Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae, Volume VI: The Negev and Addenda, 4 parts, eds. Walter Amerling, Hannah M. Cotton, Werner Eck, Avner Ecker, Johannes Heinrichs, Benjamin Isaac, Alla Kushnir-Stein, Jonathan Price, Ohad Abudraham, Peter Weiß, Ada Yardeni, Marfa Heimbach, Dirk Koßmann, and Ofer Pogorelsky (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2026).
This volume is the sixth of Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae (CIIP), which was originally intended to cover all inscriptions from the modern-day territory of ancient Judea and Palestine dating from Alexander the Great’s conquest to the Arab subjugation of the region. However, due to international regulations, the areas of the Holy Land under Palestinian administration, and the state of Israel’s illegal occupation of the Golan Heights,[1] that goal is no longer attainable and this sixth volume is the corpus’s final one.
The editors have divided it into four parts. Parts 1–2 cover epigraphs from the territory of the Negev, presenting them in order from north to south and when two or more locations are on the same latitude, the editors present them from west to east. Unfortunately, unpublished inscriptions in the Thamudic language—the language of a pre-Islamic tribe who lived in the Arabian Peninsula—are not included because the editors were unable to find someone proficient in the language who could do the hard work of examining these epigraphs in person; what is known as an autopsy. They included, however, the already published Thamudic inscriptions, adopting the readings and comments of the original publications. Part 3 contains additional inscriptions from the Negev and Part 4 addenda and corrigenda, corrections of errors in the previously published volumes of CIIP.
As in other volumes in this corpus, CIIP VI begins with a preface, explaining the corpus’s purpose and contents (see “Preface,” pp. vii–x). A table of contents (“Table of Contents,” xi–xxvi), and other front matters follow: “Author’s Sigla,” (p. xxvii), “Abbreviations,” (pp. xxxix–xliv), “Diacritical System,” (p. xlv), and keys to transliterations of non-Greek and non-Latin ancient languages: Armenian, Aramaic, Syriac, Georgian, Hebrew, and Aramaic (p. xlvii–xlxi).
Parts 1–3 present over 2,000 epigraphs from the Negev: Part 1, nos. 7819–9058; Part 2, nos. 9059–9108; and Part 3, nos. 9109–9992. The presentation of individual inscriptions follows previous volumes. Thus, each entry contains a number, title, a date for the epigraph (when possible), and a short description of its provenance and context. Next follows a picture or drawing of the artifact (if available), the inscription’s original text, a transliteration of the original language (in some cases), and a fresh English translation of the epigraph. Finally, each entry ends with a short commentary on the inscription, and a bibliography. At the end of Parts 1–2, the editors provide maps with keys (pp. 1130–33), and, at the end of Part 4, an index of personal names for the entire six-volume corpus (pp. 1979–2092).
To give one example, CIIP 8313 is an interesting Aramaic graffito written in Greek letters that dates to the first and second centuries AD. The epigraph was found on the wall of a cave in Naḥal Dimonah in Wadi Jaraba. The text, which is written left to right, reads:
σιμαθα καιαμα λαμαν
δαελαα σαβη ου ιαεβ λαλ
To read the inscription, though, one must transliterate it into Aramaic and then reverse the order of the letters:
סימתא קימא למן דאלהא צבא הו יהב לך
Thus, the graffito translates as follows:
“The treasure is available, God will give it to whomever He wishes.”
The author of this text is unclear, but the reference to the “treasure” (σιμαθα/סימתא) that God bestows raises the possibility that the author may have been a Semitic speaking Christian. The supporting evidence for this position is that the Gospels record Jesus speaking of “treasure” (θησαυρός) in heaven (Matthew 6:20; 19:21; Mark 10:21; Luke 12:33; 18:22) and the Syriac version of St. Matthew’s Gospel (dating roughly to the third century AD) translates the Greek term θησαυρός with the word sîmtâ in Matthew 6:20, which is an Aramaic cognate of the term for treasure, sîmāṯâ (σιμαθα/סימתא), in our inscription.[2]
The editor of CIIP 8313, Jonathan Price, argues that the key to interpreting our text lies in another graffito from the cave that is directly above the inscription in question. This epigraph reads:
Μνησθῇ Ζοραιθα
κ(α)λ(ὰ) τ(ὰ) λ(α)χ(ά)ν(α) τ(ὰ) π(α)ρ(α)θ(ά)λ(α)σ(α)
αααααααααα.
“May Zoraitha be remembered. Beautiful are the vegetables by the sea” (CIIP 8314).
Price suggests that the same person who composed CIIP 8313 also composed CIIP 8314 and that the latter is a writing exercise; hence, the eleven alphas that go in between the consonants are found at the end of the graffito. Therefore, he, relying on an earlier publication of these epigraphs, concludes that Zoraitha “was probably a nun whose native spoken language was Aramaic; she produced a writing exercise—a whole sentence in which the same vowel follows each consonant—playing with a leading feature of Semitic scripts, i.e., their lack of vowels. It is reasonable to assume that the other inscription (i.e., no. 8313), Aramaic in Greek letters, was also a kind of writing exercise (was she perhaps learning how to write in Greek?).”[3]
While the second inscription, CIIP 8314, may be a writing exercise, I reject the conclusion that Zoraitha authored CIIP 8313 because there are too many differences in the ligatures of the letters, especially of the alpha, theta, eta, kapa, and mu, of the two graffiti (see Image 1 and 2). These discrepancies bespeak that Zoraitha did not author CIIP 8313. To this end, we do not know who composed our graffito in question but are left with the possibility that it may have been an early Semitic speaking Christian who lived in or visited the ancient Negev. Other than that, we cannot deduce anything else from our limited evidence.[4] Perhaps future epigraphic discoveries will shed light on this enigma.
Image 1: CIIP 8313
Image 2: CIIP 8314
In sum, this new volume, like all the others in the corpus, is indispensable for those who want to know more about the world of the Holy Land from Alexander the Great to the Arab conquests, especially the inscriptions that the denizens of this world produced! Therefore, if you can afford it, I highly recommend it and you can pick up your own copy directly from De Gruyter: Parts 1–2 and Parts 3–4.
I am grateful for the gratis copy of this work that De Gruyter provided, which in no way influenced my review of it.
[1] See the U.N.’s Secretary General’s report: https://www.un.org/unispal/document/sg-report-the-occupied-syrian-golan-14nov25/.
[2] Michael Zellmann-Rohrer, “Semitic Loanwords and Transcriptions in the Greek Epigraphy of Judaea-Palestine,” in Inscriptions and the Epigraphic Habit, eds. Rebecca Benefiel and Catherine M. Keesling, Brill Studies in Greek and Roman Epigraphy 20 (Leiden: Brill, 2024), 300–1.
[3] Jonathan J. Pricer and Shlomo Naeh, “On the Margins of Culture: the Practice of Transcription in the Ancient World,” in From Hellenism to Islam: Cultural and Linguistic Change in the Roman Near East, eds. Hannah Cotton, Robert G. Hoyland, Jonathan J. Price, and David J. Wasserstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 268–69 (257–88)
[4] Even if Zoraitha authored both graffiti, I find the conclusion that she was a “nun” totally speculative and lacking of any evidence to support it, other than the fact that Zoraitha was a woman.