epigraphy The use of inscriptionshistoriography

Inscriptions are important specimens for chronology because they are often physical objects contemporary in execution with their contents. The dating of the inscription itself frequently yields a trustworthy chronology of its message: a victory stela records something freshly deserving of celebration; an epitaph implies a recent death. Exceptions do exist, which record more or less remote events at a conscious historical remove; archival specimens, for example, and secondhand copies generally lack the contemporaneity of other inscriptions. On the whole, however, external dating is crucial and may be achieved in several ways. Excavated monuments can be chronologized by their archeological context, including stratigraphic analysis and radiocarbon dating of any adjacent remains of organic matter. The shape of the monument may permit stylistic and iconographic determination. The type and variety of script used, and especially the style of writing, often allow paleographic dating. Thus, the relative age of Hittite texts can be determined by spotting the typical “Old Hittite ductus” of the more ancient period, and the various “scribal hands” of the Linear B tablets have been differentiated with extreme subtlety. Sometimes a radical reform, such as the official adoption by Athens of the Ionic alphabet in 403 bc (replacing the local Attic variety), provides a chronological watershed. Internal evidence of the inscription may yield its own kind of dating, either by synchronism with otherwise known facts or events or in true calendaric fashion. The year is frequently indicated by a king’s reign or the tenure of a magistrate. Such stable counting of time as, for example, from Rome’s legendary founding in 753 bc, or from creation (5509 bc, according to Christian dating) is rare in inscriptions; it became more of a historian’s device during the Classical and post-Classical periods. In smaller communities, however, especially in Asia Minor, analogous local departures were used (legendary or historical foundation dates or other epoch-making events), with confusing results for latter-day chronologists.

The use of inscriptions for the dating of historical events is most pervasive when the historical tradition itself is “timeless,” as in ancient India; the entire Indian chronology comes to be anchored around the Aśokan inscriptions. Inscriptions also permit a check on the veracity of ancient historians such as Herodotus (dubbed both “father of history” and “father of lies”), as in the case of the Bīsitūn inscription of Darius. Equally dramatically, the Linear B tablets prove at one stroke that the Greeks were ensconced at Knossos in the 2nd millennium bc and that the bulk of the “Olympian” religion was already theirs at the time. Most significant of all, nothing would be known of the great Hittite Empire during the 2nd millennium bc, were it not for the discovery of its inscriptional archives.