Folia archeologica 25.

János Harmatta: Two inscriptions scratched on fragments of pottery from Pannónia

INSCRIPTIONS ON POTTERY 101 inscriptions which can easier be reproduced, and usually they make mistakes even in these. In this case, however, we ought to presume that the forger created independently on a hight scientific level: he had a thorough knowledge of the stock of Roman names occurring in inscriptions and from these he chose the rare Etrusco-Latin name EJonius, and he did not use even this but like a trained linguist he reasoned out its variant FJlenins, and after all these he incised this form of name not with Latin but with Greek letters. To come to this idea and also to be able to realize it, he must have been a well informed historian and paleographer. He must have known that in the philhellenic period of the 2nd century A.D. it could occur also in Pannónia that persons with Roman names had Greek inscriptions made. He must have known the inscription of the palaestra at Aquincum as an excellent example of the Greek uncial script of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, and he must have had such a practice in the writing of this that he could reproduce letters of beautiful and sure tracing. This can hardly be presumed about an amateur collector, but I do not know such a person in Hungary either who would presumably dispose of all this knowledge and at the same time it could be imagined about him to make forgeries in possession of such attainments. Since thus the coming about of this inscription as a forgery cannot be explained reassuringly, we must rather try to find the reason, why do the stems of the letters rNIl run down to the broken surface. The explanation of this can be that at the time of the cleaning of the fragment of pottery the mud was scraped out from the grooves of the letters with some pointed object, and this way pulled through the letters of the inscription the pointed object ran down also to the broken surface. 2. On the other fragment of pottery 8 letters of an inscription going from the right to the left can be observed. However, only one stem of the first letter has been preserved. Without doubt the inscription was written in one of the Northern Italian alphabets, but it is difficult to define exactly in which one. The 2nd letter is undoubtedly m, the exact equivalent of which can only be found in the Lepontic alphabet." The 3rd and 7th letters can be regarded as variants of a, and the equivalent, of the 7th letter can be found in the Lepontic alphabet as well as in that of Sondrio, but the exact parallel to the 3rd letter is shown only by the alphabet of Sondrio, while in the Lepontic alphabet only its variant with a vertical right-side stroke occurs. The 1st letter was very likely also an a with a similar form to that of the 3rd letter (besides this possibility at the most the reading e can still be taken into account). The 4th and 5th letters represent t, but the form of this differs from the letters t of both the Lepontic alphabet and the Sondrio alphabet. An identical form, however, occurs e.g. in the Etruscan alphabet. The 6th letter is an r of a curious form, the parallel of which cannot be found in the Italian alphabet, although in the Lepontic inscriptions such variants of it occur, which can be regarded as intermediate forms between the generally used r with the form of a segment and the r of the inscription from Tokod. Thus in e For the North Italian alphabets see PID II. 501 ff.; Herbig, G., RLV I. 122, VIII. 168, XI. 25.