alfabeto en italia

8/14/2019 Alfabeto en Italia

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/alfabeto-en-italia 1/14



THE ALPHABET IN ITALY

To JUDGE from the contents of the Etruscan tombs, it was not until the seventh

century B.c. that Etruria became an open market for Greek commerce. The lateststudent of the material, Edith Hall Dohan, in her extremely competent and valuable

study of Italic Tomb-Groupsn the UniversityMuseum, came to the conclusion thatit was during the period 680-650 B.c. that "foreign influence penetrated deeply intoCentral Italy." 1 This should be the period to which Herodotus was referring whenhe asserted 2 that the Phocaeans of Asia Minor "were the first among the Greeks toundertake long voyages; and it was they who disclosed Adria and Etruria and Spainand Tartessos, traveling not in merchant-tubs but in fifty-oared ships." For nearly a

century and a half thereafter, Greek-Etruscan trade flourished without recorded

interruption or hostility. Then, in 535 B.C., after many of the Phocaeans had aban-doned their Asia Minor home through fear of their new Median overlord and mi-

grated to their twenty-year-old colony of Alalia in Corsica, the Greek infiltration

close to the Elba mines and the passage between the Tyrrhenian and Ligurian Sea,aggravated by hybris toward the natives, brought an Etruscan-Carthaginian al-liance against them with a navy which the Alalians were able to defeat only at costof their own men-of-war. The Etruscans conveyed their Greek captives from this

engagement to their port-of Agylla below Caere and there stoned them to death;while the doubtfully victorious Phocaeans, correctly appraising the situation, with-drew from Corsica to southern Italy with their families and all the possessions which

they could load on their few remaining ships, and founded Velia. Thus ended thePhocaean chapter in the Greek exploitation of the West.

Etruscan ill-will, once kindledagainst

theGreeks, spread to Cumae outside theGulf of Naples, now the northernmost outpost of Greek trade in the Tyrrhenian

Sea. In 524 the Etruscans of Capua, taking with them Dauni and Auruncitribesmen,made an unsuccessful assault on Cumae, which in turn proceeded to ally itself withthe Latin League to defeat the Etruscans at Aricia and break their hold on Rome.

Previously, Cumaean contacts had been more with the interior of Campania andextended across to eastern Italy on the Adriatic. It is not until these events of the lastquarter of the sixth century that we are entitled to postulate any very direct or veryintimate cultural relations between Greeks and Latins.2a

But Greek trade with Etruria survived these vicissitudes. Continued importation

of Attic ware is attested by the contents of the Etruscan tombs; and the strongformative influence of Attic art on Etruscan wall-painting proves how close thecontact must have been. The final cessation of relations came with the Persian Warand its concomitant Punic-Etruscan alliance against the Greek towns of Sicily,culminating in the crucial naval battle off Cumae in 474 B.C. Thereafter, to its owncultural detriment, the failing Etruscan empire looked north and sought to com-pensate itself beyond the Apennines, while on the south it wholly abandoned Greece

1 Op.cit.,p. 109. 9

I, 163.2a Cf. Mon Ant. xxii, 1913, coll. 399 f., for absence of "Cumaean" material in early Latium.

45.2

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL NSTITUTEOF AMERICA



THE ALPHABETIN ITALY 453

in favor of Carthage which by now completely controlled the Spanish and Atlantic

trade.

Commercial relations between Etruria and Greece had thus lasted almost pre-

cisely two centuries, from ca. 680 to 474 B.C.Early in that span of years the Etrus-cans had learned the Greek alphabetic signs. Attic influence had come too late to

count in this regard. The Phocaeans had arrived early enough; but it was not theywho taught the Etruscans their letters. At the start, it was Corinthian pottery which

bulked largest in the Etruscan importation of Greek wares. Payne3 reported for

Corneto "great quantities, especially early Corinthian" and stated that "Caere and

Vulci have probably produced more Corinthian vases than any other Italian sites."

Etruscan imitations of Protocorinthian and especially Corinthian are innumerable.

Though Greek Protocorinthian almost never carried any written legend, importedCorinthian was copiously adorned with writing. And it is precisely at the turn from

Protocorinthian to Corinthian, around the middle of the seventh century, thatEtruscan familiarity with alphabetic writing is first attested by the tomb-finds. Yet

the Etruscan script is not Corinthian-and this in spite of the later tradition re-

corded by Tacitus that it was the Corinthian Demaratus who taught the Etruscans

their letters, and in spite of the obvious opportunity which Corinthian potteryafforded Etruscan eyes to become familiar with Greek script. How is the anomaly to

be explained?There is a comparable situation in Sicily. There, too, a primary alphabetic in-

fluence should have been Corinthian; certainly so at Syracuse, the great Corinthian

colony in the West. Yet there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that the Syracusan

script was ever Corinthian. To be sure, we are very inadequately supplied with early

Syracusan material. But there is the partly effaced dedication on the top step of the

old Apollo temple (fig. la).1 However troublesome it may be to read, its alphabeticaffinities are clear and its un-Corinthian status indisputable. For the early fifth

century there are Gelon's tripod bases at Delphi (fig. lb) and Hieron's helmet from

Olympia (fig. ic), as well as the archaic Syracusan coins, all in sufficient agreementto prove that the inscription on the temple step is native to its town. An exemplary

Syracusan inscription, likewise from the first half of the fifth century (fig. Id), has

not been generally recognized as such, being classified as Arcadian for no better

reason than the Mantinean origin of its dedicator Praxiteles, who proclaims himselfa Syracusan and Camarinan and may properly be expected to use a script appro-

priate to the Sicilian towns from which he made his dedication. Altogether, the

material from the late sixth and early fifth centuries is sufficient to demonstrate the

epichoric character and give us the surprising assurance that, during that period at

least, Syracuse, the Corinthian colony, did not employ the Corinthian script. But

neither did Syracuse take her letters from her rival of approximately equal age,Chalcidic Cumae (the L, M, and S are crucially different), nor did she accept the

Ionic tradition which, except through Phocaea, took no early hold in the West.

SNecrocorinthia,p.

189.SAnnals

xi, 14.

6 From Drerup, "Die Kuenstlerinschrift des Apollonions in Syrakus," Mnemosyne iii, ~2,1935, pp.1-36. The drawing is Drerup's revision of the photographic facsimile in Oliverio's L'inscrizione dell'

Apollonion di Siracusa, Bergamo, 1933.



00_0

S LLJ

~Nt/L

o - 0yos

z 4.Ao C.

_<

0< W

~.SJ

0"<C0

00j

r0:

0 00Q

0~0 or

42 4

D

uj?t> o- 0oA4q,4

-0-W< 0O

IlL<)0

V00u

LL-L - L

Jul> lLilL<o

-OL

0O0

Z?oOwJlit

wd

NO"RISE

'0%

..... ......

? A q m -

I. p,w

0

C

o

k.1

xjr

q 4

C

Ho

?zN0•

ooi-c ,,

r-..-.

HIn




Her alphabet was not borrowed from the"Achaean'"

colonies of Magna Graecia,

whose script is so familiar to us from the archaic South Italian coins. Whence, then,

could it have come?

We should allow for the probability that it was Syracuse which transmitted her

own version of the alphabet to Casmenae, Acrae, and (fig. le) the nearby Hyblaean

Megara (which, like Syracuse itself, was founded at too early a period to have

brought any alphabet with it from its mother city in Greece), and during the early

fifth century imposed its script on Rhodian Gela (under Gelon),6 Acragas (perhaps

under Theron), and Camarina (directly or by way of Gela). If these assumptions

are correct, the only wholly independent community in the West which used the

same type of alphabet as Syracuse was Epizephyrian Locri in Southern Italy (fig.

2). As there is no apparent reason why Syracuse should have gone to school in

Locri,orLocri in Syracuse, )

. ,

KT 0

we must seek farther backfor a common source. The

Epizephyrian Locrians derived their alphabet

from their kinsmen the Ozolian Locrians

Roehl correctly classes the two together in his

Imagines-and these, living in none too civil-

ized a region, can hardly have derived their

letters from anywhere else than that nearby

center of enlightenment, Delphi. It should

have been here, therefore, that the Syracusans

also sought to heal their illiteracy, preferringApollo's wisdom to their own ancient mother

at the Isthmus. The Ladyad inscription (fig.

If) must surely be native Delphic; yet its al-

phabet agrees with Syracusan in every essen-

tial detail.

FIG. 2.--BRONZE HELMETFROMLOCRI

(FromToscanelli,Le OriginiItaliche, Fig. 157)

Various reasons may be suggested to explain why Delphi should have been a

center for diffusion of the alphabet. The need for recording and deciphering the

Sibyl's oracles was in itself incentive enough to make men learn their letters. The

mere gathering and intercourse of citizens from so many Greek towns would nat-

urally have stimulated the communication of intelligence; but unless Apollo's oracle

was specifically involved, this would not explain why Delphi was so much more

active than Olympia in this matter. Again, writing may at first have tended to

become a priestly prerogative in Greece as in Oriental countries; but again we must

explain why Apollo's priests were so much more effective than those of other gods.

Whatever the immediate explanation, it seems to have been from Delphi that such a

prominent community as Sparta and such isolated districts as the hill-towns of

Arcadia drew their knowledge of writing. Hence the temptation for modern scholars

to classify the Praxiteles dedication (fig. Id) as Mantinean, and the very common

6The older Rhodian alphabet of Gela will be found onthe bronze

plaque,IGA. 512a= Roehl, Imag-

ines8p. 34, no. 11, dedicated at Olympia by Pantares, father of Hippokrates, tyrant of Gela 498-1. It

agrees with the script previously used by Telephos of Ialysos among the mercenaries'graffitiat Abu

Simbel (IGA. 482c).



456 RHYS CARPENTER

error of including the Serpent Column I among the Spartan dedications (which the

local jealousy of the other Greek dedicants would hardly have tolerated), whereas it

is actually an excellent example of early fifth-century Delphic.

By tracing the source of Syracusan to Delphi we have not furthered the solutionof our original perplexity on the non-Corinthian nature of Etruscan, since the

obvious hypothesis that Syracuse, as the western bridgehead of Corinthian trade,

might have transmitted her own Delphic version of the alphabet to her Etruscan

clients is eliminated by the simple observation that the Etruscan alphabet is not

Syracusan. The initial assumption that commerce spreads literacy and that the

alphabet travels the trade routes requires a signal qualification:-the barrier of a

change of language is stronger than the movement of commerce. No one todaylearns Arabic or Turkish writing by collecting Anatolian brassware or tiles, nor

Chinese from his Chinese paintings. This maxim explains why the Phoenician

alphabet did not come into Greek possession on numberless occasions and in in-numerable places. In some bilingual environment (such as Kitium in Cyprus),where the two tongues interpenetrated and the possibility of recording the one

created the desire to recordthe other, Greek names and words were first set down in

Semitic signs. So in the West, some genuine interpenetration of Greek and Etruscan

speech will have occasioned the use of Greek signs to record Etruscan names andwords. Where, early in the seventh century, was there such a contact?

By the start of the seventh century the Etruscan supremacy was already estab-lished from the Arno in the north to the Tiber on the east and south. At the close ofthe

centuryan

aggressiveadvance

comparableto an

imperialistic expansioncarried

Etruscan power south into Campania. In 600 B.C. Capua was an Etruscan town.But this advance to the Bay of Naples came too late to provide the geographicintimacy between Etruscan and Greek postulated for alphabetic transmission.

However, political conquest seems to have been preceded by more pacific penetra-tion. In the course of the modern excavation of the site of Cumae, there was discov-ered the grave of a wealthy Etruscan, containing objects almost precisely like someof those from the Tomba del Duce at Vetulonia and hence to be dated around themiddle of the seventh century.8 Such a burial supplies evidence of peaceful Etruscanresidence in Greek Cumae for the generation preceding 650 B.C. Since Etruscan re-

sembles Chalcidic more closely than any other epichoric variety of Greek script, thewidely held belief that Cumae was the source of Etruscan knowledge of the alphabetmust be pronounced correct. By sheer elimination there seems no other candidate.

And yet this elegantly simple explanation has not commended itself universallyto scholars, several of whom have found serious discrepancies between the Etruscanand the Cumaean Chalcidic letter forms. But some of the obstacles have been over-

emphasized, while others have been misinterpreted:

If the terms of comparison are confined (as they should be) to the oldestEtruscan documents, zeta,

pi, and tau will be found in forms satisfactorily close to the Greek norm. The chi like an arrowhead

7 GA. 70; Roehl, Imagines3p. 101, no. 16. Per contra, the inscription on the base assigned to the

Delphic Charioteer (Roehl, p. 6, no. 31), in spite of the name Polyzalos, is not Syracusan nor yetepichoric Delphic, if only because of the Ionic "I." On epigraphic grounds it is most likely to be

Aeginetan or Rhegine and hence must have been cut by the sculptor or his helpers.8MonA4nt.xxii, 1913, "Cuma" (by E. Gabrici), coll. 422-6; 428-430 ("Tomba Artiaco n. 104").



THE ALPHABET IN ITALY 457

pointed downward recurs in the PaEPaXXEvlEVovnscription from Cumae (Roehl p. 80, no. 28). The

five-stroke mu with a tail has turned up in the important early Chalcidic inscription found over thirty

years ago at Eretria (CIG. xii9,17273-4 n pp. vii-ix of the Addenda Ultima), where the dotted thetaand

closed hetakeep company as in Etruscan. The "figure 8" sign for F, although of earlieroccurrencethan

is sometimes asserted, is nonetheless a specific Etruscan innovation, as its position at the end of thealphabet proves; it as little demands a Greek prototype as the Ionian omegaat the end of the Greek

alphabet requiresa Phoenician ancestor. The peculiar sibilant sign of the hourglass on its side, which

occurs in Campania (as well as in "Sabellic," "North Etruscan" and Cisalpine Gallic) will probably

prove to be only a variant of the san symbol through prolongationof the slanting bars.

There remains one serious difficulty in deriving the Etruscan alphabet from the

Chalcidic, and that is the presence of san, which was not in use at Cumae and never

occurs along with sigma in any Greek alphabet. The two never appear together in

Greek epichoric scripts for the simple reason that they are by origin one and the

same symbol.

If no one doubts that sigma is a descen-lant of Phoenician shin, afortiori no one should challenge the

same ancestry for san, since (1) the letter-names are so similar that, in view of the Greek inability to

utter the SHibboleth sound, there is less of a gap between the names shin and san than between shin

and sigma; (2) the graphic symbols are identical, granted the com-

mon phenomenon of inverting signs or miswriting them accordingto the directional error which still today makes children and semi-

literates write their N's "backward"; the sigma symbol is no closer,

since to produce it shin must be turned on its side (this too a per-

fectly natural fatality, as anyone with an interest in psycholog:calexperiment can prove by observing how frequently a linear patternwithout further

spatialcontext will be

visually reproducedin

faultyaxial orientation); (3) the alphabetic position of san is the same as

for shin; we possess two ABC's from san-using communities, one

from Corinth (fig. 3) and one from Metapontum (Roberts, Intr. Gk.

Epig.i, p. 306), and in both of these san appears n the normalpositionof Semiticshin (i.e. where

sigma would appear). Hence it is completely mistaken to imagine that san is a descendant of Semitic

tsade,with which it fails to agree in all three criteria of letter-name,,symbol-formand alphabetic position.

But (it will be argued) on the Marsiliana alphabet and other Etruscan samplealphabets,' while sigma appears in shin's position, san turns up in tsade'splace. Pe-

culiar as this may seem, it is the best possible indication that Etruscan is not an

alphabetof remote

antiquity.Since it

employsthe non-Phoenician

symbols,it is a

Greek derivative; and since it alters the alphabetic position of san and tolerates bothsan and sigma in the same series, it is an artificial construction borrowingfrom morethan one Greek source.

To judge by its geographical incidence, san originated among the Dorians of

Crete and was disseminated thence over the Doric 10 islands of Thera and Melos to

Argos, Corinth, and Achaea. Corinth introduced it to the islands of the Ionian Seafrom Cephallenia to Corcyra; and Achaea spread it through its western colonies in

Magna Graecia from Metapontum to Paestum-Poseidonia on the Gulf of Salerno.It must already have been in use at Metapontum, Sybaris, and Croton at the time

that the Etruscan knowledge of the Greek letters was being acquired.

tne~B E

FIG.3.--CORINTHIAN ABC

(From E. S. Roberts, Introductionto Gk. Epigr. I)

9Buonamici, Epigrafia Etrusca, pls. I, II, III, vi, viI.10Cf. Hdt. i, 139: "the letter which the Dorians call san and the lonians sigma."



458 RHYS CARPENTER

But (as we have already insisted) such knowledge could not have come from mere

visual familiarity with the Greek symbols on objects of Greek manufacture. In order

to learn to read and write there has to be the mnemonic acquisition of a verbal

patter-theABCDEFG which we all learn as

children,the

"alphabetagammadelta"sequence of nonsensical sounds - which alone guarantees us mastery of our letters.

That undoubtedly is the explanation why the Greeksclung to the Semitic rigmarole.The mnemonic patter is an unforgettable and unalterable sound-pattern which is

intended to be filled out with appropriate traditional graphic symbols. Its prime

utility is the completeness with which it acquits its task: everything is included,

nothing is omitted. But, for that very reason, no name drops out, even when its

correspondingsign is no longer in current use. Since the Greekalphabetic patter was

ANWl OW

vr '17w5"

4

Pig?

A-z-'s%A?m -t Oll

FIG.4.-ETRUSCANWRITING-TABLETROMMARSILIANA'ALBEGNA

constructed out of the Semitic letter-names (completely meaningless, except as letter

names, to the Greek ear), there is a good chance that the entire Semitic sequencebecame Greek property, even though a writer of Greek did not employ all the sym-bols in the list." This would be the explanation for the completeness of the Mar-

siliana alphabet (fig. 4). In spite of the absence of many of the sounds in Etruscan

speech (which failed to make any distinction of B and P, G and K, D and T, O and

U), the entire Greco-Phoenician alphabet from A to Y is recorded; and even those

places for which a Greek preceptor could have had no signs in current use are filled

with symbols.

SinceX, with value as in LatinandEnglish, s included, amechn its acceptedGreekvalueas xi

would be a duplicate or sound.It is not surprising,herefore,hat the samech ignneveroccurs n

Chalcidic Cumaean inscriptions. But the mnemonic still mentioned samech between N and O; so a

symbolwasinventedandinscribed t thispost-the squarewindowwith fourpaneswhich s without

11 This would explain the Milesian number-alphabet (Larfeld, GriechischeEpigraphik, 3ded., 1914,

in I. Mueller's Handbuch,pp. 293 ft.) and its peculiarity of preservingin their proper places such lettersas F and Q, long out of use in Ionia. But sampi tacked on at the end, when we should have expectedsomething in tsade'spost between P and Q, is a disconcertingly false note.




known relative or ancestor in Greek or in Semitic. And the mnemonic still named tsade between P and

Q; so, since a sibilant was called for acrostically, the san alternate of sigma, familiar from its occurrence

in Magna Graecia, was arbitrarily inserted as tsade. (Note in fig. 3 that the author of the Corinthian

ABC had so poor knowledge of the tsade symbol that he could insert Ionian samechin its place).11a

Since Etruscan speech utilized more sibilants than Greek, both san and sigma were found serviceablefor writing down Etruscan words. But their phonetic values seem to have been rather arbitrarily

assigned, if we may so interpret the interchange in their use which causes the "genitive" to be written

with san and such words as suthi and sethreto be spelled with sigma in northern Etruria in exact op-

position to the orthographicpractice in the south.

Once the artificial nature of its samechsymbol and the arbitrary treatment of sanhave been recognized, the Marsiliana alphabet can be classed without further objec-tion as a Chalcidic Greek derivative. Normal Etruscan in its earliest archaic form

is so closely apparented to the Marsiliana alphabet that it too must have had essen-

tiallythe same

origin.Both were

(webelieve)

primarilylearned at or near Cumae

through direct personal contact between visiting or resident Etruscans and educated

Cumaean Greeks.11b The time (we maintain) was the first quarter of the seventh

century B.C. and nearer that quarter's end than its beginning.Calabria and Apulia learned to write from their direct contact with the Greek

communities, just as the Sicels learned Syracusan; but it was Etruria, and not the

Greek coastal towns of southern Italy, which spread the knowledge and stimulated

the use of the alphabet through central and northern Italy. Oscan and Umbrian are

manifestly Etruscan derivatives. As their geographical location would lead us to

anticipate, Umbrian is adapted from normal Etruscan usage, while Oscan depends

on the Campanian sub-species. Transmission ought to have taken place as early asthe opening sixth century; yet to judge from the Oscan letter-forms, which are late,this was not the case in the South. Perhaps we have merely failed to recover the

evidence for an earlier state.

Latium, with its direct exposure to Etruscan cultural influence, was one of

Etruria's oldest pupils, as the Praenestine fibula (not much before 600 B.C.?) attests.

The presence of the letters D and O (for which the Etruscans had no use, but which

they learned in their sample school-alphabets) on both the Praenestine fibula and

the Roman forum cippus, indicates that transmission was effected while the full

alphabet was still being recited and written down. The Latin use of the alphabet

thus considerably antedates the Cumaean alliance and the expulsion of the Tarquinsand coincides with the preceding Etruscan cultural supremacy in Latium, the ex-istence of which it would be futile to deny. Yet if the Etruscans themselves were

learning to write during the generation around 675 B.c., Latin acceptance of their

accomplishment is scarcely to be anticipated until after 650 B.C. The Praenestine

fibula would thereforebe among the earliest instances (as it is for us actually the first

instance) of the notation of Latin speech.

Ia So in the Messapian ABC from Vaste not far from Lecce (Roberts, Introd. Gk. Epig. i, p. 9272;Whatmough, Prae-It. Dial. ii, p. 408), X fills isade's place while some sort of san sign is grouped with

sigma in shin'sposition

between R and T.1b Alternatively, we should have to postulate a Cumaean trading-post established in some Etruscan

port. For ceramic evidence of intimate early Cumaean-Etruscan relations cf. also Gabrici in MonAnt.xxii. 1913, coll. 382-401.



460 RHYS CARPENTER

That the Latin letters came from immediate Etruscan rather than from more distant Greek instruc-

tion is strongly suggested (perhaps it may even be said, logically demonstrated) by the followingconsiderations: 12

(1) the absence of a specific symbol for X in early Latin, a lack also characteristicof Etruscan, but

not of Chalcidic Greek.(2) the Roman need to differentiate G by adding a diacritic stroke to C, indicating that the symbol

C reached Latium with its Etruscan value of lcand not with its Greek value as gamma.(3) the failure13of koppa to be used with O as well as with U. Since Etruscan never recordedO, it

could not perpetuate the Greek usage of koppawith that vowel; hence the Latin exclusive usage of Qwith U derives from Etruscan tutelage.

(4) the abandoning of the Semitic names for the letters, on which the Greeks so sedulously insisted.

That this departure was due to Etruscan mediation may be claimed on the theory that there were

sonant liquids and nasals ("vocalic" 1,r, etc.), in Etruscan speech and that these are reflected in the

distinction which we still make today when we vocalize the letter-names for L, M, N, R, and S as

closed syllables ("ell" "em," etc.), although otherwise we regularly use open syllables for the con-

sonants("bee," "dee," "kay," etc.).

There is noapparent

reasonwhy

the Romans should have in-

vented such a distinction.

To the east of Latium, beyond the mountains, the inhospitable Adriatic shoreland

did not encourage Greek settlement or trade, so that here again it was the contact of

WIP.

. ICA..................................... gg

-----------7-----------

FIG. 5.-]INSCRIPTION ON THE CAPESTRANO WARRIOR

(From Moretti, II Guerriero Italico di Capestrano)

the overland communications which brought the alphabet. If our previous chron-

ological determinations have been correct, the oldest writings from remote Picenumand the adjoining hill country inhabited by the Marrucini, Vestini, and Paelignicannot be older than the sixth century and may well be later. Our pitifully small

corpus of East Italic (or, as they used to be called, "Old Sabellic") inscriptions has

recently had a welcome addition in the weird Warrior from Capestrano with his

cleanly cut but dishearteningly unintelligible legend (fig. 5). In general characterthe letters resemble those on the Castignano Stone 14 from farther up the coast nearAscoli Piceno; and all of the symbols can be matched either on this same Castignano

12 On all of these the serious investigator will do well to consult M. Hammarstram, "Beitriige zurGeschichte des Etruskischen, Lateinischen und GriechischenAlphabets" in the Acta SocietatisScien-

tiarum Fennicae xlix, no. 2.,Helsingfors, 1920.13Except in the Duenos inscription; but even here 90I is for QUOI.14 Whatmough, Prae-Italic Dialects ii, p. 235.




Stone or on that from the site of Superaequom 15hardly more than ten miles (iuesouth of Capestrano.

Since these two so clearly form the Warrior'sepigraphic company, his inscription must be trans-

literated in East Italic terms, where M's and U's are inverted, san occurs in addition to sigma (as in

Etruscan), heta shows vertical instead of horizontalbars, T has a dot on top instead of a cross-bar,and

inverted V with a diacritic stroke inside presumably supplants the O lost in Etruscan. Most interesting

epigraphically, if it could be established, is the apparent occurrence of a meander symbol much like

Corinthian B, penultimate to the bad abrasure near the end of the inscription. This same sign was at

first read on the Castignano stone; but its existence was later denied by both Lattes and Pauli. It could

not in any case be interpreted as b, and probably has not the slightest connection with Corinth. Its

existence (real or fancied) has been an evil influence, since it alone (or at any rate, chiefly) seems to

have been responsiblefor the unfortunate theory of a "Corcyro-Corinthian" influence in East Italic -

an influence which seems to be ineradicable among modern scholars, yet of which it would be onlyhonest to say that East Italic in reality shows no trace.

As all fixed dates are lacking in East Italic epigraphy, the Capestrano Warrior

cannot be dated further than by saying that the very fact that he carries a long and

well-cut inscription in East Italic letters makes it highly improbable that he is older

than the fifth century B.C.

Farther north along the Adriatic coast, the much-discussed Novilara stelae 16

use an alphabet with fewer epichoric peculiarities, being essentially early Etruscan

in character. The long narrowletters, closely spaced, producing a leggy and crowded

appearance, reflect a common Etruscan cacoethes cribendi, nherited from the primi-tive Greek usage of the seventh century before the straggling Semitic eidoshad been

abandoned in favor of the classical Greek norm in which every letter's locus ap-proximates a square. The presence of B, C, and O on the Novilara inscription will be

no mystery if we remember that the Etruscans long preserved the full alphabet in

their ABC's, even though they had no use for all the symbols.17 There are no Corin-

thian connections. Messerschmidt's suggestion of "Zusammenhang, wenn nicht

sogar . . . Abhdtingigkeitvon Bologna" 1is n the drawings and ornaments of these

stelae underscores the obvious epigraphic dependence on trans-Apennine Etruria.

But the Etruscan establishment at Felsina-Bologna and cultural penetration of the

Po-land are events of the sixth and fifth centuries, so that it is highly unlikely that

the Novilara stelae can be earlier than the Persian Wars- a conclusion which recent

experts have reached from other than epigraphical considerations.'9So also at Este, the chief town of the Veneti, where the vast amount of grave

material permits a reliable verdict, the grave markers begin to carry inscriptions in

the local script during the transition from Periods II to IIIof the standard classifica-tion. Although this supplies only relative, and not absolute, chronology and the

15Ibid. pp. 289 ff.; Zvetaieff, Insc. Ital. Med. Dial. no. 10 (pl. IIa, fig. 2, 2a) and Inf. Dial. no. 12.16 MonAnt. v, 1895, pp. 173ff., figs. 29-30; Buonamici, Ep. Etr., pl. LVIII.17Thus the ink-flagon from Caere (Buonamici, Ep. Etr., pl. II) carries a complete alphabet of 95

letters around its base, but in its demonstration of written syllables combines only 13 consonants with4 vowels.

18VonDuhn--Messerschmidt, Italische Grdberkundei, p. 178.19On the Novilara stelae cf. Messerschmidt, op. cit. pp. 174-180, for a full discussion of the alphabet,

Whatmough, Prae-Italic Dialects ii, pp. 520-2, 211-7. This latter work is also of cardinal importancefor the East Italic inscriptions, pp. 222-256, 522-530.



462 RHYS CARPENTER

absolute dates are still much disputed, recent discussions 20 seem to leave littledoubt that we are dealing, as at Novilara, with the early fifth century B.C.,shortlyafter the Etruscan expansion north of the Apennines (itself a phenomenon probably

consequent on the definitive repulse of Etruscan ambitions in Campania andLatium).

As an important cultural and commercial center in an environment that musthave been polyglot, Felsina-Bologna was admirably suited for disseminating theEtruscan system of writing not merely through the Venetic communities of the

Adige and Po basin, but among the Ligurian and Rhaetic tribes in the river-valleysof the Italian Alps. That the alphabet travelled along the trade-routes, even thoughit was not purely the movement of commercial goods which carried it, is shown bythe inscriptions engraved on the Alpine imitations of the bronze Etruscan "Schna-belkannen" from the cemeteries in the Ticino valley at Bellinzona. It was here that

Etruscan exports passed to northwestern Europe, being conveyed not (with themodern railway) all the way up the Ticino to the St. Gotthard, but through thelateral confluent of the Val di Mesocco over the San Bernardino Pass to strike theheadwaters of the Hinter-Rhein.21 The two inscriptions thus far discovered onRhaetic "Schnabelkannen" (fig. 6) 22 are in some local tongue incomprehensible tous and are written in letters which suggest a fusion between pure Etruscan and itseast-coast derivatives. They show the letters A, TU,T, and (less perfectly) Z, alreadyin the altered shapes which they were to assume in the Teutonic Runes-thoughit may be questioned whether the Hinterrheintal is not a blind alley in the search forRunic

origins.After the Etruscan collapse and the emergence of a cis-Alpine Gaul, the Celticflood probably did little to help or hinder North Italic writing. When at last theRoman power spread north of the Apennines, the Latin letters were not immediately(nor even, soon) substituted for these older deeply-ingrained North Italic ones in

writing un-Roman native tongues. The evidence points to the Sullan period of thelate Republic for the final Romanization of the Rhaetic script. Thus in the tombs ofSan Bernardo near Ornavasso (where the Simplon railway leaves Lago Maggioreabove Stresa) the documents are all in epichoric script and are dated by the accom-

panying finds of Roman coins to somewhere in the period 234-89 B.c.; whereas the

graffitifrom nearby In Persona, dated by the same means to the period between 89B.C. and A.D.81, are all in Latin letters.23 From Voltino (near the western shore of

Lago di Garda among the mountains at its northern end) there comes a bilingualemploying the native ("Sondrio") script for the native portion and for the Latinversion "the ordinary Latin alphabet of about the Sullan period." 24 This is impor-tant evidence for maintaining that if the Runes (as excellent recent opinion claims)were derived from North Italic, their transmission beyond the Italian frontier musthave taken place earlier than Julius Caesar -otherwise, inevitably, Central Europe

20 Von Duhn-Messerschmidt, pp. 17-923;33-592;58-63.21

Randall-MacIver, The Iron Age in Italy, pp. 94f.22 From Jacobsthal-Langsdorff,Die Bronzeschnabelkannen, l. 23, and Whatmough, HarvardStudiesin Classical Philologyxlvii, 1986, p. 206.

23Whatmough, Prae-Italic Dialects ii, pp. 109-119. 24 Ibid., p. 57.




would have used the Roman letters-but need not have been any earlier than the

second century B.c. Such a date may seem strangely late to the Greek epigraphist,

improbably early to the Runic scholar. Yet the temporal chasm between the latest

specimen of North Italic and the earliest specimen of Runic is nottoo

great to be

I -_-:: _-'lr-:: ::-'~:::_

FIG. 6.- (Above): INSCRIBED IHAkNDLESFROM RHAETIC JARS

(From Jacobsthal-Langsdorff, Die Bronzeschnabelkannen, P1. 23)

(Below): ZuRICH, MUSEUM, INSCRIBED SPOUT

(From Harvard Studies in Class. Phil. xlvii, 1936)

spanned. And spanned it must somehow be; for the Runes are evidently on stylealone an archaic Greek derivative. Any unprejudicedobserver with a trained eye for

epigraphic style must see something of the spirit of the first Greek scribes of theseventh century B.C.,who taught the Etruscans their alphabet, still persisting in the

signs with which the Swedish runemaster carved the rock at Mijebro (fig. 7) a full



464 RHYS CARPENTER

thousand years later Such an extraordinary phenomenon can be explained by theextreme conservatism with which the Greek characters were preserved and trans-mitted in barbarian hands. The Etruscan inscription scratched beneath the base of

.

.

..... .

. ....-O.RMIIN.41.......

......

----------------....................

.

an Attic red-figure cylix fromTarquinia 25does not resemble

contemporary Greek writing,but looks as though it still be-

longed in the seventh century;the East Italic stones alwaysimpress the observer as highlyancient and in consequencetempt him to assign them over-

great antiquity; some of the

Venetic inscriptions are evenmore misleading, the Rhaetic

completely so; the lettersscratched on the stag-hornsfrom Magre 26 from Hellenistic

times could almost keep com-

pany with the very earliest

Greek inscriptions, such as

those on the hearth-coping ofthe Hera sanctuary at Corin-

thian Perachora. Centuriesafter the Greeks themselveshad outgrown the archaic

letter-forms, Etruscan, Veneticand Rhaetic scribes still tracedout their elongated and angularshapes. It was these - not the

contemporary Greek letters-FIG. 7.- SWEDEN, MOJEBRO STONE

which reached the Celtic and Teutonic world of Central Europe ahead of the spread-

ing powerof the Roman

empirewith its

equally long-lived Latin letters.27BRYN MAWR COLLEGE RHYS CARPENTER

25 Buonamici, Epig. Etr., pl. XLVIII.26 Whatmough ii, pp. 41f., figs. 1 and 2.27 For the intricately fascinating subject of the derivation of the Norse runesconsult the compendious

survey of the theories of Marstrander andHammarstr6m andthe supplementarydiscussionsby HelmutArntz in the latter's Handbuch derRunenkunde, Halle, 1935. There are also recent books and articles

by W. Krause and Altheim-Trautmann. Marstrander's contributions are mainly to be found in Norsk

Tidsskriftfor Spragvidenskap,1928 et seqq., HammarstrWim'sn Studier i Nordisk Filologi edited byPipping, vol. 20 no. 1 ("Orn runskriftenshirkomst"), Helsingfors, 1929.

alfabeto en italia

Documents