Listening to Stones
Listening to Stones
Orality and Emotions in Ancient Inscriptions
This chapter explores how the gamut of responses to the presence of an inscription has to include not just sight and touch but also imagination and vocalisation. Being meant to be read aloud, they convey a reader's voice as well as that of the inscription itself or that of the dead person commemorated on a gravestone. Even more immediate is the potential impact when a person's actual words are preserved and displayed. They may be in direct speech, illustrated by letters and confessions, or in indirect speech as records of manumissions, minutes of meetings, or jokes. They may alternatively be performative speech, in the form of acclamations, formal declarations, oaths, prayers or hymns; and can equally be reports of oral events such as meetings or even public demonstrations. They can also be couched in various forms of emotional language, whether uttered by individuals (graffiti, prayers or the edicts of angry rulers) or more collectively and formally in secular or religious acclamations, and even in decrees of state. A final section emphasises the need for practitioners of the discipline of epigraphy to be missionaries — to spread the word about the value of visible words.
Keywords: epigraphic genres, performative speech, imagination, vocalisation, confessions, acclamations, oral events, oaths, prayers, graffiti
British Academy Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.