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The Phoenician Graffito in the Holt Collection of the National Museum of Wales

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2016

Alfred Guillaume
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Extract

On the morning of April 27th last I was delighted and astonished to discover in the National Museum of Wales at Cardiff a tile inscribed in Neo-Punic letters. I published a summary account of the graffito in The Illustrated London News on August 12th, 1939. Here I should like to say a little more about the inscription, not so much to amplify the short account in The Illustrated London News as to leave a permanent record in an archaeological journal of a discovery which is unique in the annals of British archaeology.

Arabia has given Britain one inscription: as long ago as 1878, a fine Roman altar, inscribed in Latin and Palmyrene characters, was discovered in the Roman camp near South Shields, and is now to be seen in the Free Library at that place. But this is the first time that an inscription from the hand of a descendant of the old Phoenician branch of the Semitic race has been found in Britain (or rather, recognized as such, for the tile was found during the excavation of Holt in the years 1907–15).

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , Spring 1940 , pp. 67 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1940

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References

page 67 note 1 I have no doubt that a good many ancient examples of textiles with Arabic writing exist in Britain. Some years ago I found that the body of St. Cuthbert in Durham Cathedral had been wrapped in a robe which bore the words which everyone can translate: La ilāha illā'llāh; and a few years later, in the Museum at Dorchester, I found on an early altár-cloth said to have come from the church at Wool a verse from the Qur'ān.

page 67 note 2 Lidzbarski, M., Ephemeris für semitische Epigraphik, Giessen, 1915, III. 282 Google Scholar.

page 67 note 3 Lidzbarski, , Handbuch der Nordsemitischen Epigraphik, Taf. XVI. 2 Google Scholar.

page 68 note 1 XLI, 1930, p. 133, No. 26 (256).

page 68 note 2 Haverfield, , The Romanization of Roman Britain, 17 Google Scholar.