Nomads, soldiers, musicians and hairdressers

Nomads, soldiers, musicians and hairdressers: some thoughts on language and identity in the Roman Provinces of Syria and Arabia.

When Latin was the official language of the army, Greek was the language of government in Roman Syria and Arabia and was used among some of the population, particularly in towns and cities. However, several other languages were spoken and written in different areas and among various communities, and it seems that language could be an important expression of identity under Roman rule, but was not always so. As might be expected, many inhabitants of the former Nabataean kingdom continued to use their traditional spoken and written languages and, according to at least one inscription, to call themselves "Nabataeans", more than twenty years after the Roman annexation. Nomads on the edges of the provinces continued to speak and (unexpectedly) write their own forms of Arabic, though they occasionally showed off by writing their names in basic Greek, etc. In this lecture, Michael C.A. MacDonald shall look at the, often strange, intersections between language-use and identity in the Levant and northern Arabia at this period.