Michele Bianconi, University of Oxford
In this talk, we are going to outline a new collaborative research project on Messapic, a language and culture present in Apulia in the second half of the first millennium BCE (cf. De Simone 2018, Marchesini 2020, 2021 Matzinger 2019). This is a project carried out by a newly-constituted working group named SPEM (Seminario PErmanente sul Messapico) and composed of specialists from different disciplines: linguistics, archaeology, epigraphy, and ancient history.
Our talk will be divided into two parts. First, we will survey the primary epigraphic material, which is not limited to the 550 published inscriptions in MLM (Monumenta Linguae Messapicae), the foremost corpus of Messapic inscriptions, but also includes a large number (circa 130) of unpublished inscriptions and two dozen inscriptions published in the last 20 years. After laying out the different strands of our project –language, connections between epigraphical records and cults, and palaeography (alphabets and alphabet series) – we will present some preliminary results from our research in the domain of synchronic phonology. While the scholarship on Messapic phonology still relies on de Simone 1972, we believe that the field is in need of an update in light of both the tremendous progress in the study of the languages of ancient Italy and Indo-European Studies of the last 50 years, and of the increased amount of data at our disposal.
We will endeavour to show that the time is ripe for a complete review of the primary linguistic material through an interdisciplinary approach and the evaluation of epigraphic contexts and an updated reliability index. This has the potential to shed light on several aspects of the language and pave the way for further research on the topic (e.g., on the morphology and on the divine and cultic figures) and for the publication of the new inscriptions from Ostuni (cf. Marchesini forthcoming) and Grotta della Poesia (on which, cf. de Simone 1988, Marchesini forthcoming)