Jonathan Price

Caesarea and the middle coast, 1121-2160

The second volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae covers the inscriptions of Caesarea Maritima and the coastal region of the Middle Coast from Tel Aviv in the south to Haifa in the north from the time of Alexander to the Muslim conquest. The approx. 1,050 texts comprise all the languages used for inscriptions during this period (Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, Samaritan, Syrian, and Persian) and are arranged according to the principal settlements and their territory. The great majority of the texts belongs to Caesarea, the capital of the province of Judaea/Syria Palaestina. No other place in Judaea has produced more Latin inscriptions than this area, reflecting the strong Roman influence on the city.

Jewish Inscriptions and Their Use

Jewish inscriptions, defined as texts written or commissioned by Jews, comprise a tiny subset of the many hundreds of thousands of inscriptions surviving from Graeco-Roman antiquity in Greek, Latin and other languages. Inscriptions can confirm, often dramatically, information known from literary sources. This is the case when tombs of known historical figures are found. The Jewish dedications in Greek adopted formulae from the Hellenistic epigraphic culture. This common Greek formula, whether applied to Jewish benefactors or Gentile rulers, was adopted by the Jews when they inscribed dedications in Greek; it has no equivalent in Hebrew and Aramaic inscriptions. The rabbis of the Mishna and Talmud knew of the practice of setting up inscriptions. A baraita teaches that the righteous do not need epitaphs since their good deeds are their memorial, implicitly acknowledging that most people do require or desire epitaphs. Keywords: Aramaic inscriptions; Graeco-Roman antiquity; Hebrew inscriptions; Hellenistic epigraphic culture; Jewish inscriptions; Mishna; Talmud

The Jewish Population of Jerusalem from the First Century b.c.e. to the Early Second Century c.e.: The Epigraphic Record

This chapter focuses not only on one particular kind of evidence, but also on the Jewish component of the first-century Jerusalem population, surely the dominant but not the only significant sector of the population at the time. The reason for this choice is not only the predominance of Jews in Jerusalem before the destruction of the temple, but also their relatively abundant epigraphic remains from that period, as opposed to the meager to non-existent epigraphic traces of the non-Jews who died and were buried near the city in the same period. So far as the colors and contours of life in Jerusalem are concerned, the inscriptions from the period are an important source for valuable and sometimes unique information, but mostly, despite their relatively large number, they supplement and round out what is known from the literary sources. Keywords:epigraphic record; Jerusalem; Jewish population; literary sources; Roman inscriptions

Introduction: documentary evidence, social realities and the history of language

Few collections of papers could claim to represent more emphatically than this one does a whole series of changes of focus which mark the evolution of ancient history over the last few decades. First, it is based almost entirely on documents, whether preserved on perishable materials or on stone; the literary texts transmitted in manuscript, and printed since the early modern period, on which our conceptions of the ancient world were previously based, have receded into the background. Second, its focus is on the eastern Mediterranean, taking the ‘Near East’ in a relatively broad sense, including both Anatolia and Egypt. Th ird, while not exploring Hellenism in the sense of the period between Alexander and Actium, it takes as its starting point the dominant Greek culture of the eastern Mediterranean under the Roman Empire. Fourth, its essential focus is on language – or co-existing or competing languages. Th at is to say both, on the one hand, that it explores the potential of original documents to represent for us the realities of the societies by and from which they were generated, and that, at the same time, it accepts always that a ‘document’ is, just like a literary text, a construct following rules and conventions – or obeying a ‘rhetoric’ of genre – and is not, and cannot be, a simple mirror of ‘how it really was’. But the focus on language also means something more complex still, namely the situations which evolve when more than one language is (in some sense) current within a particular society. To take only the crudest of alternatives, if only one language is actually represented in the documentation available from a particular place and time, should we follow the principles of empiricism, and (at the weakest) adopt the working hypothesis that only that language was current? Or are we entitled to ‘read’ the available documents in the light of a presumption that some other language was normally spoken, but not written, or at least not used for the production of offi cial public texts? Finally, this volume is characterised above all, after two contrasting initial explorations of the role of Latin in the Greek East, by its focus

On Jewish Metronymics in the Graeco-Roman Period

This brief note arises from my work on the Corpus Inscriptionum ludaeael Palaestinae, the multi-lingual epigraphical corpus which is now being prepared in Israel and Germany; the work will contain new or first editions of all inscriptions found in modern-day Israel and dating from the fourth century BCE to ca. the seventh century CE. In the course of our search for unpublished material I have found at least three texts, soon to be formally published, containing a highly unusual feature, the names of persons identified solely by their mothers’ names — metronymics. One text is from Beth She‘arim and reads: Φιλστρατος Ιουλίας Philostratos son of Julia.

The Jews in Late Ancient Rome: Evidence of Cultural Interaction in the Roman Diaspora

This study of the Jewish community in third and fourth century Rome addresses the question of interaction of Jews and non-Jews in late antiquity through an analysis of Jewish, Pagan, and early Christian archaeological, epigraphical, and literary remains.