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The “Linen Book of Zagreb”: The Longest Etruscan Text

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Re: The “Linen Book of Zagreb”: The Longest Etruscan Text

#11

Post by DonaldFisk »

inawarminister wrote: post #2

If only we have a Rosetta Stone of Etruscan and Minoan. Pre-Indo-European central Mediterranean will perhaps remain obscure for us forever... Still, the fact that an Egyptian got buried in a recycled religious treatise of another people across the sea is quite interesting. Especially post-250BC is quite deep in Ptolemaic rule in Egypt and Roman conquest of Etruria.

There are the Pyrgi tablets, which contain a bilingual text in Etruscan and Phoenician (which is a close relative of Hebrew and Arabic, and so easily readable). The Emperor Claudius wrote an Etruscan-Latin dictionary, but that has been lost.

A propos of the Rosetta Stone, Ancient Egyptian also benefitted from having a direct descendent language (Coptic), spoken until a few hundred years ago and still used in Coptic churches. Etruscan has no modern descendants.

We do have a partial knowledge of Etruscan though, so it isn't quite a closed book the way Linear A (Minoan) is. See http://www.etruskisch.de/pgs/vc.htm

Re: The “Linen Book of Zagreb”: The Longest Etruscan Text

#12

Post by microwavecamera »

new2627 wrote: post #10
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if etruscans once lived where you live now There is no evidence that Etruscans ever lived where the OP does now. All evidence we have about Etruscans points to a people living in the Mediterranean region, not further north in the Balkans. Note that although the article here is about a linen book in Zagreb, the Zagreb Museum was only the final resting place of an artifact created elsewhere; it does not mean that Etr…

I see, you are right, but I was answering to a more general point made by OP, that if those who speak your language arrived late, you could still have a connection with those who lived there before.

Culture and genetics are not necessarily related. Unless they still happen to speak Etruscan, sharing a little DNA with ancient Etruscans doesn't make them "Etruscan".

Re: The “Linen Book of Zagreb”: The Longest Etruscan Text

#13

Post by vmh1928 »

Recall that the Ptolemaic Kingdom was created out of the break-up of the Alexander the Great's empire. The Wikipedia article gives 320BC to 30BC. Its leaders were Macedonian Greeks. The Greeks had trading cities along the Italian Peninsula as far back as the 600 BC era, in part to trade with the Etruscans. It's not that difficult to conceive of this cloth(250BC,) being included in some trade shipment that ended up in Alexandria and then carried up the Nile to Thebes.

Re: The “Linen Book of Zagreb”: The Longest Etruscan Text

#14

Post by erikpukinskis »

I think AIs will be good at deciphering things like this. They can wear a text like this as a pair of glasses and wander a virtual Earth, read other texts, time travel, and wait millions of man-years for a single affordance.

The same work an amateur anthropologist does, but with more patience and better scrapbooking skills, basically.

Although by the time AIs exist that can do this, amateur anthropologists will have much better digital tools as well.

Re: The “Linen Book of Zagreb”: The Longest Etruscan Text

#15

Post by dzdt »

My favorite science story about the Etruscan language is using statistics of dice to clarify the words for numbers.

Dice were popular in ancient Mediterranean cultures. The older number arrangement put usually 1 opposite 2; 3 opposite 4; 5 opposite 6. At some point it shifted to the more modern 1-6; 2-5; 3-4 arrangement.

Usually dice used dots or "pips" as today, but an example was found numbered with Etruscan words. Arguing from statistics of how dice were numbered, they convincingly identified the pairs of numbers. This resolves an ambiguity from other literary sources about the Etruscan words for 4 and 6.

[1] http://www.academia.edu/download/44616033/GAMBLING_WITH_ETRU...

Re: The “Linen Book of Zagreb”: The Longest Etruscan Text

#16

Post by selimthegrim »

dzdt wrote: post #15

My favorite science story about the Etruscan language is using statistics of dice to clarify the words for numbers. Dice were popular in ancient Mediterranean cultures. The older number arrangement put usually 1 opposite 2; 3 opposite 4; 5 opposite 6. At some point it shifted to the more modern 1-6; 2-5; 3-4 arrangement. Usually dice used dots or "pips" as today, but an example was found numbered with Etruscan words.…

Link is broken.

Re: The “Linen Book of Zagreb”: The Longest Etruscan Text

#17

Post by tx-0 »

samastur wrote: post #6
binarray2000 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(1) Even according to Wikipedia: "The Etruscans called themselves Rasenna, which was syncopated to Rasna or Raśna(...)" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_civilization (2) Again, even according to Wikipedia: "Rascians (Latin: Rasciani, Natio Rasciana; Serbian: Рашани / Rašani) was a common exonym for Serbs during the late medieval and the early modern period. It was used most frequently in the Kingdom of Hungar…

Look mate, as a fellow Slav from Slovenia I can assure you all our common ancestors stumbled here way too late to have anything to do with Etruscans. And then there are also excellent arguments made in other comments.

the Veneti (ancestors to modern Slavs) lived around Veneto while the Etruscans lived in Tuscany. Not that there was not a lot more mixing and migrating over the years, but still.

Re: The “Linen Book of Zagreb”: The Longest Etruscan Text

#18

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

tx-0 wrote: post #17
samastur wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look mate, as a fellow Slav from Slovenia I can assure you all our common ancestors stumbled here way too late to have anything to do with Etruscans. And then there are also excellent arguments made in other comments.

the Veneti (ancestors to modern Slavs) lived around Veneto while the Etruscans lived in Tuscany. Not that there was not a lot more mixing and migrating over the years, but still.

> the Veneti (ancestors to modern Slavs) lived around Veneto

This is inaccurate. The ancestors of the Slavs spring, according to the consensus view, from around where Ukraine, Poland, and Belarus meet. So, very far from Venice, let alone central Italy. We have attestations of the language that was actually spoken around the Venetic region[0], it is not Slavic. Why the early Slavs were often labeled with an ethnonym resembling Veneti is a complex affair[1], but it does not mean that the Slavs had any meaningful contact with central Italy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetic_language

[1] Michael Weiss, “Veneti or Venetes? Observations on a widespread Indo-European tribal name”, in: Farnah: Indo-Iranian and Indo-European Studies in Honor of Sasha Lubotsky. Ann Arbor: Beech Stave Press, 2018.

Re: The “Linen Book of Zagreb”: The Longest Etruscan Text

#19

Post by yorwba »

selimthegrim wrote: post #16
dzdt wrote: post #15

My favorite science story about the Etruscan language is using statistics of dice to clarify the words for numbers. Dice were popular in ancient Mediterranean cultures. The older number arrangement put usually 1 opposite 2; 3 opposite 4; 5 opposite 6. At some point it shifted to the more modern 1-6; 2-5; 3-4 arrangement. Usually dice used dots or "pips" as today, but an example was found numbered with Etruscan words.…

Link is broken.

http://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.joule.2018.11.021

Re: The “Linen Book of Zagreb”: The Longest Etruscan Text

#20

Post by dzdt »

selimthegrim wrote: post #16
dzdt wrote: post #15

My favorite science story about the Etruscan language is using statistics of dice to clarify the words for numbers. Dice were popular in ancient Mediterranean cultures. The older number arrangement put usually 1 opposite 2; 3 opposite 4; 5 opposite 6. At some point it shifted to the more modern 1-6; 2-5; 3-4 arrangement. Usually dice used dots or "pips" as today, but an example was found numbered with Etruscan words.…

Link is broken.

Sorry, it seems that link only works if the referrer is google scholar. The publisher (paywall) link is https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1475-4754.....

Gambling with etruscan dice: A tale of numbers and letters G Artioli, V Nociti, I Angelini Archaeometry 53 (5), 1031-1043, 2011 The graphical and linguistic interpretation of the first six Etruscan numerals has long been confronted with the ambiguous assignment of the words huth and sa to either 4 or 6. Here, we show how the systematic combinatorial analysis of the numerals appearing on ancient southern Etrurian dice dated from the eighth to the third centuries bc, together with the careful comparison of the results with the only two existing dice carrying the alphabetical translations of the numerals conserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, finally allows unambiguous mathematical resolution of the linguistic riddle, allowing the firm attribution of the numeral 6 to the graphical value huth and 4 to sa. Combinatorial analysis of the numerals distribution on the six faces of the die shows that only two of the 15 possible numerical combinations were actually in use in southern Etruria, and that during the fifth century bc there was a marked shift from the typical (1–2, 3–4, 5–6) combination used in the early seventh‐ to fifth‐century bc dice to the (1–6, 2–5, 3–4) combination used at later times and still largely adopted today. The largest body of archaeometric data on dice specimens from Etruria is presented, based on macroscopic examination, X‐ray diffraction, DRIFT spectroscopy and density measurements.

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