Stele of Nora

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Stele of Nora

The stele of Nora and the fragment of Nora bear Phoenician inscriptions that are in the possession of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Cagliari , Sardinia . They are named after their place of discovery, Nora , a ruined city not far from Pula on the Sardinian south coast, and represent the oldest alphabetical documents in the western Mediterranean .

The sandstone, 105 cm high and 57 cm wide stele by Nora was discovered in 1773 in a wall of a modern vineyard . The exact location not far from the Nora archaeological site on the coast is not documented. For paleographic reasons, the stele was made between the middle of the 9th century and the second half of the 8th century BC. Dated.

Inscriptions

Installation site in the National Archaeological Museum of Cagliari

The consonant writing on the approximately one meter high stele has defied translation attempts since it was found over 200 years ago. Each attempt produced a different version. It is written from right to left without any word separation. The names of places or gods are particularly controversial. The first naming of the island as Sardinia is considered the most famous testimony of the stele.

Characters of the stele

The Old Testament scholar Frank M. Cross interprets the inscription on the stele of Nora as the victory script of a Milkaton, son of Sabna and general of King Pumayaton, who lived in peace with the Sardinians after the battle of Tarsis (in Sardinia and not Tartessos in Andalusia). Pumayaton of Tire (831–785 BC), whom the Greeks called Pygmalion , also pushed through Phoenician interests in Sardinia and not only caused Carthage to be founded. Like all other interpretations, this one is hotly controversial, but it is the most historic.

Another translation reads: “[This is] the main temple of Nora, which [the scribe] visited in Sardinia as a sign of peace. The one who hopes for peace is Saba, Milkaton's son, who built Nora opposite the island [from Capo Pula]. "

The Nora fragment is completely beyond interpretation. Regarding the fragment, it was noted that the characters would make sense even if one assumed that the script was written with furrows or if the fragment was turned upside down.

Others

The stele was on view from April to October 2016 in the exhibition “Danger at Sea - Pirates in Antiquity” in the Kalkriese Museum .

literature

  • Sabatino Moscati , Maria Luisa Uberti: Le stele puniche di Nora nel Museo nazionale di Cagliari . In: Studi semitici . tape 35 . Consiglio nazionale delle ricerche, Rome 1970 (Italian).
  • Sabatino Moscati: Una stele di Nora . In: Oriens Antiquus 10, 1971, pp. 145–146.
  • Frank M. Cross : An Interpretation of the Nora Stone. In: Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 208, 1972, pp. 13-19.
  • Brian Peckham: The Nora Inscription. In: Orientalia 41, 1972, pp. 457-468.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Giuseppe Garbati: The Phoenicians in Sardinia . In: Joan Aruz, Sarah B. Graff, Yelena Rakic ​​(Eds.): Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age . Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2014, ISBN 978-1-58839-538-2 , 98. Nora Stele, p. 213 (English, digitized version [accessed April 4, 2017]).
  2. ↑ Chiara Blasetti Fantauzzi, Salvatore De Vincenzo: The Phoenician colonization in Sicily and Sardinia and the problem of the emergence of power in Carthage . In: Martin Bentz, Dietrich Boschung, Thomas Fischer, Michael Heinzelmann, Frank Rumscheid (eds.): KuBA 2/2012 . Hopf, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-643-99857-6 , pp. 9 ( digitized version [accessed April 4, 2017]).
  3. ^ Andreas Böcker: Museum blog. Museum und Park Kalkriese, September 8, 2016, accessed April 4, 2017 .

Web links

Commons : Stele of Nora  - Collection of images, videos and audio files