Between Private Devotional Practices and Personalisation: An Unusual Inscribed Tool from the Borgia Collection

This article is the first scientific publication of a stone hammer axe with a three-line inscription currently held in the USA and long belonged to the huge collection of antiquities assembled by the Borgia family. A third-millennium bce text, engraved within a rectangular case, identifies the artefact as a private item, perhaps offered in honour to an obscure deity. The article describes the history of the object and of the Borgia's collection and present an epigraphic and philological comment of the inscription on this object and a similar inscription on a mace head once in the Foroughi collection.