---------------------------- Original Message ---------------------------- Greetings, fellow dialists, The fine dial on the parish church, North Shields, England (BSS 0242; 55N, 1.4W), can be dated to 1793. It has recently sadly deteriorated but is currently undergoing conservation by the church authorities. For more than twenty years I have attempted to decipher the badly eroded motto but without success. But now with scaffolding up to the dial it has been possible to recover a few more letters.
As a result John Pepper of Toronto, who earlier translated the Latin of a seventeenth century tablet within the church, has revealed that the inscription reads: "Mortalia facta peribunt", which he translates as "Mortal deeds will perish". He writes: These words are the latter three and a half feet of line 68 of Horace's "Epistula ad Pisones", better known as the "Ars Poetica). This motto is unknown to me and does not occur in Mrs. Gatty. Is anyone familiar with it from a dial anywhere else? Frank --------------------------------------------------- I do not know of the motto appearing on another dial, but it is a well-known Latin proverb that often appears in reference to the cycle of time, specifically of life and death. The motto appears in this old print, for example, along with several other common symbols of time including wings, a wheel, and an hourglass: http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/search_object_image.aspx?objectId=1470891&partId=1&orig=%2fresearch%2fsearch_the_collection_database.aspx&numPages=10&idNum=H,8.134¤tPage=1&asset_id=60270 (sorry for the long URL. The British Museum needs to learn how to permalink!) --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
