The Etruscan alphabet was the

alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...

used by the

Etruscans The Etruscan civilization () was developed by a people of Etruria in ancient Italy with a common language and culture who formed a federation of city-states. After conquering adjacent lands, its territory covered, at its greatest extent, rou ...

, an ancient civilization of central and northern

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...

, to write their language, from about

700 BC The year 700 BC was a year of the pre-Julian Roman calendar. In the Roman Empire, it was known as year 54 ''Ab urbe condita'' . The denomination 700 BC for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar e ...

to sometime around

100 AD __NOTOC__ AD 100 ( C) was a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. In the Roman Empire, it was sometimes referred to as year 853 ''ab urbe condita'', i.e., 853 years since the founding ...

. The Etruscan alphabet derives from the Euboean alphabet used in the

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

colonies in southern Italy which belonged to the "western" ("red") type, the so-called

Western Greek alphabet Many local variants of the Greek alphabet were employed in ancient Greece during the archaic and early classical periods, until around 400 BC, when they were replaced by the classical 24-letter alphabet that is the standard today. All forms ...

. Several Old Italic scripts, including the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and th ...

, derived from it (or simultaneously with it).

Origins

The Etruscan alphabet originated as an adaptation of the Euboean alphabet used by the Euboean Greeks in their first colonies in

, the island of Pithekoussai and the city of

Cumae Cumae ( grc, Κύμη, (Kumē) or or ; it, Cuma) was the first ancient Greek colony on the mainland of Italy, founded by settlers from Euboea in the 8th century BC and soon becoming one of the strongest colonies. It later became a rich Ro ...

Campania (man), it, Campana (woman) , population_note = , population_blank1_title = , population_blank1 = , demographics_type1 = , demographics1_footnotes = , demographics1_title1 = , demographics1_info1 = , demog ...

. In the alphabets of the West, X had the sound value , Ψ stood for ; in Etruscan: X = , Ψ = or (Rix 202–209). The earliest known Etruscan '' abecedarium'' is inscribed on the frame of a wax tablet in ivory, measuring 8.8×5 cm, found at Marsiliana (near

Grosseto Grosseto () is a city and ''comune'' in the central Italian region of Tuscany, the capital of the Province of Grosseto. The city lies from the Tyrrhenian Sea, in the Maremma, at the centre of an alluvial plain on the Ombrone river. It is the ...

Tuscany it, Toscano (man) it, Toscana (woman) , population_note = , population_blank1_title = , population_blank1 = , demographics_type1 = Citizenship , demographics1_footnotes = , demographics1_title1 = Italian , demogra ...

). It dates from about 700 BC, and lists 26 letters corresponding to contemporary forms of the Greek alphabet, including

digamma Digamma or wau (uppercase: Ϝ, lowercase: ϝ, numeral: ϛ) is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. It originally stood for the sound but it has remained in use principally as a Greek numeral for 6. Whereas it was originally called ''waw' ...

, san and

qoppa Koppa or qoppa (; as a modern numeral sign: ) is a letter that was used in early forms of the Greek alphabet, derived from Phoenician qoph (). It was originally used to denote the sound, but dropped out of use as an alphabetic character in fav ...

, but not

omega Omega (; capital: Ω, lowercase: ω; Ancient Greek ὦ, later ὦ μέγα, Modern Greek ωμέγα) is the twenty-fourth and final letter in the Greek alphabet. In the Greek numeric system/ isopsephy ( gematria), it has a value of 800. The ...

which had still not been added at the time.

Letters

The shapes of the Archaic Etruscan and Neo-Etruscan letters had a few variants, used in different places and/or in different epochs. Notably, opposite letters were used for and depending on the locality. Shown above are the glyphs from the Unicode Old Italic block, whose appearance will depend on the font used by the browser. These are oriented as they would be in lines written from left to right. Also shown are SVG images of variants shown as they would be written right to left, as in most of the actual inscriptions.

Development

The archaic form of the Etruscan alphabet remained practically unchanged from its origin in the 8th century BC until about 600 BC, and the direction of writing was free. From the 6th century BC, however, the alphabet evolved, adjusting to the phonology of the Etruscan language, and letters representing phonemes nonexistent in Etruscan were dropped. By 400 BC, it appears that all of Etruria was using the classical Etruscan alphabet of 20 letters, mostly written from right to left. An additional sign , in shape similar to the numeral 8, transcribed as F, was present in Lydian, Neo-Etruscan and in Italic alphabets of

Osco-Umbrian languages The Osco-Umbrian, Sabellic or Sabellian languages are an extinct group of Italic languages, the Indo-European languages that were spoken in Central and Southern Italy by the Osco-Umbrians before being replaced by Latin, as the power of Ancient Rom ...

such as Oscan, Umbrian, Old Sabine and South Picene (Old Volscian). This sign was introduced in Etruscan around 600-550 BC and was not present in the Marsiliana tablet, the earliest example of the Etruscan alphabet. If previously it was thought that the sign may have been an altered B or H or an ex novo creation, or even an Etruscan invention, an early Sabellian inscription suggests that it is instead an invention of speakers of a

Sabellian language The Osco-Umbrian, Sabellic or Sabellian languages are an extinct group of Italic languages, the Indo-European languages that were spoken in Central and Southern Italy by the Osco-Umbrians before being replaced by Latin, as the power of Ancient R ...

(Osco-Umbrian languages). Its sound value was and it replaced the Etruscan digraph FH that was previously used to express that sound. Some letters were, on the other hand, falling out of use. Etruscan did not have any

voiced stop In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lips ...

s, for which B, C, D were originally intended (, , and respectively). The B and D therefore fell out of use, and the C, which is simpler and easier to write than K, was adopted to write , mostly displacing K itself. Likewise, since Etruscan had no vowel sound, O disappeared and was replaced by U. In the course of its simplification, the redundant letters showed some tendency towards a semi-syllabary: C, K and Q were predominantly used in the contexts CE, KA, QU. This classical alphabet remained in use until the 2nd century BC when it began to be influenced by the rise of the

. The Romans, who did have voiced stops in their language, revived B and D for and , and used C for both and , until they invented a separate letter G to distinguish the two sounds. Soon after, the Etruscan language itself became extinct — so thoroughly that its vocabulary and grammar are still only partly known, in spite of more than a century of intense research.

Legacy

The Etruscan alphabet apparently was the immediate ancestor for the

, as well as of several Old Italic scripts used in Italy before the rise of

Rome , established_title = Founded , established_date = 753 BC , founder = King Romulus (legendary) , image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg , map_caption ...

, such as those used in the Oscan, Umbrian, Lepontic, Rhaetian (or Raetic), Venetic, Messapian,

North North is one of the four compass points or cardinal directions. It is the opposite of south and is perpendicular to east and west. ''North'' is a noun, adjective, or adverb indicating direction or geography. Etymology The word ''north ...

and South Picene, and Camunic inscriptions.Maras, Daniele F.. "Epigraphy and Nomenclature". The Peoples of Ancient Italy, edited by Gary D. Farney and Guy Bradley, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2017, pp. 63-88

Gallery

File:Etruscan cippus warrior head side.jpg, Etruscan grave marker from the necropolis Crocifisso del Tufo with an inscription in the Etruscan alphabet

References

{{Authority control

Alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...