By epigraphic evidence, we mean texts that were inscribed or painted on surfaces of stone, metal, or terracotta (inscriptions were presumably also written on wood and wax though this seldom survives in the archaeological record). Technically, the distinction between epigraphic and literary testimony is not entirely accurate: as we have seen, the inscription on the so-called “Nestor’s Cup” at Pithecusae was metrical and epitaphs were often composed in verse. A more precise distinction between the two categories of evidence is that inscriptions provide us with direct and unmediated access to the moment of their production whereas literary texts have come down to us through a long and complicated process of textual transmission, in which copying errors and editorial choices have intervened. Inscriptions may be either public (decrees; law codes; civic dedications; commemorations) or private (personal dedications; epitaphs; graffiti). The test of intentionality must always be applied but the fact that most inscriptions are contemporary with the information they communicate serves to endow them with a particular reliability. The principal factor that compromises this reliability is their state of preservation. Metal corrodes or is recycled, while stone wears, splinters, and fractures and this means that many inscriptions are not entirely legible, requiring “restorations” (indicated within square brackets) on the part of the editor. Such restorations are more than mere guesswork - they rely on an extensive knowledge of typical formulae and expressions employed in similar inscriptions - but they must always be approached with caution.
Inscriptions are next to useless for historical purposes unless they can be dated. From the Classical period, public decrees often specified the name of the magistrate who presided in the year they were proposed (see below), but this seldom happens in the Archaic period and, when it does, we invariably lack external evidence that would allow us to assign any named magistrate to a specific year. Occasionally a monument which can be dated by archaeological means allows us to date inscriptions that were displayed on it, though very many inscriptions are found detached from their original archaeological context because they were reused as building materials - either in antiquity or in more modern periods - or else excavated illegally and sold on the antiquities market. For these reasons, a large number of Archaic inscriptions are dated on the basis of letter-forms. Much like pottery styles (see below), the shapes of alphabetic letters varied between regions and over time. Some indications for the rate at which such letter forms evolved are provided by external chronological checks: the Nestor inscription can be dated by the style of the vase on which it appears while the use of inscriptions as building materials in the Athenian fortifications of the 470s provides a terminus ante quem (a latest possible date) for the shapes of the letters attested on the stones. The method is not precise and is generally insensitive to calligraphic differences between individuals, so the dating ascribed to the vast majority of Archaic inscriptions should usually be regarded as very approximate.
Inscriptions generally furnish information that is qualitatively different from that to be found in literary sources but they can also make up for gaps in our historical knowledge, especially in the Classical and Hellenistic periods and especially outside of Athens. Even in Classical Athens, however, much of our knowledge for how the Athenian Empire functioned is owed not to literary sources but to inscriptions - in particular, the annual lists of tribute paid to the Treasury of Athena by Athens’ allies. By contrast, epigraphic evidence has played a less prominent role in Archaic Greece. Although more than 5,000 inscriptions are known from the period, the vast majority are simply names, indicating possession, or short dedications - e. g. “Hariknidas dedicated (this) to the white-armed goddess, Hera” (SEG 36.341). Nevertheless, as we shall see, epigraphic testimony has provided some valuable evidence for the nature of early laws and constitutions, relations between states, and religious and commemorative practices.
Numismatic evidence (i. e. coins) has also played a relatively minor role in studying the history of the Archaic Greek world. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, coinage appears fairly late in the period - around the middle of the sixth century in a few states in mainland Greece. Secondly, unlike coins of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, which often commemorated specific events, reigns, or dynasties, the earliest issues of coins appear to be longer-lived and more concerned with establishing a widely recognizable standard than with communicating propaganda. In later periods, coins can provide important dating standards for archaeological contexts (though care needs to be exercised since coins might be hoarded and their small size may easily result in them appearing in archaeological contexts dating to an entirely different period from that in which they were minted). In the Archaic period, by contrast, coins often have to be dated by other archaeological artifacts found with them - though, once again, this technique is unavailable for those many coins that have been acquired illegally and sold on the antiques market with no note of their original provenance. For all that, Archaic coins do provide important information about the self-image that city-states wished to project and both distribution charts of known issues and comparison of varying weight-standards allow us to draw important conclusions about the nature of Archaic trade (see chapter 10).
Given the ubiquitous and contemporary nature of the material record, it may seem surprising that ancient historians should have resisted employing archaeological evidence until comparatively recently. This has much to do with the historical development of the two disciplines. For so long as classical archaeologists concerned themselves chiefly with great objects of art, their subject matter served as convenient illustrations for the scholarly preoccupations of historians who tended to focus primarily on political and military matters and the rise and fall of civilizations. The Parthenon exhibited the grandiose but serene splendor of Athenian hegemony while the exuberance of Hellenistic sculpture reflected the decadence of a Greek world in the twilight of its years, subjected to Macedonian despots. But as archaeologists began to interest themselves in the totality of material culture and in issues such as the function and meaning of objects, many preferred to affiliate themselves with anthropologists rather than historians (who failed to find much excitement in the questions archaeologists were asking). It is only really in the past three decades that a new synthesis has arisen between classical archaeologists and ancient historians as the former have once again recognized the importance of the historical dimension and the latter have turned to more social and cultural issues.
It is obvious that archaeology has a particularly crucial role to play in periods or in regions for which there is little in the way of literary, epigraphic, or numismatic evidence, but Finley’s proclamation that “[i]t is self-evident that the potential contribution of archaeology to history is, in a rough way, inversely proportional to the quantity and quality of the available written sources” (1986: 93) is anything but self-evident. The misconception arises from a commonly held belief that the role of archaeological evidence is merely to illustrate written materials. Archaeology has been summoned in from the cold but all too often only to serve as a handmaid to - rather than a bedfellow of - ancient history. There are two reasons why this understanding of the relationship between the two disciplines is flawed. Firstly, archaeology highlights a whole range of issues that are often quite different from those emphasized in literary sources. New, more meticulous techniques of excavation, trace element analysis, petrology, and floral and faunal analysis have yielded vital information about settlement use, public and domestic space, diet, environmental conditions, and cultural and commercial exchange that are barely hinted at in literary sources. Field survey, a non-intrusive investigation in which teams of walkers traverse fields in search of surface material - normally pottery sherds and roof tiles - which is then dated by ceramic experts, provides answers to questions concerning regional settlement patterns and land use that are seldom raised by ancient authors. There is a good deal more to archaeology than providing dates for historians - though that too is important (see below).
Secondly, the old distinction between “subjective” literary sources and the “objective” archaeological evidence that can confirm or refute them has receded somewhat. Most critically aware archaeologists have now come to recognize that interpretation of the material record is every bit as subjective as the historical interpretation of sources. Furthermore, material culture is not merely the passive “footprint” of past human behavior. People use material objects for particular purposes. In modern parlance, archaeology is a “discourse” but one that is entirely different from the discourse to which literary sources belong - what people say they do and what they actually do in practice are often two different things. This - together with the extremely fragmentary character of both written and material evidence - is why historians need to be careful to avoid the “positivist fallacy” of mechanically equating what we find in the archaeological record with what we know from the literary sources (see p. 7). Any given artifact or cultural feature should first be examined in its own context - both the archaeological context in which it was originally deposited and the broader context of contemporary materials among which it previously circulated - before any attempt is made to match it with information deriving from written sources. Occasionally there is a happy congruence, though cases where words and things do not appear to converge are no less interesting from the historian’s point of view.
World History
