Abstract
The present article focuses on inscriptions carved on the marble templon screen of the Middle Byzantine era, an architectural and decorative element that played an important role in the liturgy, also dressed with multiple symbolic meanings. The study of the existing examples, dispersed in many regions of the Byzantine territory and dated from the 9th to the 12th c., provides us with evidence on matters of worship, language, art and patronage. The majority of the inscriptions consist of dedicatory texts that commemorate acts of donation and express the donors’ concern for salvation. A smaller group reproduces quotations from the sacred scriptures or has references from the liturgy and the hymnography. The short number of the inscribed material of this kind, compared to the templon screens that were erected during the same period, corresponds to the general decline of epigraphy after the 7th c. and the gradual disability of the public to communicate through written texts.
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
