Multilingualism and Social Belonging in the Late Antique and Early Islamic Near East

Two-Day Conference

Provinces and Empires: Islamic Egypt in the Antique World

Administrative Transformations, Pluralistic Society and Competing Memories

2nd conference organized by Roger Bagnall & Robert Hoyland (ISAW), Soubhi Bouderbala (Tunis University), and Sylvie Denoix (CNRS)

Program

Monday, June 9th

9:45 - Roger Bagnall : Welcome

1.    Passages and interfaces
1.1 Decline/interferences of languages

10:00 - Scott Johnson, Dumbarton Oaks and Georgetown University
East of Byzantium Revisited: The Status of Greek in a Multilingual Mediterranean

10:45 -  Coffee break

11:15 - Janneke de Jong,  Leiden University
The decreasing role of Greek in the documentary culture of Early Islamic Egypt

12:00 - Christian Sahner, Princeton University
Issues of language and translation in martyrological texts

12:45 - Lunch

1.2  Textual influences and translations: the case of legal documents

2:00 -  Robert Hoyland, ISAW
The use of Arabic and Greek in the Nessana papyri

2:45 - Jelle Bruning, Leiden University
Qurʾānic Arabic and the formulary of dhikr ḥaqq-s from the Sufyanid period

3:30 –  Tea

4:00 - Mathieu Tillier, Institut français du Proche-Orient (IFPO), Beirut
From Ishoʿbokht to Ibn al-Ṭayyib: the Translation of Syriac Canon Law into Arabic in the Eleventh Century CE

4:45 -  Eve Krakowski, Yale University, Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Postdoctoral Fellow, Program in Judaic Studies
Multilingualism as legal strategy in Cairo Geniza documents

 

Tuesday, June 10th

2.   Naming places, persons and groups in multilingual contexts

9:30 - Audrey Dridi, Université  de Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne, UMR 8167 Orient & Méditerranée
The case of Fossaton and Babylon during the first century of Islamic Egypt

10:15 -  Sobhi Bouderbala, University of Tunis
جند – Μωαγαρίται and the Military System in Egypt in the 1st Century of Islamic Rule

11:00 - Coffee break

3. New approaches for an old documentation
3.1 Multilingual lexicography

11:30 - Dylan Burns, DDGLC
On the Perils of Bilingualism in Graeco-Coptic Lexicography,  with special attention to Nag Hammadi Codex VII:  A Report from the Project Database and Dictionary of Greek Loanwords in Coptic

12:15 - Sobhi Bouderbala, Audrey Dridi, Alain Delattre
PAPYVOC: a multinlingual glossary of technical terms of the Islamic administration (7th-10th century)

1:00 -  Lunch

3.2 Global approach and social network

2:30 - Alain Delattre, Université libre de Bruxelles – Sylvie Denoix, Cnrs, UMR 8167
The 8th-century multilingual archive from Edfu: a networking approach

3:15 - Marie Legendre, Oxford University - Arietta Papaconstantinou, Reading University
The 8th-century multilingual archive from Aphrodito: new perspectives

4:00 - Tea

4:30 -  General discussion, Roger Bagnall

 

To RSVP, please email isaw@nyu.edu.