Recent finds and new directions in the epigraphy of ancient Cyprus

Artemis Karnava of the University of Crete surveys recent publications and discoveries in the epigraphy of ancient Cyprus from the second and first millennia BC, covering Cypro-Minoan, the Cypriot Syllabary, Phoenician and alphabetic Greek.

She begins with the first fascicle of the Corpus of Cypriot Syllabic Inscriptions of the First Millennium BC (Inscriptiones Graecae, 2020), edited with Massimo Perna and Markus Egetmeyer. Contrasting the French tradition of Olivier Masson, which pairs texts with long commentary, with the German corpus model, she explains how the volume catalogues over 410 inscriptions from Amathus, Kourion and Marion with drawings, normalized syllabic signs, syllabic transliterations in Latin characters, Greek renderings and phonetic notations. A second volume on Paphos is in preparation, while a third will cover the rest of the island, including the difficult deposit from Kafizin, and the graffiti of Cypriot mercenaries at Abydos and Karnak in Egypt.

Turning to the Late Bronze Age and the Cypro-Minoan script, Karnava highlights an unpublished clay tablet from Pyla-Kokkinokremos now in the Larnaca District Museum, a surface find of an inscribed picrolite plaque from Enkomi whose left-hand sign matches Linear A and the earliest 16th-century Enkomi tablet, a clay ball from Mycenaean Tiryns, and a Neopalatial Minoan loom weight from Kalochorafis on Crete incised with a Cypro-Minoan sign.

For the first millennium BC, she discusses the Phoenician and syllabic archive from Idalion, including a Phoenician ostracon dated to the first year of Antigonus and Demetrius (306 BC) that shows Phoenician scribes continuing to run the fiscal administration under the early Hellenistic rulers, alongside the 2021 to 2022 discovery of a pit of fourth-century BC Phoenician ostraca at Kition-Bamboula. Among recent syllabic work, she presents a small administrative potsherd from Palaepaphos recording quantities of a commodity abbreviated te; her re-reading of a boundary stone from Rantidi naming the god of Kourion (Apollo); revised readings of royal coin legends and tombstones from Amathus, Marion and Salamis that mix Greek, Phoenician, Anatolian and indigenous names within single families; an inscribed bone with numerical entries excavated by Despo Pilides; and two syllabic ostraca from Stephan Schmid's excavations at Idalion bearing identical dedications to Aphrodite of Golgoi. After showing an alphabetic dedication to Aphrodite Akraia naming King Nikokles and the royal house of Salamis, she closes with reflections on paper squeezes, 3D scanning, the Berlin digital edition, and the risks of feeding unverified research databases inherited from Jean-Pierre Olivier into artificial intelligence models.