Parian Chronicle

Parian Marble redirects here; for marble from Paros, see Parian marble.

Detail from the shorter fragment base of the stele, found in 1897, that is in a museum on Páros. It contains chronicle entries for the years 356–299 BC.

The Parian Marble (Marmor Parium) or Parian Chronicle is a Greek chronological table, covering the years from 1581 BC to 264 BC, inscribed on a stele. Found on the island of Páros 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 and published among the Arundel Marbles, Marmora Arundelliana (London 1628-9) nos. 1-21, 59-119. One 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.

The two known upper fragments, brought to London in 1627 and presented to Oxford University in 1667, contain entries for the years 1581–322/21 BC.^[1] The surviving upper chronicle fragment currently resides in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. It combines dates for events we would consider mythic, such as the Flood of Deucalion (equivalent to 1528/27 BC) with dates we would categorize as historic. For the Greeks, the events of their distant past, such as the Trojan War (dated to 1218 in the Parian inscription) and the Voyage of the Argonauts were historic: their myths were understood as legends 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 was inscribed and erected, apparently in 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:^[2] "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."^[3]

The shorter fragment base of the stele, found in 1897, is in a museum on Páros. It contains chronicle entries for the years 356–299 BC.

Notes

1. ^ Ashmolean Museum: transcriptions and translations
2. ^ Green, Peter (2007). The Argonautika of Apollonios Rhodios. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 30. ISBN 9780520253933. 
3. ^ Green (2007), p. 14, noting Brillante, C. (1991). "Myth and history: history and the historical interpretation of myth". In Edmunds, L.. Approaches to Greek Myth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 91–140 (esp. pp 101f.). ISBN 0801838630. 

• 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. ISBN 978-1-4351-0724-3)

External links

• Ashmolean exhibit including images and English translation.