Writing board by Marsiliana d'Albegna
The Marsiliana d'Albegna writing tablet is an Etruscan artifact from the 7th century BC. BC and is now in the National Archaeological Museum of Florence . The writing board used to be coated with wax so that information could be recorded in writing with the help of a stylus. An early Etruscan alphabet is carved on the edge of the writing board.
discovery
The writing tablet was discovered in 1908 in a tomb in the Banditella necropolis near Marsiliana d'Albegna, a town in the municipality of Manciano in the Grosseto province of Tuscany . The tomb is also known as Circolo degli Avori as it contained numerous ivory artifacts. However, only incomplete fragments were left of the writing board. Therefore a lot had to be added when joining the parts. A pen and a scraper with a flat end for erasing the inscription were found along with the writing tablet.
description
The writing board is 8.8 cm high and 5.1 cm wide and was built between 675 and 650 BC. Made from ivory . It has a raised edge so that the resulting interior could be filled with wax. The writing was with a stylus ( Stilus scratched) in the wax layer. This is why a writing instrument of this type is also called a wax tablet ( Latin tabula cerata ).
inscription
An early Etruscan alphabet is carved into the edge of the writing board. Such inscriptions, which contain only one alphabet, are called abecedarium . The 26 letters run from right to left and come from a western Greek alphabet that the Etruscans used in the 7th century BC. By Greek settlers in Campania . All letters except for the S are mirrored. In inscriptions you can find the S in both variants.
The Etruscans did not use all letters of this alphabet in text inscriptions. The letters B, D and O were not used because the corresponding sounds did not occur in the Etruscan language . The Etruscan did not know the sound G either, the letter C for gamma was adopted as the character for a K sound. An S-sound in the form of a window was also not used.
Other abecedaries with model alphabets have survived from the early Etruscan period, including the Bucchero chicken from Viterbo , the Bucchero amphora from Formello , an alabastron from the Tomba Regolini-Galassi in Cerveteri and another Bucchero vessel from the necropolis of Sorbo at Cerveteri. The alphabets on these artifacts show the same letters as the alphabet on the writing board, but they are clockwise, i.e. H. from left to right, written. The letters are also reversed.
In the 7th century, the Etruscans initially made their inscriptions clockwise, from the 6th century BC onwards. Chr. Left-handed with mirror-inverted letters. It is noteworthy that the anticlockwise abecedarium of Marsiliana d'Albegna seems to be the oldest of the abecedaries found so far.
See also
literature
- Giuliano Bonfante , Larissa Bonfante : The Etruscan Language. An Introduction. 2nd Edition. Manchester University Press, Manchester / New York 2002, ISBN 0719055407 , pp. 52-55 and pp. 132-133.
- Friedhelm Prayon : The Etruscans. History, religion, art. 5th, revised edition. CH Beck, Munich 2010, ISBN 9783406598128 , pp. 38-39.
- Herbert Alexander Stützer : The Etruscans and their world. Revised and expanded edition. DuMont, Cologne 1992, ISBN 3770131282 , pp. 11-14.
