Questions: Epigraphic Analysis and Inscriptions

Question 1

A historian studying the social composition of a Roman city in the second century CE wants to find information about ordinary tradespeople — their names, ages, occupations, and family relationships. Which source type is most likely to contain this information?

• A. Literary texts by Roman authors such as Cicero or Pliny, who wrote about contemporary society
• B. Funerary inscriptions and epitaphs found in the city's necropolis
• C. Imperial administrative records preserved in the Roman state archives
• D. Religious manuscripts describing rituals practiced by the artisan class

Answer: (B)

Funerary epitaphs systematically record the names, ages, occupations, and family structures of ordinary people — including freed slaves, soldiers, merchants, and craftworkers — whose names appear nowhere in literary sources. Literary authors wrote about senators, generals, and emperors; they took ordinary social life for granted and did not describe it. Imperial administrative records rarely survive and focus on taxation and military affairs. Inscriptions are the primary historical window into the lives of people outside the elite, which is exactly why epigraphy is indispensable for social history.

Question 2

An epigraphist examines an undated Latin inscription. The letter forms are tall, thin, and highly regular with pronounced serifs, while another inscription from the same site has rounder, heavier letters. What can the epigraphist reasonably infer?

• A. The two inscriptions were carved by different craftspeople with different aesthetic preferences
• B. The inscription with taller, thinner letters was carved at a different period than the one with rounder letters, since letter forms changed systematically over time
• C. The inscription's letter style indicates it was produced in a different province, since regional variation did not exist within a single site
• D. Letter form variation is purely aesthetic and carries no chronological or geographic information

Answer: (B)

Letter forms changed systematically over time and varied by region — this is the epigraphic equivalent of paleographic dating. An epigraphist trained to recognize these changes can date an undated inscription to within a generation using letter morphology alone. Tall, thin letters with crisp serifs are characteristic of the high imperial period (first to second century CE); rounder, heavier forms are associated with late antiquity. This dating method is strengthened when combined with archaeological context. While regional variation and individual carver style exist, the systematic temporal change in letter forms is the primary dating tool.

Question 3

Inscriptions are generally considered less historically valuable than literary texts because they lack narrative context and were not written by educated authors.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

This reverses the actual epistemological situation. Inscriptions are not a lesser substitute for literary sources — they provide qualitatively *different* information that literary sources systematically exclude. Literary texts were written by and for the educated elite; they describe what elite authors found noteworthy while taking ordinary life for granted. Inscriptions capture commercial transactions, everyday language, legal arrangements, funerary customs, and the names and lives of people who were invisible to literary tradition. Pompeian graffiti recording election endorsements, bar tabs, and gladiatorial scores is historical evidence that no amount of literary reading can replicate. The absence of 'narrative context' is precisely what makes inscriptions valuable — they were written for specific functional purposes, not curated for posterity.

Question 4

An epigraphist can use letter forms to date an inscription even when the inscription contains no explicit date, because writing styles changed systematically over time and varied by region.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

Letter-form dating is a core epigraphic technique, analogous to how paleographers date manuscripts by handwriting style. The shapes, strokes, proportions, and decorative elements of individual letters evolved over centuries in patterned ways that specialists have documented through inscriptions with known dates. A trained epigraphist can often date an undated inscription to within a generation using letter morphology, then refine the estimate using archaeological context (what the inscription was built into, what other dateable materials were found nearby) and internal linguistic features (vocabulary, grammar, abbreviation conventions). The combination of these methods frequently achieves confident dating without any explicit statement of date in the text.

Question 5

Why do inscriptions reveal different social information than literary sources from the same period, even though both are written in the same language and deal with the same society?

Model answer: Literary sources were produced by and for educated elites, who wrote about events and people they considered historically significant — emperors, generals, senatorial debates, philosophical arguments. They took everyday social life for granted and did not describe it. Inscriptions were written for specific functional purposes in specific social contexts: to mark a grave, record a commercial transaction, celebrate a benefactor, or endorse a candidate. These purposes drew in populations and activities that literary authors never addressed — freedmen, tradespeople, women, soldiers at frontier posts, merchants documenting amphora contents. Inscriptions were never filtered through a scribal or literary tradition, so they preserve the texture of social reality rather than the elite's curated account of it.

This is the fundamental epistemological insight of epigraphy as a discipline. The historian who reads only literary sources has access to the most articulate ancient voices — but those voices were systematically unrepresentative. The historian who combines literary and epigraphic evidence has access to both the official narrative and the social reality that narrative took for granted. Graffiti, epitaphs, and commercial inscriptions are not 'lesser' evidence; they are evidence about different people and different aspects of life.