Keynote (Divya Kumar-Dumas, University of Maryland): Wedge-shaped, wooden, once-sealed: “Is there a text in this class?”

Or, to restate the question: how should we make meaning out of this class of Indic text-bearing objects, constituted in their entanglements with unbaked clay seal impressions? When such inscribed clay bullae are found in India and Pakistan, they are no longer affixed to whatever they once sealed. In China, however, tablets bearing sealing traces survive as administrative documents. Both forms are termed mudra in Sanskrit, a word that can mean “seal,” “sealing,” and “a sealed thing.” Yet interpretive communities have understood them as distinct texts, adding and subtracting notions based on circumscribed regional contexts. For instance, historians derive the seal-owner’s emblem, name, and social position from seal impressions, but add unattested assumptions about what those seals once enclosed. Indologists have reduced once-sealed, wedge-shaped tablets issued by kings to dematerialized texts in Gandhāri describing everyday matters. The materiality of these documents has been largely confined in scholarship to local practices in 3rd–4th century CE Kroraina. By reconsidering their use in the past, I treat the sealed document as a whole—though only available to us in fragments—and as representing a class of mobile Indic text-bearing things. Recoupled, these mudra index, through what remains present and absent, durable authentication practices employed at waystations along extensive South and Central Asian road networks.

Mary Frazer (LMU): Estimating textual abundance in antiquity: the case of the cuneiform extispicy omen corpus

A systematic count of the excavated clay tablets bearing cuneiform “canonical” texts is yet to be made, but a conservative estimate points to a total in the tens of thousands. Of this enormous body of intellectual work only a tiny fraction comprises poetry or literary prose: modern cataloguing projects of several sections of the corpus instead point to divination literature as the dominant subcategory. Because of its relative abundance, divination literature represents an optimal test case for addressing the question of whether those cuneiform texts that have survived to the present day are representative of what originally existed in antiquity, especially in the period beginning with the the fall of the Assyrian Empire ca. 600 BCE and ending with the obsolescence of cuneiform script around the turn of the Common Era. To date, modern scholars have tended to approach an uneven distribution of textual witnesses for a given scholarly work as a philological problem – “how can we reconstruct this text?” My aim in this paper is to adopt a historical approach by taking gaps in our textual record as evidence of breaks in textual transmission. I will begin by arguing that a material approach to the surviving omen compendia indicates that they represent a distorted picture of what originally existed. Then, drawing on recent work by medievalists, I will present a method that may help counter this distortion. In the final part of the paper, I will explore the ramifications of this type of modelling work for our understanding of the history of cuneiform.

Alexander Free (LMU): “Hearing the holy voice of Memnon, I missed you …”. The Memnon Colossi and Material Culture

The Colossi of Memnon are two monumental seated figures depicting Pharaoh Amenhotep III, which originally stood on either side of the entrance to his mortuary and memorial temple in West Thebes. By Roman times, this temple no longer existed, and the two seated sculptures were viewed as freestanding colossal statues. The northern of the two figures is said to have emitted a sound always within a few hours before sunrise, a phenomenon reported by numerous Greco-Roman authors from Strabo to Pliny the Elder to Tacitus, and which led to the statues being personified as Memnon, the son of Eos, the goddess of dawn. Oracular powers were attributed to the pair of statues, and a large number of visitors left inscriptions on the colossi. The talk will examine some of these inscriptions and raise the question of how the objects themselves influenced the texts left on them. It will explore how the Colossi of Memnon “speak” and how their visitors engage in dialogue with them. It will also demonstrate how the statues’ tonality, monumentality, and the texts inscribed upon them give them symbolic significance.

Giulia Grossi (LMU): Materiality of ancient papyrus petitions: A case study from 4 th century Egypt

In recent years petitions from Greco-Roman and Byzantine Egypt preserved on papyrus have been the object of much scholarly attention. This is largely due to the fact that, unlike most of the extant documentation from the ancient world, they seem to depict the everyday struggles and concerns of ordinary people, thus allowing a glimpse into the vibrant lived realities of Egyptian towns and the rural chora under Ptolemaic and Roman rule. More and more however, the highly formulaic nature of these documents has prompted scholars to shift attention away from the petitioner(s) who made the legal complaints, and towards the professional scribes, often unnamed, who reduced the petitioner’s pleas to the authorities to a written text – thereby foregrounding the materiality of the text, rather than the textual contents itself. Following this line of enquiry, the aims of this paper will be twofold. First, I will highlight 4th-century petitions, which, despite multiple monographs and edited volumes dedicated to Ptolemaic, Roman imperial and later Byzantine (5th to 7th centuries) petitions, remain curiously unrepresented. The second, and main, goal for the paper will be to take a closer look at the materiality of some of the extant 4th-century petitions by focusing explicitly on two family archives from the Arsinoite nome. I will trace clues both internal and external to the text and written medium of archival documents with a view to offering some reflections on authorship and literacy, as well as the use, circulation, and preservation of the textual objects in question.

Michael Hahn (LMU): Empire and individual on sherds of clay

The paper investigates the eastern desert between the Nile and the Red Sea in the Roman Imperial era as a laboratory for examining the relationship between empire and individual through the materiality of writing. Its central evidence consists of inscribed ostraca, mostly recovered from Roman military forts, quarries, and desert waystations. These humble, durable objects preserve the everyday paperwork of empire: letters, receipts, duty rosters, tax notes, and private complaints. As material artefacts, ostraca reveal how imperial structures were enacted, negotiated, and contested in an extreme environment. The desert’s strategic importance is underscored by long-distance trade attested in the Muziris Papyrus and by quarrying sites such as Mons Claudianus, both embedded in imperial networks secured by forts and wells. Yet it is the ostraca from forts like Didymoi and Krokodilo that illuminate how the empire functioned on a local level. Through the letters of soldiers, the presence of nomadic “barbaroi,” and the voices of sex workers managing contracts, payments, and mobility, we encounter the empire not as abstraction but as inscription. The empire in the desert was thus materially compressed into walls, wells, and shards of clay. Its boundaries were not only geographical but also physical and textual – manifested by the walls of the small military outposts and drawn in ink on ceramic fragments that made imperial power both tangible and negotiable in conditions of desolation.

Moritz Hinsch (LMU): Letters to the Gods? The Materiality of Writing Oracles

The oracle tablets from Dodona are one of the most fascinating epigraphic corpora of the ancient Greek world. The ca. 2,900 enquiries published so far reveal the hopes and anxieties of private individuals, rulers, and cities, scratched in small lead tablets and presented to Zeus in the wind-tossed highlands of Epirus. With the help of these tablets, ordinary people emerge from the shadow of the literary tradition of Greek culture, a tradition heavily centred on Athens and its educated elite. The tablets provide a wealth of information on everyday religious beliefs, economic strategies, and cooperation and conflict from 500 to 167 BCE. At the same time, the materiality of the enquirers themselves, written on small, rough-cut lead lamellae, merits more systematic study. This includes the origin and use of the lead (which was imported), the different styles of handwriting, and the use of these lead tablets in a ritual in which enquiries were written without being read (by a human being) and answered by drawing lots. In my paper, I will explore what the materiality of the oracle tablets reveal about literacy, writing, and religious belief in the ancient Greek world.

Maria Khayutina (LMU): War and Writing in Pre-Imperial China: Inscribed Weapons in Archaeological Context

Inscribing portable objects for purposes other than primarily serving as writing supports has a long history in China. Ceramic vessels with incised marks already appeared during the late Neolithic period (Demattè 2010). During the Bronze Age, clan signs, ancestors’ temple names, and ritual messages were cast on bronze vessels and bells used during sacrificial feasts, while oracle queries were carved on turtle plastrons and bovine scapulae used for osteo-pyromancy. In addition, inscriptions were also made on weapons and, somewhat later, on tools. Oracle bone inscriptions and inscriptions on vessels and bells have long been recognized as primary sources for early Chinese history (Keightley 1978; Shaughnessy 1991; Li Feng 2006; Campbell 2018). Inscriptions on weights and measuring cups have more recently attracted attention in connection with the study of government methods and political propaganda of the first Chinese empire, the Qin (221–207 BCE) (Sanft 2014). Inscribed weapons have attracted scholarly attention mainly in connection with research on state-managed craftsmanship and bureaucratic structures of the Warring States period (ca. 453–221 BCE) (Li 2020; Škrabal 2022; Khayutina forthcoming). However, inscribed weapons possess even greater potential for the study of pre-imperial Chinese cultural practices, political concepts, and history, especially, when their archaeological contextualization is possible. The present paper provides an overview of suitable materials from ca. 1300 BCE until the end of the pre-imperial period, identifying prospective research questions, methodological approaches, and perspectives for comparative analysis.

References

Campbell, Roderick B. 2018. Violence, Kinship and the Early Chinese State: The Shang and Their World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Demattè, Paola. 2010. “The Origins of Chinese Writing: The Neolithic Evidence.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 20 (2): 211–28.

Keightley, David N. 1978. Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Khayutina, Maria. forthcoming. “The Chancellor of State and the Concept ‘State’ in Excavated Inscriptions of the Warring States Period.” Asia Major.

Li, Xiuzhen Janice. 2020. Bronze Weapons of the Qin Terracotta Warriors: Standardisation, Craft Specialization and Labour Organisation. Oxford: BAR publishing.

Li Feng. 2006. Landscape and Power in Early China: The Crisis and Fall of the Western Zhou, 1045-771 BC. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sanft, Charles. 2014. Communication and Cooperation in Early Imperial China Publicizing the Qin Dynasty. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Shaughnessy, Edward L. 1991. Sources of Western Zhou History: Inscribed Bronze Vessels. Berkeley: California University Press.

Škrabal, Ondřej. 2022. “Where There Is Unity, Order Results: Manufacturers’ Labels and the Creation of Standards in the Late Warring States Period.” T’oung Pao 108 (319–368).

Younes Köhler (LMU): Cross meets Crescent: The materiality of Early Islamic documentary papyri and the pagarchs under Arab rule (641 – 750 CE)

It has become a commonplace in the study of the first century of Arab Muslim rule in Egypt that cultural, religious and administrative changes occurred at a slow pace. While the conquering Arab army and its dependents settled at the site of the emerging capital of al-Fusṭāṭ (near the old Byzantine fortress of Babylon), formerly Byzantine officials continued to staff the administrative posts of the Egyptian countryside. The duces continued to head the administration of the provinces (eparchiai) into which Egypt had been divided since Byzantine times, while the subordinate pagarchs headed Egypt’s numerous nomes (civitates) and their rural hinterlands. Pagarchs thus represented a crucial link between center and periphery in Early Islamic Egypt. It is from the chancelleries of the pagarchs and their immediate subordinates from which the most extensive papyrological archives of the period under consideration originate. Comprising letters, orders for payment, accounts, receipts, contracts etc. in Greek, Coptic, and Arabic, they provide valuable insights into the communication between the Arab-Muslim center represented by al-Fusṭāṭ, on the one hand, and the still overwhelmingly Byzantine-Christian periphery in the civic territories of Egypt.

The documentary papyri relating to pagarchs and their interactions with the Arab regime between ca. 641 and 750 CE provide fascinating insights into the material text culture of this world in transition. On the one hand, there are continuities in documentary genres and practices, yet on the other, innovations in these domains begin almost immediately following the Arab conquest. The documentary innovations introduced by the Arabs are not restricted to the Arabic language and documentary forms – they also include the reworking and application of Byzantine and Sasanian Persian forms, motifs, and usages traditionally embedded in other Near Eastern regions but applied for the first time, and in a new sense, by the Arabs in Egypt. Thus, seals (with visual motifs borrowed from the Persian cultural sphere); multilingual documents (with combinations of Arabic, Greek, and Coptic); and the targeted use of formulaic language, scripts, and layouts served to communicate state authority in the Egyptian countryside in addition to the semantic content that they conveyed. In the case of documents partially or entirely in Arabic, the Arabic script functioned not only as a vehicle of practical information, but also as a visual symbol of state authority and social standing. By analyzing both the administrative structures described by the textual content, and the administrative culture – or praxeology – of the inscribed artefacts themselves, we can appreciate the crucial role the institution of the pagarchy assumed in the consolidation of Arab rule in Egypt as it became ever more integrated into the Arab ruling establishment.

Antonis Kotsonas (ISAW): Inscribed Armor, Personhood, and the Materiality of Writing in Archaic Crete

Drawing inspiration from what Roger Bagnall labeled as “materially oriented revolutions” in the field of ancient epigraphy, I revisit a group of inscribed bronze armor, which was found at the temple(?) of Afrati, in central Crete, and dates from ca. 600 BCE. Although looted in 1964 and dispersed in museums in Europe and the USA (including the Metropolitan Museum of Art), the armor has a context that can be reconstructed to an extent. Crucial information is provided by the inscriptions on nearly half of the pieces, which record a male name and patronymic, and a verb that identifies the pieces as spoils of war. On the twin basis of the attestation of identical inscriptions on certain pieces and the iconographic and stylistic correspondences between some of them, the armor has been ascribed to panoplies set up as war trophies. Notwithstanding their merits, traditional epigraphic and art-historical approaches have had a limiting effect on the interpretation of this material. Inspired by new materialism, my paper revisits the material and epigraphic properties of the finds and analyzes the materiality of writing, including its placement on the armor and its relationship to the figural and other decoration. Additionally, I examine how the Afrati armor may have interacted with the human bodies underlying it, theorizing the ways in which personhood was “inscribed” on – and “erased” from – these objects.

Manolis Mavromatis (ISAW): Materiality of Writing in Post-Hittite Syro-Anatolia: A Quantitative Analysis of Monumental Inscribed Objects

This presentation asks whether a quantitative analysis of monumental inscribed objects can meaningfully contribute to the study of the materiality of writing in Post-Hittite Syro-Anatolia. Discussions of materiality are often grounded in close readings of individual objects, but can broader patterns within a corpus also reveal how writing functioned as a materially embedded practice? Using a database of inscribed objects from six major sites, this study examines variables such as object typology, material composition, inscription placement, script type, reported function, and chronology. By identifying recurring patterns, such as the predominance of basalt, the widespread preference for fully visible inscriptions on orthostats, or the distribution of incised versus raised scripts, the analysis evaluates whether these trends reflect structured material choices that shaped how writing was encountered. While numbers alone cannot capture lived experience, they help identify material constraints and intentional patterns that structured human engagement with inscriptions across time and space.

Beate Pongratz-Leisten (ISAW): Between Material and Materiality: The Blau Stones in Historical-Epistemological Perspective

For a long time the linguistic mode as the exclusive source of information at the expense of other sign systems has governed the ancient Near Eastern approach to artefacts that are carriers of text and image. This text/image divide has deeply impacted the way artefacts were published, typically by separating the publication of inscriptions from the one of the images depicted on them. The Blau Monuments, stone objects dated to the beginning of the third millennium BCE that not only represent the earliest legal contracts in Mesopotamian history, but also the earliest evidence for the combination of text and image on one artefact, offer exciting examples of how image and text interact and complement each other in conveying a particular message. Much discussion has been devoted to their inscriptions, because, even though some signs can be easily identified, the establishment of their right order still poses much difficulty. Rather than exclusively engaging with the decipherment of the text, this contribution investigates the way writing has been applied to the surface and thus engages with the interface between crafting process, image-making, and writing. I will show how the idiosyncratic shape of the Blau Monuments, which are reminiscent in themselves of sign shapes, throw into high relief the fluid boundaries between professions such as stonecutters and scribes. By approaching the Blau Monuments as iconotexts with culturally specific systems of intertextuality and interpictoriality with other artefacts of the same period, I will attempt to illuminate the sociocultural standing of certain stonecutters within the administration and institution of the temple in the early third millennium BCE.

David M. Ratzan (ISAW): Materiality and intertextuality, or why it matters that we know how much books cost in the Roman world

Intertextuality, or the various ways in which one text can signal (or be interpreted as signaling) its relation to another, has been a productive area of classical literary criticism since the 1980s. Intertextuality as an approach to reading and interpretation was taken up by Classicists as way of reconceptualizing both the allusive mode characteristic of much of classical literature and μίμησις/imitatio as a core concern in literary criticism since the late Hellenistic period. One curious feature of the discourse of intertextuality in Classics is its almost complete abstraction from actual texts: it is an entirely dematerialized discourse. This is due in no small part to the fact that many scholars insist that intertexts were produced and interpreted by the memories of authors and readers. This was no doubt in part the case, but my contention is that one cannot have a complete theory of intertextuality without a theory of texts. This is to say that intertextuality as a phenomenon must depend in the first instance on the availability of actual, embodied texts; and if so, we must integrate what we know about the archaeology of reading and the availability of texts when it comes to classical literature in antiquity. In this paper I will elaborate why we need a theory and practice of intertextuality that takes the materiality of texts seriously and suggest at least some implications of doing so. I invoke materiality in two specific ways. First, I will draw on the archaeology of a wide variety of texts, glosses, commentaries, anthologies, arguing that the material record can and should be interpreted as an additional stream of evidence for the phenomenon of classical intertextuality; and second, I will make an economic argument (which in the context of this workshop we may call material if not materiality) in support of this proposition by demonstrating what the cost of a full copy of the Iliad was in the Roman period.

Yu Song (ISAW): Writing on the Body: Inscriptions on the Early Dynastic Mesopotamian Statues

This paper examines the integration of writing, materiality, and craftsmanship in Early Dynastic Mesopotamian sculptural traditions, focusing on inscribed votive and commemorative statues of the third millennium BCE. Drawing on case studies from sites including Tell Asmar, Mari, Umma, and Adab, it argues that inscription transformed statues into performative media that mediated relationships between patrons, deities, and communities. Text was not merely added to sculpture but also materially and conceptually embedded within the body of the object, thus inscribing identity, status, and piety into stone. Particular attention is paid to the placement of inscriptions on specific body parts, shoulders, chests, forearms, and laps, revealing how spatial strategies structured viewers’ encounters with both text and image and articulated ideas of embodiment, visibility, and legitimacy. Through comparative analysis of scripts and textual formulae across Early Dynastic genres, the paper explores how word–image relationships operated within sculptural contexts. The paper also considers the extended material biographies of statues, including re-inscribe, repair, ritual reactivation, and deliberate burial or fragmentation. These practices demonstrate that inscribed statues were dynamic textual objects whose meanings emerged through ongoing material engagement over time, situating Early Dynastic inscriptions firmly within the entangled materialities of ancient communities.

Christina Stefanou (ISAW): Re-materializing the Alphabet: Embodied and Material Entanglements in Phrygian Writing Practice(s)

This paper investigates the embodied and sensory dimensions of Phrygian alphabetic writing at Iron Age Gordion (Yassihöyük, Turkey). It utilizes the framework of communities of practice to illuminate shared habits of inscribing and explore local preferences in visual and bodily engagement with inscribed objects. The paper draws on a materiality analysis of more than a hundred inscribed pottery fragments from Gordion involving study of their fabric, shape, and surface treatment, alongside close examination of the individual incisions (i.e. placement on the object, thickness, cross-section, dimensions). I present select examples of Phrygian writing, often in comparison with cases of Phoenician or Early Greek alphabetic writing, from the Aegean and Western Mediterranean. By reconstructing the inscribing process, I call attention to the technological choices made during the act of writing (e.g. writing implements), as well as to how handling different types of objects shaped or was shaped by distinct modes of visuality. I also reflect upon the visual relationship between verbal and non-verbal marks. Finally, I consider the visual engagement with the objects post-inscribing, exploring how the visual and haptic qualities of the inscribed objects were influenced by their physical materiality and the social setting in which they were used. Overall, I argue that the relative consistency observed in the material characteristics of the incisions found on the Gordion pottery suggests a shared technological and social knowledge behind Phrygian writing practices.

Matthias Stern (LMU): The Things We Leave Behind: Papyri, Materiality, and Documentary Practice Across the Greco-Roman World

Papyrus is widely regarded as a key writing medium across the Greco-Roman world, yet its archaeological survival is strikingly uneven. While Egypt has yielded vast quantities of papyri, evidence from other parts of the Mediterranean is comparatively sparse. Without denying the importance of environmental factors, this paper reconsiders whether climate alone offers in fact a satisfactory explanation for these patterns of transmission. Looking beyond quantities, it compares find contexts and documentary types in extra-Egyptian papyrus assemblages with the more abundant evidence from the Nile Valley. As a contribution to the workshop, the paper reflects on how materiality and documentary practices shape the interpretative horizons of papyri as a source type, both within and beyond Egypt.

Lillian Tseng (ISAW): Inscribed Objects, Empire, and Everyday Life in Han China

In Han China (202 BCE–220 CE), imperial affairs were typically recorded by scribes and clerks through a sophisticated bureaucratic system, resulting in a vast corpus of texts written on bamboo slips or carved into stone monuments. Yet references to imperial affairs were not confined to official records—they also appeared on objects of daily use, such as textiles for clothing and bronze mirrors for grooming. Drawing on archaeological discoveries, this paper investigates the textual and material contexts in which these inscriptions were embedded. It explores how the anticipation and lived realities of imperial expansion may have prompted the production of these inscribed objects, and how the circulation of these objects may, in turn, have contributed to the formation of perceptions of empire and its unfolding course. Ultimately, this paper considers the entanglement of empire and everyday life, analyzing how inscribed objects reflected and shaped contemporary understandings of empire within domestic and personal spheres.