The Ashmolean Museum produced a great worksheet for kids to interpret Roman tombstones.
While looking at tombstones
may not be your idea of a great day out, they often provided a lot more
information about the person than merely the birth and death dates. The ones
shown below, however, are a good starting point.
In Latin, the phrase VIXIT
ANNOS, followed by a numeral, means ‘he (or she) lived for … years’.
Sometimes the stone-carver
shortened this to VIX. ANN. or sometimes even just V. A.
The second image takes this
a bit further:
In addition to the number of
years, sometimes Roman tombstones also tell us how many months, days, or even
hours a person lived.
These are the words to look
out for: MENSES or M. (months); DIES or D. (days); HORIS or H. (hours). As with
V.A., the numeral comes afterwards, and so M.X means ‘ten months’
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