12.  I. XIII.  Etrusco-Attic and Latino-Sicilian Commerce

13.  That the Etruscans always were without the koppa, seems not doubtful; for not only is no sure trace of it to be met with elsewhere, but it is wanting in the model alphabet of the Galassi vase.  The attempt to show its presence in the syllabarium of the latter is at any rate mistaken, for the syllabarium can and does only take notice of the Etruscan letters that were afterwards in common use, and to these the koppa notoriously did not belong; moreover the sign placed at the close cannot well from its position have any other value than that of the -f, which was in fact the last letter in the Etruscan alphabet, and which could not be omitted in a syllabarium exhibiting the variations of that alphabet from its model.  It is certainly surprising that the koppa should be absent from the Greek alphabet that came to Etruria, when it otherwise so long maintained its place in the Chalcidico-Doric ; but this may well have been a local peculiarity of the town whose alphabet first reached Etruria.  Caprice and accident have at all times had a share in determining whether a sign becoming superfluous shall be retained or dropped from the alphabet; thus the Attic alphabet lost the eighteenth Phoenician sign, but retained the others which had disappeared from the -u.

14.  The golden bracelet of Praeneste recently brought to light (Mitth. der rom.  Inst. 1887), far the oldest of the intelligible monuments of the Latin language and Latin writing, shows the older form of the -"id:m”; the enigmatic clay vase from the Quirinal (published by Dressel in the Annali dell Instituto, 1880) shows the older form of the -"id:r”.

15.  At this period we shall have to place that recorded form of the Twelve Tables, which subsequently lay before the Roman philologues, and of which we possess fragments.  Beyond doubt the code was at its very origin committed to writing; but that those scholars themselves referred their text not to the original exemplar, but to an official document written down after the Gallic conflagration, is proved by the story of the Tables having undergone reproduction at that time.  This enables us easily to explain how their text by no means exhibited the oldest orthography, which was not unknown to them; even apart from the consideration that in the case of such a written document, employed, moreover, for the purpose of being committed to memory by the young, a philologically exact transmission cannot possibly be assumed.

16.  This is the inscription of the bracelet of Praeneste which has been mentioned at xiv, note 14.  On the other hand even on the Ficoroni cista -"id:C” has the later form of -"id:K”.

17.  Thus -"id:C” represents -Gaius-; -"id:Cn” -Gnaeus-; while -"id:K” stands for -Kaeso-.  With the more recent abbreviations of course this is not the case; in these -"id:gamma” is represented not by -"id:C”, but by -"id:G” (-Gal- -Galeria-), —­“id:kappa”, as a rule, by -"id:C” (-C- -centum- -cos- -consul; -col -Collina-), or before -"id:a” by -"id:K” (-Kar- -karmetalia-; -Merk- -merkatus-).  For they expressed for a time the sound —­k before the vowels -e -i -o and before all consonants by -"id:C”, before -a on the other hand by -"id:K”, before -u by the old sign of the koppa -"id:Q”.