Oh, I know this one. This is Egadi no. 3, one of by now 27 rams we've found associated with the Battle of the Aegates in 241 BCE, during the First Punic War, and one of now two with a Punic inscription. The inscription looks like this:
The picture on the left is from Giovanni Garbini (the transcription is split into lines "for printing reasons" but it's a single line in the inscription).
Garbini's provisional translation, quoted in The landscape of the naval battle at the Egadi Islands (241 B.C.) by Sebastiano Tusa and Jeffrey Royal in the Journal of Roman Archeology 25 (2012), was indeed "We pray to Baal that this ram will go into the enemy ship and make a big hole". In his contribution to The Site of the Battle of the Aegates Islands at the End of the First Punic War (Bibliotheca Archaeologica 60, 2019), edited by Tusa and Royal, he renders it:
wkLSW ʿŠL BKB[D] YLKD BʿL Z LḤQY WTRŠ NKʿ MMLL BTK
And that the lance cause much harm. Baal launch this (rostrum) against his objective with fury, so that the shield is debilitated, weakened at the center.
(I've corrected the Punic significantly from how it actually appears in print because it got badly mangled. I believe this is what was intended.)
Going by his discussion, even if you accept all of his interpretations lexically (which you absolutely shouldn't!), what it actually seems to say is "And that to the spear has harmed with heaviness, Baal push that, he has grabbed him and the shield has been be weakened, very languishing in the centre". It's difficult to express how little this coheres grammatically.
The picture on the right there is P. C. Schmitz's. His provisional rendition in Landscape is:
tn̊t k̊ bn̊ bʿlm̊ l hwn spt ršp ẘh̊mm lʾbn tḥ[t . . .]
... Tanit, for in it are its officers. Blow, gales of Reshep! and build the surge/overflowing/wave und[er (?) ... ]
He greatly revises this for Site:
[ . . . ] ḥ̊m̊t̊ ntk̊ bn̊ bʿl ml hwn spt ršp whmm l ʾbn tḥ[t . . . ]
[ . . . ] wrath pour out on him/it O Baal; opposite Greece may a lightning storm and its waters pull our enemy dow[n . . . ]
The most questionable thing here is reading hwn as 'Greece'—Schmitz proposes that it's a contraction of the Phoenician equivalent of Hebrew יָוָן yāwān 'Ionia → Greece' with a definite article and irregular contraction */hāyāwān/ > /hôwān/, but yāwān with a definite article wouldn't be hāyāwān for a start, it'd be hayyāwān. He cites Krahmalkov in defence, which means it's definitely wrong.
Obviously the Roman-Punic Wars were preceded by the Greco-Punic Wars with Syracuse and the other Greeks in Sicily. I'm actually not sure how the Carthaginians would have referred to them.
Schmitz's treatment in Site is accompanied by this note:
After this volume had been sent in camera-ready form to the publisher, Sebastiano Tusa communicated that he did not share the above reading of the inscription and wished that it be accompanied here by a further chapter containing what he called the "correct" reading. That piece of work had already been published by the late Giovanni Garbini as part of the article by S. Tusa, C. A. Buccellato and G. Garbini, “Il rostro punico dellabattaglia delle Egadi (241 a.C.),” RendLinc ser. 9, vol. 25 (2014) 183-99, specifically on pp. 191-99. In that article, Garbini read the inscription as:
wkLSW ʿŠL BKD[D] YLKD BʿL Z LḤQY WTRŠ NKʿ MMLL BTK
The translation Garbini proposed was: "E che la lancia rechi molto male. Baal lanci con furore questo (rostro) contro il suo obiettivo, sì che lo scudo venga fiaccato, indebolito al centro".
Professor Garbini's full discussion may be found in that 2014 publication. In his final message, Tusa proposed inviting Professor De Simone of the University Kore of Enna to write a preface to Garbini's paper, treating the issues involved. Currently therefore the inscription remains subject to further scholarly debate.
And yes, Garbini's article, translated into English (without preface and, like I said, badly mangled), appears in this book as chapter 5a, Schmitz's as 5b. What a horrific thing to do! Tusa is dead now as well, thank God.
Anyway, I only partly agree with this dead asshole's assessment: Schmitz is far and away the more credible scholar here and Garbini is clearly wrong, but there are very significant problems with Schmitz's rendering as well, and it also has to be said that he's working from photographs (I hope his own copies are more legible than what made it into print!) and hasn't seen the inscription in person.
As for more recent takes, Amadasi Guzzo (also now dead) has published something I haven't been able to track down ("Note sull'iscrizione punica del rostro Egadi 3" in Entre Málaga y Tiro, a festschrift for M. E. Aubet, 2024)—she seems to follow Schmitz more than Garbini in terms of identifying characters, but not in interpreting the meaning.
So it does not say that, but it's also not clear what it does say. We can, however, agree: there is definitely an inscription there.
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