base
- Museum number
- 2013,5017.9
- Description
-
Pedestal of blue marble with a curving front, cut down from its original state and broken at the lower right hand corner, with six lines of alphabetic Greek characters. In the text the city of Paphos dedicates to the Paphian Aphrodite a statue (or other monument) in honour of Kallippos, son of Kallippos, secretary of the city council who was elected gymnasiarch around the time the inscription was erected (possibly 105-104 BC).
- Production date
- 105 BC-104 BC (?)
- Dimensions
-
Height: 19.68 centimetres
-
Width: 60.96 centimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- The text provides a rare description from Cyprus of the career of a local official. Mitford argued that Kallippos may also have provided important services to Ptolemy IX Soter II (reigned intermittently from 116 to 81 BC) who was based in Cyprus following his second exile from Egypt after 107 BC, possibly securing the support of the local garrison. This inscription is included in Le Guen's survey of associations of Dionysaic artists (2001, 311–312 n. 68, with full references).
Bibliography:
Le Guen E. 2001, Les Associations de Technites dionysiaques à l'époque hellénistique. Études d'archéologie classique 11-12 (Nancy: ADRA; Paris: De Boccard).
- Location
- Not on display
- Acquisition date
- 1802-1883 (between)
- Acquisition notes
- The inscription was unregistered in 2013 but has been in the collection since as least 1883 when it was included by Charles Newton in the second volume of the catalogue of ancient Greek inscriptions. How it came to be in the Museum is not stated in the catalogue or in early publications of the text. However, according to Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, who was the first to publish the inscription (1811, no. 50), it was removed from Palaepaphos (modern Kouklia) by Commodore Sydney Smith of the Royal Navy along with other antiquities when he visited the area in 1802 (see Bernhard-Walcher 1999, 37-8; Maier 2001, 70-1; also Maier and von Wartburg 1988, 276-7 and note 21, providing translations of Hammer's accounts).
Bibliography:
Bernhard-Walcher, A. et al. 1999, The collection of Cypriote antiquities in the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum).
Maier, F.G. 2001, 'From Hammer von Purgstall to F.B. Welch. The archaeology of Old Paphos, 1802-1899', in V. Tatton-Brown (ed), Cyprus in the 19th century AD. Fact, fancy and fiction (Oxford: Oxbow), 70-9.
Maier, F.G. and von Wartburg, M.-L. 1988, 'Strangers at Palaepaphos', RDAC 1988 (2), 275-9.
Von Hammer-Purgstall, J. 1811, Topographische Ansichten gesammelt auf einer Reise in die Levant (Vienna).
- Department
- Greek and Roman
- Registration number
- 2013,5017.9
