Parian Chronicle - Sources of The Parian Chronicle

Sources of The Parian Chronicle

The major analysis of the Parian Chronicle is that of Felix Jacoby, written in the early 20th century. This appeared in two works: his book ‘’Das Marmor Parium’’ published in 1904, and as a part of the Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, first published in 1929. There has been no major study devoted to the entire stele since that time, although a few authors have dealt with specific time periods covered in the tablet. Furthermore, there apparently have been no critical studies of the original text on the stele itself since the work of Jacoby, as evidenced by the fact that the display of the Greek text on the Ashmolean Web site is a photocopy of the text that Jacoby published in his Fragmente.

In attempting to discern the source or sources of the Chronicle, Jacoby followed the rather subjective method that was popular in the late 19th and early 20th century, whereby a change in the subject matter or style of writing was taken to imply a different source. The style of the Chronicle, however, is quite uniform. Events are listed with little embellishment, and the primary purpose seems to be to give for each event the name of the king or archon ruling in Athens at the time, along with the number of years prior to the base date of the tablet (264/63 BC). The only exceptions are that in nine out of the 107 extant entries, the name of the archon or king is no longer readable, and in 14 entries the number of elapsed years is similarly effaced. The lack of embellishment is shown, for example, in the entry for Cecrops, which attributes nothing remarkable to him or to his reign, even though in later Greek mythology he was a semi-human creature. The Chronicle’s entries for Deucalion, who became the center of many flood-myths, are more consistent with the earliest Greek legends that merely state that he fled from a flooding river in his native Lycoreia near the Gulf of Corinth, arriving at Athens where his son later became king.

In contrast to Jacoby’s ideas, a 2012 study maintains that the style of the Chronicle’s entries suggests that the ultimate source of the information in the Parian Chronicle was the archives of the city of Athens. Authors Rodger Young and Andrew Steinmann refer to three evidences in support of their view. 1) The naming of the reigning king or archon in Athens for each entry is consistent with an Athenian provenance of the material. 2) The source behind each entry must have provided a year-number from which the author of the Parian Chronicle was able to calculate the years to his own time, thus suggesting that the archives from which the information was taken were keeping track of the years since the founding of the kingship in Athens under Cecrops. This would have been feasible if Athens was keeping a long-term calendar similar to the Anno Urbis Conditae calendar of Rome, and reckoning was made from that calendar. 3) The annalistic style of the Chronicle is in keeping with the genre of annalistic records such as the Assyrian Eponym Canon, in which the purpose was not so much to describe events as to give an accurate record of when the events occurred, as related to the years since the founding of the kingship and also tying the event to the king or archon who was currently reigning.

Young and Steinmann cite evidences against the plausibility that the source behind the Parian Chronicle was the state archives of Athens. The first is that there exist no examples of writing from Athens that date as early as 1582/81 BC, the date of the Chronicle’s first entry. The earliest known writing in Greek from any area is found in the syllabic Linear B script, for which the earliest instances date to about a century and a half after the reputed beginning of the kingship under Cecrops. Another evidence against the Athenian provenance of the information in the Parian Chronicle is the reconstruction given by Jacoby of the first two lines of the tablet, which were largely effaced when Selden made his copy (this top part has since been lost), but of which enough remained that Selden could determine that it was intended as a statement of the source of the tablet’s histories. Jacoby’s restoration of Selden’s Greek text is followed on the Ashmolean Web site, which translated it into English as follows, with square brackets and italics indicating the portion of the text that is a conjectural restoration:

al I have recorded, beginning from Cecrops becoming first king of Athens, until uanax was archon in Paros, and Diognetus in Athens.

The critical word here is “general,” which represents a Greek original for which Selden could read only the last three letters, νῶν; these are the ending of the genitive plural. Jacoby assumed that the word was an adjective and restored it to κοινῶν, meaning “common, general, ordinary”. This is consistent with Jacoby’s theory for the source of the Chronicle’s documents, namely that the author used a variety of selections from diverse materials available in the third century BC. The Ashmolean Web site then translated this into English as shown above. Young and Steinmann, however, maintain that “The writer of an annalistic history that professes to give exact dates for events would not assure readers of his credibility by saying that his information was derived from the “common” folklore ... For the Parian Marble, such reassurance would be given if the original word, for which the genitive plural ending - νῶν has survived, was not κοινῶν, but Ἀθηνῶν,” i.e. “of Athens,” taking the word as a noun (Athens was a plural noun in classical Greek). This restoration would give the reader the assurance that the writer of the tablet had an authoritative source for his information, as follows:

alens I have recorded, beginning from Cecrops becoming first king of Athens, until uanax was archon in Paros, and Diognetus in Athens.

One other conjecture for the source of the Parian Chronicle’s information is of historical interest. In 1788, Joseph Robertson went to considerable length in arguing that the tablets were of relatively recent date and entirely fraudulent. His book is accessible under the External links below. The finding of the bottom portion of the tablet on Páros in 1897 has made Robertson’s theory untenable.