An Egyptian pilgrim in Asia Minor: linguistic placing of a graffito from Hierapolis

The use of epigraphy, including Christian pilgrimage graffiti, to trace geo- graphic mobility in late antique and Byzantine studies has been limited. This article, however, relies on linguistic (lexicological and phonological) analysis of a 7(th)-8(th) graffito at the shrine of the apostle Philip at Hierapolis, Asia Minor, to unpack a regional - Egyptian - variety of the late Greek koine used in the inscription, and to argue that whoever left the graffito had hailed from bilingual Greek- and Coptic-speaking regions of the Byzantine empire. This has larger implications for how we understand the appeal of this particular pilgrimage centre as well as for broader methodologies of epigraphic research into long-haul pilgrimage patterns.