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A Jet Medusa Pendant from Aquincum/Budapest
5–16Views:178A rare jet cameo-pendant with the representation of a Medusa-head came to light south of the canabae of Aquincum during the excavation of a section of the Roman cemetery. Among the jewellery carved from jet, pendants depicting the head of Medusa form a separate group. We know only 21 pieces without this jewel; all of them are distinctive, unique carvings. The pendant from Aquincum belongs to the group of ‘beautiful-pathetic’ Medusa-heads. It could have been made in the 3rd century, based on analogy and on the other grave-goods. There is a possibility that this type of jewellery was made for burials as an apotropaic object.
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Minitrae Et Numini Eius. A Celtic Deity and the Vulgar Latin in Aquincum
179-193Views:164The subject of this paper is a curious and somewhat problematic inscription on an altar from Aquincum. Among the many features of this inscription that are interesting for our study, the most striking one is the beginning of the text: the name of the god or goddess is controversial. Who exactly was Minitra? A Celtic goddess, or someone much better known from Roman religious life? According to Géza Alföldy, the native gods of Pannonia were venerated still in the 3rd century A.D., including Teutates, Sedatus, Ciniaemus and Minitra, etc. Since the inscription in question contains many vulgar Latin phenomena, it becomes questionable whether the name of the deity is written correctly, especially because, while the names of classical gods rarely appear misspelled, the names of the gods of so-called ‘eastern’ cults and mystery religions appear in a number of faulty variations. I will try to identify the deity through the analysis of Vulgar Latin phenomena.
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Nuevas observaciones de lectura de una matriz de molde para crustula de Aquincum
115–122Views:54The paper examines again a form of the well-known crustula from Aquincum, and suggests some new possibilities for various readings of the lectio vulgata.
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Ito Pater, Eracura and the Messenger: A Preliminary Report on a Curse Tablet from Aquincum
101–113Views:102This paper publishes a new curse tablet from Aquincum. While the letter-forms are well-preserved, the text requires interpretion through linguistic analysis aided by analogies with other curse tablets and literary sources.
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Bemerkungen zur öffentlichen Sklaverei in Pannonien
89–99Views:92The monograph of Alexander Weiß on public slavery in the cities of the Roman Empire based on Greek and Latin inscriptions shed light on the role and functions of the public slaves, arguing that they had a much larger role in the administration of the provincial cities than previously thought. Weiß intended to collect all epigraphical data on public slavery, although he could not study some smaller corpora in Pannonia, like IlJug or the Corpus of Greek inscriptions found in Pannonia (CIGP). A new collection of inscriptions from Aquincum (Tituli Aquincenses) and new inscriptions offer a great opportunity to reexamine the epigraphical data of Pannonia on public slavery, and examine whether the public slaves of Pannonia fit into the administrative categories listed by Weiß, or might reveal new functions.
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A Coptic magical name in a Pannonian phylacterion
79–88Views:123A 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.
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The cities of the Iazygians
173–186Views:93Ptolemy’ 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.
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Some remarks about the morality of Roman provincial funerary poetry
159–169Views:48The 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).
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Chronicle of the first planned excavation in Hungary: István Schönvisner and De ruderibus
233–245Views:143The excavation carried out by István Schönvisner, under what is today Florian Square (Budapest, Distr. III.), next to the Villa Torcularia, during which he revealed the sudatorium of Aquincum’s bigger bath, the Thermae Maiores began on 10th February 1778. Thanks to this excavation and the rapid publication of the results, the professor of antiquity and numismatics of Buda University became the founder of provincial archaeological research in Pannonia. In the same year he published the results of the exploration in De Ruderibus Laconici Caldariique Romani..., which – like Schönvisner’s other works – is revolutionary. He systematically processed the inscribed and figurative fragments which were discovered during the excavation and gave a complete overview of the era’s cultural history. In this paper, I would like to demonstrate the historical and cultural historical importance of this work, present its structure, the topics discussed, and the results by which István Schönvisner laid down the foundations of scientific classical archaeology in Hungary.
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Oedipus Riddles
131–140Views:89The paper discusses an interesting group of glass intaglios with the motif of Oedipus and the Sphinx. They are known from sites between the Adriatic, the Danube and the Black Sea, and occur in various colors and cuts, which suggests production in different molds or even workshops. Probably modeled on an intaglio made in an Italian officina gemmaria, the glass replicas may have been produced at Aquileia. The style points to the Late Republican or Augustan era, whereas the material of the glass copies and the funerary context from Aquincum show they were in use and probably produced till the 4 th century. The paper also discusses the possible meanings of the motif, from a simple illustration of the famous heroic adventure to a metaphoric depiction representing the mystic message of the key to a blessed afterlife.