[...]... bore the same names T.Flavius Vespasianus (We know him better as the emperor Titus.) The the Middle Ages or later, and have no place either in Latin literature or Roman inscriptions For those setting up Roman inscriptions, the chief reason for cutting down on the length of words was often not speed or convenience, but the need to make the best use of the space available on the stone, and to maximize the. .. dedications to the gods and public decrees Greek settlers in Italy passed on a version of their alphabet to the Etruscans and others; soon the Romans had begun to inscribe texts, from at least the sixth century BC onwards.11 As a medium of expression in the Roman world, inscriptions were being cut and erected over a period of one thousand years; the tradition of writing in Latin continued throughout the Middle... during the Second World War 11 Several tombstones, inscriptions and an unpublished relief THE SURVIVAL OF ROMAN INSCRIPTIONS showing military decorations can be espied high up in the thirteenth-century bell tower of the cathedral at Benevento (Fig 12), which (unlike most of the cathedral itself) survived wartime bombing in 1943; similarly, the Rocca dei Rettori, overlying one of the town’s Roman. .. remembered too that the reading of the text is merely a first stage The reader then has to interpret the information it preserves This can only be achieved through a familiarity with a wide range of other epigraphic texts coupled with an awareness of the historical background and the socio-economic structure of the ancient world The Latin found on Roman inscriptions is often not the literary or poetic... firstly to introduce the non-specialist reader to the subject of inscriptions and provide some guidance towards reading the Latin texts Secondly, to get him or her to appreciate the significance of inscriptions as a resource for the historian and archaeologist anxious to know more about the Roman world If this is the first book on inscriptions which the reader picks up, I hope it may not be the last ‘An inscription,... themselves become distinctive decorative motifs These dots were placed not at the bottom of the line, as with our full stops, but were set halfway up the height of the letters There was otherwise no punctuation, or the use of commas One sentence followed another without any special notation, though the reader could be alerted by gaps left on the stone, a line division or the placing of verbs On longer... (Fig 21 and see also Figs 17, 23, 31), the outlines of each letter-shape were cut into the stone blocks to provide a bedding for the bronze letters, so that the texts can be read today even though the bronze letters themselves have disappeared In other cases, the bronze letters UNDERSTANDING ROMAN INSCRIPTIONS were attached directly against the flat surface of the façade, so that all that now remains... inscription was an expression of the spoken language they used every day THE ALPHABET It is sensible to begin with a statement on the alphabet available to, and employed by, the Romans It was an alphabet of 21 letters, adopted from Greek settlers in southern Italy (ABC DEFGHIKLMNOPQRSTVX) 1 To these 21 letters were later added Z and Y to express sounds in UNDERSTANDING ROMAN INSCRIPTIONS transliterated.. .UNDERSTANDING ROMAN INSCRIPTIONS as well as the day-to-day lingua franca of much of the eastern Mediterranean world Many Roman inscriptions from these lands were inscribed in Greek There are bilingual, even trilingual texts, in the manner of the well-known Rosetta Stone 4 Local languages and scripts such as Punic, Thracian and Palmyran can be found alongside Latin and Greek In the following... tablets from the end of the fourth millennium BC onwards recorded state events as well as the commercial life of Mesopotamia Readers will recall the ‘writing on the wall’ at Belshazzar’s feast, interpreted by Daniel.10 Egyptian hieroglyphs decorated the tombs of pharaohs and nobles and the temples to the gods from about 3000 BC onwards The Greeks made widespread use of inscriptions, in most of the major . alt="" · UNDERSTANDING · R OMAN INSCRIPTIONS · UNDERSTANDING · R OMAN INSCRIPTIONS • LAWRENCE KEPPIE • The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore ©. Introduction 9 2 The stonecutter and his craft 12 3 Reading Roman inscriptions 17 4 Dating Roman inscriptions 25 5 The survival of Roman inscriptions 30 6 Recording and publication 36 7 The emperor. incidental information on the world of the Romans and the organization of their empire. First, a definition. The term Roman inscriptions is used in modern times to denote the texts inscribed on