The Etruscan World (Routledge Worlds)

• Fredrik Tobin –

should not keep us from using images as source material for scholarly discussions, but
it should affect the types of questions we pose and encourage us to combine the use of
images with archaeological fi ndings and literary evidence.
Several musical instruments have appeared in excavations in Etruria. The fact that
most of them have been uncovered in tombs is a refl ection both of earlier archaeological
practice (which for a long time focused on tombs) and also of the superior conditions
for preservation that tombs provide. Unfortunately, the majority of the archaeological
evidence does not come from controlled excavations but either from poorly documented
excavations, as is the case of many of the fi nds made before the middle of the twentieth
century, or from the collectors’ market where objects often appear as the result of illegal
operations.
When it comes to the literary evidence there is no ancient treatise devoted specifi cally
to the subject of Etruscan instruments or music in Etruria. Instead we have to deal with
fragmentary information and discussions in the works of a variety of Greek and Latin
writers.^3 Often, these sources are very late and say more about other cultures’ views of the
Etruscans than about the Etruscans themselves.

THE INSTRUMENTS OF THE ETRUSCANS

The musical instruments for which we have evidence in Etruria, as archeological fi nds or
in locally produced images, to a high degree correspond to the instruments found in other
places around the Mediterranean in Antiquity. They can be categorized in a number of
ways, and will here be dealt with in three groups: wind instruments, string instruments
and percussion instruments. Since we do not know what the instruments were called
in the language of the Etruscans, they will be referred to using Latin or Greek terms.
In a few cases (such as the lituus and the tuba), the names of ancient instruments also
correspond to a medieval or modern instrument; it should be noted that in those cases
the ancient instruments have little or nothing in common with their later namesakes. It
is also worth remembering that the ancient use of a Latin or Greek word is not always as
consistent as the modern reader would like it to be. In many cases we cannot be certain
exactly what an ancient writer meant when they used a certain term. There is for example,
uncertainty regarding the distinction between the lituus and the bucina among some Latin
writers,^4 and regarding precisely which instrument Greek writers were referring to when
they wrote about the tyrsenike salpinx.^5 That being said, there are established modern
conventions of what to call the ancient instruments and those names are the ones that
will be used here.

Wind instruments

The wind instruments known to the Etruscans can be divided into lip-reed instruments
(or brass instruments as they are commonly called today), air-reed instruments and reed
instruments. The lip-reed instruments are musical instruments where air is set vibrating
through the use of the player’s lips. Air-reed instruments produce sound by directing air
against a fi xed edge, while reed instruments use a vibrating reed.
Broadly speaking, the lip-reed instruments in Etruria take three general shapes: the
cornu, which is curved (Fig. 46.2); the lituus, which is straight but ends with a short curve
(Fig. 46.3); and fi nally the tuba (Greek salpinx), which is straight. The fact that the shape