I experience a brief moment of surprise every time I kneel down in front of an Etruscan grave stone, expecting to piece it together like Greek or Latin, only to realize a split second later that this is an entirely different animal. At first, the script looks suspiciously like Latin; the first thing I notice that’s amiss is that the f’s are backwards. The Etruscan script, an alphabet of twenty-six letters derived from the Euboean Greek script, gave rise to the Latin alphabet, one of the most widespread scripts in the world. Unlike Latin, however, Etruscan was written from right to left, except for a few early examples which were inscribed in meandering boustrophedon like early Greek.

            The other mild shock I experience occurs when my glance shifts right, then left, searching for a plaque that translates the inscription. Though there are about 10,000 Etruscan inscriptions known, very little of the language has been deciphered. Scholars do know that the language is phonetic and can even transliterate from the Etruscan script to the modern Latin script, but, for the most part, they have no idea what these words mean.  At first, this failure to decode Etruscan, a language that seems like it should have close connections with Latin, seems ridiculous, but there are a few difficulties to consider. First of all, though we have numerous examples of Etruscan, the overwhelming majority of them are brief sepulchral and dedicatory inscriptions. These types of inscriptions are hard enough to read in Latin or Greek; not only are they littered with confusing abbreviations, but it’s often difficult to determine the distinctions between different words, or even to make out letters worn away by time. Apart from these inscriptions, there are a few longer examples of the Etruscan language, the most notable of which his the Liber Linteus, so named because it was only preserved as the wrappings of an Egyptian mummy. Scholars suggest, mainly because of the repetitive nature of the text, that it may have been a catalogue of religious rituals, characterized by numerous, redundant prayer formulas. Longer texts like these, which contain not only more, but different, words than those in dedicatory inscriptions, help scholars begin to piece together the Etruscan language, but what helps the most are bilingual texts. The Pygri Tablets, named after the Etruscan port city in which they were found, are three bronze panels inscribed with both Phoenician and Etruscan from around 500 BC. They describe the dedications that the king of Caera made to the Phoenician god Ashtaret, and some interpret them as a kind of peace treaty between the Phoenicians and Etruscans.

The other difficulty that arises in dealing with the Etruscan language is that it is an isolate, meaning that scholars can find no clear connection between Etruscan and any other language, ancient or otherwise. Because linguists often tackle unknown languages by comparing their roots to their known, etymological cousins, scholars are at a loss of how to decipher Etruscan. Michael Ventris, before he made his breakthrough discovery connecting Linear B tablets and early Greek, hypothesized that Etruscan and Linear B may be related. Instead of early Greek, Giulio Mauro Facchetti points to similarities between words in Minoan and Etruscan, but little more than minor parallels have been found. More recently, Frederik Woudhuizen argued that Etruscan and Luwian, an extinct offshoot of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European family, were connected. He draws on Herodotus’ histories, which cites a Lydian origin of the Etruscans before the Cimmerians drove them out in the early Iron Age. Despite the inconclusive nature of all of these theories, a few hundred Etruscan words have been defined. Some, like nefts for “nephew,” probably reflect a Latin influence (from nepos, “grandson”). Others suggest a Semitic origin, like talitha, the Aramaic word for girl.

Even though the lack of an intelligible language makes the Etruscans seem wholly mysterious to us, it’s important to remember that the Romans knew a good deal about them. A few highly educated Romans, like Varro, knew Etruscan; the last Roman to read Etruscan was the emperor Claudius in the early first century AD. He wrote a lengthy treatise of twenty volumes on the Etruscans, including a comprehensive dictionary compiled by interviewing elderly Etruscans on their native language, which, unfortunately, is now long gone. According to Latin authors, the Etruscans had a rich literary tradition, all of which is now lost except for the indecipherable Liber Linteus. Livy and Cicero both mention the Etruscans’ extensive writings on ritual, which were codified in four large books on different ceremonial subjects. After researching this subject, the Etruscan language seems simultaneously more mysterious and more fathomable than it did before, more understandable because scholars can make out a few hundred words and some basic grammatical rules, but even more mystifying simply because this information seems like so much, but is really very scanty. Even with all of this various information on the Etruscan language, we are no closer to sitting down and reading Etruscan like we would Latin without some sort of breakthrough.