New Lemnian Inscription

Rasenna Blog ^ | December 1, 2010 | rwallace

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A new Lemnian inscription was discovered recently during excavation of an ancient sanctuary at Efestia on the island of Lemnos. The inscription was incised in two lines on the upper portion of a rectangular altar measuring 50 cm. in length and 13.05 cm. in height (see photograph below). The direction of writing is boustrophedon. The upper line reads from left-to-right, the lower line from right-to-left. The inscription has 26 letters plus punctuation marks in the form of three vertically-aligned points separating words. The transcription provided below is that given by de Simone (2009). The letter âi (= palatal sibilant) is a transcription of the Lemnian 4-bar sigma and the letter s (= dental or alveo-dental sibilant) of the Lemnian z-sign. Punctuation is indicated by a colon.

upper line: hktaonosi : heloke (L to R)

lower line: soromâi : aslaâi (R to L)

The inscription is a votive dedication offered to or, more likely, on behalf of hktaono-. hktaonosi is inflected in the pertinentive case. (Exactly how to treat the odd initial cluster hk- is not clear.) The suffix of the verb heloke matches up well with the Etruscan past tense suffix /ke/, e.g., turuce /turuke/ ‘offered’. For the construction compare Etruscan muluvanice + pertinentive...

Background information about the date of discovery and about the archaeological context in which the altar was recovered has not yet been published. The inscription is dated on paleographic grounds to the last half of the 6th century BCE, but the date must be considered provisional until archaeological reports appear in print.

Bibliography:

de Simone, Carlo. 2009. La nuova iscrizione tirsenica di Efestia. Tripodes 11.3-58.

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