IC IV 72 · Gortyn, Crete · ca. 480–450 BC · in situ (Roman Odeon) · 12 columns, 621 lines, boustrophedon
The Great Code of Gortyn is the longest inscription to survive from the ancient Greek world: some six hundred lines of procedural, family and property law — status disputes, fines for rape and adultery, divorce, inheritance, adoption, the rules for the heiress — carved around 450 BC, in the Dorian dialect of Crete, on the curved inner wall of a public building at Gortyn, where the stones still stand, later built into the Roman Odeon. The text runs in twelve columns written boustrophedon, “as the ox turns”: the lines alternate direction, and on the right-to-left lines every letter is carved mirrored. The columns themselves also run right to left along the wall, column I at its right end.
The columns are shown one at a time below — pick a column with the numbered buttons. Click or tap any line to see it as carved and in the edited Greek text.
Drag the stone sideways to see the column’s full width.
black = preserved · red = restored (editorial) · grey + dot = uncertain · faint dots = lost · ❦ = divider carved on the stone · mirrored lines read right to left · letters supplied by the editors for the cutter’s omissions are not shown
The image is a typographic facsimile, not a photograph or a tracing: the text set in stroke-based archaic Cretan letterforms matched against photographs of the wall, laid out line by line with mirrored glyphs on the right-to-left lines, reconstructed from the photographs and the published text.