Inscriptions and Dates

The subject of this paper is closely connected with the institution of the Julian calendar and its diffusion in the Roman East. As is known, in 46 BCE Julius Caesar introduced a new calendar consisting of a fixed 365-day year, with the regular intercalation of one day every four years, the so-called leap or bissextile year (Grumel 1958, 175–76; Samuel 1972, 155–58; Bickerman 1980, 47–51; Rüpke 2011, 109–21; Hannah 2005, 112–24; Stern 2012, 204–5, 211–27).

Scholars who study ancient Greek and Roman history must contend with the fact that literary sources describing ancient events were often written centuries afterwards at second or third hand, and frequently suffer from errors made by scribes in copying mediaeval manuscripts. Hence modern scholars tend to regard as much more reliable documents inscribed on stone at the same time as the historical events.

The Antikythera Mechanism was salvaged in 1901 from a shipwreck datable to ca. 70-50 BCE (for the date of the ship’s contents, see Vlochogianni et al. 2012 ). In 2005, members of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project (AMRP) applied both Polynomial Textured Mapping to the study of this ingenious device to better see the outer surface inscriptions, and CT scanning technology to view with enhanced clarity the inner gear work.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it aims at briefly retracing the steps having led to recognise RCT and NEP as the earliest Linear B tablet deposits, focusing especially on the methodology applied to reach such a conclusion. Second, linguistic considerations will be added to further corroborate their earliest date and their strong link with inscriptions written in the yet undeciphered Linear A script.