The Nora Stone

The story

A stone used as a wall

In 1773, not far from Pula, on the southern coast of Sardinia, someone noticed a large stone with signs carved on it. It was not in its original place: it had been reused as building material in a dry-stone wall, that is, a wall made of stones piled up without mortar. A professor at the University of Cagliari, Giacinto Hintz, recognised it as important. The next year, 1774, the scholar Giovanni Bernardo De Rossi published an account of it. The “Nora Stone” was born, named after the ancient city that stood nearby.

What is written on it

The writing is Phoenician, the same we saw in the cards on the alphabet. The problem is that the text is incomplete, and so scholars cannot read it with certainty. From the start the hand-made copies had mistakes: another scholar, Alberto della Marmora, judged De Rossi's drawing “extremely unfaithful”. Even today the translations differ.

The well-known American scholar Frank Moore Cross proposed a very concrete reading: the stele would commemorate a military victory by a general named Milkaton, son of Shubna, over the Sardinians at Tarshish. The last line, in his view, would name a king who would be Pygmalion of Tyre, the brother of Dido. In this case the stone would show that Tyre was sending men and ships to the western Mediterranean, and it would be evidence of the birth of the Phoenician colonies.

Another scholar, Robin Lane Fox, prefers a simpler, religious explanation: it would be a text thanking a god for having arrived safe and sound after a storm at sea. Others, such as E. Lipiński, disagree with Cross. The truth is that nobody has a final solution. We do not know.

The name of Sardinia

Why is a damaged and disputed stone so famous? Because in the text, according to many scholars, the name of Sardinia appears in writing for the first time, in the form read as “Shrdn”, because in Phoenician only the consonants were written. The Nuragic Sardinians left no writing: their civilisation, as we have seen, built thousands of nuraghi, but we have no documents written by them. Their name and the island's reach us from others. Hence the importance of the stele.

The oldest writing outside Phoenicia

According to the analysis of the shape of the letters, the stele was carved between the end of the 9th and the beginning of the 8th century BC. For this reason it is considered the oldest Phoenician inscription found outside the region of origin, the Levant. In the catalogue used by scholars of Semitic inscriptions it is listed as KAI 46. Today the stone is kept in Cagliari, in the National Archaeological Museum.

We know from other sources too, as we saw when talking about the nuraghi, that the Phoenicians were in Sardinia from the end of the 9th century BC. But written proof gives this story extra strength: it means that at that time at least someone on this island knew how to write, and wanted to leave a lasting record of their passing.

How an ancient inscription is studied

The scholars who deal with ancient inscriptions, the epigraphers, work in several ways. They look at the shape of the letters and compare it with other datable inscriptions: this is palaeographic analysis, the method that made it possible to date the stele. Then they try to work out which words are there, comparing them with other Semitic languages, such as Hebrew. Finally they propose a translation and discuss it with colleagues. In the case of Nora the work is difficult because pieces are missing and because the oldest Phoenician texts we know are few.

For young people today it is a good example of how history works: you do not always have an answer, and sometimes the beauty lies precisely in going on searching.