Ethnic Identity Museum, written in Edessa in...^2 The corpus of inscriptions from this
region and period, never collected or analysed, includes examples written in
Latin, Greek, Syriac, Jewish Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic; and within this
corpus two categories perhaps stand out as being of exceptional importance:
the extensive mosaic inscriptions from Palestinian synagogues, written in
varying combinations of Hebrew, Jewish Aramaic, and Greek (which thus
represent the fullestdocumentaryevidence for ‘‘Talmudic Judaism’’); and the
small, but extremely significant, corpus of pre-Islamic Arabic texts. The most
important of these are both explicitly Christian, and date from the sixth cen-
tury: a trilingual inscription of.. from Zebed in northern Syria, in
Greek, Syriac, and Arabic; and a bilingual one of.. from the Lejja south
of Damascus.^3
This paper, however, will confine itself, as being a preliminary explo-
ration of some aspects of ethnicity and communal identity in this area, to the
period from Constantine’s acquisition of the eastern provinces to the Coun-
cil of Chalcedon of... Among other things it will briefly consider the
identity attributed, by themselves and others, to ‘‘Arabs’’ (or ‘‘Saracens’’ or
‘‘Ishmaelites’’) in the period up to the mid-fifth century. It will also look,
but again far more briefly than the evidence warrants, at both the Jews and
the Samaritans, seen as ethnic, religious, and linguistic communities. If it is
true, as generally believed, that the ‘‘Jerusalem’’ or ‘‘Palestinian’’ Talmud is a
product of this period, it would be possible in principle to study the repre-
sentations of both Jewish (and Samaritan) identity and non-Jewish identities
as visible in its pages. But no attempt to do this will be made here, nor will
the vast mass of Syriac writing be explored for the same purpose.
The complex interlocking issues of the representation of communal iden-
tities (whether self-ascribed or ascribed to other groups), of religious iden-
tities (for instance, in the representations of heresies, whether Christian or
sub-Christian), and of the use and role of different languages, will thus for
the moment be approached mainly through Greek and Latin texts, primarily
literary works, but also inscriptions.
The relevance of Latin is, of course, the simple fact that the areas con-
cerned are taken as being defined by their having been provinces of the
Roman Empire. That fact has more relevance to the question of ‘‘ethnic iden-
. See W. H. P. Hatch,An Album of Dated Syriac Manuscripts(), no. I. See further
text to nn. – below with notes.
. The known pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions are listed in a paper which discusses in
more detail some aspects of the topic treated here, F. Millar, ‘‘Il ruolo delle lingue semitiche
nel vicino oriente tardo-romano,’’Mediterraneo Antico. (): . For the inscription of
.., see also n. below.