Page 129 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

increasingly agreed by scholars that Thucydides, who followed almost im- mediately after Herodotus, also relied primarily on oral sources when writ- ing his History of the Peloponnesian War, providing summaries of speeches, rather than actual transcriptions of what was said, throughout his history, and citing contemporary documents, chiefly point by point citations of treaties, only in Book Five. Even by the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE, when both Herodotus and Thucydides wrote, much of the literary activity, knowledge and discussion in Greece seems to have been based upon oral communication rather than books, though books were available. It seems that during this period written texts were often viewed as aids to memory rather than the primary object of study.
Along with bookrolls on papyrus, Athenians maintained a wide variety of written records on wood tablets, lead tablets, bronze tablets, wooden boards, and stone inscriptions.62 Apart from stone inscriptions, few exam- ples of these media survived. Dramatic exceptions to this overall lack of early Greek books and archival data are the Archives of the Athenian Cavalry from the fourth and third centuries BCE, preserved on lead tablets. 63 This archive was excavated in 1965 from a water well within the courtyard of the Dipylon, the double-gate leading into the city of Athens from the north. It included 574 lead tablets from the third century BCE.64 Six years later another hundred or so lead tablets from the fourth and third centuries BCE were excavated from a well at the edge of the excavated section of the Agora in Athens. Historian of ancient archives Ernest Posner characterized these as “by far the largest name file of ancient times. Tightly rolled or folded up, they contain the following information: the name in the genitive of the owner of a horse; the horse’s color and brand, if any; and its value stated
62 For illustrations of a wide variety of Greek papyri and other writing forms see Turner, Greek Manuscripts of the Ancient World (1971), including as plate 4 a single leaf of a wooden tablet filled with wax. 63 For the role of horses in ancient Greek life, and the place of the Athenian Cavalry in Greek Culture see Camp, Horses and Horsemanship in the Athenian Agora (1998).
64 The pottery and lead tablets excavated from the Dipylon were described by Karin Braun in “Der Dipylon-Brunnen B1 Die Funde,” Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archaeologischen Instituts Athenische Abteilung, Band 85 (1970 129-269, plates 53-94. The lead tablets are illustrated on plates 83-93.
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