Building on recent studies of classical resilience, this article scrutinizes the second-century BC inscriptions on the monument of Aemilius Paullus at Delphi, erected in 167 BC. By analysing the epigraphic reuse of its surfaces, the article posits that the Roman pillar played a crucial political role in the second century BC. It functioned as a material device used by Delphi, the Amphictyony and pro-Roman Greek agents to consolidate their interstate authority and legitimacy amidst the intricate military dominance of Rome and the influence of the Greek leagues. These inscriptions reveal the interplay of new pro-Roman elites, interstate arbitrations, Greek memorialization and Roman provincialization, all converging to signify the rapid transformations of this era. Consequently, this study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of Greek ideological adaptations to Roman power during this period.

This article offers a full commentary on the Greek inscription Αοὐρελιους found at the Garamantian site of Zinkekra, in the central Sahara. The inscription is important because it is the only known example of Greco-Roman writing produced in the ancient Sahara. The article begins with an examination of the writing as a piece of textual evidence, arguing on linguistic and historical grounds that the author was a native Latin speaker from North Africa, probably Tripolitania, who wrote in Greek for reasons of prestige. The article then studies the inscription within its wider geographic and material context, as one carving among many at Zinkekra’s sacred environment, and as evidence of a Roman in the Garamantian heartlands. It hypothesises that the carver was a trader who ventured into the Fazzan to buy or sell goods as part of active Saharan exchange networks with Rome, the Garamantes, and sub-Saharan Africa.

Photographs of a previously unpublished Maya vase, smuggled out of Belize in 1979, reside in the Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. This vase, alongside dozens of others that I cataloged in the Dumbarton Oaks archives, is an example of the so-called “Holmul Dancer theme” in Maya ceramics. Re-examining this tradition in light of the new information from the vase, and from other recent discoveries, reveals how ceramic artists of the early ninth century used the dancing maize god as an allegory for the political landscape they witnessed rapidly changing around them. The vase also provides a case study in the potentially salubrious outcomes of archival and provenance research on looted materials. Should the vessel ever re-emerge, this research provides supporting evidence necessary to repatriate it to Belize.

In most modern translations of ancient Greek texts, the ‘Spartiates’ and the ‘Lakedaimonians’ have become inseparable and interchangeable. The term ‘Spartan’ is now routinely used as a generic, all-encompassing label, often for the sake of simplicity and accessibility. This interchangeability of the two terms is certainly not a modern phenomenon, with considerable conflation of the two occurring in Greek texts from the fifth century onwards. This begs the question, how would the ‘Spartans’ themselves wish to be identified? The purpose of the present paper is firstly to present the epigraphic evidence for use of the terms ‘Spartiate’ and ‘Lakedaimonian’ from the mid-sixth to the late fourth centuries BCE, the period of Spartan dominance and eventual decline. The fluctuating and developing usage of these two terms over time is then considered with regard to the evolution of Spartan self-presentation.

This article reviews the evidence for mobility within, and into, the Roman province of Britannia, assesses the current state of the field and sets out how current approaches should be developed and improved. Mobility was foundational to the Roman empire and its provinces, and this paper demonstrates that Britannia provides a rich case study of the breadth, complexity and challenges of the datasets, methodologies and history of investigation of this central topic to understanding the Roman world. The review provides overviews of textual, epigraphic, material and bioarchaeological evidence and interpretive frameworks. Finally, it sets out a vision for holistic and ethical future archaeological research on this topic, especially in light of the bioarchaeological revolution in recent decades and rapidly developing datasets.

This report discusses the chronology of the sixth-century hieroglyphic stairways of El Resbalón that has confounded prior investigations. These narratives contain historical and deep-time sections. The former follow regular chronological and syntactical conventions. The deep-time sections of the texts present multiple aberrations that appear to be rhetorical or ritual devices, rather than calculation mistakes. The departure from the conventional chronological and syntactical patterns coincides with a localized political narrative that diverges from other Classic Maya inscriptions.

Maya glyphic texts from the Classic period (250–900 CE) typically chronicle the exploits of historical or divine characters; everyday or functional records are rare. Here, the authors offer a reconstruction and transcription of a ‘microtext’ painted on an interior wall of Structure 10K-2 at the site of Xultun, Guatemala. The text records a unique astronomical formula that concludes with a name, attributing the work to an individual named Sak Tahn Waax (‘White-chested Fox’). To date, this is the only known example of a Classic Maya mathematician directly credited for their work, attesting to the value of its intellectual authorship.

The idea that nobles could embody deities through impersonation was crucial to representations of power among the Classic-period Maya (a.d. 250–900). The final section of the Sabana Piletas Hieroglyphic Stairway (Campeche, Mexico), featuring a tripartite record of deity impersonation, is one of the clearest Late Classic manifestations of this tradition. However, the third impersonation formula has remained difficult to read, hindering its integration into broader discussions. This article offers a new epigraphic analysis, focusing on the three impersonated deities and the prepositional constructions that mark the contexts of impersonation. This article identifies the third deity as a form of Jun Ajaw whose impersonation emphasizes the ballgame, complementing two other impersonations that foreground warfare (the Sun God) and lordship (the Water Serpent). Comparing this passage to parallels on the Cuychen vase (Belize) and the Xultun murals (Guatemala), I argue that such groupings of impersonation formulae serve to conceptually demarcate key aspects of rulership. With its unique triplet of extended impersonation formulae, the Sabana Piletas inscription exemplifies how Late Classic texts could use impersonation to articulate what it meant to be a ruler, notably placing the ballgame in the same ideological register as waging war and governing.

The excavations at Liberty Southwark (LDM21) carried out by Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) have yielded one of the largest assemblages of Roman wall-painted plaster in London. In the assessment and reassembling of the plasters, the building material specialist discovered two inscriptions unique to Roman Britain and likely to the study of Roman wall paintings in general. Pit (423) yielded what looks to be a signature by the painter while (135) produced a near-complete Greek alphabet scored into the plaster. Both inscriptions were analysed in the greater context of the Roman world in which comparisons of similar inscriptions were made.

This article reconstructs and contextualizes two inscriptions commemorating the Aqquyunlu occupation of Mardin in 835/1432 at the newly built main gate linking the town to the citadel. Inscription 835 Mardin was formerly displayed on three courses of stones in a framed area surmounting the gate facing the town. The gate collapsed at some point in the twentieth century. Due to the inclusion of its former location in the active military base inside Mardin’s citadel, it is unclear whether some of the stones displaying inscription 835 Mardin still exist among the rubble below its former location. Even before the collapse of the gate, the stones of inscription 835 Mardin had been reset out of their original sequence as documented in a unique photograph taken in 1911, which enables the reconstruction presented in this article. The gate surmounted by inscription 835 Mardin was closed with an inscribed monumental lock that was commissioned immediately after the Aqquyunlu occupation of Mardin. This lock was formerly held as #378 in the collection of the Çinili Köşk of the Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi in Istanbul. Notwithstanding repeated inquiries via email and on site with the administration of the museum, it cannot currently be located and appears to have been lost. Accordingly, the edition suggested in the present article builds on an earlier edition by Halil Etem [Eldem] as checked against additional photographs published in other scholarly publications until 1952 and the reconstructed historical and epigraphic context presented in the present article. Together, both inscriptions constitute a unique and coherent epigraphic programme declaring the commitment of the newly established Aqquyunlu administration to rule in accordance with Islamic normativities and the supra-regional standard of the Timurid ruler Shāhrukh, who is named as qara ʿUthmān’s overlord in both inscriptions.

This article examines a set of important but unpublished shields from Malla, Nepal, discovered in the Patan Palace Complex, by combining philology with the study of material culture. The four shields, which display images of Hindu deities, are the only known instance of inscribed textiles in pre-modern Newar art history. The paper first deciphers the shields’ inscriptions to explain their overall importance for scholarship, and then seeks to uncover their iconographic scheme by studying the objects alongside unpublished liturgical texts in order to prove that they were commissioned for the worship of Ugracaṇḍā, a goddess key to Newar conceptions of kingship. I delve into the provenance and historical background of the shields and explore broader Indic ideas of the divinization of weapons to explain the ritual function and symbolic significance of these objects for royal celebrations. In doing so, we also posit the specific political context behind their creation.