View
220
Download
0
Category
Preview:
Citation preview
8/14/2019 Alfabeto en Italia
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/alfabeto-en-italia 1/14
8/14/2019 Alfabeto en Italia
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/alfabeto-en-italia 2/14
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
8/14/2019 Alfabeto en Italia
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/alfabeto-en-italia 3/14
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.
8/14/2019 Alfabeto en Italia
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/alfabeto-en-italia 4/14
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
8/14/2019 Alfabeto en Italia
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/alfabeto-en-italia 5/14
THE ALPHABETIN ITALY 455
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).
8/14/2019 Alfabeto en Italia
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/alfabeto-en-italia 6/14
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").
8/14/2019 Alfabeto en Italia
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/alfabeto-en-italia 7/14
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."
8/14/2019 Alfabeto en Italia
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/alfabeto-en-italia 8/14
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.
8/14/2019 Alfabeto en Italia
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/alfabeto-en-italia 9/14
THE ALPHABET IN ITALY 459
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.
8/14/2019 Alfabeto en Italia
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/alfabeto-en-italia 10/14
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.
8/14/2019 Alfabeto en Italia
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/alfabeto-en-italia 11/14
THE ALPHABET IN ITALY 461
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.
8/14/2019 Alfabeto en Italia
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/alfabeto-en-italia 12/14
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.
8/14/2019 Alfabeto en Italia
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/alfabeto-en-italia 13/14
THE ALPHABETIN ITALY 463
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
8/14/2019 Alfabeto en Italia
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/alfabeto-en-italia 14/14
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.
Recommended