Albertini Tablets

The Albertini Tablets (French: Tablettes Albertini) are a set of 33 (or 34) legal documents in Latin cursive written in ink on 45 cedarwood tablets from the years 493–496. They were discovered in 1928 by local miners in a cache on the estate of Jabal Mrata near the Algeria–Tunisia border, just south of ancient Theveste and beyond the southern frontier of the Vandal Kingdom.[1][2] They are all dated by the regnal years of the Vandal king Gunthamund.[3][4][5] They are named for Eugène Albertini, who edited the first transcription.[6] The tablets are presently conserved at the National Museum of Antiquities and Islamic Art in Algiers, Algeria.

The place where the documents were found is Saharan pre-desert at the limit of the cultivable zone and of permanent human settlement.[5] The tablets show that in the Vandal period arboriculture (including of olive) and floodwater irrigation were practised in the area.[4] Besides agriculture, the tablets reveal the legal, social and economic practices in and on the fringes of the Vandal Kingdom.[5] They also provide useful information about Late Latin grammar and phonetics.[4]

References

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  1. ^ David Small (2018). Methods in the Mediterranean: Historical and Archaeological Views on Texts and Archaeology. Brill. p. 126. ISBN 978-90-04-32940-9. The specific location of the estate in the Djebel Mrata is unknown, but Matigny plausibly suggests that the estates were located along Oued el-Horchane
  2. ^ Albertini, Eugène (1928). "Documents d'époque vandale découverts en Algérie". Comptes rendus des séances de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (in French). 72 (3): 301–303. doi:10.3406/crai.1928.85808.
  3. ^ Andrew H. Merrills, "Albertini Tablets", The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2018), vol. 1, pp. 42–43.
  4. ^ a b c R. Bruce Hitchner, "Albertini Tablets", The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (Oxford University Press, 1991).
  5. ^ a b c Simon Corcoran, "Tablettes Albertini", The Encyclopedia of Ancient History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) pp. 6499–6500.
  6. ^ Douglas Boin, A Social and Cultural History of Late Antiquity (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), pp. 183–184.
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