News from Satricum

To the brief list of Very Old Latin inscriptions on pg. 22 add a reference to the 6th century BCE inscription on a fragment of a clay vessel found during excavations of the Acropolis of Satricum in 2002. The text was first edited by Colonna and Gnade in 2003, but a forthcoming article by Béla Adamik, brought to my attention by Brent Vine, and mentioned here with the author's permission, has offered the first plausible interpretation of the fragmentary text. There are two fragmentary texts. Text A written boustrophedon reads:

[---]IAMAMARC|OMPLACIOM[ (boustrophedon)

and Text B reads

]LOUCIOSx[ (i.e. Loucios + trace of another letter)

Adamik suggest a number of possible restorations, e.g. [esom ser]ia Mamarcom Placiom[que..] but the most important insight is that Mamarcom and Placiom are to be interpreted as genitive plurals of names, or in the case of placiom possibly of an adjective. The overall structure of the text would be very similar to Brent Vine's reading of the Garigliano bowl as ESOM... AVDEOM DVOM. Text B might be the remainder of a signature of the artist or commissioner, e.g. Loucios C.[ f. med feced] vel sim. 

Adamik, Béla, forthcoming. Zu den archaischen lateinischen Inschriftfragmenten auf Bruchstücken eines Tonfasses von Satricum. Proceedings of the International Colloquium of Latin Linguistics, Innsbruck.

A Hungarian version of the Adamik paper is available:
Adamik, Béla, 2009. Új archaikus latin felirat Satricumból. Antik Tanulmányok 53:239–52.

Colonna, G. and M. Gnade, 2003. Dolio con iscrizioni Latine archaiche da Satricum. Archeologia classica 54:1—21.