A Letter of Claudius, the Boundary Between Tymbrianassos and Sagalassos, and the Via Sebaste
By Paul Iversen
In the summer of 2014 as a part of an expedition around Lake Burdur in southwest Turkey to discover the route of the Via Sebaste (a major Roman road built by Augustus in 6 BCE that passed through this area), the author discovered at Yarıköy an unpublished inscription that demarcates the boundary between the imperial estate containing the village of Tymbrianassos and the territory Sagalassos. Yarıköy itself is a small village that sits a few kilometers south of the southwestern tip of Lake Burdur.
Documenting Travel in Imperial Egypt: Papyrus vs. Inscribed Letters
By Patricia Rosenmeyer
My paper compares two texts documenting tourism in Egypt in the imperial period (late 1st/early 2nd c. CE): a papyrus letter and an inscription on a monument in Egyptian Thebes, both describing devotional marks (proskynemata) on nearby stone surfaces.
Filiation Expressions and the Language of Official Roman Letters Inscribed in Greek
By Christopher Haddad
As the Romans were consolidating their position in the eastern Mediterranean, they adopted from the Greeks the practice of sending official letters to Hellenistic states. Although Rome’s state language was Latin, official Roman Republican letters were inscribed in Greek. Recent scholarship on ancient letter writing has neglected these inscribed Roman letters, and their language in particular has not yet received satisfactory treatment.
Law Set in Stone: Inscribing Private Rescripts in Imperial Roman Greece
By Kaius Tuori
One of the most important sources of legal epigraphy are imperial legal rulings: decisions, rescripts and subscripts. The texts were initially letters sent by the emperor to private recipients such as individuals or communities. For reasons that are often unclear, from the beginning of the Principate onwards, their recipients decided to inscribe the letters in stone and post them in a public place.
Epistles on Granite: Ptolemaic Authority and the Superlative at Philae
By Patricia Butz
This paper deals with the phenomenon of three letters in Greek inscribed on a single monument reflecting the series of correspondence between King Ptolemy VIII Euergetes, together with Queens Cleopatra II-III, and the priesthood of the Temple of Isis at Philae in the last quarter of the second century BCE. The monument in question was a granite pedestal base supporting an obelisk inscribed in hieroglyphs located originally in front of the temple. The base carried a fourth inscription, also in hieroglyphs, making it bilingual as opposed to the obelisk.