A house fire can preserve writing for millennia, if the tablets are clay
Epigraphers read writing that was never meant for a library: words carved in rock, stamped into metal, scratched on pots or painted on walls. Some of it survived only by luck, like clay tablets accidentally baked hard in a blaze. From such scraps they rebuild entire scripts and expose forgeries.
Epigraphy is the study of inscriptions as writing: identifying the signs, working out what they mean, placing them in time and culture, and drawing conclusions about who wrote them. It deliberately sets aside the literary merit of a text and its value as a historical record, which belong to other specialists, though in practice one scholar often does both. At Behistun in Iran, for example, epigraphers reconstruct, translate and date a three-language Achaemenid inscription cut into living rock, while historians interpret the events it reports.
An inscription can be anything from a single mark on a jar, abbreviating a shipping merchant's name, to a long treatise. Most are short. The surfaces vary enormously: stone, metal, wax, gems carved in relief or intaglio, painted pottery and frescoes. Carved texts were often meant to be seen in public, but not always; the Linear B tablets of Mycenaean Greece turned out to be mostly administrative bookkeeping. Ink handwriting is left to a sister discipline, palaeography.
The European science took shape from the sixteenth century, first focusing on Latin. Its monument is the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, launched by Theodor Mommsen and others and published in Berlin since 1863. It is arranged by region, and the volume devoted to Rome alone holds the most inscriptions; new parts keep appearing as more stones come to light. Greek inscriptions have their own collections, presented in Latin to keep the field internationally neutral.
The discipline's triumphs include the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs through the Rosetta Stone, a slab carrying the same text in Greek, Demotic and hieroglyphic script, work carried out by Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Young. Knowledge of Maya writing was lost after the Spanish conquest, but recent work by epigraphers and linguists has recovered a great deal. Epigraphic evidence also figured in the debate over whether the inscribed James Ossuary was genuine.
Source: Epigraphy
