Pyrgi Tablets

The Pyrgi Tablets, found in an excavation of a sanctuary of that town in Italy, a port of the southern Etruscan town of Caere, are three golden leaves that record a dedication made around 500 BC by Thefarie Velianas, king of Caere, to the Phoenician goddess Astarte.

These writings are important not only for providing a bilingual text that allows us to use our knowledge of Phoenician to read Etruscan, but provides evidence of Phoenician/Punic influence in the Western Mediterranean. This document helps to provide a context for Polybius's report (Hist. 3,22) of an ancient and almost unintelligible treaty between the Romans and the Carthaginians, which he dated to the consulships of L. Iunius Brutus and L. Tarquinius Collatinus (505 BC).