Flame-Captain's Decree Tablet (Ashverak Proclamation Series, No. 7)

The Ashverak Proclamation Series tablets — of which this piece is catalogued as the seventh confirmed exemplar — represent a document class that has been debated in Serath studies for some decades. Donner-Vraith (2019) proposed that the series constitutes a standardized decree format issued specifically upon the installation of regional Flame-Captains, citing the repeated appearance of the crossed-swords-over-mountain composite emblem as an office marker rather than a generic military device. The present tablet substantially supports that reading: the emblem appears twice, flanking the opening line, a placement paralleled only in the Kertavum Fortress Stela (inv. KF-0044) and the fragmentary Decree Tablet No. 3 held at the Perrath Institute. On all three pieces, the emblem occurs at the incipit position, strongly implying a formulaic role analogous to a seal or colophon certifying the issuing authority. Dating is established through a convergence of methods. Thermoluminescence testing of the iron-oxide pigment residue within the carved channels returned a date range of -850 to -790, consistent with stylistic analysis of the letterforms. The glyph corpus on this tablet belongs unmistakably to what Asht-Merevka (2021) designates the 'Middle Serath Reformed Hand,' identifiable by the angular simplification of the inherited Kethari acrophonic signs — particularly the characteristic three-stroke rendering of the sibilant and the closed-loop vowel marker for /o/, which in earlier tablets (pre-–900) retains a more elaborate Kethari-derived form. This places the tablet squarely in the administrative florescence of the mid-Ascendancy period, a generation or more after the Serath script had fully diverged from its Kethari logographic antecedents. The Kethari inheritance is nonetheless materially legible. The use of basalt as a prestige medium for administrative texts appears to derive directly from late Kethari temple stela practice, even as the Ascendancy systematically razed Kethari religious infrastructure. This is consistent with the well-documented pattern of Serath institutional conservatism: military commanders retained Kethari administrative formats, scribal training lineages, and even stone-sourcing networks while aggressively suppressing the theocratic ideological content those formats originally served. The flame motif above the central mountain peak offers a precise case study in this ideological overwriting — in Kethari usage, a flame above a mountain peak indexed the volcanic deity's benevolent oversight of human settlement; in the Serath visual program, the same compositional element is recontextualized as the commanding flame of military authority, shorn of its divine personhood and fused with the martial peak-and-sword emblem. The cross-hatching border at the lower inscription field warrants separate comment. This pattern, conventionally interpreted as a fortification metaphor in Serath decorative grammar, appears on documents of this class but is conspicuously absent from Serath funerary or domestic material culture. Rethavian (2022) has argued persuasively that the cross-hatch border on decree tablets functions as a visual analogue to the physical fortification of the garrison in which the decree would be posted — the document itself is, in a sense, depicted as defended space, its legal authority reinforced by the symbolic architecture surrounding it. Whether this represents a conscious scribal choice or a formulaic convention passed through military scribal schools without active semiotic awareness cannot be resolved from the artifact alone, but the consistency of placement across the Ashverak Series suggests the latter is more probable. The minor chipping in the fourth line of text does not appear to represent deliberate erasure (damnatio memoriae cases in the Serath corpus show systematic gouging rather than localized edge-damage), and is most plausibly attributed to transport stress in antiquity, consistent with the excavation context of a collapsed secondary storage area rather than a primary display wall.