The Idalion bilingual is a bilingual CypriotâÂÂPhoenician inscription found in 1869 in Dali, Cyprus. It was the key to the decipherment of the Cypriot syllabary, in the manner of the Rosetta Stone to hieroglyphs. The discovery of the inscription was first announced by Paul Schröder in May 1872. It is dated to 388 BCE. The Phoenician inscription is known as KAI 38 and CIS I 89.
It was discovered by Robert Hamilton Lang in his excavations at the Temple of Idaliom, whose work there had been inspired by the discovery of the Idalion Tablet in 1850. The stone was found in the centre of the temple, together with the five other Idalion Temple inscriptions. The stone is thought to have been a pedestal for a statue, as there is an apparent dowel hole in the top.
Lang wrote of his discovery: <blockquote>The most valuable monument uncovered by my excavations is unquestionably the bilingual inscription in Cyprian and Phoenician, engraved on marble; an inscription which, I feel confident, will ultimately prove the means of enabling philologists to decipher the Cyprian alphabet... The bilingual inscription proves also that, the two alphabets, Phoenician and Cyprian, had a contemporaneous existence.</blockquote>
It is currently in the archives of the British Museum, with identification number 125320. It was exhibited at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge in 2018.
The Phoenician inscription is three lines long:
The Cypriot inscription is written in the Greek language. It is four lines long, also written right-to-left. It was used by George Smith to decipher the Cypriot syllabary in 1871, in the manner of the Rosetta Stone to hieroglyphs. It is dated to 388 BCE. Subsequently, Egyptologist Samuel Birch (1872), numismatist Johannes Brandis (1873), philologists , , Justus Siegismund (1874) and dialectologist H. L. Ahrens (1876) all built on Smith's decipherment of the stone.