Bilingual Funerary Stele in Neo-Punic and Libyan
Unknown · First to second century AD
A tall limestone slab, over a metre and a half high, carries two inscriptions in two different scripts. Inside a sunken cartouche near the top runs a dedication in neo-Punic, the late form of the Carthaginian language: for Yagouakani son of Kanardat, son of Masyalan, these stones were erected. Around it are lines of Libyan characters, the writing of the native Numidian population, incomplete and only partly readable today. Look at the difference between the flowing Punic letters and the geometric strokes, circles and bars of the Libyan script.
The stele was set up in what is now north-western Tunisia in the first or second century of our era, when the region was a Roman province but its people still spoke and wrote the languages of Carthage and of the Berber tribes. Monuments like this are the main evidence for that bilingual world. Given to the Louvre in eighteen eighty-one, it is catalogued among the reference texts of both Punic and Libyan epigraphy.
Did You Know? The Libyan script on this stone, ancestor of the Tifinagh alphabet still used by the Tuareg, has never been fully deciphered.
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