Departmental Lecture: Conor Whately (University of Winnipeg)

Join us in welcoming Conor Whately from the University of Winnipeg for his lecture on
Hopes, Fears, and Raids in Roman Arabia.

September 27, 4:30 pm
125 Queens Park
Lillian Massey Building, Room 220

One of the most incredible bodies of evidence for any region and period of antiquity across the wider Mediterranean world is the mass of Safaitic graffiti found across the Black Desert in southern Syria and Jordan. Numbering in the many tens of thousands (at least so far) and widely available thanks to a fantastic database based out of the University of Oxford (OCIANA), the graffiti provide invaluable insight into the lives, both inner and outer, of the nomadic people who lived on the fringes of the settled, urbanized Roman world. Although many record little more than the names of the inscribers, some record datable historical events, and specialists have dated the collection to between the first century BCE and the fourth CE. Besides assorted references to political events and occasional conflicts, there are many references to the world of raiding, both the good and the bad (from the perspective of the inscribers), from the target and even the locations of raids, to the emotional impact on its victims. In this presentation, I survey the graffiti as a whole, with a focus on the evidence for raiding, especially what it reveals of the psychological impact on its practitioners and its victims.