I Siriani di Iulia Concordia. Alla ricerca di una identità siriana

This contribution analyzes a set of funerary Greek inscriptions found in the “Sepolcreto dei Militi” in Iulia Concordia, a small city in the Venetian lagoon. All deceased declare their origins from villages in the territories of Apamea and other cities in Northern Syria, but they tell nothing about their working activities in Concordia. Evidently, this was a compact group of pe- ople who died in Concordia during the first three decades of the 5th century. The general theme of the Syrian identity, which has been recently proposed by Andrade (2012-13), can be integrated with the data supplied by texts left behind by the déplacées, such as these who lived and died in Concordia. The specific formulations always recurrent in the inscriptions from Concordia show astonishing analogies with other formulas found in Syrian inscriptions that were produced in the framework of the registrations of agricultural lands, which had been imposed in Syria by imperial censitores in the tetrarchic period. These inscriptions of Concordia are thus relevant testimonies to that administrative praxis, which, even though it was imposed from above, it was even able to create widely shared identities from below. Here an identification of the Syrians from Concordia with the fabricenses who were active in the local factory of arrows is proposed.