This article presents an analytical study of a rare example of the text of the Lord’s Prayer inscribed on an early Byzantine ceramic plate that was found in excavations at Amorium. The graffito inscription is discussed in detail and the text identified securely with the Lord’s Prayer as preserved from the Gospels of Mathew and Luke. It is an extremely rare find in Asia Minor. At the same time, the inscribed vessel is examined as an object within its possible context, ecclesiastical, domestic or other, through comparison with other known examples. Finally, the article discusses the possible uses of the Lord’s Prayer in day-to-day life and the materiality of prayer for Christians during the early Byzantine period between the fourth and seventh centuries.

The excavation of Amorium already from the late 1980s and until today has been pioneering a hands-on approach to the study of urban evolution by exploring a major early medieval and middle Byzantine provincial capital that after the 7th century and until the 11th played a paramount role in the forefront of Byzantine history. Especially the ‘prehistory’ of the excavation of Amorium is shown to have been an early episode in the famous Kazhdan-Ostrogorsky debate on the survival of Byzantine cities into the Middle Ages. At the same time, the paper presents how this tradition endures in the new phase of the Amorium Project by continuing on the basic principles set and expanding on new questions as the articulation of built civic space and the later medieval transition from Byzantine to Seljuk and Ottoman.