (including papyri) regarding the activities of pious lay groups (spoudaioi, philoponoi). Taken together, these sources reveal that the charitable activities of laypeople played a sufficiently large role in late antique society to challenge the sense of spiritual superiority that began to prevail in monastic circles.

This chapter examines the impact of Roman imperial expansion on the Atlantic rim of the Roman empire, an “ecological frontier,” so the chapter argues, that traced a natural arc encompassing southern Ireland, southwest Britain, the whole Atlantic coast of Gaul from the Cherbourg Peninsula to the Pyrénées, most of the Iberian Peninsula, and the far northwestern corner of the African continent. A set of case studies illustrates how the territories, resources, and peoples of this ecological frontier zone were integrated into a Roman imperial system centered on the Mediterranean basin. The chapter argues that this Atlantic rim was integrated in a highly differentiated way that not only shattered a preexisting Atlantic world that had been bounded and unified, but also reordered its constituent parts in the service of empire. The chapter’s central thesis, seemingly paradoxical, is that imperial integration and regional fragmentation went together.

The workmen employed in royal tomb construction of the Egyptian New Kingdom (ca. 1539‒1077 BCE) used hieroglyphic, pictorial and abstract graphic signs when marking their property and presence, and for the creation of administrative records on ostraca. In the course of the New Kingdom, this system of identity marks developed into a complex, pseudo-written code. This chapter discusses the hybrid morphology of the marks and the way it came about. It is suggested that the morphology and use of the marks reflect the extent and nature of (semi-)literacy within the workmen’s community.

Let us begin with myths, if only to swat them down. There are the claims that systems of writing are committed to transparency and precise records of sound; that the target is the language behind such orderly marks; that readers, not viewers, matter most; and that meaning of a complex, organized sort is best communicated by phonic graphs (e.g., Sampson 1985: 27; see also Drucker 2014; Hudson 1995: 32–33, for the origin of these ideas in an “ideology of openness”). But what if the vehicle were as important as its passengers? What if embellishments mattered deeply, if hidden writing, slow to produce, slow to read, the opposite of hurried cursives, played as enduring a role as more accessible graphs? And what if meaningful marks did continuing service alongside records of spoken language? This book zeroes in on hidden writing and alternative systems of notation. It attends to writing that, by its formal intricacy, deflects attention from language. It aims at graphs or notations that target meaning by direct entrée, without passing through records of sound. What matters in these graphic systems is useable, readily accessed meaning.

The chapter is a brief attempt to follow the development of Brent Shaw’s work from his first, splendidly iconoclastic revision of the role of pastoral nomadism in Roman North Africa and in the ancient world in general (from 1981 onward) to his recent pair of crowning masterpieces, both published in 2013 – the first, on religious violence in Roman North Africa in the time of Augustine; the second, on harvesting in the ancient world. In between, I have tried to do justice to the breadth and coherence of his principal concerns for major themes of ancient history – for the nature of power and of resistance to power, for the structures of the family, for the nature of the Roman economy, and for the mobilization of opinion (largely of hatred) in the interconfessional conflicts of the later empire.

Between the ninth and sixteenth centuries, crests (mon) evolved from ornamental motifs to potent signifiers of social and political identity. Japanese warriors borrowed the use of stylized decorative motifs from the aristocracy, eventually transforming them into full-fledged heraldic markers. Scholars have explained this evolution in fundamentally military terms: absent uniforms, mon enabled warriors to distinguish friends from foes on chaotic battlefields. Yet twelfth- to fourteenth-century representations, in war tales and illustrated scrolls, reveal that the diffusion of mon accelerated in peacetime. Growing attention to mon in sources largely reflects the narrative logics of the various genres: mon served to commemorate battlefield deeds rather than organize military action. Indeed, the impetus for their diffusion was genealogical ‒ a manifestation of the contemporaneous restructuring of warrior society around the corporate warrior house (ie). The ie came to represent the fundamental unit of affiliation for Japanese warriors, with its emphasis on shared ancestry and its hierarchy of lineages and sub-lineages. Mon served as powerful visual markers of the unity and flexibility of these new kinship and political groups, providing a language to represent minute variations of identity and status in a society keenly attentive to both.

This chapter examines the dynamics of the notion of peregrinatio in Augustine’s thought, with particular attention given to its use in the Enarrationes in Psalmos. It uses Derrida’s reflections on metaphor to explore the rich regression of images in peregrinatio. Augustine uses the concept, literally denoting the status of a resident alien, to express the affective dynamics of a Christian living away from their home in the heavenly Jerusalem: their sense of misalignment in the world, but also their sense of joy in the very transience of their existence. For no one can be a peregrinus without having a home from which he has traveled, and to which he looks forward to returning. Derrida’s phrase the “destinerrancy of desire” perfectly captures this Augustinian notion.

Less glamorous than pottery or architecture, adobe bricks belong to that “Cinderella” class of material culture which archaeologists often ignore. Bricks and their makers’ marks deserve more attention as they can give us invaluable information on the organization and administration of labor. This chapter examines adobe construction and makers’ marks in the Andes, with examples from the ethnographic present and the archaeological past. The author's research on adobe bricks and makers’ marks allows for a theoretical foray into the co-development of labor administration, accounting, and evasion. The chapter argues that the growth of bureaucratic and accounting technology can be modeled as an escalating arms race between tribute payers, local leaders, mid- to high-level administrators, and the uppermost echelon of the state, the royal house. Tracking the evolution of makers’ marks and state accounting unfolds the longue durée of cat-and-mouse mind games played by those who want to capture labor versus those who wish to contribute as little public work as possible.

The chapter discusses a papyrus letter in the Basel papyrus collection that is our earliest autograph of a self-proclaimed Christian. The earliest evidence of Christians in the Egyptian countryside points to a well-traveled and well-read local landed elite. The Basel letter shows that Christians at that time were not hindered from taking public offices in their hometowns. In fact, they were called upon to do so, along with their pagan fellow citizens of means; their financial situation was decisive, not their faith. The Basel letter further illuminates the early spread of Christianity beyond urban centres and the strong links between urban and rural areas operating in a symbiotic relationship. It helps us elucidate the lives of early Christians in the Egyptian countryside during the first half of the third century, a period for which literary evidence is lacking.

This introductory essay lays out the concept of “hidden” writing, which, by its formal intricacy, deflects attention from language. It also addresses semasiography, systems of marking with visual signs. The aim is to explore modes of graphic communication often thought to be secondary to writing as a purely phonic record. In fact, these complex forms and codified signs operate alongside and beyond language, overlooked yet as compelling and omnipresent as phonic writing itself. These graphs are situated in relation to, but as distinct from, research on “cultural graphology” (Jacques Derrida), “graphesis” (Johanna Drucker), and “the graphosphere” (Armando Petrucci). Evidence to make our points comes from palaeography and steganography, along with notations as diverse as Otto Neurath’s “Isotype,” Xu Bing’s emoji narrative, and Inka khipu knot notations.