Monumentum Ancyranum: The Deeds of AugustusAugustus, Emperor of Rome
History
Monumentum Ancyranum: The Deeds of Augustus
Augustus, Emperor of Rome
Augustus, Emperor of Rome, 63 B.C.-14 A.D.; Rome -- History -- Augustus, 30 B.C.-14 A.D. -- Sources
This temple had served as a Christian church till
the fifteenth century, and from that time has been part of a Turkish
mosque, some sections of its enclosure being used as a cemetery. The
great inscription was cut on the two side walls of the pronaos, or
vestibule. It was in six pages, three on the left as one entered, and
three on the right. Each page contained from forty-two to fifty-four
lines, and each line an average of sixty letters. The pages cover six
courses of the masonry in height, about 2.70 metres, and the length of
the inscription on each wall is about 4 metres. On one of the outer
walls of the temple was a Greek translation of the Latin. This measures
1.38 metres in height by 21 metres in length. Several Turkish houses
had been built against the wall containing this Greek version, and
this made the reading of it, and still more the copying, an extremely
difficult task. The priceless value of the Greek version lies in the
fact that it supplements in many cases the breaks in the Latin. For
it is needless to say that an inscription so old and so exposed has
suffered much from time and violence. Various travelers have described
the temple and its treasure: Tournefort in his _Voyage du Levant_,
Lyons, 1717; Kinneir, _Journey Through Asia Minor_, 1818; Texier,
_Description de l’Asie mineure_, Paris, 1839; William Hamilton,
_Researches in Asia Minor_, London, 1842; and most completely,
Guillaume, Perrot and Delbet, in their _Exploration archéologique de
la Galatie, etc., in 1861_, Paris, 1872.
Numerous attempts were made at transcribing the inscription, and a
number of editions were published. Buysbecche’s fragments found several
editors in the century of their discovery. About a hundred years after
him Daniel Cosson, a merchant from Leyden, who had lived many years at
Smyrna, dying there in 1689, caused an attempt to be made to secure a
copy, and with somewhat better results. His copy was edited at Leyden
in 1695. In 1701 Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, under direction of
Louis XIV, visited Ancyra, and attempted to secure a facsimile of the
text. In 1705 Paul Lucas, also sent by Louis XIV, spent twenty days
in copying the Latin, and his work was the last of its kind till the
present century. While these early copies are far from being as perfect
as more recent ones, they have this value: that in a number of cases
they show parts of the inscription which progressive disintegration has
now rendered illegible.
The Greek text, owing to the buildings reared against it, was much
harder to transcribe. In 1745 Richard Pococke published a few
fragments, and in 1832 Hamilton copied pages 10, 11, 12 and 13 of the
nineteen into which the Greek is divided.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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