The Nora Stone or Nora Inscription is an ancient Phoenician inscribed stone found at Nora on the south coast of

Sardinia Sardinia ( ; ; ) is the Mediterranean islands#By area, second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, after Sicily, and one of the Regions of Italy, twenty regions of Italy. It is located west of the Italian Peninsula, north of Tunisia an ...

in 1773. Though it was not discovered in its primary context, it has been dated by palaeographic methods to the late 9th century to early 8th century BCE and is still considered the oldest Phoenician inscription found anywhere outside of the

Levant The Levant ( ) is the subregion that borders the Eastern Mediterranean, Eastern Mediterranean sea to the west, and forms the core of West Asia and the political term, Middle East, ''Middle East''. In its narrowest sense, which is in use toda ...

. It is conserved at the Museo archeologico nazionale, Cagliari, and is considered particularly notable due to its reference to the name Sardinia in Phoenician. The inscription is known as KAI 46.

Discovery and publication

Discovery of the stone was announced in 1774 in the journal Efemeridi letterarie di Roma, which published a letter sent by Giovanni Bernardo De Rossi, then Professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Parma to Giovanni Cristofano Amaduzzi Professor of Greek Language at the

Sapienza University of Rome The Sapienza University of Rome (), formally the Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza", abbreviated simply as Sapienza ('Wisdom'), is a Public university, public research university located in Rome, Italy. It was founded in 1303 and is ...

. It was discovered by Giacinto Hintz, professor of Sacred Scripture and Hebrew / Oriental languages at the University of Cagliari, in a secondary location, incorporated in a dry stone wall near the

apse In architecture, an apse (: apses; from Latin , 'arch, vault'; from Ancient Greek , , 'arch'; sometimes written apsis; : apsides) is a semicircular recess covered with a hemispherical Vault (architecture), vault or semi-dome, also known as an ' ...

of the Chiesa di Sant'Efisio outside of Pula, Sardinia (immediately adjacent to what became known as the archaeological site of Nora).

Inscription

A possible reference to Pygmalion of Tyre is inferred by an interpretation of the fragmentary inscription, made by

Frank Moore Cross Frank Moore Cross Jr. (July 13, 1921 – October 16, 2012) was the Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages at Harvard University, notable for his work in the interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, his 1973 '' magnum opus'' ''Ca ...

as follows:

Interpretation

In this rendering, Cross has restored the missing top of the tablet (estimated at two lines) based on the content of the rest of the inscription, as referring to a battle that has been fought and won. Alternatively, "the text honours a god, most probably in thanks for the traveller's safe arrival after a storm", observes Robin Lane Fox. According to Cross the stone had been erected by a general, Milkaton, son of Shubna, victor against the Sardinians at the site of TRSS, surely Tarshish. Cross conjectures that Tarshish here "is most easily understood as the name of a refinery town in

, presumably Nora or an ancient site nearby." He presents evidence that the name pmy ("Pummay") in the last line is a shortened form ( hypocoristicon) of the name of Shubna's king, containing only the divine name, a method of shortening “not rare in Phoenician and related Canaanite dialects.” Since there was only one king of Tyre with this hypocoristicon in the 9th century BCE, Cross restores the name to pmy ''tn or p‘mytn, which is rendered in the Greek tradition as Pygmalion. Cross's interpretation of the Nora Stone provides additional evidence that in the late 9th century BCE, Tyre was involved in colonizing the western Mediterranean, lending credence to the establishment of a colony in

Carthage Carthage was an ancient city in Northern Africa, on the eastern side of the Lake of Tunis in what is now Tunisia. Carthage was one of the most important trading hubs of the Ancient Mediterranean and one of the most affluent cities of the classic ...

in that time frame. Pygmalion, the Greek version of the Phoenician royal name Pumayyaton, also figures in the founding legend of Paphos in Cyprus, and Robin Lane Fox more cautiously finds a Cypriote association possible: "The traveller even may have had links with

Cyprus Cyprus (), officially the Republic of Cyprus, is an island country in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Situated in West Asia, its cultural identity and geopolitical orientation are overwhelmingly Southeast European. Cyprus is the List of isl ...

, suggesting the Cypriot contacts had guided Phoenicians to this island." This hypothesis is not however universally accepted and has been rejected by other scholars who have translated it differently.E. Lipiński, Itineraria Phoenicia, Leuven/Louvain, 2004, .

Discovery and publication

Inscription

Interpretation

References

Further reading