IThera011

Findspot and Location

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

Support

Material: stone.
Object type: rock face.

The inscription, according to Hiller, would have been located on a rock near the paved level of the perimeter area, to the west of the temple of Apollo Carneo. However, it is now untraceable and likely lost.

Layout

Execution: chiselled.

Palaeography

Letters of the archaic alphabet of Thera: Aspiration: represented as a closed rectangular with orizontal crossbar. Iota: with three strokes, featuring rounded corners. Omicron: smaller than the other letters, used for omega. Rho: with a rigid circular eye.

Provenance and Discovery

Place:Archaía Thíra (36.36349, 25.47804)

Date:Archaic period

Findspot:«Intra aedificium perantiquum, quod prope Apollinis Carnei templum meridiem fere versus situm est». Hiller, Suppl. p. 86

Coordinates:36.36201, 25.48064

Last recorded location: non vidi (probably lost)

Edition


Κhίρων

Apparatus

No critical notes available.

Commentary

The inscription, based on Hiller’s reading, was inscribed in retrograde and featured the name Chiron, written in the nominative case without the name of the dedicator. The lack of further details prevents a full reconstruction of the content, but it is believed to have been linked to the cult of the centaur Chiron. This inscription is the only explicit reference to the name of the centaur Chiron on the island. Hiller proposed that there may have been a sanctuary dedicated to Chiron near the gymnasium of the ephebes or within a cave, oriented towards the walls enclosing the sacred area around the temple of Apollo Carneo. This hypothesis was later revisited by other scholars (see Inglese 2008, p. 161-162). Chiron, in mythological tradition, is known as a centaur educator, linked to figures such as Achilles, Asclepius, Jason, and Actaeon. His presence in this inscription likely reflects his role in mentorship. In some traditions, Chiron’s teachings are tied to the transition from youth to adulthood, symbolizing the passage between two stages of life. This makes his appearance in Thera and in the Agora of the Gods particularly interesting, as it might suggest a connection between local cult practices and broader mythological traditions concerning rites of passage and mentorship.

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, website content creation, HTML transformation, website design and styling, interactive mapping implementation

Marika Griffo: rubbings digitisation

Simone Lucchetti: rubbings digitisation

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

Virgilio Costa: methodological and digital consultancy

Publication Details

Authority: ThERA (Theran Epigraphic Rubbings Archive) project

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.