Etruscan language
The Etruscan language gave up exactly one new word when a bronze tablet from Cortona was discovered in 1992. The tablet runs to about 200 words. It is believed to record a real estate settlement between the Cusu family and a man named Petru Scevas and his wife. From all that text, scholars gained the word tisś, which means lake, and not much else.
That meagre return is typical. Around 13,000 Etruscan inscriptions have been found, yet only a small minority are of any real length. Scholars can sound out the letters and say roughly how a line was spoken. Explaining what the line means is a far harder job.
The language belonged to the Etruscan civilization of ancient Etruria, in what is now Italy. It is attested from 700 BC to 50 AD. It shaped Latin before Latin pushed it aside. This documentary asks what the Etruscans left behind in writing, how scholars coax any grammar out of it, and who its relatives might be. It also asks how the language faded, and which of its words may still be in our mouths today.
Livy and Cicero both knew that the Etruscans had written books, and they said so in Latin. The religious works were gathered under the Latin title Etrusca Disciplina. One set, the Libri Haruspicini, covered divination by reading the entrails of a sacrificed animal. Another, the Libri Fulgurales, covered divination by watching lightning.
A third set, the Libri Rituales, might have been the most revealing. It reached beyond ritual into the standards of social and political life. The 4th-century AD writer Maurus Servius Honoratus described a fourth set about animal gods. Even so, it is unlikely that any scholar of his day could still read Etruscan.
Of all those books, only one survives, and it survives by accident. The Liber Linteus was written on linen, and the linen was later reused as wrapping for a mummy in Egypt. About 1,200 words can be read. They are mostly repetitive prayers that probably form a religious calendar. All that text yielded only around 50 vocabulary items.
The Tabula Capuana, an inscribed tile from Capua, is the other long and unified text. It dates to the fifth century BC and has 62 lines with about 300 readable words. It too seems to be a religious calendar.
In 1964, Massimo Pallottino led an excavation at the ancient Etruscan port of Pyrgi, now Santa Severa. It turned up three gold leaves dated to roughly 500 BC. One leaf is written in Phoenician and two are in Etruscan. The Etruscan side has 16 lines and 37 words. A bilingual text sounds like a key, but close study produced just one new Etruscan word, ci, meaning three.
A stone slab from Perugia, the Cippus Perusinus, carries 46 lines and about 130 words. It probably marked a boundary. It is assumed to record a contract between the Velthina family of Perugia and the Afuna family of Chiusi. The deal concerned a property with water rights and a tomb belonging to the noble Velthinas.
Smaller texts fill in the picture. The sarcophagus of Laris Pulenas, called the Magistrate, was found at Tarquinia and carries 59 words from the third century BC. Lead foils from Punta della Vipera hold about 40 legible words of ritual formulae from around 500 BC. The Lead Plaque of Magliano has 73 words, including many names of deities, in what looks like a series of dedications to gods and ancestors. A badly damaged lead sheet from near Pyrgi, found in 1963-1964, preserves traces of 80 words, only half of them certain.
One object looks like a map of the heavens. A bronze model of a sheep's liver, found at Piacenza, has the names of ruling gods engraved on different regions of the sky.
The newest arrival is the Vicchio stele, found in 2016 during the 21st season of excavation at the Etruscan sanctuary of Poggio Colla. It has about 120 letters and seems tied to the cult of the goddess Uni. Maggiani's reading of one passage is full of question marks and gaps, and the monument is still being deciphered.
The Banditaccia necropolis at Cerveteri holds more than 1,000 tumuli. Cerveteri is a UNESCO site with three complete cemeteries laid out with streets and squares. Many chambers are hidden beneath mounds held in by walls, and others are cut straight into cliffs.
The tombs matter so much because almost nothing else is left. Every other public and private building was dismantled long ago, and its stone was reused. Tombs are therefore the main storehouse of the civilization, and nobody knows how many there are. Many are underground chambers cut into soft volcanic tuff and covered by a mound. Inside, they imitate a home for the living, with furniture and favorite objects. Some walls carry painted murals.
At Tarquinia, another UNESCO site, roughly 6,000 graves span the ninth and eighth centuries BC and later periods. About 200 of them are painted with scenes that include labels and descriptions in Etruscan. The Tomb of Orcus shows scenes of the Spurinna family with such labels. Tombs identified as Etruscan run up to about 100 BC, when the cemeteries were presumably abandoned in favor of Roman ones.
The value of these finds has created a brisk black market. It is illegal to remove anything from an Etruscan tomb without authorization from the Italian government, and law enforcement is equally busy.
Portable objects carry the language into museums around the world. A bucchero wine vase from before the fifth century BC bears a votive inscription naming a woman, Venalia, as the giver. That is a rare early case of a woman making a dedication.
About 2,300 bronze hand mirrors, called specula, are known from collections worldwide. They date to an estimated window of 530-100 BC and most probably came from tombs. The Etruscan word for one was malena or malstria. Each was cast in one piece, with a tang that fitted into a handle of wood, bone, or ivory. A higher share of tin made the polished face more reflective. The convex back often shows a scene from mythology. Many scenes carry names of the figures shown, so the mirrors are called picture bilinguals. In 1979, Massimo Pallottino launched a committee to publish every one of them.
Bronze containers called cistae were used by women to store small items. Most date to the fourth and third centuries BC and bear scenes from mythology. Digs at the Latin city of Praeneste turned up about 118 of them. The most famous, the Ficoroni cista, has a Latin inscription saying that Novios Plutius made it and Dindia Macolnia gave it to her daughter.
Finger rings were set with engraved gemstones about one centimeter across, mostly dark red carnelian. The designs begin with scarabs and move on to scenes from Greek mythology, with heroes named in Etruscan.
Etruscan coins were struck between the 5th and 3rd centuries BC. Their silver unit of 5.8 grams followed a Greek standard, just as the alphabet had come from Greece. The basic Roman coin, the sesterce, is believed to be based on an Etruscan coin worth 2.5 units. Gold and silver pieces were usually struck on one side only. The legends name the minting cities in their own tongue: Pupluna for Populonia, Velathri for Volaterrae, and Velzu or Velznani for Volsinii.
A small lidded vase shaped like a cockerel, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, carries the full Etruscan alphabet scratched on it as decoration. It dates to about 650-600 BC. The alphabet had 26 letters, which scholars call the model alphabet. Four of them went unused. Etruscan lacked the voiced stops b, d, and g, and it also left out the letter o. The Etruscans invented one new letter, for the sound f.
The source of the letters was a Euboean variety of the Greek alphabet, with the letter digamma. It was probably passed on through Pithecusae and Cumae, two Euboean settlements in southern Italy. The chain goes back further still, to West Semitic scripts. A comparison with Greek shows how faithfully the Etruscans kept their copy. They preserved digamma, sampi, and qoppa, which Greek later dropped.
Most Etruscan writing ran from right to left. Archaic inscriptions sometimes used boustrophedon, in which lines alternate direction. One example from Cerveteri runs left to right. In the earliest texts the words run together. From the 6th century BC, a dot or a colon separates them, and it may also divide syllables.
The spelling followed sound rather than convention. Many inscriptions are heavily abbreviated and casually made, so even single letters can be hard to identify. Spelling also varied from city to city, probably mirroring differences in pronunciation.
The writing had two historical phases. The archaic phase, from the seventh to the fifth centuries BC, used the early Greek alphabet. The later phase, from the fourth to the first centuries BC, modified some letters and showed more syncopation.
Syncopation came from a heavy stress on the first syllable of a word, which weakened the vowels after it. Scribes wrote Alcsntre for Alexandros and Rasna for Rasena. The Greek hero Herakles became Hercle, and was sometimes expanded again to Herecele. This habit helps explain the Etruscan consonant clusters that look impossible on the page. Some consonants, such as m, n, l, and r, may also have acted as syllables on their own, as in the cl of 'of this'.
The sound system was otherwise ordinary. There were four vowels, and the main contrast among stops was between aspirated and plain. Voiced stops were missing. When Greek thriambos entered Etruscan it became triumpus, and Latin later turned it into triumphus.
The alphabet outlived the language. It gave rise to the Latin script, in the form known as Old Italic, and to the early Oscan and Umbrian alphabets. It has even been suggested that it traveled north into Veneto, then through Raetia into Germanic lands, and became the Elder Futhark, the oldest form of the runes.
Latin used three different endings for son in the nominative singular, nominative plural, and dative plural: filius, filii, and filiis. Etruscan took another path. Its word for son was clan. The plural was clenar, and the dative plural was clenar-aśi, built by adding the case ending onto the plural form.
This stacking is typical of an agglutinative language. Nouns carried five cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and locative. They had two numbers, singular and plural. Nominative and accusative merged in nouns, though pronouns usually kept them apart. Gender showed up in personal names and in pronouns, which separated animate from inanimate.
More than one suffix could pile up on a single word. Pallottino called the result morphological redetermination. His example is Uni-al-θi, meaning in the sanctuary of Juno, where -al marks the genitive and -θi marks the locative. A father's name could be added the same way. Vel Avleś means Vel son of Avle, and Arnθ-al-iśa-la carries three suffixes at once.
The genitive ended in -s or -l, depending on the noun. Rex Wallace admitted that a few nouns, such as cilθ, accept both endings with no clear difference. The dative ended in -si, and the locative in -θi. Plural nouns for humans took -ar. Others took -chve and its variants, so avil, year, became avil-χva, years.
Pronouns were few and familiar in shape. Mi meant I and mini meant me. The demonstratives ca and ta served for both this and that.
For verbs, the root alone often did the work of present tense, and it did not change for person. The past tense came from adding -ce. Tur meant gives or dedicates, and tur-ce meant gave or dedicated. Sval-ce meant lived. A form in -che gave the past passive, as in mena-che, was offered.
The bare root also served as the command. One bowl from the fifth century BC announces that it belongs to Cupe Althr̥na and ends with the translation "Don't steal me!" The command capi, take, appears in anti-theft inscriptions like it. A tentative reading of one calendar line says that on a day in September, victims must be offered to the god Nethuns. Verbs ending in -ri marked such obligations.
Word order was looser than the textbook pattern. Etruscan is considered a subject-object-verb language with postpositions, and adjectives usually followed the noun. Yet in archaic commemorative inscriptions, the orders object-verb-subject and object-subject-verb are actually more frequent, presumably as a stylistic feature of that genre.
In 1998, Helmut Rix proposed that Etruscan belonged with two other extinct languages. One was Raetic, spoken in the eastern Alps. The other was Lemnian, known from a few inscriptions on the island of Lemnos. Other scholars later added Camunic, spoken in the Central Alps. The resulting Tyrrhenian family has won wide acceptance, backed by Stefan Schumacher, Norbert Oettinger, Carlo De Simone, and Simona Marchesini.
The evidence is mostly structural. Shared features appear in morphology, phonology, and syntax, but only a few matching words are documented, partly because so few Raetic and Lemnian texts exist.
How Lemnian reached the Aegean is disputed. Some scholars point to the Late Bronze Age, when Mycenaean rulers recruited mercenaries from Sicily, Sardinia, and other parts of Italy. Oettinger, Michel Gras, and De Simone instead see an Etruscan trading settlement that predates 700 BC and has no link to the Sea Peoples.
A 2021 genetic study examined Etruscan individuals who lived between 800 and 1 BC. It concluded that they were native to Italy and genetically close to Early Iron Age Latins. The Etruscan language may therefore be a survivor of the tongues that spread across Europe before Indo-European arrived. The geneticist Johannes Krause had already argued that Etruscan, along with Basque, Paleo-Sardinian, and Minoan, "developed on the continent in the course of the Neolithic Revolution".
Older ideas were far more adventurous. In 1498, the Dominican friar Annio da Viterbo published a 17-volume miscellany called Antiquitatum variarum. He claimed that Hebrew and Etruscan shared a single ancestor, the Aramaic of Noah, whose descendants supposedly founded Viterbo. Annio is now remembered mainly for literary forgeries.
The 19th century brought more guesses. In 1858, Johann Gustav Stickel of Jena University made the last major case for a Semitic origin. One reviewer judged that he had gathered every possible argument and ended up proving the opposite. In 1861, Robert Ellis linked Etruscan to Armenian, and Sophus Bugge published a comparison with Armenian in 1890. A century after Ellis, Zecharia Mayani proposed Albanian, and that theory is now regarded as disproven.
Hungarian had its champions too. Isaac Taylor suggested the link in 1874, and Jules Martha approved in his 1913 study La langue étrusque. Mario Alinei later revived it, though experts including Giulio Facchetti and Angela Marcantonio reject it. In 1911, Baron Carra de Vaux suggested Altaic languages, and some Soviet-era linguists favored Northeast Caucasian.
Michael Ventris once treated a Minoan link as his main hypothesis, before he found that Linear B hid a Greek dialect. Giulio Mauro Facchetti has proposed an Aegean family including Minoan, but a tie to Etruscan is considered unfounded.
In 2002, Robert Beekes argued that the Lydians and Etruscans began as one people in northwest Anatolia, driven out by the Phrygians around 1200 BC. In 2006, Frederik Woudhuizen went further and called Etruscan a modified form of Luwian. Both rest on the account of Herodotus, who gave the Etruscans a Lydian origin. Dionysius of Halicarnassus rejected that story, partly because the Lydian historian Xanthus had never heard of it.
Veii, in southern Etruria, became the first Etruscan site to turn Latin after Romans destroyed it and resettled it in 396 BC. The coastal town of Caere, now Cerveteri, lies 45 kilometers from Rome and seems to have switched to Latin in the late 2nd century BC. At Tarquinia and Vulci, Latin and Etruscan shared wall paintings and grave markers from the 3rd century BC to the early 1st century BC. After that, Latin stood alone.
The north held out longer. At Clusium, now Chiusi, tomb markings from the first half of the 1st century BC mix both languages. In some families two generations are written in Latin, and then the youngest, surprisingly, appears in Etruscan. Perugia still had monolingual Etruscan monuments in the same half-century, and its bilingual period stretched from the 3rd century to the late 1st century BC.
The last bilingual inscriptions sit at three northern sites. Arezzo has one dated to 40 BC and two slightly later. Volterra has one from just after 40 BC and a final one dated to 10-20 AD. Coins with written Etruscan from near Saena have been dated to 15 BC. The scholar Freeman notes that rural speakers may have lasted longer. A survival into the late 1st century AD "cannot wholly be dismissed", especially since Oscan writing has been found on Pompeii's walls.
By 30 BC, Livy noted that Roman boys had once been widely taught Etruscan, and that Greek had taken its place. Varro recalled that plays had once been written in Etruscan. Varro himself was one of the few educated Romans with an antiquarian bent who could still read the language.
The emperor Claudius, who lived from 10 BC to AD 54, may also have read it. He wrote a treatise on Etruscan history called the Tyrrhenika, which is now lost. A dedication of his refers to "diverse Etruscan sources", though it is unclear whether any of those sources were fluent speakers. His first wife, Plautia Urgulanilla, had Etruscan roots.
Around 180 AD, Aulus Gellius mentioned Etruscan alongside Gaulish in an anecdote. Freeman cautions that he may only have meant something like "it's all Greek to me", a stand-in for the incomprehensible.
The religion outlived the speech. In late Republican and early Augustan times, Cicero and other Latin writers praised Etruscan soothsayers. One episode has lightning striking an inscription of the name Caesar and turning it into Aesar. It was read as a sign of his coming deification, because aisar was the Etruscan word for gods. That shows knowledge of one word, not of the language.
Centuries later, Ammianus Marcellinus reports that the last pagan emperor, Julian the Apostate, took Etruscan soothsayers on campaign with books on war, lightning, and celestial events. The language of those books is unknown. According to Zosimus, when Alaric threatened Rome in 408 AD, Etruscan priests claimed to have called up a storm that protected nearby towns. They offered the same service to Rome, and devout Christians there preferred death to pagan help.
Freeman reads these episodes as a hint that some limited knowledge of Etruscan lingered among the priests. One writer even argued, in 1892, that Etruscan deities still colored the folklore of Tuscany.
The English word person probably descends from Etruscan phersu, meaning mask. The path runs through Latin persona, which also meant mask, then Old French, and then Middle English. It is one of the few Etruscan gifts that scholars discuss with some confidence.
Other words are more uncertain. Military may come from Latin miles, soldier, which is either Etruscan or related to the Greek word for an assembled crowd. Satellite may come from the Latin satelles, a bodyguard or attendant, and perhaps from Etruscan satnal. Whatmough called satelles one of our securest Etruscan loans in Latin. Arena may trace back through a Sabine form to a lost Etruscan base. Market may come from Latin mercatus, of obscure origin, perhaps Etruscan. For belt, the only link is a remark by Varro that the Latin word was Etruscan.
Other Etruscan-derived words are possibly vulture, trumpet, sheath, and people. The Latin word familia also seems to come from the older civilization. The traffic ran both ways. Etruscan neftś, nephew, is probably from Latin, and the wine cup culiχna came from the Greek kylix.
Only a few hundred Etruscan words are understood with confidence. Many of them are the plain business of life. Apa is father, ati is mother, and clan is son. Avil means year, usil means sun, and tiur means moon or month. Thevru is bull, leu is lion, and θi is water. Month names have survived too, such as Velcitna for March and Acale for June.
Numbers are partly known. Θu is one and zal is two. Maχ is five, zaθrum is twenty, and śran is one hundred. Scholars are unsure which of the words semφ, cezp, and nurφ stand for seven, eight, and nine.
The numerals have also fueled an old quarrel. In 1990, Larissa Bonfante wrote that they show, "beyond any shadow of a doubt, the non-Indo-European nature of the Etruscan language." Francisco Adrados, Albert Carnoy, Marcello Durante, Vladimir Georgiev, Alessandro Morandi, and Massimo Pittau read the first ten numerals as close to Indo-European ones. That disagreement over a handful of small words shows how far the evidence can be stretched.
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Common questions
How many Etruscan inscriptions are known, and can they be read?
Around 13,000 inscriptions have been found. Scholars can sound out the letters because the alphabet came from Greek, but only a few hundred words are understood with confidence, so most texts remain only partly translatable.
What language family does Etruscan belong to?
Most scholars place it in the Tyrrhenian family proposed by Helmut Rix in 1998, together with Raetic and Lemnian. Camunic was added later. It is generally considered neither Indo-European nor Semitic.
When did Etruscan die out?
Scholarship dates its extinction to the late 1st century BC or the early 1st century AD. Latin replaced it earlier in the south near Rome, while the north held out longer. Some rural survival after that cannot be ruled out.
Which English words may come from Etruscan?
Person, probably from Etruscan phersu meaning mask, is the best-known case. Military, satellite, arena, and market have also been proposed, with varying degrees of certainty. The source calls some of these origins uncertain.
Which Etruscan text is the longest that survives?
The Liber Linteus is the longest, with roughly 1,200 readable words, mostly repetitive prayers that probably form a religious calendar. It survived because its linen was reused to wrap a mummy in Egypt.
All sources
153 references cited across the entry
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- 2JournalThe Survival of the Etruscan LanguagePhilip Freeman — 1999
- 3Bauer, Laurie (2007). The Linguistics Student's Handbook. Edinburgh.
- 4BookThe Oxford Handbook of Pre-Roman Italy (1000-49 BCE)Rex Wallace — Oxford University Press — 2024
- 5BookLanguage IsolatesLyle Campbell — Routledge — 2018
- 6Massimo Pallottino, La langue étrusque Problèmes et perspectives, 1978.
- 7Mauro Cristofani, Introduction to the study of the Etruscan, Leo S. Olschki, 1991.
- 8Romolo A. Staccioli, The "mystery" of the Etruscan language, Newton & Compton publishers, Rome, 1977.
- 9BookA Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient MediterraneanHarald Haarmann — 2014
- 10BookThe Cambridge World PrehistoryAnthony H. Harding — Cambridge University Press — 2014
- 11Schumacher, Stefan (1994) Studi Etruschi in Neufunde 'raetischer' Inschriften Vol. 59 pp. 307–320 (German)
- 12Schumacher, Stefan (1994) Neue 'raetische' Inschriften aus dem Vinschgau in Der Schlern Vol. 68 pp. 295-298 (German)
- 13Schumacher, Stefan (1999) Die Raetischen Inschriften: Gegenwärtiger Forschungsstand, spezifische Probleme und Zukunfstaussichten in I Reti / Die Räter, Atti del simposio 23–25 settembre 1993, Castello
- 14Schumacher, Stefan (2004) Die Raetischen Inschriften. Geschichte und heutiger Stand der Forschung Archaeolingua. Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft. (German)
- 15Norbert Oettinger, Seevölker und Etrusker, 2010.
- 16de Simone Carlo (2009) La nuova iscrizione tirsenica di Efestia in Aglaia Archontidou, Carlo de Simone, Albi Mersini (Eds.), Gli scavi di Efestia e la nuova iscrizione 'tirsenica', Tripodes 11, 2009,
- 17Carlo de Simone, Simona Marchesini (Eds), La lamina di Demlfeld = Mediterranea. Quaderni annuali dell'Istituto di Studi sulle Civiltà italiche e del Mediterraneo antico del Consiglio Nazionale delle R
- 18BookSocieties in Transition in Early Greece: An Archaeological HistoryAlex R. Knodell — University of California Press — 2021
- 19BookWriting systems: a linguistic approachHenry Rogers — Blackwell Publ — 2009
- 21Etruscan Language and Inscriptions Essay The Metropolitan Museum of Art Heilbrunn Timeline of Art HistoryTheresa Huntsman — June 2013
- 22Van der Meer, L. Bouke, ed. Liber Linteus Zagrabiensis (= Monographs on antiquity, vol. 4). Peeters, 2007, .
- 23Freeman, Philip. Survival of Etruscan. p. 82: "How much longer may have Etruscan survived in isolated rural locations? The answer is impossible to say, given that we can only argue from evidence, not
- 24Leland (1892). Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradition.
- 25Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae. Extract: 'ueluti Romae nobis praesentibus uetus celebratusque homo in causis, sed repentina et quasi tumultuaria doctrina praeditus, cum apud praefectum urbi uerba facer
- 26Freeman. Survival of Etruscan. p. 78
- 27For Urgulanilla, see Suetonius, Life of Claudius, section 26.1; for the 20 books, same work, section 42.2.
- 28Ostler, Nicholas (2009). Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin and the World It Created. London: HarperPress, 2009, pp. 323 ff.
- 29A summary of the locations of the inscriptions published in the EDP project, given below under External links, is stated in its Guide.
- 30Rix, Helmut (1998). Rätisch und Etruskisch. Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck: Innsbruck.
- 31Camunic : Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe: Blackwell Reference OnlineBlackwellreference.com
- 32M. G. Tibiletti Bruno. 1978. Camuno, retico e pararetico, in Lingue e dialetti dell'Italia antica ('Popoli e civiltà dell'Italia antica', 6), a cura di A. L. Prosdocimi, Roma, pp. 209–255. (Italian)
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- 36BookThe Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and RomeRex E. Wallace — Oxford University Press — 2010
- 37Raetic (languages)Simona Marchesini (translation by Melanie Rockenhaus) — Scuola Normale Superiore — 2013
- 38RaeticaKluge Sindy et al. — Department of Linguistics, University of Vienna — 2013–2018
- 39Mellaart, James (1975), "The Neolithic of the Near East" (Thames and Hudson)
- 40JournalAn 'Eteocretan' inscription from Prasos and the homeland of the Sea PeoplesLuuk de Ligt — 2008–2009
- 41Carlo de Simone, La nuova Iscrizione 'Tirsenica' di Lemnos (Efestia, teatro): considerazioni generali, in Rasenna: Journal of the Center for Etruscan Studies, pp. 1–34.
- 42Robert Drews, The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe of ca. 1200 B.C, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 59, .
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- 45BookGli Etruschi - La scrittura, la lingua, la societàVincenzo Bellelli et al. — Carocci editore — 2018
- 46JournalEtruscoValentina Belfiore — May 2020
- 47For example, Steinbauer (1999), Rodríguez Adrados (2005).
- 49BookThe Ethnicity of the Sea PeoplesFrederik Christiaan Woudhuizen — Erasmus Universiteit — 2006
- 50Woudhuizen 2006 p. 86
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- 52BookThe Peoples of Ancient ItalyJean MacIntosh Turfa — De Gruyter — 2017
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- 54BookThe Etruscans: Lost CivilizationsLucy Shipley — Reaktion Books — 2017
- 55BookDas Etruskische durch Erklärung von Inschriften und Namen als semitische Sprache erwiesenJohann Gustav Stickel — Wilhelm Engelmann — 1858
- 56Gildemeister, Johannes. In: ZDMG 13 (1859), pp. 289–304.
- 57Ellis, Robert (1861). The Armenian origin of the Etruscans. London: Parker, Son, & Bourn.
- 58Bugge, Sophus (1890). Etruskisch und Armenisch, sprachvergleichende Forschungen. Christiania, H. Aschehoug & Co.
- 59Mayani, Zacharie (1961). The Etruscans Begin to Speak. Translation by Patrick Evans. London: Souvenir Press.
- 60BookThe Etruscans: Lost CivilizationsLucy Shipley — Reaktion Books — 2023
- 61Etruscans, Huns and HungariansAlfréd Tóth
- 68BookExplorations in Language MacrofamiliesSergei Starostin et al. — Bochum — 1989
- 70BookLost languages: the enigma of the world's undeciphered scriptsAndrew Robinson — McGraw-Hill — 2002
- 71Hillary Wills Becker, "Political Systems and Law," in The Etruscan World, edited by Jean MacIntosh Turfa (Routledge, 2013), p. 355
- 73Roncalli, F. (1996) "Laris Pulenas and Sisyphus: Mortals, Heroes and Demons in the Etruscan Underworld," Etruscan Studies vol. 3, article 3, pp. 45-64.
- 74Cataldi, M. (1988) I sarcofagi etruschi delle famiglie Partunu, Camna e Pulena, Roma.
- 76Jean MacIntosh Turfa (13 November 2014). The Etruscan World. Routledge. pp. 363–. .
- 79JournalThe Vicchio Stele and Its ContextP. Gregory Warden — 1 January 2016
- 80JournalThe Vicchio Stele: The InscriptionAdriano Maggiani — 1 January 2016
- 81Maggiani, A. and Gregory, P. G. Authority and display in sixth-century Etruria: The Vicchio stele Edinburgh 2020
- 82van der Meer, B. "The Lead Plaque of Magliano" in: Interpretando l'antico. Scritti di archeologia offerti a Maria Bonghi Jovino. Milano 2013 (Quaderni di Acme 134) pp. 323-341
- 87JournalWomen and Votive Inscriptions in Etruscan EpigraphyPetra Amann — 5 November 2019
- 90Etruscan mirrors and the graveOpenEdition Books
- 93Alexander Stuart Murray et al.
- 96BookOxford Research Encyclopedia of ClassicsHarold Mattingly et al. — 2016
- 99Theories on the Origin of the Etruscan LanguageAdelle Rogers — 2018
- 100J.H. Adams pp. 163–164.
- 102Bucchero
- 103BookA Companion to the EtruscansRex E. Wallace — 2016
- 104BookThe EtruscansMassimo Pallottino — Penguin Books — 1955
- 106The summary in this section is taken from the tables of the Bonfantes (2002) pp. 91–94, which go into considerably more detail, citing examples.
- 109The words in this table come from the Glossaries of Bonfante (1990) and Pallottino. The latter also gives a grouping by topic on pages 275 following, the last chapter of the book.
- 110Theo Vennemann, Germania Semitica, p. 123, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2012.
- 111Breyer (1993) p. 259.
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