Carthaginian tombstones

Carthaginian tombstones are Punic language-inscribed tombstones excavated from the city of Carthage over the last 200 years.

The first such discoveries were published by Jean Emile Humbert in 1817, Hendrik Arent Hamaker in 1828 and Christian Tuxen Falbe in 1833.

[3][4] The steles were first published together in the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum; the first focused collection was published by Jean Ferron in 1976.

Ferron identified four types of funerary steles:[5] The oldest funerary stelae belong to Type III and date back to the 5th century BCE, becoming widespread at the end of the 4th century BCE.

Bas-reliefs and statues appeared later.

A typical Carthaginian tombstone. KAI 85 ( Delattre 30, CIS I 184, KI 74), discovered in 1831, [ 1 ] described as "the type of dedicatory inscriptions which is represented by many thousands of copies and, due to the formulaic nature of the text, only provides material for name research." [ 2 ]