Carpentras Stele

It is a funerary dedication to an unknown lady called Taba; the first line of the image depicts her standing before the god of the underworld with her arms raised and the second, her lying down, dead, being prepared for burial. The textual inscription is typical of Egyptian funerary tablets in that she is described as having done nothing bad in her life, and wishes her well in the presence of Osiris. A long-running scholarly debate has focused on the language of the inscription, and whether it was written as prose or poetry.

It was the first Northwest Semitic (i.e. Canaanite or Aramaic) inscription published anywhere in modern times (the Cippi of Melqart inscriptions, reported ten years earlier in 1694, were not published in full at that time).

It was considered to be Phoenician text at the time of its discovery. Scholars later argued that the inscription was "Aramaic" or "Chaldean". Since the early 19th century the language of the inscription has been considered to be Aramaic.

It was first translated in full by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy in the 1760s, and then by Oluf Gerhard Tychsen in 1802; the two translations were subsequently compared and critiqued by Ulrich Friedrich Kopp in 1821, who was in turn quoted by Wilhelm Gesenius in his widely published Scripturae linguaeque Phoeniciae. Kopp criticised Barthélemy and other scholars who had characterized the inscription and some coins as Phoenician, with "everything left to the Phoenicians and nothing to the Arameans, as if they could not have written at all". Kopp noted that some of the words on the stele corresponded to the Aramaic in the Book of Daniel, and in the Book of Ruth.

Initial publication

The stele was first published in 1704 by Jean-Pierre Rigord in an article focused on Rigord's description of the hieratic script; the article represented the first recognition of a non-hieroglyphic Egyptian script in modern times. Rigord wrote that "I have in my Cabinet an Egyptian Monument that I have sketched here, on which there are historical figures, above a Punic inscription."

Rigord had a number of plaster casts made and distributed to others in the academic community, mostly in Southern France. The stele was subsequently reviewed by Anne Claude de Caylus, Bernard de Montfaucon and Jean-Jacques Barthélemy. Barthelemy's review ended an early dispute about the language of the inscription – a consensus formed that the inscription was Phoenician; this consensus was to last until the beginning of the 19th century.