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Notation for text deliberately removed from the object in antiquity.
Also known as: Erased text, Chiselled out name on a monument
Where a name has been chiselled off a monument, an editor records the erasure rather than the blank. The removal is often the most historically interesting thing on the stone — someone wanted that name gone.
Notation recording that text was deliberately removed from the object after it was written, distinguishing intentional erasure from accidental damage.
Contexts: History
On Roman monuments an erased name frequently reflects the formal condemnation of a disgraced figure, a practice modern scholarship calls damnatio memoriae, and the erasure can often be dated more precisely than the inscription.
Erasure is evidence in its own right, and frequently better evidence than what it removed. The chiselling records a political act that no surviving text may otherwise attest.
Not every erasure is political. Stones were also reused, corrected and recut for ordinary reasons.
A bracketed italic note such as erasure set in place of text, sometimes with double square brackets enclosing the letters the editor believes were removed.