The Etruscan Language
A people whose words we can pronounce but never understand.
- EXISTED
- Spoken until c. 1st century AD
- WHERE
- Etruria, central Italy
- LOST
- Roughly the 1st century AD
- CAUSE OF LOSS
- Absorbed by Rome; its books left uncopied and lost
Before Rome ruled Italy, the Etruscans did, a sophisticated people with cities, art, religion and a literature of their own, written in an alphabet borrowed from the Greeks. As Rome rose, Etruria was absorbed; the language gave way to Latin, the books were not recopied, and an entire civilisation’s written voice fell silent within a few generations.
Some thirteen thousand Etruscan inscriptions survive, and because the alphabet is known we can sound the words out, yet the language is related to no other we understand, so the meaning stays just out of reach. The one man who might have saved it, the Emperor Claudius, wrote a great history of the Etruscans and a dictionary of their tongue; both were lost in turn. We are left mouthing the words of the dead without knowing what we say.
The Emperor Claudius wrote a twenty-volume history of the Etruscans and compiled a dictionary of their language. Both are lost, and with them the key. We can read the Etruscan alphabet aloud, yet barely understand a word.