Latin as an Alien Script in the Medieval Latin East

Most traffic signs in the Middle East today bear city names transcribed in Latin characters, making them familiar to all. It was the opposite in the 7th c. with the Arab conquest and the Hellenisation of the empire. The Latin script disappeared from the monumental graphic landscape of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Progressively until the Ottoman expansion, pilgrims, merchants, crusaders from the West re-established hospices, churches, castles, and placed on monuments and artefacts inscriptions and graffiti using the Latin alphabet, i.e. signs now exogenous.

They attempted through stone, painting, mosaic and metal to appropriate graphically, spatially and symbolically, parts of the East, including the Christian holy places.

The study of these inscriptions faces 3 problems: the lack of a comprehensive corpus, the concept of Latin East suggesting a uniform Latinisation, conflating writing, language, culture and religious rite, and limited to the crusades, and a perspective that views Latin epigraphy as something static and unchanging, not taking into account the plurigraphic environment of the East.

GRAPH-EAST aims to change this paradigm by exploring Latin epigraphic writing in the Eastern Mediterranean (7th-16th c.), from Greece and Turkey to Egypt via the coast of Palestine-Syria and Cyprus, in contact, interaction, and competition with Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Armenian, Syriac etc. inscriptions, reflecting the political, religious, social and cultural issues of the area.

The project proposes an innovative study of an outstanding body of texts, an estimated 2,500 inscriptions and graffiti, many unpublished, that opens a new field of research.

It aims at understanding the representation and practice of the Latin script, alien in the Byzantine and Islamic empires, providing a connected history of epigraphy in this area, and analysing this migrant Latin writing through the prism of cultural transfers between West and East, with an international and pluridisciplinary team.