Open Issues and a New Approach to Arabic Pseudo-Inscriptions from Twelfth and Thirteenth-Centuries Basilicata and Apulia

Arabic pseudo-inscriptions from twelfth and thirteenth-century Basilicata and Apulia are still underrated, though they issued from a unique cultural milieu where the Islamic, Byzantine, and western influences combined creating a peculiar visual expression. Still open issues concern the models, prototypes, and channels of transmission that brought pseudo-epigraphic motifs to south-eastern Italy and the relation intercurrent between Christian themes and Arabic scripts. To answer these questions and assess conclusively whether Byzantium acted as the main intermediary, a new research approach proposes to start from the palaeographic analysis of pseudo-inscriptions to put them in the framework of the coeval Islamic epigraphy.