The opening ceremony brings together prominent figures from the academic and diplomatic milieu: Emil Constantinescu, President of the Scientific Council of the Levant Institute; Mark Donfried, Director General of the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy in Berlin; Alexandra Motica, representative of the Romanian Embassy in the Federal Republic of Germany; Cătălin-Stefan Popa, Director General of the Levant Institute; and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Maria Luiza Oancea, Scientific Director of the Annual Interdisciplinary School of Ancient Greek, Egyptology, and Oriental Languages.
Professor Emeritus Emil Constantinescu, President of the Scientific Council of the Levant Institute of Advanced Studies for the Culture of Peace:
Dear general director Mark Donfried,
Esteemed colleagues, and distinguished participants,
It is a great pleasure for me to open today the sixth edition of the Annual Interdisciplinary School of Ancient Greek, Egyptology, and Oriental Languages, organized by the Levant Institute of Advanced Studies for the Culture of Peace, in partnership with the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy in Berlin and the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the University of Bucharest.
This educational program has already become a tradition of our Institute, bringing together researchers, professors, and students from around the world, offering not only a high-level academic framework but also a vibrant community of intercultural dialogue and exchange of ideas between renowned researchers, on the one hand, and the younger generation, on the other. In the previous editions, we have explored fundamental themes – from "Life and Death" and "Cosmogony and Myths of Creation" to reflections on "Time and Space," "Vice and Virtue," and "Truth and Lie" in Antiquity. Each of these themes has opened new perspectives on how Antiquity continues to shape our understanding of the present and our anticipation of the future.
This School was initiated during the pandemic, in 2020, thanks to the sustained efforts of Professors Renata Tatomir ("Hyperion" University of Bucharest), Maria Luiza Oancea (Faculty of Classics, University of Bucharest), and Joanna Popielska-Grzybowska (Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures, Polish Academy of Sciences). We are grateful that this year also we managed to have a physical component of the School in situ at Potsdam, thanks to the efforts of our partners, the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy in Berlin, represented by its Director General Mark Donfried, whom I greet on this occasion. This is the second consecutive year that our hosts offer a few meritorious students from the Faculty of Classical Philology in Bucharest the opportunity to study for a few days in Potsdam and to witness firsthand the heritage of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman antiquity in the museums of Berlin. I am sure that this enormous opportunity will remain forever in their hearts, and I hope it will represent a building block in their future academic careers. I have been friends with classicists such as Zoe Petre, Dan Slușanschi, and Alexandru Barnea, who have remained in the history of the discipline for their great contributions to the field, but I want to tell you that they too began translating as teenagers during summer afternoons from classical authors, for their spiritual joy and to take refuge in a world of eternal essences, of the Good, the Beauty, and the Truth, which provided them with models of inspiration and ways of living in this contemporary world, about which I dare to say, together with Leibniz, that it is the best of all possible worlds.
When we utter today the words "law" and "lawlessness," we tend to view them through the lens of modern society. We associate them with legal codes, institutions, courts, authorities, and sanctions, but also with morality, judgment, sin, and shame. In the ancient world, the boundary between law, tradition, religion, morality, and power was much more fluid. Law did not mean only what was written. It could also be the ancestral tradition or the divine rule, the voice of the community or the position of the political power. Therefore, the question "What is the law?" becomes, in Antiquity, a much deeper question: who has the right to establish the order of the world in which we live in ? But "law" is not only a matter of the city and political power. Law is connected to creation, order, and identity. To speak of law means to speak about the way the world itself is organized and about how man finds his place within this order. Hence the meeting between law and custom, between what is a norm and what is passed down from generation to generation. Lawlessness is not simply the opposite of law. It may simply be a breach of a rule. But it may also be disorder, rebellion or anarchy.
In totalitarian regimes, it may be an abuse of power even on the part of the legislative and executive branches. Just as, in societies that condemn behaviour which does not conform to the official line of thinking, it may be an expression of critical thinking. Between 1956 and 1960, during the communist dictatorship in Romania, whilst I was a student at the Faculty of Law of the University of Bucharest, constitutional law was replaced by the exclusive teaching of the Constitution of the Communist Totalitarian State. Land law was replaced by the regulations governing communist agricultural households, based on the abolishment of private property. During the courses on Dialectical Materialism and Scientific Socialism, the Soviet theory of replacing the law with Communist morality was taught. Whilst this was taught in the lecture halls, we could read on the outer walls of the building of the Faculty of Law the maxims of Greek, Roman and Byzantine thought, which had not been erased because they were written in Latin and were not considered dangerous. Fortunately, the four statues depicting the great jurists of antiquity – Lycurgus, Solon, Cicero, Papinian and Justinian – were not demolished either.
The ignorance of the Communist leaders allowed cultural traditions to be revived, and when, in 1990, the Communist dictatorship was replaced by the peaceful uprising of young people born under that dictatorship, and I was elected Rector of the University of Bucharest by the teaching staff and students, the study of ancient civilisations could be revived, as a necessary prerequisite for the restoration of the rule of law. Antiquity does not offer us simple answers. The Greek, Byzantine, Egyptian, Jewish, Syriac, and Coptic texts you will encounter in this edition are not just relics of a distant past. They are laboratories of thought, of people who have tried to understand power, order, freedom, guilt, revolt, and responsibility. Justinian perhaps offers us one of the most powerful images of this heritage: that of a world attempting to gather, organize, and transmit its rules. Through the Corpus Iuris Civilis, Roman law becomes not only the legal memory of a civilization but also one of the foundations upon which the European legal culture is built. I therefore invite you to view this edition of the School not merely as a meeting dedicated to texts and civilizations of the past, but as a dialogue between eras, in a world of individualization, which tends to reject norms, and to contest authority and institutions. A dialogue about law and liberty, about order and revolt, about authority and conscience, about what is permitted and what is just.
I warmly greet all the professors who contribute to this dialogue proposed by the Levant Institute: Associate Professor Maria-Luiza Oancea (University of Bucharest), the scientific director of the event, professors: Mădălina Vârtejanu-Joubert from the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris, Victoria Fonari (State University of Moldova), Pablo Argárate (University of Graz), István Perczel (Central European University in Vienna), So Miyagawa from the University of Tsukuba, Japan, PhD candidate Elvira Dinu from Jean Moulin University Lyon III. I thank our longtime collaborators from the University of Bucharest for remaining by our side this year as well, with patience and dedication: Andra Stoiculescu, Andreea Ștefan, Ștefan Zară, Andra Midache Cicarma from „Ovidius” University of Constanța, as well as Antonio Pio di Cosmo from the University of Modena.
I am also grateful to my young collaborators at the Levant Institute: the general director Cătălin Ștefan Popa, Dr. Ana-Maria Răducan, Ovidiu Achim and Maxim Onofrei, who ensured with tenacity and courage the organization of this edition. I believe that one of the lessons of Antiquity is also the transformation of ideas, notions and concepts in daily reality, however imperfect this could be.
I wish you to enjoy great experiences, shared reflections, open dialogue and nice readings of the ancient texts, in order to better discover ourselves and our role in the great mechanism of the world. I declare, therefore, open the sixth edition of the Annual School of Ancient Greek, Egyptology and Oriental Languages.
Thank you.
Opening Remarks by Dr. Mark Donfried, Director General of the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy:
Your Excellencies,
Distinguished Professors and Colleagues,
Dear Participants and Friends,
It is a great pleasure to welcome you to Potsdam for the sixth edition of the Annual Interdisciplinary School of Ancient Greek, Egyptology and Oriental Studies.
I would particularly like to thank President Emil Constantinescu, Dr. Cătălin-Ștefan Popa, the Levant Institute, the University of Bucharest, and all the scholars and institutions whose cooperation has made this gathering possible.
The theme chosen for this year, “Law and Lawlessness in Antiquity”, takes us deep into the ancient world. But it also brings us remarkably close to some of the most difficult questions of our own time.
What makes a law legitimate? Who has the authority to create it? When does obedience to law become a virtue, and when can resistance to law be justified? And perhaps the most enduring question of all: can law restrain power?
These questions confronted the societies of ancient Greece, Egypt and the Near East. They occupied philosophers, rulers, religious thinkers and ordinary citizens. And they continued through Roman and Byzantine thought, Jewish and Christian traditions, and many of the intellectual worlds represented in this week's programme.
Perhaps one of the most difficult lessons we inherit from antiquity is that the opposite of lawlessness is not necessarily justice.
A society can possess laws, institutions and elaborate systems of authority and still be profoundly unjust. Law can protect the weak from the powerful, but it can also preserve privilege and domination. The deeper question, therefore, is not simply whether a society has laws, but what gives those laws legitimacy and what happens when power places itself above them.
More than two thousand years later, we have international treaties, courts, conventions and institutions that much of the ancient world could scarcely have imagined. Yet the fundamental question remains surprisingly familiar: is power governed by law, or is law ultimately governed by power?
This is precisely why the study of antiquity matters today.
Ancient Greek, Egyptology, Syriac studies, Coptic studies, Jewish thought, early Christianity and the other disciplines represented here are sometimes regarded as fields concerned primarily with preserving and understanding the past. But their significance goes much further. They provide us with a longer perspective from which to examine ourselves.
And this is also where the connection with cultural diplomacy becomes particularly important.
Cultural diplomacy does not begin with the assumption that different civilizations will agree. It begins with the recognition that civilizations have developed different answers to fundamental human questions about justice, authority, faith, community, responsibility and the limits of power.
Understanding those answers requires more than translation between languages. It requires translation between historical experiences, traditions and ways of thinking.
That is why a School such as this has significance beyond the individual disciplines represented here. When we read Plato or Xenophon, examine concepts of law in ancient Egypt, study Jewish or Christian thought, or encounter Syriac and Coptic traditions, we are entering into conversations that have crossed centuries, languages and civilizations.
Potsdam is also an especially appropriate place for this discussion. This city has witnessed moments when questions of power, political order, international responsibility and the creation of new rules between states had consequences far beyond Germany. Here, history reminds us that the relationship between power and law is never merely theoretical.
Over the coming days, this School will bring together scholars, students, languages, texts and traditions that are rarely placed within a single conversation. I believe that interdisciplinary exchange is one of its greatest strengths.
I therefore hope that this week will be more than a sequence of excellent lectures and seminars. I hope it will become a genuine conversation between disciplines, between generations, between cultures, and ultimately between antiquity and our own time.
Because while our institutions have changed, our technologies have changed and the world around us has changed beyond recognition, some of the most fundamental human questions have remained with us.
The civilizations we study may be ancient. The questions they asked are not.
I wish you all an inspiring and intellectually rewarding week in Potsdam, and it is my great pleasure to welcome you again, as last year, to the sixth Annual Interdisciplinary School of Ancient Greek, Egyptology and Oriental Studies.
Thank you.
Opening Remarks from Ms. Alexandra Motica, on behalf of the Embassy of Romania to the Federal Republic of Germany:
Your Excellencies,
Distinguished Professors and Scholars,
Dear Students,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is with great pleasure that I join you today for the opening of the Annual Interdisciplinary School of Ancient Greek, Egyptology and Oriental languages on behalf of the Embassy of Romania in the Federal Republic of Germany.
Our Embassy has had the privilege of accompanying this initiative in previous years, including last year’s edition. We are therefore especially pleased to see this academic project return to Germany, grow and reach its sixth edition, with – hopefully – many more to follow.
This year’s theme, Law and Lawlessness in Antiquity, could hardly be timelier. The program will take you from Nomos and Dike to the rule of law, from Plato and Xenophon to ancient Egypt, Syriac literature and late-antique Jewish thought.
But perhaps the most interesting question behind all these topics is a very simple one: what makes a rule become a law, and what makes a law worthy of obedience? This is not merely an ancient question.
Our political vocabulary is full of words inherited from antiquity, such as democracy, politics, tyranny, citizenship and dialogue. Yet inheriting is different to understanding. Words can survive for millennia while their meaning becomes thinner. Returning to Greek, Egyptian, Coptic or Syriac sources is therefore more than a simple language exercise. It is a way of recovering the intellectual depth behind concepts that we still use to organize our societies. And this is perhaps where scholarship and diplomacy meet.
Diplomacy, at its best, is also an art of translation. Not only between languages, but between histories, experiences and different ways of seeing the world. To understand another culture before judging it; to read the source rather than the stereotype; to distinguish what is merely foreign from what is genuinely incomprehensible. These are all scholarly virtues, but they are diplomatic virtues as well.
This is particularly relevant to the mission of the Levant Institute. As the organizers rightly emphasize, understanding the multicultural space of the Levant requires going beyond clichés and returning to primary sources, their languages and the appropriate methods of interpretation.
Another reason why this School deserves attention is that ancient Greek, Egyptology and Oriental languages are fields pursued today by relatively small academic communities in Romania. Supporting young scholars who choose these demanding disciplines is therefore not an exercise in nostalgia. A culture that loses the ability to read its sources risks eventually remembering only its interpretations of them. The School was established precisely to train a new generation capable of approaching the cultural heritage of the Levant through interdisciplinary study.
On behalf of the Embassy of Romania, I congratulate the organizers, lecturers and participants, and I wish you several days of demanding texts, difficult questions and, hopefully, illuminating disagreements. Because a School devoted to law and lawlessness should perhaps begin with one useful form of intellectual disobedience: the refusal to accept easy answers.
I wish you a stimulating and successful sixth edition!
Thank you!
Dr. Habil. Cătălin-Ștefan Popa, Director General of the Levant Institute of Advanced Studies for the Culture of Peace:
The School of Greek Language, Oriental Studies, and Egyptology represents one of the ways in which the Levant Institute for Advanced Studies for the Culture of Peace fulfils its mission of transforming research on this vast space of civilization into a resource accessible to new generations. It is founded on a simple conviction: the Levant cannot be fully understood without access to the languages, texts, religions, and cultures that have shaped its identity over the millennia.
For this reason, the School brings together fields that complement and enrich one another. The study of Greek language and culture provides access to one of the great intellectual traditions of the Mediterranean, from Antiquity and the Hellenistic period to Byzantium and the modern world. Oriental Studies broaden this perspective toward the civilizations of the Near East, the Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew heritage, and the history of the communities that have made the Levant a privileged space of encounter between cultures and religions. Egyptology adds to this framework the historical depth of one of the oldest and most influential civilizations in human history.
Our aspiration is for this School to be more than a succession of courses. It should become a place of education, intellectual formation, and dialogue, where students, master’s and doctoral candidates, young researchers, as well as the wider educated public, can meet specialists, discover primary sources and intellectual traditions, and engage with major themes in international scholarship. In this respect, the Institute must serve as a genuine resource: through its researchers, the projects it develops, its library and documentary heritage, and, above all, through the international academic network it has built.
This year’s theme of the School of Greek Language, “Law and Lawlessness,” naturally opens up a comparative perspective on the literary traditions of the Levant. The study of these texts allows us to trace the ways in which the communities of the Levant understood the relationship between divine and human law, between norm and freedom, between justice and lawlessness, as well as the ways in which the Greek heritage was translated and reinterpreted within other Eastern linguistic traditions.
We received remarkable confirmation of this vocation only a month ago, when the Institute, together with the Romanian Academy, organized at the Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest, from 3 to 7 August 2026, the 14th World Congress of Syriac Studies – Symposium Syriacum – and the 12th International Conference on Christian Arabic Studies. For five days, Bucharest became one of the world’s leading centres for research on Eastern Christianity, bringing together more than 400 scholars from over 35 countries and representatives of approximately 180 universities and academic institutions. The nearly 300 papers, plenary lectures, and scholarly discussions demonstrated both the breadth and the vitality of these fields.
The theme of the World Congress of Syriac and Christian Arabic Studies revolved around the protection of the material and spiritual heritage of the communities of the Middle East, a concern that lies at the very heart of the Institute’s mission. This heritage encompasses monuments, manuscripts, and places of memory, but it also includes, just as importantly, the languages through which these communities have expressed their faith, culture, and identity over the centuries. From Greek to Syriac and Aramaic—the language spoken by Jesus—from Arabic to the other languages of the East, we are dealing with a living heritage that must be known, studied, preserved, and transmitted to future generations.
Languages are preserved through the work of scholars who study them, edit their texts, and translate them, but above all through the continuity of the communities that have carried these languages through history and that continue to preserve the material and spiritual heritage associated with them. The survival of these communities and the protection of their heritage cannot be separated from peace and dialogue. The cessation of conflict, mutual respect, and the building of a culture of peace are essential conditions if this heritage is to endure.
The success of the Congress therefore conveyed an important message about the direction of the Institute: Syriac and Christian Arabic Studies now occupy a firm place on our academic agenda, approached through the perspective of peace, heritage protection, and the promotion of dialogue. They stand alongside Greek Studies, Egyptology, and our other fields of research through which we seek to understand and reconstruct the cultural complexity of the Levant, while at the same time affirming our shared responsibility to ensure that this heritage of humanity endures for future generations.
The School carries this experience forward. This summer’s international Congress brought the global academic community to Bucharest and demonstrated that the Institute can become a true home for all those interested in the world of the Levant and the Middle East—a living world of extraordinary richness, shaped by encounters and remarkable cultural achievements. I would like the Institute to become a place where those interested in Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Egyptology, and the cultures of the East know that they can find expertise, dialogue, sources, and opportunities for academic training. Through this School, we are not merely developing academic programmes; we are building bridges between generations, disciplines, cultures, and communities, and through knowledge we are contributing to the preservation of a heritage that belongs to all humanity.
In closing, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy, our partner, for its support and for hosting this edition of the School. This collaboration once again confirms the value of institutional partnerships in creating genuine spaces for education, research, and intercultural dialogue.
I wish this year’s School every success, fruitful discussions, and inspiring intellectual encounters that may open new perspectives and lead to new collaborations.
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Maria Luiza Oancea (Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest), Scientific Director of the Annual Interdisciplinary School of Ancient Greek, Egyptology, and Oriental Languages:
Your Excellency, Mr. President Emil Constantinescu,
Dear Ms. Alexandra Motica, Representative of the Embassy of Romania in the Federal Republic of Germany,
Dear Mr. Mark Donfried, General Director,
Dear Mr. Cătălin-Ștefan Popa, General Director,
Distinguished guests,
Dear colleagues,
Dear participants,
It is a great pleasure to welcome you to the sixth edition of the Annual Interdisciplinary School of Ancient Greek, Egyptology and Oriental Studies, held in Potsdam and online.
First and foremost, I would like to express our gratitude to the Levant Institute of Advanced Studies for the Culture of Peace, represented by Mr. President Emil Constantinescu and to Mr. Mark Donfried, Director General of the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy in Berlin, for their hospitality and support for this edition, as well as for their efforts to make possible a dialogue between the participants in Potsdam and those in Bucharest.
The theme of this edition, “Law and Lawlessness in Antiquity,” invites us to cross centuries, cultural spaces and diverse traditions, while exploring one of the great questions of the ancient world: the relationship between norms and their violation, between law and conscience.
From the perspective of a classical philologist, I am particularly pleased that we will have the opportunity to approach Antiquity through texts and through the languages in which they have been transmitted to us.
The programme of this School will take us from Ancient Greek and the Greco-Roman world to Egypt, Jewish and Christian traditions, Syriac and Coptic cultures, as well as to the history of law and the history of ideas.
I invite you to see this week not merely as a succession of lectures, but as a dialogue between texts, languages, periods and disciplines.
Ask questions, approach the texts with patience, and do not be afraid of their difficulty: in philology, it is often precisely in difficulty that understanding begins.
I would like to thank everyone who is joining us, and especially you, dear participants, for choosing to take part in the courses offered by this School.
I wish you a week full of discoveries and memorable encounters!
Καλή ἀρχή!
