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Etruscan Language
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Introduction | | | Alphabet | | | Interpretation | | | Paleography | | | Numbers | | | Home | | |
Introduction
Unlike Greek and Latin, Etruscan, the third great
ancient language of culture in Italy, does not survive in any great literary
works. An Etruscan religious literature did exist
(1), and
evidence suggests that there was a body of historical literature and drama (5) as well.
Known, for example, is the name of a playwright, Volnius, of obscure date, who
wrote "Tuscan tragedies". (4),(2) Although
there is no evidence of notation, it is possible that Etruscan music was in
written form.
(6)
The Etruscan language is universally accepted as an
isolated case. It cannot be shown conclusively to be related to any other
language, living or dead, except for a couple of sparsely attested extinct
languages.
Raetic, recorded in the Alps, was clearly related to
Etruscan judging by the few inscriptions found.
Lemnian, recorded on the island of Lemnos, also
appears to have been related to Etruscan. A third language, Camunic, sparsely
recorded in NW Italy and written in the Etruscan alphabet, may possibly also
have been related, but the evidence is too sparse to allow any safe conclusions.
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. 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,(1) when
Etruscan priests were summoned to conjure lightning against the barbarians.
There is a corpus of over 10,000 known Etruscan
inscriptions, with new ones being discovered each year. These are mainly short
funerary or dedicatory inscriptions, found on funerary urns, 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 non alphabetic signs.
The origin of the Etruscan alphabet is not in
doubt. The first alphabet was invented by Semitic-speakers in the ancient Near
East, though the Caananite and later Phoenician alphabets had only consonants,
and no vowels. The Greeks derived their alphabet from the Phoenicians and added
vowels, producing the first true alphabet. A western variety of the Greek
alphabet was carried by the Euboean Greeks to Italy, and the Etruscans acquired
the alphabet from them. The Etruscans in turn passed on the alphabet to the
Romans.
(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 Germanic Runes (the Futharc) are now thought to
derive from the Northern Etruscan alphabet, a fact which supports the existence
of a vast Etruscan trading network.
The present day 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 real problem with the Etruscan texts lies in the difficulty
we have in understanding the exact 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 some 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 markedly in structure.
The traditional methods which have been employed in
interpreting Etruscan are
(S4):
(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 ri tual, votive, and funera ry formulas with presuma bly analogous
formulas from epigraphic or literary texts in languages belo nging 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 Tabula Cortinensis and the Pyrgi
Lamellae), the need to find the one right method appears to be of decreasing
importance; all available procedures tend to be utilized.
Of the longer inscriptions, the most important is the
Zagreb mummy wrapping or "Liber Lintaeus", 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 convey some idea of Etruscan religious
literature.
From Campania, Italy comes an important religious
text, inscribed on a tile at the site of ancient Capua. From Cortona comes an
inscription on bronze,(top of article) which details a
land contract between two families.
The few Etruscan-Latin bilingual inscriptions, all
funerary, have some limited importance with respect to improving our knowledge
of Etruscan. However, the 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 similar content. They are the equivalent of a bilingual inscription and thus
offer substantial data for the elucidation of Etruscan by way of Phoenician, a
known language. 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 Pyrgi Lamellae
The following is an attempt to translate the (first)
Pyrgi Tablet based on a number of sources. In the transliterataion I have used
an upper case K to represent the Etruscan letter "ch" (as in the German Bach).
The Etruscan letter which resembles the Greek Theta, pronounced like "th" in
"thing" is represented by Anglosaxon "Eth" (ð).
é
References (Primary)
Original Etruscan: |
Transliteration:............... ita.tmia.icac.he ramasva.vatieKe unial.astres.ðemia sa.meK.ðuta.ðefa riei.velianas.sal cluvenias.turu ce.munistas.ðuvas tameresca.ilacve. tulerase.nac.ci.avi l.Kurvar.tesiameit ale.ilacve.alsase nac.atranes.zilac al.seleitala.acnasv ers.itanim.heram ve.avil.eniaca.pul umKva. |
Rough Translation:
This temple and (this) statue have been dedicated to
Uni / Astarte. Thefariei Velianas, head of the community, donated it for the
worship of our peoples. This gift of this temple and sanctuary and the
consecration of its boundaries during his three year term in the month of
Xurvar(June?) in this way, and in Alsase (July?) this record together with the
divinity/statue shall thus be buried by order of the Zilach that the years may
outlast the stars.
|
The Etruscan numbers were represented by the symbols
shown above, and were used very much in the same style as Roman numerals. The
very term "Roman numerals" is a misnomer, since the prototype number system was
originally Etruscan,
A comparison of the numbers from 1 to 10 in various languages
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | |
Sumerian | desh | min | pesh | lim | i | i-ash | i-min | i-us | i-lin | Hu |
Akkadian | ishten | shena | shalash | erbe | h.amish | shishshu | sebe | samane | tishe | esher |
Phoenician | -h-d | sh-nm | sh-l-sh | -r-b | h.-m-sh | sh-sh | sh-b | s-h-m-n | t-sh | -sh-r |
Etruscan | thu | zal | ci | huth | maK | sa | semph | cezp | nutph | sar |
Latin | unus | duo | tres | quatuor | quinque | sex | septem | octo | novem | decem |
Oscan | uinus | dus | tris | petora | pompe | sehs | seften | uhto | nuven | deken |
Umbrian | uns | tuf | trif | petur- | pumpe | sehs | nuvim | desem | ||
Basque | bat | bi | hiru | lau | bost | sei | zazpi | zortzi | bederatzi | hamar |
Greek | heis | duo | treis | tettares | pente | hex | hepta | okto | ennea | deka |
References (Primary)
1. Zosimus, Historia Novae
Several other sources talk of the Sacred books being
kept in the temple of Apollo, with some direct quotes from this source.
2. Censorinus De Die Natali
-describes the Annals of Etruria.
3 Titus Livius History of Rome IX, XXXVI
The fact that the Etruscans had a literature of their
own is testified by Livy writing of the Etruscan city of Caere in the 4th
Century BCE:
"I have authority for believing that in that age
Roman boys were regularly schooled in Etruscan literature, as nowadays they are
trained in Greek."
4.Varro Lingua Latina V, IX
We have the name of one writer of "Tuscan tragedies"
named Volnius, obviously a Latinised form of the name (possibly Velnies in
Etruscan):
"Ager Romanus primum divisus in partis tris, a quo
tribus appellata Titiensium, Ramnium, Lucerum. Nominatae, ut ait Ennius,
Titienses ab Tatio, Ramnenses ab Romulo, Luceres, ut Iunius, ab Lucumone; sed
omnia haec vocabula Tusca, ut Volnius, qui tragoedias Tuscas scripsit,
dicebat...."
5. Titus Livius: History of Rome Book 7.2
"The Etruscan word for an actor is istrio, and so the
native performers were called histriones. These did not, as in former times,
throw out rough extempore effusions like the Fescennine verse, but they chanted
satyrical verses quite metrically arranged and adapted to the notes of
the flute, and these they accompanied with appropriate movements...."
6. Titus Lucretius: De Res Natura
A brief mention of Tyrrhenian songs read
backwards.
Secondary References
S1: Pallottino, M "The Etruscans" 1978
S2: Pallottino,M. Testimonia Linguae Etruscae
(TLE),1968 Firenze
S3: M. Grant, The Etruscans, 1981
S4: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Standard Edition, 1999.
Related Web Sites
Etruscan Glossary Online
Compilation and translations from French, Italian and Latin by Rick Mc Callister and Silvia Mc Callister-Castillo. A comprehensive site, which gives extensive comparisons of Etruscan words with other languages.
Compilation and translations from French, Italian and Latin by Rick Mc Callister and Silvia Mc Callister-Castillo. A comprehensive site, which gives extensive comparisons of Etruscan words with other languages.
Four Short Articles on the Etruscan Language
Etruscan Vocabulary
The Liber Lintaeus
Gabor Z. Bodroghy's suberb site on the Liber Lintaeus of Zagreb
Gabor Z. Bodroghy's suberb site on the Liber Lintaeus of Zagreb
Etruscan Philology Online
- Mostly in Italian, but excellent for the inscriptions alone. See also the section on Alphabet and the Etruscan numbering system
- Mostly in Italian, but excellent for the inscriptions alone. See also the section on Alphabet and the Etruscan numbering system
Etruscan Language
Footnote
(There are numerous crank theories which relate the Etruscan language with Hungarian, Israeli, Ukranian, Basque, Turkish or Akkadian. There is usually a good reason for trying to find such a connection, reasons which have more to do with nationalism than science. Many such websites can be found littering the web, and may be found with most search engines. The translations are quite creative, and read like crossword clues. One would have to wonder why any ancient civilisation would write such strange disjointed phrases on their grave stelae etc)
(There are numerous crank theories which relate the Etruscan language with Hungarian, Israeli, Ukranian, Basque, Turkish or Akkadian. There is usually a good reason for trying to find such a connection, reasons which have more to do with nationalism than science. Many such websites can be found littering the web, and may be found with most search engines. The translations are quite creative, and read like crossword clues. One would have to wonder why any ancient civilisation would write such strange disjointed phrases on their grave stelae etc)
Introduction | | | Alphabet | | | Interpretation | | | Paleography | | | Numbers | | | Home | | |
Last modified on 04/12/2012 10:09:18 |
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