Listening to Stones

This chapter explores how the gamut of responses to the presence of an inscription has to include not just sight and touch but also imagination and vocalisation. Being meant to be read aloud, they convey a reader's voice as well as that of the inscription itself or that of the dead person commemorated on a gravestone. Even more immediate is the potential impact when a person's actual words are preserved and displayed. They may be in direct speech, illustrated by letters and confessions, or in indirect speech as records of manumissions, minutes of meetings, or jokes. They may alternatively be performative speech, in the form of acclamations, formal declarations, oaths, prayers or hymns; and can equally be reports of oral events such as meetings or even public demonstrations. They can also be couched in various forms of emotional language, whether uttered by individuals (graffiti, prayers or the edicts of angry rulers) or more collectively and formally in secular or religious acclamations, and even in decrees of state. A final section emphasises the need for practitioners of the discipline of epigraphy to be missionaries — to spread the word about the value of visible words.

Epigraphy and Informatics

This brief chapter stresses the difference between the revolutionary possibilities of applying Information Technology to the Greek and Roman epigraphic record and its limited effects to date. It traces the reasons partly to scholarly attitudes, partly to the lack of a list of prioritised objectives, partly to divergences in the very concepts of ‘inscription’ and of ‘data-base’ and partly to a lack of unity and collaboration.

Greek Epigraphy and the Greek Language

Part I of this chapter reviews its subject historically, showing how inscriptions allow us to see the development of the Greek dialects, the effects on Greek of contact with other languages, especially Latin, and the ways in which styles of utterance and uses of language changed through time. Part II, a brief systematic review, illustrates three modes of language: poetry, with illustrations from funerary epigrams much influenced by Homer and the dramatists; prose, with its range of variations by genre and by degree of rhetorical influence, but also very directly in the form of precise citations of words and phrases used in assemblies; and Kunstprosa, the blend of prose and poetry, illustrated by the style and vocabulary of the inscription of Antiochos I of Commagene on his monument at Nemrud Dagh in South East Turkey.

Greek Epigraphy and Ancient Economics

After initial comments on the role of Greek inscriptions as ‘archives’, this chapter reviews the drastic changes that have occurred since Finley's book of 1973 in the picture of the ancient economy, both by acknowledging development and growth, and by adopting new concepts, not least New Institutional Economics with its emphasis on transaction costs. The methodological impact of such new approaches is sketched in four fields, each of which is illustrated with epigraphic documentation: (1) production and growth, instancing technological advance, land exploitation and textile production; (2) finance, taxes, trade and prices, with emphasis on the need and opportunities for quantification; (3) money and coinage; and (4) the transformation of uncertainty into an assessment of risk, illustrated in respect of farming practices and recourse to consultation of oracles and curse-tablets.

Epigraphy and the Media

Those with responsibilities for the display of inscriptions in museums and other public places have in recent years been addressing the challenge of how the riches of the ancient texts can be conveyed to a public with little or no knowledge of Latin or Greek. The choice of texts should not ignore the casual messages of daily life from graffiti and painted slogans, nor should the later ‘forgeries’ of ancient texts or the innocent errors of stonecutters be excluded. Electronic media can bring to life both ancient images and texts, and can help in presenting difficult or incomplete texts. Inscriptions speak directly from the remote past, and meeting the challenge of transmitting their messages to the modern visitor will certainly repay the effort.

Epigraphy and Demography

This chapter uses evidence from all over the Graeco-Roman world. It shows that inscriptions are second only to papyri in providing the quantitative evidence without which the study of populations is futile, but require much care in interpretation because of cultural conventions. The chapter follows the life-cycle by reviewing the evidence for (1) fertility rates, especially seasonal; (2) the parameters of marriage customs, with notable variation between Christian and non-Christian documentation; (3) regional variations in family relationships, where (contrary to some recent theories) links within the nuclear family overwhelmingly predominate; (4) population size (where inscriptions offer little) and structures (where the gross under-representation of females reflect cultural convention, not demographic reality); and (5) mortality, especially its seasonal distribution.

Latin Epigraphy and the IT Revolution

Since the appearance in 1975 of John Jory's Key Word in Context index to volume VI of CIL, computer applications and databases have had a major influence on epigraphic studies. While an initial optimism diminished somewhat once the scale of the task in their creation became apparent, a great deal has been achieved under three headings: three major databases are now established within the federal organisation Electronic Archive of Greek and Roman Epigraphy, the Heidelberg Datenbank (post CIL texts), for non-Christian Rome and for Christian Rome; imaging using x-ray fluorescence, text mapping and computer-aided reconstructions of incomplete texts; and the editing of texts by EpiDoc, with Extensible Markup Language, Text Encoding Initiative and Unicode, successfully applied to the Vindolanda Writing Tablets and the Aphrodisias Inscriptions.

From Document to Monument

The transformation of written imperial documents into monumental inscriptions in the Greek-speaking provinces owed more to local agency than central direction. Local interests ensured public display of an emperor's instruction curbing abuses by imperial officials, and ancient treaties were kept on public view centuries after they were enacted. Only in a few cases were there explicit instructions requiring public and prominent display. Dissemination of even major historical documents appears to have depended on local initiative. Copies of the Deeds (Res Gestae) of Augustus (d. ad 14) are known from only three cities in Asia Minor, and Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices (ad 301), despite its universal application, is known from only two provinces of Asia Minor and the province of Achaea.

Epigraphy and the Display of Authority

This chapter begins by citing modern examples of public notices in order to illustrate the role of inscriptions as both stylised gestures and as channels of authority: they are performative utterances. Various sources of authority are identified, such as human communities, divine sanction, magic or royal decision: the latter category is illustrated in detail by a dossier of 209 bce from Asia Minor that had both symbolic and ‘real’ impact. Also illustrated, by other examples, are the ways in which locations are used, especially by lending or creating authority. In these ways, inscriptions exemplify speech-act theories: they make us accept a particular version of events as social magic or even ‘truth’ and act in terms of it, while the negotiations involved are hidden under an authoritative aspect. Yet the latter may be detectable if the inscription is read against the grain, in the knowledge that words are also traps.

Epigraphy and Roman Religion

An abundance of Latin votive inscriptions adds much to the knowledge of religious belief in the Roman World. Several major cults of Roman (e.g. emperor worship) and foreign (e.g. Mithras) origin, and the identification of local deities with classical gods, would be little understood were it not for the survival of inscriptions. Similarly, inscriptions alone furnish many details of the ritual and ceremonial of sacrifice, most notably in the case of the archival dossier of the Arval Brethren near Rome, not mentioned in any literary source. The hopes and fears of ordinary folk are revealed in the inscribed prayers and curses addressed to the many oracular shrines in the Greco-Roman world.