(i.) The Latin alphabet of the latest Tables resembles that of the Tabula Bantina, and might have been engraved at almost any time between 150 B.C. and 50 B.C. It is quite likely that the closer relations with Rome, which began after the Social War, led to the adoption of the Latin alphabet. Hence we should infer that the Tables in Umbrian alphabet were at all events older than 90 B.C.
(ii.) For an upper limit of date, in default of definite evidence, it seems imprudent to go back beyond the 5th century B.C., since neither in Rome nor Campania have we any evidence of public written documents of any earlier century. When more is known of the earliest Etruscan inscriptions it may become possible to date the Iguvine Tables by their alphabetic peculiarities as compared with their mother-alphabet, the Etruscan. The “Tuscan name” is denounced in the comprehensive curse of Table VI. b, 53-60, and we may infer that the town of Iguvium was independent but in fear of the Etruscans at the time when the curse was first composed. The absence of all mention of either Gauls or Romans seems to prove that this time was at least earlier than 400 B.C.; and the curse may have been composed long before it was written down.
The chief sources in which further information may be sought have been already mentioned.
(R. S. C.)
[1] A portion of this article is taken by permission from R. S. Conway’s Italic Dialects (Camb. Univ. Press, 1897).
IJOLITE (derived from the first syllable of the Finnish words Jiwaru, Jijoki, &c., common as geographical names in the Kola peninsula, and the Gr. λίθος, a stone), a rock consisting essentially of nepheline and augite, and of great rarity, but of considerable importance from a mineralogical and petrographical standpoint. It occurs in various parts of the Kola peninsula in north Finland on the shores of the White Sea. The pyroxene is morphic, yellow or green, and is surrounded by formless areas of nepheline. The accessory minerals are apatite, cancrinite, calcite, titanite and jiwaarite, a dark-brown titaniferous variety of melanite-garnet. This rock is the plutonic and holocrystalline analogue of the nephelenites and nepheline-dolerites; it bears the same relation to them as the nepheline-syenites have to the phonolites. It is worth mentioning that a leucite-augite rock, resembling ijolite except in containing leucite in place of nepheline, is known to occur at Shonkin Creek, near Fort Benton, Montana, and has been called missourite.
IKI, an island belonging to Japan, lying off the north-western coast of Kiushiu, in 33° 45′ N. lat. and 129° 40′ E. long. It has a circumference of 86 m., an area of 51 sq. m., and a population of 36,530. The island is, for the most part, a tableland about 500 ft. above sea-level. The anchorage is at Gonoura, on the south-west. A part of Kublai Khan’s Mongols landed at Iki when about to invade Japan in the 13th century, for it lies in the direct route from Korea to Japan via Tsushima. In the immediate vicinity are several rocky islets.