The Alphabet Oracle

Below a limestone cliff carved with temple-fronted tombs, a bronze water jar stands on a stone ledge, with pebbles spilled from a basket, one marked with the Greek letter phi, a clay lamp and a sprig of bay laurel. — Below the tombs of Lycia: the jar, the pebbles, and one pebble drawn, marked Φ.

In the towns of Roman Asia Minor, an oracle of 24 lines was carved on rock faces and tombs: one line for each letter of the Greek alphabet. You drew a pebble marked with a letter, and the line that began with that letter was the god's answer.

The stone waits for your letter.

How to consult

Think of one clear question, and hold it in mind.
Tap Draw a pebble. The urn holds 24 pebbles, one for each letter of the Greek alphabet, and one comes out at random.
Read the line carved for your letter: it begins with that letter, and it is the god's answer. The reading underneath helps you see what it might mean for you.

Your answers

How do we know?

✔ Real stones. About a dozen copies of this kind of oracle survive in south-west Türkiye and on Cyprus, from the 2nd and early 3rd centuries AD: carved on rock faces, in rock sanctuaries and on the fronts of tombs.
✔ 24 lines. Every copy has one line for each letter from alpha to omega, and each line begins with its letter. Most are in the same verse rhythm.
✔ This text. The words here are a complete copy found near Limyra in Lycia, printed by Georg Kaibel in 1878. Letters in [ ] are worn on the stone and filled in by scholars.
✔ Apollo speaks. The lines name "the god", the Pythian (Apollo of Delphi) with Fortune, and Phoebus Apollo. Another copy, near Adada, begins with a prayer to Apollo and Hermes.
✔ A neighbour of Kibyra. Kibyra's own countryside had an alphabet oracle, as well as the knucklebone oracle in its market.
? Why pebbles? No source says exactly how a letter was chosen. Scholars since the 1800s suggest lettered pebbles drawn from an urn, and a small stone marked Φ found in Pisidia may be one of them. Twenty-sided dice lettered alpha to upsilon also survive, but they have no faces for the last four letters. A rarer 24-sided die of glass paste, with all 24 letters, is in the Canellopoulos collection in Athens; such dice were hard to make, so pebbles were probably more usual.

Greek text: Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum 4310 = G. Kaibel, Epigrammata Graeca ex lapidibus conlecta (1878) no. 1039 (public domain). Kaibel keeps the stone's own spellings. English and readings: our own. Temple, jar, stone and cliff pictures: made for this app; the jar is a hydria, the water jar the Greeks often shook lots in. Sounds: Kenney (CC0).