PU-1

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Inscription
Transliteration:	χa?φel?uries·̣kalahepruśiahil(?) / klu?θurus
Original script:	??Ś5 d(?) ?
Object:	PU-1 belt plaque ()
Position:	back
Orientation:	180°
Script:	North Italic script
Direction of writing:	dextroverse
Letter height:	22 cm <br /> – 3.7 cm
Number of letters:	36
Number of lines:	2
Craftsmanship:	engraved
Current condition:	complete, damaged
Date of inscription:
Date derived from:
Language:	Raetic
Meaning:	unknown
Alternative sigla:	IR 99 LIR SLO-1
Sources:	Schumacher 2004: 186

Images

Object PU-1 girdle plate with inscription PU-1 - rear side.

Inscription PU-1.

Inscription PU-1- detail (line 1 / letter 3).

Inscription PU-1- detail (line 1 / letter 7).

Inscription PU-1.

Commentary

First published in Pellegrini 1951b: 11–15.

Images in Pellegrini 1951b: 11 (drawing), Pellegrini 1952: 542 (drawing = Pellegrini 1959: 194), Mayr 1960g (drawing), Lunz 1981: Taf. 86 (drawing) and LIR (drawing).

Written in two lines on the back of a belt plaque (upside-down when the plaque is worn). The inscription is in very bad condition; according to Pellegrini 1959: 194 the object had been polished since his original publication, which led to the characters being "quasi svanite" – while the situation is not quite that bad, a reading is difficult without the help of Pellegrini's drawings, made before the cleaning. Note that his second version is truer than the original drawing by G.B. Frescura, which features some curiously angular letters; the overall best representation, however, is the one in Lunz. The letters are uniformly tall and slender, bars tending to be applied close to the top, with prolonged hastae towards the bottom. They are slightly inclined to the right, but tidily scratched.

Line 1: Length about 26.5 cm. Written along the upper edge (which is the lower one going by the figural decorations on the front), with a distance of 0.5–1 cm from it. is very faint, but clear; is rather broad and comparatively well visible. The following character is not as tall as the others, being written in the upper part of the line: a short hasta, two parallel lines slanting down, another two slanting upwards again, intercrossing with the first pair. Pellegrini originally read , misinterpreting the upper one of the first pair of bars as a third bar. No other letter suggests itself, but there is no reason for the shortened hasta, and lines crossing or being repeated do not occur anywhere else in the inscription. After a comparatively wide gap (0.8 cm) ; is all but vanished, but may be seen with the right light. The next letter can be confirmed to look as Pellegrini drew it;, but the identification as Sigma is dubious: The central vertical is full-length and perfectly straight, the two bars – not meeting in the centre – reach neatly up to it. The letter looks too neat to be a ramshackle , quite apart from the fact that Sigma appears in its four-stroke variant twice in the inscription. is clear. The doubtful punctuation mark consists in a short oblique scratch at the bottom of the line, parallel to the lowest bar of ; it could not be certainly confirmed in autopsy. The distance between and is not bigger than average. is damaged by a vertical crack, but unambiguous, as are the following letters.

From the first Heta on the letters get thinner and slightly shorter – the writer obviously got into difficulties with the remaining space. This begs the question of whether more letters might not be found after : Pellegrini saw the trace of another hasta, opting to read Sigma; no opinions can be offered today, as the area appears to have been polished particularly scrupulously. In any case, the group of scratches right below the last letters of line 1 is not a continuation of the line (pace Mayr 1960g: 495), but an independent character, probably non-script. It has two almost identical counterparts, situated at the centre of the other short side and in the centre of the plaque, respectively. Pellegrini interpreted them as the Etruscan numeral (inverted) '51' (or '53', due to the varying number of small scratches in the chevron: two in the central character, one in the left-side one, none in the right-side one). Ribezzo 1952–53b: 470, Mayr 1960g and Mancini read them as (various) letters.

Line 2: Length about 9.5 cm, written along the lower edge. The letters start approximately at the centre of the line, right behind the latter of the abovementioned symbols (?) – possibly to avoid it, assuming that they preceded the application of the inscription. The lower bar of is very faint. The third letter is definitely , not A19 d as originally read by Pellegrini – the bar, even if it could be detected, would have the wrong orientation. The following letter is another eccentric assembly of lines (see drawing). Pellegrini again read , for the sake of obtaining a sequence klan to compare with Etruscan. clan 'son', but as with the two instances mentioned above, the identification of the character is far from certain. is unambiguous; is turned against writing direction in opposition to in line 1.

Further references: Pellegrini 1952: 542 ff., Vetter 1954: 78 ff., , Tibiletti Bruno 1978: 230 f., Mancini 1999: 302.

Bibliography

IR	Alberto Mancini, "Iscrizioni retiche", Studi Etruschi 43 (1975), 249–306.
Lexicon Leponticum	David Stifter, Martin Braun, Michela Vignoli et al., Lexicon Leponticum. URL: http://www.univie.ac.at/lexlep/
LIR	Alberto Mancini, Le Iscrizioni Retiche [= Quaderni del dipartimento di linguistica, Università degli studi di Firenze Studi 8–9], Padova: Unipress 2009–10. (2 volumes)
Lunz 1981	Reimo Lunz, Archäologie Südtirols. Von den Jägern des Mesolithikums (um 7000 v. Chr.) bis zum Ende des Weströmischen Reiches (476 n. Chr.) [= Archäologische Forschungen in Tirol 7], Calliano (Trento): 1981.
Mancini 1999	Alberto Mancini, "Iscrizioni retiche: aspetti epigrafici", in: Gianni Ciurletti, Franco Marzatico, I Reti / Die Räter [= Archeologia delle Alpi 5], Trento: Artigianelli 1999. (2 volumes), 297–333.