Iscrizioni in antico ligure presso Campiglia (La Spezia)

by Adolfo ZAVARONI, Stefano MEZZANI, in Res Antiquae 14, 2017.

In this paper, the Authors present 6 of out 34 inscriptions in ancient Ligurian found near Campiglia (La Spezia) in the course of a research started in 2016 in the provinces of La Spezia and Massa-Carrara. The most important result of the first studies is that the inscriptions discovered so far (about one hundred) have been written in the language and the writing – largely based on ligatures tying two or more letters – of the many inscriptions previously found (2007-2015) in the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines and ascribed to the Friniates. Therefore they show that the old Ligurian, whose lexicon and morphology are close to those of the Old Italic languages, was spoken in a vast territory including the modern Liguria and the two slopes of the Apennines at least until the province of Bologna. The inscriptions presented here show several superpositions of letters that engravers usually invented to allow more than one reading. Some of them testify the warlike, indomitable temperament and the anti-roman character of the Ligurians.

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