Review of CIIP vol. 2

BMCR REVIEW:

Walter Ameling, Hannah M. Cotton, Werner Eck, Benjamin Isaac, Alla Kushnir-Stein (ed.), Corpus inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae. Volume II: Caesarea and the Middle Coast: 1121-2160. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2011. Pp. xxiv, 923. ISBN 9783110222173. $255.00.

Contributors: Additional editors: Haggai Misgav, Jonathan Price, and Ada Yardeni

Reviewed by Yaron Z. Eliav, University of Michigan (yzeliav@umich.edu)

Nearly two hundred years have passed since August Böckh launched the first comprehensive, academically standardized corpus of Greek inscriptions – the Corpus inscriptionum Graecarum – in 1815 (although the first volume was not published until 1828). The Eastern Mediterranean, originally seen as the less important periphery of the Roman world, has also claimed its epigraphic corpora – Syria’s Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie, for example, started appearing in 1929. Now, remarkably late if one considers the centrality of this region in Christian and Jewish consciousness, it is the turn of Roman Judaea, known since the second century CE as Syria Palaestina or simply Palestine, with the Corpus inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae (CIIP). Modern Middle Eastern politics has hindered the project: it does not include inscriptions from the region’s central hill or from the southern seashore plains, part and parcel of the political and cultural textures of the area’s past, but now separated by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Academic intrigue caused the leading Greek epigraphist of Judaea/Palaestina – Leah Di Segni – to depart from the team working on the inscriptions, a professional and collegial loss. Only the high quality of the series makes these hurdles somewhat more tolerable.

Werner Eck, a German epigraphist with Mommsenian authority, and Hannah Cotton, a prominent Israeli papyrologist, have assembled an impressive international team to carry out this endeavor. They plan a nine-volume series; the first, a two-book volume on Jerusalem, was published in 2010/12. The current tome, volume II in the series, offers over a thousand inscriptions from the northern parts of the Israeli seashore, a sixty-mile stretch between modern Tel Aviv and Mount Carmel. Caesarea Maritima, the central port city of Roman Palestine and the seat of its governor, dominates the region and its epigraphical output with a total of 952 inscriptions, many of which were already published and discussed in earlier corpora.1 Along with Caesarea the current volume showcases a host of other smaller cities and towns in which inscriptions survived (including Apollonia/Arsuf, Castra Samaritanorum, Dora/Dor, and Sycamina).

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A review of volume 1 is noted here. Background on the project is here and here and links.