The Lewis Lecture for 1997 was given by Miss J.M. Reynolds FBA on Wednesday 28 May in the Garden Quad Auditorium at St. John's College, with the title "New Hadrianic Documents from Aphrodisias". Miss Reynolds presented a series of recently discovered letters from the emperor Hadrian to Aphrodisias to a large audience which included the late Professor Lewis's brother, Mr. Philip Lewis. The lecture was followed by a reception.
A decision to establish an organisation to represent the interests and activities of British scholars with epigraphical interests which would at the same time constitute a chapter of the Association International d'Épigraphie Grecque et Latine (AIEGL) was taken at a meeting of British epigraphers in London on16 November, 1996. The British Epigraphy Society has established its own WWW home page (http://www.liv.ac.uk/~gjoliver/bepigsoc.html), from which further information about the Society can be obtained.
CSAD is a strong supporter of the new Society - Dr. Bowman is a committee member - and sponsored the BES Spring Colloquium in Oxford on April 26 on the Epigraphy of Asia Minor. A report on the Colloquium will appear in Newsletter no. 5.
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A similar epigraphical association for North America was also established in 1996. Details of the American Society for Greek and Latin Epigraphy (ASGLE) are available from the society's WWW pages (http:/ /www.unc.edu/campus/sigs/asgle).
The Centre's regular seminar series on documentary subjects continued in Trinity Term 1997 with three papers on Latin epigraphical themes:
30 April: Ms. I.C. Mednikarova, "On the character of the Latin Epigraphic Style: a study of funerary inscriptions"
14 May: Dr. M. Pobjoy, "A new reading of the mosaic inscription in the temple of Diana Tifatina"
18 June: Mr. Greg Rowe, "Italian Municipal Fasti"
July 9-19, 1997
The 20 available places for the Summer School advertised in Newsletter no. 3 are now fully booked.
The seminar series will be resumed in Michaelmas (October -December) 1997, with a series of papers on literary subjects. Details of these will be announced in the next newsletter.
Among visitors to CSAD during the winter and spring of 1996 /7 have been Sir Anthony Cleaver, former chairman and chief executive of IBM and current chairman of AEA Technology plc; Prof. Jorge Sánchez-Lafuente Pérez of the University of Léon; Mrs. Argyro Tataki of the University of Athens; and Prof. J.F. Oates of Duke University.
Mr. Veit Schenk has been appointed as Leverhulme Trust Research Associate for the Centre's Image Enhancement project on incised tablets. Mr. Schenk is based in the Department of Engineering Science (e-mail: vubs@robots.oxford.ac.uk).
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The lead tablet illustrated in Newsletter no. 3 has now been published by R.S.O. Tomlin in ZPE 115, 1997, 291-4, "A Fourth-Century Uterine Phylactery in Latin from Roman Britain".
This is the fourth newsletter of the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents. The Newsletter is circulated in Autumn and early Summer. The Newsletter invites contributions of news, reports and discussion items from and of interest to scholars working in the fields of the Centre's activities - epigraphy and papyrology understood in the widest sense. The Newsletter is circulated to individual scholars on the Centre's mailing list and is also available from the Centre's WWW site (URL http://ww.csad.ox.ac.uk) in HTML format or for downloading, either as a text file or as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file. Contributions, together with other enquiries and requests to be placed on the Centre's mailing list, should be addressed to the Administrator at the Centre.