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[Pottery]
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ETRUSCANS A History of the Etruscan people including their cities, art, society, rulers and contributions to civilization By: Robert Guisepi 2002 Language and Writing Etruscan, the third great language of
culture in Italy after Greek and Latin, does not, as noted above, survive in any
literary works. An Etruscan religious literature did exist, and evidence
suggests that there may have been a body of historical literature and drama as
well. (Known, for example, is the name of a playwright, Volnius, of obscure
date, who wrote "Tuscan tragedies.") Etruscan had ceased to be spoken in the
time of imperial Rome, though it continued to be studied by priests and
scholars. The emperor Claudius (d. AD 54) wrote a history of the Etruscans in 20
books, now lost, which was based on sources still preserved in his day. The
language continued to be used in a religious context until late antiquity; the
final record of such use relates to the invasion of Rome by Alaric, chief of the
Visigoths, in AD 410, when Etruscan priests were summoned to conjure lightning
against the barbarians. There are more than 10,000 known Etruscan
inscriptions, with new ones being discovered each year. These are mainly short
funerary or dedicatory inscriptions, found on ash urns and in tombs or on
objects dedicated in sanctuaries. Others are found on engraved bronze Etruscan
mirrors, where they label mythological figures or give the name of the owner,
and on coins, dice, and pottery. Finally, there are graffiti scratched on
pottery; though their function is little understood, they seem to include
owners' names as well as numbers, abbreviations, and nonalphabetic signs. Of the longer inscriptions, the most
important is the "Zagreb mummy wrapping," found in Egypt in the 19th century and
carried back to Yugoslavia by a traveler (National Museum, Zagreb). It had
originally been a book of linen cloth, which at some date was cut up into strips
to be wrapped around a mummy. With about 1,300 words, written in black ink on
the linen, it is the longest existing Etruscan text; it contains a calendar and
instructions for sacrifice, sufficient to give some idea of Etruscan religious
literature. From Italy come an important religious text, inscribed on a tile at
the site of ancient Capua, and an inscription on a boundary stone at Perugia,
noteworthy for its juridical content. The few Etruscan-Latin bilingual
inscriptions, all funerary, have little importance with respect to improving
knowledge of Etruscan. But inscribed gold plaques found at the site of the
ancient sanctuary of Pyrgi, the port city of Caere, provide two texts, one in
Etruscan and the other in Phoenician, of significant length (about 40 words) and
of analogous content. They are the equivalent of a bilingual inscription and
thus offer substantial data for the elucidation of Etruscan by way of a known
language--Phoenician. The find is also an important historical document, which
records the dedication to the Phoenician goddess Astarte of a "sacred place" in
the Etruscan sanctuary of Pyrgi by Thefarie Velianas, king of Caere, early in
the 5th century BC. The 20th-century notion that there is a
"mystery" regarding the Etruscan language is fundamentally erroneous; there
exists no problem of decipherment, as is often wrongly asserted. The Etruscan
texts are largely legible. The alphabet derives from a Greek alphabet originally
learned from the Phoenicians. It was disseminated in Italy by the colonists from
the island of Euboea during the 8th century BC and adapted to Etruscan
phonetics; the Latin alphabet was ultimately derived from it. (In its turn the
Etruscan alphabet was diffused at the end of the Archaic period [c. 500 BC] into
northern Italy, becoming the model for the alphabets of the Veneti and of
various Alpine populations; this happened concurrently with the formation of the
Umbrian and the Oscan alphabets in the peninsula.) The real problem with the
Etruscan texts lies in the difficulty of understanding the meaning of the words
and grammatical forms. A fundamental obstacle stems from the fact that no other
known language has close enough kinship to Etruscan to allow a reliable,
comprehensive, and conclusive comparison. The apparent isolation of the Etruscan
language had already been noted by the ancients; it is confirmed by repeated and
vain attempts of modern science to assign it to one of the various linguistic
groups or types of the Mediterranean and Eurasian world. However, there are in
fact connections with Indo-European languages, particularly with the Italic
languages, and also with more or less known non-Indo-European languages of
western Asia and the Caucasus, the Aegean, Italy, and the Alpine zone as well as
with the relics of the Mediterranean linguistic substrata revealed by
place-names. This means that Etruscan is not truly isolated; its roots are
intertwined with those of other recognizable linguistic formations within a
geographic area extending from western Asia to east-central Europe and the
central Mediterranean, and its latest formative developments may have taken
place in more direct contact with the pre-Indo-European and Indo-European
linguistic environment of Italy. But this also means that Etruscan, as scholars
know it, cannot simply be classified as belonging to the Caucasian, the
Anatolian, or Indo-European languages such as Greek and Latin, from which it
seems to differ in structure. The traditional methods hitherto employed in interpreting Etruscan are (1) the etymological, which is based upon the comparison of word roots and grammatical elements with those of other languages and which assumes the existence of a linguistic relationship that permits an explication of Etruscan from the outside (this method has produced negative results, given the error in the assumption), (2) the combinatory, a procedure of analysis and interpretation of the Etruscan texts rigorously limited to internal comparative study of the texts themselves and of the grammatical forms of the Etruscan words (this has led to much progress in the knowledge of Etruscan, but its defects lie in the hypothetical character of many of the conclusions due to the absence of external proofs or confirmations), and (3) the bilingual, based on the comparison of Etruscan ritual, votive, and funerary formulas with presumably analogous formulas from epigraphic or literary texts in languages belonging to a closely connected geographic and historical environment, such as Greek, Latin, or Umbrian. Nonetheless, with the increase of reliable data, in part from more recent epigraphic discoveries (such as the gold plaques at Pyrgi mentioned above), the need to find the one right method appears to be of decreasing importance; all available procedures tend to be utilized. Home Page |
