Les inscriptions en alphabet latin de Chypre au Moyen Âge : enquête exploratoire

With more than 800 inscriptions, the island of Cyprus offers the highest concentration of medieval written texts in Latin and French in the Eastern Mediterranean. The aim of this paper is to offer a preliminary survey of such vast documentation, focusing on three aspects: typology, material and palaeography, exemplified by the earliest funerary inscriptions in the 13th c., the lapidary inscriptions related to the law, such as the "lapidary charter" of Famagusta in the 14th c., and also by the graphic transition to the Venetian period (15th-16th c.). Although concerned exclusively with lapidary texts, this first study is part of a larger project encompassing all the inscriptions and graffiti in the Latin alphabet of the Eastern Mediterranean (7th-16th c.), which were in contact and interacted with other writings.