As I will show in subsequent blog posts, Aleppo province’s Afrin area- whose original inhabitants are primarily Kurds and have returned in significant numbers since the fall of the Assad regime thanks to efforts for their return organised by the new Syrian government- is full of Byzantine/Roman ruins, and despite looting in previous years, there are still archaeological treasures waiting to be found. Among the most recent finds is an impressive funerary monument uncovered in the Bulbul district of Afrin, and fortunately it has been transferred to the National Museum in Aleppo city.
In response to a query by Alexander McKeever, the funerary inscription is not written in Latin but Ancient Greek, contrary to what Syrian news outlet Zaman al-Wasl reported. I provide a transcription of the funerary inscription with my own translation below, since I have seen that there have been some erroneous attempts to transcribe and translate the funerary inscription on local social media. Note that the iota subscripts are my own insertion since they were not represented in Ancient Greek inscriptions at this point. Similarly the separation of words, the breathings on vowels and select capitalisation are my own editing, since the inscription is written in capital letters and there are no spaces between words.
New Ancient Tomb Found in Afrin
Ancient Greek Funerary Inscription with Translation
