64
Friday, April 1, 1977
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Semitic Poetry Aids in Solving Carthage Puzzle
(Editor's note: The following article was excerpted
from the December issue of Research News, published by
the University of Michigan.)
When the Romans destroyed Carthage in 146 B.C.E.,
they may be said to have left no stone unbroken. They ren-
dered Carthage un-re-inhabitable by grinding it to fine
pieces and sowing the site with salt.
Unfortunately there must be but a few traces of Car-
thage that we can reasonably hope to find. Carthaginian
writing in particular can hardly be expected to emerge
from the site of Carthage itself.
(Yet actually we cannot blame the Romans directly
for destroying evidence of Carthaginian writing; indeed,
they took the trouble to remove Carthage's library to
safety in another city, a precaution that came to nought in
a later era when that city too was destroyed.)
We have so far depended for virtually all our knowl-
edge of Carthage on indrect sources of information.
Actually there is Carthaginian writing, or, as we might
say, a body-of western Phoenician writing. The Carthagi-
nians were closely related culturally and linguistically to
the Phoenicians of the eastern Mediterranean. The
Romans called the Carthaginians by the name Poeni, from
which we take our word Punic.
The Punic language is a dialect of Phoenician, and
Phoenician is a Semitic language not distantly related to
Hebrew. Hebrew, Phoenician, and Punic are all written in
essentially the same script. Hence it ought to be possible
to decipher without great trouble any Carthaginian in-
scriptions that might come to light.
A few types of Punic inscriptions have been found at
coastal sites around the western Mediterranean—at Mar-
seille, for example—and they have indeed proved deciphe-
rable.
One item of Carthaginian writing did cause irritation
to scholars because it resisted interpretation. In 1893 in the
Tunisian town of Mactar, about 180 kilometers (100 miles)
south of the site of Carthage, French archeologists uncov-
ered a massive stone inscription that had stood above the
door to a temple.
It was written in Punic (or— Neo-Punic ) • script and
dated back to the First Century B.C.E., that is, to the peri-
od after the razing of Carthage, a period when the Romans
governed the Punic peoples remaining in the region of Car-
thage. The country was then the Roman dependency of Nu-
midian.
The Mactar inscription, about 300 characters long, re-
mained undecipherable because its content was unlike that
of any other Punic inscriptions; scholars were unable to
get the crucial initial insight into its meaning. Their em-
barrassment grew more acute in the mid-1960's when an-
other inscription came to light in the same city.
One of the embarrassed scholars was Charles R. Krah-
malkov, professor of Near East Studies at U.M. "I worked
on the two inscriptions for ten years," Krahmalkov has
said. "I carried them around with me in my briefcase.
When my classes were taking exams, I'd look them over."
Why is it that two in-
scriptions, written in a well
known writing system;
should defy decipherment?
The problem, according to
Krahmolkov, lay in decid-
ing where the words and
sentences of the inscription
began and ended.
In their length, the two in-
scriptions differed frOM
items like bills of lading or
financial accounts. Those
had simple forms and a lim-
ited range of possible mean-
ings, while the two temple
inscriptions plausibly --con-
tained whole sentences and
explicit statements. But
there were no spaces be-
tween words in the in-
scriptions and the several
lines of each inscription did
not seem to demarcate sen-
tences, clauses, or verses.
Their composition seemed
to lack rhyme or reason.
Krahmalkov's achieve-
ment was to discover their
rhyme. The several lines of
one of the inscriptions, he
observed suddenly one day,
all ended in the Punic letter
t, pronounced in this case
—ot. Rhymes, of course,
are associated with poetry.
and Krahmalkov was thus
able to handle the texts in a
familiar way, as if they
were composed in the man-
ner of Semitic-style verses. With this in mind he translated
one of the inscriptions in an hour.
But in saying, as we just did, that rhymes are "of
course" associated with verse. we have grossly over-sim-
plified the problem that scholars like Krahmalkov faced.
For in fact rhyme is not a characteristic of most Semitic
poetry-or for that matter of virtually any other ancient po-
etry.
Hence no one ever looked for rhyme or regarded with
any special interest the fact that the lines of one of these
two inscriptions all ended with the same letter. Yet on the
assumption that each line was a verse. the decipherment
became possible.
Whereas the words within the lines had hitherto beet'
indistinguishable, now by regarding the lines in the light of
the rules and characteristics of Semitic poetry one could
isolate the words within the lines. One strong character-
istic of Semitic verse is parallelism:
Darker than wine are his eyes
and whiter than milk are his teeth.
--Genesis 49:12'
The poem. dating from perhaps 118 B.C.. was carved
on a temple lintel and composed by a quasi-religious civic
organization. the mzrh of the god Drt (see line 1). The ,
poem's purpose is to thank a certain Roman appointee for
having made the countryside safe for gentleman farmers.
The Berbers in those days made a practice of harassing
'settlers whom the Romans were encouraging to occupy '-
the land in North Africa. The Roman historian Tacitus has
written of this Roman policy of settling people on North Af-
rican farms, and in this poem we have direct evidence of
the meaning of this 'policy in practice.
The poem is rendered here in Semitic verse form, but
the lines as shown here do not accord with the li•as -
they are carved. Thus for over 80 years the insc.. .on
was not perceived to be in verse form. The verses each
comprise three rhyming lines, a fact that made possible
the deciphering of words within the lines; note that. except
in the third verse, the lines of each verse have common::
final characters (on the left, not the right).
An early unsuccessful attempt at rendering lines 7, 6,
and 9 is also quoted.
1.78
or
A soft answer turns away wrath
but a harsh word stirs up anger.
--Proverbs 15:1
N
Original Punic Text
rzrin cz-ip nITT
mnr)
3
nni8 nvx
att. nrw
on' ill
'1 D'!:".
6
13-h12' 511
iii
By knowing where the lines (and hence the clauses) of
the inscriptions ended, and by assuming that pairs of lines
might contain parallelism, Krahmalkov was able to make
good guesses about the words before him. It had always
been possible to guess at a few of the words in the in-
scriptions; now it made sense to look in adjacent lines for
words of parallel significance, as
n3.72e,
.r.nnrD
II 7
'CD
8
nmrn 517
71.)nv[:,]
r-rnr np 3.,5 n
He went down against the pass,
He went up against the plain.
ririrs:
nrntr
The Krahmalkov translation
Other features of Semitic poetry also helped Krahmal-
kov isolate the words within the succession of letters. The
cesura, or minor pause in tl. middle of each verse, surely
ought to mark a space between words. The number of
words per line is also subject to some limitations, giving
clues to how many words a line might break into.
There are sevaal reasons why it was more than or-
dinarily difficult to locate words in these two inscriptions
and hence why it was crucial to bring some sort of special
insight to bear on them.
The spelling of Neo-Punic words is often unusual, and
the spelling practice is lax. In one of the inscriptions the
same word is spelled in three different ways. Krahmalkov
has said that the spelling of Neo-Punic is even less phonet-
ic and more irrational than the spelling of English.
It often happens that the script in which a language is
written and the language itself diverge, the script failing
to adapt to changes in the spoken language. By 100 B.C.E.,
the Phoenician script and language had had well over a
millenium of opportunity for divergence. The basis for
comparison between Neo-Punic writing and writing related
to it was thus strained to the limits.
Krahmalkov was able to translate both of the in-
scriptions, and the results are now in print. The decipher-
ments will remain hypothetical, Krahmalkov insists, until
scholarly judgment is brought to bear on them, a process
that happens at a glacial pace in the world of decipher-
ment.
In a few years the few dozen knowledgeable critics of
Carthaginian decipherment will have rendered their opin-
ions. Perhaps most of them will concur with Sabatino Mos-
cati, one of the world's greatest Semitic-language scholars,
that Krahmalkov's suggestions are "brilliant and attrac-
tive."
The accompanying poem and translation appeared in
1975 in Revista di Studi Fenici (Review of Phoenician Stud-
ies), which is edited by Moscati, and represents part of
Krahmalkov's effort.
The poem, in the Carthaginian language, was discov-
ered in 1893 in Tunisia but was only deciphered in 1975 by
Prof. Krahmalkov. This and one other poem are the only
pieces of Carthaginian literature ever discovered in mod-
em times.
1. It was the Mzrh of DRT
that built the temple (and) courts
2. (And) facing the shrines on this side
its pillars side by side
3. (And) the great lintel, in its behalf
and in behalf of the people who reside
on estates.
4. The holy god's
name be invoked:
5. "Kin of Htr. the king,
Of Mescar, ruler since ancient times,
6. He who inspires awe
because of his might."
I have rendered the eulogy in writing:
7. Hear concerning Mr[..b the pious,
he who is righteous in his deeds;
8. He went down against the pass,
he went up against the plain;
9. When the district was threatened,
he caused the guilty one to grieve;
10. He rescued him who cried out to him;
he also cut off the tribes,
11. Which attacked our road(s),
and unto us were their camps
thrown open.
12. All of us with happy hearts
have composed these verses of praise.
An early attempt at translating
lines 7 to 9
7. The statue of our benevoleht master,
perfect, PLT, near the passage
8. Which descends into the valley and the table
(which carries the tariff of the sacrifices?)
and the HRST which is at the foot
(or base) of the sanctuary
9. (Of which) the tops of the columns are in
the shape of "corbeilles" (or Corinthian
•
capitals).