Publications: Greek Epigraphy

This paper presents an interesting group of inscriptions made on pottery, unearthed during the archaeological excavations carried out in the site called La Cabañeta (El Burgo de Ebro, Zaragoza), from 1997 to 2009. Included are fourteen Iberian documents written in Paleohispanic script, twenty-two in Latin, two in Greek, eight signs and four difficult to identify marks, all of them dated between the second half of the II century B.C. and the destruction of the settlement in the decade of the 70s of the I century B.C.

This paper presents a group of inscriptions made on pottery, recovered in various archaeological excavations carried out in Valentia (Valencia, Spain), in the last decades. It includes sixteen Latin documents, three Greeks, one Iberian and five signs, all of them dated between the last quarter of the second century B.C. and destructión of the city during the Sertorian Wars.

This paper surveys the epigraphy of the island of Sicily in the Hellenistic / Roman period, and uses it as a methodological case study for the use of epigraphy alongside extensive but partial literary sources (in this case Cicero’s Verrine Orations) for trying to make sense of a region in a historical context.

This paper examines the epigraphic habit on the island of Sicily across antiquity (seventh century BC to seventh century AD), comparing the use of different languages, materials and categories of inscriptions over time and space across the island.

This paper surveys epigraphic practices across the western Mediterranean in the period between the fourth and first centuries BC, and suggests that some broad trends are identifiable, indicative of broader socio-cultural and historical changes across the region – and the Mediterranean – as a whole. In particular, it is suggested that Romanisation should be seen as one of the indicators of these changes rather than necessarily the cause or source of such developments, with Roman epigraphic culture only one among many developing at this time.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the use of writing as a mechanism of self-representation and as an expression of power in the Iberian world. In the present state of knowledge, Iberian epigraphy during the 5th to 3rd centuries BC was by and large restricted to colonial and eminently practical uses, such as seals, markers of quality control, and the like. One has to await the arrival and spread of Roman epigraphic models during the later 2nd and 1st centuries BC to witness the development of funerary, honorific, and architectural epigraphy through which local elites represented themselves while still using the indigenous language. Also analyzed are the forms Iberian epigraphy took in the context of different urban communities, especially Ampurias, Tarragona and Sagunto, in which (despite the limitations on our knowledge of the language which hinder understanding of the texts) one can detect evidence of the co-existence in the same public spaces of the Iberian, Roman and even Greek (in the case of Ampurias) written cultures.