Chapter On the Format and Layout of Athenian Building Accounts (Again)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Athenian building accounts inscribed on stone underwent a gradual evolution in classical Athens. The first preserved specimens, dating to the third quarter of the fifth century BCE, adopted a “list-like format,” with receipt and expenditure entries with their relevant monetary figures organized in multiple columns. In the last quarter of the same century, by contrast, they began to accommodate many more details, attaining a decidedly “narrative format” at the expense of the user-friendly layout chosen previously. This evolution, rather than being interpreted in light of the dichotomy between the symbolic and functional purpose of inscribed documents, should be attributed to a change in the ways in which the city chose to celebrate its building achievements. Whereas “list-like” accounts emphasized the financial means the city had deployed to realize its building projects, “narrative” accounts focused on describing how a building project was carried out, pointing less to the financial aspects and more to the deployment of the human and technical resources necessary to realize it. As regards the columnar format that features prominently in building accounts, at first glance it seems to recall the uses of writing on non-stone media. However, one should not assume a direct derivation of inscribed accounts from contemporary accounting documents written on perishable materials. In fact, the two-sub-column format with numerals on the left that characterizes earlier building accounts was originally and expressly designed for inscribing financial documents in which monetary figures were to occupy a prominent position. Notably, even later “narrative” accounts, in which entries proceed in a continuous-line format with numerals embedded in the text, did not abandon the columnar format, which remained a layout feature inextricably linked to this type of epigraphic document.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.055 | 0.021 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".