North Picene language

North Picene
Native to	Picenum
Region	Marche, Italy
Era	1st millennium BCE[1]
Language family	unclassified
Writing system	Picene alphabets
Language codes
ISO 639-3	nrp
Linguist List	nrp
Glottolog	nort1401
The distribution of languages in Iron Age Italy is shown in this languages map of Iron Age Italy (c. 6th Century BCE).

North Picene, also known as North Picenian or Northern Picene, is an ancient language, believed to have been spoken in part of central-eastern Italy. The evidence for the language consists of four inscriptions dating from the 1st millennium BC, three of them no more than small broken fragments. It is written in a form of the Old Italic alphabet. While its texts are easily transliterated, none of them have been translated so far. It is not possible to determine whether it is related to any other known language. Despite the use of a similar name, it does not appear that North Picene is closely related to South Picene, and they may not be related at all. The total number of words in the inscriptions is about 60. It is not even certain that the inscriptions are all in one language.

The forerunner of the term North Picene was devised in 1933 by the linguist , in Prae-Italic Dialects of Italy: a catalogue of texts in Italic languages. While neither Picene language could be read with any confidence at the time, Whatmough distinguished between six inscriptions in a central-east Italic language and all the rest southern. The northern later lost three and gained one.^[2] Before that work, all the inscriptions had been lumped together under a variety of names, such as "Sabellic."

Corpus[]

The corpus of North Picene inscriptions consists of four engraved items of similar lettering and decoration, one of known archaeological provenance and the others acquired out of context but believed to be of the same location and date. The known site is the excavation at Servici Cemetery in Novilara, a village several kilometres south of Pesaro.

Stele from Novilara, Ancona - Museo Archeologico Nazionale delle Marche

All four items are stelae or fragments of stelae. Italian scholars have adopted the habit of calling them all Novilara Stelae. "The Novilara Stele" usually refers to the largest of the four. To the lettered stelae is added one without lettering but inscribed with the scene of a naval battle. It is kept in Pesaro, where it served as a model for a reconstructed Picene ship.

Novilara has been "excavated" since the mid-19th century. In those days the digging was not scientific, with no concern for stratigraphy. The locations of objects were not recorded. Apart from the fact that an object came from the site with other objects, no other information exists regarding it. Whether it was in situ or not in situ is of little concern. Even the date an object was excavated is now uncertain. Many objects are missing, as the region, the site and the museum have endured a century and a half of history, including war and occupation.

As the North-Picene language is a unique case of such kind of language (it has no known relatives), and the origin of the inscriptions is not well established, showing also epigraphic divergences according to the dating assumed, there are authors considering that such stelae could be forgeries.^[3]

The fragment of most certain date (not very certain) is located in the Museo Oliveriano, Pesaro. One number associated with it is PID 344.^[4] It was excavated 1860, 1863 or 1895 from a tomb of the Servici Cemetery. It records two one-word lines, transcribed variously as ]lúpeś, ]mreceert^[4] or ]-UPE ś, ]Mresveat.^[2] The archaeological date is that of the site as a whole, somewhere in the window 800–650 BCE.^[5] The style of the alphabet suggests the end of the 7th and the beginning of the 6th centuries BCE.^[2] The most likely date, therefore, would be about 650 BCE, the end of the Novilara window. It was a time of Italic and Etruscan wars and warrior kings during the Roman Kingdom, as martial scenes on other stelae and the presence of weapons in nearly all graves of males suggest.

The only long inscription known to date is incised on a stone often called "the Novilara Stele". It is located in the Museo L. Pigorini, Rome, with the number PID 343. It begins mimniś erút .....^[6] The decorations: spirals, wheel, herring bone and zig-zag patterns, are similar to those of the others. The reverse side features hunting and battle scenes. It and the nautical Novilara Stele were acquired out of context probably in 1889 in the vicinity of Novilara; they are generally believed to have been taken from there and to be of the same date.

Sample text[]

The best-known North Picene inscription is on the stele from (now in the Museo Preistorico Pigorini, Rome), dated to approximately the 6th century BCE:

mimniś erút gaareśtadeś

rotnem úvlin partenúś

polem iśairon tet

śút tratneši krúviś

tenag trút ipiem rotneš

lútúiś θalú iśperion vúl

teś rotem teú aiten tašúr

śoter merpon kalatne

niś vilatoś paten arn

úiś baleśtenag andś et

šút iakút treten teletaú

nem polem tišú śotriś eúś

That both di Carlo and Harkness concluded independently that the first two words should be translated something like 'this monument' suggests that this may in fact be the beginning of a solid translation of this supposedly untranslatable text--though it, of course, still leaves us a very long way from a full translation. This, along with apparent morphological alternations such as -es ~ -em and -ter ~ tris, also suggests that at least some of the forms are in fact of Indo-European origin, likely of the Italic branch.

As di Carlo points out, 'balestenag' has close parallels in Messapic (as does 'kruvis/tenag,' by the way), suggesting some contact, at the least, between these two civilizations along the Adriatic coast of Italy. But the '-ag' ending looks like an Italic agentive ending. If di Carlo is right (which is likely) that the second word 'erut' is a neuter pronoun agreeing with 'mimnis,' that would make the latter probably an -s- stem neuter (all -s- stems were neuter in Hittite, the earliest attested Indo-European language). That opens the possibility, as suggested by Harkness, that 'rotnem' is also an agreeing neuter form. If, further, this is related (a -n- stem adjective) to Latin 'rota' (with its many IE cognates) we have an opening (but discontinuous) phrase "this wheel monument..." (note the prominent wheel shapes at the top of both sides of the stele).

References[]

Bibliography[]

• Davies, Glenys (1976). "Burial in Italy up to Augustus" (PDF). King's Manor, York: Archaeology Data Service (ads), the University of York.
• Agostiniani, Luciano (2003). "Le iscrizioni di Novilara". In I Piceni e l'Italia medio-adriatica. Atti del XXII Convegno di Studi Etruschi ed Italici (Ascoli Piceno, Teramo, Ancona, 9-13 aprile 2000), Pisa – Roma: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, pp. 115-125.
• Di Carlo, Pierpaolo (2007). L'enigma nord-piceno. Saggio sulla lingua delle stele di Novilara e sul loro contesto culturale, Padova : Unipress.
• Harkness, John (2011) "The Novilara Stele Revisited" Journal of Indo-European Studies vol. 39, pp. 13-35
• Poultney, James W. "The Language of the Northern Picene Inscriptions" Journal of Indo-European Studies vol. 7, pp. 49-64

External links[]

• Ager, Simon (1998–2010). "Old Italic alphabets". Omniglot. Retrieved 10 September 2010.
• Douros, George (2008). "Aegean" (PDF). Belarusian School of Indology. Archived from the original (PDF) on 12 March 2012. Retrieved 10 September 2010.
• Gill, NS (2008). "The Novilara Stele and the North Picene Language". about.com: Ancient/Classical History.
• Martini, Rossella (1999). "La "Stele di Novilara"" (in Italian). Centro Audiovisivo-multimediale Distrettuale Network (CADnet). Archived from the original on 2010-08-16.