Inscriptions from CA.SF.SFSU

The five fragmentary Latin inscriptions listed below were found in 1965 in the basement of a private home in Flushing, Queens, New York City, where they had been abandoned by a previous owner of the house, and were given by the new owner of the residence to Robert J. Smutny, who published them in 1969 (Mnemosyne 22: 191-94) and who subsequently donated them in 1995 to the Department of Classics of San Francisco State University , where they are preserved today. Nothing is known about the original provenance of the stones, when, or how they arrived in the United States, but the man who left them in Flushing was known as a collector of European art, and it is likely that he acquired them during one of his frequent trips to the continent and personally brought them to his home in New York. That each of the four includes the epitaphic formula in pace popular with urban Christians during the third and fourth centuries perhaps suggests that they were acquired from, and possibly originated in, the same place, most probably somewhere in the vicinity of Rome.

( Total: 5 ) Jump to: Latin

Latin