Epigraphic contributions to a history of Carthage in the fifth century B.C.E.

Abstract

The subject of the dissertation is a group of three fragments of a Punic inscription discovered by G. G. Lapeyre in the Salammbo district of Carthage in 1934, published by J.-B. Chabot in 1944, and issued in 1962 by the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticorum, Pars Prima (CIS I) as numbers 5510 and 5511. Found with more than a thousand other inscriptions in the same area, these three fragments are of interest because they are remains of a single inscribed plaque. The two larger pieces join to form one continuous text of eleven lines (CIS I 5510 A-B), and the third fragment (5511), consisting of seven incomplete lines of text, can be associated with them. The three objectives of the dissertation are (1) to restore, translate, and annotate the Punic text; (2) to establish that the military events mentioned in the text as part of a synchronic date formula can be related in detail to a narrative of the same events by the Greek historian Diodorus; (3) to discover the nature of the religious decree that constitutes most of the text, and to place the decree within the context of political and religious life at Carthage at the end of the fifth century B.C.E. In 1974 Charles Krahmalkov proposed to identify the sequence of letters 'grgnt in CIS I 5510.10 as the transliterated name of the Sicilian Greek city Akragas (Latin Agragant). The identification allowed the inscription to be set in the context of the Carthaginian sack of Akragas in 406 B.C.E. I demonstrate that certain objections which have been raised against the identification are invalidated by unambiguous evidence. Its historical context established, the inscription is subjected to close analysis. Missing text is restored on the basis of existing parallels, and solutions to a number of lexical and grammatical problems are proposed. The text's structure is compared to that of other religious texts from Carthage. Its internal witness to the political and religious organization of Carthage in the fifth century B.C.E. is explicated in detail.