Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T09:19:57.151Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Inscriptions from Jerash

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2012

A. H. M. Jones
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The following inscriptions, published by permission of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and of Yale University, are all from Jerash, the ancient Gerasa, or the immediate neighbourhood. They range in date from the reign of Domitian to after that of Justinian. The language is almost always Greek; the few examples of Latin are, with one exception, memorials of members of the imperial civil service or the army. I here put the Latin inscriptions first (nos. 1–10); the Greek I have arranged as far as possible in their chronological order, leaving to the end those which I cannot date.

It may save repetition to note that Gerasa employed throughout her known history the Pompeian era, which was reckoned as beginning from about October 1, 63 B.C. (Brünnow, Die Provincia Arabia, iii, 304).

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Roman Studies , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , November 1928 , pp. 144 - 178
Copyright
Copyright ©A. H. M. Jones 1928. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

page 144 note 1 The line drawings are for the most part tracings from photographs. Of nos. 31, 33 and 45 I cannot, owing to the bad state of the texts, give any satisfactory reproduction; a photograph conveys nothing and a drawing is bound tp be very subjective. Technical difficulties prevented the reproduction of no. 35.

page 144 note 2 Mr. J. W. Crowfoot, the Director of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, and Mr. Fitzgerald, formerly Assistant-Director, had already carried the work of decipherment some way before I arrived. I owe them both my thanks for allowing me to take over their results. I also owe an acknowledgement to Mr. W. H. Buckler, Sir George Macdonald, Mr. H. M. Last, Mr. M. N. Tod and Professor Anderson, for various corrections and suggestions, and to Professor Littmann for the derivations of the Semitic names. Finally I must thank the Rev. Julius B. Robertson for the majority of the photographs.

page 147 note 1 Gerasa was attached to Arabia at this date, and indeed from the beginning of the province's existence (see Brünnow, , Die Prov: Arabia, iii, 264, 265Google Scholar). The note on I.G.R.R. iii, 1353 is a strange lapse; it argues that, because Attidius Cornelianus was legatus of Syria (and therefore consularis) in A.D. 158, he must have been legatus of the same province when consul designatus. The inscription is incompletely and inaccurately given in I.G.R.R.; a correct version (giving the date, viz. A.D. 150) is to be found in Mitth. d. Pal.-Ver., 1901, no. 16 (Lucas).

page 154 note * It may be suggested that εὶσϕέρειν which evidently a technical word, should be substituted for [περιβάλλειν], for which there is no authority in the similar passage (l. 33) of the Ancyra inscription (J.R.S. xvi, 246; The crowning of such statues was πάτριον τοῖς τεχνίταις (Michel, , Rec. 1015, 28–30Google Scholar).

page 156 note 1 The word only occurs once in its literal sense (Stephanus, Thesaurus s.v.) and there seems to mean ‘to act.’

page 168 note 1 Another instance of the dedication of a bath in Christian times is to be found in the Princeton Exp. to Syria iii, B., no. 918.

page 172 note 1 =Aramaic 'Auga. Compare Safaitic 'G, modern Arabic 'Audj and the biblical Og king of Bashan.

page 173 note 1 =Aramaic Shamshai.

page 175 note 1 = Aramaic Mallai.

page 176 note 1 ‘Amazon's shields,’ combined sometimes with bosses, garlands etc., are the standard decoration of the Gerasene sarcophagi. I have not seen a single sarcophagus which was decorated at all, in which they were not the principal elements of the design. The same device occurs on an inscribed basis from the North theatre (no. 12) and on another similar uninscribed basis, also from the North theatre.