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Journal of archaeology and ancient architecture

Tag Archives: epigraphic fake

«The inscription is surely a fake»: un villaggio cappadoce tra finzione toponomastica e storia ecclesiastica

Author: M. Cassia

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The news of a “sensational” epigraphic discovery in Cappadocia – released in 1911 by some Turkish newspapers and “consecrated” the following year by the scientific periodical Échos d’Orient – still today arouses strong perplexity. The phantom inscription – never photographed and / or drawn – would have carried the text πόλις Σαδαγολθινά, a toponym actually attested only by the Cappadocian ecclesiastical historian Philostorgius, who however considers the site not a “city”, but a κώμη, “village”. The fake news was actually the intentional product of a political amplification of progressive style and of a Orthodox religious orientation of which the historian Pavlos Karolidis (1849-1930), a native of a suburb of Kayseri, ancient Caesarea of Cappadocia, was the main exponent.

Una falsa epigrafe nelle “Storie vere” di Luciano di Samosata: l’età degli Antonini fra realtà e finzione

Author: G. Arena

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Lucian of Samosata, an erudite and refined exponent of the Second Sophistic in the Antonine age, in the True Stories reports the text of an inscription engraved on a beryl column and placed in a port site. The verisimilitude of the story must not deceive: the sophist intends on the one hand to stigmatize the very popular custom of having self-congratulatory verses engraved and on another to argue with the flattering contemporary historiography, thus offering a pleasant entertainment to an audience equally interested in the historical subject and paradoxographical literature.