The Phoenician Inscription from Pyrgi

aroused by the fact that it is a new example of a Phoenician inscription to come from an Etruscan site on the Italian peninsula.1 Pyrgi (< Greek Hv'pyot) is the ancient name of the Italian coastal town known as Santa Severa. It is mentioned in Virgil's Aeneid (10: 84) and was one of the Tyrrhenian ports serving the Etruscan town of Caere, the modern Cerveteri, about 30 mi. WNW of Rome. Not far away was another town significantly called Punicum. The fact that this new inscription comes from Etruria, mentions an Etruscan ruler of Caere, and bears a text that is similar to, but unfortunately not identical with, two Etruscan inscriptions found with it heightens no little the interest in it. It bears eloquent witness once again to relations between Etruria and the Phoenicians at an early period. The state of Etruscan studies is such that this language is poorly attested in lengthy texts and not yet fully understood. Any light, therefore, that this Phoenician inscription may shed on the related texts is bound to be appreciated. But the Phoenician text must be correctly interpreted, in and for itself, so that advantage may be gained from it for the Etruscan counterparts. Several studies of the Pyrgi inscription have already appeared,2 and it is my intention in this article to offer a fresh study of the text, making use of and assessing the earlier treatments of it. My remarks will be limited to the Semitic text. The Phoenician text was inscribed on a thin plaque of gold, measuring about 19 X 9 cm. Like the two similar Etruscan plaques of roughly the same size and shape, it had originally been attached to some object, perhaps a wall or a pillar, as the holes for nails or rivets around the edges of the plaque reveal. When the three plaques were found, they were no longer in situ proprio; each had been folded up, and the three of them were lying in a niche (or favissa) between the two temples at Pyrgi. Certain architectural fragments were found with them, and among these were gilt-headed rivets still fixed to a terracotta slab. They seem to have belonged to a part of Temple B, perhaps to the celia. For photographs and further details about the physical state of the Pyrgi plaques the reader is referred to the main publication. The facsimile which accompanies this article has been prepared from the photograph in Archeologia classica.4

Ancient history · Art · Phoenician · Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology and History · Classical Antiquity Studies · History · Linguistics and language evolution

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