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The Parian Chronicle or Parian Marble ( la, Marmor Parium,  Mar. Par.) is a
Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
chronology Chronology (from Latin ''chronologia'', from Ancient Greek , ''chrónos'', "time"; and , ''-logia'') is the science of arranging events in their order of occurrence in time. Consider, for example, the use of a timeline or sequence of events. I ...
, covering the years from 1582 BC to 299 BC, inscribed on a
stele A stele ( ),Anglicized plural steles ( ); Greek plural stelai ( ), from Greek , ''stēlē''. The Greek plural is written , ''stēlai'', but this is only rarely encountered in English. or occasionally stela (plural ''stelas'' or ''stelæ''), wh ...
. Found on the island of
Paros Paros (; el, Πάρος; Venetian: ''Paro'') is a Greek island in the central Aegean Sea. One of the Cyclades island group, it lies to the west of Naxos, from which it is separated by a channel about wide. It lies approximately south-east ...
in two sections, and sold in Smyrna in the early 17th century to an agent for Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, this inscription was deciphered by
John Selden John Selden (16 December 1584 – 30 November 1654) was an English jurist, a scholar of England's ancient laws and constitution and scholar of Jewish law. He was known as a polymath; John Milton hailed Selden in 1644 as "the chief of learned ...
and published among the Arundel Marbles, ''Marmora Arundelliana'' (London 1628–9) nos. 1–14, 59–119. The first of the sections published by Selden has subsequently disappeared. A further third fragment of this inscription, comprising the base of the stele and containing the end of the text, was found on Paros in 1897. It has entries from 336/35 to 299/98 BC. The two known upper fragments, brought to London in 1627 and presented to
Oxford University Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...
in 1667, include entries for the years 1582/81–355/54 BC. The surviving upper chronicle fragment currently resides in the
Ashmolean Museum The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology () on Beaumont Street, Oxford, England, is Britain's first public museum. Its first building was erected in 1678–1683 to house the cabinet of curiosities that Elias Ashmole gave to the University o ...
at Oxford. It combines dates for events which modern readers would consider
myth Myth is a folklore genre consisting of narratives that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or origin myths. Since "myth" is widely used to imply that a story is not objectively true, the identification of a narrat ...
ic, such as the Flood of Deucalion (equivalent to 1529/28 BC) with dates we would categorize as historic. For the Greeks, the events of their distant past, such as the
Trojan War In Greek mythology, the Trojan War was waged against the city of Troy by the Achaeans (Greeks) after Paris of Troy took Helen from her husband Menelaus, king of Sparta. The war is one of the most important events in Greek mythology and ha ...
(dated from 1217 to 1208 BC in the Parian inscription) and the Voyage of the Argonauts were ''historic'': their myths were understood as
legend A legend is a genre of folklore that consists of a narrative featuring human actions, believed or perceived, both by teller and listeners, to have taken place in human history. Narratives in this genre may demonstrate human values, and possess ...
s to the Greeks. In fact the Parian inscriptions spend more detail on the Heroic Age than on certifiably historic events closer to the date the
stele A stele ( ),Anglicized plural steles ( ); Greek plural stelai ( ), from Greek , ''stēlē''. The Greek plural is written , ''stēlai'', but this is only rarely encountered in English. or occasionally stela (plural ''stelas'' or ''stelæ''), wh ...
was inscribed and erected, apparently during 264/263 BC. "The Parian Marble uses chronological specificity as a guarantee of truth," Peter Green observed in the introduction to his annotated translation of the ''Argonautica'' of Apollonios Rhodios: "the mythic past was rooted in historical time, its legends treated as fact, its heroic protagonists seen as links between the 'age of origins' and the mortal, everyday world that succeeded it." The shorter fragment base of the stele, found in 1897, is in the Archaeological Museum of Paros. It contains chronicle entries for the years 336/35–299/98 BC.


Sources of the Parian Chronicle

The major analysis of the ''Parian Chronicle'' is that of
Felix Jacoby Felix Jacoby (; 19 March 1876 – 10 November 1959) was a German classicist and philologist. He is best known among classicists for his highly important work ''Fragmente der griechischen Historiker'', a collection of text fragments of ancient Gr ...
, written in the early 20th century. This appeared in two works: his book ''Das Marmor Parium'' published in 1904, and as a part of the ''
Fragmente der griechischen Historiker ''Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker'', commonly abbreviated ''FGrHist'' or ''FGrH'' (''Fragments of the Greek Historians''), is a collection by Felix Jacoby of the works of those ancient Greek historians whose works have been lost, but of w ...
'', first published in 1929. There has been no major study devoted to the entire stele since that time, although a few authors have dealt with specific time periods covered in the tablet. Furthermore, there apparently have been no critical studies of the original text on the stele itself since the work of Jacoby, as evidenced by the fact that the display of the Greek text on the Ashmolean Web site is a photocopy of the text that Jacoby published in his ''Fragmente''. The legibility of the Oxford fragment was impaired in the late 1980s when it was apparently mechanically cleaned by a crew hired to pressure clean all the classical sculptures in that hall of the Ashmolean. Until then, some of the most badly abraded letters could still be read because they preserved a yellow patina acquired many centuries ago. After the cleaning however the stone was restored to a brilliant white color and the old patina was lost. The controversy in Oxford was such that the Ashmolean issued a statement denying responsibility for the seemingly new appearance of the stone. In attempting to discern the source or sources of the ''Chronicle'', Jacoby followed the rather subjective method that was popular in the late 19th and early 20th century, whereby a change in the subject matter or style of writing was taken to imply a different source. The style of the ''Chronicle'', however, is quite uniform. Events are listed with little embellishment, and the primary purpose seems to be to give for each event the name of the king or archon ruling in Athens at the time, along with the number of years prior to the base date of the tablet (264/63 BC). The only exceptions are that in nine out of the 107 extant entries, the name of the archon or king is no longer readable, and in 14 entries the number of elapsed years is similarly effaced. The lack of embellishment is shown, for example, in the entry for Cecrops, which attributes nothing remarkable to him or to his reign, even though in later Greek mythology he was a semi-human creature. The ''Chronicle’s'' entries for
Deucalion In Greek mythology, Deucalion (; grc-gre, Δευκαλίων) was the son of Prometheus; ancient sources name his mother as Clymene, Hesione, or Pronoia.A scholium to ''Odyssey'' 10.2 (='' Catalogue'' fr. 4) reports that Hesiod called Deucalio ...
, who became the center of many flood-myths, are more consistent with the earliest Greek legends that merely state that he fled from a flooding river in his native Lycoreia near the
Gulf of Corinth The Gulf of Corinth or the Corinthian Gulf ( el, Κορινθιακός Kόλπος, ''Korinthiakόs Kόlpos'', ) is a deep inlet of the Ionian Sea, separating the Peloponnese from western mainland Greece. It is bounded in the east by the Is ...
, arriving at Athens where his son later became king. In contrast to Jacoby's ideas, a 2012 study maintains that the style of the ''Chronicle’s'' entries suggests that the ultimate source of the information in the ''Parian Chronicle'' was the archives of the city of Athens. Authors Rodger Young and Andrew Steinmann base their views on three key inferences from the available evidence. 1) The naming of the reigning king or archon in Athens for each entry is consistent with an Athenian provenance of the material. 2) The source behind each entry must have provided a year-number from which the author of the ''Parian Chronicle'' was able to calculate the years to his own time, thus suggesting that the archives from which the information was taken were keeping track of the years since the founding of the kingship in Athens under Cecrops. Such framing chronicles are known to have been kept in Rome: the '' Anno Urbis Conditae,'' from which events were reckoned. 3) The annalistic style of the ''Chronicle'' is in keeping with the genre of annalistic records such as the Assyrian Eponym Canon, in which the purpose was not so much to describe events as to give an accurate record of when the events occurred, as related to the years since the founding of the kingship and also tying the event to the king or archon who was currently reigning. Young and Steinmann acknowledge several factors that make it less plausible the source behind the ''Parian Chronicle'' was the state archives of Athens. The first is that there are no known examples of writing from Athens that date as early as 1582/81 BC, the date of the ''Chronicle’s'' first entry. The earliest extant writing in Greek from any area is found in the syllabic
Linear B Linear B was a syllabic script used for writing in Mycenaean Greek, the earliest attested form of Greek. The script predates the Greek alphabet by several centuries. The oldest Mycenaean writing dates to about 1400 BC. It is descended fr ...
script, for which the earliest instances date to about a century and a half after the reputed beginning of the kingship under Cecrops. Another argument against the Athenian provenance of the information in the ''Parian Chronicle'' is the reconstruction given by Jacoby of the first two lines of the tablet, which were largely effaced when Selden made his copy (this top part has since been lost), but of which enough remained that Selden could determine that it was intended as a statement of the source of the tablet's histories. Jacoby's restoration of Selden's Greek text is followed on the Ashmolean Web site, which translates it into English as follows, with square brackets and italics indicating the portion of the text that is conjectural:
'From''al 'l the records and general accounts''I have recorded 'the previous times'' beginning from Cecrops becoming first king of Athens, until ___anax was archon in Paros, and Diognetus in Athens.
The critical word here is “general,” which represents a Greek original for which Selden could read only the last three letters, νῶν; these are the ending of the genitive plural. Jacoby hypothesized the word was an adjective and restored it to κοινῶν, meaning “common, general, ordinary”. This is consistent with Jacoby's theory for the source of the ''Chronicle’s'' documents, namely that the author used a variety of selections from diverse materials available in the third century BC. The Ashmolean Web site then translated this into English as shown above. Young and Steinmann, however, maintain that “The writer of an annalistic history that professes to give exact dates for events would not assure readers of his credibility by saying that his information was derived from the “common” folklore ... For the Parian Marble, such reassurance would be given if the original word, for which the genitive plural ending - νῶν has survived, was not κοινῶν, but Ἀθηνῶν,”Young and Steinmann, "Correlation of Select Classical Sources," p. 231. i.e. “of Athens,” taking the word as a noun (Athens was a plural noun in classical Greek). This restoration would give the reader the assurance that the writer of the tablet had an authoritative source for his information, as follows:
'From''al 'l the public records and histories of Ath''ns I have recorded 'the previous times'' beginning from Cecrops becoming first king of Athens, until ___anax was archon in Paros, and Diognetus in Athens.
One other conjecture for the source of the ''Parian Chronicle’s'' information is of historical interest. In 1788, Joseph Robertson went to considerable length in arguing that the tablets were of relatively recent date and entirely fraudulent. His book is accessible under the External links below. The finding of the bottom portion of the tablet on Páros in 1897 has made Robertson's theory untenable.


RTI scanning

In 2013, Ben Altshuler of the Institute for Digital Archaeology oversaw reflectance transformation imaging (RTI) of the Parian Marble, revealing significant, previously illegible text. RTI scans are also available as part of th
Digital Marmor Parium
project.


Notes


References

*Michael Kerrigan, 2009. ''The Ancients in Their Own Words,'' ''The Parian Marble'', p. 144-45, photo of Ashmolean piece and translation excerpts, Michael Kerrigan, Fall River Press, Amber Books Ltd, c 2009. (hardcover. )


External links

*

*
The Parian chronicle, or The chronicle of the Arundelian marbles; with a dissertation concerning its authenticity
' by Joseph Robertson 1788, from the
Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...
* M. Berti (ed.)
Digital Marmor Parium
(Universität Leipzig) {{authority control