Epigraphic Approaches to Multilingualism and Multilingual Societies in the Ancient Mediterranean

Ancient cities are frequently characterized as multicultural, cosmopolitan environments (Edwards and Woolf 2003; Moatti 2014). This paper questions how far the evidence of multilingualism in urban landscapes reflects this characterization and considers what this evidence reveals about the impact of large-scale migration on the culture, landscape, and identity of the ancient city.

This paper situates itself within a broader investigation into patterns of practice in late Archaic-early Classical Western Sicily. Its purpose is to examine commonalities or lack of uniformity in material culture, from the perspective of the cultural identities coexisting within the fluid, ethnically and retrospectively categorized Western Sicilian milieu. The dataset this paper sets out to observe is epigraphic practice as evidence for multicultural and multilingual interaction.

The paper investigates multilingualism in Caria during the Classical Age, a phenomenon which mirrors the complex cultural interactions in south-western Anatolia, and seeks to find its outcome in the Hellenistic Era.

The paper investigates the phenomenon of language contact between Greek and Lycian as it emerges from the bilingual funerary inscriptions from Classical Lycia and aims to show that a thorough sociolinguistic approach to these texts is possible only through a combined analysis of textual and visual phenomena — i.e., by considering them not just as documents but as integral parts of monuments.

The aim of this paper is to reconsider the processes of translation and reception of public documents in the multicultural region of Lycia during the late Classical period. The epigraphic evidence from Lycia is crucial to disclose the complex problem of empowerment and power projection in southern Asia Minor, between the local elite, the Persian authorities, and the Greek city-states. This complexity is particularly evident in the corpus of bi- and multilingual inscriptions.

This paper addresses the issue of bilingualism and multilingualism in Ancient Cyprus during the Classical period. It aims to show that Cypriot private and monumental bilingual inscriptions present discrepancies among their texts due to specific socio-political purposes. The analysis of a selection of bilingual texts in Phoenician, Eteocypriot, alphabetic and syllabic Greek shows that the linguistic and graphic asymmetry often mirrors a precise planning of content and message.