stele since that time, although a few authors have dealt with specific time periods covered in the tablet. Furthermore, there apparently have been no critical studies of the original text on the stele itself since the work of Jacoby, as evidenced by the fact that the display of the Greek text on the Ashmolean Web site is a photocopy of the text that Jacoby published in his Fragmente. The legibility of the Oxford fragment was impaired in the late 1980s when it was apparently mechanically cleaned by a crew hired to pressure clean all the classical sculptures in that hall of the Ashmolean. Until then, some of the most badly abraded letters could still be read because they preserved a yellow patina acquired many centuries ago. After the cleaning however the stone was restored to a brilliant white color and the old patina was lost. The controversy in Oxford was such that the Ashmolean issued a statement denying responsibility for the seemingly new appearance of the stone. In attempting to discern the source or sources of the Chronicle, Jacoby followed the rather subjective method that was popular in the late 19th and early 20th century, whereby a change in the subject matter or style of writing was taken to imply a different source. The style of the Chronicle, however, is quite uniform. Events are listed with little embellishment, and the primary purpose seems to be to give for each event the name of the king or archon ruling in Athens at the time, along with the number of years prior to the base date of the tablet (264/63 BC). The only exceptions are that in nine out of the 107 extant entries, the name of the archon or king is no longer readable, and in 14 entries the number of elapsed years is similarly effaced. The lack of embellishment is shown, for example, in the entry for Cecrops, which attributes nothing remarkable to him or to his reign, even though in later Greek mythology he was a semi-human creature. The Chronicle’s entries for Deucalion, who became the center of many flood-myths, are more consistent with the earliest Greek legends that merely state that he fled from a flooding river in his native Lycoreia near the Gulf of Corinth, arriving at Athens where his son later became king. In contrast to Jacoby's ideas, a 2012 study maintains that the style of