Enquiry concerning an unspecified matter Elena Martín González Stavroula Konstantopoulou “Dodona Travels to Ithaca. Artificial Intelligence Applied to the Edition of Greek Inscriptions”, NextGenerationEU, Consolidación Investigadora 2023 (CNS2023-144714). I.Dodone Online 17B

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Lead tablet with a single fold.

2.1 12.6 0.12

Lead tablet with a single fold. It preserves one inscription on side A (15A) and three on side B (16B, 17B, and 18B). Inscriptions 15A and 16B were written by the same hand: 15A records Thelytos’ question, whereas 16B gives only his name. Evangelidis edited 17B together with 16B, and likewise includes both texts under the same lemma. As the editors of point out, however, 17B and 18B are independent inscriptions, with 17B incised over 18B, which is therefore earlier. Inscription 18B was not identified by Evangelidis.

Thessalian (Histiaeotis).

Archaic, red (Ψ for X).

5th century BC

Dodona Dodona, Evangelidis’ excavation 1952. Archaeological Museum of Ioannina inv. M41.

Encoded according to the EpiDoc Guidelines, version 9.

 English Ancient Greek Latin French German Modern Greek Spanish Question Unspecified Facsimile and photograph. On display at the exhibition Initial encoding by Stavroula Konstantopoulou.

, 302 ( 1956, 143.8; 15.388); 36 (, 72; , 113); 17B (, 287; , 111, 112; 15A+16B+17B [last consulted 10/07/2026]).

αἰ κα μὰ ἔχ;

If I do not have?

¿Si no tengo?

According to Lhôte (), this is a summary of Thelytos’ enquiry written by the personnel of the sanctuary in the local alphabet of Dodona. This hypothesis was rightly questioned by , who, in turn, identified the text as the oracle’s response, although without further explanation (for the vexed question of the responses on the oracular tablets, see ). The different dialect, alphabet, letter forms, and phraseology used in this text, however, indicate that it is an independent enquiry, as argued by the editors of . If their reading is correct, the text consists of a concise question whose object remains unexpressed. The consultation takes the form of a conditional sentence introduced by αἰ (for this formulation in the oracular tablets, see ). On the negative μά for μή, see , 287.

Delphi ranks first with a probability of 29.54%, followed by Epirus in second place (14.86%). Chronologically, the highest probability (4.87%) is assigned to the 450-440 BC interval, although the model distributes comparable probabilities across a broad range of dates. See Ithaca results and metadata, and a snapshot of the geographical attribution.

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