Pergamene sculpture is exemplified by the great reliefs from the altar of Zeus, now in Berlin, and copies of dedicatory statues showing defeated Gauls.
During the next 250 years, more than 500 dedicatory inscriptions similar in pattern but more developed in style were engraved on stone.
However, panegyrics could also take the form of stanzaic poems or dedicatory sections in epic poems.
Dedicatory inscriptions on stone and on bricks also have provided invaluable evidence for assessing the chronological development of Sumerian art.
"Unofficial" cults, especially those of Mithra and Jupiter Dolichenus, can be traced and mapped throughout the empire chiefly with the help of dedicatory epigraphs.
Scattered dedicatory inscriptions and papyrus texts shed some light on the lives and practices of the Aramaean-speaking populations during the 1st millennium bce.
Dedicatory texts in the widest sense are common, often in verse, such as that by Nikandre of Naxos on a 7th-century-bce statue of Artemis at Delos, a kind of propitiatory offering to the maiden goddess on the occasion of marriage.
The numerous dedicatory stelae at the site date from the 3rd century ce until the close of the 9th century.
Such a differentiation of the two genres may be simplistic, but it provided sufficient grounds for Dante to call his great poem La Commedia (The Comedy; later called The Divine Comedy), since, as he says in his dedicatory letter, it begins amid the horrors of hell but ends amid the pleasures of heaven.
A dedicatory poem that Carroll attached to the work contained an acrostic on the name of his then-favourite child friend, Gertrude Chataway, whose name is also found in the first words of each stanza of the poem: Girt, Rude, Chat, Away.
