The Second Life of Inscriptions in Late Antique and Byzantine Asia Minor: Some Remarks on the Reuse of the Inscribed Material

Abstract

When the ancient world began to decline, the lands of the Asia Minor were already littered with a plethora of Greek and Latin inscriptions in stone: laws, letters, decrees, honorific, votive or funerary inscriptions, invocations and all kinds of texts which dated from the Archaic period at the earliest to Late Antiquity at the latest. This material had lost its initial purpose, and its content was considered to be incomprehensible or inaccessible to the people. However, new life was given to it during the Late Antique and Byzantine period, 1 when it was used as building material. In their new positions, many of these blocks of stones had their inscribed surfaces visible, and this feature poses a series of questions related to the possible perceptions that Byzantine society had for the written word: a) Did the masons and builders understand that those were inscriptions? b) Did the presence of the text affect the way in which the material was to be treated? c) Can we trace any kind of respect towards these examples of the written word? 2 The textual sources of the Byzantine period only briefly state anything about such matters and in most cases are related to certain and limited cycles of scholars. According to the 10th c. bishop of Kyzikos Theodore, the inscriptions should be acknowledged as evidence of a bygone prosperity-«παλαιᾶς εὐδαιμονίας ἐν μὲν γράμμασιν ἀμυδρὰ λείψανα». 3 Their content, however, was inaccessible for many. Already from the 5 th century, an ancient text recovered in the walls of Chalcedon was treated as an oracle and changed the attitude of emperor Valens towards the city. 4 According