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Tyre Cistern Inscription
Unknown · Hellenistic, c. 250 BC
A small marble block in the form of a shrine, with an Egyptian-style cavetto cornice and a sloping roof, carries nine lines of Phoenician letters on its left side. The stone is only thirty centimetres wide and has been broken and mended, with part of the inscription lost on the right. It was designed to be set into the wall of a cistern, so only the front and inscribed side were meant to be seen. Look at the crisp, slightly cursive lettering, typical of Phoenician writing in the Hellenistic centuries.
The text records the construction of a basin on a channel near the borders of Tyre, gives its capacity in the local measure of logs according to the standard of the city, and names the donors: a magistrate, or suffete, called Adonibaal son of Azimilk, from a family of suffetes. Dated around two hundred and fifty years before Christ, it shows the old Phoenician institutions still functioning under Greek rule. The block was brought to the Louvre in eighteen eighty-six by a French archaeological mission.
Did You Know? The text is a piece of ancient plumbing paperwork: it records the capacity of a water basin in logs, a Phoenician measure, checked against the official standard of Tyre.
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