Engubine Tables

Engubine Tables (Lat. Tabulae Iguvine), the name given to seven bronze tablets, the inscriptions on which present a comprehensive and very remarkable memorial of the Umbrian language. They were discovered in 1444 at Gubbio (the ancient Iguvium or Eugubium), where they are still preserved. The characters on four of the tablets are Etruscan, on two Roman, and on one partly Roman and partly Etruscan; the inscriptions run from right to left. The language employed, however, is in all cases the same, and differs both from Etruscan and Latin, but resembles somewhat the older forms of the latter and also the Oscan dialects, so far as we know them. The subjects of the inscriptions are directions concerning sacrificial usages and forms of prayer, and they seem to have been inscribed in the 1st and 2d centuries A.D. Philip Bonarota first published them in a complete form in Dempster's Etruria Regalis (2 vols. Florence, 1723-24). The first really judicious attempt at interpretation was that of Lanzi, in his Saggio di Lingua Etrusca (3 vols. Rome, 1789), who points out the important fact that they related to sacrificial usages, &c. Ottfried Müller, Lassen, Grotefend, and Lepsius continued their study; the last gave the most accurate copy of the inscriptions in his Inscriptiones Umbricæ et Oscæ (Leip. 1841). The best and most complete work on the language and contents of the tablets is that of Aufrecht and Kirchhoff, entitled Die Umbrischen Sprachdenkmäler (1849-51). See F. W. Newman, The Text of the Iguvine Inscriptions, with Latin translation and notes (1864); and Bréal, Les Tables Eugubines (Paris, 1875-78).