Documents such as papyri and inscriptions are essential to our knowledge of ancient history in a broad sense. This volume turns the attention to the texts themselves, and explores in an interdisciplinary way how people communicated with each other in antiquity.

Essays on the magical handbooks of Greco-Roman Egypt

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 16th Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries, IRCDL 2020, held in Bari, Italy, in January 2020. The 12 full papers and 6 short papers presented were carefully selected from 26 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on information retrieval, bid data and data science in DL; cultural heritage; open science.

Scholarship surrounding the standard varieties of Ancient Greek (Attic, the Koine, and Atticistic Greek) focused from its beginnings until relatively recently on determining fixed uniformities or differences between them. This collection of essays advocates for understanding them as interconnected and continuously evolving and suggests viewing them as living organisms shaped by their speakers and texts. The authors propose approaches that integrate linguistics, sociolinguistics, and literary studies to explore how speakers navigate linguistic norms and social dynamics, leading to innovations and reshaping of standards. Each contribution challenges the dichotomy between standards and deviations, suggesting that studying linguistic diversity through socio-literary interconnectedness can enrich our understanding of language history and cultural wealth.

The essays in Between Orality and Literacy address how oral and literature practices intersect as messages, texts, practices, and traditions move and change, because issues of orality and literacy are especially complex and significant when information is transmitted over wide expanses of time and space or adapted in new contexts. Their topics range from Homer and Hesiod to the New Testament and Gaius’ Institutes, from epic poetry and drama to vase painting, historiography, mythography, and the philosophical letter. Repeatedly they return to certain issues. Writing and orality are not mutually exclusive, and their interaction is not always in a single direction. Authors, whether they use writing or not, try to control the responses of a listening audience. A variable tradition can be fixed, not just by writing as a technology, but by such different processes as the establishment of a Panhellenic version of an Attic myth and a Hellenistic city’s creation of a single celebratory history.

Voice and Voices in Antiquity draws together 18 studies of the changing concept of voice and voices in the oral traditions and subsequent literate genres of the ancient world. Ranging from the poet's voice to those of characters as well as historically embodied communities, and from the interface between the Greek and Near Eastern worlds to the western reaches of the Roman Empire, the scholars assembled here offer a methodologically rich and diverse series of approaches to locating the power of voice as both poetic construct and communal memory. The results not only enrich our understanding of the strategies of epic, lyric, and dramatic voices but also illuminate the rhetorical claims given voice by historians, orators, philosophers, and novelists in the ancient world.

Ancient Perspectives encompasses a vast arc of space and time—Western Asia to North Africa and Europe from the third millennium BCE to the fifth century CE—to explore mapmaking and worldviews in the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In each society, maps served as critical economic, political, and personal tools, but there was little consistency in how and why they were made. Much like today, maps in antiquity meant very different things to different people. Ancient Perspectives presents an ambitious, fresh overview of cartography and its uses. The seven chapters range from broad-based analyses of mapping in Mesopotamia and Egypt to a close focus on Ptolemy’s ideas for drawing a world map based on the theories of his Greek predecessors at Alexandria. The remarkable accuracy of Mesopotamian city-plans is revealed, as is the creation of maps by Romans to support the proud claim that their emperor’s rule was global in its reach. By probing the instruments and techniques of both Greek and Roman surveyors, one chapter seeks to uncover how their extraordinary planning of roads, aqueducts, and tunnels was achieved. Even though none of these civilizations devised the means to measure time or distance with precision, they still conceptualized their surroundings, natural and man-made, near and far, and felt the urge to record them by inventive means that this absorbing volume reinterprets and compares.