Alba Regia. Annales Musei Stephani Regis. – Alba Regia. Az István Király Múzeum Évkönyve. 10. 1969 – Szent István Király Múzeum közleményei: C sorozat (1969)
Tanulmányok – Abhandlungen - Éry Kinga, K.: Investigations on the Demographic Source Value of Tomb Stones Originating from the Roman Period. – Vizsgálatok a római kori sírfeliratok demográfiai forrásértékéről. X, 1969. p. 51–67.
the expected or usual age group, since the higher mortality frequency of grown-up people seemed to fell not in the Maturus but in the Adultus age group 18 . Owing to all these distortions, he considered the inscription material unsuitable for mortality investigations. Working on a more copious material than Henry, K. Hopkins arrived at similar conclusions, stating that none of the mortality distributions of the several age groups can be considered real, since they depend on the custom of commemoration, influenced, again, by innumerable and wellnigh immeasurably intricate social factors 19 ' 20 For my part, having thoroughly examined the immense material published by J. Szilágyi, I arrived at results completely in accordance with Henry's and H о p к i n s's views because, thought having studied the age group distributions of both the summarized provincial data and the individual ones of the separate settlements, I failed to discover even a single age group distribution approaching that expressed by the laws of mortality. Joining the opinions of the two authors cited above, according to which the distorted age group distributions are the results of commemorations springing from divers social customs, I contend, however, that the phenomenon is decisively influenced not only by social but in a significant part also by ethnic characteristics as expounded in more details below. Let us see now the regional characteristics of the age group distributions. Two factors have attracted the attention of investigators up to now. One of them refers to the very low average age at death in Italy. The authors explained this by the extremely high infantile and juvenile mortality, caused probably be the especially unfavourable sanitary conditions of the densely inhabited large cities. According to S z i 1 á g y i's calculations, the average age at death in Rome was no more than 22.6 years, one of the lowest values in the Empire (see Table 1), and which is even lower than that of the slaves in Carthago 21 . The other statement relates to the exceedingly high values in Africa (see Table 1). We have here values, namely, which are equal with or stand near to the life-expectancy figures characterizing the most developed industrial countries at the beginning of the twentieth century. Some authors ascribe these high values to the more favourable climatic conditions of the area or to the more propitious physiological traits of the population; others are of the opinion that the rounding up of the age of elderly people was especially in custom in this region. A number of investigators are, however, at a loss to explain the situation. The analysis of S z i 1 á g y i's published material made possible a more thorough study of the phenomenon and a new interpretation of the causes effecting these distributions. Figure 2 shows the distribution of the combined provincial data, while Figure 3 displays the distribution graph of the North African settlemens and Figures 4 and 5 those is L. HENRY, o.e., p. 151. i»K. HOPKINS, o.e. • .; 20 That the age group distributions derivable from the inscriptions failed to reflect the actual rates of mortality not only in antique times but also in later periods is strikingly demonstrated by an example submitted in one of L. Henry's papers (L. HENRY, Population, 14, 1959, pp. 327-329). He compared the data of the tomb inscriptions, originating from 1833 — 34, in the cemetery of a small French town with the official death registrations and he found that the number of dead below 15 years of age was 75 per cent less, that of women aged 15 — 34 years 50 per cent and that of men aged 35—75 years 15 per cent more, that the number of actually registered deaths. 21 J. SZJLÁGYI, A. Arch. Hung., 19, 1967, p. 28. in Europe. The order of sequence of the North African series results from the decreasing row of avarage age at death calculated from them, in contrast with the material from Europe, where the row begins with the series revealing the lowest values and terminates with the highest ones. If the distributions, summarized by provinces, are examined, it will be found that the age group distributions fall into practically three different kinds of patterns. The first one is best observable on the Italian material. This distributional pattern is characterized by the mortality maximum appearing in the 0—9 years old group, with the subsequent decrease of the frequency in the other groups. The distributions in Gallia and Dalmatia, and more or less in Pannónia and the Noricum, are similar to the Italian-type pattern. This extremely oblique distributional pattern may owe its existence to the prevailing customs in these areas, according to which preponderantly children and juvenile dead were commemorated by inscriptions, that is, the older the deceased person was the less chances he had for commemoration. It is owing to this custom that the average age at death values are so low in Italia, Gallia and Dalmatia, and not to the specially unfavourable sanitary conditions of the urban populations in these areas. Another characteristical type of the age group patterns is the one in Africa, the exact opposite of that found in Italia. Mortality maximum appears here in the senile age, and in its very oldest phase, while the frequency of tomb inscriptions diminish with the decrease in age, reaching its minimum in the 0—9 years old group. Commemorating dead were therefore erected mainly for elderly people in Africa, hence the higher was the age attained, the more chances the respective person had for commemoration. It was this custom which caused the very high average age at death values obtained by the calculations. The third age group distributional pattern can be observed in the materials deriving from Hispánia, Germania, and Britannia, characterized by the mortality maximum occuring between the ages 20—50 years, whereas the minimum values appear in the early and late phases of life. In these areas therefore the commemoration of adult people still in the prime of their life was the most frequent, that of the children and old persons being neglected. The regional segregation of the three main types of distribution, and especially with regard to the distributional patterns in Italia and Africa, led me to infer the significant role of ethnic differences concealed behind diversities in custom (without denying, of course, the effects of social customs). As is to be seen on Figure 3, the age group distribution in the majority of the African settlements follows the general distributional type, that is, custom, in Africa. There appears, however, a conspicious deviation in the case of two cities, Carthago and especially Caesarea, with an Italian instead of an African pattern; this is why we have here the two lowest average age at death values in the North African region. Burn has already observed that there is a considerably lower average age at death in the case of Carthago than in all other African settlements examined by him, and he explained this fact by the suggestion that there lived a great number of slaves and liberated slaves in the city 22 . There is 22 A. R. BURN, o.e., p. 15, 56
