Migration, Mobility and Language Contact in and around the Ancient Mediterranean: (Cambridge Classical Studies)

Migration, Mobility and Language Contact in and around the Ancient Mediterranean is the first volume to show the different ways in which surviving linguistic evidence can be used to track movements of people in the ancient world. Eleven chapters cover a number of case studies, which span the period from the seventh century BC to the fourth century AD, ranging from Spain to Egypt, from Sicily to Pannonia. The book includes detailed study of epigraphic and literary evidence written in Latin and Greek, as well as work on languages which are not so well documented, such as Etruscan and Oscan. There is a subject index and an index of works and inscriptions cited.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction James Clackson, Patrick James, Katherine McDonald, Livia Tagliapatra and Nicholas Zair; 2. Inter-ethnic mobility in pre-Roman Etruria: the contribution of onomastics Daniele F. Maras; 3. Elusive migrants of ancient Italy Elena Isayev; 4. The language of mobile craftsmen in the Western Mediterranean Katherine McDonald and James Clackson; 5. Lost – and found – in transmission: the creation of the Oscan alphabet Karin W. Tikkanen; 6. Mobility and orthography: a contextualisation of variant spellings in the Oscan inscriptions in the Greek alphabet Livia Tagliapietra; 7. The Mamertini in Messina: mobility, migration and mercenaries Nicholas Zair; 8. Migration, identity, and multilingualism in Late Hellenistic Delos Francesco Rovai; 9. Interpretes, negotiatores and the Roman army: mobile professionals and their languages Rachel Mairs; 10. 'HOC PRIMVS VENIT': Italians and others in Egypt before the Caesars Patrick James; 11. Population, migration and language in the city of Rome Olivia Elder.

About the Author :
James Clackson is Professor of Comparative Philology in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge and is one of the foremost scholars of the historical sociolinguistics of Latin and Greek. His major publications include Indo-European Linguistics (Cambridge, 2007), The Blackwell History of the Latin Language (with Geoffrey Horrocks) (2007), A Companion to the Latin Language (2011) and Language and Society in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Cambridge, 2015). He was PI of the AHRC-funded Project 'Greek in Italy' (2013-2018). Patrick James teaches Classics at Haileybury College, Hertfordshire. He served for nine years as an Assistant Editor for the Cambridge Greek Lexicon. Katherine McDonald is a Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter. Her books include Oscan in Southern Italy and Sicily (Cambridge, 2015) and Italy Before Rome: A Sourcebook (forthcoming), written as part of her AHRC-funded project 'Connectivity and Competition: Multilingualism in Ancient Italy'. Livia Tagliapietra is a Junior Research Fellow in Classics at Jesus College, Cambridge. She wrote her Ph.D. thesis as part of the AHRC-funded project 'Greek in Italy'. Her research interests include: ancient Greek linguistics and dialectology, historical sociolinguistics, and the languages and cultures of ancient Italy. Nicholas Zair is a Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Peterhouse. He has written two books: The Reflexes of the Proto-Indo-European Laryngeals in Celtic (2012) and Oscan in the Greek Alphabet (Cambridge, 2016). He is presently working on a third, on Roman imperial inscriptions and sub-elite education, while holding a Pro Futura Scientia Fellowship based in Cambridge and Uppsala.