30 September 2026, by Harter-Uibopuu /Ed.

Photo: Sebastian Engels

Prof. Dr. Harter-Uibopuu

The University of Hamburg (UHH) is home to more than 6,200 researchers. Every two weeks, in the “Research and Understanding” series in the Hamburger Abendblatt, we provide insight into their work. In this installment, Professor Kaja Harter-Uibopuu explores what inscriptions can tell us beyond the words they preserve.

When we encounter an ancient stone bearing a Greek or Latin inscription, our first instinct is usually to ask what it says. As an ancient historian, I am no exception. I start by reading the text: deciphering the letters, reconstructing missing passages, establishing a date, translating the inscription and setting it in its historical context. But that is only the beginning. An inscription is more than a text. It is a man-made object with a history of its own. To understand it fully, I need to approach it as it was originally conceived: as a monument whose text, material and physical setting were all closely interconnected.

My work at Miletus, one of the major cities of the ancient world on the western coast of present-day Türkiye, provides a particularly good illustration. Each year, I record newly identified inscriptions in the field and in the site’s stone repositories, while also returning to previously documented material. The first step is always a close examination of the original. How large is the stone? How well has its surface survived? How were the letters carved? I take measurements and photographs and, where appropriate, make a squeeze: a three-dimensional paper impression of the inscribed surface.

During our most recent field season, we combined this long-established technique with a digital approach. We used photogrammetry to create a digital 3D model of a small second-century BCE altar dedicated to Aphrodite following a dream by a woman from Miletus named Artemonis. It was the first time we had employed this method in our work at the site. Paper, water and brushes now sit alongside digital technology in our toolkit. Although these methods belong to very different periods in the history of the discipline, each offers its own way of examining an inscription both as a text and as a physical monument.

I am particularly interested in inscriptions relating to law and legal practice. In Miletus and other Greek cities, laws, decrees and treaties were put on public display. They provide evidence for political decision-making and relations between states, the responsibilities of the city’s magistrates, and the management of public and private property. They tell us not only about the rules that governed life within a community, but also about the ways in which they were given a visible presence in the urban landscape. Inscriptions helped to make law part of the everyday experience of the ancient city.

Yet committing a text to stone was by no means an automatic choice. Some information was recorded on perishable materials, for example in charcoal on whitewashed wooden boards, while other texts were inscribed on bronze. Stone inscriptions might take the form of free-standing stelae, texts carved directly into walls, or inscriptions incorporated into honorific monuments. The choice of stone itself could also carry significance. In a setting dominated by local limestone, gleaming marble would have been conspicuous. Material, scale, design and location all shaped the way an inscription was encountered and understood.

A recent example from Miletus also shows how a stone could acquire a history quite separate from that of the text originally inscribed upon it. In the third century CE, an older inscription was repurposed to honour the Roman emperor Aurelian. The name of the emperor who had previously been commemorated was erased and replaced with Aurelian’s. The message changed, but the monument remained in use. Such instances of reuse are particularly revealing because they show how an inscribed object could be transformed and continue to function long after its original text had lost its relevance.

This brings me to another question central to my research: what alternatives lay behind the production of written artefacts? At the Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’, we investigate what we call ‘Material Choices’. Rather than looking only at the finished monument, we examine the processes and decisions that gave it its particular form. What materials and techniques were available? What practical constraints shaped the choices that were made? And what did those responsible hope to achieve through them?

For me, epigraphy – the study of inscriptions – involves far more than deciphering texts and establishing what they say. My work at Miletus repeatedly demonstrates that text and monument cannot properly be understood in isolation. It is only by considering them together that we can move beyond the words themselves and ask how inscriptions were encountered, how they were read, and what role they played in the life of an ancient city.