Professor Imbert is the director of the Department of Arabic, Medieval and Modern Studies of the Institut français du Proche-Orient (IFPO) at Beirut. He presents his lecture as keynote of the international Workshop “Arabic Secondary Inscriptions – Contextualizing the Evidence From Dayr Anba Hadra at Aswan (Egypt)”, organized in the framework of the Dayr Anba Hadra Project, a cooperation between the German Archaeological Institute (DAI), Cairo Dept., the Seminar for Egyptology (FU Berlin), and the Excellence Cluster Topoi.