The Alphabet in Italy Author(s): Rhys Carpenter Reviewed work(s): Source: American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 49, No.

4 (Oct. - Dec., 1945), pp. 452-464 Published by: Archaeological Institute of America Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/499861 . Accessed: 28/10/2011 13:46
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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 latest student of the material, Edith Hall Dohan, in her extremely competent and valuable in the University Museum, came to the conclusion that study of Italic Tomb-Groups it was during the period 680-650 B.c. that "foreign influence penetrated deeply into Central Italy." 1 This should be the period to which Herodotus was referring when he asserted 2 that the Phocaeans of Asia Minor "were the first among the Greeks to undertake long voyages; and it was they who disclosed Adria and Etruria and Spain and 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 abandoned their Asia Minor home through fear of their new Median overlord and migrated 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 alliance against them with a navy which the Alalians were able to defeat only at cost of 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, withdrew 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 the Phocaean chapter in the Greek exploitation of the West. Etruscan ill-will, once kindled against the Greeks, spread to Cumae outside the Gulf of Naples, now the northernmost outpost of Greek trade in the Tyrrhenian Sea. In 524 the Etruscans of Capua, taking with them Dauni and Aurunci tribesmen, made an unsuccessful assault on Cumae, which in turn proceeded to ally itself with the 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 and extended across to eastern Italy on the Adriatic. It is not until these events of the last quarter of the sixth century that we are entitled to postulate any very direct or very intimate 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 strong formative influence of Attic art on Etruscan wall-painting proves how close the contact must have been. The final cessation of relations came with the Persian War and 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 own cultural detriment, the failing Etruscan empire looked north and sought to compensate itself beyond the Apennines, while on the south it wholly abandoned Greece
1
2a

Op.cit., p. 109.

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

I, 163.

45.2

THE ARCHAEOLOGICALINSTITUTE OF AMERICA

THE ALPHABET IN 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 precisely two centuries, from ca. 680 to 474 B.C.Early in that span of years the Etruscans 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 they who 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, imported Corinthian was copiously adorned with writing. And it is precisely at the turn from Protocorinthian to Corinthian, around the middle of the seventh century, that Etruscan 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 recorded by Tacitus that it was the Corinthian Demaratus who taught the Etruscans their letters, and in spite of the obvious opportunity which Corinthian pottery afforded 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 influence 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 alphabetic affinities 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 agreement to 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 himself a Syracusan and Camarinan and may properly be expected to use a script appropriate 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.
SAnnals xi, 14. 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.
6 From

SNecrocorinthia, p. 189.

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THE ALPHABET IN ITALY

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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 0 T Locri, or Locri in Syracuse, K ) we must seek farther back . , for a common source. The Epizephyrian Locrians derived their alphabet from their kinsmen the Ozolian LocriansRoehl correctly classes the two together in his 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, preferring Apollo's wisdom to their own ancient mother at the Isthmus. The Ladyad inscription (fig. If) must surely be native Delphic; yet its alHELMETFROM FIG. LOCRI phabet agrees with Syracusan in every essen- (From 2.--BRONZE Toscanelli, Le OriginiItaliche, Fig. 157) tial detail. 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 The Sibyl's oracles was in itself incentive enough to make men learn their letters. natmere gathering and intercourse of citizens from so many Greek towns would oracle urally have stimulated the communication of intelligence; but unless Apollo's more much so was not explain why Delphi was specifically involved, this would to tended have at first active than Olympia in this matter. Again, writing may must become a priestly prerogative in Greece as in Oriental countries; but again we 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 of prominent community as Sparta and such isolated districts as the hill-towns scholars Arcadia drew their knowledge of writing. Hence the temptation for modern to classify the Praxiteles dedication (fig. Id) as Mantinean, and the very common
IGA. 512a= Roehl, Imag6 The older Rhodian alphabet of Gela will be found on the bronze plaque, of father Hippokrates, tyrant of Gela 498-1. It ines8 p. 34, no. 11, dedicated at Olympia by Pantares, the mercenaries' graffiti at Abu of among used Ialysos the with Telephos by script previously agrees Simbel (IGA. 482c).

Imagines-and

these, living in none too civil-

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 solution of 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 today learns 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 innumerable 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 record the 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 and words. Where, early in the seventh century, was there such a contact? By the start of the seventh century the Etruscan supremacy was already established from the Arno in the north to the Tiber on the east and south. At the close of the century an aggressive advance comparable to an imperialistic expansion carried 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 geographic intimacy between Etruscan and Greek postulated for alphabetic transmission. However, political conquest seems to have been preceded by more pacific penetration. In the course of the modern excavation of the site of Cumae, there was discovered the grave of a wealthy Etruscan, containing objects almost precisely like some of those from the Tomba del Duce at Vetulonia and hence to be dated around the middle of the seventh century.8 Such a burial supplies evidence of peaceful Etruscan residence in Greek Cumae for the generation preceding 650 B.C. Since Etruscan resembles Chalcidic more closely than any other epichoric variety of Greek script, the widely held belief that Cumae was the source of Etruscan knowledge of the alphabet must be pronounced correct. By sheer elimination there seems no other candidate. And yet this elegantly simple explanation has not commended itself universally to scholars, several of whom have found serious discrepancies between the Etruscan and the Cumaean Chalcidic letter forms. But some of the obstacles have been overemphasized, while others have been misinterpreted:
If the terms of comparison are confined (as they should be) to the oldest Etruscan documents, zeta, pi, and tau will be found in forms satisfactorily close to the Greek norm. The chi like an arrowhead 7IGA. 70; Roehl, Imagines3 p. 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 yet epichoric Delphic, if only because of the Ionic "I." On epigraphic grounds it is most likely to be Aeginetan or Rhegine and hence must have been cut by the sculptor or his helpers. 8MonA4nt.xxii, 1913, "Cuma" (by E. Gabrici), coll. 422-6; 428-430 ("Tomba Artiaco n. 104").

THE ALPHABET IN ITALY

457

inscription from Cumae (Roehl p. 80, no. 28). The pointed downward recurs in the PaEPaXXEvlEVov five-stroke mu with a tail has turned up in the important early Chalcidic inscription found over thirty years ago at Eretria (CIG. xii9, 17273-4on pp. vii-ix of the Addenda Ultima), where the dotted theta and closed heta keep company as in Etruscan. The "figure 8" sign for F, although of earlier occurrence than is sometimes asserted, is nonetheless a specific Etruscan innovation, as its position at the end of the alphabet proves; it as little demands a Greek prototype as the Ionian omega at the end of the Greek alphabet requires a 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 prolongation of 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 common phenomenon of inverting signs or miswriting them according to the directional error which still today makes children and semiliterates 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 perfectly natural fatality, as anyone with an interest in psycholog:cal experiment can prove by observing how frequently a linear pattern without further spatial context will be visually reproduced in faulty FIG. 3.--CORINTHIAN ABC axial orientation); (3) the alphabetic position of san is the same as S. Roberts, Introduction for shin; we possess two ABC's from san-using communities, one (From E. to Gk. Epigr. I) from Corinth (fig. 3) and one from Metapontum (Roberts, Intr. Gk.

tne~B"E

Epig. i, p. 306), and in both of these san appearsin 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 sample alphabets,' while sigma appears in shin's position, san turns up in tsade's place. Peculiar as this may seem, it is the best possible indication that Etruscan is not an alphabet of remote antiquity. Since it employs the non-Phoenician symbols, it is a Greek derivative; and since it alters the alphabetic position of san and tolerates both san and sigma in the same series, it is an artificial construction borrowing from more than 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 Sea from 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.
9 Buonamici,

10Cf. Hdt. i, 139: "the letter which the Dorians call san and the lonians sigma."

Epigrafia Etrusca, pls. I, II, III, vi, viI.

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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-the ABCDEFG 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 Greeks clung 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 corresponding sign is no longer in current use. Since the Greek alphabetic patter was

vr
Pig?

Wl w5"
4

OW
X.

AN '17

-'s%A?m

-t

A-z Oll

D'ALBEGNA FROM MARSILIANA FIG. 4.-ETRUSCANWRITING-TABLET

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 sequence became Greek property, even though a writer of Greek did not employ all the symbols 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.
in its acceptedGreekvalue as xi SinceX, with value as in Latin and English,is included,samech that the samech wouldbe a duplicatefor sound.It is not surprising, therefore, sign never occursin at this post-the squarewindowwith fourpaneswhichis without symbolwas inventedand inscribed
11 This would explain the Milesian number-alphabet (Larfeld, Griechische Epigraphik, 3d ed., 1914, in I. Mueller's Handbuch,pp. 293 ft.) and its peculiarity of preserving in their proper places such letters as F and Q, long out of use in Ionia. But sampi tacked on at the end, when we should have expected something in tsade's post between P and Q, is a disconcertingly false note.

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

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 samech in its place).11a Since Etruscan speech utilized more sibilants than Greek, both san and sigma were found serviceable for 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 opposition to the orthographic practice in the south.

Once the artificial nature of its samechsymbol and the arbitrary treatment of san have been recognized, the Marsiliana alphabet can be classed without further objection 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 essentially the same origin. Both were (we believe) primarily learned 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 as the 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 Tarquins and coincides with the preceding Etruscan cultural supremacy in Latium, the existence 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 therefore be 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's position 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.

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RHYS CARPENTER

That the Latin letters came from immediate Etruscan rather than from more distant Greek instruction is strongly suggested (perhaps it may even be said, logically demonstrated) by the following considerations: 12 (1) the absence of a specific symbol for X in early Latin, a lack also characteristic of 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 lc and not with its Greek value as gamma. (3) the failure 13of koppa to be used with O as well as with U. Since Etruscan never recorded O, it could not perpetuate the Greek usage of koppa with that vowel; hence the Latin exclusive usage of Q with 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 consonants ("bee," "dee," "kay," etc.). There is no apparent reason why the Romans should have invented 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. ..........................

-----------7----------FIG. 5.-]INSCRIPTION ON THE CAPESTRANO WARRIOR

gg

(From Moretti, II Guerriero Italico di Capestrano)

the overland communications which brought the alphabet. If our previous chronological determinations have been correct, the oldest writings from remote Picenum and the adjoining hill country inhabited by the Marrucini, Vestini, and Paeligni cannot 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 character the letters resemble those on the Castignano Stone 14 from farther up the coast near Ascoli 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 zur Geschichte des Etruskischen, Lateinischen und Griechischen Alphabets" in the Acta Societatis Scientiarum 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.

THE ALPHABET IN ITALY

461

Stone or on that from the site of Superaequom 15hardly more than ten miles (iue south of Capestrano.
Since these two so clearly form the Warrior's epigraphic company, his inscription must be transliterated 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 horizontal bars, 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 responsible for 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 only honest 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 narrow letters, closely spaced, producing a leggy and crowded appearance, reflect a common Etruscan cacoethesscribendi,inherited from the primitive Greek usage of the seventh century before the straggling Semitic eidos had been abandoned in favor of the classical Greek norm in which every letter's locus approximates 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 Corinthian connections. Messerschmidt's suggestion of "Zusammenhang, wenn nicht sogar . . . Abhdtingigkeitvon Bologna" 1isin 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.'9 So 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 III of the standard classification. Although this supplies only relative, and not absolute, chronology and the
15Ibid.
16

17Thus the ink-flagon from Caere (Buonamici,

pp. 289 ff.; Zvetaieff, Insc. Ital. Med. Dial. no. 10 (pl. IIa, fig. 2, 2a) and Inf. Dial. no. 12. MonAnt. v, 1895, pp. 173ff., figs. 29-30; Buonamici, Ep. Etr., pl. LVIII.
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 with 4 vowels. 18 Von Italische Grdberkunde ii, p. 178. Duhn--Messerschmidt, 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 importance for the East Italic inscriptions, pp. 222-256, 522-530.

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absolute dates are still much disputed, recent discussions 20 seem to leave little doubt that we are dealing, as at Novilara, with the early fifth century B.C., shortly after the Etruscan expansion north of the Apennines (itself a phenomenon probably consequent on the definitive repulse of Etruscan ambitions in Campania and Latium). As an important cultural and commercial center in an environment that must have been polyglot, Felsina-Bologna was admirably suited for disseminating the Etruscan 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-valleys of the Italian Alps. That the alphabet travelled along the trade-routes, even though it was not purely the movement of commercial goods which carried it, is shown by the inscriptions engraved on the Alpine imitations of the bronze Etruscan "Schnabelkannen" from the cemeteries in the Ticino valley at Bellinzona. It was here that Etruscan exports passed to northwestern Europe, being conveyed not (with the modern railway) all the way up the Ticino to the St. Gotthard, but through the lateral confluent of the Val di Mesocco over the San Bernardino Pass to strike the headwaters of the Hinter-Rhein.21 The two inscriptions thus far discovered on Rhaetic "Schnabelkannen" (fig. 6) 22 are in some local tongue incomprehensible to us and are written in letters which suggest a fusion between pure Etruscan and its east-coast derivatives. They show the letters A, TU, T, and (less perfectly) Z, already in the altered shapes which they were to assume in the Teutonic Runes-though it may be questioned whether the Hinterrheintal is not a blind alley in the search for Runic origins. After the Etruscan collapse and the emergence of a cis-Alpine Gaul, the Celtic flood probably did little to help or hinder North Italic writing. When at last the Roman 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 the late Republic for the final Romanization of the Rhaetic script. Thus in the tombs of San Bernardo near Ornavasso (where the Simplon railway leaves Lago Maggiore above Stresa) the documents are all in epichoric script and are dated by the accompanying 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 89 B.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 bilingual employing the native ("Sondrio") script for the native portion and for the Latin version "the ordinary Latin alphabet of about the Sullan period." 24 This is important evidence for maintaining that if the Runes (as excellent recent opinion claims) were derived from North Italic, their transmission beyond the Italian frontier must
have taken place earlier than Julius Caesar -otherwise,
20 21

inevitably, Central Europe

Von Duhn-Messerschmidt, pp. 17-923;33-592;58-63. Randall-MacIver, The Iron Age in Italy, pp. 94f. 22 From Jacobsthal-Langsdorff, Die Bronzeschnabelkannen, pl. 23, and Whatmough, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology xlvii, 1986, p. 206. 23Whatmough, Prae-Italic Dialects ii, pp. 109-119. 24 Ibid., p. 57.

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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 not too great to be

-_-::

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

FIG. 6.-

(Above): INSCRIBED IHAkNDLESFROM RHAETIC JARS

Die Bronzeschnabelkannen, P1. 23) (Below): ZuRICH, MUSEUM, INSCRIBED SPOUT (From Harvard Studies in Class. Phil. xlvii, 1936)

(From Jacobsthal-Langsdorff,

spanned. And spanned it must somehow be; for the Runes are evidently on style alone an archaic Greek derivative. Any unprejudiced observer with a trained eye for epigraphic style must see something of the spirit of the first Greek scribes of the seventh 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

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thousand years later! Such an extraordinary phenomenon can be explained by the extreme conservatism with which the Greek characters were preserved and transmitted in barbarian hands. The Etruscan inscription scratched beneath the base of an Attic red-figure cylix from Tarquinia 25 does not resemble contemporary Greek writing, but looks as though it still be. longed in the seventh century; ..... .. the East Italic stones always impress the observer as highly ancient and in consequence tempt him to assign them overgreat antiquity; some of the Venetic inscriptions are even more misleading, the Rhaetic ......... ..... completely so; the letters --O.RMII scratched on the stag-horns from Magre 26 from Hellenistic times could almost keep com.... . .. ... .. pany with the very earliest Greek inscriptions, such as ............ ---------------.......... those on the hearth-coping of the Hera sanctuary at Corinthian Perachora. Centuries after the Greeks themselves had outgrown the archaic letter-forms, Etruscan, Venetic and Rhaetic scribes still traced . out their elongated and angular FIG. 7.- SWEDEN, MOJEBRO STONE shapes. It was these - not the contemporary Greek letterswhich reached the Celtic and Teutonic world of Central Europe ahead of the spreading power of the Roman empire with its equally long-lived Latin letters.27

'N.41

BRYN MAWR COLLEGE

25

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26

Buonamici, Epig. Etr., pl. XLVIII. Whatmough ii, pp. 41f., figs. 1 and 2.

27 For the intricately fascinating subject of the derivation of the Norse runes consult the compendious survey of the theories of Marstrander and Hammarstr6m and the supplementary discussions by Helmut Arntz in the latter's Handbuchder Runenkunde, 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 in Studier i Nordisk Filologi edited by Tidsskriftfor Spragvidenskap, 1928 et seqq., HammarstrWim's Pipping, vol. 20 no. 1 ("Orn runskriftens hirkomst"), Helsingfors, 1929.