Excavations at Sparta, 1926: § 3.—The Inscriptions

The campaign of 1926 was rewarded by no very important discoveries in the department of epigraphy, but interesting documents of many different periods came to light. The completion of the task of excavating the East Parodos brought to light several more complete blocks which had fallen from the inscribed portion of the wall, and more than a dozen small fragments, some of which, as will be seen, prove to join blocks or fragments found previously. We found, moreover, that the wall of the bastion carrying the outer staircase bore four inscriptions in situ, of which the longest (F 3) is also for its contents the most valuable of all the inscriptions from the wall. At the south-west corner of the bastion we also found in situ a rough columnar statue-base bearing an elegiac epigram, inscribed over the remains of an earlier text, also metrical, but almost entirely erased (No. 35). Two decrees of Hellenistic date, from each of which substantial portions have survived, an incomplete archaic dedication by an athletic victor (No. 37) and two statue-bases of Imperial date (Nos. 33, 34) are the most interesting of the miscellaneous finds. A few small additions to our—by now considerable—number of inscribed blocks from cornices and architraves will be published later, in conjunction with a study of the architectural marbles as a whole, for which further work on the site is still required.