Etruscan Language

Etruscan was the language of the Etruscan civilization in the ancient region of Etruria, in what is now Italy. It influenced Latin but was eventually superseded by it. About 13,000 Etruscan inscriptions have been found, only a small minority of significant length, and the language is attested from about 700 BC to 50 AD. It is generally agreed to belong to the Tyrrhenian language family, closely related to Raetic and to the Lemnian language, and it is treated as a pre-Indo-European language. The Etruscan alphabet derived from the Greek alphabet, so inscriptions can be read in the sense of knowing roughly how they were pronounced, although their meaning is still only partly understood. Etruscan religion was influenced by that of the Greeks, and many of the surviving Etruscan-language artifacts are votive or religious. In this atlas the entry names the language of such inscriptions.