Crecchio Stele
The Crecchio Stele is a sandstone stele of the 5th c. BC found in October 1846 in the contrada of Santa Maria Cardetola, part of the town of Crecchio, in the province of Chieti.[1] The stele carries an inscription of several lines in the South Picene language and alphabet. The stele is currently in the Museo archeologico nazionale di Napoli.[2]
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Inscription
[edit]The stele inscription is written in South Picene, an Osco-Umbrian language belonging to the family of Italic languages and spoken in the first millennium BC in the area occupied by the ancient Italic Picene people.
This is a transcription of the text from the Picene alphabet: [2]
deiktam h[lpas] pimoftorim esmenadstaeoms upeke[--]orom iorkes iepeten esmen ekúsim raeliom rufrasim poioúeta iokipedu pdufem ok[r]ikam enet bie múreis maroúm -elíúm uelaimes staties qora kduíú
Notes on the text
[edit]deiktam = "This (stele)", from the Greek root deik- ("to show")
poioúeta = likely derived from the Greek ποιεῖται ("he makes", "he does"), used in a ritual sense
okrikam = archaic construction that gave rise to the toponym Crecchio, with the meaning of "citadel" or "fortress"
qora = perhaps "wrote" or "this stone", from the Greek chôra or from an Osco-Umbrian root similar to sēma (“burial marker”)
This is not a literal translation because South Picene has not been completely deciphered. Nevertheless it is a plausible reconstruction based on linguistic analogies with archaic Latin, ancient Greek, and other Italic languages.
Notes
[edit]- ↑ "Crecchio, riportati alla luce i resti di un'antica necropoli (foto)" (in Italian).
- 1 2 "Lingua e scrittura" (in Italian).