Arthur Ernest Cowley, John Faithfull Fleet, Edward Lee Hicks, George Francis Hill, Emil Hübner, and Wallace Martin Lindsay

“ 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. ”

“ He who erects a temple or a public building, or constructs a road, a bridge, an aqueduct or the like, by inscribing his name on the work, honours himself, and, as permission to do so has to be given by the public authorities, is also honoured by the community. Therefore the tituli operum publicorum, though in form only short official statements (at least in the older period) of the origin of the work, without any further indications as to its character and purpose, partake of the style of the older honorary inscriptions. ”

“ 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 Aśōka’s reign in 227 B.C. to the commencement of the reign of Kaṅishka 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. ”

“ 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.
1. Foremost among the inscriptions which illustrate Greek history and politics are the decrees of senate and people (ψηφίσματα βουλῆς, ἐκκλησίας, &c.) ”

“ The Brāhmī alphabet is the parent of all the modern Hindu scripts, including on one side the Nāgarī or Dēvanāgarī, and on the other the widely dissimilar rounded forms of the Kanarese, Tamil̤, Telugu, and other southern alphabets; and the inscriptions enable us to trace clearly the gradual development of all the modern forms.
The great classical Indian language, Sanskṛit, is not found in any inscriptional records of the earliest times. ”

“ But, practically, the known inscriptions of India begin with the records of that king who calls himself in them “the king Dēvānaṁpiya-Piyadassi, the Beloved of the Gods, He of Gracious Mien,” but who is best known as Aśōka by the name given to him in the literature of India and Ceylon and in an inscription of A.D. 150 at Junāgaḍh (Junagarh) in Kāṭhiāwār. 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 stūpas. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In Northern India, the inscriptions of the period before 58 B.C. present various early Prākṛits, i.e. vernaculars more or less derived from Sanskṛit or brought into a line with it. From 58 B.C., however, the influence of Sanskṛit 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 Prākṛit nor exactly Sanskṛit, but Prākṛit with an intermixture of Sanskṛit terminations and some other features ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 stūpa or relic-mound at Bhaṭṭiprōlu 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ The lunate epsilon and sigma (ε, Σ,) establish themselves in this period; so does the square form , and the cursive ω 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.
The finest collections of inscribed Greek marbles are of course at Athens. ”

“ 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 Meharaulī 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. ”

“ As in some of the already-mentioned inscriptions of public works the measurements of the work to which they refer (especially, as may be supposed, in the case of works of great extent, such as walls of towns or lines of fortification, like the walls of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius in Britain) are indicated, so it early became a custom in the Roman republic to note on milestones the name of the founder of the road and, especially at the extremities of it and near large towns, the distances. ”

“ 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 Reasons why the inscriptions are so valuable. important; since we are dependent on them for almost all our knowledge of the ancient history of the country. ”

“ In recent years a number of others has been collected belonging to the people of Liḥyān and dating from about A.D. 250. Nearly related to the Liḥyānitic are the Thamudic (so called from the tribe of the Thamūd 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 Halévy) , [24] are carelessly scrawled graffiti very like those of the Sinai peninsula. ”

“ From Southern India we have, at Nāsik, inscriptions of the Sātavāhana king Gautamīputra-Śrī-Sātakarṇi, mentioned just above, and of his son Vāsisṭhīputra-Śrī-Puḷumāyi, and of another king of that line named Gautamīputra-Śrī-Yajña-Sātakarṇi; and other records of the last-mentioned king come from Kaṇheri near Bombay, and from the Kistna district, Madras, and testify to the wide extent of the dominions of the line to which he belonged. ”

“ As a last species, therefore, of instrumenta, there remain some documents, public and private, which similarly lack the strict monumental character, but still are to be reckoned among inscriptions. These are the inscriptions painted or scratched (graffiti) on the walls of the buildings of ancient towns, like Pompeii, where, as was to be expected, most of them have been preserved, those from other ancient cities buried by the eruptions of Vesuvius and from Rome being very small in number. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ‘Athtār Wadd and Nakraḥ, 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.” ”

“ 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 Ghāzīpūr district numerous bricks bearing the inscription “the glorious Kumāragupta,” with reference to either the first or the second Gupta king of that name, of the 5th century A.D.; in the Gōrakhpūr district there have been found brick tablets bearing Buddhist texts, one of which is a version in Sanskṛit of a short sermon preached by Buddha ”

“ Inscriptions were usually set up in temples, theatres, at the side of streets and roads, in τεμένη 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Except in a few intrusive cases, the use of the Kharōshṭhī 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 Biās (Beas) and the Satlaj (Sutlej) : and the eastern locality of the meeting of the two alphabets is marked by coins bearing Kharōshṭhī and Brāhmī legends which come from the districts of the Jālandhar (Jullundhur) division, and by two short rock-cut records, each presented in both the alphabets, at Paṭhyār and Kanhiāra in the Kāṇgṛa valley. Outside India, this script was notably current in Afghānistān ”

“ 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. ”

“ In Western India, Kāṭhiāwār and all the portions of Gujarāt above Broach lie to the north of the Narbadā; 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 ”