History Set in Stone

In current-day Bergama, a district in the Turkish province of Izmir, inhabitants sometimes come across treasures when gardening. After all, they live at the foot of the hill of the legendary historic city of Pergamon, the capital of the Hellenistic Attalid Dynasty from the 3rd to the 2nd century BC, and the metropolis of the Roman province of Asia from the 1st century AD until late antiquity. Today, Pergamon is a UNESCO World Heritage site and a cultural hotspot. Nearly every single stone has a history – and a story to tell. “Our research is a work in progress,” says Andreas Victor Walser.

To illustrate what he means, the epigraphist and professor of ancient history recounts an anecdote. A local archaeologist called Walser to Pergamon with the news that an extraordinary find had been made on some private land. A family had discovered the overgrown entrance to an old drainage channel in their garden. The son had climbed into the drainage channel and seen “something” there. Walser himself later crawled into the drain, armed with a head torch, and pushed his way around 15 meters inside. And, lo and behold, there wassomething – an unusually large, 120cm-tall and 58cm-wide Hellenistic inscription was built into the ancient conduit as a ceiling slab.

These are the kinds of inscriptions Andreas Victor Walser researches. “They can tell us so much about life in antiquity,” the historian says. Things that were presented publicly and were to be recorded permanently were literally set in stone. The most common types are epitaphs (on tombstones), but also religious dedicatory and honorific inscriptions. “The most fascinating ones are public records,” says Walser. That may be, for example, the resolution from a popular assembly, a legal text, a donation record or a will.

The stones tell stories about people and bring the ancient city to life. “In historiography, major events are described. In epigraphy, however, you’re right there with the people from that time,” says Walser, enthusiastically, “inscriptions allow you to dive right into daily life.” 

The inscription in the old drainage channel also has such a story to tell. It documents a resolution from the Gerousia, or council of elders. In the early 80s of the 1st century BC, a wealthy citizen from the elite echelons of society in Pergamon named Menophantos recorded in a will that he wished to donate money to the city and to various municipal organizations. But before the will could be implemented, war broke out and all his wealth was lost.

The council of elders held a meeting to decide how to honor the will of the deceased and how the endowment could still be realized. Detailed information was carved into the stone on who had to contribute how much money – some voluntarily, others under compulsion. A total of 4,805.5 drachmas were to be invested at a specific interest rate, and the interest was to be used to procure pork, mutton and wine for a celebration. The stone recorded in detail who was responsible for accounting and how the endowment was to be organized. Because these rules were meant to apply forever, they were carved into a marble slab.

“Ancient inscriptions are not generally found where they originally stood,” explains Walser. In this case, the inscription was originally placed in the gymnasium in Pergamon – a sort of elite training center where young citizens came to engage in physical training and scholarly education. Like most of its kind, the inscription was removed back in ancient times and built into another structure. What at one time was a relevant message, later served as building material. This is why fragments of life in Pergamon that have been set in stone can be found scattered across the surrounding area and incorporated into later buildings and structures.

Back in the 19th century, archaeologists from Berlin’s museums made their way to Pergamon to dig for ancient treasures. At the time, the discoveries were recovered and transported away to Berlin to be presented to the public. Nowadays, the finds remain where they are. New discoveries are first documented, described and photographed, says Walser. A so-called squeeze is then made to reproduce the inscription. This involves placing wet paper on the inscription, which, once dry, produces a negative impression of the inscription that the epigraphists then decipher.

“Around half of the inscriptions from Pergamon have been documented,” says Walser. Max Fränkel published the Inscriptions of Pergamon in two seminal volumes in 1890 and 1895. A third volume by Christian Habicht about the Inscriptions of the Asclepieion was added in 1969. Today, the three volumes no longer correspond to the current state of research.

Through the large-scale SNSF project iPergamon, Andreas Victor Walser and his team are now transferring the inscriptions of Pergamon into the digital age. The aim is to provide a digitally edited corpus of inscriptions that is also available to a broader audience with interdisciplinary interests. The inscriptions are pictured, cataloged in terms of content and historical relevance, contextualized, annotated and translated.

In future, people will be able to browse the digital corpus and travel back to ancient times. But it is not only the large slabs with rulings, laws and tributes that are of interest. Smaller ones – some with crooked or irregularly carved lettering – also have fascinating tales to tell. A striking example is a small bronze tablet with a double ear motif. In the inscription, someone is thanking Apollo for healing them. Presumably, the man was suffering from an ear condition. People often spent the night in the nearby Asclepius healing temple, where they would go for what was known as a “temple sleep” in the hope that their prayers would be answered and their ailments cured. A dedicatory inscription could be used to give thanks for a healing already received – or perhaps merely hoped for.

We can also learn quite a lot about day-to-day life in a Greek city from the many other smaller stone tablets. Anyone could get hold of a stone and carve whatever was important to them – provided they were able to write. There is also graffiti, where someone practiced their writing skills on the back of an inscription, clumsily carving letters into the stone.

“The lucky thing about Pergamon as an archaeological site is that the modern settlement has not been built on the hill, but on the plain,” explains Walser. This means that there is a particularly large amount of surviving evidence from this magnificent cultural golden age. The Attalid kings invested a great deal in designing the city and in public art, helping the region garner extraordinary cultural influence. The last king of the Dynasty, Attalos III, died childless in 133 BC.

Before his death, he made a remarkable decision: he didn’t want to let Pergamon disappear, so he made a will leaving his kingdom to the Romans. And the city did indeed survive and – following some difficult years – thrive a second time in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD as a Roman metropolis. People can find plenty of evidence from the golden age of the Hellenistic royal city and the imperial metropolis in the iPergamon digital corpus.

Let us shift to a different place and a different era: we are now in a Roman province in 79 AD. The legionary Gusula proudly receives a weighty diploma. After 25 years of service in the auxiliary troops of the Roman Army, the Thracian is rewarded with Roman citizenship for himself and his children, and the right to marry a non-Roman woman, as attested on the inscription on a Roman military diploma on two bronze plates. This document, which Gusula held in his hands almost 3,000 years ago, can now be viewed, alongside many other inscriptions, in the Epigraphic Database Clauss-Slaby (EDCS) with a single click.

Anne Kolb, epigraphist and professor of ancient history, is leading the project. The world’s largest database, which catalogs over half a million Roman inscriptions, provides researchers and interested laypeople with access to valuable ancient sources. For example, the military diploma belonging to Gusula is documented with a photo, a transcription of the inscription, and information on the place and date of discovery. Unlike the iPergamon project, the EDCS is not a digital critical edition, but is primarily intended as a comprehensive search engine that can provide efficient support with source research and comparison.

The most common inscriptions come from graves – the search engine lists over 190,000. Monumental inscriptions are important, such as public records documenting major events. The database has a total of 38 categories. Besides dedicatory inscriptions, tomb inscriptions, building inscriptions, military diplomas, honorary inscriptions, epigrams, senatorial decrees, owner inscriptions and milestones, there are also some surprising categories, such as curse tablets (defixiones) and oculist’s stamps (signacula medicorum). Eye diseases were very common in Roman times, and as medicine was already well developed, the trade in eye ointments also flourished, Kolb explains. At any rate, the database lists 309 such inscriptions. “The manufacturers stamped their names into the ointment directly,” says Kolb.

It seems there was quite a lot of curse-casting going on, too. The database includes 983 defixiones, or curse tablets. If, for example, a wife wanted to put a curse on her husband because he had betrayed her with another, she would scratch a mysterious magical spell with fierce damnations onto a small lead tablet using a rusty nail, roll it up and bury it at a ritual site. People often called on professionals for advice on such things. “Professional curse-makers would sit in front of healing temples and sacred places and wait for people to come to them with paid requests,” explains the professor of ancient history.

Anne Kolb has a special interest in milestones (or miliaria). They once towered 1.5 to 2 meters above the ground, and in exceptional cases may have reached 3 meters tall. And they can still tell us quite a lot today. “In antiquity, they were used for navigation. Nowadays, they can provide information on the layout of the Roman road network,” explains Kolb.

She has retrieved a picture of an example from the database, which stood on the road connecting northern Italy with the Danube River – the Via Claudia Augusta. According to the milestone, the distance to Augusta Vindelicorum (Augsburg) is 40 Roman miles. If we were Romans standing in front of this stone column, we would have let out a sigh: another one-and-a-half days to Augsburg, the nearest town in the province of Raetia.

Anne Kolb’s epigraphic eye reads much more from the inscription. The emperor could use the milestone to demonstrate his power and ideology. “For example, he could style himself as a conqueror by listing his victorious epithets, or he could present himself as wealthy by citing streets and bridges that he extensively renovated,” the researcher explains. Some milestones even featured the name of the provincial governors who were responsible for maintaining the roads. Such information provides an insight into the administration and organization of the Roman Empire.

Apart from the language, are there any differences between the Roman and Hellenistic inscriptions from Pergamon? What is striking is that the script on Hellenistic tablets is smaller. “Roman inscriptions are bigger, and they also feature many abbreviations,” says Anne Kolb. At any rate, Hadrian knew that everyone would be aware of who IMP CAES HADR AVG was referring to: Imperator Caesar Hadrianus Augustus.