Recent excavations at Carthage.

  • Moore, Mabel.
Date:
[1904]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Recent excavations at Carthage. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    opinion has been admitted by the savants. Possibly these instruments formed part of the paraphernalia of Phoenician worship, since there have been discovered in the ruins of Carthage Voting Offerings of the Sacred Barbers, j and in an inscription from Cyprus we see tonsures forming part of the personnel of the Temple of Astarte. We have here, perhaps, an explanation both of our razors in the form of a hatchet and of the frequent presence of those scissors (forcipes) in the tombs of the necropolis which we are exploring. The razors are perhaps the most interesting as they are indeed among the rarest of the finds. A certain tribute of Carthaginian spoil finds its way to the Museum at Bardo, the Official Palace of the Bey of Tunis; and here one notes, as in the Musee St. Louis, that there is no plethora of these little bright green hatchet razors. As for pottery and potter’s marks, the subject is so wide that only a touch at the fringe of this extensive theme can be aimed at here. [Of potter’s marks the Chaplain of St. Louis writes]: We collect and publish with care these little monuments which at first sight appear insignificant, but in archaeology there is nothing insignificant, the smallest potsherd, as soon as one can by dint of a long series of | observations, recognise its origin and assign to it a date, becomes a scientific element enlightening a discovery. The Mus£e Lavigerie de St. Louis possesses hundreds of potter’s marks of all epochs. When these inscriptions shall have become embodied in the Corpus Inscriptionum of Berlin, which publishes all Greek and Latin Ceramic texts collected throughout the world, some interesting conclusions will be opened out, not only as touching the history of pottery and epigraphy, but also, and above all, that of the great commercial currents of which Carthage constituted the point of departure. He mentions elsewhere “ the clay handle of a Rhodian amphora with a circular potter’s mark ornamented with a rose, symbol of the Isle of Rhodes, which took its name from the abundance and beauty of the roses which its soil produced.” Again he notes “ the handle of a Rhodian amphora and another of a Punic amphora, each with its mark.” The Greek stamp is <7 millimetres long and 15 wide. I reproduce it here.