'Punic was not dead'

A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages, 2020

<cn>Chapter 16 <ct>Phoenician and Punic <au>Françoise Briquel Chatonnet and Robert Hawley <h1>Introduction <p>"Phoenician" is the name given by the Greeks to the language and culture of "Phoenicia", a loose grouping of cities, each with its hinterland, situated along the coastal strip of the Eastern Mediterranean seaboard, stretching roughly from Arwad in the north to Tyre in the south, with Byblos, Beirut and Sidon in between. The Phoenicians themselves did not employ a single global gentilic in this way, but instead defined themselves as Tyrians, Sidonians, etc. "Punic" (which derives from the Latin form for "Phoenician") is the name given to the manifestations of the same language and script attested in the Carthaginian world of the Western Mediterranean. The terms "Phoenician" and "Punic" are here retained for convenience, as a necessary category for discussing the pertinent data, and as a consequence of the last century and a half of scholarship. Phoenician and Punic are known almost exclusively from epigraphic sources. Archeologically, the earliest of the Phoenician inscriptions can be dated to the beginning of the 1 st millennium BCE, and the latest to the reign of the Roman emperor Augustus. Punic inscriptions are known from the mid-first1st millennium BCE through the first1 st century BCE. Punic culture survived the destruction of Carthage, however, and continued to exist within the Roman Empire; this form of language and script is referred to as "Neo-Punic", attested until the third3 rd century of the common era (and even the fourth4 th , although then transcribed into Latin characters, in the inscriptions of Sirte from Libya). Traces of even earlier stages of the language may be found sporadically in the cuneiform record, especially in the form of proper names, but also as isolated nouns and verbal forms appearing as substrate elements in the abundant diplomatic correspondence from the Late Bronze Age. Inversely, vestiges of Punic may also be found for example in Latin and Greek literature, as in the Latin works of the playwright Plautus and of Saint Augustine, and in the manuscript tradition of Dioscorides in Greek. Although the language is, of course, attested in inscriptions from the heartland, ironically enough it is much better attested outside of Phoenicia proper. Indeed, the presence of Phoenician traders and merchants is attested not only in the North (Cilicia) and East (Mesopotamia), but also and especially in the West, where commercial colonies were founded throughout the Mediterranean, from Cyprus and Malta to Carthage and Cadix. This "Phoenician expansion" in the Mediterranean had almost certainly begun already in the ninth9th century BCE, and perhaps even earlier. Many of these "colonies"-and Carthage comes immediately to mind-rather quickly 2 acquired independence, although political, religious, and commercial connections with the heartland continued to be cultivated. Modern scholars, for linguistic reasons, nevertheless group the full documentation, whether from the heartland or from the various colonies alike, under the broader rubric of "Phoenician and Punic". Taken globally, the corpus of Phoenician inscriptions numbers upwards of 10 000 objects. This seemingly large number is deceptive, however, since many inscriptions are highly formulaic, and present virtually the same stereotyped wording, with the exception of personal names. The geographical distribution of the Phoenician corpus is also uneven. By far, the vast majority come from Carthage, and date to the third3 rd and early second2 nd centuries BCE. The corpus is also essentially monumental, consisting of funerary or commemorative stelae intended for public display. This aspect of the corpus makes its linguistic study difficult, however, since very few documents from daily life are known, which ought, theoretically, to reflect more faithfully the language as it was actually spoken. With respect to better known or better attested ancient languages, Phoenician appears to be linguistically most closely related to Old Hebrew, as attested in inscriptions and in the Hebrew Bible, for example. This linguistic proximity was even profound enough to lead early decipherers of Phoenician to use the square Hebrew block script for the publication of Phoenician inscriptions, a practice that continued until very recently. <h1>Textual evidence <p>Throughout their history, Phoenician and Punic inscriptions used the same graphic system, the 22-sign consonantal alphabet, which derives from the older Canaanite alphabet which had emerged already in the seco 2nd millennium BCE. Whether this 22-sign system was accurate and appropriate for representing the consonantal inventory of 1 st millennium Phoenician, however, is uncertain (cf. the dual pronunciation for the sign Š in Tiberian Hebrew for example, which may or may not be pertinent for Phoenician). Unlike Old Aramaic and epigraphic Hebrew, matres lectionis only appear very late, and mainly in Neo-Punic. The Phoenician corpus may be conveniently divided in terms of its geographical distribution, with some indications of chronology for each geographical area. <h2>The Hheartland <p>Only a limited number of inscriptions are known from the heartland, but among these are some of the most significant, in terms not only of size and length, but also for chronology and political and cultural history. Typologically, Byblos provides the earliest sizeablesubstantial group of the

The arid pre-desert lands along the fringe of the Sahara have proven to be an especially fertile source of epigraphic remains from Roman Late Antiquity. In particular, the former Roman region of Tripolitania has yielded a small corpus of roughly sixty Punic inscriptions, dating from the first century of the common era to the fifth century. This corpus differs from other inscriptions in that language not only for its comparatively late time span, but also by virtue of the script in which it was composed. In the final stage before it disappeared completely from history, the Punic of Tripolitania was written in a modified form of the Latin script, which was apparently adapted to the phonology of Late Punic much as the Latin script was later adapted to represent other languages, including related languages like Maltese. In this paper, I will argue that the orthography of the Latino-Punic inscriptions represents the first unified and consistent system to render any Semitic language alphabetically, with full indication of vowels, rather than by syllabary or abjad. That is to say, I will argue that the orthography of the Latino-Punic inscriptions was unique in its time because it reflects the phonemes of Late Punic as it was spoken in Tripolitania at the time, solely for the benefit of Tripolitanian Punic speakers, rather than an attempt to render the sounds of Late Punic according to the orthography of other languages for the benefit of their speakers, such as Origen and Jerome’s roughly contemporary efforts to transcribe a closely related Semitic language (Hebrew) into the Greek and Latin scripts, respectively, for the express benefit of speakers of these two languages.

Two well preserved Punic texts from Carthage are translated and fully justified according to the scholar's standard showing that Phoenician letter style texts are actually in the Akkadian empire language just like all other pre-Hellenistic Mediterranean texts. The black temple plaque has a poignant yet sophisticated argument blaming first one divine power then another for Carthage's problems before ending with a statement blaming all the "high powers." Despite admitting that their emotion magic is mostly ineffective, this text still implies it is their only hope against their enemy mentioned in Line 2. This "enemy" follows the sun/storm god "Atu" which can only be Rome. The temple plaque mentions these deities: Su (full moon god, father time), Atu (sun/storm god), Hu (healing sun god), the Revealer (Yahu), the Reed-Boat (goddess Ayu), and the Opener (goddess Utu). The second text is on a white gravestone from Carthage's child cemetery (Tophet) and it is blaming some local drought on the lack of activity in the magical motion powers. Deities mentioned in the gravestone are the Revealer (Yahu) and Reed-Boat (crescent moon goddess Ayu). Neither text mentions Tanit, the supposed goddess of the Phoenicians, or child sacrifice.

Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel, 2022

It is generally agreed that Phoenician-Punic and Hebrew are characterized by a certain, if not high, degree of mutual intelligibility. However, several features clearly differentiate the two in terms of phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon. After delineating the history and dialectal subdivision of Phoenician-Punic, and then summarising the debate surrounding both its position among the Semitic languages and its relations with the languages and dialects of Syria-Palestine in the first half of the first millennium BCE, this paper goes on to focus on noteworthy linguistic features of Phoenician-Punic through a comparison with Hebrew and its dialectal varieties.

This communication intends to focus on a phase of ancient human occupation in the great region where the city of Kairouan is located, which we are beginning to define geographically, administratively but even less historically and which we qualify with the term "Kairouanais". As a term only defines the perception of a reality, it is not insignificant to examine the latter from an angle specific to historians and not simply borrowed from other disciplines (1). My investigation spans chronologically from the founding of Carthage to its fall and the effective Roman presence on African soil. It seems to me that coming to grips with the totality of this vast file, as much for the extent of the zone that it embraces as for the chronology that it has set itself, goes beyond the framework of this colloquium. Thus, I will confine myself to examining a few fundamental hypotheses which will serve as a general framework for a global approach to such a file. Concretely, my questions concern the examination of the hypothesis of the direct relations of the Carthaginians with this region then that of what we qualify as Phoenician-Punic influences on the Numidians in these regions of Central Tunisia.

Egitto e Vicino Oriente XXXIV, 2011

2011

This study traces the continuity of Punic cultural elements during Roman rule in three chosen areas in the central Mediterranean – the Maltese islands, Pantelleria and western Sicily – by taking a look at different socio-political and cultural aspects that are generally analysed in such comparative studies, namely administration, economy, language and religion. The notably Punic nature of the archaeological record of the Maltese islands after the establishment of Roman authority over the archipelago in 218 B.C. and well into the 2nd century B.C. was what inspired this study in the first place. Since Punic cultural continuity has been frequently referred to in Maltese archaeological literature without actually going in depth, this dissertation focuses mainly on the Maltese islands. However, instead of looking at the Maltese islands on their own and in abstract fashion, this study makes comparisons with the neighbouring islands of Sicily (with a strict emphasis on the western region of the island, where Punic activity was located) and Pantelleria, which more or less passed through similar political and cultural changes. Moreover, this study places the Punic culture in context and maps the contemporary Greek and/or Roman custom, in order to make claims about any interaction of the Punic culture with the new political and cultural regime. Volume I comprises the main text of the thesis. Volume II includes all the maps, figures and photographs, as well as three appendices. Appendix I provides a chronological chart of selected principal dates that make up the historical framework of the Mid- and Late Republic and Early Empire, and which are referred to or mentioned in the main text; Appendix II lists selected sources from classical texts (with their respective translations) that are referred to in the main text; and Appendix III provides key epigraphic texts retrieved in the places under study: essentially Punic and Neo-Punic inscriptions of Roman date, as well as two bilingual inscriptions (both in Punic and Greek) and two Greek inscriptions (bearing Punic names), also dating to Roman age.