Cultic Graffiti in the Late Antique Mediterranean and Beyond

Studies of cultic practice in Late Antiquity generally rely on texts written by the ecclesiastical elite, providing a lens - and often, a hagiographical agenda - through which the actions of devotees must be viewed. A singular exception to this is graffiti, scratched or drawn on the walls of religious shrines, with the personal messages of individual worshippers. This volume presents and discusses cultic graffiti across the late antique Mediterranean, and beyond into Nubia and Arabia, exploring this unmediated evidence of ordinary men and women invoking and seeking the help of God and the saints.
While the principal focus of many of the chapters gathered here is the Christian world, attention is also paid to pre-Christian practice as well as to the world of early Islam. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that draws on the evidence of both history and archaeology, these contributions offer important insights into how men and women interacted with the divine during Late Antiquity.

Sacred space, its use, development and meaning, is a major theme in archaeology and ancient history, and productive of research questions relating to religious identity, performance and practice, change, innovation, and dissolution. This series seeks to integrate the study of archaeology, texts, architecture, and religion, creating a forum for interdisciplinary and comparative studies of landscapes and domains of evidence that are normally treated separately.
The series is open to thematic, cross-regional and diachronic studies, as well as specific works within ancient history, classical archaeology, Egyptology, Assyriology, archaeology and philology that treat sacred space and its material culture in regions encompassed by the designation 'Ancient Near East'. Studies that seek to make issues and questions from one area accessible and thought-provoking to scholars in another are welcome.