Southwest script
.jpg)
The so-called Southwest script ( Escrita do Sudoeste , also known as South Lusitan ( Escritura sudlusitana ), Tartessian ( Escritura tartésica ) or Algarve script ) is an Old Hispanic script with about 2,700 years old written evidence in Andalusia and Portugal . The town of Almodôvar , around 70 km north of Faro in the Algarve, is considered the place of origin . To a lesser extent, the written documents come from Andalusia.
Over 90 slate steles have been found around Almodôvar in the last few decades . Most of the steles only contain short texts, others have images. The “Stele of Abóbada” bears 60 characters. The longest known text in the Southwest language was provided by the most recent stele found in 2009 with 86 characters. Almodôvar is located at the transition from the Alentejo to the Algarve. The presence of Phoenicians or Carthaginians can be proven there at the time in question .
The steles , mostly tombstones, were made between the 7th and 5th centuries BC. The southwest script was developed under the influence of the Phoenician alphabet (readable from right to left) and shows formal, but not orthographic, influences of the South Iberian script . While the Phoenician script only knew consonants, the southwest script also uses vowels. Archaeologists therefore assume that it was not the Phoenicians who shaped the development of writing as much as the Tartessians living in the south of the Iberian Peninsula or peoples like the Kynets or Konians . Some Portuguese sources consider the southwest script to be identical to the Tartessian script.
A new museum in Almodôvar wants to make the documents from the old days accessible. The Museu da Escrita de Sudoeste presents 16 of the steles found in the area of Almodôvar, supplemented by some external finds.
literature
- Hermanfrid Schubart, A. Arbeiter, S. Noack-Haley (Ed.): Finds in Portugal ; Muster-Schmidt Göttingen / Zurich 1993; ISBN 3-7881-1512-2
- Ulrich Schmoll: The southern Lucanian inscriptions , Wiesbaden 1961.
- Javier de Hoz: El origen de la escritura del SO In: Actas del III coloquio sobre lenguas y culturas paleohispánicas , 1985, pp. 423-464.
- José Antonio Correa: La epigrafía del sudoeste: estado de la cuestión. In: La Hispania preromana , 1996, pp. 65-75.
- Virgílio-Hipólito Correia: A escrita pré-romana do Sudoeste peninsular. In: De Ulisses a Viriato: o primeiro milenio ac , 1996, pp. 88-94
- Jürgen Untermann : Monumenta Linguarum Hispanicarum IV. The Tartessian, Celtiberian and Lusitanian inscriptions , Wiesbaden 1997.
- Jesus Rodríguez Ramos: “La lectura de las inscripciones sudlusitano-tartesias” (PDF; 192 kB), In: Faventia 22, 2000, pp. 21-48.
- Amilcar Guerra: Novos monumentos epigrafados com escrita do Sudoeste da vertente setentrional da Serra do Caldeirao . In: Revista portuguesa de arqueologia 5, 2002, pp. 219-231 ( Memento of December 19, 2009 in the Internet Archive )