Writing on the Wall by Stern Karen B

Author:Stern, Karen B.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

Map 4. Restored plan of the City of Aphrodisias with the city grid. Reproduced courtesy of New York University Excavations at Aphrodisias (H. Mark).

Graffiti found in civic spaces, nevertheless, comprise the most abundant evidence for Jewish presence in Aphrodisias. Most graffiti from the city, of course, bear little relationship to local Jewish populations. Throughout Aphrodisias, graffiti of diverse genres total in the hundreds and outnumber examples found in most other cities of the Roman East.43 Their contents range from lewd images and texts to love poems and devotional and symbolic writings. They appear everywhere: in the stadium and markets, around the town hall, inside the Aphrodite temple and theatre.44 But a percentage of these graffiti, chronicled principally by Reynolds and Tannenbaum, Roueché, and Chaniotis, include words and symbols of Jewish identification.

Several examples of graffiti associated with Jews were discovered inside a covered building jointly identified as the Odeon and a Bouleterion (henceforth, for brevity, the Odeon), a structure which resembles a small theatre, situated on the northern boundary of the civic agora (Map 4).45 Marble seats were placed throughout the building, which had an open interior plan that was covered in antiquity. The multipurpose public space probably served a number of overlapping functions during its varied three- to five-hundred-year history. In earlier periods, it may have housed public council meetings of the boulē, but also competitions of oratory and drama.46 Changes to the architecture of the space in the middle of the fifth century, combined with a contemporaneous dedicatory inscription that calls the building a palaestra, suggest that the building assumed two additional uses in subsequent periods, as both a space for “competitions” (competitive entertainments) and as a “place of training” (in a pedagogical sense).47 The local boulē thus may have continued to convene in the space, but the additional appearance of statuary inside it in the fifth century suggests its supplementary uses as an intellectual gathering place for combined expositions of philosophy, poetry, and rhetoric.48

Graffiti discovered throughout the building mostly date to this last phase of use in the fifth through seventh centuries CE, when competitive entertainments and intellectual performances took place inside. Textual and figural markings were discovered throughout different areas of the structure: around the stage, in the portico post scaenam, in the paradoi, and still others in and around the cavea, where additional markers, including letters and abbreviations, were also carved at intervals throughout.49 The texts that nominate Jews fall exclusively into a category of non-monumental inscriptions,50 discovered in the area where spectators sat and marked seats, in and around the semicircular seating area, which extends from the “corridor around the rim of the orchestra to an upper corridor.”51 Their inelegant paleography and carving prompted Reynolds to declare them as “poorly cut”; most are carved in different hands, and some appear to be partially reused through reinscription.52 Just like the analogous inscriptions from Miletos, however, seating labels from the Odeon document ancient seating patterns, because they were discovered in places of their original deposit.53

Several graffiti explicitly

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