Inscriptions Show Ancient Jerusalem Was a Global City
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Walking through the streets of Jerusalem today, one hears a myriad of languages: Hebrew and Arabic, of course, but also English, French, German and Russian. Modern Jerusalem is a city with an international flavor.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the epigraphic record shows that this was true also in antiquity, especially during the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods (fourth century B.C.E. to seventh century C.E.) when foreign languages like Greek and Latin were used alongside, and sometimes even supplanted, the local Hebrew and Aramaic that were spoken (and written) in Judea. Even before the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E., for example, Greek was commonly used for public inscriptions, such as the signs warning Gentiles not to enter the inner court of the Temple (a fragmentary example found in Jerusalem in 1935 is shown above). Hebrew and Aramaic were used primarily for informal, private inscriptions, such as those that often adorned Jewish burial boxes, or ossuaries.
These and more than 1,100 other Jerusalem inscriptions are catalogued in the recently published first volume of a long-term epigraphic project that aims to publish all of the inscriptions ever found in Israel and the West Bank that were written during the thousand-year period from Alexander the Great to the prophet Mohammad. The Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae (CIIP), as the collection is called, includes inscriptions written in the entire range of languages and dialects used in the land of Israel in antiquity, from Hebrew and various forms of Aramaic, to Greek and Latin, to early Arabic and various Caucasian languages. Ultimately, the comprehensive, multilingual collection will consist of nine volumes, each of which will catalog the inscriptions recovered from a specific area or region of Israel. The first volume, published in two parts, covers inscriptions from Jerusalem and surrounding areas.
According to Hannah Cotton, professor of classics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who has been one of the project’s lead editors since it began in 1999, the CIIP allows the inscriptions to be viewed and studied in the diverse, multicultural context in which they were written. “We seek to present the historic truth of local linguistic diversity as attested by the many surviving written documents,” she said. “We depict the epigraphic evidence as it exists, as an authentic expression of varied and different cultures and societies that existed together, in the Middle East in general, and the land of Israel in particular.”
Walking through the streets of Jerusalem today, one hears a myriad of languages: Hebrew and Arabic, of course, but also English, French, German and Russian. Modern Jerusalem is a city with an international flavor.
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