INSCRIPTIONS

Inscription is the term given to a piece of writing on a durable material, such as metal, terra-cotta, or stone. The people who decipher, classify, and publish inscriptions (with an exception of those on coins, studied by numismatists) are known as epigraphers, and their field as epigraphy. Inscriptions have a central role in the history of information for two related reasons: first, people in nearly all literate societies have written on durable surfaces, often hoping that by so doing they would preserve their texts; and second, those durable surfaces are much more likely to survive today than writing on materials such as *papyrus, cloth, or paper. As a result, historians of ancient societies in particular rely on the work of epigraphers. We would know very little about the histories of ancient Mesopotamia or Egypt, or pre-Muslim India, for example, without the evidence of inscriptions, and even where plenty of other texts survive, as in the cases of ancient Greece and Rome, we can use inscriptions to complement those sources and to provide information about questions that the texts do not address. Although scholars had used the evidence of inscriptions before, it was in the nineteenth century that the field blossomed and epigraphers showed Greek and Roman historians just how much they could learn from objects of this sort. Historians of other premodern societies followed the lead of the classical epigraphers and adopted many of their techniques.

Often, inscriptions are casual creations: graffiti at tourist sites, for example. But because inscribing words in stone or metal gives them the impression of permanence (hence the metaphor “set in stone”) and is usually a time-consuming procedure, many inscriptions record deliberate pronouncements. They disseminate information to a broad audience, whether set up by individuals—most commonly, funerary inscriptions preserving the deceased’s name, age, and achievements—or state institutions. Inscriptions record the texts of treaties and laws, and honors awarded to individuals. The law code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi (d. 1750 BCE), for example, was carved into a seven-and-a-half-foot-tall piece of basalt underneath an image of the king being invested by Shamash, the god of justice (figure 1); to encourage future students, the fifteenth-century Vietnamese emperor Lê Thánh Tông established the practice of inscribing the names of graduates of royal exams on large steles or stelai (stone slabs) in the Temple of Literature, Hanoi. Inscribed stones could serve other communal functions, acting as boundary stones, or providing details of the organization of time. Scholars have suggested that the earliest steles found in the Zapotec site of Monte Albán, in the Oaxaca Valley, include calendrical notation. The Parian Chronicle is a monumental inscription providing a year-by-year countdown of events in Athens and other classical Greek cities from 1581/80 BCE to 264/63 BCE (figure 2). Sometimes inscriptions recorded longer, sanctioned narratives. The Roman emperor Augustus (d. 14 CE) gave orders that his first-person account of his achievements, the Res gestae, was to be inscribed on bronze on columns outside his mausoleum. The bronze originals are lost, presumably melted down after the fall of the Roman Empire by scavengers eager for the metal; but because respectful communities in the empire then displayed their own versions of the text on stone, historians can use it today. The Aihole Inscription of King Pulakesin II (634–35 CE), composed by his court poet, the Ravikirti, presented a panegyrical account of the Chalukya dynasty’s achievements in central India. In Islamic areas, inscriptions play a crucial role in the decoration of religious buildings. Other inscriptions provide information about the object on which they appear, ranging from artists’ signatures to the texts on votive dedications.

Figure 1. Stele with the text of Hammurabi’s code. The text is dominated by the image of Shamash and the king, above. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Code_of_Hammurabi_11.jpg, licensed under Creative Commons (BY-SA 2.0).

Historians today read and exploit the texts of these inscriptions, interpreting them as public communications. They also use the texts in ways their creators might not have expected. The large-scale study of names in Roman inscribed texts, for example, can reveal how people from different linguistic backgrounds moved around the empire. Incidental references to women in inscriptions can illuminate their societal roles in ways that conventional narratives do not. Collectively, the records of individual transactions on clay tablets have allowed historians to reconstruct the workings of Mesopotamian economies. Famously, multilingual inscriptions have provided linguists with the keys to decipher languages. The *Rosetta Stone includes the same decree in ancient Greek, demotic script, and Egyptian hieroglyphs, which led nineteenth-century scholars to interpret the last of these. At Bisotun, between Babylon and Baghdad, a great relief depicts the Persian king Darius’s (d. 486 BCE) defeat of his rivals, and an inscription in Elamite, Babylonian, and Old Persian records the history of his reign, allowing the decipherment of cuneiform (figure 3).

Figure 2. Seventeenth-century reproduction of the Parian Chronicle. The page represents the inscribed monument as a text with gaps shown by dots and includes line numbers to the left. John Selden, Marmora Arundelliana, 1628, 1 (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, 4 Arch. 181, https://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/en/fs1/object/display/bsb10222002_00025.html).

Inscriptions are not simply disembodied texts, although some of the editions that epigraphers have produced, dense with regular capital letters, might give that impression. (As well as reflecting the technological difficulties involved in reproducing inscribed monuments, this approach is also an inheritance of the *philological interests of early classical epigraphers [figure 2].) As with words in other media, the style of the characters, the use of symbols and decoration alongside letters, and the size and arrangement of inscriptions’ texts can affect how we interpret them. The Gothic script used for the Ten Commandments on a 1961 monument at the Texas state capitol, whose display was deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court in 2005, demonstrates the text’s venerability. Historians interested in the analysis of individual inscriptions pay attention to the objects on which the texts appear, especially when they are investigating societies with low levels of *literacy. An inability to read the words of an inscription does not necessarily prevent the interpretation of the object. The central message of the Bisotun inscription, for example, Darius’s triumph over pretenders to his throne, is clear from the relief, which, unlike the letters, can be seen from a considerable distance away (figure 3); scholars have pointed out that viewers of the stele with Hammurabi’s code would have seen the words of the laws surmounted by an divinely inspired lawgiver, making clear the source of authority within the state (figure 1).

Figure 3. The Bisotun relief. The text records King Darius’s conquests in three languages, and the dominant relief makes clear the king’s power, showing figures in submission to him. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Behistun_Inscription_in_Persia_ca._520_BC-_UNESCO_World_Heritage_Site.jpg, licensed under Creative Commons (BY-SA 4.0).

Text and object can play off one another. A peculiar dedication by a Roman chief priest (archigallus) called Marcus Modius Maxximus is made up of a substantial stone cylinder with a carved cock on top. This is a pun on the man’s name and role: the cylinder is a Roman corn measure, a modius, and the Latin for cock is gallus (figure 4). An inscribed silver casket made in 976 CE for ʾAbū Walīd Hišām, then heir to the caliphate of Spain, features the names of the craftsmen on the underside of the clasp: this is both a sign of humility, and, perhaps, an indication that the two men were under the thumb of the ruler. And the site of the inscribed object matters: in 726 CE the Chinese emperor Xuanzong composed a moya inscription (the Chinese term for an inscription on an unquarried rock) that was carved and inlaid with gold pigment at the summit of the holy Mount Tai, commemorating his sacrifices and addressing deities and spirits. He thus inserted himself into a holy landscape at the end of an arduous climb; its placement testified to the emperor’s piety and power.

Figure 4. Dedication of Marcus Modius Maxximus. This nineteenth-century reproduction of the small monument allows us to see the cock standing on top of the corn measure. Monumenti inediti pubblicati dall’istituto di corrispondenza archeologica 9 (1869): vol. VIIII tav.VIIIa (digitized by the Arachne project [http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/item/buchseite/655585], licensed under Creative Commons [BY-NC-ND 3]).

Inscriptions are objects, therefore, usually made for particular sites, and should be interpreted as such. They can also make demands on the viewer, requiring him or her to interact with the setting in which they were placed. On Mount Gang in Shangdong Province, China, passages from a Buddhist sutra were inscribed on a series of rocks going up the mountain: reading the text thus requires climbing from one to the next, making a metaphoric parallel with the route to *enlightenment that sutra describes. Other inscriptions invite the visitor to engage with their texts. In Sasanian Iran, a high priest made an addendum to an inscription commissioned by Shapur I (d. 276 CE), saying that whoever read it out loud should feel more confident in his soul. Many Roman funerary monuments beseech travelers to stop, read their inscription, and reflect on the fate of the deceased, addressing passersby in the second person. A tomb in Pompeii features one inscription recording that Publius Vesonius Phileros built it for his patron, himself, and a “friend,” Marcus Orfellius Faustus; beneath, he added another, presumably after his Faustus’s death. “Learn what to avoid,” he wrote, “the man who I had hoped was my friend, I am forsaking: a case was maliciously brought against me.… May neither the household gods nor the gods below receive the one who misrepresented our affairs” (Carroll, 52). Some of the makers of medieval and *early modern Christian inscriptions followed the Romans’ lead, telling readers to stop and pray for the deceased’s soul, although without invectives such as Phileros’s. The Latin inscription commemorating the architect Sir Christopher Wren (d. 1723 CE), in St Paul’s Cathedral, London, famously advises the reader to do something else. “If you seek his monument,” it concludes, “look around” (Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice): the visitor has to turn away from the inscription to admire the cathedral that serves as Wren’s best memorial.

Wren’s son, also called Christopher, composed the epitaph. After the elder Wren’s death, the younger devoted much time to securing his father’s reputation, commissioning engravings of his buildings and collecting documents related to his career, to which he gave the telling title Parentalia. None of this, though, had anything like the impact of his aphoristic inscription. His tribute to his father demonstrated the ongoing power of an inscribed text, displayed in public, to commemorate, engage, and inform.

William Stenhouse

See also archaeological decipherment; coins; money

FURTHER READING

• Mary Beard, “Vita inscripta,” in La Biographie antique, edited by Widu Wolfgang Ehlers, 1997, 83–114; Sheila S. Blair, Islamic Inscriptions, 1998; John Bodel, ed., Epigraphic Evidence: Ancient History from Inscriptions, 2001; Maureen Carroll, “ ‘Vox tua nempe mea est’: Dialogues with the Dead in Roman Funerary Commemoration,” Accordia Research Papers 11 (2007–8): 37–80; Robert E. Harrist Jr., The Landscape of Words: Stone Inscriptions from Early and Medieval China, 2008; Christopher Woods, ed., Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond, 2015.