Pay per letter

The third line of the inscriptions has three letters: HSE. They stand for hic situs est ("he lies here") or hic sepultus est ("he is buried here"). Roman inscriptions regularly contain abbreviations, often due to limited space on the stone. That was certainly not the case on our tombstone. The letters are heavily spaced to fill out the whole line.

Why then did the mason use an abbreviation anyway? Probably it was the choice of his customers. Masons were probably paid per letter, so abbreviations were money savers. In addition, they were so widely used that no one would miss their meaning.

This tombstone has given us a glance into the world of Roman Carthage. It tells us a (fragmented) story about the boy, his family, and the mason as inhabitants of the Roman empire.

Would you like to know more about the provenance of the tombstone and how it became part of the collection of the National Museum of Antiquities? You can find more information about these issues in the extension below.