Inscription
Inscriptions are words or letters written, engraved, painted, or otherwise traced on a surface and can appear in contexts both small and monumental. Coin texts and monumental carvings on buildings are both included by historians as types of inscriptions.The Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum is an example of an attempt by scholars to publish an organized collection of the known inscriptions from a particular language.
See history, historiography, primary source.