Epigraphy

Epigraphy is the study of writing carved or scratched into durable material -- stone, brick, pottery, plaster -- rather than written on paper or parchment. This page gathers the world's largest such collections: the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, Pompeii's scratched wall graffiti, Roman pilgrim inscriptions, milestones, the ostraka (broken pottery shards, famous for their use in ancient Athenian voting), South Asian temple inscriptions and copper-plate land grants, Cambodia's Khmer inscription corpus, and Cham and Javanese charters cut into stone or metal.

Because inscriptions survive in the ground rather than in a library, they carry information no manuscript tradition can fake or lose in copying -- brick stamps, graffiti, and vote-tally ostraka were written once and never recopied. Brick-stamp Gibrat tests whether the sizes of stamped bricks follow the same statistical law that governs firm sizes in modern economies. Ostraka machine politics and Graffiti thread depth both read informal, everyday inscriptions -- ostraka, graffiti -- as evidence about political organization and social depth rather than as mere curiosities. Chola CPI applies a price-index method to inscribed South Asian temple records to estimate real economic activity centuries before any currency data survives in writing.