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The Praeneste fibula (the "brooch of Palestrina") is a golden fibula or brooch, today housed in the Pigorini National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography in Rome. The fibula bears an inscription in Old Latin, claiming craftsmanship by one Manios and ownership by one Numazios. At the time of its discovery in the late nineteenth century, it was accepted as the earliest known specimen of the Latin language. The authenticity of the inscription has since been disputed, repeatedly rejected and affirmed, with one assertion of antiquity dating to the first half of the seventh century BC.

Discovery

The fibula was presented to the public in 1887 by Wolfgang Helbig, an archaeologist. According to some sources, Helbig did not explain how he had come to acquire the artifact at the time, although others state that the fibula "was first made known to the public in three short articles in the for 1887 where it is said to have been purchased in Palestrina by a friend of Helbig in the year 1871, or five years before the discovery of the tomb" – the tomb in question being the Bernardini Tomb whose treasure the fibula was later claimed to be a part of.

Date and inscription

The fibula was thought to originate from the seventh century BC.

The reconstructed Proto-Italic ancestor would have been:

:

In Classical Latin the inscription reads:

:,

"Manius made me for Numerius." This was the most formal but not the first accusation of its kind: Georg Karo had said that Helbig told him that the fibula had been stolen from Palestrina's Tomba Bernardini.

In 2011, new scientific evidence was presented by the research team of and , whose optical, physical and chemical analyses allowed them to take into consideration smaller scrapes on the surface of the object than was possible in the 1980s. Observation by means of scanning electron microscope (SEM) and detailed physical and chemical analyses on the surface of small areas within the track of the incision showed the existence of micro-crystallization of the gold surface: a natural phenomenon that could have taken place only in the course of centuries after the fusion. The study reported that a 19th-century forger could not have realized such a forgery. and also by the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

See also

  • Duenos inscription
  • Lapis Niger

References

Bibliography

Further reading

Authors who argue that the Fibula is a forgery:

Authors who argue that the Fibula is authentic: