In 1964, excavators at Pyrgi, the harbor town of the Etruscan city of Caere, established three sheets of aureate leaf rolled up and buried beside a temple. Two were inscribed in Etruscan. One was in Phoenician.
This was, on the visage of it, the item everybody had been waiting for. A bilingual. The Rosetta Stone had cracked Egyptian; current was the identical current for Etruscan, in gold, from about 500 BCE.
It did help. It fair didn't do what everyone hoped, and understanding why is the entire narrative of this language.
It was never a code
First, apparent distant the customary framing. Etruscan is not a mysterious manuscript awaiting a genius.
The Etruscans borrowed their alphabet from Greek traders in the eighth hundred years BCE, and it stayed recognisably Greek. Anyone who says Greek alphabet can audio out an Etruscan inscription following concerning ten minutes of instruction. Scholars have been capable to do this for centuries.
So we can peruse all living Etruscan content aloud, confidently, including the lengthy ones. We cognize the phonology. We cognize a awesome agreement of the grammar: the case endings, how nouns decline, how verbs are marked, how the tongue builds a sentence.
What we deficiency is a dictionary. And a dictionary is a much harder item to rebuild than an alphabet, since an alphabet has concerning twenty-six answers and a vocabulary has thousands.
Nothing to translate from
Most ancient languages are cracked alongside a cousin. Discover that a term looks akin the Latin, Greek and Sanskrit words for the identical thing, and you have a definition and a audio law thrown in. Indo-European grant is an enormous device for exactly this, and it works.
Etruscan isn't Indo-European. It's not Semitic either, or Uralic, or item alternatively alongside a ample attested family.
The finest current view, set out by Helmut Rix, groups it alongside two another languages into a small family normally called Tyrsenian: Etruscan, Raetic from the east Alps, and Lemnian, known from a fistful of inscriptions on the Aegean isle of Lemnos. The grammatical resemblances are genuine and fairly convincing.
The difficulty is arithmetic. Raetic and Lemnian last in small quantities, and the three languages appear to have divided first adequate that shared vocabulary is thin. Having relatives helps verify what benevolent of tongue Etruscan is. It barely helps at all alongside what any stated term means.
Thirteen thousand inscriptions, one sentence
Here is the part that surprises people, since the raw figure appears so promising.
Around dozen or thirteen thousand Etruscan inscriptions survive. That's a significant corpus, additional content than we have for plentifulness of languages we comprehend absolutely well.
Except that the overwhelming bulk are epitaphs and dedications, and they are one or two lines long. A name. A father's name. A mother's family. An age at death. Sometimes an agency held. Then the next tomb, doing the identical item again.
Thousands of examples of the identical fistful of formulae. It's a magnificent asset for names, family construction and grammatical endings, and we cognize an bonzer amount concerning how Etruscans were named and who they were connected to. For vocabulary it's near to worthless, since it uses approximately the identical forty words complete and over.
Continuous prose amounts to four documents. The Liber Linteus, at concerning 1,200 words, preserved as mummy wrapping. The Tabula Capuana, a tile alongside about three hundred. The Tabula Cortonensis, a bronze tablet established in 1992 carrying concerning two hundred. The Cippus Perusinus, forty-six lines on a border stone.
That is the complete literature. Put together, it comes to item akin two thousand words of operating text: ten minutes' reading, against the millions of words that last in Greek.
And of those four, three are administrative or lawful and one is a liturgical calendar. Nobody remaining us a story, and the one man who wrote twenty books concerning them misplaced all term of it.
Why the bilingual wasn't enough
Which brings us rear to the aureate sheets.
The Pyrgi texts commemorate the identical event: a dedication by a ruler of Caere to a goddess, Uni in Etruscan and Astarte in Phoenician. The Phoenician type can be peruse straightforwardly.
But the two are not a translation in the awareness the Rosetta Stone is. They're parallel compositions, all phrased naturally in its own language, of distinct lengths, saying overlapping fairly than identical things. You cannot row them up term by term and peruse the meanings off.
What they gave was a genuine, helpful handful: confirmation of several divine names, several vocabulary about dedication and time, a few grammatical points. A fine day's activity for a site anywhere advancement is measured in idiosyncratic words.
They did not provision a lexicon, since there wasn't one to give.
Two dice, six words, motionless arguing
If you desire a sole entity that captures the province of the field, it's a brace of ivory cubes established near Tuscania.
Instead of pips, the faces transport words: mach, thu, zal, huth, ci, śa.
So we have, indisputably, the Etruscan words for one to six. We've had them for a lengthy time. And there is motionless no complete accord concerning which term is which number, since the disagreement have to be settled by inference: from the gathering that contrary faces sum to seven, from number-words embedded in ages on tombstones, from the command they appear in elsewhere.
Six words. Certain definition as a set. Decades of conversation complete the assignment.
This is what the before centuries of the site got wrong, seriously and repeatedly. Scholars tried to power Etruscan into Hebrew, Albanian, Hungarian, Basque and most of the remainder of Eurasia, and all attempt produced assured translations that dissolved on communication alongside the next inscription. The method that really plant is slower and small satisfying: study Etruscan against itself, observe what varies alongside what, and obtain a term at a time.
It is additionally why there won't be a breakthrough moment. The realistic way is new lengthy texts coming out of the dirt (the Cortona tablet in 1992 was value additional than a decade of theorising) and all one moves the dictionary alongside by a few dozen entries.
We can pronounce a religion's complete living liturgy. We fair can't say what it asked anyone to do.
