The Region
The final case study of the Developmental Literacy
project focuses on the inscriptions of North West Italy and the
Ticino area of Switzerland. The region is an extremely complex one
in Antiquity, with little consensus about its ethnic character and the
ethnic boundaries within it. The ancient sources refer to a number
of peoples, defined externally by the criteria of Greek and Roman
observers - e.g. the Ligures, Leponti, Salassi, Boii, Cenomani, Insubres
etc - but there is little consensus about where the boundaries between
these groups were and how far (if at all) these labels corresponded to
the self-perceptions of the peoples of ancient Lombardy, Piedmont,
Liguria and S. Swizerland themselves. The principal archaeological
cultures of the region in the Iron Age are known as the Golasecca
culture and the La T่ne culture,
which persisted until the Roman conquest of the region in the 2nd
century BC. Recent research has stressed continuity and an
underlying common Celtic identity for the entire region rather than a
division between an earlier Golasecca and a later Celtic period.
The region was primarily one of small settlements, possibly organised
into chiefdoms, in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. From the 3rd
century onwards, however, there are signs of increasing nucleation of
settlements and the emergence of states based on a common identity
(expressed in items such as coinage, inscriptions and particular types
of pottery and metalwork), rather than domination by a warrior elite.
After the Roman conquest in the early 2nd century BC, there was an
ambitious programme of colonisation in the region, and Bergamo,
Brescia, Como, Milan, Novara, Vercelli and Verona were all fundamentally
transformed into Roman coloniae.
The Inscriptions
The inscriptions of the region are written in a script
derived from that of the Etruscans and fall into three main groups -
stone inscriptions (mainly but not exclusively funerary in nature);
graffiti on pottery (also mainly from funerary contexts); and
inscriptions on coins. The earliest inscriptions date to the end
of the 6th century BC, but are very few in number. The majority
(around 70% of the total) are short inscriptions on pottery, almost all
from a funerary context, coinage, or inscriptions on stone, dating to
the 2nd-1st centuries BC. The remaining c.30% of inscriptions (a
mixture of inscriptions on grave goods and stone grave markers) date to
the 5th-4th centuries BC. The language(s) represented are a matter
of debate. The early inscriptions are traditionally designated as
Lepontic and the later ones as Celtic or Gallo-Lepontic, but recent
research has moved towards identifying them all as a form of early
Celtic.
References
R.S. Conway, J. Whatmough and S. Johnson (1933), The
Prae-Italic Dialects of Italy. 3 vols.
M. Lejeune (1971), Lepontica.
M. Lejeune (1988), Receuil des Inscriptions Gauloises. Vol. II:
Textes gallo-้truscques; textes
gallo-latin.
J.H.C. Williams (2001), Beyond the Rubicon. Romans and Gauls in
Republican Italy.