Dura-Europos was rich in gods and rich in languages. The unique religious and linguistic situation of this fortress town on the Middle Euphrates reflected its vicissitudes. Founded as the Macedonian colony Europos on a plateau overlooking the river, Dura was under Parthian control (with a brief Roman interlude in 116/7 CE) from the late-second century BCE until 165 CE. Lucius Verus' campaigns brought in the Roman troops who, nearly a century later, would be defeated by the Sasanians in 256 CE. Throughout most of the Parthian and Roman phases a large Palmyrene contingent was to be found in the town too. The now legendary excavations from the 1920s and 1930s by Yale University and the French Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres revealed a wide spectrum of pagan cults, coming from different spheres of influence, in addition to a synagogue (famous because of its unique murals, with their illustrations of scenes from the Hebrew Scriptures) and a Christian house church. Graffiti and inscriptions, as well as the remains of writing on more perishable material, show an even more remarkable diversity of languages and dialects in use, with the classical languages supplemented by Aramaic (including Palmyrenean, Hatrean and Syriac), Hebrew, Parthian and Middle Persian, and the ancient north Arabian dialect known as Safaitic. Though not one of the grand Levantine cities, Dura-Europos was no marginal outpost either, and the abundance of archaeological findings makes it potentially our best case study for social and religious life in a normal Near Eastern small town under the early and high Empire. So far, however, neither the religious life nor the language situation has received the attention that has long been due.

What do we know of Nabataean law? Or, rather, what are our sources for Nabataean law?

Although some legal customs can be inferred and gleaned from literary sources about the Nabataeans, most, if not all, the evidence derives from documentary texts, inscriptions and papyri, written in the Nabataean script in Nabataean Aramaic (and as will become clear later on, also in Greek). This documentary evidence, to use John Healey's phrase, ‘is not “supported”, so to speak, by the survival of any contemporary or later literature in Nabataean’. ‘Unsupported’ is indeed an understatement: in contrast to Roman or Jewish law for example, a vacuum exists outside the documents whose testimony cannot be enhanced, modified, explained or nuanced by a body of literary legal tradition. In this Nabataean shares the fate of several other Near Eastern Semitic languages represented by epigraphic documents alone. On the other hand, the Nabataean legal document in the Nabataean script is part of the ‘Aramaic common law tradition’, and its formulae and provisions can be profi tably compared and contrasted with sibling documents. My aim in the present exercise, however, is not to detect identity, similarity and continuity of formulae, not even ‘to identify the diversity existing within commonality’ of ‘heirs to a rich Aramaic tradition,’ but rather to isolate pieces of substantive Nabataean law, more precisely the Nabataean law of persons. Paradoxically as it may seem at first sight, my task was rendered easier by the fact that I rely on documents written mostly in Greek rather than in Nabataean Aramaic.

The epigraphical remains of Jerusalem from the period between the reign of Herod and the Destruction (37 BCE–70 CE) are unlike those of most other cities of comparable size (however precisely we calculate this) and importance in the eastern Roman Empire. In brief, the overwhelming majority of public, or quasi-public, writings consists of graffiti scratched on limestone ossuaries. These inscriptions, of which there are several hundred, normally record only the name of the deceased, usually either in Aramaic letters or in Greek (a handful are in Palmyrene), without so much as a hic iacet, though there are exceptions. Inscriptions of similar type have been found in burial caves and monumental nefashot, or mausolea, scattered around the outskirts of the city. Even here, though, writing is much less common than in the earlier burial caves of Marisa/Tell Sandahanna, or the later ones of Bet Shearim. As examples of what is there, there is an enigmatic, and very roughly carved, graffito from the ‘Tomb of the Kings’, and a longer graffito, interestingly in Hebrew, listing the names of the members of the priestly clan of Hezir buried in their famous mausoleum in the Kidron Valley (CIJ 1388, 1394).

Several non-funerary inscriptions have turned up, too, for example in the Jewish Quarter excavations – but these are similar in character to the funerary inscriptions, very brief, often graffiti, often apparently simply marking possession of an item.

Few collections of papers could claim to represent more emphatically than this one does a whole series of changes of focus which mark the evolution of ancient history over the last few decades. First, it is based almost entirely on documents, whether preserved on perishable materials or on stone; the literary texts transmitted in manuscript, and printed since the early modern period, on which our conceptions of the ancient world were previously based, have receded into the background. Second, its focus is on the eastern Mediterranean, taking the ‘Near East’ in a relatively broad sense, including both Anatolia and Egypt. Th ird, while not exploring Hellenism in the sense of the period between Alexander and Actium, it takes as its starting point the dominant Greek culture of the eastern Mediterranean under the Roman Empire. Fourth, its essential focus is on language – or co-existing or competing languages. That is to say both, on the one hand, that it explores the potential of original documents to represent for us the realities of the societies by and from which they were generated, and that, at the same time, it accepts always that a ‘document’ is, just like a literary text, a construct following rules and conventions – or obeying a ‘rhetoric’ of genre – and is not, and cannot be, a simple mirror of ‘how it really was’. But the focus on language also means something more complex still, namely the situations which evolve when more than one language is (in some sense) current within a particular society.

SAXA LOQUUNTUR: THE EPIGRAPHY OF ORAL PERFORMANCE

Stones speak. And until the invention of a time machine allows us to observe ritual actions in antiquity as eye-witnesses, it is the petrified voices of stones that we will have to listen to. Sometimes they captured loud voices in the context of ritual performances, as in the case of an inscription from Lydia:

1. Great is the Mother of Mes Axiottenos.

2. Glykon, the son of Apollonios, and Myrtion, the wife of Apollonios, (set up) this praise [eulogia] for Mes Ouranios and for Mes of Artemidoros who rules over Axiotta, for their rescue and for that of their children.

3. For you, Lord, have shown mercy, when I was a captive.

4. Great is your holiness! Great is your justice! Great is your victory! Great your punishing power! Great is the Dodekatheon that has been established in your vicinity!

5. For the son of my brother Demainetos made me his captive.

6. For I had neglected my own affairs and helped you, as if you were my own son. But you locked me in and kept me a captive, as if I were a criminal and not your paternal uncle!

7. Now, great is Mes, the ruler over Axiotta!

8. You have given me satisfaction. I praise you.

Although this inscription characterises itself as ‘praise’ (eulogia), its affinity to a group of inscriptions commonly labelled ‘confession inscriptions’ (‘Beichtinschriften’) is obvious. The term ‘confession inscriptions’ designates a continually growing group of documents from Lydia and Phrygia (first to third centuries CE) written on stone stelae and set up in sanctuaries.