Repository
Cyrene Museum, 302.
Support
Fragment of a white marble panel, thicker above than below, broken off at right and left, with a dowel-hole in the bottom, perhaps due to a repair, which would mean that the panel was also broken off below, or related with an adjacent panel completing the monument; a garland was sculpted on the face (0.10; 0.195;0.03-0.035).
Layout
Inscribed on the face, a) left of the garland in two lines; b) inside the garland.
Letters
a) 0.02; b) 0.01 with serifs; non-slanting sigma.
Place of Origin
Findspot.
Date
Perhaps second half of third or first half of second century B.C. (lettering)
Findspot
Found before 1977 at Cyrene pleiades; HGL : exact findspot unrecorded.
Last recorded Location
Seen by C. Dobias-Lalou in 1977 in Shahat : Cyrene Museum .
Text constituted from
Transcription from stone CDL.
Not previously published.
a) [Untel fils d'Untel?].
b) (Jeux) Isthmiques.
a) [So-and-so son of So-and-so?].
b) Isthmian (games).
a) [Il tale figlio del tale?].
b) (Giochi) istmici.
أ) [فلان ابن فلان ؟]. ب) الإسثيمية ("الألعاب": كما يمكن فهمها ضمنياً).
Such monuments, well known in Greece, are uncommon in Cyrenaica. We only know of many garlands cut into the walls of buildings, mainly gymnasiums, with a name written inside and those seem to be rather graffiti emanating from friends or from the winner himself and concerning local competitions. Here we have a more monumental honorific marker, which should give the name of the honoured person and inside garland(s) the mention of the games where he (she) carried off prize(s). The inscription a) should either have been cut across the garland or only at left (possibly with a companion piece at right). If the latter, it is not impossible to have a woman's name ending with -α and her father's name at the genitive ending with -ς, if and only if she was, as owner of the carriage, a winner of horse-races. Conversely if the layout was the former, the α was in the middle of the own name and the σ in the middle of the father's name. It seems impossible to guess more.
Amongst the different types of monuments with garlands commemorating victories in the main competitions, this one should be interpreted as a funerary stele if the name is really at the nominative. However if the name was at the accusative the monument would be honorific (see Guarducci, 1974 Guarducci, M., 1974, Epigrafia greca, III, Roma - see in bibliography , pp. 99-102, 138-140).
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