Download PDF | Hannah M. Cotton, Robert G. Hoyland, Jonathan J. Price, David J. Wasserstein - From Hellenism to Islam_ Cultural and Linguistic Change in the Roman Near East-Cambridge University Press (2009).
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FROM HELLENISM TO ISLAM
The 800 years between the fi rst Roman conquests and the conquest of Islam saw a rich, constantly shifting blend of languages and writing systems, legal structures, religious practices and beliefs in the Near East. While the diff erent ethnic groups and cultural forms often clashed with each other, adaptation was as much a characteristic of the region as confl ict. Th is volume, emphasising the inscriptions in many languages from the Near East, brings together mutually informative studies by scholars in diverse fi elds. Together, they reveal how the diff erent languages, peoples and cultures interacted, competed with, tried to ignore or were infl uenced by each other, and how their relationships evolved over time. Th e volume will be of great value to those interested in Greek and Roman history, Jewish history and Near Eastern studies.
hannah m. cotton is Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
robert g. hoyland is Professor of Arabic and Middle East Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.
jonathan j. price is Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Tel Aviv University. david j. wasserstein is Professor of History and the Eugene Greener Jr. Professor of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University
Contributors
walter ameling Professor of Ancient History, Institut für Altertumswissenschaften, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany. His publications include Karthago: Studien zu Militär, Staat und Gesellschaft (1993), and most recently, Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis II: Kleinasien (2004). dan barag Professor emeritus of Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, author of Catalogue of Western Asiatic Glass in the British Museum I (1985) and other studies on glass from the second millennium BCE to the early Byzantine period. Editor of Israel Numismatic Journal. nicole belayche Directeur d’études in the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sciences religieuses, Paris; author of Th e Pagan Cults in Roman Palestine (Second to Fourth Century) (2001). gideon bohak Professor at the Department of Jewish Culture and the Program in Religious Studies at Tel Aviv University. His publications include Joseph and Aseneth and the Jewish Temple in Heliopolis (1996), and Ancient Jewish Magic: A History (2008). sebastian brock Emeritus Reader in Syriac Studies, University of Oxford, and Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. Among his publications are Th e Syriac Version of the Pseudo-Nonnus Mythological Scholia (1971), and several collections of reprinted articles, including From Ephrem to Romanos: Interactions between Syriac and Greek in Late Antiquity (1999). angelos chaniotis Former Professor of Ancient History in Heidelberg, Senior Research Fellow for Classical Studies at All Souls College, Oxford, and senior editor of Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum.
hannah m. cotton Professor of Classics and Ancient History, the Shalom Horowitz Chair in Classics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, editor of Masada II: Th e Latin and Greek Documents (1989 with J. Geiger) and of Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek Texts from Nahal Hever, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XXVII (1997 with A. Yardeni) and the Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae Palaestinae. leah di segni Lecturer and researcher at the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, editor of the Tabula Imperii Romani-Judaea Palaestina (1994), the Onomasticon of Iudaea, Palaestina and Arabia in the Greek and Latin Sources, and the Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae Palaestinae. werner eck Professor emeritus of Ancient History, Institut for Altertumskunde-Alte Geschichte, Universität zu Köln, Germany. His most recent publications include Köln in römischer Zeit (2004) and Rom und Judaea (2007). Director of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum and the Prosopographia Imperii Romani at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy in Berlin, editor of the Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae Palaestinae. robert g. hoyland Professor of Arabic and Middle East Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK, author of Seeing Islam as Others Saw It (1997), Arabia and the Arabs (2001) and Medieval Islamic Swords and Swordmaking (2004); he has written on the epigraphy of the late Roman and early Islamic Middle East. benjamin isaac Fred and Helen Lessing Professor of Ancient History at Tel Aviv University, author of Th e Limits of Empire: Th e Roman Army in the East (1990), Th e Near East under Roman Rule, Selected Papers (1998) and Th e Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (2004), and editor of the Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae Palaestinae. ted kaizer Lecturer in Roman Culture and History at Durham University since 2005, author of Th e Religious Life of Palmyra (2002) and editor of Th e Variety of Local Religious Life in the Near East in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods (2008). ernst axel knauf Professor at the Institut für Bibelwissenschaft, Th eologische Fakultät, Universität Bern. He has written on the production of authoritative scripture in the Persian period and all aspects of Israel/Palestina and Arabia before Islam.
fergus millar Emeritus Camden Professor of Ancient History in the University of Oxford and a member of the Hebrew and Jewish Studies Unit, Oriental Institute, Oxford, author of Th e Emperor in the Roman World (1977), Th e Roman Near East 31 BC–AD 337 (1993), and most recently A Greek Roman Empire: Power and Belief under Th eodosius II, 408–50 (2006). shlomo naeh Professor of Talmud and Jewish Th ought at the Hebrew University, member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language and a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem; he writes extensively on rabbinic textual culture, especially among the Palestinian schools. arietta papaconstantinou Marie Curie Fellow in the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, author of Le culte des saints en Égypte des Byzantins aux Abbassides (2001) and of articles on various aspects of late antique and early Islamic social history and material culture. jonathan j. price Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Tel Aviv University, author of Jerusalem Under Siege: Th e Collapse of the Jewish State, 66–70 C.E. (1992) and Th ucydides and Internal Confl ict (2001), and editor of the Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae Palaestinae. tonio sebastian richter Lecturer, Ägyptologisches Institut/Ägyptisches Museum–Georg Steindorff , Universität Leipzig, author of Rechtssemantik und forensische Rhetorik: Untersuchungen zu Wortschatz, Stil und Grammatik der Sprache koptischer Rechtsurkunden (2002, 2nd edn., 2008). marijana ricl Professor of Ancient History in the University of Belgrade, author of Th e Inscriptions of Alexandreia Troas (1997), Inscriptiones Graecae Epiri, Macedoniae, Th raciae, Scythiae, II: Inscriptiones Macedoniae, II: Inscriptiones Macedoniae septentrionalis, sectio prima: Inscriptiones Lyncestidis, Heracleae, Pelagoniae, Derriopi, Lychnidi (1999), and co-editor of Lexicon of Greek Personal Names. seth schwartz Gerson D. Cohen Professor of Rabbinic Culture and Professor of History at the Jewish Th eological Seminary in New York. He has written about the infl uence of Roman imperialism on political, social and economic developments in Jewish life in ancient Palestine, author of Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE to 640 CE (2001).
david j. wasserstein Professor of History and Eugene Greener, Jr Professor of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University, author most recently (with the late Abraham Wasserstein) of Th e Legend of the Septuagint, From Classical Antiquity to Today (2006).
Preface
This book is devoted to processes of continuity and change over the thousand years which separate Alexander the Great from Muhammad the Prophet – two men perceived as instrumental in changing the linguistic and cultural map of the Middle East, the former responsible for the spread of Greek, the latter for the demise of Greek and the rise of Arabic. Obviously the reality is not so simple, and the main purpose of this book is to examine the fi ner details and complexities of the relationship between languages and cultures during this period, and also to off er some account of the variety of responses that Greek, and other languages, evoked in the peoples of that area from Greece (and Rome) eastwards to Iran. Like many other collective works, this book too has its own history.
It grew out of the success of a conference, and the conference itself out of the experience of the editors as leaders and participants in a yearlong research group at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2002–3. Th e group was led by Hannah M. Cotton (of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Jonathan J. Price (of Tel Aviv University) and David J. Wasserstein (then of Tel Aviv University, now of Vanderbilt University); the other members were Leah Di Segni and Shlomo Naeh (of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Robert G. Hoyland (then of Oxford University, now of the University of St Andrews), E. Axel Knauf (of Bern University), Marijana Ricl (of the University of Belgrade) and Seth Schwartz (of the Jewish Th eological Seminary in New York). Th e theme of our work at the Institute was ‘Greeks, Romans, Jews and Others in the Near East from Alexander to Muhammad: “A Civilization of Epigraphy”’, echoing Louis Robert’s defi nition of the Greco-Roman civilisation there.
Engagement in inscriptions off ered itself as a gateway to larger issues, especially languages and cultures and the interrelationships between them in the immensely varied worlds ruled by speakers of Latin and Greek and inhabited by those others whom they dominated, or tried to, between Alexander and Muhammad. Th ese concerns were in themselves a natural outgrowth of the ongoing international project known as the Corpus inscriptionum Iudaeae– Palaestinae (CIIP), three of whose editors were members of our research group. Th e CIIP is an attempt to create a comprehensive multilingual corpus of all inscriptions, both published and unpublished, from the fourth century BCE to the seventh century CE, from the territories of Israel and Palestine, where, as the many surviving written documents attest, the local languages and cultures pre-dating the arrival of the Greeks and Romans proved tenacious and potent and remained vital and vibrant under Greek and Roman rule.
Here, more than anywhere else, it becomes evident that the richness of the epigraphic tradition comes fully into its own only when epigraphic texts in diff erent languages, the contemporaneous expressions of diff erent but related cultures, are studied together. Th e highlight of the year, the culmination of our weekly seminars attended by ever-increasing numbers of people, was a three-day conference, held on 29 June–2 July 2003, under the title ‘Epigraphy and Beyond: Cultural and Linguistic Change in the Near East from Hellenism to Islam’. Scholars from France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States took part. Th e enthusiasm of those present, and the quality of many of the papers delivered there, encouraged us to think about a book on the theme, and this volume is the result. It contains a number of papers from the conference, all of them revised in the light of the discussions in Jerusalem and comments by the readers for Cambridge University Press, as well as several additional papers that we solicited from scholars who had not participated in our group or in the conference. Our aim in editing this volume has thus been not to off er yet another miscellaneous collection of variegated conference papers, but rather to make a distinctive contribution to an area of scholarly interest that has been growing in recent years. In inviting Fergus Millar to write an introduction for us we have sought deliberately both to obtain the imprimatur of that scholar whose contributions to this fi eld have been the richest and the most thought-provoking and – perhaps inevitably – by asking him to read and in eff ect to comment on its contents, to obtain his reactions to the contributions themselves. Many bodies and individuals have contributed to the making of this book. First, we wish to thank the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem for hosting both our Research Group in 2002–3 and the conference in 2003. Without the generous support and commitment of the Institute and its staff , continuing through to the preparation of this volume for the press, nothing would have been possible. It is a pleasure to thank here Benjamin Kedar, then the Director of the Institute, as well as Penina Feldman, its Administrative Director, Shani Freiman, Semadar Danziger, Batya Matalov, Dalia Aviely, Ofer Arbeli, Hanoch Kalimian, and, last but not least, Shoshana Yazdi, our cook, whose Afghan cooking delighted us all over many months. Our group benefi ted during the year also from the services of a research assistant, Ariadne Konstantinou. Th anks to the Institute she was able to work for us in the preparation of the volume for the press as well. We owe her much. We are most grateful to Tanya Tolubayev for her assiduous and meticulous help with collating the proofs of the authors and the editors. Formal acknowledgement is due to Gabi Laron and the Israel Museum for granting us permission to reproduce the two inscriptions which appear on the dust jacket and inside the book.1 Th ese two inscriptions encapsulate in more ways than one the theme of the book, continuity and change. Th e ‘memorial epigraphy’, so well described by Werner Eck in the opening chapter, survived the gap of more than 900 years which separate the two inscriptions from each other. Both inscriptions testify to the chain of command in a world empire in which the ruler channels his orders through his local representatives. In both, those representatives display the order in the public sphere in the language of power, whether in Greek in the case of a Seleucid king acting through his viceroy, the infamous Heliodorus, then present in the satrapy of Koilē Syria and Phoinikē, or in Arabic in the case of the Servant of Allāh (‘abd allāh) Hishām b. ‘Abd al-Malik, Commander of the Faithful, the Umayyad Caliph, acting through his governor Ish≥a¯q b. Qabı¯s≥a. As for change, this is more obvious, and striking: a new language, Arabic, and a diff erent style of rule, by a ‘Commander of the Faithful’. Th e change is as yet still fresh: just a few miles away, in modern Hammat Gader (ancient Gadara), another building inscription (alluded to in Leah Di Segni’s paper) attests an earlier ‘Commander of the Faithful’, Mu‘awiya ibn Abi Sufyan (660–80), who restored the baths there, again following the convention of naming the chain of command for the execution of the task, but this time in Greek. Mu‘awiya was a very nouveau ruler, and he followed standard practice in using Greek. But this practice was dispensed with very dramatically a few years later, again not so far away, in Jerusalem, by the ‘Commander of the Faithful’ ‘Abd al-Malik in his long mosaic inscription on the Dome of the Rock, and thenceforth, as the Bet Shean/Baysān inscription illustrates, this would become the norm for the monumental epigraphy of the Middle East. Finally, we are grateful to Michael Sharp, at the Press, whose encouragement kept us going from the inception of this project and enabled us to see it through to completion, and to Clare Zon and Muriel Hall, our copy-editors, whose sharp eyes and shrewdness saved us from a host of errors. Last but not least we thank Eloise Dicker and Sarah Waidler for producing so effi ciently the indispensible index.
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