Scholarship places the extinction of spoken Etruscan in the late first century BC or early first century AD. Evidence suggests rural survival extended further with coins minted near Saena bearing Etruscan script dated to 15 BC.
The Etruscan alphabet emerged around 650 BC on a small bucchero terracotta lidded vase shaped like a cockerel now held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It derived directly from the Euboean variant of the Greek alphabet brought by colonists to southern Italian settlements like Pithecusae and Cumae.
Helmut Rix proposed that Etruscan belonged to the Tyrsenian language family alongside Raetic and Lemnian in 1998. This hypothesis gained widespread acceptance among scholars like Stefan Schumacher and Carlo De Simone after linguists previously treated Etruscan as an isolate.
Archaeologists have discovered approximately 13,000 Etruscan inscriptions ranging from short dedications to lengthy religious texts. The only surviving book is the Liber Linteus Zagrabiensis which held about 1,200 words before being repurposed as mummy wrappings in Egypt.
The Pyrgi Tablets were found in 1964 by Massimo Pallottino at the ancient port of Santa Severa. These three gold leaves contain bilingual text in Etruscan and Phoenician dating to roughly 500 BC.