Kition dans les textes: Testimonia litteraires et epigraphiques et Corpus des inscriptions.

• Author: Janko, Richard
• Position: Book review

Kition dans les textes: Testimonia litteraires et epigraphiques et Corpus des inscriptions. By MARGUERITE YON. Kition-Bamboula, vol. 5. Paris: ADPF-EDITIONS ERC, 2004. Pp. 380, illus. [euro]44 (paper).

This fine volume continues the admirable work in Cypriot epigraphy for which French scholarship has long and rightly been celebrated, in tandem with the excavations at Kition in modern Larnaca which the French Mission to Cyprus has been conducting since 1976. It consists of two parts. The first is a collection of literary and epigraphical testimonia in various original languages (with the exception of Biblical Hebrew, which is given in French) mentioning Kition, its celebrated inhabitants, including the philosophers Zeno, Persaeus and Philolaus, and citizens of Kition living abroad (often Greco-Phoenician bilinguals). All texts are translated with an informative commentary. The second part of the volume is a complete corpus of the inscriptions found there, organized by the wide range of languages used in that city--Phoenician, Greek, Latin, Assyrian (by F. Malbran-Labat), Egyptian (by A. Gasse and A. South), Cypro-Minoan and Ugaritic, Scarabs, coins, potters' marks and stamped amphora-handles are excluded, but the inscriptions first published in Kition III (1977) are briefly recapitulated, incorporated into the running numeration and brought up to date by M. G. Amadasi Guzzo. The inscriptions in alphabetic Greek are excellently published by T. Oziol, those in the Cypriot syllabary by M. Yon (not all are illustrated), who also republishes ten texts in Cypro-Minoan script and (with the help of P. Bordreuil) one in Ugaritic cuneiform. Each section is organized by chronology and ends with a thorough set of indices, and the whole is superbly illustrated. Anyone who peruses this volume will have as complete a picture of the history and cosmopolitan society of Kition, from its foundation in the thirteenth century B.C.E. down to Late Antiquity, as one can hope to have.

In her preface, Mme. Yon rightly notes that such a volume could not have appeared without the collaboration of experts in a variety of different fields, and notes that the ways of particular sub-disciplines have been to some extent standardized in publishing the respective inscriptions. The inscriptions have been numbered continuously, but with gaps wisely left in order to accommodate future discoveries. The achievement of a homogeneous result is a remarkable one.

The history of Kition...