Large-Scale vs Close-Up? The (In)Visibility of Christian Ideas and Language in the Written Spaces of Late Antique Ephesos (original) (raw)
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Space and Communities in Byzantine Anatolia. ed. Nikos D. Kontogiannis and Tolga B. Uyar (Chicago 2021)
This chapter looks at an inscribed imperial sacra of Justinian I in the spatial and doctrinal contexts of late antique Ephesus. I bring together the recent methodological lenses of epigraphic visuality and spatiality, as well as social agency and, on the other hand, insights into doctrinal clashes between Miaphysites and Chalcedonians in fifth and sixth-century Ephesus, to produce a contextualized study of this inscription. The imperial message of 'orthodoxy' central to its rhetoric, I argue, would read divisively within the liturgical space of the church of St John as well as in the broader Ephesian cityscapes hotly contested by the conflicting doctrinal parties. Yet, as I suggest, the inscribed ruling could at the same time be making an almost surprisingly unifying point in the context of Justinian's efforts to win over the alienated yet strategically important Miaphysite regions of the Christian East. Alongside the doctrinal agenda, the inscription may also have been instrumental as part of episcopal and clerical competition within the city. The complex matrix of imperial and local agencies therefore was responsible for the inscription's spatial placing and dogmatically charged reading in late antique Ephesus and its spaces.
The presence of inscriptions on temple buildings in general and in the area of the pronaos in particular seems to be a phenomenon that applies specifically to the sanctuaries in Hellenistic and Roman Asia Minor. Both in the coastal regions of Caria and Ionia, and in the more inland regions of Phrygia and Galatia, temples can be found whose walls were inscribed with a variety of official documents, turning them into Schriftträger. These documents show a large variety in type and content, ranging from letters of kings and magistrates to civic decrees concerning the polis itself or, to a lesser extent, regulations for the cult. What all these records have in common is their aspiration to publicly display the mentioned events, privileges, rights and individuals publicly on the walls of the temple and, consequently, inside the sanctuary. This contribution analyses the significance of the pronaos for the publication of documents and addresses how the presence of inscriptions changed the symbolic meaning of the pronaos and the temple as a whole. In addition, it hopes to provide a backdrop against which the use of writing at the entrance of the Early Christian church and later cult buildings can be interpreted. It ultimately argues that the ancient temple fulfilled a multidimensional range of functions in a significant number of cities in Asia Minor, ranging from a religious and economical role to a monumental support for the publication of civic dossiers.
Göz Önünde Saklı Kalmak: Aphrodisias’taki Tapınak-Kilise’de Epigrafik Yeniden Kullanım MS 500 civarında, Afrodisias'taki (Türkiye) görkemli Afrodit Tapınağı sökülerek daha büyük bir kilise olarak yeniden inşa edildi. Bu süreçte, Yunanca yazılmış birkaç eski Roma yazıtı, yeni Hıristiyan kutsal alanına dâhil edildi. Bazıları, bir kapı pervazında (MÖ 1. yüzyıl) Afrodit'e ithaf edilmiş ve sütunlarda bulunan tanrıçaya yapılan diğer adaklar (MS 1. yüzyıl) da dâhil olmak üzere, orijinal olarak tapınaktan geliyordu. Bu yazıtlar üzerine yapılmış epigrafik çalışmaların çoğu, kilisedeki yeniden kullanımlarını değil, yalnızca orijinal Roma anlamlarını dikkate almıştır. Ancak birkaç yazıtta göze çarpan silinen kısımlar, Hıristiyanların bu metinleri okuduğunu ve bunlara dikkat ettiğini gösteriyor. Özellikle kapı pervazındaki Afrodit’e yapılan ithaf silinmiş, ancak sadece Afrodit'in adı tamamen kaldırılmıştır; diğer kısımlar ise kısmen de olsa okunaklıydı. Tapınak-kilisenin mimari mekânlarında bu eski yazıtların sergilenmesini belgeleyerek, Afrodisias'ın ilk Hıristiyan halkının şehrin tarihini, özellikle de uzak Roma yöneticileriyle olan bağlantıları anlatmaya devam ettiklerini öne sürüyorum. Ayrıca, bu eski yazıtları kilisede Hristiyan yazıtları ve grafitilerle yan yana görmek, erken Hristiyanlık döneminde, önceki dönemlerde elitlerin himayesindeki bu gelenekte yaşanan değişimi ve geride tanrı için yazılı bir kayıt bırakmanın genel halka kadar indiğini vurguluyor. (trans. Abdullah Timuçin Alp Aslan) Around 500 CE, the magnificent Temple of Aphrodite at Aphrodisias (Turkey) was deconstructed and rebuilt as an even larger church. During this process, several ancient inscriptions from the temple and from elsewhere, including building dedications and records of column donations, were incorporated into the new Christian sacred space. Previous studies of the temple-church have fixated on the original, Roman-period texts of the inscriptions and their historical contexts, to the exclusion of exploring their late antique reuse, the selective erasures that took place, and the potential meanings that these older texts, which were still legible to educated Greek-speaking viewers, may have held for the Christianizing city. By documenting the display of these older inscriptions in the architectural spaces of the temple-church, I argue that they continued to impart to the people of Aphrodisias a conception of their shared civic history centered on local elites and connections with distant Roman rulers. Moreover, the viewing of these older inscriptions side by side with the late antique graffiti in the church highlights the change in euergistic and epigraphic habits in late antiquity and reveals the democratization of commemorative practice in the early Christian period.
Introduction: Defining the field : The epigraphic cultures of Late Antiquity
2017
The aim of this book – and of the conference on which it was based – is to document and discuss the diversity and wealth of the epigraphic cultures of Late Antiquity. It is an attempt at understanding the various political, cultural and religious structures that characterized this period, and the special place occupied by inscriptions in the societies that produced and lived with them. Our goal is, therefore, to put these inscribed artefacts in their wider sociopolitical and physical contexts, illustrating the ways in which monuments and texts were related to the world around them. The chapters that follow propose to explore the geographic and typological diversity of late antique epigraphy as well as the many textual forms and material supports through which these epigraphic practices have come down to us. One of the central arguments pursued here is that, although marked by essential continuities, late antique epigraphy differed from that of previous periods in many important way...