An ancient Latin-Gaulish bilingual inscription from Umbria

Having recently (but not that recently, y’know) visited the Vatican Museums, just a quick visit with a friend who was in town, to see the Raphael tapestries hanging in the Sistine Chapel, I realized that I hadn’t been in years and years. It was always a bit of a pain, with the lines stretching down the street and around the corner, and over the past decade or so, it’s become so that there’s not much of an off-season for tourism in Italy. But January and February are better months, in any case, and as I snapped some photos along the way, I made plans to return and spend more time.

I hadn’t been to the Museo Gregoriano Etrusco in probably a decade—it seems they’ve renovated it since then, and I definitely need to spend a day or two in there, once that becomes possible again. Of course, for an ‘Etruscan’ museum, there are an awful lot of Greek pots in there—as you probably know, if you’re a classical archaeologist, and maybe not if you’re not, most of the whole Athenian ‘vases’ we see in books and museums (or, let’s be honest, on the internet) were found in Etruscan tombs. But that’s another story.

One of the non-Greek, non-Etruscan, non-ceramic things that caught my eye was a stone stele, inscribed on both sides, that was found at Todi in the central Italian region of Umbria. It’s a fascinating artifact. It bears inscriptions in both Latin and Gaulish, the language of the Gauls, who lived most famously in what’s now France, but also across northern Italy and nearby regions. Having both languages on a single stone is already pretty unusual—J. N. Adams, who wrote an 800-page book on Bilingualism and the Latin Language, collects exactly two Latin-Gaulish bilingual inscriptions from Italy, one from Vercelli in the north, and this one from Todi. What’s even more unusual about this one is that both sides of the stele bear versions of the text in both languages—so there is both a Latin and a Gaulish text on each side.

The texts in the two languages record the same information in pretty similar ways, on both sides. It’s clear that this is a grave monument, set up in memory of Ategnatus/Ateknatos, the son of Drutos, by his brother Coisos. These are very much Gaulish names, not Latin or Umbrian. What were the Gauls Ategnatus and Coisos doing in Umbria in the later 2^nd century BCE (it’s difficult to say when exactly this inscription was carved, but the letter forms and Latin spelling suggest a time between the mid-2^nd and mid-1^st century BCE)? Umbria by that point was under Roman control, but we know that people moved around for all sorts of reasons, much as they do today, and there weren’t any border controls or passport checks—or passports. We don’t have enough information to be able to say in this case, though to judge from the shape of the letters used in the Gaulish inscriptions, they probably came from Cisalpine Gaul.

On both sides the Latin text comes first, likely an acknowledgement of the political and social realities of the Umbrian context in the 2^nd century BCE, but there are reasons to think that the author(s) of the text spoke Latin as a second language. There are a few differences between the two sides, however. On side A the writing is much more deeply cut into the stone, and the shape of the letters differs, to the extent that we can imagine a different scribe working on each side, though inscribing in both languages. The way the words are arranged on the lines also differs, as does the spelling of one of the Latin case-endings. On side A, the Latin genitive Drutei ends in the older form -ei, on side B, in -i (Druti), which is the standard Latin second-declension genitive in most of the Latin that survives.

A major difference between the two sides occurs in the Gaulish texts, where the object(s) that Coisos set up for his brother Ategnatus is/are named differently: in A, he set up artuaš, in B, lokan. The equivalent Latin texts would help us understand the difference, but unfortunately the top part of the stone is broken and the words in question are lost. Artuaš is accusative plural, the object of the verb karnitu ‘set up’/‘establish’ (which is translated by Latin locavit et statuit), and might refer to stones marking the boundaries of the burial monument, or the inscription(s) themselves, as Poccetti has suggested. Lokan, accusative singular, perhaps the burial chamber—but many questions remain open.

An interesting difference between the texts in the two languages is that the Latin specifies that Coisos was Ategnatus’ little brother: frater eius minimus. This detail is absent from the Gaulish texts, however. The meaning of Ateknatos can’t be determined with certainty, but one of the possibilities is ‘Firstborn’ and Poccetti suggests that a Gaulish speaker would have inferred the relationship between the brothers without the need to spell it out on the stone.

More could be (and has been) said about this stele, but I’ll leave it there for now; may pick up the question of locavit statuitque vs. karnitu soon... Some bibliography can be found at the Lexicon Leponticum website at the University of Vienna; Paolo Poccetti’s “L'inscription bilingue gallo-latine deTodi et les enjeux de la traduction” has also been very helpful.