The Etruscan language : new acquisitions

Abstrakt

In the last twenty years many Etruscan inscriptions have been found, bringing the total number of documented exempla to well over 10.000, even if we restrict ourselves to those of a certain linguistic importance. The variety of supports is striking: lead tablets, such as that of Pech Maho1 ; cippi, of which there is an exceptionally beautiful, though fragmentary, one from Tragliatella, between Cerveteri and veio2 ; and the important stele of Saturnia3 , which has a fairly long text. We now even have the bronzeplated lead weight ofa balance, theso-called aequipondium of Cerveteri 4 . Each of these documents supplies important elements for our knowledge of Etruscan. Take, forexample, the cippus at Tragliatella (Fig. 1a, b), which has given us a verb with a thel– base, which inevitably recalls the greek thelo, ethelo; and here we return to the old but still-lively debate on Etruscan’s linguistic kinship with the other languages of the classical world (and the Etruscans wanted to be, and were, an integral part of the classical world; to realise that one need only stroll round the necropoles of Cerveteri and Tarquinia, or visit any of the main Etruscan museums in Rome, Tarquinia and florence). New finds in the field of inscribed pottery allowed Agostiniani to dispel some of our embarrassing ignorance with his deciphering of the recurrent sequence ei minipi capi 5 (there are about ten cases of it with minor variants): this can only mean “do not take me”, to be understood as the inscribed vase speaking in the first person, in the well-known archaic, Etruscan, greek and Latin tradition of the speaking object. Nor is there any difficulty in linking capi with the Latin capio and the greek kapto in the dual sense of “contain” and “take”.