The Alphabet of Vaste

Extract

All students of Greek epigraphy are familiar with the abecedarium discovered in 1805, ‘prope Bastam (the modern Vaste) ruri quodam dicto Melliche,’ by Luigi Cepolla, amongst whose papers (still preserved at Lecce in the Biblioteca Provinciate, Misc. Castromed. D. 29. 18) Mommsen found and published it in his Unteritalische Dialekte (1850). Cepolla's copy, though inaccurate, is not so bad, as I hope to show, as has usually been supposed. To be sure, he proposed to interpret an alphabet as a complete inscription, and actually ‘translated’ it! Nor, I think, could it be properly deciphered until more Messapic inscriptions than were known to Mommsen had been collected and their alphabet more closely studied. It has, however, long been recognized that the Vaste alphabet should be rightly regarded as essentially a Messapic (rather than a Greek) alphabet, although, as is well known, the alphabet of the Messapic inscriptions agrees in the main with the Tarentine-Ionic variety of the Western Greek alphabet; but the proposed explanations of Cepolla's transcript of the Vaste alphabet have been most diverse, not to say perverse—certainly they have been largely arbitrary. They may be sought in the places cited in the footnote below.