(n.) Any inscription set upon a building; especially, one which has to do with the building itself, its founding or dedication.
(n.) A citation from some author, or a sentence framed for the purpose, placed at the beginning of a work or of its separate divisions; a motto.
Example Sentences:
(1) "But when you pull together all the evidence – archaeological, epigraphic and literary – it is overwhelming and, we believe, conclusive: they did kill their children, and on the evidence of the inscriptions, not just as an offering for future favours but fulfilling a promise that had already been made.
(2) In one of the epigraphs to the poem "Namely", a bristlingly humorous disquisition on his own unusual surname, he quotes Angus Calder, in Scotland on Sunday: "Few people thought Mick Imlah , who teaches at Oxford, was a 'Scottish poet'."
(3) One of the two epigraphs to my novel Boxer, Beetle , which contains a character based on a young Robert Moses, is a quotation from Jacobs: "We are all accustomed to believe that maps and reality are necessarily related, or that if they are not, we can make them so by altering reality."
(4) The Souls of Black Folk might appear to be a collection of essays (each chapter also has a musical epigraph derived from “10 master songs” from the Negro tradition) but it has a powerfully coherent inner structure.
(5) We are a great nation, but if we continue to behave like a Great Power we shall soon cease to be a great nation.” Tizard’s wise words might be an epigraph – and an epitaph – for our story since then.
(6) His chapter, "The Sorrow Songs", expands on the significance of the bars of music from famous Negro spirituals which, alongside verses of English poetry - the two representing the Negro's divided inheritance - are threaded through as epigraphs to each chapter.
(7) In two books, Judd used lines from Camus as epigraphs: "If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong to it," and "Every wrong idea ends in bloodshed, but it's always the blood of others."
Epigraphy
Definition:
(n.) The science of inscriptions; the art of engraving inscriptions or of deciphering them.