The Honeyman inscription, also known as the Archaic Cyprus inscription, is a seven-line Phoenician gravestone inscription found in Cyprus and first published in 1939. It is the oldest detailed Phoenician inscription found in Cyprus.[1]
It was first published in 1939 by Professor Alexander Mackie Honeyman in a review of the Phoenician inscriptions in the Cyprus Museum.[2] Its provenance is unknown, but it is made from red sandstone typical of Kokkinochoria.[2] On the basis of letter forms and grammatical peculiarities the writing was dated to c. 900 BCE (or rather the first half of the ninth century) by William F. Albright.[2]
The inscription apparently refers to the tomb of an important individual. Unlike other tombs it does not begin with the name of the deceased or the name of the builder of the monument. Most of the first four lines is readable, and it is helpful that word borders are nicely indicated by vertical strokes as word separators. But even then the interpretation is not easy.
The Phoenician text reads (uncertain letters are underlined, a colon is the word separator):[3]
(line1)
...]H’: ’Y: MPT: WH’Š: ’Š[.
(2)
...]M: LQBR: Z’: K‘L: HGBR: Z’[
(3)
...]ŠY: WY’BD: H[...] Z’: ’YT: H’[
(4)
.] BN: YD: B‘L: WBN: YD: ’DM: WB[N
(5)
YD ..]’R: ’LM: [.....]: L..Y: L[.
(6)
..]..’YT: [...............]Š[..
(7)
..].ŠM[...]Y[..........]NY
Honeyman reconstructed and translated the first five lines as:
He who [de]files (this) sar[cophagus will be for]gotten and will perish
(4)
Z’] BN YD B‘L WBN YD ’DM WB[N
whether by the hand of Ba‘al or by the hand of man or b[y
(5)
YD Ḥ]BR ’LM [..............]‘NY L[
the hand of the as]sembly of the gods [...]
The inscription being one of the oldest in Cyprus in the Phoenician language, Krahmalkov has interpreted it as referring to a Phoenician who, perhaps as a colonizer, invaded the island.[6][7] Crucial for his interpretation is the reading of two words. In line 1 the otherwise unknown word MPT, read by Honeyman as something like mufti and interpreted as a synonym of R’Š (rō’š = head), is read by Krahmalkov as mipPūt, from Pūt, out of Pūt, where Pūt is assumed to be the name Phoenicia.[8][9] And in line 3 the incomplete word ..]ŠY is read by Krahmalkov as ’LŠY, Alasiya, the common name of Cyprus. His reconstruction and translation of the first four lines is:
(line1)
[’ŠM] B’ ’Y MPT WH’Š ’Š [R’Š-]
[Men] came to (this) island from Pūt, and the man who was [their lead-
(2)
-M LQBR Z’ Y‘L HGBR Z’
-er,] his is this grave. This warrior came up to (invaded)
(3)
[’L]ŠY WY’BD H[...] Z’ ’YT H’[Y]
[Ala]siya, and[...] this (man/warrior) devastated the isl[and].
(4)
BN YD B‘L WBN YD ’DM WB[N...]
In him was the strength of Baal, and in him was the strength of man/’Adom,[10]and in h[im...]
Notes
↑ Christina Ioannou, Cypriotes and Phoenicians, Kyprios Character: History, Archaeology & Numismatics of Ancient Cyprus, 25 August 2015, The Phoenicians and Cyprus prior to the 8th century: "The earliest Phoenician inscription dates paleographically to the 11th century BC... consists of three letters incised... The second inscription is cut on a grave stela and is intriguing both in respect of the date it is paleographically attributed to, i.e. 9th century BC, and in terms of its content. The inscribed grave stela refers to a Phoenician buried on the island by his/her relatives. Being in charge of his/her burial, they erected the stela while other elements indicate the high social position of the deceased. The content of the inscription also attests to the importance of the dead person. It is a text of seven lines which informs readers about the kind of disasters awaiting them if they attempt to violate the tomb.
↑ In the Bible Puthians are mentioned in 1 Chronicles 2:53, but these are not Phoenicians but inhabitants of Judah.
↑ Hypothesized god of death and destruction, lord of Netherworld; Phoenician ’DM (Hebrew ’ādām) is the common word for man, person, human being. Krahmalkov 2000, p. 33, surmises that, as a deity, ’ADOM is "perhaps the apotheosis of First Man, like First Woman (Phoenician ḥwt [Hebrew Ḥawwāh, Eve]) a god of death and devastation, the dead and the Netherworld."
This article about Phoenicia, its colonies and people is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
The Phoenician alphabet is a consonantal alphabet used across the Mediterranean civilization of Phoenicia for most of the 1st millennium BCE. It was one of the first alphabets, and attested in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region. In the history of writing systems, the Phoenician script also marked the first to have a fixed writing direction—while previous systems were multi-directional, Phoenician was written horizontally, from right to left. It developed directly from the Proto-Sinaitic script used during the Late Bronze Age, which was derived in turn from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Phoenician is an extinct Canaanite Semitic language originally spoken in the region surrounding the cities of Tyre and Sidon. Extensive Tyro-Sidonian trade and commercial dominance led to Phoenician becoming a lingua franca of the maritime Mediterranean during the Iron Age. The Phoenician alphabet spread to Greece during this period, where it became the source of all modern European scripts.
The Punic language, also called Phoenicio-Punic or Carthaginian, is an extinct variety of the Phoenician language, a Canaanite language of the Northwest Semitic branch of the Semitic languages. An offshoot of the Phoenician language of coastal West Asia, it was principally spoken on the Mediterranean coast of Northwest Africa, the Iberian peninsula and several Mediterranean islands, such as Malta, Sicily, and Sardinia by the Punic people, or western Phoenicians, throughout classical antiquity, from the 8th century BC to the 6th century AD.
Astarte is the Hellenized form of the Ancient Near Eastern goddess ʿAṯtart. ʿAṯtart was the Northwest Semitic equivalent of the East Semitic goddess Ishtar.
The Punic religion, Carthaginian religion, or Western Phoenician religion in the western Mediterranean was a direct continuation of the Phoenician variety of the polytheistic ancient Canaanite religion. However, significant local differences developed over the centuries following the foundation of Carthage and other Punic communities elsewhere in North Africa, southern Spain, Sardinia, western Sicily, and Malta from the ninth century BC onward. After the conquest of these regions by the Roman Republic in the third and second centuries BC, Punic religious practices continued, surviving until the fourth century AD in some cases. As with most cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, Punic religion suffused their society and there was no stark distinction between religious and secular spheres. Sources on Punic religion are poor. There are no surviving literary sources and Punic religion is primarily reconstructed from inscriptions and archaeological evidence. An important sacred space in Punic religion appears to have been the large open air sanctuaries known as tophets in modern scholarship, in which urns containing the cremated bones of infants and animals were buried. There is a long-running scholarly debate about whether child sacrifice occurred at these locations, as suggested by Greco-Roman and biblical sources.
The Ahiram sarcophagus was the sarcophagus of a Phoenician King of Byblos, discovered in 1923 by the French excavator Pierre Montet in tomb V of the royal necropolis of Byblos.
Kanaanäische und Aramäische Inschriften, or KAI, is the standard source for the original text of Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions not contained in the Hebrew Bible.
The Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions, also known as Northwest Semitic inscriptions, are the primary extra-Biblical source for understanding of the society and history of the ancient Phoenicians, Hebrews and Arameans. Semitic inscriptions may occur on stone slabs, pottery ostraca, ornaments, and range from simple names to full texts. The older inscriptions form a Canaanite–Aramaic dialect continuum, exemplified by writings which scholars have struggled to fit into either category, such as the Stele of Zakkur and the Deir Alla Inscription.
The Marseille Tariff is a Punic language inscription from the third century BCE, found on two fragments of a stone in June 1845 at Marseille in Southern France. It is thought to have originally come from the temple of Baal-Saphon in Carthage. It is one of the earliest published inscriptions written in the Phoenician alphabet, and one of the longest ever found.
The Mdina steles are two Phoenician language inscriptions found near the city of Mdina, Malta, in 1816. The findspot is disputed; the oldest known description places it near the Tal-Virtù Church. The surviving stele is currently in the National Museum of Archaeology, Malta; the other stele has been considered lost for more than a century.
The Kition Tariffs are two important Phoenician inscriptions found in Kition (Larnaka), Cyprus in 1879. The longer of the two has been described as "Among the longest and most important Phoenician inscriptions from Cyprus".
The Kition Necropolis Phoenician inscriptions are four Phoenician inscriptions discovered in the necropolis of Tourapi at Kition in 1894 by British archaeologist John Myres on behalf of the Cyprus Exploration Fund.
The Son of Safatba'al inscription is a Phoenician inscription dated to c. 500-475 BCE.
The Batnoam inscription is a Phoenician inscription on a sarcophagus. It is dated to c. 450-425 BCE.
The Byblos bronze spatulas are a number bronze spatulas found in Byblos, two of which were inscribed. One contains a Phoenician inscription and one contains an inscription in the Byblos syllabary.
The Byblos clay cones inscriptions are Phoenician inscriptions on two clay cones discovered around 1950.
The Agrigentum inscription is a Punic inscription found in 1934 during the excavations led by Gabriel-Guillaume Lapeyre at "Salambo", the infant and children's cemetery (tophet) of Carthage, and published in 1942. It probably refers to military events in Sicily in 406 BCE.
The Larnakas tis Lapithou pedestal inscription, also known as KAI 43 or RES 1211, is a sixteen-line Phoenician inscription on the pedestal of a now lost statue of a local Cypriote governor, Yatonbaal. It is on a piece of greyish marble, measuring 44 by 69 centimeters, found in 1893 by Émile Deschamps at the foot of a hill near the northeastern Cypriote village of Larnax-Lapithou, in a field strewn with ancient stones, "that local inhabitants use as building material".
The Carthage Festival inscription or Carthage Festival Offering inscription is an inscription from Carthage in the Punic language that probably describes the liturgy of a festival of, at least, five days. It is dated to the fourth or third century BCE.
The KNMY inscription is an inscription in the Punic language from Carthage that is believed to record a so-called "molk" child sacrifice. The text is inscribed on a 55 cm high stela that was discovered in 1922.
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