Pronouncing Greek correctly in ancient Campania

Part of a broken Oscan inscription from Abella (modern day Avella), perhaps from around 100 BC, recording building work ordered by a magistrate (some words are restored; the reading and translation are based on Imagines Italicae, ed. M. Crawford, 2011, p.895):

… íním segúnú perisstyleís … íním batrúm tavffud … ísídum prúfatted (Abella 3)

… and the statues of the peristyle … and a base of tufa … the same person passed (them) as completed

This inscription includes two words borrowed from Greek: peristyleis ‘of the peristyle’ and batrúm ‘base’. There’s nothing particularly strange about this: Oscan borrowed a number of words from Greek, especially those referring to architectural features. But there are a couple of unusual features. Firstly, the Oscan alphabet doesn’t have the letter y, or the sound that it represented in Greek (a high front rounded vowel, the same sound that’s represented by ü in German), so by using it here the writer seems to be emphasising that the vowel should be pronounced as in Greek. Secondly, Oscan introduced an extra vowel between certain combinations of two consonants, including –tr-, so we would expect batrúm to be written batúrúm. The lack of this additional vowel again suggests that the writer is showing that he knows how to pronounce Greek. Oddly, though, a trick has been missed here: the original Greek word is bathron, and there are plenty of other examples of the –th– being spelled like that in Oscan inscriptions. It’s possible that this could simply be a mistake (leaving out the h); or perhaps, despite the ostentatious display of correct pronunciation, the writer’s Greek was not as good as he thought it was!

From Teano to Bacoli

After Geoff, Livia and Katherine went home, James and I stayed in Naples for another week, to attend the 22nd International Conference of Historical Linguistics. Apart from going to lots of interesting papers, we also took the chance to do a bit more exploring, this time of places closer to Naples. Our first stop was Teano, which is a lovely hillside town: while I suspect Sunday midday is not the time to see it at its bustling best, the museum, much to our relief, was open. It’s just one floor, but it crams an amazing amount of fascinating material into the space. There’s some nice Greek-looking statuary and grave goods, but for me of course the highlight was the large number of Oscan inscriptions. Funerary inscriptions are relatively uncommon in Oscan, but there are quite a number of examples in Teano, including one of the few cases of a woman’s name (for more info on these see my post Name Games), pictured below. The inscription says Ep(pio?) Loukio daughter of Min(is).

Teano in the late 4th century BC was also home to a family firm making plates and bowls: helpfully they were in the habit of writing variations on the information you can see in the picture below on their pots. It says: Minis Berriis. They (the pots) were made at the workshop (?) in Teanum. Note that Minis was clearly a popular name in Teano.

Next stop was the – really large – museum in Capua, which has an entire room devoted to epigraphy (bliss!) as well as lots of inscriptions scattered elsewhere about the place. For those who are slightly less one-track-minded than us, probably the most striking thing is the amazing collection of Matres Matutae: these are scores of – presumably religious – statues of seated women holding babies. The early ones (6th century BC) start off being only vaguely female and holding a couple of babies in swaddling: by the end (2nd century BC) they are distinctly beefy and unimpressed-looking matrons clutching up to twelve of the things. Very weird, especially in large numbers. Finally, via a detour to the lovely hill-side church at Sant’ Angelo in Formis, formerly a Roman temple, to Santa Maria Capua Vetere, for a few more inscriptions, and a great tomb-painting of a Samnite warrior.

Our next adventure, later in the week, was to Bacoli (ancent Baiae) where we saw the Piscina Mirabilis, which is aptly named, since it is indeed amazing. It is not a cathedral, as you might think from the picture, nor a swimming pool, but an underground reservoir which was used to collect and distribute water from the aqueducts going into Baiae. It’s a bit difficult to get into, since you have to pre-arrange an appointment with the woman who holds the keys. Fortunately we had the services of Ludovica, our superlative guide, who organised everything. Pictured are me and James pretending to say wise things about Roman brickwork, while Ludovica looks sceptical.

From there we went to the Museo Archeologico dei Campi Flegrei. Like so many of the museums we’ve been to in Italy it’s brilliantly presented and full of fantastic stuff – and in an old Aragonese castle with a wonderful view over the Bay of Naples. Cumae, just around the corner, was the earliest mainland Greek colony in Italy, and the museum has a number of early Greek inscriptions, several with features which are more or less unique – it’s amazing that even in a language which we know as well as Greek, a single inscription can make a big difference to what we think we know. The inscription below is a nice example of boustrophedon writing, where the lines are written alternately left-to-right and right-to-left.

As we were leaving the museum the exhaust fell off our car, so that was the end of the ancient part of our adventures that day!

From Neapolis to Calimera

Last week was our second “Greek in Italy” project trip to the south of Italy. Like our last trip in September 2014, I’m sure that pictures and thoughts from this trip will keep bubbling up in my blog posts and articles for quite some time. But even though we’ve only just got back and I’ve not had time to go through all my notes and photos yet, I wanted to write a quick summary of what we did – partly to show off some great sites and museums which deserve more visitors, and partly to help remind myself later.

We started out in Paestum, which boasts some of Italy’s most beautiful and well-preserved Greek temples, dating from the sixth and fifth centuries BC. Today it’s a popular tourist sight, and rightly so. The temples are (mostly) not reconstructed – their amazing state of preservation made them a key sight of the Grand Tour. There are even some Early Modern engravings showing the temples all overgrown and disused.

There were plenty of inscriptions around the site to keep us busy, mostly in Latin. Inscriptions in Greek, Oscan and Latin have been discovered at Paestum, making it a very important site for research on ancient multilingualism in Campania and Lucania. We don’t know exactly which ancient region Paestum would have been in, since ancient authors aren’t always specific about borders: Paestum is in modern Campania, but is often considered to be part of ancient Lucania because of the use of Oscan in the Greek alphabet there.

Next we traveled to Velia, also known in Greek as Elea, home of several famous pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, the Eleatics. One of the main attractions of the site for me was the view, which naturally made me feel very philosophical. We made sure to take some time to ponder whether change is impossible (as believed by Parmenides) and a couple of Zeno’s paradoxes on the way up the hill.

Next we travelled to Roccagloriosa – a non-Greek site whose original Oscan name isn’t recorded in any ancient source. It’s near the later Roman colony of Buxentum, but distinct from it. Again, the views were brilliant – I think the whole team was in agreement that Basilicata (ancient Lucania) has some of the best landscapes in Italy. You can just about see the sea to the right-hand side of the picture below – I’d never realised that the sea would be visible from Roccagloriosa at all, despite having read about it for several years.

Roccagloriosa is a fascinating site, and despite its relative obscurity two important Oscan inscriptions have been found there. The longer text is a fragment of a bronze law, one of the earliest legal texts in Italy. Nick and I have written an article on this text, so it was great to see it in person again.

Excavators also found a piece of lead which bears both a commercial text in Greek (probably some kind of receipt) and a curse in Oscan. The photo below is a close-up in which you can just about see the small letters scratched on the lead.

The next day, we returned to Paestum to visit the museum. This silver disc with an obscure inscription in the Achaean alphabet attracted our attention. Even though it’s very clear indeed, it’s still not well understood. We’re not even sure what a couple of the letters are supposed to be (any suggestions for the letter on the left which looks like a tau with two legs?).

Of course we also had to visit Paestum’s fantastic tomb paintings. In general art history seems to prefer the paintings from the “Greek” era of the town, but we also have a fondness for the later “Lucanian” paintings. Most of these show gladiators stabbing each other, but there are also some evocative scenes of funerals and the afterlife, including a demon welcoming a woman’s soul into a boat to the underworld.

We then travelled to Metaponto, where we found this great early example of the Achaean Greek alphabet. By the time we got to Metaponto it was 41 degrees, and even the Italians were wilting a little.

Moving on to Puglia the next day, we travelled to Brindisi. Ancient Brundisium was at the very end of the Appian Way, the main road south from Rome. This is the column which marked the end of the ancient road. I’ve seen quite a bit of the Appian way this year in Rome and Capua, so it was great to feel like I’d finally completed that journey.

Brindisi has an extensive epigraphic collection in its museum, which kept us busy looking at many interesting borrowings and contact effects between Greek and Latin. Brindisi also takes its strong Classical heritage pretty seriously, since many early Latin authors including Pacuvius, Ennius and Livius Andronicus were from Brundisium, Tarentum and the surrounding area. Though the Ennius quote they’ve displayed was perhaps not the most exciting one they could have found.

On the Thursday, we went to the Grotta della Poesia in Roca, near Otranto, where we were shown around by Dott.ssa Mazzotta of the University of Salento. This was not only a beautiful beach resort, but also an incredible source of Messapic, Greek and Latin inscriptions, all hidden away in a huge cave. Before we arrived, we had no idea just how many inscriptions there were – but it turned out that the entire cave is covered in writing, which often overlaps and covers previous generations’ messages. We’d like to thank the British School at Rome for helping us set up this visit.

Since we were in the area, we also swung by the town of Calimera (Greek for “good morning”), which is one of the few towns in Italy where Greek is still spoken, in the form of the dialect Griko. We were rewarded by several signs and posters written partly in Griko, which our resident Greek speaker had a go at translating for us.

On our final day, we visited Canosa and Venosa on our way back to Naples. Canosa has a very interesting Daunian history, which we all know relatively little about, as well as some evidence of a Greek presense there. I was quite taken with this dice marked with the first six Greek letters instead of numbers or dots (note the digamma on the left hand side for the sixth letter).

Venosa was a Roman colony, called Venusia, but the museum there also includes some Oscan and Latin material from the nearby town of Bantia. This block is part of a dedication to Jupiter, written in Oscan in the Latin alphabet.

Before we flew back to the UK at the end of the week, we also went round the touristy but very fun Naples Underground tour, where we saw remains of Greek and Roman cisterns, and the flats and hotels built into the ancient theatre – highly recommended if you’re visiting Naples. We also visited the Roman street preserved underneath the Chiesa di San Lorenzo nearby.

And so what did all that look like? Something like this:

It’s been a very valuable trip for me – there’s nothing quite like putting the inscriptions and literature I’m working on in their context, and getting to see the landscapes and towns where this writing was produced. I feel very lucky to have taken not one but two trips to southern Italy with this project. Here’s one last photo of the team at the Grotta della Poesia, looking hot but pleased with our discoveries.

Migrating to the Hay Festival

Last week I gave a talk relating to the Greek in Italy project as part of the Cambridge Series at the Hay Festival of Literature and Arts. The festival is set in the beautiful Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye and attracts around 100,000 visitors each year. Around three hundred of them braved the torrential rain on Friday morning to come to my talk, ‘Migration and Language: Ancient Perspectives’. In the talk I was comparing some of the modern and ancient anxieties about the consequences of population movement on language. Nigel Farage’s disquiet at hearing foreign languages spoken on a London train and David Starkey’s fears (expressed after the London riots in 2011) that British youth had been corrupted by Jamaican patois can be set aside ancient views, found for example in Pseudo-Xenophon Athenian Constitution and Cicero’s Brutus, that the language of incomers leads to linguistic corruption. These worries about the effects of migration on language can be countered by the findings of the national census (in the modern case) and by consideration of the long-term picture of language change in the ancient world. Despite the massive influx of non-native speakers of Latin (many of them Greeks) into Rome, Latin continued to be spoken in the Western Roman Empire. Indeed, it was the other languages, Oscan, Umbrian, Etruscan, Gaulish, Iberian etc. that died out. In the same way recent census findings have shown the dominance of English in the British Isles, and that this is at the expense of the minority language, Welsh. The 2011 UK Census also asked for the first time about competence in English amongst those who did not use it as their first language, and found that only a tiny fraction (0.3% roughly 138,000 people) of the population were unable to speak any English at all (

Click to access dcp171776_302179.pdf

). A recording of this talk  – although unfortunately without the accompanying slides – is available here.

Tile Stamps

‘Linguists just aren’t interested in tile stamps.’ I remember making that point years ago to Michael Crawford when collaborating on the Imagines Italicae project, and now my words come back to haunt me. It turns out that tile stamps, imprinted on wet clay during the manufacture of roof-tiles, can be more interesting —linguistically, epigraphically, and for social history—than I had imagined. On our recent trip to Calabria, the Greek in Italy project members spent quite a lot of time looking at tile stamps, most memorably in the deposito of the Museo Regionale Interdisciplinare di Messina (thanks to the extraordinary kindness of Dottore Agostino Giuliano and his colleagues, who gave up their Saturday morning to let us in and to show us around). The Messina collection includes Greek, Oscan and Latin tile stamps alongside each other, but most publications separate out the material into different languages. Seeing all the stamps together, it is not always easy at first glance to be sure which language they are in, particularly if the stamp is well-worn or broken. We spent an excited 15 minutes thinking that we had found a new tile stamp with Oscan written in the Greek alphabet, since it ended in the letter M. Greek words don’t end in M, but Oscan genitive plurals do, and one way of saying that the tile is the property of a particular community is to use a genitive plural—the name of the Mamertini, the mercenaries who captured the port of Messina at the beginning of the third century BCE, appear on tile stamps in the genitive plural, both in Greek (Μαμερτίνων), and in Oscan written in Greek (Μαμερτινουμ). But then Nick pointed out that we were reading the text upside down, and it was a familiar Greek text after all.

Some of the other Greek tile stamps were also puzzling. One clearly reads ΡΗΠΙΝΟΝ ΟΡΘΟΝ – the first word can be corrected on the basis of other stamps to ΡΗΓΙΝΟΝ, i.e. Ῥηγίνων ‘of the Rhegians’, showing that someone had got a tile from Rhegium (modern Reggio Calabria) on the other side of the straits of Messina, but what of the second word? At first sight this appears to mean the ‘true’ Rhegians, as opposed to outsiders or imposters, but the Greek word ὀρθός isn’t used of people without further specification like this, and it is probably better to think that this is the name, Orthon, of the tile manufacturer.

What were tile stamps for, and who read them? It seems that stamps could have different audiences and functions. Latin tile stamps from Veleia and Oscan tile stamps from Bouianum, for example, include the name of magistrates, and Crawford argues that this is so that the purchaser of a tile would know its age, since a tile that had lasted over winter was more valuable. In other areas of the ancient world, stamps indicated that the tiles belong to a sanctuary or a public building. The marking of tiles with the genitive plural, as in ‘of the Rhegians’ or ‘of the Mamertini’ is limited (in Italy) to Greek texts from the south, and the only peoples of Italy who adopted this practice are the Mamertini and the Tauriani (whose bricks and tiles have been found in several areas just north of Reggio). So did the Mamertini abandon Oscan as they became Greek speakers, or did they start stamping in Greek and then switch to Oscan? Or was no one that much bothered about which language to use? Going to the trouble of making a stamp and marking tiles is unlikely to have been a trivial matter, and it seems to me that adopting the Greek alphabet and using the Greek style genitive plural shows that the Mamertini took a conscious decision to make the Greek practice their own. There is more to tile stamps than you might think.

Calabria and Sicily

As those of you who follow us on Twitter will know, the project has been in Italy this last week. Not because we fancied a holiday just before term starts again (although the weather was very nice indeed, and we did manage to have lunch on the beach at Nicotera Marina), but because part of the point of our project is to see the inscriptions we rely on for our work for ourselves. Even when an inscription is fully published, with good pictures and information about provenance, context and problems in the reading, it’s astounding what a difference it can make to see the object itself. All of a sudden you can discover that an apparently obvious stroke is caused by accidental damage rather than an intentional chisel, or that if you turn the object to catch the light differently an otherwise invisible indentation appears.

On the other hand, it’s easy to get carried away when you see an inscription ‘in the flesh’. Here’s a picture of the team hard at work over an exciting new Oscan inscription. Shortly afterwards we realised we had it upside down and it was really Greek. On this trip we were predominantly looking at Oscan inscriptions, as both mine and Katherine’s books on Oscan are in the final stages. We found some pretty exciting new readings, which we’ll have to take account of (watch this space). Among the museums we visited were the Musei Nazionali Archeologici of Crotone, Vibo Valentia and Reggio Calabria in Calabria, and the Museo Regionale Interdisciplinare in Messina, Sicily. We were overwhelmed by – and very grateful for – the helpfulness of the staff at all the museums, especially in finding things that we didn’t have inventory numbers for, letting us into the museum deposits, and giving up their time to help us out. Our limited edition project keyrings were but little recompense for their kindness. Planning for the next trip starts soon!

Linguistic Landscapes

The “linguistic landscape” (often abbreviated to LL) is a term from sociolinguistics to describe the how writing is used in public space. The visibility of a language out in the real world can have a real effect on how well-regarded and prestigious a language is felt to be. If you’ve walked along a street yet today, can you remember what languages you saw around you? If you’re in Britain or the USA, it’s likely you saw a lot of English. But even in a majority English-speaking country, you’ll probably have seen other languages without really realising it – for example, you might have seen Chinese characters if you passed a Chinese restaurant, or a sign translated into several languages if you’re in an area with lots of tourists. In this cases, the use of different languages can clearly tell us something about the people who live in an area, or the people who might be expected to visit.

In some areas, things might be more complicated. For example, in Wales, it’s common for signs to be in both English and Welsh. This is not necessarily because there is anyone in Wales who can only speak Welsh, and needs the signs for practical reasons, but because the use of Welsh in signage shows official support for the use of Welsh (in contrast to the situation a hundred years ago). In post-Soviet countries, it’s common for the Russian part of signs to be erased or painted over, in something like a damnatio memoriae. If a local language is not included on official signs, people might feel that their language is not valued – this can lead them to start using another language instead, or even to feel more proud of their own language and use it more.

So what does all this have to do with ancient Italy? Last week, James Clackson and I were invited to an innovative workshop organised by Alex Mullen of All Souls College, Oxford, where we discussed ancient and modern linguistic landscapes with linguists, Classicists and other interesting people. In preparation for this workshop, I had to do my homework – what did the ancient linguistic landscape look like?

One of the best-preserved ancient sites is, of course, Pompeii. The amazing amount of writing still in situ in Pompeii – including stuff that would otherwise not have survived – tells us a lot about language use in the public space. For example, you might notice that the road into the town is lined on both sides by hundreds of funerary monuments – very different to how a cemetery would be laid out today. We also get an idea of the temporary elements of the linguistic landscape, such as adverts for gladiatorial games and posters promoting politicians, which were painted in red letters on the white plaster walls of houses.

Most interestingly to me, we can even glimpse the linguistic landscape of Pompeii’s past. For example, to this day a long, low table with holes in the top stands in the town forum. This is a weights and measures table, which would help people to confirm that the goods they were being sold measured up to the officially-sanctioned units. The table has a Latin inscription which confirms that two magistrates were responsible for revising the measurements to fit the Roman standard. So what measurements was the town using before? If you look closely, you can see that on the top surface there was an Oscan inscription that was chipped away – and we can tell that the Oscan weights and measures were often based not on the Roman standard, but on measurements used around the Greek world.

So were the Romans erasing Pompeii’s Oscan and Greek past deliberately, to show that the linguistic landscape was a Latin-only zone? Perhaps, but there’s evidence elsewhere in Pompeii that they were not too bothered about removing traces of other languages, as long as they didn’t cause anyone practical problems. It’s possible that the weights and measures were only changed to avoid confusion. Still, the changing of the weights and measures table, right in the central public space of the town, must have sent a fairly clear message that Latin was the only “official” language around.

 

Many thanks to Alex Mullen and the other workshop participants at Ancient and modern linguistic landscapes: interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches to written space, 20th June 2014.

 

 

Name games

I’m writing a book at the moment on how Oscan-speakers spelled their language when it was written in the Greek alphabet, and one of the side-effects of this is that I needed to know how women’s names worked in Oscan. Men’s names are easy, and work much like in Latin (and a bit like in English): everyone has a praenomen (which is like our first name), and a gentilicium (like our surname, passed down in families); usually we’re also told what their father’s praenomen was too, in the genitive (in Latin this is followed by f. for filius ‘son’, but there’s no equivalent abbreviation in Oscan). In Classical times, Roman men also had a cognomen, which started off as a kind of nickname, but later became part of the official part of the name. Sometimes Oscan men have cognomina too, but it seems to have been quite rare. So, a typical Oscan man’s name would be Vibis Púpidiis Vibieis “Vibis Popidiis, son of Vibis”.

So what are women called? You might assume that women’s names would work much the same, with a praenomen and gentilicium. But that’s not the case in Latin, at least by Classical times, where women just get one official name, the gentilicium. Clearly, if there was more than one daughter in the family, there must have been some way for people to distinguish them, and indeed once the cognomen began to take off for men, we also find women with cognomina. So, women have one less name than men: either just a gentilicium (e.g. Quinctilia) to a man’s praenomen + gentilicium , or a gentilicium + cognomen (e.g. Appuleia Varilla) to a man’s praenomen + gentilicium + cognomen. Just as the men’s names can be followed by the father’s names in the genitive, so the women’s names can be followed by their father’s names, or by their husband’s names. As I say, this is the way that things work in the Classical period, but there’s a small number of examples of female names from Praeneste, near Rome, in the third century BC, which seem to imply that at this stage women could have a praenomen, like men: was this later dropped, or did they just have different naming habits in Praeneste?

Since the system of men’s names is so similar in Oscan and Latin (and, with minor differences, in Umbrian and Etruscan), we might expect that the same is true for women’s names. But is this in fact the case, and even if so, did Oscan women’s names work like those in Praeneste or in the same way as in Classical times? It turns out that it’s very difficult to know for sure.

One reason for this is that, unlike men’s names, which we find in inscriptions all over the place, there are hardly any women’s names written down, so we don’t have much evidence. The other, is that it’s often quite hard to know how to analyse the evidence. Some of our examples are just single names. Should we take these as praenomina or gentilicia? One way to tell is to look at the name and see whether the male equivalent is used as a praenomen or a gentilicium. But this isn’t as easy as it sounds. Most gentilicia are originally derived from praenomina (that is, they probably started off as a patronymic, before becoming fixed as a family name, just as the English surname Jackson originally meant Jack’s son). This is done by adding –is to the name (so next to the praenomen Heirens there is a gentilicium Heirennis). But some praenomina already end in -is, and then the result is a gentilicium in -iis (for example, praenomen Dekis, gentilicium Dekiis). The equivalent for women is praenomina or gentilicia in –iú, gentilicia in –iiú.

This means it’s not always easy to tell whether a name ending in –is or –iú is a praenomen or a gentilicium unless you have definite cases of that name being used in a male name written out in the full sequence praenomen + gentilicium + father’s name, where you can tell by the position of the names. There’s also a further complication: normally, at least if you find a spelling -iiú, you can be sure that you’re dealing with a gentilicium. But at some point there was a rule in Oscan that changed a single –i– after a –v– into a double -ii- (we can see this in words like menereviius ‘belonging to Minerva’, which we know for etymological reasons should be menerevius). So in the case of the single name Úviiú ‘Ovia’, we’ve no way of knowing whether it’s a praenomen or a gentilicium. And things are even more difficult in the Greek alphabet, where no distinction is made in writing between -iú and –iiú: they’re both spelt -ιο. Unfortunately, by far the majority of our examples of female names are written in the Greek alphabet…

We may not be able to tell from the single names. But when we have two names together, it’s a fair bet that thεy’re a praenomen + gentilicium sequence, right? Well, not necessarily. Some scholars have suggested that in cases like siviiú magiú, what we have are two gentilicia, one that of the woman’s father, one that of the husband. I think that this is wrong, and that Oscan women did have a praenomen of their own, as well as a gentilicium. But in the end, this comes down to a single piece of evidence, the name ahvdiú ni(umsieís) ‘Audia daughter/wife of Numsis’. We’ve got an example of the male equivalent of this name as a gentilicium, and it’s spelt ahvdiis, so the female gentilicium ought to be ahvdiiú, and ahvdiú ought to be a praenomen.

So it looks as though Oscan women, like the women of Praeneste, were better off than most of their Roman equivalents in the way of names, having two, just like their menfolk. But it would be nice to have more evidence, so if you find any, let me know!

Multilingual Mirrors Part 2

Katherine wasn’t the only person thinking about Etruscan around Christmas (see her post below). On Boxing Day I went to the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia in Rome to see their fantastic collection of Etruscan finds. They’ve got some spectacular stuff including the sarcophagus of the spouses (of which there’s a picture in Katherine’s post), and three gold tablets from Pyrgi which are written in Etruscan and Punic (pictured below). In real life they’re surprisingly small, but just as golden as they look here (Etruscan on the right and left, Punic in the middle). It’s thanks to these tablets – which aren’t direct translations of each other, but contain similar material – that we know the Etruscan word for ‘three’, which is ci. The museum has a particularly good section on writing and the alphabet.

What, you may be asking, does all this have to do with mirrors? Well, in addition to lots of lovely Etruscan inscriptions, the museum also has quite a good selection of early Latin inscriptions, several of which are captions to the scenes on the backs of mirrors. One of them shows two dancing figures, who it identifies as marsuas (Marsyas, a satyr) and painiscos ‘little Pan’. In addition, along one of Marsyas’s legs we have a signature: uibis pilipus cailauit ‘Vibius Philippus engraved it’. Although he’s writing in Latin, Vibius’s names give a hint of the complex linguistic situation in third century BC Praeneste, where the mirror is from*: the missing final vowel in uibis is characteristic of a Sabellic language (Oscan?), while pilipus is the Latinised version of the Greek name Philippos (it would be a hundred years before Greek ph, ch, th were written with an h in Latin). Vibis Pilipus may have been a Greek slave or freedman belonging to an Oscan-speaking family, writing in Latin. But why does he Latinise only one of his names? Why does he give pilipus a Latin ending, but keep the Greek ending in painiscos (not painiscus) and marsuas (not marsua)? This is the kind of thing that keeps us awake at night…

*Praeneste is modern-day Palestrina, in Lazio, about 25 miles from Rome. It’s built into a hill-side, with great views, and another excellent museum.

Greek is in the eye of the beholder

Identifying the language of an inscription is not always completely straightforward. In my case, I’m often interested in whether a particular text is in Greek, or a different non-Greek language.

Of course, there are various clues we can use to try to determine the language of a text. The first hint is often in the alphabet – but this isn’t always enough. There are at least three areas in the western Mediterranean where the Greek alphabet is used (with some slight adaptations) to write languages other than Greek. Two of these areas are in the south of Italy, where Oscan and Messapic are also written, broadly speaking in the toe and the heel respectively. The other is in southern Gaul, now southern France, where Gaulish was written in the Greek alphabet for a few centuries before the Latin script became more usual. In all of these areas, Greek was being written at the same time period as the local language, and we often find both languages being used at the same site. This means we have to look beyond the script to identify the language.

Ideally, an inscription might have vocabulary (lexicon) or word endings (morphology) that pin it down as one language or another. But this is where it gets tricky, as many inscriptions are very short indeed – very often, they contain only personal names, or words that are abbreviated. How do we assign these texts to a particular language? Well, we might decide that the name appears to be of a particular origin – for example, an inscription naming a Vibis Adirans would look very “Oscan” in origin, because traditionally Greek-speakers don’t have inherited family names. We wouldn’t want to rely on this too much, though, because it’s easy for people to have names that don’t match up to the languages that they speak – particularly if their parents or grandparents spoke another language, or had friends that did. Names can also be a matter of parents’ personal preference – not everyone called Siobhan is from Ireland, for example.

All of this can become particularly interesting when we take into account the trade routes between the three areas on the map. In the late twentieth century, a silver drinking cup imported from southern Italy was found in Alesia, a site in southern Gaul, inscribed with the Greek letters MEDA ARAGE (SEG 34 1035, if you are interested in looking this up). This looked like an abbreviated name, or two names, but in what language? Greek, Gaulish, or Oscan? Something like MEDA could more or less be the beginning of a name in any of them, and ARAGE looked suspiciously like the beginning of a word for “silversmith” (Greek arguros: so maybe this is not quite Greek?).

People have argued about this text a little bit, but whatever your opinion you have to agree that the language is not that clear. Since the object has travelled from one area to another, we don’t even know where the inscription was added. But it’s possible to look at a text like this in a different way. What if the writer, knowing that the cup might be sold in an area that spoke a different language but used the same alphabet as him, wrote his name in this abbreviated way so that the purchaser could read it in whatever language he or she preferred?

If we accept that writers of ancient inscriptions, especially if they were artisans producing goods for the export market, could be deliberately ambiguous in this way, that opens up some interesting avenues for us. Firstly, it means can’t always be sure what language a text is written in. And secondly, it gives us an interesting insight into the horizons of some of the people of the ancient Mediterranean – they’re wider than we sometimes think.

This post is based on a talk given at the Indo-European Seminar, University of Cambridge, 5^th March 2014.