A S O R   P u n i c   P r o j e c t

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  Two centuries ago, aristocratic military officers first began to extract Punic inscriptions for European museums in the Netherlands (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, J. E. Humbert 1821), in England (British Museum, Temple 1835), and in Denmark (Nationalmuseet Danmarks, Falbe 1833). Such combinations of military-antiquarian interest and scholarly study developed in a competitive environment, as French officers were seizing artifacts for the Musée du Louvre and as the Earl of Elgin was seizing artifacts from the Athenian acropolis for the British Museum. French colonization of Algeria (1830) accelerated such acquisitions across North Africa.
  The philologist Wilhelm Gesenius visited London and Leiden in 1835 in order to autopsy all known Phoenician inscriptions or their casts (Lehmann 2013). Two years later he published his survey, Scripturæ linguæque phoeniciæ monumenta, or Monumenta (1837), which gave them sequential Latin numeration, site-by-site in order of discovery, and thereby assigned to inscriptions from Carthage (Carthaginensis, or Carth.) and from North Africa (Numidica, or Numid.) what would become their vulgate names. The correspondence between Gesenius' common names and later catalogs is consistent but not always precise, in part because later scholars omitted Carthaginensis decima from the sequence (as Libyan/Numidian rather than Punic). The following table notes correspondences and provides texts in line-number order, derived from his catalog (nᵒˢ46-66) and its appendix (nᵒˢ81-84).

  To view mocked-up samples made in anticipation of funding for what could be comprehensive digital corpus entries, click on highlighted proivisional CIP numbers (*) marked with additional plus (++) signs, namely zzz.

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sample tranches :: Gesenius || Hadrumetum || Hoftijzer