What looks like a volume of epigraphy is really not one. The articles collected here are explicitly not concerned with the words that constitute inscriptions, but rather everything non-verbal and non-textual that is both accompaniment to and context for the words. Although some contributions consider inscriptions as art, calligraphy as such is not treated, but instead the way inscriptions function ‘as constituents of wider visual environments’ (p. 2). That is, inscriptions are not to be treated as disembodied words, their verbal content detached from context. They must rather be taken as a whole, particularly in societies where advanced literacy was a rarity and where for many functionally (or instrumentally) literate individuals, the experience of an inscription was more one of viewing than of reading. Most of the contributions to the volume are squarely medieval or even later in their contents (and are quite worth reading), but three will be of particular value for readers of this journal.

In the first chapter, M. Canepa looks at the interaction between inscriptions and Iranian identity, over a long period of time from the Achaemenids all the way down to the last of the Sasanians – an interaction that reaches across dynastic transitions, linguistic change and different systems of writing. This is perhaps best illustrated by the inscriptions of Naqsh-e Rostam near Persepolis, the necropolis and cult site of the Achaemenid monarchy. There, although the content of the inscriptions of Darius I (d. 486 b.c.) and Shapur I (d. a.d. 270/72) is astonishingly similar, the one is not an imitation of the other. The Old Persian inscription of Darius could not be read by anyone in Shapur's time – both script and language had changed irrevocably. In a chrestomathy or corpus publication, a modern scholar would find significance in the verbal similarities, but would be wrong to do so; the bearer of meaning here was the context in which Shapur placed his words next to the (unintelligible) words of an earlier Persian king. But this example is only a starting point – Canepa reads the inscriptions of the Iranian world as very much part of a visual process of understanding, because they were so often not only unintelligible to viewers, but also stood at such physically inaccessible sites of power that they could not be read even by those with the literary capacity to do so. They acted as reinforcement for rituals conducted at highly charged sites, and they functioned to distribute the royal presence in a virtual fashion. Sometimes, as at Van in modern Turkey, all the inscription states is the fact of its having been carved, but even there, it is making a claim to control a site that had once been the old Urartian heartland.

In Chapter 2 A.M. Yasin treats the ‘materiality’ of Christian graffiti as a way of producing Christian social space. She sees them as important because they reflect actual individuals interacting with built space, instead of the prescriptions for how space was to be used that we commonly find in ritual texts of various sorts. These inscriptions tend by their nature to attract imitation, one graffito functioning like a magnet for others to repeat the gesture. She is careful to remind readers that graffiti in the ancient world have none of the negative (still less the hipster-ish) associations of modern graffiti and that the ancient world clearly regarded graffiti as a recognisable type of unofficial writing. Both points are illustrated by the tendency of graffiti to occur in groups. Religious graffiti, by contrast to political or social comment, are rarely anonymous, but rather openly proclaim its author's identity. This proclamation is an essential element in its communication with heavenly powers, which communication is thereby memorialised and made permanent by the graffito. Similarly, religious graffiti tend not to attract rejoinders, as political and social comment do; instead, they encourage imitation, as does the human scale working on a ‘personal, somatic level’ and encouraging ‘a sense of personal identification with writers’ (p. 51). Religious graffiti, unlike the lived ritual experience at a shrine – became a tangible gesture of a communion that had taken place, and one that encouraged future gestures of the same sort.

The third chapter that will – perhaps surprisingly – interest readers of this journal is J.M. Bloom's piece on the erasure of inscriptions and historical memory in Aghlabid and Zirid North Africa (roughly coterminous with modern Tunisia). The ninth- and tenth-century historical details will be unfamiliar, and tracing the fate of Arabic inscriptions as dynasties succeed each other is likewise more information than the Classicist needs. Bloom suggests that it was the unprecedented density of Latin epigraphic remains in the province of Ifriqiya that led to the surprising and precocious development of monumental inscriptions there by contrast with other Islamic provinces. The reuse of Latin inscribed blocks in the minaret of Kairouan was not casual – the inscriptions are consistently placed upside down, in contrast to the Arabic, in a region where Latin was still spoken into the tenth or eleventh century. Given that the upsurge of inscriptions in Ifriqiya comes at the same time as it does in early medieval Italy, Bloom speculates that it is the density of the epigraphic heritage that led to its reception in those regions, one Christian, the other Islamic, where the Romans had left the most evidence of their presence.

This is an intriguing book that ranges too widely to have much chance of finding an audience to read it from cover to cover, but the quality of individual contributions is beyond dispute.