Message #49254

[Bianca]

Another mystery is their language.

We know more of Sicel than we do of either Elymian or the more linguistically isolated Sicanian. Little of the written Elymian language has been discovered in archeological elements dated to their civilization as it existed before the arrival of the Phoenicians and Greeks, and what has been found (using Greek characters with a few Phoenician ones in tablets found at Entella and inscriptions at Segesta) has not been satisfactorily translated.

Indeed, it is their early assimilation with both societies, and particularly that of the Greeks, that often makes it difficult to clearly identify the Elymian culture at all. In other words, in archeological studies it is not always easy to distinguish early Elymian settlements from later Elymo-Greek ones (such as Hellenic Segesta) because the Elymians so rapidly adapted Greek art and architecture as their own.

It appears that the Elymians lived in just a few localities before 700 BC, but the hypothetical discovery of even a small --but exclusively Elymian-- settlement could shed new light on our knowledge of their civilization. (Even in Sicily, such archeological discoveries are not unknown.)