SEG 26:1139 · SEG 52:951 · OF 474 · Museo «Vito Capialbi», Vibo Valentia · ca. 410–400 BC · gold foil, 16 hexameters
The Orphic gold lamella of Hipponion: a gold leaf of 5.9 × 3.2 centimeters, found in 1969 in the western necropolis of Hipponion (Vibo Valentia, Calabria) on the chest of a dead woman, folded in four. Sixteen hexameters, incised freehand in letters of 1–2 millimeters in the alphabet of the Locrian colonies, instruct the initiate’s soul on its way through the underworld: past the first spring and its white cypress, to the guardians of the lake of Memory. It is the oldest and longest of the Orphic “B” tablets.
Click or tap any line of the facsimile below to see it as incised on the foil and as printed in the two editions, with an English translation of the verse.
Drag the leaf sideways to see its full width.
black = preserved · red = restored (editorial) · grey + dot = uncertain · blank gaps = uninscribed letter-spaces · the stray signs closing lines 2–3 are carved · line 14’s last letters climb the right margin · the horizontal fold crease runs through line 10, whose middle is disputed
The image is a typographic facsimile, not a photograph or a tracing: the text set in stroke-based letterforms of the Locrian colonial alphabet matched against photographs of the foil, laid out line by line on the leaf’s tapering silhouette with its fold creases, reconstructed from the photographs and the published editions.