martedì 12 giugno 2012

THE ETRUSCAN LANGUAGE RIDDLE


By  Enio Pecchioni

Scholars can not yet entirely translate the language spoken in Etruria in historic times. The innumerable attempts made by the greatest masters in linguistics and philology have failed to decipher a language which was spoken in Tuscany up the beginning of the Christian era and which the Etruscan priests must have used both in Tuscany and in Rome itself up to the end of th 5th century A.D.
In othe fields, there has been no lack of discoveries which have permitted us to understand idioms seemingly even more difficult to tackle than Etruscan. Some years ago, the Hittite pictographic language was deciphered and, quite recently, the language spoken by the Mycenaeans, known as Linear B, as well. In all cases the difficulties were duly overcome and the solution of the problems has opened up a magnificent field to linguistic research. The wide interest rightly aroused by the deciphering of Mycenaean at once springs to mind; since from it we learn that at Mycenae and in Crete the language spoken in the second millenium B.C. was very close to Homeric Greek.
Also the Etruscans used a language near to Greek, and with a Greek alphabet, but this language was not Indo-European and probably connected with certain pre-Hellenic languages of eastern Mediterranean. A related language was still used on Lemnos in the archaic period, as the inscription on the stele of Caminia proves.

martedì 5 giugno 2012

Il Battistero di San Giovanni



 


La crisi economica e demografica che afflisse l’Italia dalla metà del IV al VI secolo d.C., non aveva impedito, grazie a Teodorico, la costruzione dentro la piccola cerchia muraria fiorentina della chiesa cattedrale di S.Reparata e di un Battistero ariano poco discosto dal futuro “Bel San Giovanni”(1).
Sarà invece con la conversione al cattolicesimo dei nuovi dominatori Longobardi, grazie all’alto esempio dei loro regnanti Agilulfo (morto nel 616) e Teodolinda (morta nel 628), la ripresa economica e demografica di buona parte dell’Italia. Gli architetti longobardi che avevano studiato direttamente i modelli classici e assimilato dai nativi la tecnica costruttiva, furono gli artefici del Battistero fiorentino.
Prendendo a modelli la chiesa di San Vitale a Ravenna e il duomo di Monza, edificarono ex novo il Battistero di Firenze intorno al 620-640, epoca di poco posteriore alla lettera (615) diretta al Re Aginulfo dal Pontefice S.Gregorio Magno, il quale si rallegrava col monarca per la sua conversione e per la pace restituita alla Chiesa e all’Italia.