Epigraphic baking: Oscan

Presenting the most recent addition to my now very long-running series of inscriptions in various ancient writing systems in cake form: a cake version of an inscription from Pompeii, written not in Latin, but in a closely-related language called Oscan. Oscan building inscription, Pompeii, 3rd-2nd century BCE, in the form of a lemon-poppyseed traybake. Photo by author (and baker). Though Latin would eventually spread across not only the whole of Italy but also much further afield, originally it was just one of a whole family of related languages (known as Italic) spoken across the Italian peninsula. The map below is only approximate, since it’s very difficult to fully map exactly where different languages were spoken, especially since many people and places will have been multilingual, but it gives an idea of where Oscan was primarily found, along with other related Italic languages (e.g. Latin, Umbrian, Venetic) and others like Greek or Etruscan. By Dbachmann, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons Although the Oscan language is closely related to Latin, you might have noticed that the cake inscription above doesn’t look quite like the Roman alphabet – some letters are pretty similar, but others are totally different, and the whole thing is also written right-to-left. In fact, the two alphabets are also quite closely related, as both were derived from the alphabet used to write the Etruscan language – a language spoken and written widely across the northern part of the Italian peninsula, not actually related to the Italic family, or for that matter any other known family. The Etruscan alphabet, however, was the source of many of the alphabets used to write other languages of the Italian peninsula (the other main one was the Greek alphabet – itself the original source of the Etruscan alphabet; Oscan was in fact written with both its own alphabet and with a version of the Greek alphabet). The Oscan alphabet, by Katherine McDonald As you can see from the alphabet above, some of the differences with the Roman alphabet are just because Oscan is written right-to-left, so the letters’ orientation is reversed – but others involve more radical differences of shape (in particular, what looks like an R is actually /d/, and what looks like D is an /r/) or additions of new letters needed to write the Oscan language (the three at the end of the alphabet). I’ll transcribe and translate the cake inscription below, but you could have a go first at transcribing it yourself using this alphabet if you want! The Bay of Naples, where Pompeii is located, is in an area on the map marked as Greek-speaking, but was actually one of those multilingual areas: both Greek and Oscan were in widespread use until the city was incorporated into the expanding area of Roman control and Latin became the language of official business, after which use of Oscan gradually declined here as across the peninsula (the last known Oscan inscriptions date to about 50 BCE, though it’s likely that the language continued to be spoken for some period of time after this before eventually dying out). However, in Pompeii, a range of Oscan inscriptions from the period when this language was still in regular use survived long enough that they were preserved when the whole city was buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. This particular inscription was put up to commemorate a building being put up by a Pompeiian official, though we don’t know what that building was because the stone was later re-used in building one of the city’s gates. Here’s the inscription transcribed, then transcribed with abbreviations expanded, and then translated (| = a line-break): v · púpidiis · v | med · túv | aamanaffed | ísídu | prúfatted v(ibis) · púpidiis · v(ibieís) | med(dís) · túv(tíks) | aamanaffed | ísídu | prúfatted Vibius Popidius, son of Vibius | chief magistrate | built | the same man | approved i.e. “Vibius Popidius, son of Vibius, chief magistrate, built this building and the same man also approved it” Oh, and the red colour of the icing is not just because I got bored of using grey or black for my ancient inscription cakes – many ancient inscriptions, both Oscan and Latin, had red-painted letters for greater visibility, traces of which sometimes survive to allow a reconstruction of the original colour. You can see this on the British Museum’s photograph of the actual inscription, where the red colour has been repainted in modern times: The original Oscan inscription. BM 1867,0508.76 © The Trustees of the British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) The excuse for making this cake – and the venue for eating it – was provided by my colleague Katherine McDonald organising an Oscan reading group to introduce us to the language, the alphabet, and a few of the inscriptions: you can find an online version of this on Katherine’s website if you’d like to have a go at reading some Oscan yourself!