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Palaeohispanic Languages and Epigraphies

Online ISBN:
9780191833274
Print ISBN:
9780198790822
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Palaeohispanic Languages and Epigraphies

Alejandro G. Sinner (ed.),
Alejandro G. Sinner
(ed.)

Assistant Professor of Roman Art and Archaeology

Assistant Professor of Roman Art and Archaeology, University of Victoria
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Javier Velaza (ed.)
Javier Velaza
(ed.)

Professor of Latin Philology

Professor of Latin Philology, University of Barcelona
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Published online:
17 April 2019
Published in print:
28 February 2019
Online ISBN:
9780191833274
Print ISBN:
9780198790822
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

At least four writing systems—in addition to the Phoenician, Greek, and Latin ones—were used between the fifth century bce and the first century ce to write the indigenous languages of the Iberian peninsula (the so-called Palaeohispanic languages): Tartessian, Iberian, Celtiberian, and Lusitanian. In total over three thousand inscriptions are preserved in what is certainly the largest corpus of epigraphic expression in the western Mediterranean world with the exception of the Italian peninsula. The aim of this book is to present a state of the question that includes the latest cutting-edge scholarship on these epigraphies and the languages that they transmit. To do so, the editors have put together a volume that from a multidisciplinary perspective brings together linguistic, philological, epigraphic, numismatic, historical, and archaeological aspects of the surviving inscriptions. The study of these languages is essential to achieve a better understanding of the social, economic, and cultural history of Hispania and the ancient western Mediterranean. They are also the key to our understanding of colonial Phoenician and Greek literacy, which lies at the root of the spread of these languages and also of the diffusion of Roman literacy, which played an important role in the final expansion of the so-called Palaeohispanic languages.

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