Shapur's shooting

Abstract

The Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities of the British Museum has in its collections an inscribed plaque (BM 136772) which is intriguing for bearing not one but one and a half inscriptions, for being almost perfectly legible, and yet for having no obvious purpose. There is no information about its provenance (the plaque was in a European private collection for some considerable time) other than that it is said to have come, indirectly, from Iran. Of this there can be little doubt, as we shall see. The plaque is of sheet silver, roughly rectangular, and measures approximately 13 · 5 cm. in width and 14 · 5 cm. in length. At some time it has been folded in half both ways, leaving a horizontal crack across the middle. Another crack runs across the bottom right-hand corner. It is possible to give these orientations because of the 21 lines of writing which, from their division, were incised in the plate after it acquired its present shape. The writing is ‘inscriptional’ Parthian. The first 14 lines bear a close copy of the corresponding version of the rock inscription of Shapur I at Ḥāǰīābād (by Persepolis), and 11. 15–21, probably by another hand, contain a repetition of the beginning of this. But this is by no means to say all.