March of this year will mark 12 years of civil war in Syria. Alongside the horrific and ongoing humanitarian impact, the archaeological heritage of the region also came under attack. In August 2015, militants of the so-called Islamic State destroyed the temple of Bel in the ancient city of Palmyra; this act was followed a month later by the destruction of some of the well-preserved funerary architecture in the nearby Valley of the Tombs. Despite the devastation, archaeologists continue working to record and understand the archaeology of Palmyra, with projects such as Archive Archaeology: Preserving and Sharing Palmyra's Cultural Heritage through Harald Ingholt's Digital Archives (Miranda & Raja Reference Miranda and Raja2022) demonstrating how archive material can help to reconstruct what has been lost. This NBC features two recent additions to the Studies in Palmyrene Archaeology and History series, dedicated to deepening knowledge of the ancient city. These volumes, and the others reviewed below, share a focus on the ancient Middle East, especially during the late antique and early medieval periods, and highlight exciting new research and discoveries.
Showcasing some of the rich archaeology of the Palmyra region, this volume offers a timely reminder of the consequences—both humanitarian and in terms of heritage—of the ongoing civil war. The contributions are divided into two parts: ‘Language, History and Trade’ and ‘Art and Archaeology’, bound by the overall theme of Palmyra as a nexus of trade and encounter between the Mediterranean, the Near East and India.
Expanding on research that has challenged descriptions of the city as a ‘melting pot’ that simply adopted the traditions of other regions, the contributors explore the distinctive aspects of Palmyrene culture and how they were maintained and used to define the city and its people. Catherine Bonesho presents a review of Palmyrene Aramaic language (Chapter 1), noting that most studies consider the subject from a Western perspective—for example, beginning with an assumption that Palmyrenes would have adopted Greek, and taking this as a norm. Providing an introduction to Palmyrene language and arguing for a reframing of language studies in the ancient Near East, Bonesho suggests that the use of Greek or Latin was not necessarily standard. She notes that Palmyrenes expressed their identity through their own language wherever they travelled and lived around the Roman Empire; this is evident as far away as northern England, where a tombstone discovered near the Roman fort of Arbeia (South Shields) is inscribed with the lament of the Palmyrene Barates for his late wife Regina, inscribed in both Palmyrene and Latin (Roman Inscriptions of Britain n.d.: 1065). The local response to pressure to move to a standard use of the Greek language was the use of Palmyrene Aramaic in monumental epigraphy, increasing its visibility. Bonesho concludes that in the shift toward Hellenistic epigraphic traditions “the Palmyrenes push back to essentially elevate their language as a visual equivalent of Greek” (p. 19). Other chapters in Part 1 identify similar Palmyrene resistance to Sasanian attempts to control the regional economy in the third century AD (Touraj Daryaee), as well as aspects of maritime trade (Katia Schörle); a material cultural perspective on contact with the East (Jean-Baptiste Yon); Queen Zenobia's relations with the East (Nathanael Andrade); and how Palmyra fared in late antiquity and the early Islamic period (Emanuele Intagliata).
Part 2 begins with a chapter (7) by Rubina Raja that considers the socio-cultural meaning of the motif of the reclining woman—imagery which seems out of place in an otherwise patriarchal society. The motif is relatively rare, with only 13 recorded examples, all dating to the late second to late third century AD and mostly representing sarcophagal sculpture. Drawing on the work of Maura Heyn, Raja makes the case that the representations of women, reclining alone and in private settings, drew on a knowledge of both Eastern (Assyrian and Mesopotamian) and Graeco-Roman and Etruscan imagery to personalise a motif that recalls elite culture and status. The sculptures that represent women in this way appear to be for private, rather than public, viewing and, in this sense, are comparable with images of bare-breasted mourning mothers—another motif that bucks the trend of typically modestly portrayed representations of women in Palmyrene art. Maura Heyn continues the scrutiny of the reclining banqueter motif in Chapter 8, which revisits Jean-Marie Dentzer's seminal article on this imagery. Heyn charts the significance of the reclining figure motif at Palmyra and finds that Dentzer's argument for its Eastern origin remains compelling; she expands on this to propose that the motif provided a focal point for collage scenes that could be personalised to reflect a particular family, religious activity or social standing, but the central image of the reclining figure was the key to communicating status. This is a theme that Heyn discusses further in the next volume under review: Individualizing the dead. Collectively, the contributions to this volume reveal Palmyra not as an indiscriminate melting pot, but rather, in the words of the editors, as a society “highly aware of its own traditions and identities and whose members used their knowledge of the world around them to express their own way of doing things” (p. xix).
Reflection on funerary art at Palmyra continues in our next volume, which features eight contributions focusing on how specific attributes and motifs were used to convey individuality, social cohesion and group identity. The contributors consider a variety of attributes that appear in funerary sculpture, including: the fringed cloak, or mantle (Fred Albertson); plants and vegetation (Olympia Bobou); keys (Rikke Randeris Thomsen); the accoutrements of drinking (Maura Heyn); jewellery and adornment (Rubina Raja); and coinage (Nathalia Breintoft Kristensen). A final chapter by Jean-Baptiste Yon considers memorials with no attributes and looks at how carefully crafted inscriptions could convey status.
Chapter 2 highlights ways in which the same vestments can convey very different meanings in different contexts. Albertson focuses on a group of 27 funerary reliefs that depict both men and women wearing a cloak with fringed edges consisting of short, twisted threads. The cloak is depicted as made of a heavy fabric and Albertson assumes this to be wool. Albertson argues that when depicted worn by men, the cloak represents Roman military service or that the man was ‘of the desert’—a mounted guard for the desert caravans. This association is strengthened by the shared style of wearing the cloak fastened with a round brooch at the right shoulder, as was Roman military custom—perhaps to offer freedom of movement for the right arm. When portrayed on women, however, the mantle had a more dynamic symbolism. Unlike in Graeco-Roman culture, in which a cloak most often represented a mature woman of matronly status, in Palmyrene examples the mantle is also associated with younger and unmarried women. In this way, the mantle can be seen as a style through which culturally aware women were able to convey status differently. Albertson points to this as an example of female iconography in Palmyra being more dynamic than male iconography, but it might also represent Palmyrenes’ rejection of traditional Graeco-Roman symbolism in favour of their own interpretation.
Raja (Chapter 6) discusses the use of jewellery, and brooches in particular, as markers of status in Palmyrene funerary sculpture. She concludes that brooches are most commonly associated with priests; the priestly brooches are depicted as round, often plain—though this may belie original painted detail—or sometimes adorned with rosettes or recesses that appear to have been inlaid. As in Albertson's study, the position of brooches varies by gender, with women (always with covered heads) wearing them on their left shoulder and men on their right. This offers both a window on status—the priests’ decorative brooches underlining their status, while for women the brooch may represent a coming of age—and gender markers in Palmyrene sculpture. The rich symbolism of funerary portraiture considered in this volume offers an opportunity to understand how the Palmyrenes wished to present themselves and to be remembered—both of these volumes reveal that this was probably very much as ‘Palmyrene’. The evidence suggests that rather than creating an indistinct cultural melange, Palmyra's position at the confluence of empires and languages, and with so many external influences, engendered fierce protection of its local identity.
In other cities of the Roman Empire, the imperial iconography was more marked. One such city was Nicomedia, modern Izmit, in Turkey. Şare Ağtürk's volume documents some significant discoveries from excavations at Nicomedia over the past 20 years. Nicomedia was an imperial capital during the tetrarchy (the rule of four emperors) initiated by the emperor Diocletian in the late third century AD. The tetrarchy aimed to manage the empire by dividing it in two, each half—east and west—governed by two men, an Augustus and a Caesar. The system broke down after 40 or so years when Constantine reunified the empire, becoming sole emperor. Though the tetrarchy did not last, the cities made into imperial capitals by the tetrarchs—Augusta Treverorum (Trier, Germany), Mediolanum (Milan, Italy), Sirmium (Sremska Mitrovica, Serbia) and Nicomedia (Izmit, Turkey)—preserve archaeological evidence of their former imperial splendour.
The discovery presented in this volume was made after the devastating Izmit earthquake of 1999, when salvage excavations revealed an imperial complex that included a well-preserved 50m-long frieze, comprising 66 marble relief panels with traces of polychrome decoration. Şare Ağtürk devotes this volume to careful analysis of the technique, style and iconography of these relief sculptures. The Introduction contextualises the discovery within the broader field of Roman art, situates Nicomedia within the history of the Roman Empire and introduces the TÜBİTAK Çukurbağ Archaeological Project. This project cleaned, catalogued, recorded and partially restored the marble relief panels. Recording included 3D scanning, multispectral imaging and portable X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy.
Chapter 2 offers an overview of the reliefs in terms of technique, materials and the practicalities of sculpting and fitting the panels to the building. Made from Proconnesian marble, the reliefs include images of imperial propaganda, but also local motifs. This chapter rehearses long-standing arguments for a Nicomedian sculptural school, but Şare Ağtürk sees the style as determined more by individual imperial design than by the traditions of a particular school. The remarkable preservation of colour pigments on the reliefs is unique among imperial monuments and provides an unprecedented opportunity to study the use of colour on a sculptural group of the highest status.
Chapters 3 to 5 consider the iconography and interpretation of the images, with a focus on imperial depictions (Chapter 3), mythological images (Chapter 4) and agonistic scenes—featuring games or contests perhaps related to the imperial cult of Diocletian and Maximian (Chapter 5). The chapters are supported by a full catalogue of the reliefs (Chapter 7) presented in colour images and with detailed descriptions; appendices provide an additional catalogue of smaller relief fragments, along with a concordance of catalogue and inventory numbers. Şare Ağtürk offers a concise interpretation of the frieze in the conclusions (Chapter 6, in both English and Turkish). The author speculates that the frieze graced a monumental two-storey, aediculated imperial hall that formed part of a palace complex from the Tetrarchic era. The well-preserved reliefs “afford key new insights into the nexus of imperial propaganda, art, colour-coding, sculpture, and court ritual in later Roman culture” (p. 89). Beyond providing material support to epigraphic evidence for a Nicomedian sculptural workshop, the Çukurbağ reliefs offer a rich source of evidence for artistic styles, imperial imagery, the role of Nicomedia as an imperial capital and the carefully coded use of colour in imperial imagery. The evidence is persuasively and elegantly presented in Şare Ağtürk's volume, which will surely be a go-to text for those studying the tetrarchy and the later Roman Empire more broadly.
Turning from state-sanctioned decoration to personal graffiti, our next volume celebrates “unmediated evidence of individual devotional practice and religious sentiment” (p. xviii). Antonio Felle and Bryan Ward-Perkins bring together 14 chapters focused on graffiti in religious contexts in the late antique Mediterranean. Contributions take in the Mediterranean—with additional chapters focused on Arabia and Nubia—and all deal with examples of devotional graffiti created during the first millennium AD. While most feature late antique Christian examples, the volume also includes pagan cultic graffiti at Pompeii (Rebecca Benefiel), and Jewish (Leah Di Segni) and Islamic (Frédéric Imbert) graffiti. The editors begin by defining what is meant by graffiti in late antiquity; this is not the unwelcome or unauthorised vandalism that might be connoted by the term in the modern world. Indeed, Marlena Whiting's study of Christian pilgrim graffiti at religious sites in the Holy Land (Chapter 2) finds that, far from being an illicit act, inscribing names in a sacred space was considered a privilege and an act of reverence. There were even professional graffiti artists, with an aptitude for script and epigraphy, who could be commissioned to create a personal graffito on behalf of the visitor. The editors concede that it is difficult to offer a universal definition for graffiti from this period and so suggest that the examples included in the volume are “texts placed secondarily on existing structures or on living rock, that are generally informal and generally personal” (p. xviii). Despite the problems of dating any individual graffito, and the artistic licence that may have been used by professional practitioners, graffiti offer a closer connection to their creators than other forms of text.
Carlo Carletti's chapter (6) focuses on runic graffiti discovered inscribed on a fresco of St Luke in the church of Sts Felix and Adauctus, and in the catacomb of Sts Marcellinus and Peter, both in Rome. The fact that pilgrims from the north chose to inscribe their names and petitions in runes reveals that they were not communicating with other visitors to the shrine, most of whom would not understand the language, but rather, directly with the divine and with the saints. These graffiti, dating to the seventh to ninth centuries at shrines known to have been favoured as pilgrimage destinations for Christians from the north, reveal the international nature of pilgrimage during this period, and the personal experience of the individual pilgrim, leaving their identity and their devotional sentiment in their own script.
Paweł Nowakowski's chapter (9) considers travellers’ graffiti—both Christian and pagan—from the Aegean islands of Syros and Tinos. Nowakowski looks at identity markers in the inscriptions to understand who was leaving their marks and what their aims and motivations were. The author considers the important differences between ‘cultic graffiti’, ‘invocations’ and ‘visitor inscriptions’, the significance of the two islands and, of course, the content of the inscriptions. Nowakowski concludes that two types of visitor can be identified through the graffiti: sailors and their travelling companions, crossing the Aegean and using the islands as stopping points; and local islanders visiting the sites for personal devotion. The inscriptions from Syros and Tinos offer a window on the transition from a pagan to Christian mentality in the region, but also demonstrate the “cross-religious need to leave a permanent mark of one's prayer during a perilous journey, or while visiting even a comparatively minor sanctuary” (p. 133). To close the volume, Felle and Ward-Perkins both offer their own concluding remarks, situating the vast array of evidence discussed in the volume within the context of epigraphic habits (Felle) and the perspective of ‘cult’ (Ward-Perkins). The volume provides valuable insights into the creation and intent of graffiti, which can be viewed as “the most private form of ‘displayed texts’ and the most ‘public’ form of individual texts” (p. 178).
Glass, wax and metal presents an impressive collection of 29 papers addressing aspects of lighting technologies over a broad timeframe—the late antique, Byzantine and medieval periods (including the sixteenth century AD)—and across a wide geographical area from Western Asia and Eastern Europe to the Mediterranean and Scandinavia. The volume aims to compare lighting technologies of Western Europe and Byzantium—a much-needed resource, given that the few existing studies of lighting devices are heavily focused on the Byzantine east (e.g. Bouras & Parani Reference Bouras and Parani2009; Papanikola-Bakirtzi & Kousoulakou Reference Papanikola-Bakirtzi and Kousoulakou2010).
The studies open with Verena Perko's overview of lighting devices from late antique Slovenia; the author draws together published examples of lamps and candelabra to identify patterns in the supply and use of lighting devices. Perko considers how political and economic events determined the availability and use of lamps across the region and influenced their decoration. Thomas Bitterli (Chapter 2), meanwhile, considers the practicalities of lighting medieval castles—by night and during the day—and also the prescribed use of such lighting as revealed by codices, courtly literature and monastic documents. Catherine Vincent's chapter (4) focuses specifically on the symbolic use of light in the churches of medieval Western Europe. Vincent's focus stretches from ancient Rome to thirteenth-century France to investigate the relationship between light, faith and worship. Vincent argues that the meaning of light as easily perceptible, but also deeply anchored in a rich theological philosophy, provided a common cultural referent.
Moving from the sacred to the industrial, Lena Berg Nilsson (Chapter 6) investigates methods of artificial lighting in medieval mines in Sweden, as revealed by literary sources and contemporaneous art. Other, non-religious, lighting solutions are detailed in the brief Chapter 28 by Efterpi Marki, who describes a structure at the medieval castle of Kitros, Pieria Macedonia, which is interpreted as a beacon. The chapters represent a good balance of east and west, broad period coverage, and a variety of sources of evidence and discussions examining ways of interpreting lighting methods. As the editors acknowledge in the Introduction, the length of the papers vary according to how much evidence is available, but even those that are brief add to the broader understanding of lighting devices and their uses in the late antique and medieval world. The volume represents a promising new direction for research on lighting that widens the study to allow for comparison and collaboration across disciplinary and geographical boundaries.
During the eleventh to fourteenth centuries AD, the Mediterranean world, and in particular the Byzantine Empire, saw massive political and economic upheaval. This can be seen reflected in the Eastern Mediterranean trade network, which forms the central focus of Katerina Ragkou's volume. Beginning in the later eleventh century AD (with the accession of Alexios I and the start of the Komnenian dynasty [1081–1185]), and taking in the next three centuries until the establishment of the Crusader States in the thirteenth century, Ragkou considers regional and rural economies, industry and trade, coinage, and settlement networks to investigate the cultural and economic relations between Byzantium and the Italian maritime powers and Frankish States.
The volume focuses on the Peloponnese, with the aim of mapping changes in trade patterns over time at a range of scales, to identify variations in the economic structure of the region, and to consider its changing settlement patterns. The methods, terms and concepts are clearly set out in Chapter 1. A neat summary of the history of the Eastern Mediterranean in the medieval period is presented in Chapter 2; this includes analysis of sea routes, demographic trends and the socio-economic situation in the Peloponnese. Brief reviews of economic theory in social science (Chapter 3) and Network theory (Chapter 4) follow, before the main data presentation begins in Chapter 5, dealing with the rural economy and how the countryside was exploited. To reconstruct the management of the rural economy, Ragkou relies on fragmentary evidence sourced mainly from documents surviving from areas under Latin control—these include codified feudal laws (assizes) and edicts from Angevin, Florentine and Venetian territories.
The most substantive chapters (6, 7 & 8) present the material at the heart of the study—the ceramics (glazed tableware), coins and settlement networks, respectively. Here, the data are analysed to form the conclusions presented in Chapter 9. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the economy of the Byzantine Empire was in rude health, with taxes generated from the rural population, whose economy was centred on villages and large estates. The period saw demographic growth and economic stability. The same can be said of the Peloponnese region, which remained economically stable even after the introduction of Latin rule in the early thirteenth century and the imposition of the feudal system. Alongside the rural economy, the ceramic industry in the Peloponnese was an important part of a wider trading network. Whereas the rural economy survived the Latin occupation, the local ceramics industry in the Peloponnese declined in the early thirteenth century, perhaps as a result of conflict but also because of a failure to compete successfully with imports of increasingly popular Italian ceramics. At this time, the Peloponnesian ceramics did not reach an international market but served only the local rural communities. Ragkou's volume is both informative and engaging, pulling together the scattered evidence to show how the fragmentation of the Byzantine Empire led to the establishment of new regional economic centres.
Together, the volumes reviewed in this NBC reflect some of the broader themes of late antique and early medieval studies. While Palmyra provides a useful case study of the material remains of cultural exchange, Hellenisation and Romanisation, all of the volumes demonstrate that even in tumultuous times and places of transit, perhaps especially in these situations, the need to express identity, to preserve tradition and to leave a lasting legacy endures, whether it was manifest in monumental funerary architecture or a name scratched on a wall. Similarly, places that often seem peripheral, and the most fragile, can prove to be the fiercest in preserving regional and local identity.
As this is my last NBC after four years in post, I would like to take the opportunity to introduce my successor as Reviews Editor, Marion Uckelmann, a specialist in the archaeology of the European Bronze Age. I hope Marion will enjoy the role as much as I have; I leave the Reviews Section in her capable hands and wish you all happy reading!
This list includes all books received between 1 September 2022 and 31 October 2022. Those featuring at the beginning of New Book Chronicle, however, have not been duplicated in this list. The listing of a book in this chronicle does not preclude its subsequent review in Antiquity.
