British Epigraphy Society |
The British Epigraphy Society continues to promote the development of epigraphical studies in Britain. In 1999 the Society held its third Spring Colloquium in Cardiff on 24th April:
The BES Spring Colloquium this year took as its theme ŒInscriptions and Buildings¹. Greek and Roman antiquity were equally well represented by case-studies ranging across the Mediterranean world.
David Gill (Swansea) and Harold Mattingly (Cambridge) both engaged with the much debated question of the year in which the Temple of Athene Nike was built on the Acropolis at Athens, and grappled once more with the notorious three-barred sigma controversy. The archaeological context of the temple and of its inscriptions, along with the physical form of the inscribed stelai themselves, offered new impetus to discussion.
Benet Salway (London) presented a paper on the basilica at Veleia, in which he proposed a possible reading of its building inscription. He also analysed the other inscribed monuments found in the area of the forum in order to delineate an overall picture of the nature of the settlement at Veleia.
The audience was particularly pleased to be able to listen to the ideas about building inscriptions from speakers visiting from abroad, Bertrand Goffaux (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium), and Angela Kalinowski (Mount Allison University, Canada), whose papers concentrated on monumental texts from Spain and Ephesus respectively. Bertrand Goffaux examined the types of public building projects in which Spanish municipal authorities were commonly involved. Angela Kalinowski presented a detailed commentary on the language of four Ephesian inscriptions, in order to suggest how to distinguish between Œcommemorative¹ and Œdedicatory-commemorative¹ inscriptions.
The BES WWW home page has moved to a new permanent location on the CSAD server at http://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/BES. Responsibility for maintaining the BES pages has been taken on by Alison Cooley.
Monumentum Ephesinum Colloquium A two-day conference organised under the auspices of the Centre by Barbara Levick, Alan Bowman and Michael Crawford on October 1-2, 1999 re-examined the text and interpretation of the lex portorii provinciae Asiae from Ephesos with a view to the publication of a new text, translation and commentary in English. The Austrian Institute¹s generous loan of its latex squeeze of the inscription allowed participants in the colloquium to verify and augment current readings of the text. A full report on the Colloquium will appear in Newsletter no. 9. David Lewis Lecture The Lewis Lecture for 1999 was given by Prof. Shaye Cohen of Brown University on Wednesday 26 May in the Lecture Theatre of St. Anne¹s College on the subject of ŒHellenism in Unexpected Places¹. Prof. Cohen¹s lecture ranged widely from Herodotus to Rabbinic commentators on the domestic habits of the Persians, stressing commonalities of intellectual and moral traditions in Hellenism and Judaism. The Lewis Lecture for 2000 will be delivered by Professor Lewis¹ close colleague and collaborator, Prof. P.J. Rhodes of Durham University.| Created on |