Читать книгу The Hellenistic World - F. Walbank W. - Страница 10

This new material falls mainly into three categories. The first consists of inscriptions on stone or marble. The classical world was addicted to inscribing information on durable material of this kind. For the period with which we are concerned, including the reign of Alexander, the majority of these inscriptions are in Greek but from Egypt we have also Egyptian inscriptions in both the hieroglyphic and the demotic forms. The famous Rosetta Stone, now in the British Museum, is a piece of black basalt containing a decree passed by the Council of Priests at Memphis on 27 March 196 and enumerating the good deeds of Ptolemy V Epiphanes and the honours which they proposed to pay to him (OGIS, 90). The Greek version was followed by a translation into Egyptian, which was recorded in hieroglyphic and demotic, and it was this that enabled the French scholar Champollion, from 1820 onwards, to begin the long process of unravelling the Egyptian hieroglyphics. There are also a few Latin inscriptions but most of the documents which concern Roman relations with Greece come from Greece and are in Greek. They have been conveniently assembled in R. S. Sherk, Roman Documents from the Greek East. There are also several cuneiform inscriptions from Babylonia of relevance to the history of the Seleucids.

Inscriptions were set up for a variety of reasons. A few are directly concerned with recording historical facts, such as the so-called Parian marble, of which two fragments survive and which gave an account by an unknown author of

the dates from the beginning, derived from all kinds of records and general histories, starting from Cecrops, the first king of Athens, down to the archonship of [Ast]yanax at Paros and Diognetus at Athens (264/3) (Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, 239).

But the majority are preserved for other reasons. Many register official matters such as a treaty or law or agreement to exchange citizenship (sympoliteia) or the findings of an arbitration; here the purpose is to set up a public record, available to all and sundry, of decisions taken publicly by sovereign and other bodies. For the hellenistic period a special group of inscriptions records relations between Greek cities and the kings; often a letter from a king is inscribed in full followed by decisions taken in accordance with its instructions. Some examples of these will be considered below in Chapter 8. Others record decrees passed by city assemblies honouring eminent citizens of the same or some other city for services rendered – financial, political and, especially, for serving on important embassies. There are also building inscriptions recording expenditure, details of loans incurred by cities, requests for grants of immunity from reprisals (see pp. 145 ff.) by temples, cities and other bodies, and records of their concession by kings and cities, details of embassies sent to solicit collaboration in the setting-up of new religious festivals or the up-grading of established ones, or of the manumission of slaves (in which temples like that of Apollo at Delphi were regularly concerned), and a score of other categories, all having one thing in common, someone’s need to keep a permanent record.

The historian requires a special technique and experience to extract the fullest information from this epigraphic material. The exact provenance of many inscriptions is uncertain and they are usually fragmentary or partially illegible. Happily they tend to be couched in somewhat stereotyped language and the study of the vocabulary and phraseology used in various contexts at various dates enables the skilled epigraphist to suggest plausible restorations to fill lacunae on the stone. It is however vitally important to distinguish clearly between what actually stands on the stone and what is someone’s more or less convincing restoration. To make such restorations it is of course essential to be able to date an inscription at least approximately and this can be done by taking note of the letter forms and the context and character of the inscription, including in some cases the names of the persons mentioned in it. But letter forms can persist over several decades and it is by no means always possible to identify an individual mentioned in an inscription with certainty, since many Greek names are quite common and boys were often named after their grandfather. For example, a series of eighteen Megarian decrees which mention a king Demetrius were for a long time habitually referred to Demetrius I Poliorcetes, who captured Megara towards the end of the fourth century, until in 1942 a French scholar argued that the Demetrius in question was Demetrius II, who ruled in Macedonia from 239 to 229. This hypothesis substantially modified our picture of the reign of Demetrius II and his activity in Greece. Quite recently, however, it has again been argued that the attribution to Demetrius I is correct and the history of the two reigns has thus once more been thrown into, the melting-pot.

If inscriptions require special care and knowledge for their effective use, they are nevertheless among the most important sources of new information. Moreover, because of their stereotyped form it is not only possible to use one to restore gaps in another, but inscriptions falling into certain categories – building inscriptions, manumissions, decrees in honour of doctors, funerary inscriptions, records of private associations, etc. – can be used together to furnish information on such diverse subjects as price levels, the status of occupations, the incidence of slavery or the structure of royal bureaucracies and, as we have just seen, the publication of new inscriptions (or the more accurate republication of old ones) often leads to the revision or abandoning of established theories and assumptions.