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The corpus of Meroitic inscriptions is divided into several categories, but only the royal inscriptions are characterized by narrations. Most translated words and clauses suggest that those narrations consist of descriptions of religious events or reports of wars. The typical report of war refers to the punishments the king inflicted on the captives: ‘slaughtering the men’‚ ‛enslaving the women’‚ ‛taking their (y) emoqe’‚ Often, these clauses are preceded by the ethnonym of the defeated enemies. The same phraseology is seen in Napatan texts, particularly in the inscriptions of the last Napatan kings, Anlamani, Amannote-erike, Harsiyotef and Nastasen, who are thought to have conducted military campaign against the Eastern and Southern regions of the kingdom of Kush in Nubia. Similarities can be found with some Aksumite royal texts. In RIÉ I 185 I e II, Ezana, after subjugating the enemies, deported the captives with their livestock and supplied them with goods and food before relocating them to a new place. The relocation of captives seems also to be a practice of some Meroitic kings as described in two Meroitic royal texts: the inscription of Akinidad, at Hamadab (REM1003) and the inscription of Kharamadoye, at Kalabsha (REM0094). The most interesting aspects include not only the similarities among the reports of wars in Meroitic and Aksumite royal texts but also the records of displacements of some populations under decree of the central power.

In the present work, a recently found monument fragment from Toniná is analyzed. Notwithstanding the brief glyphic text, the fragment provides valuable information about one of the least known moments in the history of this city. Among other topics, the duration of the reign of the so-called “Ruler 8” is re-assessed and in turn allows us to specify part of the dynastic sequence of Toniná towards its last years of splendor.

Relatively few examples of Palaeohispanic writing have been recovered from the Vasconic territories of present-day Navarre, leading to the assumption that the Vascones were a pre-literate society. Here, the authors report on an inscription on a bronze hand recovered at the Iron Age site of Irulegi (Aranguren Valley, Navarre) in northern Spain. Its detailed linguistic analysis suggests that the script represents a graphic subsystem of Palaeohispanic that shares its roots with the modern Basque language and constitutes the first example of Vasconic epigraphy. The text inscribed on this artefact, which was found at the entrance of a domestic building, is interpreted as apotropaic, a token entreating good fortune.

We present a photogrammetric model and new line drawing of Sacul Stela 3 at the ancient Maya site of Sacul 1, Guatemala. Although virtually illegible in person and from photographs, the inscription on the eroded stela can largely be read or reconstructed in the 3D model. Our reading confirms a previous argument that the kingdom based at Sacul 1 was attacked in A.D. 779 by forces from the site of Ucanal. Traveling by night, warriors from Sacul retaliated with a raid at dawn next day on an unidentified site and, months later, followed up with an attack on Ucanal itself. The same narrative appears substantially on a well-known monument, Ixkun Stela 2, but there are differences between the two texts which suggest that Sacul and Ixkun had their own sculptors and record-keepers and which offer insights into the implications of verbs (pul, “to burn” and ch'ak, “to chop”) commonly attested in Classic Maya accounts of war. We then present the results of GIS analysis which suggests that the site area of El Rosario (between Sacul 1 and Ucanal) is an appealing candidate for the unidentified site mentioned in the stela text.

Between 1994 and 2008, a team composed of students from the Epigraphy Section of the Student Historical Society at the Jagiellonian University, doctoral candidates, and young scholars, led by Wojciech Drelicharz from the Department of Auxiliary Sciences of History at the Institute of History of the Jagiellonian University, conducted an inventory of surviving epigraphic and heraldic monuments in the eastern territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, now part of the western Ukraine. Thanks to this work, an important part of Poland’s historical heritage was preserved for future generations.

Abstract This article surveys epigraphic evidence for Damaris, Damares and Damari(o)n to show that these are distinctively Spartan or Laconian names. It rejects the hypothesis that Damaris is a Lukan construction from Homeric δάµαρ (wife) or a typical name for a courtesan. Positively, it suggests that the woman named Damaris in Acts 17:34 could be imagined as a member of the Voluseni family, a prominent Spartan family connected with the Athenian elite. Finally, it examines the rhetorical force that a recognizably Spartan name could have in the narrative of Acts.

The Novallas Bronze may be considered one of the most important epigraphic finds in recent years in Spain. It is a fragment of a public document datable to the last decades of the 1st c. BCE, composed in the Celtiberian language but written in the Latin alphabet. The Novallas Bronze is not only one of the latest inscriptions composed in this language – over half a century later than the famous inscriptions from Contrebia Belaisca – but also the longest Celtiberian document written in the Latin alphabet known thus far. This paper offers a complete publication of this exceptional document, as well as an analysis of the principal developments that the artifact illuminates and the consequent implications for the transformations that the Celtiberian people underwent during the transition from Republic to Empire, with particular focus on the process of Latinization.

Study of Roman Sicily is well established and has a long tradition, with the two most authoritative and well-established epigraphic corpora –CIL X (1883) and IG XIV (1890)– dating to the late 19th century. While I.Sicily was conceived to offer easy and up-to-date access to the evergrowing but increasingly scattered epigraphic evidence of Sicily, its digital nature also enables the adoption of new approaches and the pursuit of novel research questions. The open-access dataset has recently been expanded to include institutional annotations, which hold great promise for research, particularly in fields that rely on extensive and detailed datasets, such as administrative and onomastic history (prosopographic annotation will follow). This paper aims to demonstrate both the potential and the limitations of a digitally annotated dataset as a tool for historical research, through a preliminary case study on the practice of dedications to the Roman emperor in Sicily. Recent scholarship suggests that provincial subjects also contributed to shaping the notion and the expectations around emperorship, which were not only imposed from above. The data-driven approach facilitated by an annotated corpus is well-suited to the new bottom-up perspective, but it is not without methodological pitfalls, which will be highlighted in this paper.

Drawing on theoretical understandings of the relationship between civil society and the state, the authors argue that the collapse of the kingdoms of Piedras Negras and Yaxchilan in the ninth century AD resulted from the same political processes that permitted the expansion of dynastic power in preceding centuries. Populations initially clustered around the dynastic capitals of these kingdoms, where daily spheres of interaction facilitated trust building among its residents. The image and performance of the polity was focused on the monarch, and participation in communal efforts, such as construction, warfare, and feasting, nurtured generalized trust within society as a whole, strengthening the polity. As populations expanded over the course of the Classic period and polities grew in territorial extent, spheres of interaction were more diffuse and trust-building efforts were increasingly focused on activities and individuals outside of the king and his court. The result was a breakdown of uniform trust across the kingdom and the failure of dynastic polities. Beyond a study of historical particularities in two kingdoms, this article is intended to suggest ways to more broadly frame interpretations of political processes in Maya polities within the broader context of ancient and modern complex societies worldwide. The model may also be applicable in other cultural contexts where emergent states contended with the challenges of maintaining coherency across an expanding territory.