A New Punic inscription from Żejtun (Malta) and the Goddess Anat-Astarte

Abstract

The inscription in question is incised on a pottery sherd (Figs. 1-2) which had been found in July 1976 during a seven-day excavation campaign at Zejtun conducted by Anthony Bonanno 'on behalf of the Museums Department as part of a Summer School Course organised by the National Students Travel Service (NSTS)' (Bonanno 1997). The town of Zejtun is situated in the south-east of the island of Malta, and the aforementioned inscription was unearthed in an area which today lies in the grounds of the town's secondary school. The first signs of archaeological remains in the area appeared in 1961 when the operations for the building of the school had started; at that time some Roman pottery and stones had appeared, but it seems that nothing was done about this discovery. Further remains came to light in 1964, but it was only in 197 I that archaeological work started in earnest with the help of foreign volunteer students under the supervision of Tancred Gouder, then Curator of Archaeology at the Museums Department of Malta; the operation lasted for three consecutive summers. Thereafter, Anthony Bonanno continued to supervise the work in a small part of the area where the discoveries up to then had been made; he did this during the aforementioned seven-day campaign of 1976 (when the inscription which is the object of this study was found) and in 1977. No reports (not even preliminary ones) on any of the seasons of the archaeological work which was done at Zejtun have ever been published, except for Bonanno's recent report in the annual magazine of the girls' secondary school where the discoveries were made (Bonanno 1987). In this report Bonanno interpreted the archaeological discoveries made at Zejtun as the remains of a Roman villa which (in view of the Punic pottery found in the area) seems to have been preceded on the same spot by another villa which had been in use in Punic times during the last centuries before the Roman occupation of Malta in 218 B.C. (Bonanno 1987).