Raetic or Rhaetic is an obscure language of antiquity, which used to be spoken in the province of Raetia, in the Eastern Alps, to the north and west of Venetic. It is very sparsely attested, leaving room for much speculation on its ancestry, but an affiliation with Etruscan seems most probable. See also. Aegean languages -- The language group to which Raetic belongs. Etruscan civilization Etruscan language Liber Linteus - An Etruscan inscription. < ...

Read more here: » Raetic language: Encyclopedia - Raetic language

Including:

Cippus perusinus - Discussion of its translation Cippus perusinus - The text

Read more here: » Cippus perusinus: Encyclopedia - Cippus perusinus

As with most Etruscan inscriptions, translations have not been very trustworthy because of a lack of thorough organization on the part of the translators. One author says this [citation needed], another that [citation needed], and before long, the reader is hopelessly confused. Beyond the myths, attentive analysis and crossreferencing will help us sift through the mess to get at the heart of the Etruscan language. Currently, much work has been done [citation needed] to piece together Etruscan and these discoveries have helped to shatter previous ...

See also:

Cippus perusinus, Cippus perusinus - Discussion of its translation, Cippus perusinus - The text

Read more here: » Cippus perusinus: Encyclopedia II - Cippus perusinus - Discussion of its translation

Since the Phoenician text has long been known to be a Semitic language (related to such languages as Hebrew, Canaanite, Ugaritic, Arabic and Akkadian), it's decipherment was achieved very early. There is hardly any doubt concerning the values of the above words. ...

See also:

Pyrgi Tablets, Pyrgi Tablets - The Phoenician Text, Pyrgi Tablets - Phoenician Vocabulary, Pyrgi Tablets - The Etruscan Text, Pyrgi Tablets - Etruscan Vocabulary

Read more here: » Pyrgi Tablets: Encyclopedia II - Pyrgi Tablets - The Phoenician Text

Dreros 1 1: ---rmaw|et|isalabre|komn 2: ---d|men|inai|isaluria|lmo 3: ----tonturonmēa.oaoiewad 4: eturo---munadoa-enē-- 5: --matritaia-- Part of the inscription (lines 3 to 5) is written in Greek, probably the Doric dialect. Due to the lack of preservation of many of the words, it is difficult to ascertain what even the Greek text is saying. It has been pointed out that <ewade> ...

See also:

Eteocretan language, Eteocretan language - Known inscriptions

Read more here: » Eteocretan language: Encyclopedia II - Eteocretan language - Known inscriptions

As the Etruscan tongue slowly died out the meaning of the Liber Linteus would have been forgotten: first as a text, and then as a sacred object. New calendars were written in Latin, and new customs would have prevailed. Perhaps the community who wrote it, like the language and the book itself, declined and fell into obscurity. For many years the book would have lain untouched, its owners considering it no more than a worthless anachronism. In the first century BCE, the Roman Empire conquered Egypt. Like the Hellenes before them, Roman ...

See also:

Liber Linteus, Liber Linteus - Discovery, Liber Linteus - Purchase of the mummy, Liber Linteus - Initial examinations, Liber Linteus - Production, Liber Linteus - Text, Liber Linteus - Structure, Liber Linteus - Content, Liber Linteus - Disuse and disposal

Read more here: » Liber Linteus: Encyclopedia II - Liber Linteus - Disuse and disposal

Liber Linteus - Purchase of the mummy. In 1848, Mihajlo Barić (1791–1859), a Croatian minor official in the Hungarian Royal Chancellery, resigned his post and embarked upon a tour of several countries, including Egypt. While in Alexandria, he purchased a sarchophagus containing a female mummy, as a souvenir of his travels. Barić displayed the mummy at his home in Vienna, standing it upright in the corner of his sitting room. He often told his visitors that it was the body of King Stephen of Hungary's s ...

See also:

Liber Linteus, Liber Linteus - Discovery, Liber Linteus - Purchase of the mummy, Liber Linteus - Initial examinations, Liber Linteus - Production, Liber Linteus - Text, Liber Linteus - Structure, Liber Linteus - Content, Liber Linteus - Disuse and disposal

Read more here: » Liber Linteus: Encyclopedia II - Liber Linteus - Discovery

Please remove this notice after the article has been expanded. Details are on this talk page or at Wikipedia:Requests for expansion. The Etruscan civilization flourished in Etruria and the Po valley in the northern part of what is now Italy, prior to the arrival of Gauls in the Po valley and the formation of the Roman Republic. Etruscan culture developed in northern and central Italy after ca 800 BC without a serious break out of the preceding Villanovan culture. The Villanovan culture, the earliest ...

Including:

Etruscan civilization - Language Etruscan civilization - Collapse of Etruscan politics Etruscan civilization - Influence Etruscan civilization - Some Etruscan cities Etruscan civilization - Some Etruscan rulers Etruscan civilization - Bibliography

Read more here: » Etruscan civilization: Encyclopedia - Etruscan civilization

Certain local gods mentioned within the text allow the Liber Linteus's place of production to narrowed to a small area in the southeast of Tuscany near Lake Trasimeno. Four major Etruscan cities were in that area: modern day Arezzo, Perugia, Chiusi and Cortona. All of them would have had temples that could have both produced and used the Liber Linteus. The age of the book is unknown, though a date of about 250 BCE is given due to the shape of the letters. It must have been made before use of the Etruscan language declined in opposition to Latin, as the cost involved would req ...

See also:

Liber Linteus, Liber Linteus - Discovery, Liber Linteus - Purchase of the mummy, Liber Linteus - Initial examinations, Liber Linteus - Production, Liber Linteus - Text, Liber Linteus - Structure, Liber Linteus - Content, Liber Linteus - Disuse and disposal

Read more here: » Liber Linteus: Encyclopedia II - Liber Linteus - Production

Liber Linteus - Structure. The book is laid out in twelve columns from right to left, each one representing a "page". Much of the first three columns is missing, and it is not known where the book begins. Closer to the end of the book the text is almost complete (there is a strip missing that runs the entire length of the book). By the end of the last page the cloth is blank and the selvage is intact, showing the definite end of the book. There are 230 lines of text, with 1200 legible words. Black ink has been used for the main text, ...

See also:

Liber Linteus, Liber Linteus - Discovery, Liber Linteus - Purchase of the mummy, Liber Linteus - Initial examinations, Liber Linteus - Production, Liber Linteus - Text, Liber Linteus - Structure, Liber Linteus - Content, Liber Linteus - Disuse and disposal

Read more here: » Liber Linteus: Encyclopedia II - Liber Linteus - Text

In order to properly translate the stele, one must sift through a sea of hearsay and speculation that abounds about this cloudy text. Some words attract an especially inordinate amount of controversy, yielding multiple and conflicting translations for the same word. We need to obtain a more accurate picture of what this text is telling us. The only way to do this is through a balanced analysis of the smallest details while keeping sight of the larger context at the same time. Let's undo some of the myths that continue to ...

See also:

Lemnian language, Lemnian language - Relationships to Other Languages, Lemnian language - Classical sources, Lemnian language - The Lemnos stela, Lemnian language - Translation of the Lemnos Stele, Lemnian language - Classification

Read more here: » Lemnian language: Encyclopedia II - Lemnian language - Translation of the Lemnos Stele

The Etruscans are thought by some to be indigenous people of Italy, living there before the Indo-European migration and the arrival of the Latins, around 1000 BC. Herodotus (Histories I.94), however, describes the Tyrrhenians as immigrants from Lydia in western Anatolia, led west, fleeing famine, by their leader Tyrrhoeus, to settle in Umbria [1]; the Tyrrhenians of Herodotus are sometimes identified with the Etruscans, although there is no material cultural evidence to back this up. Literacy was fairly common, as can be seen by the g ...

See also:

Etruscan language, Etruscan language - History, Etruscan language - Classification, Etruscan language - Other less accepted theories, Etruscan language - Geographic distribution, Etruscan language - Related Languages, Etruscan language - Sounds, Etruscan language - Vowels, Etruscan language - Consonants, Etruscan language - Texts, Etruscan language - Vocabulary, Etruscan language - Writing system

Read more here: » Etruscan language: Encyclopedia II - Etruscan language - History

The stela was found built into a church wall in Kaminia and is now at the National Museum, Athens. The 6th-century date is based on the fact that in 510 BC the Athenian Miltiades invaded Lemnos and Hellenized it. The stele bears a low-relief bust of a helmeted man and is inscribed in an alphabet similar to the western ("Chalcidian") Greek alphabet. The inscription is in Boustrophedon style, and has been transliterated but had not been successfully translated until serious linguistic analysis based on comparisons with Etruscan, combined with breakthroughs ...

See also:

Lemnian language, Lemnian language - Relationships to Other Languages, Lemnian language - Classical sources, Lemnian language - The Lemnos stela, Lemnian language - Translation of the Lemnos Stele, Lemnian language - Classification

Read more here: » Lemnian language: Encyclopedia II - Lemnian language - The Lemnos stela

Characters similar to those used in Lemnos Stele inscription are also found on some pottery fragments on Lemnos. The Lemnian inscriptions use an alphabet similar to that used to write the Etruscan language and the older Phrygian inscriptions, all derived from Euboean scripts which had been adopted some time during the Hellenic Dark Ages (circa 1200 BCE). These scripts are ultimately of West Semitic origin, but since the scripts were widely used for Hellenic languages, mere use of these scripts does not sufficie to ...

See also:

Lemnian language, Lemnian language - Relationships to Other Languages, Lemnian language - Classical sources, Lemnian language - The Lemnos stela, Lemnian language - Translation of the Lemnos Stele, Lemnian language - Classification

Read more here: » Lemnian language: Encyclopedia II - Lemnian language - Relationships to Other Languages

Due to the high degree of similarity between Lemnian and Etruscan, it has been concluded that the two languages are closely related within a family which is called the Tyrrhenian or Aegean language family. It itself is isolate, that is, unrelated to other language groups as far as we can tell. There is no doubt that Rhaetic and Etruscan are among this family. In his Natural History (1st century AD), Pliny wrote about Alpine peoples: "The Rhaetians and the Vindelicans border with these [Noricans], all distributed in numerous cit ...

See also:

Lemnian language, Lemnian language - Relationships to Other Languages, Lemnian language - Classical sources, Lemnian language - The Lemnos stela, Lemnian language - Translation of the Lemnos Stele, Lemnian language - Classification

Read more here: » Lemnian language: Encyclopedia II - Lemnian language - Classification

The majormost consensus is that Etruscan is related only to other members of what is called the Tyrrhenian language family which in itself is isolate, that is, unrelated to other language groups as far as we can tell. There is no doubt that Rhaetic and Lemnian are among this family. In his Natural History (1st century AD), Pliny wrote about Alpine peoples: "The Rhaetians and the Vindelicans border with these [Noricans], all distributed in numerous cities. The Gauls maintain that the Raetians descend from the Etruscans, pushed b ...

See also:

Etruscan language, Etruscan language - History, Etruscan language - Classification, Etruscan language - Other less accepted theories, Etruscan language - Geographic distribution, Etruscan language - Related Languages, Etruscan language - Sounds, Etruscan language - Vowels, Etruscan language - Consonants, Etruscan language - Texts, Etruscan language - Vocabulary, Etruscan language - Writing system

Read more here: » Etruscan language: Encyclopedia II - Etruscan language - Classification

The interest in Etruscan antiquities and the mysterious Etruscan language found its modern origin in a book by a Dominican monk, Annio da Viterbo, "il Pastura" (1432—1502), the cabalist and orientalist who guided Pinturicchio's allegorical frescoes for Pope Alexander VI's Vatican apartments. In 1498 Annio published his antiquarian miscellany titled Antiquitatum variarum (in 17 volumes) where he put together a fantastic theory in which both the Hebrew and Etruscan languages were said to originate from a single source, the "Aramaic" s ...

See also:

Etruscan language, Etruscan language - History, Etruscan language - Classification, Etruscan language - Other less accepted theories, Etruscan language - Geographic distribution, Etruscan language - Related Languages, Etruscan language - Sounds, Etruscan language - Vowels, Etruscan language - Consonants, Etruscan language - Texts, Etruscan language - Vocabulary, Etruscan language - Writing system

Read more here: » Etruscan language: Encyclopedia II - Etruscan language - Other less accepted theories

Etruscan was spoken in north-west and west-central Italy, in the region that even now bears their name: Tuscany, and in the Po valley to the north of Etruria. Etruscan language - Related Languages. One language certain to be very closely related to Etruscan is the language once spoken on the island of Lemnos before the Athenian invasion (6th century BC), aptly named Lemnian. A stone tablet called the Lemnos stele was found there written with a script related to Etruscan and is dated to approximately 600 BC ...

See also:

Etruscan language, Etruscan language - History, Etruscan language - Classification, Etruscan language - Other less accepted theories, Etruscan language - Geographic distribution, Etruscan language - Related Languages, Etruscan language - Sounds, Etruscan language - Vowels, Etruscan language - Consonants, Etruscan language - Texts, Etruscan language - Vocabulary, Etruscan language - Writing system

Read more here: » Etruscan language: Encyclopedia II - Etruscan language - Geographic distribution

The reconstructed phonemes of Etruscan (IPA encoding): Etruscan language - Vowels. /a/ letter: A /e/ letter: E /i/ letter: I /u/ letter: V See also:

Etruscan language, Etruscan language - History, Etruscan language - Classification, Etruscan language - Other less accepted theories, Etruscan language - Geographic distribution, Etruscan language - Related Languages, Etruscan language - Sounds, Etruscan language - Vowels, Etruscan language - Consonants, Etruscan language - Texts, Etruscan language - Vocabulary, Etruscan language - Writing system

Read more here: » Etruscan language: Encyclopedia II - Etruscan language - Sounds

Helmut Rix, Etruskische Texte, works as a kind of incomplete thesaurus, a main key to studying the Etruscan language. First of all Rix and his collaborators present the only two unified (though fragmentary) texts available in Etruscan: the Liber Linteus used for mummy wrappings (now at Zagreb, Croatia) and the Tabula Capuana (the inscribed tablet from Capua). All the rest of the recovered inscriptions follow, grouped according to the localities in which they were found: Campania, Latium, Falerii and Ager Fa ...

See also:

Etruscan language, Etruscan language - History, Etruscan language - Classification, Etruscan language - Other less accepted theories, Etruscan language - Geographic distribution, Etruscan language - Related Languages, Etruscan language - Sounds, Etruscan language - Vowels, Etruscan language - Consonants, Etruscan language - Texts, Etruscan language - Vocabulary, Etruscan language - Writing system

Read more here: » Etruscan language: Encyclopedia II - Etruscan language - Texts