Nestor’s cup and ancient Ischia PITECUSA.

Today on our logbook we discuss the origins of the first island colony of Magna Graecia

the cup of Nestor is an archaeological find unearthed in the necropolis of San Montano in Lacco Ameno on the island of Ischia by German archaeologist Giorgio Buchner

The inscription on the vase, which can be dated to around the last twenty-five years of the 8th century B.C.

the cup was part of the rich grave goods of a child as young as ten years old. ore recently, the anthropological reexamination of the remains, conducted by bioarchaeologist and bioanthropologist Melania Gigante and a team of experts, revealed that, in fact, the cremated remains associated with Nestor’s Cup belong to at least three adult individuals and some animals, including birds, goats and a probable medium-sized carnivore, perhaps a dog; while there is no trace of infant or subadult remains. The cup bears engraved on one side in the Euboic alphabet in a retrograde sense, that is, from right to left, in accordance with Phoenician custom, an epigram composed of three verses, the first in iambic meter and the second and third in perfect dactylic hexameter, alluding to the famous cup described in Homer’s Iliad:

The inscription, in addition to testifying to the dense network of trade relations that the colonists of Pithekoussai developed with the Near East and Carthage, with Greece and with Europe

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