University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2017 The Writing On The Wall: Inscriptions And Memory In The Temples Of Late Antique Greece And Asia Minor Anna Marie Sitz University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Classics Commons, and the History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons Recommended Citation Sitz, Anna Marie, "The Writing On The Wall: Inscriptions And Memory In The Temples Of Late Antique Greece And Asia Minor" (2017). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2886. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2886 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2886 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. The Writing On The Wall: Inscriptions And Memory In The Temples Of Late Antique Greece And Asia Minor Abstract This dissertation documents late antique (fourth to seventh century CE) Christian responses to earlier, pagan inscriptions at sanctuaries, as seen in the archaeological record. I argue that Christians in Greece and Asia Minor neither ignored nor unthinkingly destroyed older inscriptions, but rather were generally tolerant toward these legible reminders of the pagan past, selectively editing them only occasionally. In order to clarify the types of inscriptions that Christians encountered on temple walls and architraves, I have assembled the first catalog of inscriptions on temples, which er veals that the majority of texts inscribed on sacred structures between the seventh century BCE and the third century CE were, counterintuitively, not about religion, but rather civic matters: political privileges, economic/territorial rights, and elite social structures.