IThera034

Findspot and Location

  • Country: Greece
  • Region: Santorini
  • Settlement: Ancient Thera
  • Repository: Archaeological site of Ancient Thera

Support

Material: stone.
Object type: rock face.

Layout

The inscription is currently lost. According to Hiller’s reading, it is arranged in three lines: the first two run in an orthograde direction, except for the iota in Ἰσοκλῆς on line 2; the third line is retrograde.

Execution: chiselled.

Palaeography

Letters of the archaic alphabet of Thera (Hiller): Epsilon: vertical stroke slightly protruding at the bottom, oblique bars. Eta: represented as a closed rectangular with orizontal crossbar. Pi: hook-shaped. San: used for the sibilant sound. Theta: circle with cross-shaped bars inside.

Provenance and Discovery

Place:Archaía Thíra (36.36349, 25.47804)

Date:Archaic period

Findspot:«supra epheborum gymnasium» Hiller

Coordinates:36.36168, 25.48143

Last recorded location: non vidi; the inscription is lost

Edition


1. [Μόθα]κς ἄριστος
2. Ἰσοκλῆς
3. παο͂ θετός

Apparatus

No critical notes available.

Commentary

It should be noted that the first term in l. 1 could be any personal name (ending in -κς), followed by an adjective, as commonly attested in this area, and not necessarily Μόθαξ. Furthermore, the integration of Μόθαξ, chosen by Hiller, is likely the result of a scholarly association with line 3: παο͂ θετός (παός, Doric for πηός "relative", "in-law"; θετός "adopted"), which links the anthroponym in line 2 to the concept of adoption. As Chantraine explains, μόθος, with the -ακ- suffix (frequent in Doric), means "son of a helot or a perioikos, raised with the sons of a citizen." This could suggest that the integration of the personal name in line 1 was influenced by the reading of the subsequent lines. The name Ἰσοκλῆς is well attested in Greece (cf. LGPN s.v., which dates the theran attestation to the VII c. BCE) and in Thera (with three later occurrences).

Bibliography

To consult the full bibliography of the project, visit our Zotero library.

Images

No images available.

Editorial Team

Editor: Alessandra Inglese

Principal Investigator: Alessandra Inglese

Funder: CHANGES - Theme 5. Humanities and Cultural Heritage as Laboratories of Innovation and Creativity, funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU, Associazione Centro di Eccellenza DTC

Alessandra Inglese: original data collection and edition

Valentina Mignosa: encoding, editing metadata and geo data

Luigi Tessarolo: website construction, design and styling, interactive mapping implementation

Virgilio Costa: methodological and digital consultancy

Publication Details

Authority: Inscriptions from Thera

Licence: Licensed under a Creative Commons-Attribution 4.0 licence

Encoding model / validation: EpiDoc encoding model and validation framework adapted from ISicily

Download

To consult the full TEI EpiDoc XML source of this inscription, click here.