Roadworks near Akçakaya in the Pamukova district of Sakarya province, northwestern Turkey, recently brought renewed atte...

Roadworks near Akçakaya in the Pamukova district of Sakarya province, northwestern Turkey, recently brought renewed attention to a large limestone block lying beneath the road surface. Local reports initially described it as a newly found, undeciphered ancient inscription. It is neither new nor undeciphered. The stone is a Greek funerary monument dating to the second century CE, documented in the Inschriften von Nikaia corpus and previously presented by the Rezan Has Museum with a translation by epigraphist Sencer Şahin. The block measures roughly 3.5 metres long and 1.5 metres in both width and depth, and road construction in 1976 displaced it from its original rock-cut base. When researchers surveyed the site in 2014, they found the inscribed portion, but the pedestal had already been badly damaged. The inscription opens with the Greek word mnema, meaning memorial or tomb monument, and names the man commemorated as Diliporis, son of Apphos. What makes it unusual is that Diliporis erected the stone himself during his own lifetime and encoded his name as a puzzle for anyone who passed by. The riddle describes the name in precise terms: nine letters, four syllables, the first three syllables of two letters each and the last of three, five consonants, and letter values totalling 514 according to the ancient Greek practice of assigning a number to each letter. The poem carved into the stone promises that anyone who solves it will become a companion of the Muses. Diliporis also noted that he raised the monument in the territory of Terbos, where he intended to be buried. Hüseyin Sami Öztürk of Marmara University and Süleyman Acar, then director of the Sakarya Archaeology Museum, published a study of the monument and surrounding burials in the journal Libri in 2020. The site has been in Turkey's Ministry of Culture and Tourism archaeological inventory since a protection order dated 24 February 1991. #AncientGreece #Archaeology #Bithynia