What's in a Name?

My project is an investigation of the names and identity markers from the city of Uruk during the Hellenistic period (the 4^th–2^nd centuries BCE). Uruk, an ancient city in southern Babylonia (modern Iraq), was a vibrant community near the center of the Seleucid Empire, a kingdom founded after the conquests of Alexander the Great and ruled by a line of Macedonian kings.

This paper proposes that the inscription at the base of the statue of Cato the Elder in the Temple of Salus, of which we hear via Plutarch, is mediated via famous lines from Ennius’ Annales.

There is no satisfactory account for the etymology of the name Aphrodite that provides a plausible linguistic explanation and accounts for her connections to goddesses of the Near East: Astarte, Ishtar, and Inanna. The various attempts to derive Aphrodite from Indo-European (Janda 2010; Mallory and Adams 1997) are necessarily committed to Indo-European speakers migrating from their homeland to Greece accompanied by a goddess named Aphrodite.

Counting to One: A Step toward Understanding the Homeric hapax ezeugmena