Poetry in Stone: Hellenistic Verse Inscriptions from the Greek East is a postdoctoral research project funded by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (FWO) at UGent 2025-2028. It investigates the poetic production inscribed on stone in the Hellenistic Age (3rd-1st BC) in the so-called "Greek East", i.e. the territories in the Eastern Mediterranean, Near East and Central Asia which were conquered by Alexander the Great.
The project sits at the intersection of three significant scholarly developments: an increased interest in verse inscriptions as a form of literature (also facilitated by the growing number of epigraphic corpora, digital tools, and databases); a new interest in forms of Hellenistic poetry beyond Alexandria; a more nuanced understanding of Hellenistic culture and its relationship with foreign cultures, which generated new cultural expressions.
This project will start by forming a dataset consisting of Greek verse inscriptions which can be dated to the Hellenistic age and come from the ‘Greek East’, with the appropriate adjustments to the usual definition of this range. The dataset will be catalogued according to different parameters, and then made freely available. The dataset will then be analysed through research questions on the material and textual features inscriptions, their style, their authorship, their geographical patterns. The methodology will be a mixture of traditional and innovative methods for the study of this material.
Image: the Hellenistic world in 281 BC, by Cattette via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
