Certain research topics are able to shed a slim ray of light on the intricacies of history. This is the story of how a group of inscribed funerary slabs from the Lusignan period in Cyprus are connected to the man who played a key role on the birth of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1861. Also, how team work, method, intuition and a pinch of luck can lead to unexpected and satisfying results.
One may think that archives have little or nothing to do with the epigraphist’s tasks, since epigraphists spend most of their time studying inscriptions exposed to the public rather than manuscripts, but they might be actually much more closely related than what they appear at first sight. An important and relatively recent branch of philosophy has been dealing with the idea that ‘things’ and ‘objects’ embody the hubs of social relationships. Because the nature (and the actors) of these social relationships shift over time, the values and the functions represented by culturally connotated objects change as well. From this assumption, epigraphists, art historians and archaeologists – essentially all those researchers that are used to dealing with objects – have been taking a closer look to what has been poetically called ‘the cultural biography of things’. As a living being, objects get old, move, change meaning, affect and are affected by the people that over time came in contact with them.
This is why one of the goals of Graph-East project is to trace, as much as possible, the long life of medieval inscriptions in Latin characters coming from the Eastern Mediterranean, from the moment they were created to the present.




À l’occasion de la semaine interdisciplinaire organisée par le Centre d’Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale à l’Université de Poitiers au mois d’Octobre 2021, le chercheur postdoctoral spécialiste de l’histoire urbaine Sercan Sağlam et l’historienne de l’art post-doctorante, spécialiste de l’art italien et byzantin au Moyen Âge, Maria Villano, ont présenté un projet inédit dans le monde de la recherche épigraphique sur la Méditerranée Orientale au Moyen Âge. Allant de Chypre, de la Grèce à la Turquie, en passant par la Syrie et la Palestine, la Méditerranée Orientale constitue un réel berceau qui reste encore inexploré pour l’étude de l’écriture épigraphique latine dans l’empire byzantin et islamique. La prise de conscience du potentiel que cette aire géographique représente dans la recherche en épigraphie a mené, en 2020, à la création du programme de recherche scientifique GRAPH-EAST par la chercheuse en épigraphie au CESCM à l’Université de Poitiers, Estelle Ingrand-Varenne. D’une très grande envergure, ce projet, qui est soutenu à la fois par l’European Research Council et le CNRS, projette de récolter de 2021 à 2026 près de 2500 inscriptions, qui, pour la grande majorité d’entre elles, n’ont encore jamais suscité d’études sérieuses.