Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: documentary evidence, social realities and the history of language
- Part I THE LANGUAGE OF POWER: LATIN IN THE ROMAN NEAR EAST
- Part II SOCIAL AND LEGAL INSTITUTIONS AS REFLECTED IN THE DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE
- Part III THE EPIGRAPHIC LANGUAGE OF RELIGION
- Part IV LINGUISTIC METAMORPHOSES AND CONTINUITY OF CULTURES
- Part V GREEK INTO ARABIC
- Index
Introduction: documentary evidence, social realities and the history of language
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: documentary evidence, social realities and the history of language
- Part I THE LANGUAGE OF POWER: LATIN IN THE ROMAN NEAR EAST
- Part II SOCIAL AND LEGAL INSTITUTIONS AS REFLECTED IN THE DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE
- Part III THE EPIGRAPHIC LANGUAGE OF RELIGION
- Part IV LINGUISTIC METAMORPHOSES AND CONTINUITY OF CULTURES
- Part V GREEK INTO ARABIC
- Index
Summary
Few collections of papers could claim to represent more emphatically than this one does a whole series of changes of focus which mark the evolution of ancient history over the last few decades. First, it is based almost entirely on documents, whether preserved on perishable materials or on stone; the literary texts transmitted in manuscript, and printed since the early modern period, on which our conceptions of the ancient world were previously based, have receded into the background. Second, its focus is on the eastern Mediterranean, taking the ‘Near East’ in a relatively broad sense, including both Anatolia and Egypt. Th ird, while not exploring Hellenism in the sense of the period between Alexander and Actium, it takes as its starting point the dominant Greek culture of the eastern Mediterranean under the Roman Empire. Fourth, its essential focus is on language – or co-existing or competing languages. That is to say both, on the one hand, that it explores the potential of original documents to represent for us the realities of the societies by and from which they were generated, and that, at the same time, it accepts always that a ‘document’ is, just like a literary text, a construct following rules and conventions – or obeying a ‘rhetoric’ of genre – and is not, and cannot be, a simple mirror of ‘how it really was’. But the focus on language also means something more complex still, namely the situations which evolve when more than one language is (in some sense) current within a particular society.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- From Hellenism to IslamCultural and Linguistic Change in the Roman Near East, pp. 1 - 12Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009