The
Pyrgi Tablets, found in a 1964 excavation of a sanctuary of ancient
Pyrgi on the
Tyrrhenian coast of
Italy (today the town of
Santa Severa), are three golden leaves that record a dedication made around
500 BC by Thefarie Velianas, king of Caere, to the
Phoenician goddess
‘Ashtaret'. Pyrgi was the port of the southern
Etruscan town of
Caere. Two of the tablets are inscribed in the
Etruscan language, the third in
Phoenician.
[1]These writings are important not only in providing a bilingual text that allows researchers to use knowledge of the Phoenician language to read Etruscan, but they also provide evidence of Phoenician/Punic influence in the Western Mediterranean. This document helps provide a context for Polybius's report (Hist. 3,22) of an ancient and almost unintelligible treaty between the Romans and the Carthaginians, which he dated to the consulships of L. Iunius Brutus and L. Tarquinius Collatinus (505 BC).
The tablets are now held at the National Etruscan Museum, Villa Giulia, Rome.
The Phoenician text has long been known to be a Semitic language (related to such languages as Hebrew, Canaanite, Ugaritic, Arabic and Akkadian); hence there was no need for it to be "deciphered." And while the inscription can certainly be read, certain passages are philologically uncertain on account of perceived complications of syntax and the vocabulary employed in the inscription, and as such they have become the source of debate among both Semitists and Classicists.[2]
