Inscriptions from the “Phoenician Homeland”: The Lebanese Coast
The Phoenician cities of the Lebanese coast have produced relatively minimal epigraphic remains, at least in part because excavations at these sites are restricted by modern settlement. The city of Byblos has provided the largest corpus of lengthy inscriptions, which is not surprising, as it is the only major site thoroughly excavated to pre-Hellenistic levels. Several of these are among the oldest extant Phoenician texts. A sequence of tenth- or ninth-century bce funerary, dedicatory, and construction epigraphs from the city provide the names of kings ruling there in that period (KAI 1–2, 4–7; Sass 2017; Lehmann 2005). One of these, that of King Yeḥimilk (KAI 4), is illustrated in figure 16.1 and reads as follows:
bt . z bny . yḥmlk . mlk gbl
hˀt . ḥwy . kl . mplt . hbtm
ˀl . yˀrk . bˁlšmm . wbˁl
gbl . wmpḥr.t. ˀl gbl
qdšm . ymt . yḥmlk . wšntw
ˁl gbl . kmlk . ṣdq . wmlk
yšr . lpn . ˀl gbl . qd[šm hˀ(?)]
House that Yeḥimilk, king of Byblos, built.
It was he who revived all these ruined houses.
May Baal-shamem, the Lad
because [he?] is a just and upright king before the holy gods of Byblos.
Figure 16.1 Royal inscription of King Yeḥimilk (KAI 4), Byblos, ca. tenth century bce. Beirut National Museum 2043.
Source: Drawing by M. Richey.
The approximately ten “Byblian pseudo-hieroglyphic” inscriptions from the site (Dunand 1945: 71–138) are usually understood to be even older and are conceivably in the Phoenician language. They remain undeciphered despite many valiant attempts. Shorter old inscriptions from the site include the bronze “spatula” inscription possibly recording an economic transaction (KAI 3) and various shorter inscriptions mostly bearing personal names or fragments thereof (throughout Dunand 1954, 1939).
An archaic (tenth-century bce?) inscribed weight from the Dunand excavations at Byblos has only recently been published (Sader 2005b). It bears an inscription of a certain Ozibaal and seems to predict destruction of his enemy (Lemaire 2013; Amadasi Guzzo 2008). A fragmentary inscription carved in relief, the “Byblos champlevé” inscription, is often also connected with the site because it mentions gbl (Bordreuil 1977). The corpus of apparently archaic (tenth-century bce?) inscribed arrowheads continues to grow solely from the antiquities market (e.g., recently Lemaire 2012). These items are often described as “Phoenician” from their paleography and reported geographic provenance (usually Lebanon) (e.g., KAI 20–22). They may include, however, a high proportion of inauthentic material and involve minimal linguistic data for dialectal assignation.
There is also a group of Persian-period inscriptions from Byblos. These include the inscription of the “son of Shipiṭbaal” (KAI 9), the large “Yeḥawmilk” building inscription (KAI 10), and a more recently discovered funerary inscription known as “Byblos 13” (originally published by Starcky 1969; Quick 2017: 170–71). From the Hellenistic and Roman periods, respectively, come the Batnoam funerary text (KAI 11) and Abd-Eshmun dedicatory inscription (KAI 12).
The city of Sidon has provided a few major inscriptions and additional smaller pieces. The sixth-century bce kings Tabnit and Eshmunazor II have both left inscriptions on Egyptianizing sarcophagi (KAI 13–14). The next king of Sidon, Bodashtart, produced some thirty building inscriptions of mostly stereotyped character that continue to appear from both excavations and the antiquities market (e.g., RES 766–67; KAI 15–16; Xella and Zamora 2005, 2004). Some of these originate from the temple of Eshmun at Bustan esh-Sheikh, where most of the other nearly thirty Persian period inscriptions are dedicatory and formulaic (Mathys 2005: 275–95). Excavations at the temple also revealed, however, a group of five lapidary palindromic “magic squares,” of uncertain import (Mathys 2008, 2005: 295–315; Lemaire 2009). Seven fifth-century bce ink ostraca from the same site bear more or less fragmentary lists of names (Vanel 1967, 1969). The Hellenistic temple complex at Oumm el-Amed meanwhile yielded sixteen third- and second-century bce construction and dedicatory inscriptions (Dunand and Duru 1962: 181–96).
Tyre, the preeminent Phoenician city-state for most of the period in question, nevertheless has only a small number of inscriptions to its name. Grave stelae dating from the tenth through fourth centuries bce are now known from the Tyre Al-Bass cemetery, other nearby sites, and private collections that probably drew from these (Sader 2005a; Abousamra and Lemaire 2013). The nearby site of Khirbet et-Ṭayibeh is known for its third- or second-century bce dedicatory inscription to Athtart incised on a votive throne (KAI 17; recently Lipiński 2016: 319–21). Another inscribed throne has been published recently (Lemaire 2014), but both its provenance and current whereabouts are unknown; it is therefore far from certain whether the piece and the inscription on it are authentic. Said inscription, which runs to six lines, begins with the designation ksˀ krbm, “throne of cherubs,” and was allegedly dedicated byrḥ mrzḥ, “in the month of the marzeaḥ-feast.”
As for most of the regions surveyed here, the shorter inscriptions dispersed at numerous other sites and purchased on local antiquities markets consist mainly of personal names. Excavations at Sarepta (Pritchard 1988: 7–15) and Beirut (e.g., Sader 1998) uncovered small collections of mostly short inscriptions. Ink ostraca from Beirut—bearing at most six or seven letters—have been known for some years now (e.g., Badre 1997: 74; Sader 1998: 203), but only one has been published (Badre 1997: 91, fig. 47d; Schmitz 2002). Painted and incised amphorae from Tambourit, Tell er-Rachidiyyeh, and the antiquities market also generally convey little more than names (e.g., Bordreuil 2003, 1982). The exception is an unprovenanced crater, dated ca. 750–700 bce and now held at the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem, with both a painted inscription qlb “crater(?)” and an incised inscription that appears to include, unusually, two verbs (Puech 1994).
Elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean: Syro-Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Palestine, Egypt
There are just a few Phoenician inscriptions from Syria and southeastern Anatolia. One of them is Kulamuwa’s royal inscription at Zincirli (ancient Samˀal) (KAI 24). This king’s successors used various dialects of Aramaic for their own memorials (KAI 213–17). Two ca. seventh-century bce incantations from Arslan Tash are linguistically Phoenician but include some Aramaizing orthographies in personal names (KAI 27; Pardee 1998). The easternmost Phoenician inscription by findspot is the ivory box dedicatory inscription (ca. seventh century bce) discovered at Ur (KAI 29), but the potential mobility of this piece and the absence of any clear Phoenician epigraphic tradition in Mesopotamia make it likely that the box reached its eventual destination as a trade good or plunder.
Phoenician also traveled to the Cilician plain in modern Turkey, perhaps along trade routes and facilitated by political interactions among the Syro-Hittite kingdoms of northern Syria and those of southeastern Anatolia. Aside from one Luwian-source personal name incised on an eighth-century bce storage jar from Kinet Höyük (Hodos 2006: 81–82, fig. 2.31), all the early inscriptions are monumental and royal. Two of these are Phoenician-Luwian bilinguals from the late eighth century: the lengthy inscription from Karatepe displayed along the citadel entryway (KAI 26; Röllig 1999) and the broadly contemporary Çineköy inscription (Tekoğlu and Lemaire 2000). One other monolingual Phoenician inscription from Hasan-Beyli appears to describe local incursions by the Assyrians (KAI 23; Lemaire 1983). All three of these name a king Awarikus, but it is uncertain if the same individual is intended in all cases (Simon 2014). In turn, the trilingual inscription—Akkadian-Luwian-Phoenician, the first two nearly obliterated—found at Incirli is extremely abraded, but it names a king with a similar name in the context of its long military narrative (Kaufman 2007). A recently published inscription from Ivriz was apparently written by a king of Tyana ca. 725–700 bce, but is quite
fragmentary (Röllig 2013). Finally, the later (seventh-century?) inscription from Cebel Ireis Daği represents the only Phoenician text treating the legal transfer of land holdings (Mosca and Russell 1987).
A number of Phoenician inscriptions from the southern Levant have been published since the corpus of Bernard Delavault and André Lemaire (1979), as the recent summary of Paolo Xella (2017) demonstrates. Many such inscriptions are difficult to differentiate paleographically and linguistically from a putative “Philistian” language (Maier et al. 2016), from Hebrew, and even from Aramaic. Most of the certain witnesses to Phoenician and Punic in the region are from Persian-period cities on the coast. Nearly fifty short inscriptions from Ashkelon date from the seventh through fourth centuries and include a number of economic and onomastic ostraca (Cross 2008). Other notable groups of inscriptions include seventh- and sixth-century bce funerary stelae from Akhziv (Cross 2002), fifth-century epistolary and/or economic ostraca from Dor (Naveh 1995), and third-century seals from Akko (Naveh 1997). A ca. fifth-century ostracon from the same site includes a diverse vocabulary of dedicated or traded items throughout its seven lines (Dothan 1985; Cross 2009; Lipiński 2009).
Phoenician and Punic are also found to a limited extent in Egypt (Calabro 2015). Phoenician and Punic papyri are very rare, but one sixth-century Phoenician letter on papyrus was found at Saqqara, near Memphis (KAI 50); another more fragmentary piece is of unknown provenance (KAI 51). Short Phoenician graffiti of the sixth-century or later are known from both Abydos (KAI 49) and Ipsambul (Abu Simbel; CIS I.112). Schmitz (2012: 32–42) has recently interpreted the latter to consist of historical narratives.
Cyprus
The island of Cyprus is often regarded as having served as something of a steppingstone for Phoenician trading, settlement, and other ventures in the Mediterranean. The material culture evidence supporting this view includes numerous inscriptions from the ninth century bce down through the Hellenistic period. Already when the compendia CIS (I.10–96) and KAI (30–43) were published in the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, respectively, the number of inscriptions from the island was large and included many substantial monumental texts. The collection of Masson and Sznycer (1972), which published many new texts and summarized work to that date, already attested to continued expansion of the evidence.
In recent years, much discussion in Cypriot Phoenician studies has revolved around the gigantic palace archive discovered between 1993 and 2012 by the Cypriot excavations at inland Idalion. This as yet unpublished archive consists of over seven hundred Phoenician epigraphs from the late fifth and/or fourth centuries. The texts are mostly ink ostraca that describe economic, agricultural, and other activities of the central administration (Amadasi Guzzo and Zamora 2016). Fascinating details about Cypriot politics and daily life have already begun to emerge from this archive, such as that the Hellenistic-period name of the island continued to be, as in earlier periods, ˀlšy “Alashiya” (Amadasi Guzzo and Zamora 2018).
Idalion was previously the source of just a few royal and dedicatory inscriptions of the fourth and third centuries bce (e.g., KAI 38–40) and thereby paled in comparison to neighboring sites, especially coastal Kition. The inscriptions from that site, most of which are Persian-period or Hellenistic, have been compiled in comprehensive editions (Yon 2004; Amadasi Guzzo and Karageorghis 1977). In addition to long-known royal inscriptions, exempla of unique or rare types include a fifth-century pair of temple expense reports written in ink on either side of a marble fragment; these are the “Kition tariffs” (KAI 37). A self-identified trpy, “trophy” inscription narrates a victory of King Milkyaton of Kition and Idalion over his Paphian and other enemies (Yon and Sznycer 1991; KAI5 288). One of the more archaic inscriptions from the site is a fragmentary bowl with an eighth-century inscription; its state of preservation is poor enough and its lexemes unclear enough that scholars have proposed a range of more and less plausible interpretations, among which are that it bears an incantation (Coote 1975) or a description of a hair offering to Athtart (Dupont-Sommer 1972).
The Central Mediterranean and the Aegean: Greece, Italy, and Its Islands
Phoenician and Punic inscriptions are scarcer on the peninsulas of mainland Greece and Italy, but there are substantial concentrations from the nearby islands of Malta, Sicily, and Sardinia. There are also a few important and notably early inscriptions from Aegean islands. On Crete, a tomb in Tekke north of Knossos was the site of the discovery of an ownership inscription on a bronze bowl, the “Tekke bowl” (KAI5 291; Sznycer 1979). Although the inscription is short and mundane, its early dating—likely ca. 900 bce—has made it a popular topic. Surprisingly, the only other possibly Phoenician inscriptions from Crete are fragmentary pieces from Kommos (Csapo, Johnston, and Geagen 2000).
There is also a small group of inscriptions from the large Dodecanese (southeast Aegean) island of Rhodes. The earliest of these is a ca. seventh-century bce inscribed sherd from Rhodes on which the word kd (“vase”) is visible (Amadasi Guzzo 1987: 16–17). Two second-century funerary inscriptions are both more substantial and more formulaic (KAI 44–45). Elsewhere in the Dodacanese, a handle dipinto (ink inscription) from Kos seems relatively early (sixth century bce?; Bourogiannis and Ioannou 2012). The inscription consists, however, of a series of {w}s and {y}s, to uncertain purpose. Also from Kos is a much later, Hellenistic Greek-Phoenician bilingual that describes a dedication to Ashtart by a king of the Sidonians (KAI5 292; Sznycer 1999).
The archipelago of Malta, by virtue of its position at the crossroads of Mediterranean shipping routes, is replete with inscriptions dating from the sixth through first centuries bce (CIS I.122–32; KAI 47, 47A, 61–62; Amadasi Guzzo 1967: 15–52). These include the second-century bce Marsascirocco cippi (KAI 47), Greek-Phoenician bilingual dedicatory inscriptions whose Phoenician texts were among the first deciphered by European scholars (Barthélemy 1764). The site that has yielded the greatest quantity of inscriptions is Tas Silġ, although most of these are very short (Frendo and Mizzi 2015). Potentially more interesting is the bronze amulet capsule containing a Punic papyrus from Tal-Virtù, near Rabat (Gouder and Rocco 1975), but interpretation of this possibly apotropaic piece has proven very difficult (e.g., Schmitz 2017). The delicate nature of papyri means that few Phoenician and Punic inscriptions in this medium have survived, but it is likely that such texts would have been common in antiquity (see chapter 18, this volume).
There are much larger corpora of Phoenician, Punic, and even neo-Punic inscriptions from both Sardinia and Sicily. All inscriptions known to the mid-1960s were published by Amadasi Guzzo (1967: 53–136). Larger groups published subsequently include, on Sardinia, dedicatory and other inscriptions from Antas on Sardinia (Fantar 1969; Garbini 1997) and, on Sicily, stelae and ostraca from the Motya/Mozia tophet (Amadasi Guzzo 1986) and ink inscriptions from Grotta Regina (Amadasi Guzzo 1979, 1969). Later volumes have catalogued inscriptions held in Italian museums (Amadasi Guzzo 1990) and more recently discovered Sicilian inscriptions (De Simone 2013). The oldest inscriptions from Sardinia are the famous Nora stele (KAI 46), which narrate a local military victory, and two fragments from Nora and Bosa (CIS I.145, 162), all plausibly dating to the ninth century bce on paleographic grounds. Punic is attested through at least the third century on both Sardinia and Sicily, but appears to have become gradually less frequent (Amadasi Guzzo 2014: 325–29).
There are surprisingly few Phoenician and Punic inscriptions from mainland Greece and the Italian peninsula. Most of the Phoenician inscriptions from Greece are from Athens and its nearby Piraeus harbor (CIS I.115–21; KAI 53–60; Lipiński 2004: 169–76). These date to the fourth through second centuries bce and are mostly funerary or dedicatory. They are attributed in Phoenician (and sometimes Greek) to individuals of mostly eastern geographical backgrounds—for example, Kitionite or Ashkelonite (recently Stager 2005). The longest of the Attic Phoenician inscriptions is the possibly 96 bce Piraeus marble inscription KAI 60 describing the “crowning”
of one Shamabaˁl from among the local Sidonian community in exchange for his temple service. Exceptions to Athenian geographical restriction are three third-century bce Greek-Phoenician bilingual funerary inscriptions from Demetrias in Thessaly (Masson 1969: 687–700; KAI5 293).
Mainland Italy, by contrast to both Greece and the nearby islands, has yielded no funerary inscriptions and only a handful of Phoenician and Punic inscriptions in general. One of the more famous Phoenician inscriptions is, however, from Pyrgi in Latium (Lazio)—namely the sixth-century Pyrgi temple inscription incised on one gold leaf with a two-leaf Etruscan equivalent (KAI5 277; Bellelli and Xella 2015–2016). The text is a dedication by Thefarie Velianas, king of Caere, to the goddess Athtart (Uni in the Etruscan parallel). It describes construction, alludes to months and holidays—including the sacrifice of the sun-god and the “burial of the god”—and concludes with a still enigmatic blessing: “As for the years of the statue(?) of the goddess in her temple, may they be like these stars(?).” Beyond Pyrgi, Phoenician inscriptions from mainland Italy or islands just off the coast are rare. An early example is the eight-century silver bowl with ownership inscription (CIS I.164) from Praeneste (modern Palestrina in Lazio).
The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean Page 33