This chapter explores the state of knowledge about the Antonine Plague, an empire-wide pandemic that struck from the mid-160s. It emphasizes that even against the backdrop of the unhealthy environment of the Roman empire, the Antonine Plague stood out as an extraordinary event in its geographical scope and biological impact. The stories of the Roman armies introducing the plague on their return from the Parthian campaign deserve greater scrutiny, as they are likely colored by imperial propaganda concerning Avidius Cassius and Lucius Verus, but the notion that the disease was caused by a pathogen carried into the Roman empire from without, likely along Red Sea and Indian Ocean trading routes, is plausible.

Paintings and other objects made in late medieval and early modern European sometimes contain what appears to be highly stylized ornamental writing, often reminiscent of contemporary Arabic scripts but seemingly devoid of linguistic content. Often called pseudo-kufic and now more commonly pseudoscript, these passages of apparently meaningless writing continue to vex historians of art. This chapter aims to advance our understanding of pseudoscript by examining its use in the paintings of the Florentine master Fra Filippo Lippi (c. 1406–1469). A close reading of Lippi’s pseudoscripts, including a few examples in which he surprisingly included legible content, emphasizes that while pseudoscript was a widespread phenomenon, it is perhaps best understood through careful consideration of its particular uses in specific contexts.

This chapter reexamines the extensively discussed evidence for the circumstances that drove the Jews to a seemingly irrational and hopeless challenge to the power of Rome. The account of Josephus, on which we almost exclusively rely, offers the teleological scenario of a long build-up of hostility that issued inevitably in disaster. While acknowledging the background and circumstances that lay behind the conflict, this chapter emphasizes the numerous contingencies, unanticipated events, personalities, and miscalculations that played a key role in bringing it about. The tension and anxiety that had built up for two generations in a series of individual episodes supplied a significant impetus. But error, accident, and unintended consequences are critical to understanding the course of events. Josephus’ sense of inevitability, born of hindsight and his special situation, needs a corrective.

This chapter reviews the networks that made possible the diffusion of the beliefs and practices associated with the figure of Christ during the first and second centuries and concludes that the missionary, the pious merchant, and the occasional Christian traveler should definitively be discarded as likely agents of religious change. Complex contagions such as the diffusion of religious beliefs and practices require as agents individuals who have strong ties, and therefore social capital, in the different networks among which they circulate. In turn, the local networks of diffusion must be both strong-tie and sufficiently open. These findings invite a reopening of the question of the role of the Jewish Diaspora in the spread of Christianity beyond the first century.

Chronograms are a cryptographic written practice in which the numerical values of some letters of a text encode a date relevant to that text. They constitute a form of ludic numeracy ‒ a specific kind of ludic language or wordplay in which writers not only highlight their skill with words and numbers but also conceal information, forcing readers to expend effort to extract their hidden meanings. Four distinct chronogram traditions are outlined: South and Southeast Asian word-symbols, South Asian alphasyllabic numerals; Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic alphanumeric chronography; and the early modern Western European tradition using Roman numerals. This chapter analyzes a corpus of over 10,000 Roman numeral chronograms from the fourteenth through the twentieth centuries, drawn from those previously compiled by the antiquarian James Hilton. Roman numeral chronograms use the letters IVXLCDM, specially marked within texts, to encode dates.While these chronograms began prior to the Hindu-Arabic (Western) numerals’ ubiquitous use, they were most popular in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, by which time the Roman numerals were already archaic. It was thus just at the point when Roman numerals were falling out of everyday use that they were ripe for symbolic repurposing in chronograms.

Monograms originated in the classical world as producers’ marks, but their use became much more widespread in late antiquity, when they not only appeared in various new material media but also developed into more sophisticated and aesthetically appealing visual devices, encoding personal names and titles as well as various ritualistic phrases. This chapter surveys these newly acquired functions, turning them into liminal graphic devices and visual tokens of social power, as well as various messages conveyed by such monogrammatic devices. Since late antique and early medieval monograms communicated their linguistic and symbolic messages by means of a dual-coding system, they should be viewed in the context of this volume as phenomena situated in between hidden writing and semasiography.

Over a span of a millennium or more, Maya scribes and sculptors in the Maya lowlands used a writing system notable for its formal complexity and close links to imagery. At times, in so-called full-figure writing, glyphic elaboration erupts into a welter of massed bodies, imparting a misleading impression of narrative pictures. Wit and fun seem to abound, along with hints of an exuberant, scribal personality behind certain inscriptions. The stress on physicality ‒ things with interiors, exteriors, and defining edges in between ‒ is thoroughgoing. Efficiencies of graphic presentation lead logically to a design choice, whether to show a full thing-in-the-world, or to abbreviate that display by exhibiting a recognizable feature. As a deliberate category error ‒ is it picture, is it text? ‒ full-figure signs heighten the pleasure of being puzzled. They build in part on the cognitive frissons of the Stroop Effect, in which one set of information collides with another. The pictorial interaction of such signs ranges along one of two extremes: sociable contact that is decorous, restrained, respectful, and an indecorous, emotive striving that might lead to uncertain outcomes. In the most extreme cases, Maya writing oscillates between controllability and a bare containment of feral will in the glyphs.

Art historical study of writing in the Islamic world centers on calligraphy, beautiful writing as a high, perhaps the highest expression of Islamic art. This calligraphic ideal is shadowed by the prominent place on Islamic buildings and objects of decoration that looks like writing but is not: called pseudo epigraphic, pseudo Kufic, and the like. The study of pseudo-writing in Islamic art has one of its origins in another curious phenomenon, the prominence of Arabic-like decoration on medieval Byzantine churches. This chapter investigates ways that the presence of Arabic script on objects and buildings in medieval Islam (and Byzantium)conveyed meanings in the large space between the binary opposition of “real” and “pseudo” writing, the ways writing means by way of pattern or cipher, and also through talismanic and incantatory functions.

The visual and intertextual effects of Ausonius’ versified riverscape, the Mosella, make it a prize specimen for modern study of late antique Latin poetics and aesthetics. What kind of performance – and then what kind of a book – would this poem originally have been, in the empire of Valentinian and his sons, in the 370s and ’80s? The chapter measures the oddity of the Mosella, and of the poet’s oeuvre, against the background of prior fourth-century Latin opuscular poetizing, to argue that Ausonius’ “poetical fame” (Gibbon) was at once enabled by his profile as an imperial officeholder and an effect of his deliberately stepping aside from it. A following generation of Latin writers, many of whom would style Christian literary careers for themselves, may be seen reprising – if not emulating – the trick that Ausonius performed in improvising a personal poetic subjectivity at the edge of the cognitive ecology of Roman empire.

The chapter sketches an approach to a great challenge of contemporary ancient history, namely, the history whereby state power was extended into the ancient countryside. It commences with consideration of the operations that produced Roman taxonomies of city-states and villages: far from a simple consequence of recognition, the statuses of city-state and village alike were ascribed. The chapter directs attention to the decades when Rome ceased to treat with regions via networks of bilateral alliances and instead instrumentalized select city-states to dominate territories and peoples that were henceforth deemed non-political. On this basis, the chapter challenges the interpretive truisms that Rome “governed through city-states” or that it relied on preexisting institutions. What we should seek to bring into view is the political economics of republican empire: the related forms of fiscal domination and monopolies over law-making and law-applying institutions that the democratically constituted oligarchies of the ancient city exercised over others on behalf of Rome.

This chapter examines writings from Bronze Age China that might at first glance seem to be hidden, asking about their audience and the intentions behind them. It begins at the late second millennium Anyang site with a pit deposit of inscribed oracle bones in the royal precinct. Arguing that the pit was part of a representation of sacrifice, it suggests that the buried writing was offered to the royal ancestors in thanks for their replies to the divination questions. Next it looks at inscriptions on bronze ritual vessels. These originated in the late second millennium as display texts addressed to deceased ancestors but early in the first millennium came to be consciously written for the living as well. A third case is stone tablets inscribed with covenant texts and buried in sacrificial pits at the fifth-century BCE Houma site. Here it seems that rulers seeking to enforce loyalty not only called the spirits to witness but also kept duplicate copies of the covenants as witnesses that could be called in evidence. The chapter concludes with some camouflaged writings from the latter part of the first millennium. These were designed to entertain highly literate readers by provoking mental gymnastics.

The Introduction traces the main themes of the volume: boundaries and networks, religious innovation, and violence as an agent of societal change. It offers a tribute to the inspirational scholarship and intellectual influence of Brent Shaw. An analysis of the Demna mosaic from Cap Bon in North Africa is used as an example of the types of overlapping topics that inspired Brent Shaw and this volume.