The three instalments reviewed here represent the first two volumes of a new corpus of the Hellenistic and Roman inscriptions of contemporary Israel/Palestine that seeks to break the traditional disciplinary boundaries between classical and oriental scholarship by placing texts side by side irrespective of the language or script employed. These conventional barriers have proved easier to surmount than contemporary political ones, however. At the outset in 1999 it was planned that the corpus, totalling about 12,000 texts, would comprise eight regional volumes and a final volume collecting the milestones of the entire area. Political considerations have subsequently forced Volumes VII (Samaria) and VIII (Golan) to be omitted from the schedule, though space will be left in the numeration to allow for their eventual integration. In terms of funding, and largely also of personnel, the project is a major German-Israeli collaboration, with a sizeable editorial team and even longer list of contributors, amongst whom harmony has not always reigned, resulting in occasional notes of dissension and a rather curious appendix: CIIP I.2, pp. 75, 415, 523–70 (see Eck in Rationes Rerum 1 (2013), 17–38). Despite such hiccups, publication is proceeding at a commendable pace, with Volume III (South Coast) advertised for April 2014 and Volume IV (Judaea/Idumaea) anticipated by the end of the year.
In general, the sequencing of the inscriptions follows the established pattern for comprehensive epigraphic corpora, grouping texts by community, then beginning with the religious and finishing with epitaphs and instrumentum domesticum, but in both these volumes there are deviations from the basic template. As signalled by the subtitles to the volumes, English has been adopted as the language of commentary throughout. The individual entries adhere to very high standards of clarity and user-friendliness. Each numbered text is given a (varyingly informative) descriptive heading, followed by physical and palaeographical description, provenance and location history, diplomatic text, an apparatus criticus listing divergent readings (plus a transliteration for non-Greek or Latin texts), an edited text, an English translation, and a succinct commentary, supported by a specific bibliography, and is accompanied wherever possible by an illustration integrated within the entry (but cf. CIIP I.2, 975, for which the documentation is oddly defective in several respects). Another welcome feature is the provision of historical introductions to each community by Ben Isaac, providing the literary and archaeological context for the epigraphic evidence. Comprehensive indices have been deferred until completion of the series but each volume is provided with a basic name index.
As demonstrated by both Volumes I and II, the collection of and commentary on the full range of epigraphy is a great boon to scholarship. While most of the texts for Jerusalem and its immediate environs have been previously published, the assembly of the material from very disparate sources is a major achievement in itself. For sound intellectual reasons the material has been grouped according to the three distinct phases of the city's life: from Alexander to a.d. 70 (CIIP I.1); from a.d. 70 to the emperor Constantine; and from Constantine to the Arab conquest (both CIIP 1.2). This arrangement has the advantage of highlighting the very different epigraphic profiles of these phases. Numerically the texts of the Hellenistic and early Roman phase outnumber those of the subsequent two phases put together. The overwhelming majority (CIIP I.1, 18–608; I.2, 1088–90, 1118–20) belongs to the single category of labels to stone ossuaries in Hebrew/Aramaic and/or Greek from the cemeteries dug into the hills around the city. Surveying these en masse, the reader is struck by the contrast between the elegant execution of the carved façades and the basic and often careless nature of the inscriptions, which in two cases (33 and 576) were so inconspicuous that they were missed by earlier editors. In this company the notorious ‘brother of Jesus’ ossuary (531) is revealed as unremarkable. Although the majority of those named on the ossuaries have Semitic names, the extent of Hellenization is evidenced by the strong admixture of Greek names and the significant minority of chests inscribed bilingually or exclusively in Greek. Of these about twenty are transliterated Latin names, including a couple of possibly North Syrian origin who may even be Roman citizens (416, 423–4). More surprising at this date are three Jewish names inscribed in Latin letters: Iohana (40), Simon (391) and Marion (570).
The paltry number of texts of a public character before a.d. 70 (CIIP I.2, 2–17) is testament to the thoroughness of the destruction of much of the urban area by the Roman conquest. Highlights among the few survivals include the famous warning notices in Greek to gentiles to keep out of the temple (CIIP I.1, 2), the Hebrew sign marking ‘the place of trumpeting’ (5) and the foundation stone of Theodotos' synagogue for visiting Jews (9). The subsequent two-and-a-half centuries during which Jerusalem became a Roman military base and then the colonia of Aelia Capitolina, of which the topography remains mysterious and controversial (CIIP I.1, pp. 18–26), is poorly documented epigraphically. There are fewer than eighty texts (CIIP I.2, 705–83), all but one of them in either Latin or Greek and over one-third of them public texts of one kind or another. In the last tranche, coinciding with the period of Christian hegemony, Latin is now almost completely displaced by Greek, there is a very minor return of Hebrew/Aramaic, and a more typical ratio of funerary texts to other categories. New, religiously motivated, immigration is signalled by a scattering of texts in exotic languages, notably Armenian and Georgian (of which CIIP I.2, 973 is one of the earliest witnesses).
For the first section of Part 2, the primary responsibility for commentary falls to Werner Eck. All but two of the small number of newly published texts are fragments. The two exceptions are one Latin text found in re-use in the Damascus gate, further testament to building activity by the resident legio X Fretensis (CIIP I.2, 727), and a Greek epitaph naming one C. Rusticius Apollonius (746). Despite opening with a copy of Anastasius' law on the duces and annona militaris in the diocese of Oriens, known from five other examples (784), it is the ecclesiastical establishment that predominates in the final chronological section. The primary commentator's baton now passes to Leah Di Segni, who provides helpful introductions to each of the locations where texts of ecclesiastical or religious character have been found on site. Here the most historically significant is the list of relics of Palestinian martyrs deposited by the empress Eudocia to consecrate the Church of St Stephen, 15 June 460, with colons neatly punctuating the list of names (816). The Bethany cave, whose walls are covered in Greek and Latin graffiti (842.1–67), is convincingly identified with the ‘hospitium of Martha’, visited by the pilgrim Paula in a.d. 385 (Jerome, Ep. 108.12). Of the twenty or so novelties in the late antique section, most notable are a mosaic floor with quotations from the Psalms from a sixth/seventh-century building outside the Jaffa gate, identified by the excavators as a hostel (810.1–3); the epitaphs of a cantor and lector (887) and of deacons (977) of the Holy Anastasis, the cathedral of the patriarch; an epitaph confirming the use of the term monachousa for nun (984); an altar table donated by a comes [?Domi]tius (1024); and, from the secular sphere, epitaphs for a maker of breeches (898) and for a doctor (990).
The second volume collects the inscriptions of the ‘middle coast’ (of Israel) from north of Tel Aviv to Haifa, corresponding to the northern coastal area of ancient Judaea/Palaestina, from Apollonia northwards to Sycamina. Within this, however, the communities are arranged alphabetically ‘[f]or the reader's convenience’ (CIIP II, p. v), which is questionable since it causes the essay on the boundary between Judaea and Syria (pp. 831–6) to split the discussion of the two communities that certainly lay to the north of that line. More imagination is evident within the organization of the entry that occupies most of the volume, that for Caesarea, the city founded by Herod and administrative hub successively of Roman Judaea, Syria Palaestina and Palaestina Prima. Here the topographical arrangement seen in the ecclesiastical section of CIIP I.2 is reprised for the supposed Chapel of St Paul (CIIP II, 1153–67) and the two government headquarters (1266–76, 1282–1344). The editors acknowledge the extent to which they benefited from C. M. Lehmann and K. Holum's Greek and Latin Inscriptions of Caesarea Maritima (2000). Nevertheless CIIP II contains more than double the number of entries for the equivalent material, largely thanks to the inclusion of about 200 previously unpublished fragments turned up by excavations since the 1990s.
The infamous inscription recording Pontius Pilate's rebuilding of a Tiberieum, is interpreted, following G. Alföldy, as referring to a lighthouse (1277). Highlights among the less fragmentary inedita are a series of late antique texts: a mosaic from the theatre commemorating the euergetism of a comes Iulittus (1265); a dedication in the governor's praetorium that pairs Constantius I's gentilicia with Galerius' cognomen (1272), to which confusion the commentary adds by attributing ‘Aurelius’ instead of ‘Galerius’ to the younger Maximianus (p. 222); two lead curse tablets, one from the hippodrome (1679–80); and the seal of a Persian lady (1724), perhaps from the Sasanian occupation of a.d. 614–27. The Jewish community is visible through menorahs and Semitic names in Greek epitaphs and some notable Hebrew texts from Late Antiquity (1145–7). Up the coast at Dor is the hotly debated epitaph of T. Mucius M. f. Clemens, who ended his career as an eparchos st[ratou?] for Agrippa II (2123). Strangely the translation omits the filiation, which is clear in the inscription, and the editors fail to report the supplement st[ratiōtōn] of SEG 36, 1322 or consider the alternative st[ratopedōn], i.e. praefectus militum/castrorum. Finally from Castra Samaritanorum comes a warning against onomastic assumptions: a ring of one Sabatius that, without its invocation of Christ, would probably have been ascribed to a Jew (2113B). Until full indexing is provided, scholars forced to engage in the salutary task of browsing these superb volumes will certainly learn much they had not anticipated.
