The alphabet is known. The sounds are known. The language is not related to anything and it is still, largely, a mystery.
Taberna Etrusca holds a 4.2 from three hundred and seventy-seven people and charges twenty to seventy pounds, and it is named after a people whose language we can pronounce and cannot read.
The Etruscans
They were in Italy before Rome. They were the dominant power of the peninsula, they had cities and fleets and an art of extraordinary quality, and Rome’s early kings were Etruscan.
Rome absorbed them. Their culture went into Roman culture – the toga, the fasces, the practice of reading omens from the entrails of animals, the arch – and their language was replaced by Latin, and within a few centuries nobody spoke it.
And here is the situation we are left with.
We can read it perfectly
The Etruscan alphabet is derived from the Greek, and it is entirely understood. Every letter is known. The sounds are known.
You could hand an Etruscan inscription to a scholar and they could read it aloud, correctly, with confident pronunciation.
And they would not know what it meant.
Because Etruscan is not an Indo-European language. It is not related to Latin, or Greek, or Sanskrit, or Celtic, or Germanic. It appears to be related to essentially nothing – a language isolate, like Basque, which we wrote about at bask street boys in Covent Garden, and which is the other great unexplained survival in Europe.
Which means there is no cognate to work from. No sister language to compare it with. No key.
What we do know
Quite a lot, actually, and it has been extracted painfully, word by word, over two centuries.
Numbers, from a pair of dice found with the words written on the faces. Kinship terms, from tomb inscriptions – because a tomb tells you that this person was the son of that person, and if you have enough of them the structure emerges.
Gods’ names, from bronze mirrors with the figures labelled.
We have perhaps a few hundred words with confident meanings, out of thirteen thousand surviving inscriptions – and the overwhelming majority of those inscriptions are short, formulaic, and funerary, because tombs survive and houses do not.
We know how Etruscans died. We know almost nothing about how they thought.
The lost library
The Emperor Claudius wrote a twenty-volume history of the Etruscans, in Etruscan, having married an Etruscan woman and learned the language.
It is lost. Every word of it.
Somewhere in the fall of the Roman world, the last complete account of an entire civilisation, written by a man who could read it, ceased to exist – and there is nothing anybody can do about it.
Verdict
Good Italian, decent room, honest rating.
Go, eat, and consider that an entire people are sitting in our museums, perfectly legible and completely silent.
What Rome took from them
More than Rome ever admitted, and the Romans were slightly embarrassed about it.
The fasces – the bundle of rods with an axe, carried before a magistrate as a symbol of the power to punish – is Etruscan. It went on to become the emblem of the Roman state, and then, three thousand years later, the root of the word fascism.
The practice of divining the future from the livers of sacrificed animals is Etruscan, and Rome imported it wholesale and took it extremely seriously, and Roman generals would not fight without it.
The toga. The arch, probably. The gladiatorial games, possibly, in origin as funeral rites.
An entire civilisation was absorbed, stripped for parts, and forgotten – and the parts are still in use.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
My mate’s councillor. Not showing him this. Enough stress.
Es wirkt, als sei es von jemandem geschrieben worden, der sich detaillierte Notizen über Dinge macht, über die er nicht nachdenken sollte.
My therapist says I use comedy avoiding difficulty. Validates mechanism.