The "Amathus bilingiual"

An interpretation of Eteocypriot as a distant relative of Etruscan

Large parts of Ancient Greece appear not to have been Greek at all until well into the historical period. Groups that the Greeks themselves called “Pelasgians” are mentioned to have inhabited large parts of the mainland Balkan peninsula, Crete, the northern Aegean islands, and the Troad.

Their identity has been the subject of speculation for centuries, and frequent attempts have been made to link the Pre-Greek inhabitants of Greece to Anatolia, the Minoans, the Etruscans of northern Italy, and to the Levant.

Fuelling and frustrating many of these attempts are several languages sparsely attested from inscriptions in Crete, Cyprus, and Lemnos.

Of these, “Eteocypriot” or “true Cypriot” is probably the best attested, with several inscriptions found in the ancient Cypriot cities of Amathus and Golgoi. These are written in the Cypriot syllabary, a script descended from the Bronze Age “Linear C”.

Cyprus appears to have escaped from the disruptions of the late Bronze Age relatively unscathed, with much of the material culture of the period surviving until well into the classical age. The Cypriot syllabary is one such survival, and is relatively well understood because it was also frequently used to write Greek. Around 1,000 Greek inscriptions written in the syllabary have been recovered.

Most importantly, there is one relatively complete Eteocypriot bilingual. This is generally referred to as the “Amathus bilingual”, found in a local antique store just before the outbreak of the first world war, and dating to the early Hellenistic period.

The only real attempt to tackle the text was made by Cyrus Gordon in Forgotten Scripts (1987). Below is an illustration of the text as given therein.

I believe that with currently available resources, we can interpret the “Amathusian” of this bilingual as a language related to, but significantly divergent from, Etruscan. I will endeavour to demonstrate this below.

The text

Gordon transliterates the “Eteocypriot” part of the text as follows:

1. a-na-ma-to-ri-u-mi-e-sa-i-mu-ku-la-i-la-sa-na-a-ri-si-to-no-se-a-ra-to-wa-na-ka-so-ko-o-se

2. ke-ra-ke-re-tu-lo-se-ta-ka-na-[?]-[?]-so-ti-a-lo-ka-i-li-po-ti

Although the original is lost, other copies look very similar and give us some clue as to the identity of the ambiguous characters on the second line, as in the illustration below, credited to the French linguist Olivier Masson.

Based on both Gordon’s illustration and the above, I would revise the second line as follows:

ke-ra-ke-re-tu-lo-se-ta-ka-na-[no? 𐠜 or ne? 𐠚]-[u? 𐠄 or ki? 𐠌]-so-ti-a-lo-ka-i-li-po-ti

The Greek is easily interpreted as

Η ПΟΛΙΣ Η АΜАΘΟΥΣΙΩΝ ΑΡΙΣΤΩΝΑ ΑΡΙΣΤΩΝΑΚΤΟΣ ΕΥΠΑΤΡΙΔΗΝ

“The polis of the Amathusians [verb omitted] Ariston son of Aristonax, a nobleman.”

The fact that ΑΡΙΣΤΩΝΑ ΑΡΙΣΤΩΝΑΚΤΟΣ ΕΥΠΑΤΡΙΔΗΝ appears in the accusative presupposes an omitted verb (such omissions are common in dedicatory inscriptions). The fact that the Eteocyptiot (or “Amathusian”) text is significantly longer than the Greek which translates it suggests it may preserve a longer form of dedicatory formula.

Gordon notes that the fact that the names Ariston (a-ri-si-to-no-se) and Aristonax (a-ra-to-wa-na-ka-so-ko-o-se) are clearly intelligible confirms that whatever language “Eteocypriot” is, it was written using broadly the same sign values as used to write Greek. This is important as it allows us to be relatively confident in our transcription of the rest of the text.

We can also suppose that Amathusian maintains a similar set of orthographic conventions to syllabic Greek. Most importantly:

1. We might expect final consonants to be written with a dummy e vowel. (E.g. a word final -s will be written with 𐠩 se, potentially as in a-ri-si-to-no-se).

2. We might expect nasal consonants which precede another consonant to be omitted entirely.

3. We shouldn’t expect any distinctions in “manner of articulation”, as syllabic Cypriot Greek makes no distinction between unvoiced, voiced, and aspirated consonants.

These conventions will be important for our upcoming interpretation of the text.

Interpreting the text

The small dots that separate some sequences of signs have generally been taken as word separators. I would like to tentatively suggest that they instead separate phrases or linked components of a sentence.

This helps to explain why we see no separation marker in a-ri-si-to-no-se-a-ra-to-wa-na-ka-so-ko-o-se (the name “Ariston son of Aristonax”, which I analyse beliw as Aristonos Artowanaks-kōs), and possibly also between u-mi-e-sa-i-mu-ku-la-i-la-sa-na (which I analyse as umiesai muklai lasna).

With this assumption made, we can draw inferences about the relation of different elements within each “phrase” boundary.

Normalising the text

1. ana ma-to-ri u-mi-e-sa-i mu-ku-la-i la-sa-na a-ri-si-to-no-se a-ra-to-wa-na-ka-so-ko-o-se

2. ke-ra ke-re-tu-lo-se ta-ka-na [no/ne]-[u/ki]-so-ti a-lo ka-i li-po-ti

Which can be normalised as follows:

1. Ana Matori umiesai muklai lasna Aristonos Artowanakskōs

2. Kera-kertulos ta kana nousti alo kai lipoti

Line 1 analysis

ana: corresponds to Etruscan relative pronoun an(a), itself a derivative of the 3rd person pronoun “he/she”. We might give it the force “which” in this position, paralleling the tendency of Etruscan votive inscriptions to refer to the object directly.

Matori: this must reflect the toponym Amathus, suggesting the “Amathusian” name for the city was Mato (or possibly Amato). The suffix -ri potentially reflects a plural ending -ri related to Etruscan -r, or is a combination of plural -r and -i, used in Etruscan as an element in the names of cities named for families. “The city of the Amato tribe”, perhaps?

umiesai: appears to be a verb corresponding to Estruscan verbal root um(u)- “to pledge”, isolated from umene (n. “one who makes a pledge”), umu (n. “pledge”) and umuce (v. active preterite “pledged, secured”). Etruscan may exhibit vowel harmonisation of an underlying *i to u, suggesting an underlying root *umi-. The element -(e)sai likely relates to the Etruscan preterite suffix -ce (see also Lemnian -kai). Whether the ending -ai preserves a plural sense lost in Etruscan (number is not usually reflected in Etruscan verbs) or simply a dipthong which has collapsed in Etruscan is unclear. We also appear to see the change *k > s, at least between front vowels.

muk(u)lai lasna: analogous to the common Etruscan formula mechl rasna “Etruscan nation”. Rasna (glossed in Greek as Rasénna) is often taken to reflect the Etruscan endonym, but this phrase most commonly translates Latin res publica, and it often simply seems to mean “people” or “popular” as an adjective.

Etruscan mechl is an extension in -l of mech, “great, strong, a lord”, which appears to be related to or derived from mac “to increase, make great” < ma- “greatness”, which also seems to underly mach, the numeral five (perhaps originally “full hand”, compare the derivation of PIE *penkwe from “fist”).

-l (< *al, *la) is usually a genitive suffix in Etruscan, but was perhaps employed in an adverbiative sense to derive a new noun mechl originally meaning, “strength”. The mechl ras(en)na may therefore be translated as “popular strength”, with rasna acting as an adjective, corresponding to the Greek ПΟΛΙΣ and referring specifically to the community of men under arms.

The function of the ending -ai here is unclear. It can’t be easily explained as a plural marker, because it is missing from lasna. It may simply be a nominalising suffix for a particular kind of word, or it may function in a similar manner to the Etruscan enclitic conjunction -um, which is also occasionally seen in this expression (i.e. mechlum rasna).

Aristonos: “to Ariston”. We must presume that the -se sign should be taken to represent a terminal consonant, as is the case in Greek inscriptions written in the Cypriot syllabary, giving us Ariston-os.

The obvious solution is that -os is a case marker of some kind. The Greek translation gives us ΑΡΙΣΤΩΝΑ in the accusative. My suggestion is that the Amathusian -os is actually a dative case related to Etruscan -si. I’ve analysed this case marker as -os rather than simply -s in light of the form taken by the next word.

Artowanakskōs: here we again see the case marker -(os), indicating that the name Artowanaks is here taken to be part of an adjective phrase with Ariston(o)s. I’ve rendered the name as Artowanaks because the treatment of Ariston suggests that Amathusian simply appended its own case markers to the end of the Greek nominal stem.

The suffix -kōs occurs with an explicitly marked long vowel. My intuition is that we should analyse this as an agglutination of two suffixes -ko-os, indicating that the -o- vowel is an inseparable element of the Amathusian dative.

-ko- must be a patronymic or relational marker of some kind, perhaps an especially archaic genitive. It appears also to be preserved in a fossilised form in some Etruscan kinship terms, e.g. “grandson” papacs (also papals, with the more common -l suffix), derived from papa “grandfather”. The Etruscan patronymic suffix -isa may or may not be a distant relation.

Artowanaks-ko-os therefore represents a classic case of suffixaufnahme-mediated morphological reorientation. The -ko- suffix turns the proper noun Artowanaks into an adjective “coming from, borne of Artowanaks”, which is then given the dative marker to agree with Aristonos.

kera kertulos: although this is technically part of line 2, we should consider it a continuation of the first line because of the clear presence of another -os, indicating we’re dealing with another adjective subordinated to Aristonos.

This is an obvious candidate for the counterpart to ΕΥΠΑΤΡΙΔΗΝ eupatridē (“nobleman, noble”) in Greek. We appear to see a reduplication of the same root ker(a)- in the first and second part of the phrase, suggesting we might be dealing with a compound. We also see the -ul suffix we encountered earlier in mukulai, which we proposed must be related to the Etruscan genitive -(a)l.

We can assume from this we might therefore be dealing with a formula that we might translate as “a noble man of noble stock”, leaving us to conclude the word cera must mean “noble(man)”. This might very plausibly be cognate to the Etruscan word cara “beloved, dear”, derived from cer- “to make, build, care for or attend to”, perhaps employed here with the extended sense “refined, genteel”.

Kertul- can be analysed as a suffixaufnahme formulation of the same root ker-. The element -t- most likely corresponds to the Etruscan “participle” in -θ, which is usually used to designate actions taking place at the same time as the main verb of a phrase, eg. trin‐θ “(while) speaking”, and which is also closely related to the dative -θ(i), which is sometimes used as a tribal or ethnic suffix. If the verbal root ker- “to build, be attentive, be discerning” becomes a substantive “noble” via the addition of -a, kert- probably therefore means “noble race” or “noble lineage”, and is further augmented with the genitive -(u)l-.

We can therefore offer a full translation of the sequence

Ana Matori umiesai mukulai lasna Aristonos Artowanakskōs kera kertulos

as

This the res publica of the Amathusians pledged to Ariston son of Aristonax, a noble born of nobles.

Line 2 analysis

The second part of the inscription is nowhere near as clear cut as the first, thanks in no small part to two of its fourteen characters being badly damaged. Assuming Masson’s sketch is trustworthy, I believe the most likely candidates for these signs are no 𐠜 or ne? 𐠚 and u? 𐠄 or ki? 𐠌.

ta kana: probably corresponds to the Etruscan demonstrative pronoun/adjective ta “this” and the noun cana “image, likeness, work of art” but also “favour, gift, blessing”.

neki or noki: likely corresponds to the Etruscan adverb nac, which has a variety of nuances including “as” “when” “how” “why” “because” “so” and “why”.

soti: almost certainly cognate to Etruscan sut(h)i < sat/sut “to place”. In Etruscan, the derived nouns suti and suthi can mean “place, construction, site, or seat” but also euphemistically “sepulchre, tomb, burial”.

alo: almost certainly a verb cognate to Etruscan al- “to give”, although possibly also to ar- “to make”. Intuition begs us to associate alo with the following kai as a past-tense passive, “was given/made”, but the presence of a phrase separator between the two seems to make this impossible, and this must either be the Amathusian equivalent of an Etruscan -u participle “given/made”, or an equivalent to the simple present “gives/makes”.

kai: if it is a separate word, this may correspond either to Etr. cei “here” or to the adjective kai “happy, fortunate, good”.

lipoti: possibly corresponds to Etruscan lei-, lup- both “to die”. lipo- could plausibly correspond to the -u participle lupu “dead”, or form another kind of verbal noun/adjective. With the locative -ti this could tentatively be construed as meaning “in death”?

A tentative and much more speculative translation might be:

This image thus (adorning) (his) tomb makes/gives him glory in death.

What does this mean?

Unfortunately, not a great deal. There isn’t enough material here to make serious linguistic comparison viable. That said, we should note that “Amathusian” appears to preserve dipthongs which have collapsed in Etruscan, resolve certain sounds slightly differently, and also perhaps to preserve certain features of grammar as productive elements which are moribund or fossilised in Etruscan, suggesting a greater degree of separation between Etruscan and Amathusian than between Etruscan and Lemnian, which are nearly identical.

That said, we can identify a handful of other elements in surviving “pre-Greek” toponyms which can also be confidently linked to Etruscan (or more accurately “Tyrrhenic” or “Aegean”) or its otherwise unattested relatives. We’ll explore some of these in a later post.