CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

THE ETRUSCAN LANGUAGE

Luciano Agostiniani

THE DOCUMENTATION

E

truscan^1 is a dead language, the knowledge of which – in contrast to other dead
languages like Latin or Greek – has been completely lost, and therefore it is
accessible for us only through the surviving evidence: the written documents and the
so-called “Etruscan glosses.” The latter contribution to our knowledge of the language is
minimal. We are dealing, as is known, with about sixty words – the greater part of them
reported by the Lexicon of Hesychius and by the Liber Glossarum, and the rest by authors
such as Varro, Verrius Flaccus, Dioscorides, Strabo and others – that the ancients have
passed down to us as Etruscan, providing a Greek or Latin translation. Their number,
in itself modest, decreases further when one considers that some of them, such as κάπρα
or δέα reported by Hesychius, are obviously not Etruscan words but rather Latin-Italic.
Moreover, the words often appear in Graecized or Latinized form (as exemplifi ed by the
case of αι̉σ-οĩ, “gods,” also in Hesychius, with an infl ectional ending -οĩ , which is a
Greek nominative plural): this makes them very unreliable evidence for the sounds or
forms of Etruscan.
Therefore, our knowledge of the Etruscan language rests essentially on written
documents, which – except in one case, as we shall see – consist of inscriptions. Now,
if by “inscription” is meant, in a very general sense, every manifestation of writing that
is in itself complete (although possibly lacking one or more parts, due to accidents
occurring in the transmission of the text), including also alphabetic sigla, abbreviations
and the like, we can say that Etruscan is attested by about 11,000 inscriptions, and this
testifi es to a highly developed use of writing. Their upper chronological limit falls at the
very beginning of the seventh century bc (the earliest Etruscan inscription seems to be
the graffi to from Tarquinia, Ta 3.1), while the lower limit is the fi rst century ad, with
the bilingual inscription on a funerary urn from Arezzo, Ar 1.8 (in agreement with the
testimony of Dionysius of Halicarnassus 1.30, who says that Etruscan was still spoken in
the time of Augustus).