Workshop in Athens

[N.B. This blog post was written by the whole team]

The whole group in the courtyard of the Finnish Institute. Photo: Vesa Vahtikari.

Our project’s workshop “Interfaces between scribal work and language use” was held in sunny Athens full of spring flowers (and their scent!) in April 6-8, 2017. The venue was the small but lovely Finnish Institute at Athens in the shadow of the Acropolis.

The program and the abstracts can be accessed through the Workshop page. Here is our description of the sessions and other happenings.

Martti Leiwo’s welcome words. Photo: Vesa Vahtikari.

Thursday

Prof. Andreas Willi. Photo: Sonja Dahlgren.

We started on Thursday afternoon with two sessions. The first one concentrated on Latin texts and the difficulties of spelling. Andreas Willi (Oxford) presented the case of carmen Arvale, a cult song by the Arval priests preserved in an inscription from 218 A.D. A stonecutter with limited linguistic skills had had difficulties in interpreting some of the unclassical features of the song due to the difficult Latin cursive script used in his model and this mix-up has cheated later scholars in believing that the inscription represents odd archaic forms of the religious language. Lower levels of literacy and how education reflects in nonstandard spelling was the focus also in Nicholas Zair’s (Cambridge) and Timo Korkiakangas’ (Oslo) talks, but from different angles: Zair’s focus was archaic spellings as signs of educated writers in inscription material, and Korkiakangas presented large statistic studies on Late Latin Charters (714–897 A.D.) where over 200 scribes’ spellings show that the spelling correctness increased by time, in contrast to the expectations.

Nick Zair and Greek in Italy plug. Photo. Vesa Vahtikari.

The second session took us to Egypt and Greek (and bilingual) texts. Martti Leiwo (Helsinki) gave a description of the use of Greek in the Egyptian Desert in the Roman praesidia. He proposed an “ostraca variety” of the language written on potsherds in these peculiar circumstances. Interestingly, many letters concerned prostitution and in most cases the writer was not a professional scribe. Joanne Stolk (Ghent) discussed the whole corpus of Greek papyri and the corrections that the writers themselves had made in the papyri. It is interesting to see what they saw worthwhile to correct and in what types of documents. Victoria Fendel (Oxford) presented examples from bilingual (Coptic-Greek) letters discussing contact-induced variation in their  formulae, idiomatic expressions and collocations.

Reception in the courtyard of the institute. Photo: Marja Vierros.

Thursday ended in a reception in the courtyard of the institute in the warm(ish) evening with wine/juice, nibbles, and joyful discussions. Part of the group also ended up for dinner in a near-by taverna where we heard splendid rebetika played by the owner and his friends. Our PI almost had to perform himself.

Friday

Friday morning found us no less sunny than the previous night, and strengthened by the morning cup of coffee we carried on with interesting presentations such as the possible existence of graphic Koine in Late Antiquity by Arianna Gullo (Durham), that is, how we can see the letter forms transferring over the language boundaries. The second speaker of the day, Tommaso Mari (Bamberg) talked to us about the transcripts taken by notaries in the Council of Chalcedon (451), and whether they indeed were verbatim as alleged. The main questions are: what can be said about the spoken level of language in this context of scribal work, how much did scribes’ work interfere with it, and what was the linguistic output of the scribes in terms of translation and bureaucratic conventions? Last, but not least, Anastasia Maravela (Oslo) and Nicola Reggiani (Parma) introduced the corpus of medical papyri they have explored and digitized in the ERC project DIGMEDTEXT (Parma). They have analysed their linguistic variation in terms of language choice, document format and handwriting.

The second session of the day started with Klaas Bentein (Ghent) presenting his theory of applying multimodality to the study of variation in the documentary texts in the Nepheros archive. Next, Carla Bruno (Siena) talked about the infinitives in Ptolemaic Greek papyri, introducing the scope of variation that marked the decline of the infinitive in the Post-Classical Greek verb system. Last in the session, Marja Vierros talked about how modern authorship attribution methods could be applied to the study of papyrological material to be able to better determine who actually wrote the texts, the scribe (or an acquaintance of the sender of the message), or perhaps the author himself.

Prof. Sebastian Richter. Photo: Marja Vierros.

The third session took us to the land of Coptology. Jenny Cromwell (Copenhagen) started with an insight to palaeography through the study of early Islamic Coptic and bilingual Coptic-Greek administrative texts in Egypt. If the same kind of handwriting, and usage of new terminology, can be seen in two sites with a substantial geographic distance, how reliable evidence can handwriting styles really be in determining individual authors, and dating? Sebastian Richter (Berlin) presented us with an equally fascinating subject on Coptic legal documents through looking at P.Budge, one of the earliest legal documents in Coptic, with a question on who exactly was responsible for the vivid language use – was the scribe faithfully recording the original sociolinguistic registers, or was the scribe narrating these? The session was ended by Sonja Dahlgren presenting some of her findings on a possible Egyptian Greek variety, based on Ohala’s (1981) phonological theory of listener perception, a frequent phenomenon in language contact situations.

Ruth Duttenhöfer talking about ostraca. Photo: Marja Vierros.

The fourth and last session on Friday contained papers on ostraca and papyrus archives. Ruth Duttenhöfer presented exciting material from Roman poll tax receipts from Elephantine where short and formulaic texts are filled with much interesting orthographic and linguistic variation (in how many ways can one (mis)spell laografia?). Elizabeth Buchanan (Ohio, Findlay) talked about Greek and Coptic debt acknowledgements in the archive of Dioscorus of Aphrodito, concentrating on dating of documents and the transition between forms and different languages (Greek and later Coptic) used in their composition. In the last paper Anna Arpaia (Florence) presented her work on the evolving functions and role of the notaries known as agoranomoi, who worked both as public scribes and editors of documents.

Gathering in front of the Institute, heading towards dinner. Photo: Sonja Dahlgren.

Workshop dinner. Photo: Marja Vierros.

Saturday

MariaChiara Scappaticcio early on Saturday morning. Photo: Sonja Dahlgren.

MariaChiara Scappaticcio’s paper on Saturday morning discussed the papyrus P.Amh. II 26 (III-IV AD). This papyrus contains three fables of Babrius with a Latin translation, which shows many mistakes and unidiomatic uses. The text was used in a language learning environment and the paper discussed the possibility that the translation was in fact made by the scribe who wrote the papyrus. Elena Martin González discussed the Greek inscriptions of Roman Macedonia. These texts show unmistakably Roman practices in their use of punctuation and abbreviations, making it possible to observe the transition of epigraphical and scribal practices across the language boundary. The third paper was given by Hilla Halla-aho. Her paper addressed the level of learning and writing of those scribes who wrote wills and birth certificates in Latin in Roman Egypt.

The second session on Saturday took us several centuries back in time. First Anna Novokhatko discussed terminology used of writing and writing equipment in classical Greek texts. In the 5th century BCE it is possible to discern the increasing role of scribal activity and its impact on the society in especially dramatic texts. Anna Judson’s paper concerned scribes and orthographic variation in the linear-B tablets of Pylos. She concentrated on different types of orthographic variation which are found and their distribution amongst scribes working in different areas of the administration, raising the possibility of different spellings being ‘standard’ amongst different groups of scribes. Artermis Karnava’s paper focused on the bilingual and digraphic writing in the epigraphical evidence from Cyprus, paying special attention to inscriptions with digraphic evidence (Cypriot syllabic vs. Phoenician, Cypriot syllabic vs. Greek alphabetic) or bilingual evidence (Greek vs. ’Eteocypriot’).

Discussion after Giuditta Mirizio’s paper. Chair Sonja Dahlgren. Photo: Marja Vierros.

In the third session, Giuditta Mirizio talked about different types and meanings of texts labelled “copies” in Greek documents, pointing out that the term “copy” may encompass a wide variety of activities and terms, including e.g. a mention of an existing copy in a document, or a copy of another text enclosed e.g. in a letter, or a fully-fledged official copy. The final speaker of the workshop was Mariarosaria Zinzi who discussed graphic and linguistic variation in private letters written (or sent) by women in Roman Egypt, focusing on connections between linguistic change, the scribal practice and the sender’s literacy.

Sunday: Excursion to Mycenae

Having said farewell to those participants who left after the official program ended on Saturday, a small group of us entered a bus on Sunday morning and set out to explore Mycenae.  At the site we were introduced to the exceptional history and archaeological remains by Martti Leiwo and our pop-up guide Artermis Karnava. Afterwards we had lunch in Nafplio before returning to Athens.

We wish to thank all participants for a vivid and inspiring workshop! Our warmest thanks also to Vesa Vahtikari, the assistant director of the Finnish Institute at Athens, and to other members of the staff in the Institute for all their help during the workshop!

Mycenae. Photo: Marja Vierros.