It is well known that Punic survived for a very long time in North Africa; Augustine makes frequent reference to the language and its speakers in northern Algeria. What is a lot less clear is how extensive this phenomenon was, both geographically and in terms of the language's functions, not least because inscriptions written in Punic script are not found in Africa after the early second century c.e. Fascinating clues, however, come from the Punic-language texts written in Latin script in Tripolitania, dating from the first to (at least) the fourth century c.e. These were first catalogued by Francesco Vattioni in 1976, but new finds and advances in Phoenician linguistics mean that Robert Kerr's catalogue, which includes all currently known documents (published and unpublished, decipherable and not), is hugely welcome. Based to a much larger degree than its predecessor on autopsy, K.’s catalogue now provides reliable new translations and commentary, though not illustrations (of which seventeen can be conveniently accessed online in the reissue of Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania (http://irt.kcl.ac.uk/irt2009/), an excellent resource which could itself be updated on the basis of this work). K. takes a sensibly conservative approach to the transcription and interpretation of the texts, and has little patience for the more creative suggestions of those who do not.

K. publishes sixty-nine ‘Latino-Punic’ texts from Tripolitania in all, as well as two ‘Graeco-Punic’ ones from Algeria, and one (probably) Greco-Phoenician example from Syria. Most are epitaphs, three are building inscriptions, one is a brickstamp. This relatively small group of texts emanating from élite contexts nonetheless provides a fascinating glimpse into everyday life in a region where for instance women erected not only mausolea but apparently in one case a castrum or fortified farm. It should be noted that K. provides first and foremost a linguistic commentary on the texts themselves and the development of the language that they reveal; there is still much scope for historical and cultural interpretation, for which this catalogue finally provides a solid foundation.

The catalogue is, however, only an appendix to the book under review. K. first provides an introduction to the inscriptions in their historical contexts, usefully summarizing earlier work on local cultural persistence in the region under Rome and discussing the identity of the authors of the inscriptions — Roman colonists (unlikely because the names are Libyan, and what little Latin there is in inland Tripolitania is poor quality), ‘Libyan tribesmen’ (as has been suggested in the past), or (as K. prefers) ‘Libyphoenician’ migrants from the coast? The bulk of the text is then devoted to the phonology and grammar of Late Punic as elucidated by the Latino-Punic texts (which crucially contain the vowels that Phoenician and Punic scripts traditionally omit), contemporary inscriptions in ‘Neo-’Punic script and, with due caution, the passages of transcribed Punic in Plautus’ Poenulus. K.’s stated goal is to demonstrate the extent to which Late Punic is a coherent system, not the vulgar and debased dialect of much scholarship on the subject, already half-drowned in Latin. This aim he accomplishes with some style: not only was there ‘a standard system for rendering Punic in Latin letters’ (7), but the Neo-Punic inscriptions too use systematic and explicable spellings which reflect not confusion, but a development in the language in which gutturals were lost in pronunciation, and their lexemes often recycled as vowel-letters in the written language. Speculation is clearly marked as such, as in discussions of possible Libyan substrate influence on the disappearance of gutturals in Late Punic (26–38: bilingual inscriptions suggest that unlike Tuareg, Libyan had no guttural phonemes) and the vowel shortening that occurs in both Punic and African Latin (103–4).

K. brings an enormous variety of ancient and modern languages to bear on his already polyglot topic (mostly rendered in their original scripts as well as in transcription; there is no strict policy with regard to translation into English). In this sense and others, the book is a treat: highly technical but also very readable, and often funny — not the least of the reasons to wholeheartedly recommend it to all those interested in Roman North Africa as well as, of course, Semitic linguistics.