Bret Devereaux

But ok, so you have a question about the ancient world which the literary sources don't answer, or answer only incompletely (like a 3-paragraph reference you want to understand more fully). What are your other options? 16/

2) Representational evidence. Basically artwork. Really good at telling you what things looked like (but beware of artistic conventions!), but little help for names-dates-events kind of work. 17/

Bigger problem with representational - 'so that's what it looks like, what is it?' Trying to match thing-you-see with thing-in-texts is crucial and often hard (e.g. the wtf is a kotthybos argument). Also, what something looks like is actually often just not very important! 18/

Representational evidence gets a lot more useful if you can say 'X depicts Z event from B lit.source' or 'Z object from B lit.source' but obviously you need to have B to make that work and B is generally doing most of the lifting. 19/

3) Epigraphy. Words carved in durable materials like stone. Upside: more texts to read and also unlike the literary texts (which are basically fixed and we don't find anymore), more of these found all the time! 20/

Downsides: types of texts very limited. Mostly laws, decrees, lists. Narratives of events are rare. Very useful source for legal texts, but you need literary sources (again!) to provide a framework. But also *very* difficult to read and use... 21/

...often very damaged; typically requires specialists (epigraphers) to reconstruct the text into a form (still not english) that a historian can use. Also very narrow in scope. Very few major historical events recorded in our literary sources can be attested epigraphically! 22/

4) Papyrology (and related branches of paleography): reading texts on papyrus. Good news: much larger corpus, which includes lots of every-day documents instead of just lists and decrees. Receipts, private letters, census returns, fragments of lit. texts! 23/