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The key defining element of the variety of the Near Eastern lands may well be the presence of a range of Semitic and other non-classical languages, in use (in varying degrees) alongside the koinē that was Greek (Latin, though never absent, played a more modest role in the region’s linguistic situation). Great progress has been made in recent years with regard to the publication of different corpora, including (to give but two examples) Laïla Nehmé’s archaeological and epigraphic atlas of Petra (Nehmé 2012a) and Marco Moriggi and Ilaria Bucci’s publication of the Aramaic graffiti from the archives of the Italian Archaeological Mission to Hatra by the University of Turin, which was spearheaded by Roberta Venco Ricciardi (Moriggi and Bucci 2019). Comparative study of the different Aramaic vernaculars in use in places such as Palmyra – “the only publicly bilingual city in the Roman Near East” (thus Millar 1993: 470; cf. Kaizer 2017: 87–94) – Hatra, Edessa, and Petra is greatly facilitated by the fourth installment, by John Healey, of the Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions (Healey 2009).

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