Sometimes archaeologists make discoveries that truly highlight how far we have come as a species. But sometimes, a discovery can also show us how similar we are to our ancestors. An ancient Greek inscription dating almost two thousand years ago falls in this second category: we are talking about a marble tablet that turns out to be a class yearbook…
A project aimed at translating and publishing the 20,000 Athenian inscriptions currently in British collections. A note released last week by research project Attic Inscriptions Online says of the tablet: “The inscription is a list of fellows going through ephebate, a year of military and civilian training for young men.”
The notes continue, “The thirty-one ephebes included in this list are a subset of the entire group, which probably included more than a hundred young males.” “Perhaps a touch of egalitarianism that hides differences in social background. Unusually, many of the ephebes are called Theogas for Theogenes, and the abbreviated forms of Dionysas and Dionysodoros.”
This startling discovery was made in Scotland, about 3,000 kilometers from the tablet’s original home in Athens. The tablet had been in storage for nearly 135 years. It was originally from a different tablet kept in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England.
However, speaking to NPR, Peter Liddel says, “When we looked a little closer at this article, we discovered that it was actually a new document.” Liddel also serves on the editorial committee of the Attic Inscriptions Online project at the University of Manchester in the UK.
Liddel told NPR, “This is one of the few inscriptions found in Scotland, one of the three ancient Athenian inscriptions from the city of Edinburgh. one, so it’s definitely exciting. “It’s something quite different from anything known before,” he says.
Fortunately, the author of the tablet, a young man named Attikos, son of Philippos, also wrote the history of the yearbook. The last line of the class list says “From Caesar.” Researchers say it’s a reference to Tiberius Claudius Germanicus Caesar.
Considering that Claudius, known as Claudius, the Roman Emperor who ruled between 41 and 54 AD, was the emperor who brought Britain under Roman control, we can say that it is a bit ironic that the tablet was found in the United Kingdom. Raised in Athens, which had been under Roman rule centuries ago and had survived numerous rebellions and reconquests at the time of the writing of the tablet, ephebes were trained to consider serving the Emperor as a fundamental part of their identity.
Although we know such political and military realities, we often do not know much about what happens in daily life. That’s why Liddel notes that this ancient Athenian yearbook, written by a teenager to record his schoolmates exactly as he knew them, was an invaluable discovery.
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