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.

Despite some progress in recent decades, the study of Jewish magic is still in its infancy. The few monographs devoted to this subject – most notably the classic treatments of Ludwig Blau and Joshua Trachtenberg – cover only small segments of the Jewish magical tradition, which spans at least from the Second Temple period all the way to the twenty-first century. And more recent work, including both the publication of numerous Jewish magical texts and some attempts at broader syntheses, has not yet grappled enough with the diachronic aspect of the Jewish magical texts, and with their diffusion and transformation over space and time. It is as a contribution to this important yet neglected topic that the following discussion of the Genizah magical texts and their transmission of some late antique Jewish magical recipes should be read. The significance of this contribution does not lie in the novelty of its main argument – that some of the magical texts from the Cairo Genizah are copies of magical texts from late antique Palestine and Egypt – for this point has already been made by others, but in the attempt to provide sound methodological guidelines which could supplement existing scholarly intuitions. It is for this reason that I shall begin with a brief general survey of the magical texts from the Cairo Genizah, move on to discussing the methods for distinguishing late antique materials in the Genizah magical texts and illustrating these methods with a concrete example, and end with some reflections on the wider implications of this claim for the study of late antique Jewish magic and its transmission history.

My on-going study of θρ∈πτός (threptos) and related categories in Greek narrative and documentary sources began as a study in terminology, but it inevitably grew into a study of legal, social and economic structures of Hellenistic Greece and the Roman east from 200 BCE to 300 CE. This study will include discussions about the origin and the legal and social status of children whose natural parents were unable or unwilling to raise them as their own, and the legal and social status of those who raised them. With nearly 1,200 inscriptions and papyri and a small sample of literary texts at our disposal, this project seems long overdue, especially in view of the growing number of important studies on the Roman family and the Latin correlative of Greek θρ∈πτοί (threptoi) – Roman and Italian alumni/nutriti.

Prior to A. Cameron's study, ‘ΘPEΠTOΣ and Related Terms in the Inscriptions of Asia Minor’, published in 1939, only sporadic references to this social group were to be found in modern literature. As Cameron himself put it, ‘no very systematic attempt has been made to determine their status or the nature of their relationships to other persons’ (p. 27). Teresa Giulia Nani took up the problem of θρ∈πτοί anew in a lengthy article published in 1944. She enlarged her field of study by including all the sources available at that time. She collected about 230 inscriptions featuring θρ∈πτοί, their natural families and their nurturers. Since the publication of these two studies, the question of θρ∈πτοί has been strangely neglected, although the amount of documentary evidence has more than doubled in the meantime.

The aim of this paper is to examine the epigraphic use of Greek in the last period of Byzantine rule and in the early Islamic period in the region nowadays divided among the State of Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan and Syria, once a patchwork of provinces and parts of provinces of the Byzantine Empire: the three Palaestinae, Arabia and southern Phoenice. This region shared a common cultural and political history in the period indicated, albeit with some chronological variations in its development. I shall endeavour, first, to follow the career of Greek as the main vehicle of expression in epigraphic form, and second, to trace changes in its usage, and in the language itself, if any can be discovered.

The peak of Greek inscriptions in this region, throughout the period of currency of this tongue, was in the sixth and the early seventh centuries. By the end of the eighth century, Greek as an epigraphic medium had ceased to be relevant, though it was still occasionally used in the ecclesiastical milieu, especially in Jerusalem. Ostensibly, what brought about the decline is clear – the impact of the Islamic conquest and the formation of a dominant culture supported by an Arabic-speaking Muslim elite that superseded the former Greek-speaking Christian leading class. Not surprisingly, Greek did not go down without a fight. It survived in private use – namely, in epitaphs – until the eighties of the seventh century (in isolated cases even later, including early medieval occurrences in Jerusalem), and in public inscriptions until the late eighth century (and in Jerusalem and its vicinity even as late as the Crusader period).

This book is devoted to processes of continuity and change over the thousand years which separate Alexander the Great from Muhammad the Prophet – two men perceived as instrumental in changing the linguistic and cultural map of the Middle East, the former responsible for the spread of Greek, the latter for the demise of Greek and the rise of Arabic. Obviously the reality is not so simple, and the main purpose of this book is to examine the finer details and complexities of the relationship between languages and cultures during this period, and also to offer some account of the variety of responses that Greek, and other languages, evoked in the peoples of that area from Greece (and Rome) eastwards to Iran.

Like many other collective works, this book too has its own history. It grew out of the success of a conference, and the conference itself out of the experience of the editors as leaders and participants in a yearlong research group at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2002–3. The group was led by Hannah M. Cotton (of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Jonathan J. Price (of Tel Aviv University) and David J. Wasserstein (then of Tel Aviv University, now of Vanderbilt University); the other members were Leah Di Segni and Shlomo Naeh (of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Robert G. Hoyland (then of Oxford University, now of the University of St Andrews), E. Axel Knauf (of Bern University), Marijana Ricl (of the University of Belgrade) and Seth Schwartz (of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York).

INTRODUCTION

Functional domains of languages and the difference between spoken and written language

In bi- or multilingual societies, the use of one or another language depends on a few basic parameters and a number of social variables which have been put together in the sociolinguistic concept of ‘functional domains’. Speakers can use, for example, one language within their families, another one in business affairs, etc. Empirical studies have brought to light typical clusters of functional domains, resulting from common speaker attitudes towards their languages, which can frequently be classified within a binary scheme as ‘Dominant’ vs. ‘Minority’ languages (see Table 17.1). These assumptions, reasonable as they are, have not yet been fully applied to the field of ancient bilingualism, where the use of a certain language is often simply taken as a shibboleth of a correlative personal identity. Although in some circumstances language use may indeed function as a claim of belonging to a societal group, or express a sense of identity with that group, we cannot draw conclusions from occasionally attested connections between persons and languages without taking the full range of their language options into account, including their spoken medium(s) too, which usually have to be guessed, or reconstructed.

In everyday bi- or multilingual spoken communication, it is the speakers' social competence, their acquired knowledge of language behaviour, which serves as an ‘intrinsic’ guide to more or less appropriate language choices, similar to the way in which they would choose certain lexical and/or phraseological means belonging to different registers of a single language in order to form stylistically different utterances, simply depending on actual circumstances of speech.