VOLUME XIV, SLICE VI

Inscriptions to Ireland, William Henry

ARTICLES IN THIS SLICE:

INSCRIPTIONS INTROSPECTION INSECT INTUITION INSECTIVORA INULIN INSECTIVOROUS PLANTS INVAR INSEIN INVARIABLE PLANE INSOMNIA INVENTORY INSPIRATION INVERARAY INSTALLATION INVERCARGILL INSTALMENT INVERELL INSTERBURG INVERKEITHING INSTINCT INVERNESS INSTITUTE INVERNESS-SHIRE INSTITUTIONAL CHURCH INVERSION INSTRUMENT INVERURIE INSTRUMENTATION INVESTITURE INSTRUMENT OF GOVERNMENT INVOICE INSUBRES INVOLUTION INSURANCE IO INTAGLIO IODINE INTELLECT IODOFORM INTELLIGENCE IN ANIMALS IOLA INTENDANT IOLITE INTENT ION INTERAMNA LIRENAS IONA INTERCALARY IONIA (Asia Minor) INTERCOLUMNIATION IONIA (Michigan, U.S.A.) INTERDICT IONIAN ISLANDS INTERDICTION IONIANS INTERESSE TERMINI IONIAN SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY INTEREST IOPHON INTERFERENCE OF LIGHT I.O.U. INTERIM IOVILAE INTERLACED ARCHES IOWA INTERLAKEN IOWA CITY INTERLOPER IPECACUANHA INTERNATIONAL, THE IPEK INTERNATIONAL LAW IPHICRATES INTERNATIONAL LAW (PRIVATE) IPHIGENEIA INTERPELLATION IPSWICH (Queensland, Australia) INTERPLEADER IPSWICH (Suffolk, England) INTERPOLATION IPSWICH (Massachusetts, U.S.A.) INTERPRETATION IQUIQUE INTERREGNUM IQUITOS (Indian tribe) INTERSTATE COMMERCE IQUITOS (city of Peru) INTERVAL IRAK INTESTACY IRAK-ARABI INTESTINAL OBSTRUCTION IRAK-I-AJAMI INTESTINE IRAN INTOXICATION IRBIT INTRA IRELAND, JOHN (English divine) INTRADOS IRELAND, JOHN (American prelate) INTRANSIGENT IRELAND, WILLIAM HENRY INTRINSIC

INSCRIPTIONS (from Lat. _inscribere_, to write upon), the general term for writings cut on stone or metal, the subject matter of epigraphy. See generally WRITING and PALAEOGRAPHY. Under this heading it is convenient here to deal more specifically with four groups of ancient inscriptions, Semitic, Indian, Greek and Latin, but further information will be found in numerous separate articles on philological subjects. See especially CUNEIFORM, BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA, SUMER, BEHISTUN, EGYPT (_Language and Writing_), ETHIOPIA, PHOENICIA, ARABIA, HITTITES, SABAEANS, MINAEANS, ETRURIA, AEGEAN CIVILIZATION, CRETE, CYPRUS, BRITAIN, SCANDINAVIAN LANGUAGES, TEUTONIC LANGUAGES, CENTRAL AMERICA: _Archaeology_, &c.

I. SEMITIC INSCRIPTIONS

Excluding cuneiform (q.v.), the inscriptions known as Semitic are usually classed under two main heads as North and South Semitic. The former class includes Hebrew (with Moabite), Phoenician (with Punic and neo-Punic), and Aramaic (with Nabataean and Palmyrene). The South Semitic class includes the Minaean and Sabaean inscriptions of South Arabia. In most of these departments there has been a very large increase of material during recent years, some of which is of the highest historical and palaeographical importance. The North Semitic monuments have received the greater share of attention because of their more general interest in connexion with the history of surrounding countries.

1. _North Semitic._--The earliest authority for any North Semitic _language_ is that of the Tel-el-Amarna tablets (15th century B.C.) which contain certain "Canaanite glosses,"[1] i.e. North Semitic words written in cuneiform characters. From these to the first inscription found in the North Semitic _alphabet_, there is an interval of about six centuries. The stele of Mesha, commonly called the Moabite Stone, was set up in the 9th century B.C. to commemorate the success of Moab in shaking off the Israelitish rule. It is of great value, both historically as relating to events indicated in 2 Kings i. 1, iii. 5, &c., and linguistically as exhibiting a language almost identical with Hebrew--that is to say, another form of the same Canaanitish language. It was discovered in 1868 by the German missionary, Klein, on the site of Dibon, intact, but was afterwards broken up by the Arabs. The fragments,[2] collected with great difficulty by Clermont-Ganneau and others, are now in the Louvre. Its genuineness was contested by A. Lowy (_Scottish Review_, 1887; republished, Berlin, 1903) and recently again by G. Jahn (appendix to _Das Buch Daniel_, Leipzig, 1904), but, although there are many difficulties connected with the text, its authenticity is generally admitted.

Early Hebrew inscriptions are at present few and meagre, although it cannot be doubted that others would be found by excavating suitable sites. The most important is that discovered in 1880 in the tunnel of the pool of Siloam, commemorating the piercing of the rock. It is generally believed to refer to Hezekiah's scheme for supplying Jerusalem with water (2 Kings xx. 20), and therefore to date from about 700 B.C. It consists of six lines in good Hebrew, and is the only early Hebrew inscription of any length. The character does not differ from that of the Moabite Stone, except in the slightly cursive tendency of its curved strokes, due no doubt to their having been traced for the stone-cutter by a scribe who was used to writing on parchment. There are also a few inscribed seals dating from before the Exile, some factory marks and an engraved capital at al-Amwas, which last may, however, be Samaritan. Otherwise this character is only found (as the result of an archaizing tendency) on coins of the Hasmoneans, and, still later, on those of the first and second (Bar Kokhba's) revolts.

The new Hebrew character, which developed into the modern square character, is first found in a name of five letters at 'Araq-al-amir, of the 2nd century B.C. Somewhat later, but probably of the 1st century B.C., is the tombstone of the B'ne Hezir ("Tomb of St James") at Jerusalem. An inscription on a ruined synagogue at Kafr Bir'im, near Safed, perhaps of about A.D. 300, or earlier, shows the fully developed square character.

Since the publication of the _Corpus Inscr. Sem._ it has been customary to treat papyri along with inscriptions, and for palaeographical reasons it is convenient to do so. Hebrew papyri are few, all in square character and not of great interest. The longest, and probably the earliest (6th century A.D.), is one now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, containing a private letter[3] written in a character closely resembling that of the Kair Bir'im inscription. Other fragments were published by Steinschneider[4] (perhaps 8th century), and by D. H. Muller and Kaufmann.[5]

Hebrew inscriptions outside Palestine are the cursive graffiti in the catacombs at Venosa (2nd-5th century), the magical texts on Babylonian bowls (7th-8th century), and the numerous tombstones[6] in various parts of Europe, of all periods from the 6th century to the present time.

The few Samaritan inscriptions in existence are neither early nor interesting.

Closely related to the Hebrews, both politically and in language, were the Phoenicians in North Syria. Their monuments in Phoenicia itself are few and not earlier than the Persian period. The oldest yet found, dating probably from the 5th or 4th century B.C., is that of Yehaw-milk, king of Gebal (modern Jebel) or Byblus, where it was found. It records at some length the dedication of buildings, &c., to the goddess of Gebal. Of the 3rd century B.C. are the inscriptions on the sarcophagi of Tabnith and his son Eshmun'azar, kings of Sidon, and some records of other members of the same family, Bod-'ashtart and his son Yathan-milk, found in 1902 a short distance north of Sidon.

Outside Phoenicia the inscriptions are numerous and widely scattered round the Mediterranean coasts, following the course of Phoenician trade. The earliest is that on some fragments of three bronze bowls, dedicated to Baal of Lebanon, found in Cyprus. The character is like that of the Moabite Stone, and the date is probably the 8th century B.C., though some scholars would put it nearer to 1000 B.C. In the latter case, the Hiram, king of Sidon, mentioned in the inscriptions would be the same as Hiram, king of Tyre, in Solomon's time. Similar bowls (of about 700 B.C.) found at Nimrud sometimes bear the maker's name in Phoenician characters.

Many monumental inscriptions have also been found in Cyprus, at Kition, Idalion, Tamassos, &c. They are chiefly votive, some dated in the 4th century, and some being perhaps as late as the 2nd century B.C., so that they afford valuable evidence as to the succession of the local kings. Several also are bilingual, and it was one of these which supplied George Smith with the clue to the Cypriote syllabic system of writing Greek. Similar memorials of Phoenician settlements were found at Athens (Piraeus), in Egypt, Sardinia, Malta and Gozo. Most interesting of all is the celebrated sacrificial tablet of Marseilles, giving an elaborate tariff of payments at or for the various offerings, and showing some striking analogies with the directions in the book of Leviticus. For the information it gives as to civil and priestly organization, it is the most important Phoenician text in existence. It was probably brought from Carthage, where similar tariffs have been found. On the site of that important colony, and indeed throughout the parts of North Africa once subject to its rule, Punic inscriptions are, as might be expected, very numerous. By far the majority are votive tablets, probably belonging to the period between the 4th and the 2nd centuries B.C., many of them in a wonderfully perfect state of preservation. One of the most interesting, recently discovered, mentions a high-priestess who was head of the college of priests, and whose husband's family had been _suffetes_ for four generations. Later inscriptions, called neo-Punic, dating from the fall of Carthage to about the 1st century A.D., are written in a debased character and language differing in several respects from the earlier Punic, and presenting many difficulties.

In Aramaic the earliest inscriptions are three found in 1890-1891 at and near Zinjirli in North-west Syria, dating from the 8th century B.C. Of these, one was set up by Panammu, king of Ya'di, in honour of the god Hadad, and is inscribed on a statue of him, the other two were set up by Bar-rekub, son of Panammu, one in honour of his father and on his statue, the second commemorating the erection of his new house. They are remarkable as being engraved in relief, a peculiarity which has been thought to be due to "Hittite" influence. Otherwise the character resembles that of the Moabite Stone. The texts consist of 77 lines (not all legible), giving a good deal of information about an obscure place and period hitherto known only from cuneiform sources. The ornamentation is Assyrian in style, as also is that of the inscriptions of Nerab (near Aleppo), commemorative texts engraved on statues of priests, of about the 7th century.

Of shorter inscriptions there is a long series from about the 8th century B.C., on bronze weights found at Nineveh (generally accompanied by an Assyrian version), and as "dockets"[7] to cuneiform contract-tablets, giving a brief indication of the contents. Aramaic, being the commercial language of the East, was naturally used for this purpose in business documents. For the same reason it is found in the 6th-4th centuries B.C. sporadically in various regions, as in Cilicia, in Lycia[8] (with a Greek version), at Abydos (on a weight). At Taima also, in North Arabia, an important trading centre, besides shorter texts, a very interesting inscription of twenty-three lines was found, recording the foundation and endowment of a new temple, probably in the 5th century B.C. But by far the most extensive collection of early Aramaic texts comes from Egypt, where the language was used not only for trade purposes, as elsewhere, but also officially under the Persian rule. From Memphis there is a funeral inscription dated in the fourth year of Xerxes (482 B.C.), and a dedication on a bowl of about the same date. A stele recently published by de Vogue[9] is dated 458 B.C. Another which is now at Carpentras in France (place of origin unknown) is probably not much later. At Elephantine and Assuan in Upper Egypt, a number of ostraka have been dug up, dating from the 5th century B.C. and onward, all difficult to read and explain, but interesting for the popular character of their contents, style and writing. There was a Jewish (or Israelitish[10]) settlement there in the 5th century from which emanated most, if not all, of the papyrus documents edited in the _C.I.S._ Since the appearance of this part of the _Corpus_, more papyri have come to light. One published by Euting[11] is dated 411 B.C. and is of historical interest, eleven others,[12] containing legal documents, mostly dated, were written between 471 and 411 B.C.; another (408 B.C.) is a petition to the governor of Jerusalem.[13] The fragments in the _C.I.S._ are in the same character and clearly belong to the same period. The language continued to be used in Egypt even in Ptolemaic times, as shown by a papyrus[14] (accounts) and ostrakon[15] containing Greek names, and belonging, to judge from the style of the writing, to the 3rd century B.C. The latest fragments[16] are of the 6th-8th century A.D., written in a fully developed square character. They are Jewish private letters, and do not prove anything as to the use of Aramaic in Egypt at that time.

Nabataean inscriptions are very numerous. They are written in a peculiar, somewhat cursive character, derived from the square, and date from the 2nd century B.C. The earliest _dated_ is of the year 40 B.C., the latest dated is of A.D. 95. The Nabataean kingdom proper had its centre at Petra (= Sela in 2 Kings xiv. 7), which attained great importance as the emporium on the trade route between Arabia and the Persian Gulf on the one side and Syria and Egypt on the other. The commercial activity of the people, however, was widely extended, and their monuments are found not only round Petra and in N. Arabia, but as far north as Damascus, and even in Italy, where there was a trading settlement at Puteoli. The inscriptions are mostly votive or sepulchral, and are often dated, but give little historical information except in so far as they fix the dates of Nabataean kings.

A distinct subdivision of Nabataean is found in the Sinaitic peninsula, chiefly in the Wadi Firan and Wadi Mukattib, which lay on the caravan route. The inscriptions are rudely scratched or punched on the rough rock, without any sort of order, and some of them are accompanied by rude drawings. A few only are dated, but, as shown by de Vogue in the _C.I.S._ (ii. 1, p. 353), they must all belong to the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D. This accounts for the fact that already in the 6th century Cosmas Indicopleustes[17] has no correct account of their origin, and ascribes them to the Israelites during their wanderings in the wilderness.[18] They were first correctly deciphered as Nabataean by Beer in 1848, when they proved to consist chiefly of proper names (many of them of Arabic formation), accompanied by ejaculations or blessings. It is clear that they are not the work of pilgrims either Jewish or Christian,[19] nor are they of a religious character. The frequent recurrence of certain names shows that only a few generations of a few families are represented, and these must have belonged to a small body of Nabataeans temporarily settled in the particular Wadis, no doubt for purposes connected with the caravan-traffic. The form of the Nabataean character in which they are written is interesting as being the probable progenitor of the Kufic Arabic alphabet.

Another important trading centre was Tadmor or Palmyra in northern Syria. Numerous inscriptions found there, and hence called Palmyrene, were copied by Waddington in 1861 and published by de Vogue in his great work _Syrie Centrale_ (1868, &c.), which is still the most extensive collection of them. The difficulties of exploration have hitherto prevented any further increase of the material, but much more would undoubtedly be found if excavation were possible. The texts are mostly sepulchral and dedicatory, some of them being accompanied by a Greek version. The language is a form of western Aramaic, and the character, which is derived from the Hebrew and Aramaic square, is closely related to the Syriac estrangelo alphabet. The inscriptions are mostly dated, and belong to the period between 9 B.C. and A.D. 271. The most important is the tariff of taxes on imports, dated A.D. 137. Nearly all were found on the surface at or round Palmyra and remain _in situ_. Of the very few in other places, one (with a Latin version) was found at South Shields, the tombstone of _Regina liberta et conjux_ of a native of Palmyra.

Syriac inscriptions are few. The earliest is that on the sarcophagus of Queen Saddan (in the Hebrew version, Sadda), perhaps of about A.D. 40, found at Jerusalem. Others were found by Sachau[20] at Edessa, of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, and by Pognon.[21]

2. _South Semitic._--The South Semitic class of inscriptions comprises the Minaean, Sabaean, Himyaritic and Lihyanitic in South Arabia, the Thamudic and Safaitic in the north and the Abyssinian. A great deal of material has been collected by Halevy, Glaser and Euting, and much valuable work has been done by them and by D. H. Muller, Hommel and Littmann. Many of the texts, however, are still unpublished and the rest is not very accessible (except so far as it has appeared in the _C.I.S._), so that South Semitic has been less widely studied than North Semitic.

The successive kingdoms of South Arabia (Yemen) were essentially commercial. Their country was the natural intermediary between Asia (India), Africa and Syria, and this position, combined with its natural fertility, made the south far more prosperous than the north. In language, the two most important peoples, the Minaeans and Sabaeans, differ only dialectically, both writing forms of southern Arabic. The Minaean capital was at Ma'in, about 300 m. N. of Aden and 200 m. from the west coast. Here and in the neighbourhood numerous inscriptions were found, as well as in the north at al-'Ola.[22] Their chronology is much disputed. D. H. Muller makes the Minaean power contemporary with the Sabaean, but Glaser (with whom Hommel and D. S. Margoliouth agree) contends that the Sabaeans followed the Minaeans, whom they conquered in 820 B.C. Mention is made in a cuneiform text (Annals of Sargon, 715 B.C.) of Ithamar the Sabaean, who must be identical with one (it is not certain which) of the kings of that name mentioned in the Sabaean inscriptions. Their capital was Marib, a little south of Ma'in, and here they appear to have flourished for about a thousand years. In the 1st century A.D., with the establishment of the Roman power in the north, their trade, and consequently their prosperity, began to decline. The rival kingdom of the Himyarites, with its capital at Zafar, then rose to importance, and this in turn was conquered by the Abyssinians in the 6th century A.D. With the spread of Islam the old Arabic language was supplanted by the northern dialects from which classical Arabic was developed. A peculiarity of the South Arabian inscriptions is that many of them are engraved on bronze tablets. Besides being historically important, they are of great value for the study of early Semitic religion. The gods most often named in Sabaean are 'Athtar Wadd and Nakrah, the first being the male counterpart of the Syrian Ashtoreth. The term denoting the priests and priestesses who are devoted to the temple-service is identified by Hommel and others with the Hebrew "Levite."

Closely connected with South Arabia is Abyssinia. Indeed a considerable number of Sabaean inscriptions have been found at Yeha and Aksum, showing that merchants from Arabia must at some time have formed settlements there. D. H. Muller[23] thinks that some of these belong to the earliest and others to the latest period of Sabaean power. The inscriptions hitherto found in Ethiopic (the alphabet of which is derived from the Sabaean) date from the 4th century A.D. onward. They are few in number, but long and of great historical importance. There can be no doubt that exploration, if it were possible, would bring many more to light.

From time to time emigrants from the southern tribes settled in the north of Arabia. Mention has already been made of Minaean inscriptions found at al-'Ola, which is on the great pilgrim road, about 70 m. south of Taima. In recent years a number of others has been collected belonging to the people of Lihyan and dating from about A.D. 250. Nearly related to the Lihyanitic are the Thamudic (so called from the tribe of the Thamud mentioned in them), and the Safaitic, both of which, though found in the north, belong in character to south Arabia and no doubt owe their origin to emigrants from the south. The Thamudic inscriptions, collected by Euting (called Proto-Arabian by Halevy),[24] are carelessly scrawled graffiti very like those of the Sinai peninsula. Their date is uncertain, but they cannot be much earlier than the Safaitic, which resemble them in most respects. These last are called after the mountainous district about 20 m. S.E. of Damascus. The inscriptions are, however, found not in Mount Safa itself but in the desert of al-Harrah to the west and south and in the fertile plain of ar-Ruhbah to the east. They were first deciphered by Halevy,[25] whose work has been carried on and completed by Littmann.[26] Their date is again uncertain, since graffiti of this kind give very few facts from which dates can be deduced. Littmann thinks that one of his inscriptions refers to Trajan's campaign of A.D. 106, and that they all belong to the first three centuries. They are found together with the earlier Greek and Latin graffiti of Roman soldiers and with later Moslem remarks in Kufic. Many of them are not yet published.

Bibliography--The best introductions are, for North Semitic, Lidzbarski's _Handbuch d. nordsemitischen Epigraphik_ (Weimar, 1898); and G. A. Cooke's _Text-book of North-Semitic Inscriptions_ (Oxford, 1903); for South Semitic, Hommel's _Sud-arabische Chrestomathie_ (Munich, 1893); Alphabets and facsimiles in Berger, _Histoire de l'ecriture_, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1892). The parts of the _Corpus Inscr. Sem._ published up to 1910 are: pars i., tom. i., and tom. ii., fascc. 1-3, 1881-1908 (Phoenician); pars ii., tom. i., 1889-1902 (Aramaic with Nabataean), tom. ii., fasc. i., 1907 (Sinaitic); pars iv., tom. i., fascc. 1-4, 1889-1908 (Himyaritic, including Minaean and Sabaean). In all these parts a full bibliography is given. For Palmyrene see de Vogue's _Syrie Centrale_ (Paris, 1868-1877). Works on special departments of the subject have already been mentioned in the notes. (A. Cy.)

II. INDIAN INSCRIPTIONS

Materials on which the inscriptions were recorded.

The inscriptions of India are extremely numerous, and are found, on stone and other substances, in a great variety of circumstances. They were mostly recorded by incision. But we have a few, referable to the 2nd or 3rd century B.C., which were written with ink on earthenware, and some others, of later times, recorded by paint,--one on a rock, the others on the walls of Buddhist cave-temples. Those, however, were exceptional methods; and equally so was the process of casting, with the result of bringing the letters out in relief, of which we know at present only one instance,--the Sohgaura plate, mentioned again below. The Mussulman inscriptions on stone were, it is believed, nearly always carved in relief; and various Hindu inscriptions were done in the same way in the Mussulman period: but only one instance of a stone record prepared in that manner can as yet be cited for the earlier period; it is an inscription on the pedestal of an image of Buddha, of the Gupta period, found in excavations made not long ago at Sarnath.

Amongst the inscriptions on metal there is one that stands out by itself, in respect of the peculiarity of having been incised on iron: it is the short poem, constituting the epitaph of the Gupta king Chandragupta II., which was composed in or about A.D. 415, and was placed on record on the iron column, measuring 23 ft. 8 in. in height, and estimated to weigh more than six tons, which stands at Meharauli near Delhi. We have a very small number of short Buddhist votive inscriptions on gold and silver, a larger number of records of various kinds on brass, and a larger number still on bronze. The last-mentioned consist chiefly of seals and stamps for making seals. And one of these seal-stamps, belonging to about the commencement of the Christian era, is of particular interest in presenting its legend in Greek characters as well as in the two Indian alphabets which were then in use. For the period, indeed, to which it belongs, there is nothing peculiar in the use of the Greek characters; those characters were freely used on the coins of India and adjacent territories, sometimes along with the native characters, sometimes alone, from about 325 B.C. to the first quarter of the 2nd century A.D.: but this seal-stamp, and the coins of the Kshaharata king Nahapana (A.D. 78 to about 125), furnish the only citable good instances of the use of the three alphabets all together. For the most part, however, the known inscriptions on metal were placed on sheets of copper, ranging in size from about 2(1/2) in. by 1(7/8) in. in the case of the Sohgaura plate to as much as about 2 ft. 6 in. square in the case of a record of 46 B.C. obtained at Sue-Vihar in the neighbourhood of Bahawalpur in the Punjab. Some of these records on copper were commemorative and dedicatory, and were deposited inside the erections--relic-mounds, and, in the case of the Sue-Vihar plate, a tower--to which they belonged. The usual copper record, however, was a donative charter, in fact a title-deed, and passed as soon as it was issued into private personal custody; and many of the known records of this class have come to notice through being produced by the modern possessors of them before official authorities, in the expectation of establishing privileges which (it is hardly necessary to say) have long since ceased to exist through the lapse of time, the dying out of families of original holders, rights of conquest, and the many changes of government that have taken place: but others have been found buried in fields, and hidden in the walls and foundations of buildings. The plates on which these inscriptions were incised vary greatly in the number of the leaves, in the size and shape of them, and in the arrangement of the records on them; partly, of course, according to the lengths of individual records, but also according to particular customs and fashions prevalent in different parts of the country and in different periods of time. In some cases a single plate was used; and it was inscribed sometimes on only one side of it, sometimes on both. More often, however, more plates than one were used, and were connected together by soldered rings; and the number ranges up to as many as thirty-one in the case of a charter issued by the Chola king Rajendra Chola I. in the period A.D. 1011 to 1037. It was customary that such of the records on copper as were donative charters should be authenticated. This was sometimes done by incising on the plates what purports to be more or less an autograph signature of the king or prince from whom a charter emanated. More usually, however, it was effected by attaching a copper or bronze reproduction of the royal seal to the ring or to one of the rings on which the plates were strung; and this practice has given us another large and highly interesting series of Indian seals, some of them of an extremely elaborate nature. In this class of records we have a real curiosity in a charter issued in A.D. 1272 by Ramachandra, one of the Yadava kings of Devagiri: this record is on three plates, each measuring about 1 ft. 3 in. in width by 1 ft. 8(1/2) in. in height, which are so massive as to weigh 59 lb. 2 oz.; and the weight of the ring on which they were strung, and of an image of Garuda which was secured to it by another ring, is 11 lb. 12 oz.: thus, the total weight of this title-deed, which conveyed a village to fifty-seven Brahmans, is no less than 70 lb. 14 oz.; appreciably more than half a hundredweight.

Amongst substances other than metal we can cite only one instance in which crystal was used; this material was evidently found too hard for any general use in the inscriptional line: the solitary instance is the case of a short record found in the remains of a Buddhist stupa or relic-mound at Bhattiprolu in the Kistna district, Madras. In various parts of India there are found in large numbers small tablets of clay prepared from stamps, sometimes baked into terra-cotta, sometimes left to harden naturally. Objects of this class were largely used as votive tablets, especially by the Buddhists; and their tablets usually present the so-called Buddhist formula or creed: "Of those conditions which spring from a cause, Tathagata (Buddha) has declared the cause and the suppression of them; it is of such matters that he, the great ascetic, discourses": but others, from Sunet in the Ludhiana district, Punjab, show by the legends on them that the Saivas and Vaishnavas also habitually made pious offerings of this kind on occasions of visiting sacred places. Recent explorations, however, in the Gorakhpur and Muzaffarpur districts have resulted in the discovery, in this class of records, of great numbers of clay seals bearing various inscriptions, which had been attached to documents sent to and fro between administrative offices, both royal and municipal, between religious establishments, and between private individuals: and amongst these we have seals of the monastery at Kusinara, one of the places at which the eight original portions of the corporeal relics of Buddha were enshrined in relic-mounds, and also a seal-stamp used for making seals of the monastery at Vethadipa, another of those places. And from Kathiawar we have a similar seal-stamp which describes itself as the property "of the prince and commander-in-chief Pushyena, son of the illustrious prince Ahivarman, whose royal pedigree extends back unbroken to Jayadratha." There are no indications that the use of brick for inscriptional purposes was ever at all general in India, as it was in some other eastern lands: but there have been found in the Ghazipur district numerous bricks bearing the inscription "the glorious Kumaragupta," with reference to either the first or the second Gupta king of that name, of the 5th century A.D.; in the Gorakhpur district there have been found brick tablets bearing Buddhist texts, one of which is a version in Sanskrit of a short sermon preached by Buddha; and from the Jaunpur district we have a brick tablet bearing an inscription which registers a mortgage, made in A.D. 1217, of some lands as security for a loan. Inscribed earthenware relic-receptacles have been found in the Bhopal state: donative earthenware jars, bearing inscriptions, have been obtained near Charsadda in the North-West Frontier province: and from Kathiawar we have a piece of earthenware, apparently a fragment of a huge pot, bearing an inscription which presents a date in A.D. 566-67 and the name of "the glorious Guhasena," one of the Maitraka princes of Valabhi. For the great bulk of the inscriptions, however, stone was used: but limitation of space prevents us from entering into any details here, and only permits us to say that in this class the records are found all over India on rocks, on isolated monolith columns and pillars, of which some were erected simply to bear the records that were published on them, others were placed in front of temples as flagstaffs of the gods, and others were set up as pillars of victory in battle; on relic-receptacles hidden away in the interiors of Buddhist stupas; on external structural parts of stupas; on facades, walls, and other parts of caves; on pedestals and other parts of images and statues, sometimes of colossal size; on moulds for making seals; on walls, beams, pillars, pilasters, and other parts of temples; and on specially prepared slabs and tablets, sometimes built into the walls of temples and other erections, sometimes set up inside temples or in the courtyards of them, or in conspicuous places in village-sites and fields, where they have occasionally in the course of time become buried.

Reasons why the inscriptions are so valuable.

The inscriptional records of India which have thus come down to us do not, as far as they are known at present, pretend to the antiquity of the Greek inscriptions of the Hellenic world; much less to that of the inscriptions of Egypt and Assyria. But they are no less important; since we are dependent on them for almost all our knowledge of the ancient history of the country.

The primary reason for this is that the ancient Hindus, though by no means altogether destitute of the historical instinct, were not writers of historical books. In some of the _Puranas_, indeed, they have given us chapters which purport to present the succession of their kings from the commencement of the present age, the Kaliyuga, in 3102 B.C.: but the chronological details of those chapters disclose the fault of treating contemporaneous dynasties, belonging to different parts of India, as successive dynasties ruling over one and the same territory; with the result that they would place more than three centuries in the future from the present time the great Gupta kings who reigned in Northern India from A.D. 320 to about 530. They have given us, for Kashmir the _Rajataramgini_, the first eight cantos of which, written by Kalhana in A.D. 1148-49, purport to present the general history of that country, with occasional items relating to India itself, from 2448 B.C., and to give the exact length, even to months and days, of the reign of each king of Kashmir from 1182 B.C.: but, while we may accept Kalhana as fairly correct for his own time and for the preceding century or so, an examination of the details of his work quickly exposes its imaginative character and its unreliability for any earlier period: notably, he places towards the close of the period 2448 to 1182 B.C. the great Maurya king Asoka, whose real initial date was 264 B.C.; and he was obliged to allot to one king, Ranaditya I., a reign of three centuries (A.D. 222 to 522, as placed by him) simply in order to save his own chronology. They have given us historical romances, such as the _Harshacharita_ of Bana, written in the 7th century, the _Vikramankadevacharita_ of Bilhana, written about the beginning of the 12th century, and the Tamil poems, the _Kalavali_, the _Kalingattu-Parani_, and the _Vikrama-Cholan-Ula_, the first of which may be of somewhat earlier date than Bana's work, while the second and third are of much the same time with Bilhana's: but, while these present some charming reading in the poetical line, with much of interest, and certainly a fair amount of important matter, they give us no dates, and so no means without extraneous help of applying the information that is deducible from them. Again, they have given us, especially in Southern India, a certain amount of historical details in the introductions and colophons of their literary works; and here they have often furnished dates which give a practical shape to their statements: but we quickly find that the historical matter is introduced quite incidentally, to magnify the importance of the authors themselves rather than to teach us anything about their patrons, and is not handled with any particular care and fulness; and it would be but a sketchy and imperfect history, and one relating to only a limited and comparatively late period, that we could piece together even from these more precise sources. The ancient Hindus, in short, have not bequeathed to us anything that can in any way compare with the historical writings of their Greek and Roman contemporaries. They have not even given us anything like the _Dipavamsa_ of Ceylon, which, while it contains a certain amount of fabulous matter, can be recognized as presenting a real and reliable historical account of that island, taken from records written up during the progress to the events themselves, from at any rate the time of Asoka to about A.D. 350; or like the _Mahavamsa_, which, commenting on and amplifying the details of the _Dipavamsa_, takes up a similar account from the end of the period covered by that work. Even the Greek notices of India, commencing with the accounts of the Asiatic campaign of Alexander the Great, have told us more about its political history and geography during the earlier times than have the Hindus themselves: and in fact, in mentioning Sandrokottos, i.e. Chandragupta, the grandfather of Asoka, and in furnishing details which fix his initial date closely about 320 B.C., the Greeks gave us the first means of making a start towards arranging the chronology of India on accurate lines. It is in these circumstances, in the absence of any indigenous historical writings of a plain, straightforward, and authentic nature, that the inscriptions of India are of such great value. They are supplemented--and to an important extent for at any rate the period from the end of Asoka's reign in 227 B.C. to the commencement of the reign of Kanishka in 58 B.C., and again from about a century later to the rise of the Gupta dynasty in A.D. 320--by the numismatic remains. But the coins of India present no dates until nearly the end of the 2nd century A.D.; the case of Parthia, which has yielded dated coins from only 38 B.C., illustrates well the difficulty of arranging undated coins in chronological order even when the assistance of historical books is available; and what we may deduce from the coins of India is still to be put into a final shape in accordance with what we can determine from the inscriptions. In short, the inscriptions of India are the only sure grounds of historical results in every line of research connected with its ancient past; they regulate everything that we can learn from coins, architecture, art, literature, tradition, or any other source.

That is one reason why the inscriptions of India are so valuable; they fill the void caused by the absence of historical books. Another reason is found in the great number of them and the wide area that is covered by them. They come from all parts of the country: from Shahbazgarhi in the north, in the Yusufzai subdivision of the Peshawar district, to the ancient Pandya territory in the extreme south of the peninsula; and from Assam in the east to Kathiawar in the west. For the time anterior to about A.D. 400, we already have available in published form, more or less complete, the contents of between 1100 and 1200 records, large and small; and the explorations of the Archaeological Department are constantly bringing to light, particularly from underground sites, more materials for that period. For the time onwards from that point, we have similarly available the contents of some 10,000 or 11,000 records of Southern India, and of at any rate between 700 and 800 records of Northern India where racial antagonism came more into play and worked more destruction of Hindu remains than in the south.

Another reason is found in the fact that from the first century B.C. the inscriptions are for the most part specifically dated: some in various eras the nature and application of which are now thoroughly well understood, often with also a mention of the year of the twelve-years or of the sixty-years cycle of the planet Jupiter; others in the regnal years of kings whose periods are now well fixed. And, in addition to usually stating the month and the day along with the year, the inscriptions sometimes give, under the influence of Hindu astrology, other details so exact that we can determine, even to the actual hour, the occurrence of the event registered by a particular record.

A final reason is found in the precise nature of the inscriptions. A certain proportion of them consists of plain statements of events,--recitals of the pedigrees and achievements of kings, records of the carrying out of public works, epitaphs of kings, heroes, and saints, compacts of political alliance, and so on; and some of these present, in fact, short historical compositions which illustrate well what the ancient Hindus might have done if they had felt any special call to write plain and veracious chronicles on matter-of-fact lines. But we are indebted for the great bulk of the inscriptions, not to any historical instinct, but to the religious side of the Hindu character, and to the constant desire of the Hindus to make donations on every possible occasion. The inscriptions devoted simply to the propagation of morality and religion are not very numerous: the most notable ones in this class are the edicts of Asoka, which we shall notice again farther on. The general object of the inscriptions was to register gifts and endowments, made sometimes to private individuals, but more usually to gods, to priests on behalf of temples and charitable institutions, and to religious communities. And, as the result of this, in the vast majority of the inscriptional remains we have a mass of title-deeds of real property, and of certificates of the right to duties, taxes, fees, perquisites, and other privileges. Now, the essential part of the records was of course the specification of the details of the donor, of the donee, and of the donation. And we have to bear in mind that not only are the donative records by far the most abundant of all, but also, among them, by far the most numerous are those which we may call the records of royal donations; by which we mean grants that were made either by the kings themselves, or by the great feudatory nobles, or by provincial governors and other high officials who had the royal authority to alienate state lands and to assign allotments from the state revenues: also, that many of them register, not simply the gift of small holdings, but grants of entire villages, and large and permanent assignments from the public revenues. It is to these facts that we are indebted for the great value of the records from the historical point of view. The donor of state lands or of an assignment from the public revenues must show his authority for his acts. A provincial governor or other high official must specify his own rank and territorial jurisdiction, and name the king under whom he holds office. A great feudatory noble will often give a similar reference to his paramount sovereign, in addition to making his own position clear. And it is neither inconsistent with the dignity of a king, nor unusual, for something to be stated about his pedigree in charters and patents issued by him or in his name. The records give from very early times a certain amount of genealogical information. More and more information of that kind was added as time went on. The recital of events was introduced, to magnify the glory and importance of the donors, and sometimes to commemorate the achievements of recipients. And it was thus, not with the express object of recording history, but in order to intensify the importance of everything connected with religion and to secure grantees in the possession of properties conveyed to them, that there was gradually accumulated almost the whole of the great mass of inscriptional records upon which we are so dependent for our knowledge of the ancient history of India in all its branches.

Survey of the inscriptions.

Coming now to a survey of the inscriptions themselves, we must premise that India is divided, from the historical point of view, though not so markedly in some other respects, into two well-defined parts, Northern and Southern. A classical name of Northern India is Aryavarta, "the abode of the Aryas, the excellent or noble people." Another name, which figures both in literature and in the inscriptions, is Uttarapatha, "the path of the north, the northern road." And, as a classical name of Southern India answering to that we have Dakshinapatha, "the path of the south, the southern road," from the first component of which name comes our modern term Deccan, Dekkan, or Dekhan. Sanskrit literature names as the dividing-line between Aryavarta or the Uttarapatha and the Dakshinapatha, i.e. between Northern and Southern India, sometimes the Vindhya mountains, sometimes the river Nerbudda (Narmada, Narbada) which, flowing close along the south of the Vindhya range, empties itself into the gulf of Cambay near Broach, in Gujarat, Bombay. The river seems, on the whole, to furnish the better dividing-line of the two. But it does not reach, any more than the range exactly extends, right across India from sea to sea. And, to complete the dividing-line beyond the sources of the Narbada, which are in the Maikal range and close to the Amarkantak hill in the Rewa State, Baghelkhand, we have to follow some such course as first the Maniari river, from its sources, which are in that same neighbourhood but on the south of the Maikal range, to the point where, after it has joined the Seonath, the united rivers flow into the Mahanadi, near Seori-Narayan in the Bilaspur district, Central Provinces, and then the Mahanadi itself, which flows into the bay of Bengal near Cuttack in Orissa. Even so, however, we have only a somewhat rough dividing-line between the historical Northern and Southern India; and the distinction must not be understood too strictly in connexion with the territories lying close on the north and the south of the line sketched above. In Western India, Kathiawar and all the portions of Gujarat above Broach lie to the north of the Narbada; but from the palaeographic point of view, if not so much from the historical, they belong essentially to Southern India. Our modern Central India lies entirely in Northern India, but has various palaeographic connexions with Southern India. Our Central Provinces extend in the Saugar district into Northern India; and that portion of them presents in ancient times both northern and southern characteristics. Eastern India may be defined as consisting of Bengal, with Orissa and Assam: it belongs to Northern India.

The inscriptional remains of India, as known at present, practically begin with the records of Asoka, the great Maurya king of Northern India,--grandson of that king Chandragupta whose name was written by the Greeks as Sandrokottos,--who reigned 264 to 227 B.C. The state of the alphabets, indeed, in the time of Asoka renders it certain that the art of writing must have been practised in India for a long while before his period; and it gives us every reason to hope that systematic exploration, especially of buried sites, will eventually result in the discovery of records framed by some of his predecessors or by their subjects. But those discoveries have still to be made; and matters stand just now as follows. From before the time of Asoka we have an inscription on a relic-vase from a stupa or relic-mound at Piprahwa in the north-east corner of the Basti district, United Provinces, which preserves the memory of the slaughtered kinsmen of Buddha, the Sakyas of Kapilavastu according to the subsequent traditional nomenclature. We may perhaps place before his time the record on the Sohgaura plate, from the Gorakhpur district, United Provinces, which notifies the establishment of two public storehouses at a junction of three great highways of vehicular traffic to meet any emergent needs of persons using these roads. And we may possibly decide hereafter to refer to the same period a few other records which are not at present regarded as being quite so early. But, practically, the known inscriptions of India begin with the records of that king who calls himself in them "the king Devanampiya-Piyadassi, the Beloved of the Gods, He of Gracious Mien," but who is best known as Asoka by the name given to him in the literature of India and Ceylon and in an inscription of A.D. 150 at Junagadh (Junagarh) in Kathiawar. From his time onwards we have records from all parts in constantly increasing numbers, particularly during the earlier periods, from caves, rock-cut temples, and Buddhist stupas. Many of them, however, are of only a dedicatory nature, and, valuable as they are for purposes of religion, geography, and other miscellaneous lines of research, are not very helpful in the historical line. We are interested here chiefly in the historical records; and we can notice only the most prominent ones even among them.

Of this king Asoka we have now thirty-five different records, some of them in various recensions. Amongst them, the most famous ones are the seven pillar-edicts and the fourteen rock-edicts, found in various versions, and in a more or less complete state, at different places from Shahbazgarhi in the Yusufzai country in the extreme north-west, to Radhia, Mathia, and Rampurwa in the Champaran district, Bengal, at Dhauli in the Cuttack district of Orissa, at Jaugada in the Ganjam district, Madras, at Girnar (Junagadh) in Kathiawar, and even at Sopara in the Thana district, Bombay. These edicts were thus published in conspicuous positions in or near towns, or close to highways frequented by travellers and traders, or in the neighbourhood of sacred places visited by pilgrims, so that they might be freely seen and perused. And the object of them was to proclaim the firm determination of Asoka to govern his realm righteously and kindly in accordance with the duty of pious kings, and with considerateness for even religious beliefs other than the Brahmanical faith which he himself at first professed, and to acquaint his subjects with certain measures that he had taken to that end, and to explain to them how they might co-operate with him in his objects. But, in addition to mentioning certain contemporaneous foreign kings, Antiochus II. (Theos) of Syria, Ptolemy Philadelphus of Egypt, Antigonus Gonatas of Macedonia, Magas of Cyrene, and Alexander II. of Epirus, they yield items of internal history, in detailing some of Asoka's administrative arrangements; in locating the capital of his empire at Pataliputra (Patna), and seats of viceroys at Ujjeni (Ujjain) and Takhasila (Taxila); in giving the names of some of the leading peoples of India, particularly the Cholas, the Pandyas, and the Andhras; and in recording the memorable conquest of the Kalinga country, the attendant miseries of which first directed the thoughts of the king to religion and to solicitude for the welfare of all his subjects. Another noteworthy record of Asoka is that notification, containing his Last Edict, his dying speech, issued by local officials just after his death, which is extant in various recensions at Sahasram, Rupnath, and Bairat in Northern India, and at Brahmagiri, Siddapura, and Jatinga-Ramesvara in Mysore. Some three years before the end of his long reign of thirty-seven years, Asoka became a convert to Buddhism, and was admitted as an Upasaka or lay-worshipper. Eventually, he formally joined the Buddhist order; and, following a not infrequent custom of ancient Indian kings, he abdicated, took the vows of a monk, and withdrew to spend his remaining days in religious retirement in a cave-dwelling on Suvarnagiri (Songir), one of the hills surrounding the ancient city of Girivraja, below Rajagriha (Rajgir), in the Patna district in Behar. And there, about a year later, in his last moments, he delivered the address incorporated in this notification, proclaiming as the only true religion that which had been promulgated by Buddha, and expanding the topic of the last words of that great teacher: "Work out your salvation by diligence!" This record, it may be added, is also of interest because, whereas such of the other known records of Asoka as are dated at all are dated according to the number of years elapsed after his anointment to the sovereignty, it is dated 256 years after the death of Buddha, which event took place in 483 B.C.

For the two centuries or nearly so next after the end of the reign of Asoka, we have chiefly a large number of short inscriptions which are of much value in miscellaneous lines of research--palaeography, geography, religion, and so on. But historical records are by no means wanting; and we may mention in particular the following. From the caves in the Nagarjuni Hills in the Gaya district, Bengal, we have (along with three of the inscriptions of Asoka himself) three records of a king Dasaratha who, according to the _Vishnu-Purana_, was a grandson of Asoka. From the stupa at Bharaut in the Nagod state, Central India, we have a record which proves the existence of the dynasty of the Sunga kings, for whom the _Puranas_, placing them next after the line of Chandragupta and Asoka, indicate the period 183 to 71 B.C. Two of the records from the stupa at Bhattiprolu in the Kistna district, Madras, give us a king of those parts, reigning about 200 B.C., whose name appears both as Kubiraka and as Khubiraka. From Besnagar in the Gwalior state we have an inscription, referable to the period 175 to 135 B.C., which mentions a king of Central India, by name Bhagabhadra, and also mentions, as his contemporary, one of the Greek kings of the Punjab, Antalkidas, whose name is familiar from his coins in the form Antialkidas. From the Hathigumpha cave near Cuttack, in Orissa, we have a record, to be placed about 140 B.C., of king Kharavela, a member of a dynasty which reigned in that part of India. From a cave at Pabhosa in the Allahabad district, United Provinces, we have two records which make known to us a short succession of kings of Adhichatra, otherwise known as Ahichchhattra. From a cave at the Nanaghat Pass in the Poona district, Bombay, we have a record of queen Nayanika, wife of one of the great Satavahana-Satakarni kings of the Deccan. And from the stupa No. 1 at Sanchi in the Bhopal state, Central India, we have a record of a king Sri-Satakarni, belonging to perhaps another branch of the same great stock.

The historical records become more numerous from the time of the Kushan king Kanishka or Kanishka, who began to reign in 58 B.C., and founded the so-called Vikrama era, the great historical era of Northern India, beginning in that year.[27] For the period of him and his immediate successors, Vasishka, Huvishka and Vasudeva, we have now between seventy and eighty inscriptions, ranging from 54 B.C. to A.D. 42, and disclosing a sway which reached at its height from Bengal to Kabul: we are indebted for some of these to the Buddhists, in connexion with whose faith the memory of Kanishka was preserved by tradition, but for most of them to the Jains, who seem to have been at that time the more numerous sect in the central part of his dominions.

The dynasty of Kanishka was succeeded by another foreign ruler, Gondophernes, popularly known as Gondophares, whose coins indicate that, in addition to a large part of north-western India and Sind, his dominions included Kabul, Kandahar, and Seistan. This king is well known to Christian tradition, in connexion with the mission of St Thomas the Apostle to the East. And the tradition is substantially supported by an inscription from Takht-i-Bahai in the Yusufzai country on the north-west frontier, which, like some of his coins, mentions him as Guduphara or Gunduphara, and proves that he was reigning there in A.D. 47.

Gondophernes was followed by the Kadphises kings, belonging to another branch of the Kushan tribe, who perhaps extended their sway farther into India, as far at least as Mathura (Muttra), and reigned for about three-quarters of a century. For their period, and in fact for the whole time to the rise of the Guptas in A.D. 320 we have as yet but scanty help from the inscriptions in respect of the political history of Northern India: we are mostly dependent on the coins, which tend to indicate that that part of India was then broken up into a number of small sovereignties and tribal governments. An inscription, however, from Panjtar in the Yusufzai territory mentions, without giving his name, a Kushan king whose dominion included that territory in A.D. 66. And an inscription of A.D. 242 from Mathura has been understood to indicate that some descendant of the same stock was then reigning there. The inscriptional records for that period belong chiefly to Southern India.

Meanwhile, however, in the south-west corner of Northern India, namely in Kathiawar, there arose another foreign king, apparently of Parthian extraction, by name Nahapana, described in his records, whether by a family name or by a tribal appellation, as a Chhaharata or Kshaharata, in whom we have the founder of the so-called Saka era, the principal era of Southern India, beginning in A.D. 78: in respect of him we learn from the _Periplus of the Erythraean Sea_ that he was reigning between A.D. 80 and 89, and from inscriptions that he was still reigning in A.D. 120 and 124: at the latter time, his dominions included Nasik and other territories on the south of the Narbada; and the _Periplus_ names as his capital a town which it calls Minnagar, and which Ptolemy would locate in such a manner as to suggest that it may be identified with the modern Dohad in the Panch Mahals district of Gujarat, Bombay. Nahapana was overthrown, and his family was entirely wiped out, soon after A.D. 125, by the great Satavahana king Gautamiputra-Sri-Satakarni, who thereby recovered the territories on the south of the Narbada. On the north of that river, however, he was followed by a line of kings founded by his viceroy Chashtana, son of Ghsamotika, to whom Ptolemy, mentioning him as Tiastanes, assigns Ujjain as his capital: these names, again, show a foreign origin; but, from the time of his son Jayadaman, the descendants of Chashtana became Hinduized, and mostly bore purely Indian appellations. The coins show that the descendants of Chashtana ruled till about A.D. 388, when they were overthrown by the great Gupta dynasty of Northern India. Only a few of their inscriptional records have been discovered: but amongst them a very noteworthy one is the Junagadh (Junagarh) inscription of Chashtana's grandson, Rudradaman, bearing a date in A.D. 150; it is remarkable as being the earliest known long inscription written entirely in Sanskrit.

From Southern India we have, at Nasik, inscriptions of the Satavahana king Gautampputra-Sri-Satakarni, mentioned just above, and of his son Vasisthiputra-Sri-Pulumayi, and of another king of that line named Gautamiputra-Sri-Yajna-Satakarni; and other records of the last-mentioned king come from Kanheri near Bombay, and from the Kistna district, Madras, and testify to the wide extent of the dominions of the line to which he belonged. The records of this king carry us on to the opening years of the 3rd century, soon after which time, in those parts at any rate, the power of the Satavahana kings came to an end. And we have next, also from Nasik, an inscription of an Abhira king named Isvarasena, son of Sivadatta; in this last-mentioned person we probably have the founder of the so-called Kalachuri or Chedi era, beginning in A.D. 248 or 249, which we trace in Western India for some centuries before the time when it was transferred to, or revived in, Central India, and was invested with its later appellation: we trace it notably in the records of a line of kings who called themselves Traikutakas, apparently from Trikuta as the ancient name of the great mountain Harischandragad in the Western Ghauts, in the Ahmadnagar district.

We can, of course, mention in this account only the most prominent of the inscriptional records. Keeping for the present to Southern India, we have from Banawasi in the North Kanara district, Bombay, and from Malavallji in the Shimoga district, Mysore, two inscriptions of a king Harit putra-Satakarni of the Vinhukadda-Chutu family, reigning at Vaijayanti, i.e. Banawasi, which disclose the existence there of another branch, apparently known as the Chutu family and having its origin at a place named Vishnugarta, of the great stock to which the Satavahana-Satakarnis belonged. And another Malavalli inscription, of a king Siva-Skandavarman, shows that the Satakarnis of that locality were followed by a line of kings known as the Kadambas, who left descendants who continued to rule until about A.D. 650. From the other side of Southern India, an inscription from the stupa at Jaggayyapeta in the Kistna district, Madras, referable to the 3rd century A.D., gives us a king Madhariputra-Sri-Vira-Purushadatta, of the race of Ikshvaku. And some Prakrit copperplate inscriptions from the same district, referable to the 4th century, disclose a line of Pallava kings at Kanchi, the modern Conjeeveram near Madras, whose descendants, from about A.D. 550, are well known from the later records.

Reverting to Northern India, we have from the extreme north-west a few inscriptions dated in the era of 58 B.C. which carry us on to A.D. 322. The tale is then taken up chiefly by the records of the great Gupta kings of Pataliputra, i.e. Patna, who rose to power in A.D. 320, and gradually extended their sway until it assumed dimensions almost commensurate with those of Asoka and Kanishka: the records of this series are somewhat numerous; and a very noteworthy one amongst them is the inscription of Samudragupta, incised at some time about A.D. 375 on one of the pillars of Asoka now standing at Allahabad, which gives us a wide insight into the political divisions, with their contemporaneous rulers, of both Northern and Southern India: it is also interesting because it, or another record of the same king at Eran in the Saugar district, Central Provinces, marks the commencement of the habitual use of Sanskrit for inscriptional purposes. The inscriptions of the Gupta series run on to about A.D. 530. But the power of the dynasty had by that time become much curtailed, largely owing to an irruption of the Huns under Toramana and Mihirakula, who established themselves at Sialkot, the ancient Sakala, in the Punjab. We have inscriptional records of these two persons, not only from Kura in the Salt Range, not very far from Sialkot, but also from Eran and from Gwalior. And next after these we have inscriptions from Mandasor in Malwa, notably on two great monolith pillars of victory, of a king Vishnuvardhana-Yasodharman, which show that he overthrew Mihirakula shortly before A.D. 532, and, describing him as subjugating territories to which not even the Guptas and the Huns had been able to penetrate, indicate that he in his turn established for a while another great paramount sovereignty in Northern India.

We have thus brought our survey of the inscriptions of India down to the 6th century A.D. There then arose various dynasties in different parts of the country: in Northern India, in Kathiawar, the Maitrakas of Valabhi; at Kanauj, the Maukharis, who, after no great lapse of time, were followed by the line to which belonged the great Harshavardhana, "the warlike lord (as the southern records style him) of all the region of the north;" and, in Behar, another line of Guptas, usually known as the Guptas of Magadha: in Southern India, the Chalukyas, who, holding about A.D. 625 the whole northern part of Southern India from sea to sea, then split up into two branches, the Western Chalukyas of Badami in the Bijapur district, Bombay, and the Eastern Chalukyas of Vengi in the Godavari district, Madras; and, below them, the successors of the original Pallavas of Kanchi (Conjeeveram). These all had their time, and passed away. And they and their successors have left us so great a wealth of inscriptional records that no further detailed account can be attempted within the limits available here. We must pass on to a few brief remarks about the language of the records and the characters in which they were written.

Alphabets.

The inscriptions of Asoka present two alphabets, which differ radically and widely: one of them is known as the Brahmi; the other, as the Kharoshthi or Kharoshtri. For the decipherment of the Brahmi alphabet we are indebted to James Prinsep, who determined the value of practically all the letters between 1834 and 1837. The decipherment of the Kharoshthi alphabet was a more difficult and a longer task: it was virtually finished, some twenty years later, by the united efforts of C. Masson, Prinsep, C. L. Lassen, H. H. Wilson, E. Norris, Sir A. Cunningham, and John Dowson; but there are still a few points of detail in respect of which finality has not been attained.

The Kharoshthi script was written from right to left, and is undeniably of Semitic origin; and the theory about it, based on the known fact that the valley of the Indus was a Persian satrapy in the time of Darius (521-485 B.C.), is that the Aramaic script was then introduced into that territory, and that the Kharoshthi is an adaptation of it. Except in a few intrusive cases, the use of the Kharoshthi in India was limited to the valley of the Indus, and to the Punjab as defined on the south by the territory watered by the Bias (Beas) and the Satlaj (Sutlej): and the eastern locality of the meeting of the two alphabets is marked by coins bearing Kharoshthi and Brahmi legends which come from the districts of the Jalandhar (Jullundhur) division, and by two short rock-cut records, each presented in both the alphabets, at Pathyar and Kanhiara in the Kangra valley. Outside India, this script was notably current in Afghanistan; and documents written in it have in recent years been found in Chinese Turkestan. In India it continued in use, as far as our present knowledge goes, down to A.D. 343.

The Brahmi alphabet, written from left to right, belonged to the remainder of India; but it must also have been current in learned circles even in the territory where popular usage favoured the other script. Various views about its origin have been advanced: amongst them is the theory that it was derived from the oldest north-Semitic alphabet, which prevailed from Phoenicia to Mesopotamia, and may, it is held, have been introduced into India by traders at some time about 800 B.C. It is, however, admitted that the earliest known form of the Brahmi is a script framed by Brahmans for writing Sanskrit. Also, the theory is largely based on a coin from Eran, in the Saugar district, Central Provinces, presenting a Brahmi legend running retrograde from right to left; from which it is inferred that that was the original direction of this writing, and that the script eventually assumed the other direction, which alone it has in the inscriptions, after passing, like the Greek, through a stage in which the lines were written in both directions alternately. But we can cite many instances in which ancient die-sinkers were careless, wholly or partially, in the matter of reversing the legends on their dies, with the result that not only syllables frequently, but sometimes entire words, stand in reverse on the coins themselves; moreover, the Eran coin, being one of the earliest known Indian coins bearing a legend at all, may quite possibly belong to a period before the time when the desirability of working in reverse on the dies presented itself to the Indian die-sinkers. In all the circumstances, the evidence of the Eran coin cannot be regarded as conclusive; and we require some inscription on stone, or at least some longer record on metal than a brief legend of five syllables, to satisfy us that the Brahmi writing ever had a direction different from that which it has in the inscriptions. Further, if there is any radical connexion between the Brahmi and the Semitic alphabet indicated above, so many curious and apparently capricious changes must have been made, in adapting that alphabet, that it would seem more probable that the two scripts were derived from a joint original source. In view of the high state of civilization to which the Hindus had evidently attained even before the time of Chandragupta, the grandfather of Asoka, it must still be regarded as possible that they were the independent inventors of that which was emphatically their national alphabet. The Brahmi alphabet is the parent of all the modern Hindu scripts, including on one side the Nagari or Devanagari, and on the other the widely dissimilar rounded forms of the Kanarese, Tamil, Telugu, and other southern alphabets; and the inscriptions enable us to trace clearly the gradual development of all the modern forms.

Languages.

The great classical Indian language, Sanskrit, is not found in any inscriptional records of the earliest times. It is not, however, to be supposed therefrom that the use and cultivation of Sanskrit ever lay dormant, and that there was a revival of this language when it did eventually come to be used in the inscriptions; the case simply is that, during the earlier periods, Sanskrit was not known much, if at all, outside the Brahmanical and other literary and priestly circles, and so was not recognized as a suitable medium for the notifications which were put on record in the inscriptions for the information of the people at large.

In Northern India, the inscriptions of the period before 58 B.C. present various early Prakrits, i.e. vernaculars more or less derived from Sanskrit or brought into a line with it. From 58 B.C., however, the influence of Sanskrit began to manifest itself in the inscriptions, with the result that the records present from that time a language which is conveniently known as the mixed dialect, meaning neither exactly Prakrit nor exactly Sanskrit, but Prakrit with an intermixture of Sanskrit terminations and some other features; and we have, in fact, from Mathura (Muttra), a locality which has yielded interesting remains in various directions, a short Brahmanical inscription of 33 B.C. which was written wholly in Sanskrit. The mixed dialect appears to have been the general one for inscriptional purposes in Northern India until about A.D. 320. But a remarkable exception is found in the inscription of Rudradaman, dated in A.D. 150, at Junagadh in Kathiawar (mentioned on a preceding page), which is a somewhat lengthy record composed in thoroughly good literary Sanskrit prose. Also, the extant inscriptions of the descendants of Rudradaman--(but only four of their records, ranging from A.D. 181 to 205, are at present available for study)--are in almost quite correct Sanskrit; and this suggests that, from his time, the language may have been habitually used for inscriptional purposes in the dominions of his dynasty. That, however, is only a matter of conjecture; and elsewhere pure and good Sanskrit, without any Prakrit forms, appears next, and is found in verse as well as in prose, in the two inscriptions from Eran and Allahabad, referable to the period about A.D. 340 to 375, of the great Gupta king Samudragupta. From that time onwards, as far as our present knowledge goes, Sanskrit, with a very rare introduction of Prakrit or vernacular forms, was practically the only inscriptional language in the northern parts of India. We can, however, cite a record of A.D. 862 from the neighbourhood of Jodhpur in Rajputana, the body of which was written in Maharashtri Prakrit.

In Southern India we have an instance of the mixed dialect in the Nasik inscription, referable to A.D. 257 or 258, of the Abhira king Isvarasena, son of Sivadatta, which has been mentioned on a preceding page. With the exception, however, of that record and of the few which are mentioned just below, the inscriptional language of Southern India appears to have been generally Prakrit of one kind or another until about A.D. 400, or perhaps even somewhat later. Sanskrit figures first in one of the records at Nasik of Rishabhadatta (Ushavadata), son-in-law of the Kshaharata king Nahapana, which consequently gives it almost as early an appearance in the south as that which is established for it in the north; but it is confined in this instance to a preamble which recites the previous donations and good works of Rishabhadatta; the record passes into Prakrit for the practical purpose for which it was framed. Sanskrit figures next, in an almost correct form, in the short inscription of not much later date at Kanheri, near Bombay, of the queen (her name is not extant) of Vasishthiputra-Sri-Satakarni. It next appears in certain formulae, and benedictive and imprecatory verses, which stand at the end of some of the Prakrit records of the Pallava series referable to the 4th century; but here we have quotations from books, not instances of original composition. We have a Sanskrit record, obtained in Khandesh but probably belonging to some part of Gujarat, of a king named Rudradasa, which is perhaps dated in A.D. 367. But the next southern inscription in Sanskrit, of undeniable date, is a record of A.D. 456, belonging to the Vyara subdivision of the Baroda state in Gujarat, of the Traikutaka king Dahrasena. The records of the early Kadamba kings of Banawasi in North Kanara, Bombay, exhibit the use of Sanskrit from an early period in the 6th century; and records of the Pallava kings show it from perhaps a somewhat earlier time on the other side of India. The records of the Chalukya kings present Sanskrit from A.D. 578 onwards. And from this latter date the language figures freely in the southern records. But some of the vernaculars, in their older forms, shortly begin to present themselves alongside of it; and, without entirely superseding Sanskrit even to the latest times, the use of them for inscriptional purposes became rapidly more and more extensive. The vernacular that first makes its appearance is Kanarese, in a record of the Chalukya king Mangalesa, of the period A.D. 597 to 608, at Badami in the Bijapur district, Bombay. Tamil appears next, between about A.D. 610 and 675, in records of the Pallava king Mahendravarman I. at Vallam in the Chingalpat (Chingleput) district, Madras, and of his great-grandson Paramesvaravarman I. from Kuram in the same district. Telugu appears certainly in A.D. 1011, in a record of the Eastern Chalukya king Vimaladitya; and it is perhaps given to us in A.D. 843 or 844 by a record of his ancestor Vishnuvardhana V.; in the latter case, however, the authenticity of the document is not certain. Malayalam appears about A.D. 1150, in inscriptions of the rulers of Kerala from the Travancore state. And on the colossal image of Gommatesvara at Sravana-Belgola, in Mysore, there are two lines of Marathi, notifying for the benefit of pilgrims from the Maratha country the names of the persons who caused the image and the enclosure to be made, which are attributed to the first quarter of the 12th century: this language, however, figures first for certain in a record of A.D. 1207, of the time of the Devagiri-Yadava king Singhana, from Khandesh in the north of Bombay.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--The systematic publication of the Indian inscriptions has not gone far. Cunningham inaugurated a _Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum_, by giving us in 1877 the first volume of it, dealing with the records of Asoka; but the only other volume which has been published is vol. iii., by Fleet, dealing with the records of the Gupta series. The other published materials are mostly to be found here and there in the _Journals_ of the Royal Asiatic Society of London, its Bombay branch, and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, in the _Reports_ of the various Archaeological Surveys, and in the _Indian Antiquary_, the _Epigraphia Indica_ and the _Epigraphia Carnatica_; and much work has still to be done in bringing them together according to the periods and dynasties to which they relate, and in revising some of them in the light of new discoveries and the teachings of later research. The authority on Indian palaeography is Buhler's work, published in 1896 as part 2 of vol. i of the _Grundriss der Indo-Arischen Philologie und Altertumskunde_; an English version of it was issued in 1904 as an appendix to the _Indian Antiquary_, vol. xxxiii. (J. F. F.)

III. GREEK INSCRIPTIONS

Etymologically the term inscription ([Greek: epigraphe]) would include much more than is commonly meant by it. It would include words engraved on rings, or stamped on coins,[28] vases, lamps, wine-jar handles,[29] &c. But Boeckh was clearly right in excluding this _varia supellex_ from his _Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum_, or only admitting it by way of appendix. Giving the term inscription a somewhat narrower sense, we still include within it a vast store of documents of the greatest value to the student of Greek civilization. It happens, moreover, that Greek inscriptions yield the historian a richer harvest than those of Rome. Partly from fashion, but partly from the greater abundance of the material, the Romans engraved their public documents (treaties, laws, &c.) to a large extent on bronze. These bronze tablets, chiefly set up in the Capitol, were melted in the various conflagrations, or were carried off to feed the mint of the conqueror. In Greece, on the contrary, the mountains everywhere afforded an inexhaustible supply of marble, and made it the natural material for inscriptions. Some Greek inscribed tablets of bronze have come down to us,[30] and many more must have perished in the sack of cities and burning of temples. A number of inscriptions on small thin plates of lead, rolled up, have survived; these are chiefly imprecations on enemies[31] or questions asked of oracles.[32] An early inscription recently discovered (1905) at Ephesus is on a plate of silver. But as a rule the material employed was marble. These marble monuments are often found _in situ_; and, though more often they were used up as convenient stones for building purposes, yet they have thus survived in a more or less perfect condition.[33]

Inscriptions were usually set up in temples, theatres, at the side of streets and roads, in [Greek: temene] or temple-precincts, and near public buildings generally. At Delphi and Olympia were immense numbers of inscriptions--not only those engraved upon the gifts of victorious kings and cities, but also many of a more public character. At Delphi were inscribed the decrees of the Amphictyonic assembly, at Olympia international documents concerning the Peloponnesian cities; the Parthenon and Acropolis were crowded with treaties, laws and decrees concerning the Athenian confederation; the Heraeum at Samos, the Artemisium at Ephesus, and indeed every important sanctuary, abounded with inscriptions. It is a common thing for decrees ([Greek: psephismata]) to contain a clause specifying where they are to be set up, and what department of the state is to defray the cost of inscribing and erecting them. Sometimes duplicates are ordered to be set up in various places; and, in cases of treaties, arbitrations and other international documents, copies were always set up by each city concerned. Accordingly documents like the _Marmor Ancyranum_ and the _Edict of Diocletian_ have been restored by a comparison of the various fragments of copies set up in diverse quarters of the empire.

Greek inscribed marbles varied considerably in their external appearance. The usual form was the [Greek: stele], the normal type of which was a plain slab, from 3 to 4 or even 5 ft. high,[34] 3 or 4 in. thick, tapering slightly upwards from about 2 ft. wide at bottom to about 18 in. at the top, where it was either left plain or often had a slight moulding, or still more commonly was adorned with a more or less elaborate pediment; the slab was otherwise usually plain. Another form was the [Greek: bomos] or altar, sometimes square, oftener circular, and varying widely in size. Tombstones were either [Greek: stelai] (often enriched beneath the pediment with simple groups in relief, commemorative of the deceased), or [Greek: kiones], pillars, of different size and design, or sarcophagi plain and ornamental. To these must be added statue-bases of every kind, often inscribed, not only with the names and honours of individuals, but also with decrees and other documents. All these forms were intended to stand by themselves in the open air. But it was also common to inscribe state documents upon the surface of the walls of a temple, or other public building. Thus the antae and external face of the walls of the pronaos of the temple of Athena Polias at Priene were covered with copies of the awards made concerning the lands disputed between Samos and Priene (see _Gk. Inscr. in Brit. Mus._ iii. S 1); similarly the walls of the Artemisium at Ephesus contained a number of decrees (_ibid._ iii. S 2), and the _proscenium_ of the Odeum was lined with crustae, or "marble-veneering," under 1 in. thick, inscribed with copies of letters from Hadrian, Antoninus and other emperors to the Ephesian people (_ibid._ p. 151). The workmanship and appearance of inscriptions varied considerably according to the period of artistic development. The letters incised with the chisel upon the wall or the [Greek: stele] were painted in with red or blue pigment, which is often traceable upon newly unearthed inscriptions. When Thucydides, in quoting the epigram of Peisistratus the younger (vi. 54), says "it may still be read [Greek: amydrois grammasi]," he must refer to the fading of the colour; for the inscription was brought to light in 1877 with the letters as fresh as when they were first chiselled (see Kumanudes in [Greek: Athenaion], vi. 149; _I.G._ suppl. to vol. i. p. 41). The Greeks found no inconvenience, as we should, in the bulkiness of inscriptions as a means of keeping public records. On the contrary they made every temple a muniment room; and while the innumerable [Greek: stelai], _Hermae_, bases and altars served to adorn the city, it must also have encouraged and educated the sense of patriotism for the citizen to move continually among the records of the past. The history of a Greek city was literally written upon her stones.

The primary value of an inscription lay in its documentary evidence (so Euripides, _Suppl._ 1202, fol.). In this way they are continually cited and put in evidence by the orators (e.g. see Demosth. _Fals. Leg._ 428; Aeschin. _In Ctes._ S 75). But the Greek historians also were not slow to recognize their importance. Herodotus often cites them (iv. 88, 90, 91, v. 58 sq., vii. 228); and in his account of the victory of Plataea he had his eye upon the tripod-inscription (ix. 81; cf. Thuc. i. 132). Thucydides's use of inscriptions is illustrated by v. 18 fol., 23, 47, 77, vi. 54, 59. Polybius used them still more. In later Greece, when men's thoughts were thrown back upon the past, regular collections of inscriptions began to be made by such writers as Philochorus (300 B.C.), Polemon (2nd century B.C., called [Greek: stelokopas] for his devotion to inscriptions), Aristodemus, Craterus of Macedon, and many others.

At the revival of learning, the study of inscriptions revived with the renewed interest in Greek literature. Cyriac of Ancona, early in the 15th century, copied a vast number of inscriptions during his travels in Greece and Asia Minor; his MS. collections were deposited in the Barberini library at Rome, and have been used by other scholars. (See _Bull. Corr. Hellen._ i.; Larfeld in Muller's _Handbuch_ 1.^2, p. 368 f.; Ziebarth, "de ant. Inscript. Syllogis" in _Ephem. Epigr._ ix.). Succeeding generations of travellers and scholars continued to collect and edit, and Englishmen in both capacities did much for this study.

Thus early in the 19th century the store of known Greek inscriptions had so far accumulated that the time had come for a comprehensive survey of the whole subject. And it was the work of one great scholar, Augustus Boeckh, to raise Greek epigraphy into a science. At the request of the Academy of Berlin he undertook to arrange and edit all the known inscriptions in one systematic work, and vol. i. of the _Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum_ was published in 1828, vol. ii. in 1833. He lived to see the work completed, although other scholars were called in to help him to execute his great design; vol. iii., by Franz, appeared in 1853; vol. iv., by Kirchhoff, in 1856.[35] The work is a masterpiece of lucid arrangement and profound learning, of untiring industry and brilliant generalization. Out of the publication of the _Corpus_ there grew up a new school of students, who devoted themselves to discovering and editing new texts, and working up epigraphical results into monographs upon the many-sided history of Greece. In the _Corpus_ Boeckh had settled for ever the methods of Greek epigraphy; and in his _Staatshaushaltung der Athener_ (3rd ed. of vols. i. ii. by Frankel, 1886; well known to English readers from Sir G. C. Lewis's translation, _The Public Economy of Athens_, 2nd ed., 1842) he had given a palmary specimen of the application of epigraphy to historical studies. At the same time Franz drew up a valuable introduction to the study of inscriptions in his _Elementa Epigraphices Graecae_ (1840).

Meanwhile the liberation of Greece and increasing facilities for visiting the Levant combined to encourage the growth of the subject, which has been advanced by the labours of many scholars, and chiefly Ludwig Ross, Leake, Pittakys, Rangabe, Le Bas and later by Meier, Sauppe, Kirchhoff, Kumanudes, Waddington, Kohler, Dittenberger, Homolle, Haussoullier, Wilhelm and others. Together with the development of this school of writers, there has gone on a systematic exploration of some of the most famous sites of antiquity, with the result of exhuming vast numbers of inscriptions. To mention only some of the most important: Cyrene, Rhodes, Cos, Cnidus, Halicarnassus, Miletus, Priene, Ephesus, Magnesia on the Maeander, Pergamum, Delos, Thera, Athens, Eleusis, Epidaurus, Olympia, Delphi, Dodona, Sparta, have been explored or excavated by the Austrians, English, French, Germans and Greeks. German, French, British, Austrian and American institutes have been established at Athens, to a great extent engaged in the study of inscriptions. From every part of the Greek world copies of inscriptions are brought home by the students of these institutes and by other travellers. And still the work proceeds at a rapid rate. For indeed the yield of inscriptions is practically inexhaustible: each island, every city, was a separate centre of corporate life, and it is significant to note that in the island of Calymnos alone C. T. Newton collected over one hundred inscriptions, many of them of considerable interest.

The result of this has been that Boeckh's great work, though it never can be superseded, yet has ceased to be what its name implies. The four volumes of the _C.I.G._ contain about 10,000 inscriptions. But the number of Greek inscriptions now known is probably more than three or four times as great. Many of these are only to be found published in the scattered literature of dissertations, or in Greek, German and other periodicals. But several comprehensive collections have been attempted, among which (omitting those dealing with more limited districts of the Greek world) the following may be named:--Rangabe, _Antiquites helleniques_ (2 vols., 1842-1855); Le Bas-Waddington, _Voyage archeologique, inscriptions_ (3 vols., 1847-1876, incomplete); Newton, Hicks and Hirschfeld, _Greek Inscriptions in the British Museum_ (parts i.-iv.); and above all the _Inscriptiones Graecae_, a Corpus undertaken by the Berlin Academy (absorbing the _Corpus Inscr. Attic._ and other similar collections). Of this work six complete volumes and parts of others have appeared (by 1906) representing Attica, Argolis, Megaris, Boeotia, Phocis, Locris, Aetolia, Acarnania, Ionian Islands, Aegean Islands (exc. Delos), Sicily, Italy and western Europe; they are edited by Kirchhoff, Kohler, Dittenberger, Frankel, Hiller von Gaertringen, Kaibel and others. Of a similar Austrian publication dealing with Asia Minor (_Tituli Asiae Minoris_) only the first part (Lycian Inscriptions) has appeared. Of general selections of inscriptions on a smaller scale it is necessary to mention: Dittenberger, _Sylloge Inscriptionum Graec._ (2nd ed., 1898-1901, 3 vols.); the same, _Orientis Graeci Inscr. Selectae_ (2 vols., 1903-1905); Hicks, _Greek Historical Inscriptions_ (1st ed., 1882; 2nd ed., 1901); Michel, _Recueil d'inscriptions grecques_ (1900); Roberts and Gardner, _Introd. to Gk. Epigraphy_ (2 vols., 1887-1905); Rohl, _Inscr. gr. antiquissimae_ (1882), and _Imagines Inscriptionum_ (2nd ed., 1898).

Oldest Greek inscriptions.

The oldest extant Greek inscriptions appear to date from the middle of the 7th century B.C. During the excavations at Olympia a number of fragments of very ancient inscriptions were found (see _Olympia, Textband_ v.); and other very early inscriptions from various places, as Thera and Crete, have been published (see Rohl, _op. cit._). But what is wanted is a sufficient number of very early inscriptions of fixed date. One such exists upon the leg of a colossal Egyptian statue at Abu-Simbel on the upper Nile, where certain Greek mercenaries in the service of King Psammetichus recorded their names, as having explored the river up to the second cataract (_C.I.G._ 5126; Rohl, 482; Hicks^2, 3). Even if Psammetichus II. is meant, the inscription dates between 594 and 589 B.C. Another, but later, instance is to be found in the fragmentary inscriptions on the columns dedicated by Croesus in the Ephesian temple (c. 550 B.C.; _Gk. Inscr. in the Brit. Mus._ 518). Documents earlier than the Persian War are not very frequent; but after that period the stream of Greek inscriptions goes on, generally increasing in volume, down to late Byzantine times.

Greek inscriptions may most conveniently be classified under the following heads: (1) those which illustrate political history; (2) those connected with religion; (3) those of a private character.

Political inscriptions.

1. Foremost among the inscriptions which illustrate Greek history and politics are the _decrees_ of senate and people ([Greek: psephismata boules, ekklesias], &c.) upon every subject which could concern the interests of the state. These abound from every part of Greece. It is true that a large number of them are honorary, i.e. merely decrees granting to strangers, who have done service to the particular city, public honours (crowns, statues, citizenship and other privileges). One of these privileges was the _proxenia_, an honour, which entailed on the recipient the burthen of protecting the citizens of the state which granted it when they came to his city. But the importance of an honorary decree depends upon the individual and the services to which it refers. And even the mere headings and datings of the decrees from various states afford curious and valuable information upon the names and titles of the local magistrates, the names of months and other details. On the formulae, see Swoboda, _Die gr. Volksbeschlusse_ (1890). Droysen in his _Hellenismus_ (1877-1878) has shown how the history of Alexander and his successors is illustrated by contemporary [Greek: psephimata]. And when the student of Athenian politics of the 5th and 4th centuries turns to the 1st and 2nd volumes of the _I.G._, he may wonder at the abundance of material before him; it is like turning over the minutes of the Athenian parliament. One example out of many must suffice--No. 17 in _I.G._ ii. pt. 1 (Hicks^2, 101) is the famous decree of the archonship of Nausinicus (378 B.C.) concerning the reconstruction of the Athenian confederacy. The terms of admission to the league occupy the face of the marble; at the bottom and on the left edge are inscribed the names of states which had already joined.

Inscribed _laws_ ([Greek: nomoi]) occur with tolerable frequency. The following are examples:--A citation of a law of Draco's from the [Greek: protos axon] of Solon's laws (_I.G._ i. 61; cf. Dittenberger, _Syll._^2 52); the Civil Codes of Gortyna (5th century, Dareste, &c., _Inscr. jurid. gr._ i. 352 ff.); a reassessment of the tribute payable by the Athenian allies in 425 B.C. (_I.G._ i. 37; Kohler _Urkunden und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des delisch-attischen Bundes_, 1870, p. 63; Hicks^2, 64); a law passed by the Amphictyonic council at Delphi, 380 B.C. (Boeckh, _C.I.G._ 1688; _I.G._ ii. 545); law concerning Athenian weights and measures (Boeckh, _Staatshaushaltung_^3, ii. 318; _I.G._ ii. 476); the futile sumptuary law of Diocletian concerning the maximum prices for all articles sold throughout the empire (Mommsen-Blumner, _Der Maximaltarif des Diocletian_, 1893). For a collection of such legal documents, see Dareste, Haussoullier and Reinach, _Recueil des inscr. juridiques gr._ (1891-1898).

Besides the inscribed _treaties_ previously referred to, we may instance the following: Between Athens and Chalcis in Euboea, 446 B.c. (_I.G._ suppl. to vol. i. 27A); between Athens and Rhegium, 433 B.C. (Hicks^2, 51); between Athens and Leontini, dated the same day as the preceding (_ibid._ 52); between Athens and Boeotia, 395 B.C. (_ibid._ 84); between Athens and Chalcis, 377 B.C. (_ibid._ 102); between Athens and Sparta, 271 B.C. (_I.G._ ii. No. 332); between Hermias of Atarneus and the Ionian Erythrae, about 350 B.C. (Hicks^2 138); treaties in the local dialect between the Eleans and the Heraeans, 6th century (_Olympia Inschr._ 9), and between various cities of Crete, 3rd century B.C. (_C.I.G._ 2554-2556; _Griech. Dial. Inschr._ 5039-5041, 5075). Egger's _Etudes historiques sur les traites publics chez les Grecs et chez les Romains_ (Paris, 1866) embraces a good many of these documents; see also R. von Scala, _Die Staatsvertrage des Altertums_, pt. i. (1898).

The international relation of Greek cities is further illustrated by _awards_ of disputed lands, delivered by a third city called in ([Greek: ekkletos polis]) to arbitrate between the contending states, e.g. Rhodian award as between Samos and Priene (_Gk. Inscr. in Brit. Mus._ 405; Dittenberger, _Syll._^2 315); Milesian between Messanians and Spartans, discovered at Olympia (_ibid._ 314; see Tac. _Ann._ iv. 43); and many others. Akin to these are decrees in honour of judges called in from a neutral city to try suits between citizens which were complicated by political partisanship (see _C.I.G._ No. 2349B, with Boeckh's remarks; _I.G._ xii. 722). On the general subject, E. Sonne, _De arbitris extends_ (1888).

_Letters_ from kings are frequent; as from Darius I. to the satrap Gadates, with reference to the shrine of Apollo at Magnesia (Hicks^2, 20); from Alexander the Great to the Chians (_ibid._ 158); from Lysimachus to the Samians (_C.I.G._ 2254; Hicks^1, 152); from Antigonus I. directing the transfer of the population of Lebedus to Teos (Dittenberger, _Syll._^2 177); from the same to the Scepsians (Dittenberger, _Or. Gr. Inscr. Sel._ 5), Letters from Roman emperors are commoner still; such as Dittenberger, _Syll._^2 350, 356, 373, 384-388, 404.

The internal administration of Greek towns is illustrated by the minute and complete lists of the treasures in the Parthenon of the time of the Peloponnesian War (Boeckh, _Staatshaush_.^3 vol. ii.); public accounts of Athenian expenditure (_ibid._); records of the Athenian navy in the 4th century, forming vol. iii. of the 1840 ed. of the same work. To the same category belong the so-called Athenian tribute-lists, which are really lists of the quota (of the tribute paid by the Athenian allies) which was due to the treasury of Athena ([Greek: aparchai te theo mua apo talantou]). Being arranged according to the tributary cities, they throw much light on the constitution of the Athenian empire at the time (_I.G._ i. 226-272 and suppl. p. 71 f.; Kohler, _Urkunden und Untersuchungen zur Gesch. des attisch-delischen Seebundes_ 1870; Boeckh, _Staatshaush_.^3 ii. 332-498). The management of public lands and mines is specially illustrated from inscriptions (Boeckh, _op. cit._ vol. i. passim); and the political constitution of different cities often receives light from inscriptions which cannot be gained elsewhere (e.g. see the document from Cyzicus, _C.I.G._ 3665, and Boeckh's note, or that from Mytilene, Dittenberger, _Or. Gr. Inscr._ 2, and the inscriptions from Ephesus, Gk. _Inscr. in Brit. Mus._ pt. iii. S 2).

Inscriptions in honour of kings and emperors are very common. The _Marmor Ancyranum_ (ed. Mommsen,^2 1883) has already been mentioned; but an earlier example is the _Monumentum Adulitanum_ (from Abyssinia, _C.I.G._ 5127A); Dittenberger, (_Inscr. or. Gr._ 54) reciting the achievements of Ptolemy III. Euergetes I.

Offerings in temples ([Greek: anathemata]) are often of great historical value, e.g. the dedications on the columns of Croesus at Ephesus mentioned above; Gelo's dedication at Delphi, 479 B.C. (Hicks^2 16); the helmet of Hiero, now in the British Museum, dedicated at Olympia after his victory over the Etruscans, 474 B.C. (_C.I.G._ 16; Hicks^2 22); and the bronze base of the golden tripod dedicated at Delphi after the victory of Plataea, and carried off to Constantinople by Constantine (Dethier and Mordtmann, _Epigraphik von Byzantion_, 1874; Hicks^2 19).

Religious Inscriptions.

2. The religion of Greece in its external aspects is the subject of a great number of inscriptions (good selections in Dittenberger, _Syll._^2 550-816, and Michel 669-1330). The following are a few specimens. (1) Institution of festivals, with elaborate ritual directions: see Sauppe, _Die Mysterieninschrift aus Andania_ (1860); Dittenberger, _Syll._^2 653, and the singular document from the Ephesian theatre in _Gk. Inscr. in Brit. Mus._ 481; the following also relate to festivals--_C.I.G._ 1845, 2360, 2715, 3059, 3599, 3641b; Dittenberger, _Syll._^2 634 (the lesser Panathenaea) and _Or. Gr. Inscr._ 383 (law of Antiochus I. of Commagene). (2) Laws defining the appointment, duties or perquisites of the priesthood: Dittenberger, _Syll._^2 601; Boeckh, _Staatshaush_. ii. 109 seq. (3) Curious calendar of sacrifices from Myconus: Dittenberger, _Syll._^2 615. (4) Fragment of augury rules, Ephesus, 6th century B.C.: _ibid._ 801. (5) Leases of [Greek: temene] and sacred lands (see Dareste, &c., _Inscr. jur. Gr._ ii. S 19 and commentary). (6) Imprecations written on lead, and placed in tombs or in temples: Wunsch, _I.G._ iii. App.; Audollent, _Defixionum tabellae_ (1904). (7) Oracles are referred to _I.G._ xii. 248; Michel 840-856. (8) Among the inscriptions from Delphi few are more curious than those relating to the enfranchisement of slaves under the form of sale to a god (see _Gr. dial. Inschr._ nos. 1684-2342); for enfranchisement-inscriptions of various kinds, Dareste, &c., _Inscr. jur. Gr._ S xxx. (9) Cures effected in the Asclepieum at Epidaurus (Dittenberger, _Syll._^2 802-805). (10) Inventories, &c., of treasures in temples: Michel 811-828, 832, 833, &c. (11) Inscriptions relating to dramatic representations at public festivals: A. Wilhelm, _Urkunden dramatischer Auffuhrungen in Athen_ (Vienna, 1906). This catalogue might be enlarged indefinitely.

Private Inscriptions.

3. There remain a large number of inscriptions of a more strictly private character. The famous Parian marble (_I.G._ xii. 444) falls under this head; it was a system of chronology drawn up, perhaps by a schoolmaster, in the 3rd century B.C. The excessive devotion of the later Greeks to athletic and other competitions at festivals is revealed by the numerous dedications made by victorious competitors who record their successes (see Michel 915-960; Dittenberger, _Syll._^2 683 f.). The dedications and honorary inscriptions relating to the Ephebi of later Athens (which occupy half of _I.G._ iii. pt. 1), dreary as they seem, have yet thrown a curious light upon the academic life of Roman Athens (see A. Dumont, _Essai sur l'ephebie attique_; Reinach, _Traite_, pp. 408-418; Roberts and Gardner ii. 145); and from these and similar late inscriptions the attempt has been made to construct _Fasti_ of the later archons (von Schoffer in Pauly-Wissowa, _Realencyklopadie, s.v._ "Archontes"; W. S. Ferguson in _Cornell Studies_, x. The sepulchral monuments have been beautifully illustrated in Stackelberg's _Graber der Hellenen_; for the Attic stelae see Conze, _Die attischen Grabreliefs_ (1893 ff.). Some of the most interesting epitaphs in the _C.I.G._ are from Aphrodisias and Smyrna. Kumanudes's collection of Attic epitaphs has been mentioned above; see also Gutscher, _Die attischen Grabschr._ (1889); they yield a good deal of information about the Attic demes, and some of them are of high importance, e.g. the epitaph on the slain in the year 458 B.C. (Dittenberger, _Syll._^2 9), and on those who fell in the Hellespont, c. 440 B.C. (Hicks^2 46). For the metrical inscriptions see Kaibel, _Epigrammata Graeca_ (1878). Closely connected with sepulchral inscriptions is the famous "Will of Epicteta" (_I.G._ xii. 330). It was also customary at Athens for lands mortgaged to be indicated by boundary-stones inscribed with the names of mortgagor and mortgagee, and the amount (_I.G._ ii. 1103-1153; Dareste, &c., _Inscr. jur._ i. pp. 107-142); other [Greek: oroi] are common enough.

The names of sculptors inscribed on the bases of statues have been collected by E. Lowy (_Inschriften gr. Bildhauer_, 1885). In most cases the artists are unknown to fame. Among the exceptions are the names of Pythagoras of Rhegium, whom we now know to have been a native of Samos (Lowy 23, 24); Pyrrhus, who made the statue of Athena Hygieia dedicated by Pericles (Plut. _Per._ 13; Lowy 53); Polyclitus the younger (Lowy 90 f.), Paeonius of Mende, who sculptured the marble Nike at Olympia (Lowy 49); Praxiteles (Lowy 76), &c.

Study of Dialects.

The bearing of inscriptions upon the study of dialects is very obvious. A handy selection has been made by Cauer (_Delectus inscr._ Gr. 2nd ed., Leipzig, 1883) of the principal inscriptions illustrating this subject, and a complete collection is in course of publication (Collitz and others, _Sammlung der griechischen Dialekt-Inschriften_, Gottingen, 1884 ff.). See also R. Meister, _Die griech. Dialekte_ (1882-1889), and O. Hoffman, _Die griech. Dialekte_ (1891-1898). The grammar of Attic inscriptions is treated by Meisterhans, _Grammatik der att. Inschr._ (3rd ed. by Schwyzer, 1900).

Date of Inscriptions.

The date of inscriptions is determined partly by the internal evidence of the subject, persons, and events treated of, and the character of the dialect and language. But the most important evidence is the form of the letters and style of execution. For the Attic inscriptions the development from the earliest times to about A.D. 500 is elaborately treated by Larfeld, _Handbuch der att. Inschr._ (1902). bk. ii. Much of the evidence is of a kind difficult to appreciate from a mere description. Yet--besides the [Greek: boustrophedon] writing of many early documents--we may mention the contrast between the stiff, angular characters which prevailed before 500 or 450 B.C. and the graceful yet simple forms of the Periclean age. This development was part of the general movement of the time. Inscriptions of this period are usually written [Greek: stotchedon], i.e. the letters are in line vertically as well as horizontally. From the archonship of Eucleides (403 B.C.) onwards the Athenians officially adopted the fuller alphabet which had obtained in Ionia since the 6th century. Before 403 B.C. [zeta] and [psi] were expressed in Attic inscriptions by [Chi][Sigma] and [phi][Sigma], while [EPSILON] did duty for [eta], [epsilon], and sometimes [epsilon][iota], [Omicron] for [omicron], [omicron][upsilon], and [omega]--[Eta] being used only for the aspirate. There is, however, occasional use of the Ionic alphabet in Attica, even in official inscriptions, as early as the middle of the 5th century. The Macedonian period betrays a falling off in neatness and firmness of execution--the letters being usually small and scratchy, excepting in inscriptions relating to great personages, when the characters are often very large and handsome. In the 2nd century came in the regular use of _apices_ as an ornament of letters. These tendencies increased during the period of Roman dominion in Greece, and gradually, especially in Asia Minor, the _iota adscriptum_ was dropped. The Greek characters of the Augustan age indicate a period of restoration; they are uniformly clear, handsome, and adorned with _apices_. The lunate epsilon and sigma ([epsilon], C) establish themselves in this period; so does the square form [square C], and the cursive [omega] is also occasionally found. The inscriptions of Hadrian's time show a tendency to eclectic imitation of the classical lettering. But from the period of the Antonines (when we find a good many pretty inscriptions) the writing grows more coarse and clumsy until Byzantine times, when the forms appear barbarous indeed beside an inscription of the Augustan or even Antonine age.

Collections of Marbles.

The finest collections of inscribed Greek marbles are of course at Athens. There are also good collections, public and private, at Smyrna and Constantinople. The British Museum contains the best collection out of Athens (see the publication mentioned above); the Louvre contains a good many (edited by Frohner, _Les Inscriptions grecques du musee du Louvre_, 1865); the Oxford collection is very valuable, and fairly large; and there are some valuable inscriptions also at Cambridge.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--The following essays give good outlines of the whole subject:--Boeckh, _C.I.G._, preface to vol i.; C. T. Newton, _Essays on Art and Archaeology_ (1880), pp. 95, 209; S. Reinach, _Traite d'epigraphie grecque_ (Paris, 1885). Besides the works already quoted the following should be mentioned:--Boeckh's _Kleine Schriften_; Michaelis, _Der Parthenon_; Waddington, _Fastes des provinces asiatiques_, part i. (1872), and _Memoire sur la chronologie de la vie du rheteur Aristide_; Kirchhoff, _Studien zur Geschichte des griechischen Alphabets_ (4th ed., 1887); Schubert, _De proxenia_ (Leipzig, 1881); Monceaux, _Les Proxenies gr._ (Paris, 1886); Latyshev, _Inscr. ant. orae septentr. Ponti Euxini Gr. et Lat._ (2 vols., St Petersburg, 1885-1890); Bechtel, _Inschriften des ionischen Dialekts_ (Gottingen, 1887); Paton and Hicks, _Inscriptions of Cos_ (Oxford, 1891); Frankel and others, _Inschriften von Pergamon_ (2 vols., Berlin 1890-1895); Comparetti, _Le Leggi di Gortyna_, &c. (_Monum. antichi_, iii., 1893); E. Hoffmann, _Sylloge epigrammatum Graec._ (Halle a. S., 1893); O. Kern, _Inschriften von Magnesia am Maeander_ (Berlin, 1900); S. Chabert, _Histoire sommaire des etudes d'epigraphie grecque_ (Paris, 1906); Hackl, _Merkantile Inschr. auf attischen Vasen (Munch, arch Stud._, 1909); Wilhelm, _Beitrage zur griech. Inschriftenkunde_ (Vienna, 1909). (E. L. H.; G. F. H.*)

IV. LATIN INSCRIPTIONS

I. Latin or Roman Inscriptions (by which general name are designated, in classical archaeology, all non-literary remains of the Latin language, with the exception of coins, letters and journals) fall into two distinct classes, viz. (1) those which were written upon other objects of various kinds, to denote their peculiar purpose, and in this way have been preserved along with them; and (2) those which themselves are the objects, written, to be durable, as a rule, on metal or stone. The first class is that of _inscriptions_ in the stricter sense of the word (styled by the Romans _tituli_, by the Germans _Aufschriften_); the second is that of instruments or charters, public and private (styled by the Romans first _leges_, afterwards _instrumenta_ or _tabulae_, and by the Germans _Urkunden_).

No ancient Latin authors have professedly collected and explained or handed down to us Roman inscriptions. Some of the orators and historians, such as Cicero, Livy, Pliny the elder, and Suetonius among the Latins, and Polybius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Josephus among the Greeks, occasionally mention inscriptions of high historical interest. A few grammarians, as, for example, Varro, Verrius Flaccus and Valerius Probus of Berytus, quote ancient words or _formulae_ from them, or explain the abbreviations used in them. Juridical instruments, laws, constitutions of emperors, _senatus consulta_ and the like appear in the various collections of Roman jurisprudence.

Inscriptions (in the wider sense, as we shall henceforth call them without regard to the distinction which has been drawn) have been found in nearly every centre of ancient Roman life, but, like many other remains of antiquity, only seldom in their original sites. The great mass of them has to be sought for in the large European museums of ancient art, and in the smaller local collections of ancient remains which occur nearly everywhere in the European provinces of the former Roman empire as well as in the north of Africa, and also here and there in Asia Minor.

Only those copies of inscriptions are to be received with full confidence which are furnished by experienced and well-equipped scholars, or which have been made with the help of mechanical methods (casts, photographs, moist and dry rubbings), not always applicable with equal success, but depending on the position and the state of preservation of the monuments.[36] From the first revival of classical learning in the Carolingian age attention was paid anew, by pilgrims to Rome and other places worth visiting, to epigraphic monuments also. In the time of the Renaissance, from the end of the 14th century downwards, some of the leading Italian scholars, like Poggio and Signorili, and the antiquarian traveller Cyriacus of Ancona, collected inscriptions, Greek and Latin.[37] In the 15th century large collections of the inscriptions of all countries, or of limited districts, were made by Giovanni Marcanova, Fra Felice Feliciano, Fra Michele Ferrarino, Fra Giocondo the architect of Verona, Marino Sanudo the Venetian polyhistor, and others. At the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th, the first printed collections can be recorded (Spreti's for Ravenna, 1489; Peutinger's for Augsburg, 1508; Huttich's for Mainz, 1520; Francesco degli Albertini's for Rome, printed in 1521 by Jacopo Mazochi), while during the same century a long list of epigraphic travellers, like Pighius, Rambertus and Accursius, or antiquarian collectors, like Sigonius, Panvinius, Antonius Augustinus with his collaborators Ursinus and Metellus, and many others, were busy in augmenting the stock of epigraphic monuments. The series of printed epigraphic _Corpora_ begins with that of Apianus (Ingolstadt, 1534), the only one arranged in geographical order, and is continued in those of Smetius (1558, but edited only after the author's death by Justus Lipsius, 1588), Gruter (with Joseph Scaliger's _Indices_, 1603, and re-edited by Graevius, 1707), Gudius (about 1660, edited by Hessel, 1731), Reinesius (1682), Fabretti (1699), Gori (1726), Doni (1731), Muratori (1739), Maffei (1749), Donati (1765-1775). These collections, manuscript and printed, will never altogether lose their value, as great numbers of inscriptions known to the ancient collectors have since been lost or destroyed. But, inasmuch as even towards the beginning of the 15th century, as well as afterwards, especially from the 16th down to a very recent period, all sorts of inaccuracies, interpolations and even downright falsifications, found their way into the _Corpora_, these can be employed only with the greatest caution. Modern critical research in the field of epigraphy began with the detection of those forgeries (especially of the very extensive and skilful ones of Pirro Ligorio, the architect to the house of Este) by Maffei, Olivieri and Marini. The last-named scholar opens a new era of truly critical and scientific handling of Roman inscriptions (especially in his standard work on the _Atti dei fratelli arvali_, Rome, 1795); his disciple and successor, Count Bartolomeo Borghesi (who died at San Marino in 1860), may be rightly called the founder of the modern science of Roman epigraphy.[38] Orelli's handy collection of Roman inscriptions (2 vols., Zurich, 1828) is a first attempt to make accessible to a larger scientific public the results of the researches of Marini and his successors; but it was not completed, (and thoroughly corrected) until nearly thirty years later, by Henzen (Orelli, iii., with the indispensable _Indices_, Zurich, 1856), who, with Mommsen and De Rossi, carried out the plan of a universal _Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum_, previously projected by Maffei (1732), by Kellermann and Sarti (1832), with Borghesi's help, and by Letronne and Egger (1843). After the appearance of Mommsen's _Inscriptiones regni Neapolitani Latinae_ (Leipzig, 1852) and his _Inscriptiones confoederationis Helveticae Latinae_ (vol. x. of the publications of the Zurich Antiquarian Society, 1854), the publication of the _C.I.L._ , following the similar work of the Greek inscriptions, was undertaken by the Royal Academy of Sciences of Berlin.

This work, in which the previous literature is fully described and utilized, consists of the following parts:--vol. i., _Inscriptiones antiquissimae ad C. Caesaris mortem_ (1863; 2nd ed., part i., 1893); Ritschl's _Priscae Latinitatis monumenta epigraphica_ (Berlin, 1862, fol.) form the graphic illustration to vol. i., giving all extant monuments of the republican epoch (with five _Supplementa_, Bonn, 1862-1865; R. Garrucci's _Sylloge inscriptionum Latinarum aevi Romanae reipublicae usque ad C. Iulium Caesarem plenissima_, 2 vols., Turin, 1875-1877, must be used with caution); vol. ii., _Inscr. Hispaniae_ (1869; with Supplement, 1892); vol. iii., _Inscr. Asiae, provinciarum Europae Graecarum, Illyrici_ (1873; with Supplements and Index, 1889-1902); vol. iv., _Inscr. parietariae Pompeianae Herculanenses Stabianae_ (the scratched and painted inscriptions chiefly of Pompeii) (1871; with Supplement, part i., 1898; part ii., 1909); vol. v., _Inscr. Galliae cisalpinae_ (1872-1877; with Suppl., Et. Pais, _C.I.L. suppl. Italica_); vol. vi., _Inscr. urbis Romae_ (1876-1902; with Supplement, 1902); vol. vii., _Inscr. Britanniae_ (1873); vol. viii., _Inscr. Africae_ (1881; with Supplement, 1891-1894, 1904); vol. ix., _Inscr. Calabriae, Apuliae, Samnii, Sabinorum, Piceni_ (1883); vol. x., _Inscr. Bruttiorum, Lucaniae, Campaniae, Siciliae, Sardiniae_ (1883); vol. xi., _Inscr. Aemiliae, Umbriae, Etruriae_ (1888; part ii., 1901 sqq.); vol. xii., _Inscr. Galliae Narbonensis_ (1888); vol. xiii., _Inscr. trium Galliarum et duarum Germaniarum_ (1899 sqq.; part ii., 1905 sqq.); vol. xiv., _Inscr. Latii antiqui_; vol. xv., _Inscr. laterum_ (1891; part ii., i. [_vasa, lucernae, fistulae_], 1899). The arrangement observed in the _Corpus_ is the geographical (as in Apianus); within the single towns the order of subjects (_tituli sacri_, _magistratuum_, _privatorum_, &c., as in Smetius) is followed, with some few exceptions, where the monuments are so numerous (as in the _forum_ of Rome and at Pompeii and Lambaesis) that they can be assigned to their original places. Running supplements to the _C.I.L._ are given in the _Ephemeris epigraphica, Corporis inscr. Latinarum supplementum_ (Berlin, 1872 sqq.); and the new discoveries of each year are recorded in Cagnat's _L'Annee epigraphique_.

The inscriptions in the other Italian dialects have been published by Conway, _Italic Dialects_ (Cambridge, 1897); cf. vol. ii. of von Planta, _Grammatik der oskisch-umbrischen Dialekte_ (Strassburg, 1897). A Corpus of the Etruscan inscriptions was begun in 1893 by Pauli and is now nearly complete. The inscriptions of the Veneti, a N. Italian people of the Illyrian stock, will be found in vol. iii. of Pauli, _Altitalische Forschungen_ (Leipzig, 1891). For the Christian inscriptions see De Rossi's _Inscr. Christianae urbis Romae septimo saeculo antiquiores_, vol. i. (Rome, 1857), vol. ii. (1888); the _Inscriptions chretiennes de la Gaule of Le Blant_ (2 vols., Paris, 1857-1865; new edition, 1892); the _Altchristliche Inschriften der Rheinlande_ of Kraus (1890); the _Christliche Inschriften der Schweiz vom IV.-IX. Jahrhundert_ of Egli (1895); and the _Inscr. Hispaniae Christianae and Inscr. Britanniae Christianae_ of Hubner (Berlin, 1871, 1876). As splendidly illustrated works on the Latin inscriptions of some districts Alphonse de Boissieu's _Inscriptions antiques de Lyon_ (Lyons, 1846-1854), Ch. Robert's _Epigraphie romaine de la Moselle_ (Paris, 1875), and J. C. Bruce's _Lapidarium septentrionale_ (London and Newcastle, 1875) can be recommended. Besides the above-mentioned Orelli-Henzen collection, G. Wilmanns's _Exempla inscriptionum Latinarum_ (2 vols, Berlin, 1873, with copious indexes), and Dessau's _Inscriptiones Latinae selectae_ (vol. i., 1892; vol. ii., 1903; ii., 1906) give a general synopsis of the materials. Inscriptions of interest to students of history are collected in Rushforth's _Latin Historical Inscriptions_ (Oxford, 1893); Leroux, _Revue des publications epigraphiques relatives a l'antiquite romaine_, records those which bear on antiquities. Of other works may be mentioned Ruggiero, _Dizionario epigrafico di antichita romane_ (1886); Olcott, _Thesaurus linguae Latinae epigraphicae_ (1904 sqq.).

II. Information regarding the forms of letters used on Roman inscriptions will be found under the articles LATIN LANGUAGE, PALAEOGRAPHY and WRITING (cf. Hubner, _Exempla scripturae_ _epigraphicae Latinae_, 1895). The forms of the single letters vary not inconsiderably according to the material of the monuments, their age and their origin. Carefully cut letters, especially when on a large scale, naturally differ from those scratched or painted on walls by non-professional hands, or hewn on rocks by soldiers; and small incised (or dotted) letters on metal or ivory and bone, and those painted on earthenware, or impressed on it or on glass before burning, are also necessarily of a different character. The letters, ordinarily drawn with _minium_ on the monument before being cut (and also often painted, after having been cut, with the same colour), sometimes have been painted with a brush, and thence receive a peculiar form. To save space, on coins first and afterwards in inscriptions also, two or three or even more letters were joined, especially at the end of the lines, to a _nexus_ or a _ligatura_. This system of compendious writing, very rare in the republican epoch, and slowly extending itself during the 1st century, became rather frequent in the 2nd and 3rd, especially in Spain and Africa. There is no constant system in these _nexus litterarum_, but generally the rule is observed that no substantial element of a single letter is to be counted for twice (thus e.g. [cross] is _it_ or _ti_, not _Titi_). Numerals are usually distinguished from letters in the ancient period, down to the end of the republic, by a stroke drawn through them, as in ++VIR, _duo(m) vir(om)_ ++S _duo semis_ (_sestertius_), [D with line-through] 500; it was afterwards put above them, as in IIVIR, XVIR, I[1111]IVIR, _duovir_, _decemvir_, _sevir_.[39]

The direction of the writing is in the very oldest inscriptions from right to left and from left to right in alternate lines, an arrangement technically called [Greek: boustrophedon] (D. Comparetti, _Iscrizione arcaica del Foro Romano_, Florence, 1900; H. Jordan, _Hermes_, vol. xv. p. 5, 1880), and in the Sabellic inscriptions similar arrangements are not infrequent. In all others it is from left to right. Each word is separated from the other by a sign of interpunction, which is not wanted, therefore, at the end of lines or of the whole text. Exceptions to this rule occur only in the later period (from the 2nd century downwards), and sometimes under special conditions, as when abridged words form the end of the line. Here and there even the different syllables of each word are separated by interpunction. The interpunction is formed by a single dot (except in some very ancient inscriptions, such as the recently found Forum inscription of the regal period and those of Pisaurum, where, as in Greek and other Italian monuments, three dots [:.] are used). According to the technical skill of the different periods in stone-cutting this dot is in some very ancient inscriptions quadrangular, or similar to an oblique cross (X), or oblong (as a bold stroke), but, as a rule, triangular, and never circular. This triangular dot changes, by ornamentation, into a hook [Symbol] or a leaf [Symbol]; the ivy-leaf-shaped dot is especially frequent in inscriptions from about the 2nd century downwards. The dot is always placed at the middle height of the letters, not, as now, at the foot of the line. In large texts of instruments the interpunction is often omitted; in the later period it is often entirely wanting; and in short texts, in the disposition of the lines, in the varying sizes of the letters employed, in the division of words at the end of the lines, &c., certain rules are observed, which cannot be detailed here. In some instances older inscriptions have been cancelled and more recent ones substituted (e.g. on milestones), especially in the case of the _damnatio memoriae_ (in cases of high treason), in consequence of which the names of consuls and emperors are often cancelled; but in modern times also inscriptions have been deliberately destroyed or lost ones restored.

For understanding the texts of the inscriptions an accurate knowledge of the system of abbreviations used in them is necessary (see Cagnat, _Cours d'epigraphie latine_, 3rd ed., 1898). These are almost invariably _litterae singulares_; that is to say, the initial letter is employed for the entire word (in all its grammatical forms), or if one initial, as belonging to more than one word, is not sufficiently clear, the first two or even the first three letters are employed; rarely more than three. Abbreviations in the true sense of the word (by dropping some letters at the end) are to be found, in the older period, only at the end of lines, and not frequently. In the later period some instances of them have been observed. The _litterae singulares_, as Valerius Probus taught, are either generally employed (_usus generalis_) in all classes of written documents (and so in literature also), as, for instance, those of the individual names (the _praenomina_), the names of days and feasts (_kal._ for _kalendae_), and those of the chief magistrates (_cos._ for _consul_) and the like; or they belong chiefly (but not exclusively) to certain classes of documents, such as those used in juridical acts (_l._ for _lex_, _h._ for _heres_, _s. d. m._ for _sine dolo malo_, and so on), in sepulchral inscriptions (_h. s. e._, _hic situs est_) or in dedicatory inscriptions (_v. s. l. m._, _votum solvit libens merito_), &c.[40]

It may be observed here that the _praenomina_ are, as a rule, always written in the universally known abbreviations (in the few instances where they are written in full it is a consequence of Greek influence or of peculiar circumstances). The _gentilicia_ in -_ius_ are abridged, in the republican period, in -_i_ (in the nominative, perhaps for -_is_). In the always abbreviated indications of ancestors or patrons (in the case of slaves and freedmen), as _C.f._, _Gai filius_, _M.l._, _Marci libertus_ (_s._ for _servus_ is not frequent), the feminine gender is sometimes indicated by inversion of the letters. Thus [Symbol]. _l._ (or _lib._) or W (an inverted M) _l._ designates a _mulieris libertus_; [Symbol] and [Symbol] are used for _filia_, _pupilla_. On the _tribus_ and their abbreviations, and on the so-called military _tribus_ (which are names of colonies collocated, for the sake of symmetry, at the place usually occupied, in the nomenclature, by the _tribus_), and on the other indications of origin used in the designation of individuals, the indexes to the above-named works give sufficient information; on the geographical distribution of the _tribus_ see Grotefend's _Imperium Romanum tributim descriptum_ (Hanover, 1863). For the abbreviations of official charges, urban and municipal, and, in the imperial period, civil and military (to which, beginning with the 4th century, some Christian designations are to be added), see also the explanations given in the indexes. Among these abbreviations the first instances are to be found of the indication of the plural number by doubling the last letter; thus _Augg._, _Caess._, _coss._, _dd._ _nn._ (_domini nostri_), are used from the 3rd century downwards (see De Rossi's preface to the _Inscriptiones Christ. urbis Romae_) to distinguish them from _Aug., Caes._, as designating the singular. In the later period, a dot or a stroke over the abridged word, like that upon numerals, here and there indicates the abbreviation.

III.--1. Among the inscriptions in the stricter sense (the _tituli_), perhaps the oldest, and certainly the most frequent, are the _sepulchral inscriptions_ (_tituli sepulcrales_). Of the different forms of Roman tombs, partly depending upon the difference between burial and cremation, which were in use side by side, a very complete account is given in Marquardt's _Handbuch der romischen Altertumer_ (vol. vii. part i., Leipzig, 1879, p. 330 seq.). The most ancient examples are those of a _sepulcretum_ at Praeneste (_C.I.L._ i. 74, 165, 1501 _a-d_; _Ephem. epigr._ i. 25-131; Wil. 153); the oldest of these contain nothing but the name of the deceased in the nominative; those of more recent date give it in the genitive. The oldest and simplest form remained always in use down to Christian times; it is that used on the large tectonic monuments of the Augustan age (e.g. that of Caecilia Metella, _C.I.L._ vi. 1274) and in the _mausolea_ of most of the emperors, and is still frequent in the _tituli_ of the large _columbaria_ of the same age (_C.I.L._ vi. part ii.). It was early succeeded by the lists of names, given also in the nominative, when more than one individual, either dead or alive, were to be indicated as sharers of a tomb. To distinguish the members still alive, a _v_ (_vivit_, _vivos_, _vivi_) was prefixed to their names (e.g. _C.I.L._ i. 1020, 1195, 1271); the deceased were sometimes marked by the [Greek: theta] _nigrum_ (_C.I.L._ i. 1032; Wil. 158; see also _C.I.L._ vi. 10251 seq.). Only the names in the nominative are shown, too, on the _sarcophagi_ of the _Turpleii_ and _Fourii_ at Tusculum (_C.I.L._ i. 65-72; Wil. 152), and in the oldest inscriptions on those of the _Scipiones_, painted with _minium_ (_C.I.L._ i. 29; Wil. 537), to which were added afterwards the insignia of the _magistratus curules_ (_C.I.L._ i. 31; Wil. 538) and the poetical _elogia_. Of a somewhat different kind are the inscriptions scratched without much care on very simple earthen vessels which belonged to a _sepulcretum_ of the lower class, situated outside the _porta Capena_ at Rome, on the Appian road, near the old church of San Cesario (_C.I.L._ i. 882-1005, 1539, 1539 _a-d_ = _C.I.L._ vi. 8211-8397; Wil. 176); they can be ascribed to the period of the Gracchi. On these _ollae_, besides the name of the deceased, also for the most part in the nominative, but on the more recent in the genitive, the date of a day, probably that of the death, is noted; here and there _obit_ (or _o._) is added. About the same epoch, at the beginning of the 6th century, along with the growing taste for tectonic ornamentation of the tombs in the Greek style, poetical epigrams were added to the simple sepulchral _titulus_, especially amongst the half-Greek middle class rapidly increasing in Rome and Italy; Saturnian (_C.I.L._ i. 1006), iambic (1007-1010) and dactylic (1011) verses become more and more frequent in epitaphs (see Buecheler, _Anthologia Latina_, ii.). In prose also short designations of the mental qualities of the deceased (_homo bonus_, _misericors_, _amans pauperum_, or _uxor frugi_, _bona_, _pudica_ and the like), short dialogues with the passer-by (originally borrowed from Greek poetry), as _vale salve_, _salvus ire_, _vale et tu_, _te rogo praeteriens dicas_ "_sit tibi terra levis_," &c. (Wil. 180), then indications of his condition in his lifetime, chiefly among the Greek tradesmen and workmen, e.g. _lanius de colle Viminale_ (_C.I.L._ i. 1011), _margaritarius de sacra via_ (1027) and the like, and some formulae, such as _ossa hic sita sunt_, _heic cubat_, _heic situs est_ (in republican times mostly written in full, not abridged) were added (J. Church "Zur Phraseologie der lat. Grabinschriften" in _Arch. lat. Lexikogr._ 12. 215 sqq.). The habit of recording the measurement of the sepulchre, on the sepulchral _cippus_, by such formulae as _locus patet in fronte pedes tot_, _in agro_ (or _in via_, or _retro_) _pedes tot_, seems not to be older than the Augustan age (_C.I.L._ i. 1021, with Mommsen's note; Wil. 188). About the same time also the epitaphs more frequently state how long the deceased lived, which was formerly added only on certain occasions (e.g. in the case of a premature death), and mostly in poetical form. The worship of the _dei Manes_, though undoubtedly very ancient, is not alluded to in the sepulchral inscriptions themselves until the close of the republic. Here and there, in this period, the tomb is designated as a (_locus_) _deum Maanium_ (e.g. at Hispellum, _C.I.L._ i. 1410); or, it is said, as on a _cippus_ from Corduba in Spain (_C.I.L._ ii. 2255; Wil. 218), _C. Sentio Sat_(_urnino_) _co(n)s(ule)_--that is, in the year 19 B.C.--_dei Manes receperunt Abulliam N(umerii) l(ibertam) Nigellam_. In the Augustan age the _titulus sepulcralis_ begins to be confounded with the _titulus sacer_; it adopts the form of a dedication _deis Manibus_, offered to the _dei Manes_ (or _dei inferi Manes_, the _dei parentum_ being the _Manes_ of the parents) of the deceased (see Orel. 4351; Wil. 217-228). This formula, afterwards so common, is still very rare at the end of the republic, and is usually written in full, while in later times it is employed, both simply and in many varied forms (as _dis manibus sacrum_, or _d. m. et memoriae_, _d. m. et genio_, or _memoriae aeternae_, _paci et quieti_, _quieti aeternae_, _somno aeternali_ and so on; Wil. 246), in thousands of monuments. By similar degrees the _titulus sepulcralis_ adopts many of the elements of the _titulus honorarius_ (the indication of the _cursus honorum_, of the military charges, &c., as e.g. in the inscription of Cn. Calpurnius Piso, _C.I.L._ i. 598 = vi. 1276, Wil. 1105, on the pyramid of Cestius, _C.I.L._ vi. 1374, and on the monument at Ponte Lucano of Ti. Plautius Silvanus Aelianus, consul A.D. 74, Orel. 750, Wil. 1145 and many others), of the _tituli operum publicorum_ (e.g. _monumentum fecit_, _sibi et suis_, &c.), and of the _instrumenta_. Testaments (like those of Dasumius of the year A.D. 109.--_C.I.L._ vi. 10229; Wil. 314; and T. Flavius Syntrophus--_C.I.L._ vi. 10239; Henz. 7321; Wil. 313), or parts of them (like that on the tomb of a Gaul of the tribe of the Lingones, belonging to Vespasian's time, Wil. 315), funeral orations (as those on Turia--_C.I.L._ vi. 1527; _Notizie degli scavi_ (1898), p. 412; Hirschfeld, _Wiener Studien Bormannheft_, p. 283; Fowler, _Classical Review_, xix. 261; on Murdia--_C.I.L._ vi. 10230; Orel. 4860; Rudorff, _Abhandlungen der Konigl. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin_ (1868), p. 217 seq.; and that of Hadrian on the elder Matidia, found at Tivoli--Mommsen in the same _Abhandlungen_ (1863), p. 483 seq; Dehner, _Laudatio Matidiae_, Neuwied (1891), numerous statements relating to the conservation and the employment of the monuments (_C.I.L._ vi. 10249; Wil. 287-290), to their remaining within the family of the deceased--from which came the frequent formula "_h(oc) m(onumentum) h(eredem) n(on) s(equetur)_" and the like (Wil. 280; cf. Hor. Sat. i. 8. 13),--and relating to the annual celebration of _parentalia_ (Wil. 305 seq.), down to the not uncommon prohibition of violation or profanation of the monument _noli violare_, &c., with many other particulars (on which the index of Wil. p. 678 seq. may be consulted), form the text of the sepulchral inscriptions of the later epoch from Augustus downwards. The thoroughly pagan sentiment _non fui non sum non curo_, or _n. f. n. s. n. c._, is common, apparently a translation of the Greek [Greek: ouk emen, egenomen ouk esomai ou melei moi]. Another type of epitaph, much affected by the poorer classes (like our "Affliction sore" &c.), is: _noli dolere mater eventum meum, Properavit aetas, hoc voluit fatus_ (sic) _mihi_ (Lier, "Topica carminum sepulcralium Latinorum" in _Philologus_, 62. 445 sqq.). To these are to be added many local peculiarities of provinces (as Spain and Africa), districts (as the much-disputed _sub ascia dedicare_ of the stones of Lyons and other parts of Gaul), and towns, of which a full account cannot be given here.

2. Of the _dedicatory inscriptions_ (or _tituli sacri_), the oldest known are the short indications painted (along with representations of winged _genii_, in the latest style of Graeco-Italian vase painting), with white colour on black earthen vessels, by which those vessels (_pocula_) are declared to be destined for the worship, public or private, of a certain divinity (_C.I.L._ i. 43-50; _Ephem. epigr._ i. 5-6; Wil. 2827 a-i); they give the name of the god, as that of the possessor, in the genitive (e.g. _Saeturni pocolom_, _Lavernai pocolom_). The proper form of the dedication, the simple dative of the name of a divinity and often nothing else (as _Apolenei_, _Fide_, _Junone_, &c., which are all datives), is shown on the very primitive altars found in a sacred wood near Pisaurum (_C.I.L._ i. 167-180; Wil. 1-14); but also the name of the dedicants (_matrona_, _matrona Pisaurese_, which are nomin. plur.) and the formulae of the offering (_dono dedrot_ or _dedro_, _donu dat_, where _dono_ and _donu_ are accus.) are already added to them. This most simple form (the verb in the perfect or in the present) never disappeared entirely; it occurs not infrequently also in the later periods. Nor did the dative alone, without any verb or formula, go entirely out of use (see _C.I.L._ i. 630; Wil. 36; _C.I.L._ i. 814 = vi. 96; Orel. 1850; Wil. 32; _C.I.L._ i. 1153; Henz. 5789; Wil. 1775). But at an early date the verb _donum dare_ and some synonyms (like _donum portare_, _ferre_, _mancupio dare_, _parare_) were felt to be insufficient to express the dedicator's good-will and his sense of the justice of the dedication, which accordingly were indicated in the expanded formula _dono dedet lub(e)s mereto_ (_C.I.L._ i. 183, cf. p. 555; Wil. 21; _C.I.L._ i. 190; Wil. 22), or, with omission of the verb, _dono mere(to) lib(e)s_ (_C.I.L._ i. 182). The dative case and this formula, completely or partially employed (for _merito_ alone is also used, as _C.I.L._ i. 562, cf. _Ephem. epigr._ ii. 353, Wil. 29), remained in solemn use. To _lubens_ (or _libens_) was added _laetus_ (so in Catullus 31. 4), and, if a vow preceded the dedication, _votum solvit_ (or _voto condemnatus dedit_; see _C.I.L._ i. 1175; Henz. 5733; Wil. 142, and _C.I.L._ ii. 1044); so, but not before the time of Augustus (see _C.I.L._ i. 1462 =