Alan K. Bowman

Literacy and power in the ancient world

1. Literacy and power in the ancient world Alan K. Bowman and Greg Woolf 2. The Persepolis Tablets: speech, seal and script D. M. Lewis 3. Literacy and the city-state in archaic and classical Greece Rosalind Thomas 4. Literacy and language in Egypt in the Late and Persian Periods John Ray 5. Literacy and power in Ptolemaic Egypt Dorothy J. Thompson 6. Power and the spread of writing in the West Greg Woolf 7. Texts, scribes and power in Roman Judaea M. D. Goodman 8. The Roman imperial army: letters and literacy on the northern frontier Alan K. Bowman 9. Literacy and power in early Christianity Robin Lane Fox 10. Greek and Syriac in Late Antique Syria S. P. Brock 11. Later Roman bureaucracy: going through the files C. M. Kelly 12. Literacy and power in the migration period Peter Heather 13. Texts as weapons: polemic in the Byzantine dark ages Averil Cameron.

Agriculture in Egypt: From Pharaonic to Modern Times

From the Pharaohs to the United Arab Republic of the present day, Egypts agriculture has been subject to very different forms of political power and organization. The papers in this volume draw on the abundant documentary and archaeological evidence to analyse and compare the patterns of agricultural exploitation across historical periods (including Ptolemaic, Roman, and Ottoman times). Among important themes discussed are: the changing composition of agrarian elites, relationships between state, landholders and peasants, the impact of commercialization on the rural economy, technology, irrigation and water control, and changes in crop patterns and production. This volumes comparativist approach to the subject is crucial in crossing the linguistic and historical barriers between the different eras in Egypts agrarian history.

Enhancement and feature extraction for images of incised and ink texts

This paper describes the image enhancement techniques that we have used to help historians read three kinds of writing tablets: ink, wooden stilus and lead curse tablet. The techniques include: homomorphic filtering to correct uneven illumination, high-pass filtering to remove shading caused by surface undulations, and a newer technique to remove the often substantial complicating factor of wood grain. A phase-based feature detector has been developed to detect text stroke. A description of the detected strokes is generated for a text recognition system.

Rome and Italy

Augustus had started the process of making Rome, as a matter of policy, a worthy capital of the world. Travelling to Rome, city of wonders in a land of wonders, was a special experience. In the world of thinking, speaking and writing, Rome was the centre too, the norm and exemplar of Antonine cities. The architecture of Rome was the greatest of its wonders. The cities of Italy in the Augustan period had functioned as channels of horizontal and vertical social mobility. In the Antonine period, moreover, there was more to economic life than landowning. The nature of production in Italy in this period constitutes one of the most problematic sets of questions in ancient economic history. In the Flavian and Trajanic period, the evidence suggests a burgeoning of the cash-crop based, villa-centred, agrarian economy which had characterized the rural landscape of large parts of Italy since the middle Republic.

New Texts from Vindolanda

The renewed excavations in the pre-Hadrianic area of the Vindolanda site have continued to produce large numbers of writing-tablets. The inventory numbers under which the finds of 1985 and 1986 are catalogued run as far as 670; many include pieces of more than one tablet but there is, of course, a large number of scraps which are either blank or have only exiguous traces of writing. It is gratifying to report that the 1985 tablets have now gone to join their predecessors of 1973–5 in the British Museum, with an agreement that subsequent discoveries will also reach the same destination. It is envisaged that there will be two further seasons of excavation in 1987 and 1988. A rough estimate of the bulk of the significant written material which emerged in 1985 suggests that it is approximately the equivalent of the corpus of texts published in 1983. The yield of 1986 was somewhat smaller but there are good grounds for believing that this was not because the progress of the excavation was coming to the end of the tablet deposit and there is every reason to hope for significant quantities of tablets in 1987 and 1988.

The imperial court

The work of the last generation of historians has represented a large step towards a better understanding of the early imperial court. Several major studies have extended the detailed knowledge of the freedmen personnel, the equestrian amici principis, and of links among the senatorial elite. Above all, study of contacts between emperors and their subjects, the decision-making process and the distribution of resources and patronage, show the network of imperial personnel in operation and reveal something of the structures within which they operate. In discussing the nascent court of the Julio-Claudian period, it is necessary to generalize more broadly about the function of the court in the structure of imperial power. The social rituals of a court may act as a facade to screen the realities of power. Between Augustus and Nero the patterns of court life were developing, and still far from fixed. The court was a system of power which tended to its own perpetuation.

The expansion of the empire under Augustus

A survey of territorial expansion under Augustus tempts conclusions about strategic designs, empire-wide policy, and imperialist intent. It has been claimed, for example, that Augustus adopted and refined a military system of hegemonic rule, resting on a combination of client states and an efficiently deployed armed force stationed in frontier sectors but mobile enough for transfer wherever needed. Many reckon the push to the north as a carefully conceived and sweeping plan that linked the Alpine, Balkan and German campaigns, and aimed to establish a secure boundary of the empire that ran along the line of the Danube and the Elbe. In Asia Minor and Judaea Augustus cultivated client princes, generally keeping in place those already established, regardless of prior allegiances. The imperial policy of Augustus varied from region to region, adjusted for circumstances and contingencies. Augustus reiterated the aspirations and professed to eclipse the accomplishments of republican heroes. The policy may have been flexible, but the image was consistent.

Two Letters from Vindolanda

In this article we offer editions of two texts which were discovered at Vindolanda in the excavation seasons of 1986 and 1988, respectively. Both the letters are complete and are of exceptional interest from the linguistic point of view, as well as for the information which they yield on a variety of points of military, social and economic history.

Visual enhancement of incised text

This paper describes ongoing research into the application of pattern recognition to incised documents, for which grooves and other structural surface markings are significant, rather than surface coloration. We deduce incised stroke information by imaging the document under a carefully selected set of lighting conditions that cause shadows to be cast, and observing the position and motion of shadow areas. The removal of wood grain noise, image registration, and the detection of image features using phase congruency techniques form the basis of our work. We also briefly describe our approach to interpolating broken strokes and recovering 3D surface structure.

Emptio Bovis Frisica: the 'Frisian Ox Sale' Reconsidered

The article offers a re-edition of a Latin stilus tablet found in 1917 at Tolsum in the Netherlands, the region inhabited in Roman times by the tribe of the Frisii, and first published as a contract of sale for an ox. The re-edition, with readings based on new techniques of digital image capture, establishes the date of the text (A.D. 29) and shows that it does not concern the sale of an ox, but is more probably the second half of a loan-note for a sum of money now lost, between a debtor whose name is lost and a creditor named Carus (or perhaps Andecarus) who was a slave of Iulia(?) Secunda, herself perhaps the wife of a tribune of Legion V named T(itus) Cassius