Historical periods
The presence of the Etruscan people in Etruria is attested by their own inscriptions, dated about 700 bce; it is widely believed, however, that the Etruscans were present in Italy before this time and that the prehistoric Iron Age culture called “Villanovan” (9th–8th century bce) is actually an early phase of Etruscan civilization.
Inasmuch as no Etruscan literary works have survived, the chronology of Etruscan history and civilization has been constructed on the basis of evidence, both archaeological and literary, from the better-known civilizations of Greece and Rome as well as from those of Egypt and the Middle East. Contact with Greece began around the time that the first Greek colony in Italy was founded (c. 775–750 bce), when Greeks from the island of Euboea settled at Pithekoussai in the Bay of Naples. Thereafter, numerous Greek and Middle Eastern objects were imported into Etruria, and these items, together with Etruscan artifacts and works of art displaying Greek or Oriental influence, have been used to generate relatively precise dates along with more general ones. In fact, the basic nomenclature for the historical periods in Etruria is borrowed from corresponding periods in Greece; the assigned dates are usually (though perhaps erroneously) conceived of as being slightly later than their Greek counterparts to allow for cultural “time lag.” Thus the Etruscan Orientalizing period belongs to the 7th century bce, the Archaic period to the 6th and first half of the 5th century bce, the Classical period to the second half of the 5th and the 4th century bce, and the Hellenistic period to the 3rd to 1st centuries bce. Etruscan culture became absorbed into Roman civilization during the 1st century bce and thereafter disappeared as a recognizable entity.
Etruscan friezeEtruscan frieze; in the National Archaeological Museum, Siena, Italy.© Timur Kulgarin/Shutterstock.com
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 (died 54 ce) 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 410 ce, 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 bce.
The 20th-century notion that there is a “mystery” regarding the Etruscan language was fundamentally erroneous; there exists no problem of decipherment, as was 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 bce 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 bce] 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.