Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike International License 4.0.
All citation, reuse or distribution of this work must contain somewhere a link back to the DOI (
Loose
Elegant cutting of the text, with modest
Letters:
Encoded for EpiDoc schema 8.17 on 01-01-2014 by JM Carbon.
Edition here based on
Cf. also:
Further bibliography:
[The] owner will sacrifice [each] year in the month of Artemeisios a sacrificial animal on the altar. If he does not sacrifice (it), (5) may he be an offender of all the gods and heroes, and may there not (be) [...] anything for him.
[Le] propriétaire sacrifiera [chaque] année durant le mois d'Artemeisios un animal sacrificiel sur l'autel. S'il ne (le) sacrifie pas, (5) qu'il soit coupable envers tous les dieux et héros, et qu'il ne [...] aucun pour lui.
This document is included in the present Collection as a well-preserved, relatively early example of a particular type of inscription: brief and funerary texts prescribing periodic offerings. Rather than being set up at a sanctuary, where they informed worshippers about sacrifices for specific deities, these inscriptions were typically set up at a private place—usually a tomb or a familial cult-site—and they instructed, or recorded prescriptions for, the owner of the site or the descendants and inheritors. The recipient of the sacrifice is in the present case perhaps left implicit, but was typically defined as the deceased; alternatively, the name of the honorand may now be missing in lines above the first extant line. One may compare and contrast some other examples of private instructions for sacrificial performance in the present Collection, which are usually related to divine cult: e.g. CGRN 60 (Thera) and CGRN 215 (Attica).
The phenomenon of recording such periodic sacrifices for the deceased seems to have been particularly prevalent in Roman-era Asia Minor, and especially in Lycia. Robert already collected six similar inscriptions from western Lycia; as Bean notes, one of the closest parallels to the present text is
Lines 4-7: Though fines are sometimes prescribed for the failure to perform the due sacrifice (cf.