Epigraphy
From
ἐπιγράφειν=
inscribere. A word
conventionally used to describe the scientific study of inscriptions. In its widest sense it
has reference to all inscriptions, including words engraved on rings, or stamped on coins,
lamps, jars, vases, and other articles of use or ornament; but more strictly it relates to the
historical inscriptions carved upon slabs of stone (i. e. lapidary inscriptions), or upon
plates of bronze and other metal. Classical philology and archæology owe an
inestimable debt to the study of the inscriptions that have been preserved to us from the
Greek and Roman world, and to the inscriptions of these two great centres of civilization this
short sketch must be confined. (For other epigraphic remains, see the articles
Assyria;
Babylonia; Cuneiform Inscriptions;
Hieroglyphics;
Persia. For inscriptions on
coins, see the article
Numismatics.)
I. Greek.—The inscriptions of ancient Greece are more
valuable than those of Rome, for the twofold reason that they date much further back in point
of time, and because, being usually carved on marble, they have more generally survived the
ravages of time than the bronze plates employed by the Romans, which were either melted by
various conflagrations that consumed the buildings where they were stored, or else were
carried off by invading armies to be made over into coins. There are, however, some inscribed
Greek tablets of bronze still surviving, as well as thin plates of lead marked with
inscriptions. (See the
Archäolog. Zeitung for 1877, p. 196; and id.
for 1878, p. 71; Franz,
Elementa Epigr. Graecae, p. 168; and Roberts,
Greek Epigraphy, pp. 234-242.) One of the Greek bronze plates is represented
on the next page. It contains part of a treaty between Oeanthea and Chaleion.
Immense numbers of inscriptions were set up in ancient times, in all public buildings, in
temples and theatres, and by the side of the great roads. Delphi and Olympia abounded in them;
while the Parthenon and Acropolis at Athens, the Heraeum at Samos, the Artemisium at Ephesus,
and, in fact, all the important sanctuaries, were great storehouses of inscriptions recording
laws, decrees, treaties, gifts, arbitrations, and other memorable events of political and
religious life. In all, some 30,000 ancient Greek inscriptions are known to scholars.
A brief account of the Greek alphabet is given
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Bronze Treaty Tablet found at Oeanthea. (Woodhouse Collection.)
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under the title
Alphabet, to which
reference may be made. The alphabet itself is found in inscriptions in the so-called
“abecedaria,” of which one of the most interesting is the
“Formello Alphabet,” found at Formello near Veii, in Italy, in 1882 by
Prince Chigi, and of which a representation is given below. It is the only abecedarium in
exist
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The Formello Alphabet.
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ence which contains the archaic Greek forms of every one of the twenty-two
Phœnician letters arranged precisely in the accepted Semitic order. (Cf. Roberts,
Greek Epigraphy, p. 20.) It also enables us to determine the alphabetic
position and the form of the Greek letter which represents the
san
(shin)—i. e. . (See Kirchhoff,
Studien zur Geschichte des
griechischen Alphabets, pp. 134 foll.). Other abecedaria are the “Alphabet
of Caeré,” on a black vase found in 1836 by Galassi at Cervetri
(Kirchhoff, pp. 134 foll.); the “Alphabet of Colle,” found painted on a
tomb near Sienna in 1698; the “Cepolla Alphabet,” found near Basta in
Calabria by Luigi Cepolla in 1805 (Kirchhoff, p. 157); the “Corinthian
Alphabet” (incomplete), on a piece of pottery from Corinth (Kirchhoff, p. 103); and
the “Ionic Alphabet,” from a fragment of a marble stelé found
by Newton at Calymna (Roberts, p. 19).
The usual form for the Greek inscribed marbles was the
στήλη, a slab from three to five feet high and from three to four inches in
thickness, slightly tapering to the top, which was plain or ornamented with a slight moulding.
Another form of marble was the
βωμός, or altar, square or
circular. There are also pillars (
κίονες), sarcophagi,
statue-bases, and even the walls of the
cellae of temples (
C. I.
G. 2905). Letters cut on walls and
στῆλαι were
picked out in blue or red pigment.
The oldest Greek inscriptions yet discovered are from the island of Thera (Santorin) in the
Aegean, which are mortuary records, and are by some scholars dated as far back as the tenth
century B.C. The oldest, however, to which a definite date can be assigned are found cut on
the knee of a colossal
statue at Abu Simbel in Egypt by Greek mercenaries in the service of Psammetichus,
king of Egypt, and hence dating from the end of the seventh or the beginning of the sixth
century B.C. Next in order come the inscriptions upon the bases of the statues set along
the Sacred Way leading to the Temple of Apollo at Branchidae near Miletus, and assigned to the
sixth century B.C. An inscription found by Newton at Halicarnassus, and known as the
“Lygdamis Inscription,” is of the time of Herodotus (B.C. 453), and is
important as exhibiting the Ionic alphabet in almost exactly the form in which it was legally
adopted at Athens, fifty years later. A fac-simile of this is given by Roberts in his
Greek Epigraphy, p. 175. (See, also, Newton and Pullan,
Historical
Discoveries at Halicarnassus, etc., pp. 23 foll.). A very interesting Greek
inscription is that upon the trophy set up at Delphi by the Greeks to commemorate the Persian
defeat at Plataea, and now in the Hippodrome at Constantinople, whither it was brought by
Constantine. See
Columna.
Greek inscriptions may be conveniently grouped under the following heads:
1.
Historical and Political (
ψηφίσματα, νόμοι, treaties,
records of awards and arbitrations between rival cities, letters from kings and other rulers,
public accounts, lists of treasures, and laudatory inscriptions in honour of
individuals);
2.
Religious (rituals, laws relating to priests, calendars of sacrifices, rules of augury,
etc.; prayers and imprecations, leases of sacred lands, oracles, etc.);
3.
Private (dedications and honourary inscriptions, epitaphs, sepulchral inscriptions,
boundary stones of mortgaged lands, inscriptions on statues, etc.). The finest collections of
Greek inscribed marbles are those at Athens, London (British Museum), Paris (Louvre), Smyrna,
Constantinople, and Oxford.
II. Roman.—The oldest Latin inscriptions do not date
from an earlier period than the beginning of the sixth century B.C. The oldest of all is
probably the so-called “Fibula Praenestina,” a gold clasp found at
Praenesté in 1886, with a short inscription written from right to left. Next in
point of time comes the celebrated “Duenos Inscription” (q. v.), written
(also from right to left) on three earthen pots, figured on p. 608, and called the
“Vascula Dresseliana,” from the archaeologist, Dr. Dressel.
Other Latin inscriptions of great historical and linguistic interest are those on the tombs
of the Scipios, now in the Vatican Library, and other
tituli
sepulcrales, the Carmen Arvale (see
Fratres
Arvales), the Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus (see
Dionysia, p. 521), and a number of
leges, such as
the Lex Acilia Repetundarum (
C. I. L. 198); Lex Luci Lucerini on a stone found
at Luceria (
C. I. L. ix. 782), the Lex Luci Spoletini found at Spoletum in
1876 (Cortese,
Latini Sermonis Vetust. Exempla, p. 11), the Lex Antonia
Rubrica (
C. I. L. 204), the Lex Salpensana and the Lex
Malacitana from Spain (
C. I. L. ii. 1963, 1964), etc.
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Vascula Dresseliana, showing the Duenos Inscription.
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Roman inscriptions are, as a rule, of a much more formal character than the Greek, and are
expressed in regular conventional formulae, with abbreviated designations of status for
freemen, slaves, children, freedmen, and all the dignities and functions of official,
military, and sacerdotal life. Formulaic, also, are the legal inscriptions of all
kinds—the
sortes, prayers, dedicatory sentences, and
execrations—thus exemplifying the methodical and orderly character of the Roman
mind. The most important of the epigraphic abbreviations are given in this Dictionary under
the different letters of the alphabet. Informal inscriptions, especially the
graffiti scratched upon the walls and elsewhere, are likewise numerous
and valuable, and have a literature of their own. See
Graffiti. The finest collections of Roman inscriptions are at Rome (Vatican,
Capitoline Museum, etc.), Naples (Museo Nazionale), London (British Museum), Paris (Louvre),
Vienna, and Munich.
Besides the Latin inscriptions proper, of which some 70,000 are now known, there are
dialectic inscriptions in Oscan and Umbrian, and some 6000 in Etruscan. See
Etruria;
Osci;
Tabula Bantina;
Tabulae Iguvinae;
Umbria.
III. History of Epigraphy.—The ancients themselves
fully recognized the historical value of inscriptions, so that both orators and historians
continually cite them as evidence. (See Demosth.
De Falsa Legat. 428;
In Ctes. 75;
Herod.iv. 88; v. 58; vii. 228; ix.
81; Thucyd. v. 18; and cf. Eurip.
Suppl. 1202 foll.). Regular collections of
Greek inscriptions were made by Philochorus (B.C. 300), Polemo (hence called
στηλοκόπας), Aristodemus, and others. Cicero, Livy , Pliny the
Elder, and Suetonius often cite important inscriptions. As soon as the revival of learning
began after the downfall of the Roman Empire, the study of epigraphy
commenced—first of the Latin remains by scholars like Poggio Bracciolini and
Signorili in the fourteenth century, and then of both Greek and Latin by Cyriacus of Ancona,
who copied great numbers of monumental inscriptions, in which he was followed by Marcanova,
Felice Feliciano, Ferrarino, Marino Sanudo, and others in the fifteenth century. The first
printed collections were published by Spreti
(Ravenna, 1489), Peutinger
(Augsburg, 1509), Huttich
(Mayence, 1520), and Albertini
(Rome, 1521). Early
corpora inscriptionum are those of
Apianus
(Ingolstadt, 1534), Gruter
(1603; re-edited by Graevius,
1707), Gudius (ed. by
Hessel, 1731), Reinesius
(1682),
Fabretti
(1699), Muratori
(1739), Maffei
(1749), and
Donati
(1765-75). Among these collections, however, were many inaccurately
copied inscriptions and many actual forgeries and falsifications, so that only after critical
study and acute investigation could they be used with safety. The sifting of the inscriptions
by Maffei, Marini, and others with a view to the detection of falsehood and to scientific
research, laid the foundations of critical epigraphy. In 1828,
Orelli (q.v.) published two volumes of Roman inscriptions embodying the
researches of Marini and others, and in the same year August Boeckh published the first
volume of the
Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum, subsequently augmented by other
volumes and by the labours of Franz and Kirchhoff. The publication of these works fixed the
methods of epigraphy; and from this time on, numerous epigraphists have devoted themselves to
the study of inscriptions and to the working up in monographs of the results obtained in
their investigations. The great
Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum was projected
as early as 1732 by Maffei, but was not actually begun until the work had been taken up by
the Royal Academy of Sciences of Berlin. The first volume (
Inscriptiones Antiquissimae
ad C. Caesaris Mortem) appeared in 1863, containing also the
Fasti
Consulares and indices. Up to 1895, fifteen volumes had appeared under the editorship
of Mommsen, Henzen, De Rossi, Hübner, Ritschl, Zangemeister, Wilmanns, Hirschfeld,
Dessan, and others. The arrangement adopted is the geographical.
Of late, great attention to the study of inscriptions has been given by students of the
dialects, especially the dialects of Greece, as the information which the epigraphic remains
afford is much more reliable than that derived from literature with its conventional and
frequently artificial language. See
Dialects.
IV. Bibliography.—Standard works on Greek epigraphy are
the following:
Franz, Elementa Epigraphices Graecae (1840);
Keil, Analecta Epigraphica (1842); Reinach,
Traité d'Epigraphie Grecque (Paris, 1885); Hicks,
Manual of Greek Historical Inscriptions (Oxford, 1882);
Roberts,
Introduction to Greek Epigraphy (Cambridge, 1887).
Important collections of Greek Inscriptions are the
Corpus Inscriptionum
Graecarum, 4 vols.
(1828- 1877); the
Corpus Inscriptionum
Atticarum, 3 vols.
(1873-83); Lebas,
Voyage
Archéologique en Grèce et en Asie Mineure, 6 vols.
(Paris, 1847); Keil,
Sylloge Inscriptionum Boeoticarum
(Leipzig, 1847); Kaibel,
Epigrammata Graeca ex Lapidibus
Conlecta (Berlin, 1878); Rangabé,
Antiquités
Helléniques, 2 vols.
(Athens, 1842-55); Rose,
Inscriptiones Graecae Vetustessimae (Cambridge, 1825); Roehl,
Imagines Inscriptionum Graec. Antiquissimarum (Berlin, 1883);
Hicks and Newton,
Collection of Anc. Gk. Inscript. in the British Museum, 3
parts
(Oxford, 1874-86); Cumanudes,
Ἀττικῆς
Ἐπιγραφαὶ Ἐπιτύμβιοι
(Athens, 1871); Dittenberger,
Sylloge Inscriptionum
Graecarum (Leipzig, 1883); and with especial reference to the dialects,
Cauer,
Delectus Inscriptionum Graecarum, etc.
(Leipzig, 1883);
Collitz,
Sammlung der griechischen Dialekt-Inschriften, 3 vols.
(Göttingen, 1884-86); Larfeld,
Sylloge Inscriptionum
Boeoticarum Popularem Dialectum Exhibentium (Berlin, 1883); Roehl,
Inscript. Graec. Antiquiss. praeter Atticas in Attica Repert. (Berlin,
1882); Hoffman,
Die griechischen Dialekte (Göttingen,
1891). On the language of the Greek inscriptions see especially
Meisterhans,
Grammatik der attischen Inschriften (Berlin, 1885);
Meister,
Die griechischen Dialekte (Göttingen, 1882-89);
and the bibliography given in the article
Dialects. Other valuable supplementary reading will be found in the following:
Hinrichs, the article “Griechische Epigraphik” in I. Müller's
Handbuch; Newton,
Essays on Art and Archaeology (London,
1880); Newton and Pullan,
History of Discoveries at Halicarnassus,
etc., 2 vols.
(London, 1862); the article by Egger,
Des Collections des
Inscriptions Grecques, in the
Journal des Savants for 1871; and
Westermann in Pauly's
RealEncyclopädie, s. v.
“Inscriptions.”
Standard works on Roman epigraphy are the following: Cagnat,
Cours
d'Épigraphie Latine (2d ed. Paris, 1890); Egbert,
Introd. to Study of Lat. Inscriptions (N. Y. 1895); Bone,
Anleitung zum Lesen, Ergänzen, und Datiren römischer
Inschriften (Trèves, 1881); Blanchère,
Hist. de l'Épigraphie Romaine (Paris, 1887); the
article “Römische Epigraphik” in I. Müller's
Handbuch; and that by E. Hübner in the
Encyclopaedia
Britannica, s. v. “Inscriptions,” vol. xiii. pp. 124-133.
Valuable collections of Latin inscriptions are the
Corpus Inscriptionum
Latinarum, 15 vols. (Berlin, 1863 foll.); Morcelli,
Lexicon
Epigraphicum (Padua, 1819); Zell,
Handbuch der römischen
Epigraphik, 2 vols.
(Heidelberg, 1850-52); Ritschl,
Priscae
Latinitatis Monumenta Epigraphica, with 5 supplements
(Berlin, 1862);
Hübner,
Exempla Scripturae Epigraphicae Latinae (Berlin,
1885); and for general and convenient use, the two following: Wilmanns,
Exempla
Inscriptionum Latinarum, 2 vols.
(Berlin, 1873); and Dessau,
Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae, vol. i.
(Berlin, 1892). A good
selection of Latin inscriptions, with an introduction and commentary, is that of Wordsworth,
Fragments and Specimens of Early Latin (Oxford, 1874),
containing also literary remains. Elementary is the work of F. D. Allen,
Remnants of Early Latin (Boston, 1884). A short and convenient
collection, showing the forms of the letters, is that of Cortese,
Latini
Sermonis Vetustioris Exempla Selecta (Turin, 1892). For very early and
dialectic Latin, see Schneider,
Dialectorum Italicarum Aevi Vetustioris Exempla
Selecta (Leipzig, 1886); and for Etruscan, Oscan, and Umbrian, Mommsen,
Die Unteritalische Dialekte (Leipzig, 1850); Fabretti,
Corpus Inscrip. Italicarum Antiquitoris Aevi, and its supplements
(Turin, 1867, 1872-77); and the bibliography given in the articles
Etruria;
Osci;
Umbria. Christian inscriptions are collected by De
Rossi (see
Catacumbae); by Le Blant,
Inscriptions Chrétiennes de la Gaule, 2 vols.
(Paris,
1857-65); and by Hübner,
Inscriptiones Britanniae
Christianae (Berlin, 1876), and id.
Inscript. Hispaniae
Christ. (Berlin, 1871). See, also, Le Blant,
L'Épigraphie Chrétienne en Gaule et dans
l'Afrique (Paris, 1890). General supplementary reading will be found in
Curtius's
Studien (Leipzig, 1868-78); in Hübner's
Grundriss zu Vorlesungen über die lateinische Grammatik (2d
ed. Berlin, 1880); and the
Dizionario Epigrafico di Antichità
Romane (Rome, 1886 foll.).
