Читать книгу Rome and the Black Sea Region - Группа авторов - Страница 17

By far the best sample of dated inscriptions derives from the territory of Amaseia, the former capital of the Pontic Kingdom, and was collected by David French. Although the corpus still awaits publication, the published lists of dated inscriptions provide us with an adequate impression of the material. The latest count shows 443 inscriptions: 6 Hellenistic, 350 Roman, and 87 Byzantine – figures that strongly testify to the scarcity of Hellenistic material. Among the Roman inscriptions, 278 relate to funerary monuments, and of these 84, or 30%, can be dated according to the local era.²⁹

We have no idea as to what caused people to include or omit the year in the epitaphs of their relatives. It does not seem to be a question of chronology. A study of the limited material published with photographs or drawings in Studia Pontica³⁰ on the basis of letter forms suggests that there is no overall discrepancy between the chronological distribution of the dated and undated inscriptions. The monuments likewise appear to be a representative sample with regard to quality. I think that we can safely take the dated inscriptions as indicative of the whole corpus.

The earliest definite evidence of the use of the local era in Amaseia is provided by three coin issues during the Flavian period.³¹ Slightly later, we find the earliest epigraphic use of the era on a sarcophagus dated to 97/98 AD, and from then on, the number of inscriptions increases until the 160s and 170s, after which a decrease sets in (Table 1). The high figures in the late 160s and 170s can possibly be interpreted as an increased mortality rate due to the Antonine Plague, followed by a reduced number of deaths and perhaps economic stagnation in the 180s AD.³² The Gothic and Sassanian invasions in the 250s and 260s brought an end to the use of local calendars, or at least to our knowledge of them. It may be of significance that local coinages ceased at the same time. The very sporadic use of the Amaseian era and other eras in northern Asia Minor in the late fourth, the fifth and even sixth centuries AD reveals that the memory of the era was somehow kept alive in media not preserved for posterity or was reinvented during late antiquity.

One area where the dated inscriptions offer promising evidence concerns the changes in the use of personal names: When did people begin to use Roman names and how common do they become, how long did indigenous and Persian names persist, can we detect gender related practices etc. The list of questions raised by these changes is long, and to answer them adequately would require a very thorough study; here I will restrict myself to one aspect: the introduction of Latin names. In this respect the evidence from Amaseia is a bit disappointing because the transition from Greek and indigenous names to the mixture of Greek, Latin and mixed names that can be observed in the second and third centuries must have taken place before our record of inscriptions begins (Fig. 4). The earliest inscriptions already have a majority of Latin names. Indigenous and Persian names that were relatively common at the time of Mithridates VI, judging from a study of names of officials and officers,³³ had largely disappeared.

Table 2. Chronological distribution of the dated inscriptions from Amastris (based on Marek 1993, 157-187).

Decade	Number of inscriptions
AD 50-59	1
60-69	1
70-79	0
80-89	1
90-99	1
100-109	2
110-119	2
120-129	1
130-139	2
140-149	2
150-159	2
160-169	1
170-179	1
180-189	2
190-199	1
200-209	4
210-219	0
220-229	0
230-239	1
240-249	0
250-259	1
260-269	0
270-279	0
280-289	0
Total	26