Building Inscriptions Research Articles

Texts and Fragments

The museum of the Kibbutz of Bar-Am' in the Galilee has recently acquired a large collection of antiquities and various objets d'art from a private collector in Haifa, Mr. Moshe Bar-David. The collection includes sixteen cuneiform tablets from the Ur III period and a building inscription on a clay cone of Sin-kigid from the Larsa period. The authorities of the Bar-Am Museum have kindly invited me to work on these tablets and prepare them for publication. I wish to thank the curator of the museum, Mr. J. Nasi, for placing the tablets at my disposal for a considerable length of time so that I could work on them at my leisure. I thank also my student, Mr. E. Baruch, for having called my attention to the tablets and arranging for me to publish them. Most of the tablets are economic and administrative tablets of the Ur III period from the Umma and Drehem archives. They include receipts and disbursements of animals (dead and alive, nos. 1-9), deliveries of food offerings to various shrines (no. 13), and records of male workers hired to do agricultural work (nos. 10-11). One tablet (bearing the registration no. 366/q2) seems to record a legal protocol concerning a (hired?) plowing ox and a boat loaded with barley. All the accounts except the last mentioned, which will be published separately in the near future, are reproduced here in copy, in the hope that they may be of some value to specialists in the field.

The Roman Military Occupation of North-West Spain

The north-west corner of Spain was long neglected by Roman archaeologists, who have tended to concentrate on the more spectacular remains to be found in the south and east. However, recently more attention has been directed there by workers of several nationalities, who have now produced a quite extensive literature on the gold mines, as well as on wider aspects, chiefly in connection with the activities of the legion VII Gemina. Yet there has been little attempt in all this to examine why a substantial military force was maintained in the region for so long. This paper aims to review that problem to about the end of the second century A.D. The evidence available is almost entirely epigraphic, chiefly consisting of epitaphs and religious dedications. Building inscriptions are scarce. For convenience all the epigraphic material from the north-west of Spain that is relevant to the disposition of the army is collected in the appendix, and in the main text reference will be made to the numbers given there. In addition a few historical passages are of importance, but the archaeological site evidence is very slight. The nature of the evidence is such that most attention must be devoted to the units attested in the region and their deployment, with little to be said about their actual bases. Previous work on the subject has been dominated by the late Antonio García y Bellido in several masterly papers. However it has tended to concentrate more on the history of the units themselves than on questions of topography and the reasons behind their presence.

Carpow and Caracalla

A the invitation of the editor I venture to resume a theme' which I have dealt with in some detail and with full illustrations elsewhere. First, because it can form an epigraphic corollary to Mr. B. R. Hartley's substantial paper2 on 'The Roman occupations of Scotland: the evidence of samian ware'. In his chart on page 42 he dates the evacuation of Scotland to 21 1-12 to leave space for the Carpow evidence. Secondly, because summaries can be quoted of the evidence from samian and coarse pottery, on the latter of which there are recent modifications. Thirdly, because two writers, Dr. J. C. Mann and Dr. M. G. Jarrett, have given inadequate reasons for rejecting my dating of the monumental text from the east gate of Carpow fortress to the emperor Caracalla no earlier than 212. These articles must have had a wide circulation, and there is a risk that many readers will have been misled by what seem, at least to me, to be erroneous observations. One note of caution is needed: this interpretation is limited by the evidence which is available now, and it is quite possible that the spades of Dr. J. Wilkes and Mr. J. D. Leach will produce some further text which may upset, or perhaps substantiate, the proposed conclusions. In their discussion of the monumental inscription from Carpow, Drs. Mann and Jarrett have advanced two self-inconsistent conclusions. In JRS they say 'The Carpow inscription cannot be proved to belong to the period after the death of Geta: the use of imp. before the name of each emperor, instead of impp. at the beginning referring to them all, is attested elsewhere, e.g. RIB 722.' Whereas in Bonner Jahrbiicher they say 'Only a small portion of the inscription has been found, and it has been suggested that it refers to construction under a single emperor. If so, this could only be Caracalla or one of his successors. But it is by no means certain that the inscription was set up under a single emperor.' It must be added that in the table of building inscriptions on page 209 they give 212-17 as the bracket of dates for this text.

Building Inscriptions of Carchemish: The Long Wall of Sculpture and Great Staircase.

With the publication in 1952 ofCarchemish, part III, Sir Leonard Woolley attempted to allocate the excavated buildings and monuments to reigns and dates. For the epigraphic evidence of the Hieroglyphic Hittite inscriptions, he relied upon the chapter contributed to the publication by R. D. Barnett. Here Barnett constructed a chronological framework based on the names and genealogies appearing in the inscriptions. He was, however, working in the immediate aftermath of the discovery of Karatepe, before even the preliminary publication of the bilingual was complete, so that a number of his readings required subsequent correction. Detailed epigraphic criticism was offered particularly by Güterbock and Meriggi in their reviews of the volume. The efforts of all these scholars considerably advanced our knowledge of the chronology of the buildings and sculpture, and subsequent treatments of the art and archaeology of Carchemish have naturally relied heavily upon them.More recently however, the study of the hieroglyphic inscriptions, which are for the most part concerned mainly with the erection of buildings and sculptures, has fallen behind that of the monuments to which they relate. This remains true even after the new edition of some of these inscriptions published by Meriggi in what is primarily a philological study. It would therefore seem desirable to present editions of the Carchemish building inscriptions as complete as their fragmentary nature and persistent difficulties interpretation will permit; and on this basis to review the chronology of the buildings and sculptures described therein. It is the purpose of this article therefore to examine the inscriptions relating to the Long Wall of Sculpture and the Great Staircase, which elucidate to some extent the history of the construction of that complex.

The Roman Occupations of Scotland: The Evidence of Samian Ware

Of the problems facing historians of Roman Britain few are so pressing, or so difficult to solve, as those associated with the Roman occupations of Scotland. The difficulties stem from the sparsity of contemporary or near-contemporary literary accounts, but they are exacerbated by the apparent lack of dated building inscriptions firmly assignable to the second Antonine period. Nevertheless, any assessment of Antonine Scotland must clearly start from the ancient historians, take into account all the available inscriptions and add the evidence provided by coins. The structural evidence for the forts has to be reviewed against this background. However, in recent years we have come to realise more and more that all these categories of evidence taken together are not enough to allow precise conclusions on some vital points. All this applies primarily to the Antonine period: the Flavian occupation indeed has its problems, but on the whole they are relatively minor ones, and do not involve widely different chronological interpretations.

Arkitekten i antiken

The Architect in AntiquityThe word "architect" in modern languages is derived from the Latin "architectus", and this again is a loan-word based on the Greek "architekton". Tekton means "one who creates", and was used particularly for artisans. "Architekton" therefore signifies an artisan-in-chief or master builder. Ancient literature testifies that the Greek artists were, in fact, considered non-intellectual craftsmen, while architects were not popular like painters and sculptors, who could appeal to the public taste for mythology and life-like imagery.Historians of late antiquity, however, such as Pliny and Pausanias, have handed down important facts respecting architects and architecture, while the Roman architect Vitruvius, who wrote ten books about architecture, was chiefly inspired by Greek architectural tradition. Moreover original building inscriptions (descriptions, technical instructions, presentations of accounts) tell us quite a lot about conditions under which architects worked.The Greek architects were strongly committed to the traditional pure orders: Ionic and Doric - (deviations such as the capital in fig. 2 are exceptional in the prime of Greek architecture). In the 4th century they began to combine them, but the attempts were abandoned and subsequently the Ionic style was preferred, though the Doric survived. This development probably was due mainly to a strict formulation of architectural theory in the terms of the so called "symmetry", which seems to be of mathematical origin. The Greek mathematicians of Plato's age established a definition of "symmetry" in contrast to "asymmetry", after they had discovered by geometrical methods the existence of incommensurable linear quantities. By this theory two linear quantities were symmetrical only if they had a common denominator, a "module".Vitruvius gives only a vague idea of the adaptation of "symmetry" to architecture in Greece, but an analysis of buildings such as the Erechtheum (fig. 3) and the Arsenal at the Piraeus (fig. 1, 4), from the second halves of the 5th and 4th century respectively, shows what happened. The ratios of the measurements in the Erechtheum are rather complicated (e. g. 13/22 or -19/47), whereas the arsenal was designed with a module of 2½ ft., which involved simple proportions like 1/2, 2/3, 3/5, and 3/8. It is clear that the problem of "angle contraction" in the Doric style (due to the difference in width between triglyphs and columns) became hopeless when irregular proportions were considered incompatible with a pure "symmetrical" design. For the rest, the methods of the ancient architects were in the main like those of today.The design comprised plan, elevation, perspective representation or model (Vitruvius). The Greeks and Romans knew how to plan on a large scale, but functionalism in the modem sense was unknown.Vitruvius, who is such a valuable source of information about Greek architects, was also a practising architect, but probably not of great importance. He won fame exclusively as the learned man who emerged from oblivion when the monuments of ancient architecture had fallen in ruins. For the architects of the Renaissance, who knew little about the famous artists on whom he based his eclecticism, he was not only a classical writer, but - undeservedly - an oracle, who had fixed for eternity the principles of Classical Architecture.Kr. Jeppesen.

Esarhaddon Building Inscription from Nippur

Esarhaddon Building Inscription from Nippur

In the Workshop of the Erechtheion

OR a number of years Philip Davis and I carried on an intermittent correspondence regarding the building inscription of the Erechtheum and the building practices it indicated. In the summer of 1939 he sent me a draft of the following paper. I wrote him a letter agreeing very largely with his ideas but questioning some points and suggesting a few minor modifications. He said that when he had time to study the whole again he would write me, but his premature death intervened. I have withheld his manuscript, hesitating to present as his work an unfinished draft, and unwilling to rewrite and put my own impression on what was his. But as the ideas contained seem to me too valuable to lose, I have finally decided to present what he sent me with the omission of tentative material which he might well have discarded on further study, the addition of a few explanatory passages from previous discussions and occasional rewriting to further continuity. The ideas remain as he intended them; I think that he would endorse my editing, and approve the publication of the result. L. B. HOLLAND.

The Toledo Collection of Cuneiform Tablets

The Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Arts possesses a small collection of thirty-one cuneiform tablets, of which the writer published seventeen in Babyloniaca, Vol. VII, from copies made during his visit to the United States in 1913. Unfortunately this article perished in the destruction of Louvain in 1914, but a few off prints survived. These will furnish material for a duplicate article as soon as we are able to continue our periodical. Since my last visit to the Toledo Museum a few inscriptions have been added. Most noteworthy is a perfect duplicate of the Marada inscription of Nebuchadnezzar, No. 2 in my Building Inscriptions of the Neo-Babylonian Empire and No. 2 in the German edition (Vorderasiatische Bibliothek, Vol. IV). Also a duplicate of the Sin-gagid inscription, Thureau-Dangin, VAB, I, 222b, has been acquired and numbered 29 in the collection.