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472
THE ALPHABET
groups; the southern group consists of pure Messapian documents found in the modern provinces of Lecce, Taranto and Brindisi. Less homogeneous and not purely Messapian is the northern group, consisting of inscriptions discovered in the territory to the north as far as Lucera in the province of Foggia and attributed to mixed Messapian-Apulian tribes.
While there is no doubt that the Messapian alphabet (Fig. 226) was of Greek origin, there is some disagreement regarding the Greek variety from which it descended. According to some scholars, it was borrowed from the Tarentine alphabet (Tarentum, the modern Taranto, was perhaps the earliest Greek colony in Magna Græcia), belonging to the Ionic branch
TAMOBRANAAD RAITAHIRANES
PAATOPASAR OXXI HI
ATHI ISAF1005007 PEIZATANAANROA LATTARE PERIS
Fig. 210-Messapian inscriptions
of the eastern Greek groups, as is shown by the shape of the letters kh and ps (which are amongst the main criteria for the classification of the Greek alphabets). According to other scholars, however, the Messapian alphabet was connected with that of Locri; and Rhys Carpenter suggests ("AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ARCHEOLOGY" 1945, pp. 455-6) that the Epizephyrian Locri, an important Greek colony in Messapian territory, and Syracuse, the great ancient Corinthian colony in Sicily, which transmitted its alphabet to other neighbouring Greek colonies, both derived their alphabets from the Ozolian Locrians. These in their turn had probably borrowed their script from "that nearby centre of enlightenment, Delphi."
The solution of the problem is not easy, especially since the exact phonetic value of some Messapian letters is still uncertain.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Magiulli and Castromediano, Le iscrizioni messapiche raccolte, Lecce, 1871. I. P. Droop, in "ANN. BRIT. SCHOOLS OF ATHENS", 1905-06.
F. Ribezzo, La lingua degli antichi Messapii, Naples, 1907; Corpus Inscriptionum Messapicarum, "RIVISTA INDO-GRECO-ITALICA," VI, 1922 onwards.
P. Kretschmer, in "GLOTTA," 30 (1943), pp. 161 sgg.
