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A: Palermo, Sicilia, Italy

A Bilingual Advertisement for an Inscription-Cutter's Workshop Cut in Stone

Circa 50 CE
Bilingual advertisement for an inscription-cutter's workshop. 1st century CE. CIL 10.7296 / IG 14.297.
Bilingual advertisement for an inscription-cutter's workshop. 1st century CE. CIL 10.7296 / IG 14.297.

"The making of a major Roman inscription was the business of highly efficient and professionalized guilds. The significant document in this connection is an advertisement in the form of an inscription of the first century A.D. This inscription (C.I.L. x. 7296) was in Palermo in 1885.... In Latin and Greek, the advertiser says that in his premises titles were laid out and cut: Tutuli heic ordinantur et sculpuntur.  Here as M. Jean Mallon suggests, the verb ordinare must mean the advertiser had an 'ordinator' who undertook the responsibility for the mise-en-page of the text, and the designation of the type of letter, and it was he who traced on the stone the ordinatio of the text, which the sculptor exerted himself to follow with exactitude.

"There were two main types of capital, that made geometrically, and that drawn freehand. A plurality of tools was involved in the process of cutting both scripts, as may be seen from certain surviving inscriptions described by Hübner, Cagnat, and others, which include representations of the square chisel, compass, rule, curve, hammer and plumb. All this organization lay behind the inscriptions which then included the largest capitals the world had ever seen" (Morison, Politics and Script. . .Barker ed. [1972] 38).

H. Dessau. Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae (Berlin 1892-1916) no. 7680; R. Cagnat, ed. Inscriptiones Graecae ad Res Romanas Pertinentes (Paris, 1911) vol. 1, no. 503; P. Kruschwitz, “Die Sprachlichen Anomalien der Werbeinschrit CIL X 7296,” ZPE 130 (2000) 239-240; O. Tribulato, “The Stone-Cutter’s Bilingual Inscription from Palermo,” ZPE 177 (2011) 131-140; SEG 50.1016; AE 1982.417, 2000.643, 2011.437.

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