Speaker Details

Dr Patricia   Butz
Savannah College of Art and Design

Presentation Abstract:

THE MEMORIAL OF MITHRODOROS Greek Stoikhedon from North Africa

This paper presents a funerary monument that depends solely on its distnctive style of writing to commemorate the deceased: Mithrodoros son of Apollonides of Miletos. The provenance of the limestone plaque, now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo (Inv. 31183), is believed to be ancient Naukratis, where a population of transplanted Milesians among others resided under the Saïte pharaohs. Early graffiti recorded by W. M. F. Petrie in the precinct of Apollo Milesios dates from the third quarter of the sixth century BCE (Jeffery, LSAG, 332). The six-line funerary inscription written in Greek may be as late as the fourth century BCE and is distinguished by a gridded stoikhedon formation that reinforces the overall square of the plaque with its raised frame. Stoikhedon inscriptions are characterized by the manipulation of the written elements composing the text with respect to an underlying grid. Letterforms on the plaque average 3 cm in height and are finely cut; but it is the fitted layout of the parts of the funerary text together with the meticulously placed punctuation that suggest a deeper meaning for the seemingly simple display. The paper examines how these parts create, in fact, a kind of magical word square. The presence of the magical word square is known on Egyptian soil, most famously in the much later Stele of Moschion (SEG 8.464). It is the argument of this paper that the Mithrodoros inscription demonstrates not only the properties of a word square but the true perfection of the rare stoikhedon arrangement in Egypt. On one level the Mithrodoros inscription is all about letters, numbers, and proportions and does its job very well. But the Egyptian necessity for a memorial that functions effectively on more than one level of reality, one of those being the magical, takes the letterforms in their stoikhedon matrix and weaves in the eternal.