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• The cities of the Iazygians

  173–186

  Bence Fehér

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  92

  Ptolemy’ description of the Iazygian territory (Geogr. hyph. III 7) describes eight ‘poleis’ – which could be any kind of settlement indeed by name, and the boundaries of the region. The boundaries can be traced from the Greater Fatra range in the north to the river Temes or Krassó in the south, but the position of the settlements allows for some variations, taking as a fix point Partiskon = Szeged, from where a probable trade route started to the north or northwest, reaching most of the settlements mentioned. If the direction of the route in Ptolemy’s map were correct, some localities were outside of the actual territory (A), but supposing two different kinds of distortion, we may reconstruct a route heading to the Zagyva–Tarna region (B) or to Aquincum (C). Both possibilities seem realistic, but the most important settlement in the first part of the 1st c. was Bormanon (according to Geogr. hyph. VIII 11). The etymology of the name points to a warm or/and medicinal water spring. This fact and the date makes the B the most probable version.

• Some remarks about the morality of Roman provincial funerary poetry

  159–169

  Bence Fehér

  Views:

  48

  The morality/view of life of the ordinary provincial Roman is hard to discern; for the most part we must rely on the more literary inscriptions. The funerary verse inscriptions provide considerable material, but not individualized wording: they consist mostly of well-known patterns. At the same time these patterns form regionally different structure types; hence they can throw light upon the funeral customs of the different regions. In Pannonia there were two main poem types: one of early Carnuntum, and one of Aquincum in the 3rd c. The differences between these communities in the way they thought about death are clearly visible. There were very few individualized poems referring to personal feelings: two such are analysed here in detail (TAq 769, TAq 512).

• A Coptic magical name in a Pannonian phylacterion

  79–88

  Bence Fehér

  Views:

  123

  A silver lamella was found in Aquincum (1927/28), in a burial site which could be easily dated to the latest Trajan or early Hadrian era, but it was published defectively, misread and misinterpreted. Several attempts at re-interpretation in the 1990s and 2000s succeeded only partially. The reading I propose contains distinct textual units beginning with characters (among them hieroglyphs), and a Coptic magical logos (παχνουφις). In my opinion, the phylacterion was meant to give protection in the next world, and the writer of the spell was well acquainted with the Egyptian magical traditions.

• Syrian Names Given in Pannonia Inferior

  95–109

  Bence Fehér

  Views:

  95

  Many people in Pannonia Inferior, who had some connection with the Syrian military units of the province, had more or less evidently barbarous names. Examining 46 such names, we can find that most of them are clearly interpretable either in Syriac or in Hebraic language, or even in both of them. Sometimes we can identify orthographic variations of these names, their religious background or even some differences in those people’s use of their native language.