IThera092

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 is places near the Gymnasium of the Ephebes, in the area where erotic graffiti are concentrated, on the same rock surface as inscription no. 540. Hiller noted the presence of a wall at the lower part of the rock, which evidently covered the left section of the inscription until it was exposed following the collapse of the wall.

Layout

The inscription is orthograde.

Execution: chiselled.

Palaeography

Provenance and Discovery

Place:Archaía Thíra (36.36349, 25.47804)

Date:End of the 6th century BCE

Findspot:Near the Gymnasium of the Ephebes and the graffito nr. 540 (IThera033), Inglese 2008.

Coordinates:36.36168, 25.48150

Last recorded location: in situ; Last seen by A. Inglese in 2003 in situ

Edition


ᾱ̓́ρᾱρη ⁝ Δας

Apparatus


Edition after Inglese 2008

Commentary

It is likely that the inscription represents a formula. The term should be interpreted as ἄραρη, a pluperfect form of ἀραρίσκω, corresponding to the Homeric ἠρήρει (with augment, Il. X.265) or ἀρήρει (without epsilon, Il. XII.265). Given that the perfect tense, particularly in Attic, often conveys the meaning of "is fixed," the formula in this case may have meant "thus it was fixed." Regarding Δας, one could hypothesize that it represents a form of Ζεύς, who would be the guarantor of the pact expressed by ἄραρη. However, this interpretation is problematic for several reasons: (1) the substitution of delta for zeta is attested (especially in Boeotia, Thessaly, and Laconia) but not in Thera; (2) even if we hypothesize the substitution delta/zeta the only known occurrence of Zas is in Pherecydes of Syros (fr. 1 D‑K); (3) in Thera we find only the forms Ζεύς, Ζηύς, and later Ζηνός—never with delta or alpha.

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.