Latin inscription from Cirencester © David Gill
Professor David Gill, Director of Heritage Futures at UCS, has been shortlisted in the first Corinium Museum poetry competition. The Corinium Museum in Circencester is one of the leading Roman collections in the UK. The winning and shortlisted poems will be displayed in the museum alongside the objects.
Professor Gill’s poem, ‘Sowing Letters’, was inspired by a Latin acrostic inscription cut into wall plaster that was found in a Roman house at Cirencester in the 1860s. The five lines of text can be read from left to right, right to left, or vertically. The letters can be re-arranged to form the first two Latin words of the The Lord’s Prayer (‘Pater Noster’) with ‘A’ and ‘O’, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet that allude to Jesus Christ as the beginning and the end. The text is perhaps one of the earliest allusions to Christianity found in the British Isles.
The earliest known version of the inscription has been discovered at Pompeii, destroyed during the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. Another has been excavated at the site of Dura-Europus on the river Euphrates in what is now modern Syria.
Professor Gill’s poem uses two of the Latin words from the inscription to provide an acrostic structure to his work.
