A volume that collects and discusses the graffiti, scratched or drawn on religious shrines in the first centuries of Christianity and Islam, by ordinary men and women, seeking the help of their God and their favoured saints.

The essays in the present volume celebrate the work of Margaret M. Mitchell (University of Chicago) by engaging, extending, and challenging her ground-breaking research in three areas: (1) the letters of Paul the Apostle, both authentic and pseudepigraphic; (2) the emergence and rapid development of early Christian literary culture over the first few centuries of the cult’s existence; and (3) Late Antique interpretive practices and perspectives, particularly among patristic readers of the scriptures.

The Proceedings of the 14th International Conference for Nubian Studies are published in the research journal Kush for its 20th issue. Sixty articles are presenting the advances of international research on Middle Nile Valley archaeology and highlighting the richness and importance of Sudanese sites along the different phases of its Prehistory and History i.e. kingdoms of Kush (Kerma, Napata, Meroe), Medieval, Post-Medieval and Modern Periods. The eighty authors are coming from different disciplines: archaeology, linguistic, bio-anthropology, museum studies, etc. Their contributions are showing the nowadays implication of research in site management, cultural heritage and museums, especially in the frame of the bilateral programme Qatar Sudan Archaeological Programme.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Latinization is a strangely overlooked topic. Historians have noted it has been 'taken for granted' and viewed as an unremarkable by-product of 'Romanization', despite its central importance for understanding the Roman provincial world, its life, and languages. This volume aims to fill the gap in our scholarship. Expert contributors have been selected to create a multi-disciplinary volume with a thematic approach to the vast subject, tackling administration, army, economy, law, mobility, religion (local and imperial religions and Christianity), social status, and urbanism. They situate the phenomena of Latinization, literacy, and bi- and multilingualism within local and broader social developments and draw together materials and arguments that have not before been coordinated in a single volume. The result is a comprehensive guide to the topic, which offers original and more experimental work. The sociolinguistic, historical, and archaeological contributions reinforce, expand, and sometimes challenge our vision of Latinization and lay the foundations for future explorations. This volume will be accompanied by two further volumes from the European Research Council-funded LatinNow project: Latinization, Local Languages, and Literacies in the Roman West, and Languages and Communities in the Late-Roman and Post-Imperial Western Provinces.

Manuscript cultures have frequently forgotten, neglected, or even erased women's contributions from memory. Women's agency has also been a glaring blind spot in the scholarly pursuit of gender perspectives on the production of written artefacts. This volume addresses these lacunae by highlighting manuscripts and inscriptions by and for women, their active participation and enabling sponsorship, and their role in the circulation and dissemination of written artefacts. Seven papers present case studies from East Asian inscriptions to ancient cuneiform epigraphic, Egyptian graffiti from late antiquity to individual specimen and large-scale collections in medieval Europe, focusing on how women participated in and contributed to those. How did they assert their involvement, their claims and their aspirations? By what rationales and mechanisms were they excluded or their contribution marginalised? How did they react to structures that discriminated against them, eventually circumventing, subverting and transforming them? The present volume sheds light on new findings, gives unique insights and discusses methodological considerations in the budding field of women's manuscript studies.

The arrival of Alexander the Great in the southern Levant ushered in many changes, and the subsequent period saw many more upheavals, including the Roman conquest, the Jewish revolts, and the gradual Christianization of the Holy Land. Throughout this period, many local 'pagan', Jewish, and Christian cults and cultic places dotted the local landscape of the southern Levant, which today covers the area of Israel, Jordan, and parts of Lebanon and southern Syria. These cults underwent processes of profound change, but also preserved much of their older identities while still interacting with each other. This volume seeks to present these processes both synchronically and diachronically, along three different axes - cultic places, personnel, and objects. The common denominator shared by these three axes is the people whose beliefs and practices shaped religious behaviour in the Greco-Roman southern Levant. The 18 articles in this volume investigate whether cultic practices formed a coherent cultural system. They consider the co-existence and competition of the different religious systems, analyzing them in terms of continuity, discontinuity, and change over an extended period of time, roughly from the arrival of Alexander the Great to the Imperial integration of Christianity (ca. late fourth century BCE - early fifth century CE). The approaches presented in the volume are varied and interdisciplinary, combining archaeological, philological, historical, and art-historical analyses of multiple bodies of evidence.

Twenty-four experts from the fields of Ancient History, Semitic philology, Assyriology, Classical Archaeology, and Classical Philology come together in this volume to explore the role of textiles in ancient religion in Greece, Italy, The Levant and the Near East. Recent scholarship has illustrated how textiles played a large and very important role in the ancient Mediterranean sanctuaries. In Greece, the so-called temple inventories testify to the use of textiles as votive offerings, in particular to female divinities. Furthermore, in several cults, textiles were used to dress the images of different deities. Textiles played an important role in the dress of priests and priestesses, who often wore specific garments designated by particular colours. Clothing regulations in order to enter or participate in certain rituals from several Greek sanctuaries also testify to the importance of dress of ordinary visitors. Textiles were used for the furnishings of the temples, for example in the form of curtains, draperies, wall-hangings, sun-shields, and carpets. This illustrates how the sanctuaries were potential major consumers of textiles; nevertheless, this particular topic has so far not received much attention in modern scholarship. Furthermore, our knowledge of where the textiles consumed in the sanctuaries came from, where they were produced, and by who is extremely limited. Textiles and Cult in the Ancient Mediterranean examines the topics of textile production in sanctuaries, the use of textiles as votive offerings and ritual dress using epigraphy, literary sources, iconography and the archaeological material itself.

For most people the mention of graffiti conjures up notions of subversion, defacement, and underground culture. Yet, the term was coined by classical archaeologists excavating Pompeii in the 19th century and has been embraced by modern street culture: graffiti have been left on natural sites and public monuments for tens of thousands of years. They mark a position in time, a relation to space, and a territorial claim. They are also material displays of individual identity and social interaction. As an effective, socially accepted medium of self-definition, ancient graffiti may be compared to the modern use of social networks. This book shows that graffiti, a very ancient practice long hidden behind modern disapproval and street culture, have been integral to literacy and self-expression throughout history. Graffiti bear witness to social events and religious practices that are difficult to track in normative and official discourses. This book addresses graffiti practices, in cultures ranging from ancient China and Egypt through early modern Europe to modern Turkey, in illustrated short essays by specialists. It proposes a holistic approach to graffiti as a cultural practice that plays a key role in crucial aspects of human experience and how they can be understood.

Memory studies — one of the most vibrant research fields of the present day — brings together such diverse disciplines as art and archaeology, history, religion, literature, sociology, media studies, and neuroscience. In scholarship on ancient Rome, studies of social and cultural memory complement traditional approaches, opening up new horizons as we contemplate the ancient world. The fifteen essays presented here explore memory in the Roman Empire, addressing a wide spectrum of cultural phenomena from a range of approaches. Ancient Rome was a memory culture par excellence and memory pervades all aspects of Roman culture, from literature and art to religion and politics. This volume is the first to address the cultural artifacts of Rome through the lens of memory studies. An essential guide to the material culture of Rome, this book brings important new concepts to the fore for both scholars of the ancient world and those of social and cultural memory throughout human history.