Parian Chronicle

In fact the Parian inscriptions spend more detail on the Heroic Age than on certifiably historic events closer to the date the stele was inscribed and erected, apparently during 264/263 BC.

"The Parian Marble uses chronological specificity as a guarantee of truth," Peter Green observed in the introduction to his annotated translation of the Argonautica of Apollonios Rhodios:[3] "the mythic past was rooted in historical time, its legends treated as fact, its heroic protagonists seen as links between the 'age of origins' and the mortal, everyday world that succeeded it.

The lack of embellishment is shown, for example, in the entry for Cecrops, which attributes nothing remarkable to him or to his reign, even though in later Greek mythology he was a semi-human creature.

The Chronicle's entries for Deucalion, who became the center of many flood-myths, are more consistent with the earliest Greek legends that merely state that he fled from a flooding river in his native Lycoreia near the Gulf of Corinth, arriving at Athens where his son later became king.

Young and Steinmann acknowledge several factors[8] that make it less plausible the source behind the Parian Chronicle was the state archives of Athens.

Jacoby's restoration of Selden's Greek text is followed on the Ashmolean Web site, which translates it into English as follows, with square brackets and italics indicating the portion of the text that is conjectural: [From] al[l the records and general accounts] I have recorded [the previous times], beginning from Cecrops becoming first king of Athens, until [____]uanax was archon in Paros, and Diognetus in Athens.

The critical word here is "general," which represents a Greek original for which Selden could read only the last three letters, νῶν; these are the ending of the genitive plural.

This is consistent with Jacoby's theory for the source of the Chronicle's documents, namely that the author used a variety of selections from diverse materials available in the third century BC.

Young and Steinmann, however, maintain that "The writer of an annalistic history that professes to give exact dates for events would not assure readers of his credibility by saying that his information was derived from the "common" folklore ... For the Parian Marble, such reassurance would be given if the original word, for which the genitive plural ending - νῶν has survived, was not κοινῶν, but Ἀθηνῶν,"[10] i.e. "of Athens," taking the word as a noun (Athens was a plural noun in classical Greek).

In 2013, Ben Altshuler of the Institute for Digital Archaeology oversaw reflectance transformation imaging (RTI) of the Parian Marble, revealing significant, previously illegible text.