An Eternal Home away from Home: The Epigraphy of Migrant and Itinerant Merchants in the Early Byzantine Period (5th-7th c.)

Merchants are by definition a liminal category: they always travel, crisscrossing vast distances in search of profit and a better life, encounter populations of different ethnicities, cultures, and religions, and thus are often are challenged, implicitly or explicitly, to articulate their own identity in front of local populations and authorities. Sometimes, these expressions take on a physical shape. Unfortunately, these self-presentations are often lost to the ravages of time. However, there is still enough left to attempt to recover the identity of migrant and itinerant merchants. In a paper I researched during my MPhil at the University of Oxford, I compiled, edited, and translated all known Greek-language epigraphic sources from the Early Byzantine Period (5th-7th centuries) to investigate the ways merchants documented as coming from elsewhere presented themselves in front of local audiences, with a particular focus on funerary and votive monuments. My main conclusions from this investigation were two-fold. On the one hand, there was a large variety of formulae, linguistic choices, and quirks meant to either bring these figures closer to local communities or, alternatively, to distance themselves from these populations. This evidences an individualistic approach to self-presentation that goes beyond traditional class-based constructions of merchant identity. On the other hand, there is a trend towards increasing the precision of describing one’s origin-spot with distance; i.e., as merchants travel and migrate further away from their place of birth, the articulations of that origin-spot become longer and more elaborate, even making use of administrative vocabulary. This likely indicates an additional purpose for funerary monuments beyond (self-)presentation of the deceased, perhaps related to issues of taxation and inheritance. If you would like to read this paper in full, discuss it, or use it in your own scholarly work, please feel free to reach out to me.