
	Top News: Wilderness and Spotsylvania 1864 Napoleon's Hussars World History Encyclopedia (21 Volumes) Atlas of Medieval Jewish History A Vertical Empire: History of the British Rocketry Programme A History of the Modern World, To 1815 (Volume 1), 10th edition They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America Battleground - Aubers Ridge The Somme Campaign Human Sacrifice, Militarism, Rulership: Materialization of State Ideology at the Feathered Serpent Pyramid, Teotihuacan

Contact

21-07-2015, 17:22

Introduction

The practice of inscribing and displaying texts on durable surfaces, or epigraphy, is characteristically Greek. Take, for example, a stele, or inscribed pillar, discovered a decade ago at Kaunos in Karia, Asia Minor (340s-330s bc; Blumel et al. 1998). The stele was found in the Kaunian stoa, among other stelai and statue-bases inscribed in Greek. And the document inscribed on the stele is typically Greek: a “proxeny” decree, recognizing two Athenians and their descendents as representatives and benefactors of the Kaunian people. But the document is not only Greek. It is also inscribed in Karian, the indigenous language of Kaunos. The text on the stele represents one of the few documents in Karian from Karia itself - most are from Egypt, where the Pharaohs employed Karian mercenaries - and the only public document in Karian. It even served to confirm the decipherment of the Karian script, which combines the Greek alphabet with some twenty additional characters whose values were unknown.

The decree from Kaunos reflects the interaction of two epigraphical cultures, one minor and regional, the other major and pan-Mediterranean. So the decree prompts a series of questions. What were the epigraphical cultures of the classical world? What peoples, or language-groups, inscribed texts on durable surfaces for display? How did different language-groups use inscriptions? How did different epigraphical cultures affect each other? In particular, how were minor epigraphical cultures like the Karian affected by Greek and Latin epigraphy? This chapter answers these questions by surveying the epigraphical cultures of the classical Mediterranean, c.800 bc to ad 300. It treats first Greek epigraphy and its relationship to the Greek city, then Latin

Epigraphy and its diffusion in the Roman empire, and lastly regional epigraphies and the influence of Greek and Latin. Its running theme is the way Greek and Latin continuously stimulated new epigraphical cultures.