The Kition Necropolis Phoenician inscriptions are four

Phoenician inscriptions 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 occ ...

discovered in the necropolis of Tourapi at

Kition Kition ( Egyptian: ; Phoenician: , , or , ; Ancient Greek: , ; Latin: ) was a city-kingdom on the southern coast of Cyprus (in present-day Larnaca). According to the text on the plaque closest to the excavation pit of the Kathari site (as of ...

in 1894 by British archaeologist John Myres on behalf of the Cyprus Exploration Fund. They currently reside in the

British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...

, the

Cyprus Museum The Cyprus Museum (also known as the Cyprus Archaeological Museum) is the oldest and largest archaeological museum in Cyprus. The museum houses artifacts discovered during numerous excavations on the island. The museum is home to the most extensi ...

and the Ashmolean Museum. They are dated to the 4th century BCE. The four inscriptions were first published in '' The Academy'' by

George Albert Cooke George Albert Cooke (26 November 18659 September 1939) was a British Anglican clergyman and academic. He held two senior chairs at the University of Oxford: Oriel Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture from 1908 to 1914, and Regius Pro ...

, who later published the well known ''Text-book of North-Semitic Inscriptions'' (NSI) which included two of the inscriptions as NSI 21 and NSI 22.

British Museum inscription

The inscription in the British Museum, known as BM 125082, and the inscription as KAI 34, is a white marble funeral stela with a rectangular shaft and triangular top. The inscription is in five lines.BM 125082
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Gallery

File:Phoenician inscription in the British Museum (KAI 34 from Kition, Cyprus) close up.jpg, Close up of the inscription in the British Museum (KAI 34, NSI 21) File:Kition Necropolis Phoenician inscription in the Cyprus Museum Catalogue from 1899, plate VIII (6231).jpg, Inscription in the

(NSI 22, RES 1207)Honeyman, A. M. “The Phoenician Inscriptions of the Cyprus Museum.” Iraq 6, no. 2 (1939): 104–8. https://doi.org/10.2307/4241651 File:Kition Necropolis Phoenician inscription in the Cyprus Museum Catalogue from 1899, plate VIII (6232).jpg, Inscription in the

(RES 1208)

External links

Kition, Larnaca; French Archaeological Mission of Kition (dir. Sabine Fourrier)
Alexandre Rabot, November 1, 2020

Notes

{{British Museum 1885 archaeological discoveries Phoenician inscriptions Archaeological artifacts Phoenician steles