The Dipylon inscription is a short text written on an ancient Greek

Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...

 pottery vessel dated to ca. 740 BC. It is famous for being the oldest (or one of the oldest) known samples of the use of the Greek alphabet

Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...

. The text is scratched on a wine jug (oenochoe

Oenochoe

An oenochoe, also spelled oinochoe, is a wine jug and a key form of Greek pottery. There are many different forms of Oenochoe. The earliest is the olpe and has an S-shaped profile from head to foot.Oenochoe may be decorated or undecorated...

), which was found in 1871 and is named after the location where it was found, the ancient Dipylon Cemetery, near the Dipylon Gate on the area of Kerameikos in Athens

Athens

Athens , is the capital and largest city of Greece. Athens dominates the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, as its recorded history spans around 3,400 years. Classical Athens was a powerful city-state...

. The jug is attributed to the Late Geometrical Period

Geometric Style

Geometric art is a phase of Greek art, characterised largely by geometric motifs in vase painting, that flourished towards the end of the Greek Dark Ages, circa 900 BCE to 700 BCE...

 (750-700 BC), and it has been dated to ca. 740 BC. It is now in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens

National Archaeological Museum of Athens

The National Archaeological Museum in Athens houses some of the most important artifacts from a variety of archaeological locations around Greece from prehistory to late antiquity. It is considered one of the great museums in the world and contains the richest collection of artifacts from Greek...

 (inv. 192).

Text

The text is written in an archaic form of the Greek alphabet

Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...

, with some letter shapes still resembling those of the original Phoenician alphabet

Phoenician alphabet

The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, was a non-pictographic consonantal alphabet, or abjad. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia...

. It is written from right to left, with the individual letters mirror-shaped in comparison with the modern forms. It is placed in a circle around the shoulder of the vessel. The text consists of 46 characters, of which the first 35 can easily be read as an hexametric

Hexameter

Hexameter is a metrical line of verse consisting of six feet. It was the standard epic metre in classical Greek and Latin literature, such as in the Iliad and Aeneid. Its use in other genres of composition include Horace's satires, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. According to Greek mythology, hexameter...

 verse in Greek

Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...

. The fragmentary rest is believed to have been the beginning of the second verse of a distichon, but the exact interpretation is unclear. The text marks the vessel as a prize in a dancing competition. It is translated as: "whoever of the dancers now dances most lightly ...", and the second line is conjectured to have said something to the effect of "... he shall get me (the vessel) as his prize."

The text of the inscription runs:

ΗΟΣΝΥΝΟΡΧΕΣΤΟΝΠΑΝΤΟΝΑΤΑΛΟΤΑΤΑΠΑΙΖΕΙΤΟΤΟΔΕΚΛΜΙΝ

In modern scholarly editions this is transcribed as:

This corresponds to the following in the later classical orthography in Greek (using the Ionian form of the Greek alphabet), with the metric feet of the hexameter indicated:

Literal translation:

Whoever of all these dancers now plays most delicately,

to him this ...

Oldest inscriptions

It is believed that either the Dipylon inscription or the so-called Nestor Cup is the oldest known alphabetic Greek inscription. The Nestor Cup, which also bears a verse inscription, was found in an excavation at the ancient Greek colony of Pithekoussai on the island of Ischia

Ischia

Ischia is a volcanic island in the Tyrrhenian Sea. It lies at the northern end of the Gulf of Naples, about 30 km from the city of Naples. It is the largest of the Phlegrean Islands. Roughly trapezoidal in shape, it measures around 10 km east to west and 7 km north to south and has...

 in Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

. It is thought to be of equal age with the Dipylon inscription or slightly younger.

See also

• History of the Greek alphabet
  History of the Greek alphabet
  The history of the Greek alphabet starts with the adoption of Phoenician letter forms and continues to the present day. This article concentrates on the early period, before the codification of the now-standard Greek alphabet....
  
  
• National Archaeological Museum of Athens
  National Archaeological Museum of Athens
  The National Archaeological Museum in Athens houses some of the most important artifacts from a variety of archaeological locations around Greece from prehistory to late antiquity. It is considered one of the great museums in the world and contains the richest collection of artifacts from Greek...
  
  
• Pottery of Ancient Greece
  Pottery of Ancient Greece
  As the result of its relative durability, pottery is a large part of the archaeological record of Ancient Greece, and because there is so much of it it has exerted a disproportionately large influence on our understanding of Greek society...
  
  

External links

• Bibliotheca Augustana corpus: Online text and image
• Epigraphical database: Online text