LAST WORDS

Tyrsenian (isolate in Italy) Β· Etruscan alphabet

Etruscan

πŒ“πŒ€πŒ”πŒπŒ€ rasna, β€œEtruscan, the Etruscans”

Spoken
c. 700 BC – AD 50
Written
inscriptions until c. AD 50
Where
Central Italy, today Tuscany, Umbria and northern Lazio

The Etruscans taught Rome a great deal: the toga, probably gladiatorial games, the reading of omens in a sheep's liver, and the alphabet that became our own. Their language, though, belongs to no family we know in Europe. Thanks to their Greek-based alphabet we can pronounce Etruscan reasonably well. Understanding it is another matter. Most surviving texts are short epitaphs and dedications, so scholars know the words for son, wife, year and gift, and little about poetry or argument.

Where and when

Etruria lay between the Arno and Tiber rivers, in today's Tuscany and northern Lazio. Its twelve great cities, among them Tarquinia, Cerveteri, Veii, Vulci and Perugia, grew rich on iron, copper and trade with Greeks and Phoenicians. Etruscan was also spoken in colonies in the Po valley and in Campania.

The first inscriptions date to about 700 BC, soon after the Etruscans adopted a Greek alphabet. Some 13,000 inscriptions survive, mostly short. The longest text is the Liber Linteus, a ritual calendar on linen that was cut into strips and used to wrap an Egyptian mummy, now in Zagreb. Nobody knows how it reached Egypt.

The area where Etruscan was spoken, laid in red and gold.
700 BCAD 50

How it fell silent

Rome swallowed Etruria city by city. Veii fell in 396 BC, and by the third century BC all of Etruria was under Roman control. After the Social War of 91–88 BC, the Etruscans received Roman citizenship, and with it came Latin in law, the army, trade and marriage. Etruscan families who wanted careers in Rome switched languages, and bilingual epitaphs show the shift happening.

By the first century AD Etruscan had almost no new inscriptions. Emperor Claudius, who married an Etruscan woman, wrote a twenty-volume history of the Etruscans and probably knew some of the language, but the books are lost. Priests skilled in Etruscan divination were still consulted in AD 408, when Alaric besieged Rome, but whether they still spoke Etruscan is unknown.

How it may have sounded

  • πŒ‚πŒ‹πŒ€πŒ

    clan

    Say it roughly KLAHN/klan/

    β€œson”

    Common on epitaphs as 'X, son of Y'; the c was a k sound, since the Etruscans used the Greek gamma letter for k and had no g.

  • πŒ€πŒ…πŒ‰πŒ‹

    avil

    Say it roughly AH-vil/awil/

    β€œyears (of age)”

    Appears with numbers in statements of age at death; the letter v was probably pronounced like English w.

  • πŒˆπŒ– πŒ†πŒ€πŒ‹ πŒ‚πŒ‰

    ΞΈu zal ci

    Say it roughly THOO TSAHL KEE/tΚ°u tsal ki/

    β€œprobably 'one, two, three'”

    These number words are written on the faces of a pair of dice from Tuscania; which word goes with which number is still argued over, and ΞΈ was probably an aspirated t rather than English th.

Your name, set in stone

Etruscan was written right to left with an alphabet that had no b, d, g or o. Your name has to borrow: b becomes p, d becomes t, g becomes c, and o is usually written as u.

    A playful transcription, not a scholarly one: the people who used this script never heard your name, and would have spelled it in more than one way.

    Three things

    1. The longest Etruscan text survived as mummy wrappings in Egypt and is now in a museum in Zagreb.
    2. The word 'person' may come from Etruscan Ο†ersu, a masked figure in tomb paintings, via Latin persona.
    3. Emperor Claudius wrote twenty books of Etruscan history; not a single page survives.

    Further reading