This was one of the most insightful study opportunities during the programme, “Agency, Authorship, and Appearance.” On Wednesday 7 May, our group spent an entire afternoon in the epigraphical room of the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia, guided by Panayiotis Panayides (Τμήμα Αρχαιοτήτων Κύπρου/ Department of Antiquities Cyprus) and other staff members.
This room displays exemplary inscriptions that document the coexistence and evolution of writing systems in Cyprus. When carefully chosen texts in Cypro-syllabic, Greek and Latin scripts are displayed side by side, they can be seen and compared. A careful observer will also notice differences in letter shapes, text layout, and support preparation in Greek alphabetic texts from the Archaic, Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods.
During our workshop, we began with an overview of the collection and a brief discussion of its contents. This was followed by a practical examination of letter shapes and carving techniques by a group of doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers who had been invited to participate in our research project. First, they used a specially adapted questionnaire — the same one we use to describe individual inscriptions from other sites — to mark different aspects of the visual appearance of the inscriptions and the textual formulae. This questionnaire uses descriptors from a controlled vocabulary developed in our project, with precise terms chosen for each physical feature of inscribed objects.
They then proceeded to conduct a detailed study of scripts. Using the raking light technique and close-zoom digital photography, they documented the structure of the letter grooves and, in some cases, the traces of the individual carving tools used. The shapes of the letters were described using the STONE-MASTERS project’s thesaurus of letter shapes.
The results present the basic characteristics of the workshops that produced the selected inscriptions. Using controlled vocabularies ensures that the results of this study can be compared with our other findings.
The ERC STONE-MASTERS project team would like to express their sincere gratitude to the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus for giving us the opportunity to view the collection, use our research instruments and spend as much time as we needed in the room. Access to such a wonderful study space is a unique privilege, and we hope that Cyprus’s epigraphical heritage will soon be given even more prominence in the new museum building, which is currently under construction.
Photos by Amal Azzi, Marina Bastero Acha, Pawel Nowakowski, and Nathan Websdale.
