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Description: | A Roman inscribed gold amulet (lamella) comprising a rectangular sheet of gold foil, originally tightly rolled but unrolled by the finder. The resulting creases and corrugations were regularised by a metals conservator at the British Museum to enable an attempt at reading the inscribed text. The top, bottom and right side of the sheet are largely intact, but the left side is broken away.Text (Dr Roger Tomlin): Inscribed across the short axis by a fine point are 18 lines of cursive writing, of which only the right-hand portion survives. Line 1 ends with a space, as if it is some sort of 'heading', and some of the other lines end with an elongated letter as if to mark the end of a word. The surface damage and abrasion, together with the springiness of the sheet, make it difficult to record the text letter by letter; but the real difficulty is that many of the letters are ambivalent. So, it is a puzzling text, but apparently a Roman 'phylactery' [a protective text worn rolled up as an amulet]. There are no 'magical' letters or pictograms, but there may be 'magical' words or letter-combinations. The text is written continuously, but I was disappointed not to recognise words, and I am not even sure whether the script is Latin cursive or Greek - though I think it is Greek: there are at least two Ks and at least two Greek thetas.Date: 1st - 4th century AD.
Original Image | Publisher: | http://finds.org.uk | Source: | Portable Antiquities | Identifier: | http://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/r... | Go to resource |
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