Epitaph or honours (?)
created: Transcription from stone CDL.
source date: Perhaps second half of third or first half of second century BC
language: ar; en; fr; de; grc; grc-Latn; el; he
availability: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Deed Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. All citation, reuse or distribution of this work must contain a link back to DOI: https://doi.org/10.60760/unibo/igcyrgvcyr2 and the filename (IGCyr000000 or GVCyr000), as well as the year of consultation. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/)

Not published before [...] 128200.

[...]α [...]σ

Ἴσθμια

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 [...], pp. 99-102, 138-140).