British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, grant MCFSS23\230032
In the Roman Empire literature was almost invariably written in Greek or Latin. Traces of literature in other languages, such as Gaulish or Punic, are rare. Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, stands out as a significant exception. The use of Syriac was initially confined to the city of Edessa in Northern Mesopotamia and its hinterland, but from the second century CE Syriac gave rise to one of the most prestigious literatures of late antiquity and beyond. Syriac literature flourished for more than a millennium in its classical form; it came to play a fundamental role in the identity and culture of Christian communities across the Near East and Asia along the Silk Roads, and approximately a million speakers still use Syriac today, in its modern varieties. The aim of this project, supported by the British Academy and the Princeton IAS, is to understand how a local dialect became the vehicle of one the richest and most prestigious literatures of the first millennium.
University of Exeter / Durham University (2018-2022)
AHRC (grant number AH/R010943/1)
Research associate: Dr Livia Tagliapietra
Before Latin came to dominate the peninsula from c.200 BC onwards, Italy was a highly multilingual environment, where multiple languages, dialects and alphabets interacted over many centuries. This interdisciplinary project explores multilingualism in ancient Italy using an innovative comparative approach to shed new light on what written language can tell us about connections between communities, cities and regions.
Using methods from modern sociolinguistics, historical sociolinguistics, epigraphy, history and archaeology, this project examines inscriptions in languages including Greek, Etruscan, Oscan, Venetic, Messapic and Latin. Unlike many studies, which treat these languages separately even when they occur at the same site, this project looks at inscriptions in their physical and cultural context. Building on the methodologies that the PI has already established for working with fragmentary corpora, inscriptions are considered at multiple levels: they are read individually for linguistic and epigraphic detail, but are also studied by text type within and across regions. By investigating evidence at archaeological sites and museums, the project looks at how language was used in a particular time and place, and considers the inscriptions' purpose and audience, rather than dealing with language in the abstract.
This project builds up a picture of multilingualism in ancient Italy and reach new insights about how multilingual individuals used their languages in different contexts, expanding not just our linguistic knowledge, but transforming our historical understanding of connectivity in Iron Age Italy and the context into which Rome emerged.
Publications from this project include the sourcebook Italy Before Rome (2022) and the Journal of Roman Studies article ‘Education and literacy in Ancient Italy’ (2019).
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, British School at Athens, grant no. 885977
The Linear B administrative texts of Late Bronze Age Greece were written on clay tablets, whose production therefore formed the first stage in the process of document creation, though it generally remains unclear whether the tablets’ writers were also their makers. This study combines experimental archaeology with autopsy of the tablets from Pylos in order to investigate the methods by which the Linear B tablets were created at this site. It thereby sheds light not only on the physical processes involved in shaping the clay, but also on the decisions involved on the part of the tablet-makers, and hence on the relationship between the ‘making’ and ‘writing’ stages of the process of creating the Linear B documents.
Publications from this project include 'The Tablet-Makers of Pylos: An Experimental Investigation into the Production of Linear B Tablets'.
