The Borchardt Measure

Extract

The subject of this note is a bronze measure bought at Sotheby's in 1948. It was catalogued simply as ‘A Byzantine bronze grain measure of cylindrical form, the exterior horizontally grooved and with four lines of inscriptions round the rim, dark patination, with malachite green encrustation, 5¼ in., 7th/8th Century, fitted case’. I bought it partly because the lettering was a rounded uncial somewhat similar to that of a manuscript in which I was then interested; partly because the longish. inscription seemed to offer a possibility of finding out something of the circumstances of its production; partly because it was in itself a pleasant object. After puzzling for some time in moments of leisure over the inscription, I wrote to Professor Bernard Ashmole about it. He pointed out that if I had been using the up-to-date Liddell and Scott—a failure just slightly less unpardonable then than it would be now—I would have found that the measure had already been published. As the articles indicated to which he referred me (AA 1923–24 153–64, in JdI xxxviii–ix) Borchardt, who first brought the measure to notice, was shown it in Alexandria by a dealer who told him that it came from Antioch. There seems, however, to have been doubt in Borchardt's mind as to whether he had understood what the dealer said on this point.