Neumann a Cypriot Silver Bowl Reconsidered

7/27/2019 Neumann a Cypriot Silver Bowl Reconsidered

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A C y p r i o t S i l v e r B o w l Reconsidered3 . T h e InscriptionGUNTER NEUMANNUniversityof Wiirzburg

T HESILVER OWL r phiale (MMA74.51.4557;Figures 1, 4), the primary object of concernin this survey, is probably from Kourion,within the broaderregion of Paphos.Itwasdated byEinarGjerstad o the beginning of the sixthcenturyB.C.(see, however,the comments on this score byVassosKarageorghis,above).'Thanks to the restoration undertaken by The

Metropolitan Museum of Art, we now have theopportunityto tryfor a better reading of the bowl'sinscriptions. In spite of this, however, we mustassume that some essentialelements in a number ofsigns have been lost forever as a result of corrosion.

THE LEGEND ABOVE THE RECUMBENTQUEENThe inscription readsfrom left to right (see Figure1). Unquestionably, it refers to the female figure(on the left) beneath it, lying on a klineor couch(KXCv'q) nd looking at her partner at the right.Thus, one may logically expect a feminine propername in the nominative, or possibly a title. Thenumber of syllabicsigns cannot be preciselydeter-mined, and it would be possible to come up withbetween six and eight, depending on how onearranged the strokes. My own preference is forseven as will be explained further on.The engraver started the legend far to the left.The firstsign in the group standsabove the doubleflute of the leading female musician. The signs areclearly separated by intervening spaces.Of the previousreadings, that of Otto Hoffmann(ipe-ropo-ta-ko) ust be almost completelyrejected;we mayretain only his reading of the third sign, ro.2Olivier Masson included this inscription in his? The MetropolitanMuseum of Art 1999METROPOLITAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 34The notes for part 3 begin on page 35.Figures 1-3 appearin part 1 of this article,Figures4-15 in part 2.

Inscriptions chypriotesyllabiques,as no. 179, and ven-tured for the first three signs the reading ape-ro(witha question mark at the a).3He did not attempta transliterationfrom sign 4 on. Terence Mitfordread the whole as kupo-ro-ta-le-uKvrpo0&XEV[;]),and he was certainlycorrect with regard to signs 1through 3.4His reading of sign 6 also appearsto beaccurate, though his suggested transliterationsforsigns 4 and 5 are unconvincing, which is, I believe,equallythe case with his grammatical nterpretationof the entire name (as the genitive singularmascu-line of a propername Kmrpo-0&ATXq).hile Massonaccepts this as "tres eduisante," n the 1983 editionof his Inscriptions chypriotes yllabiques,Markus Eget-meyer rightlyexpressesreservations.5Let us now consider these signs, one at a time.Sign i: ku. Its form, now visible again thanks tothe Metropolitan's restoration, corresponds pre-cisely to that in the EarlyPaphian grid, in Inscrip-tions chypriotes yllabiques(p. 66), with the two smallverticalstrokesat the very top.6Sign 2: The po was engraved in two curvingstrokes.

Sign 3: ro. This sign-and what remains of thosethat follow-is considerablysmaller than the firsttwo. At the top, it is on a line with the precedingcharacters,but it does not extend as far downward.Like the preceding character, it was also writtenwith two strokes. The stroke extending from theupper right to the lower left accidentallybecametoo long. (Perhaps the engraver merely slippedhere; the bottom part of the stroke is considerablythinner. Both downwardstrokes should be the samelength.)As Mitford proposed, this gives us ku-po-ro-,rKvrpo-,the first element of apropername. It refersto the island, and it is certain that such a namewould have been given only to members of thelandowning aristocracy.(Of the syllabary inscrip-tions, see, for example, the masculine Kvrp6-(pLtXo[Inscriptions chypriotes yllabiques,no. 158]; KvrrpO-

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OEj,LS [Inscriptions chypriotes syllabiques, pp. 15f.];Kvtrp6-TLRuos [Inscriptions chypriotessyllabiques,no.205]; the feminine Kvrrpo-TCpLcx,tc. It is rarer tofind -Krrpo- as the second element, as in the repeat-edly attested FDLX6-Kv1rpos.)These first three signs are well preserved; thosethat follow, however, are difficult to reconcile withthe normal forms of the Paphian grid. Their verti-cal strokes are all slanted slightly to the left.

Sign 4: Its form does not fully correspond to anyregistered in the Paphian grid. The interpretationas ta, or -, which was first suggested by Mitford,would presuppose that the sign's vertical hasta con-tinued upward beyond the intersection of the twostrokes. Yet there is no trace of this that one can see.Moreover, one must remember that the upper endsof the preceding signs all seem to lie along thesame imaginary horizontal line. The horizontalstroke has been extended a bit to the left.

Now let me anticipate here, briefly, my conclu-sion regarding the queen's inscription. I aminclined, by my overall sense of what this propername might be, to conclude that sign 4 could bethe syllable me. My reasons will become clear in amoment. Suffice it to say that-at the least-theremaining fragments of the sign do not excludethis possibility. In Inscriptions chypriotessyllabiques,no. 8-an inscription in the Late Paphian syllabary-the sign me takes the forms Qf,1'. There, the rightangle is present in just the manner we see on ourbowl, and this is probably the case, as well, for thesmall stroke pointing off from it to the left. To besure, one would also have to assume the loss ofthe vertical hasta to the left. For the time being,however, we will treat this sign as an unknownquantity.

Sign 5: It is possible, in sign 5, that there were, infact, two diagonal strokes branching downward andto the right from the vertical hasta;the upper one isclear, and a tiny remainder of the lower one is stillvisible next to the vertical hasta. If so, the signwould bear a similarity to the Early Paphian to T.This is closed off at the top by a horizontal stroke,which survives on the left and right.Sign 6: As Mitford proposed, this must be consid-ered a u. It corresponds precisely to its specificPaphian form: A .7

Sign 7: I take the two surviving small strokes atthe top between the u and the woman's head to bewhat is left of a seventh sign, otherwise lost. The leftstroke is clearly slanted to the right, so one couldimagine-this is, of course, hypothetical-that

these are the remains of the sign sa, which takes theform of an acute angle, open at the top: v .Altogether, then, this would give us:ku-po-ro-[x]-t-u-sa

I would like to propose-with one addition, the mementioned just above-a transliteration for this asfollows:KvTrpoJle8owvc

This would be a suitably expressive name for aqueen: "she who holds sway, reigns over Cyprus."The masculine pendant KvTppoe.8Sovs documentedin Inscriptions chypriotes yllabiques,no. 142.1 (in thedative ku-po-ro-me-to-[ti]). he verb pe8&orequentlyhas the name of a country as its genitive object.8We have not yet had an active feminine presentparticiple in the corpus of Cypriot inscriptions.Presumably, one must interpret its diphthong -ou-in much the same way as the -au- in ki-yo-na-u-se(KLy6ovrt [accusative plural]) in a number ofPaphian inscriptions. (There, the nasal of the caseending -ans has been vocalized.)

THE LEGEND ABOVE THE FIGURE OF THEKING

Mitford emphatically stated that this inscription(Figure i, on the right, above the king) was "clear-ly not syllabic"-that we are faced, here, with analphabetic script.9 Moreover, other researchershave not incorporated these signs into the Cypriotsyllabic material. Yet it seems improbable that dif-ferent types of scripts would have been used for twofigures that are so definitely related to each other.On the assumption that they are in the same syllab-ic script, let us take a look.Here, too, the legend most likely consists of aproper name or a title, this time a masculine noun.Again, one must assume a reading from left toright. What we see here are probably the remainsof four signs. I make no assertions about the firsttwo. It does seem possible, however, to read sign 3as the remnant of a le,and sign 4 as a surviving frag-ment of a Paphian se. This would give us [x-] [x-] le-se, producing the nominative ending -s that onewould expect. Naturally, all this is highly uncertain.Let me only suggest, and very tentatively, that whatmight have been inscribed here-appropriatelyenough-was pa-si-le-se (POcLrXEts) or "king." (Thisis the dialectical form for 3patLXErE6.)

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NOTES1. Einar Gjerstad,"Decorated Metal Bowls from Cyprus," Opuscula

Archaeologica (1946), pp. 3ff.2. Otto Hoffmann, Die griechischenDialekte in ihrem historischenZusammenhange,vol. 1, Der siid-achiischeDialekt (G6ttingen,1891), p. 61, no. 116.

3. Olivier Masson, LesInscriptions hypriotesyllabiques,Etudes chy-priotes, 1 (Paris, 1961); rev. and augmented repr. (Paris, 1983).4. Terence B. Mitford, TheInscriptionsof Kourion,Memoirs of theAmerican Philosophical Society, 83 (Philadelphia, 1971),pp. 11ff., no. 2.

5. Masson, Inscriptionschypriotesyllabiques,1983, p. 398; MarkusEgetmeyer, Wirterbuch u den Inschriften m kyprischenSyllabar

(unterBeriicksichtigunginerArbeitvonAlmutHintze),Kadmos Sup-plement, 3 (Berlin and New York,1992), p. 72.6. A earlier reading of an i instead of ku is preciselywhat occurredin the case of Inscriptions hypriotesyllabiques,o. 283; see Gfin-ter Neumann, "Beitrage zum Kyprischen XII," Kadmos 29(1990), pp. 163ff. There, we now have the masculine propername KrrpotpatvTrXos.

7. In other local grids it has the value ko.However, I do not thinkthat should be seen as a factor, even though O. Hoffmannthought otherwise.8. See, for example, Alcaeus Z 31 (E. Lobel and D. Page, eds., Poe-tarumLesbiorumFragmenta, ev. ed. [Oxford, i963], p. 273, no.354): 'ACXXiAvsTras KV6iLKOtS.6ELS (present activeparticiple).

9. Mitford, Inscriptions fKourion,p. 12.

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Neumann a Cypriot Silver Bowl Reconsidered