The Etruscan alphabet was used by the

Etruscans The Etruscan civilization ( ) was an ancient civilization created by the Etruscans, a people who inhabited Etruria in List of ancient peoples of Italy, ancient Italy, with a common language and culture, and formed a federation of city-states. Af ...

, an ancient civilization of central and northern

Italy Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe, Western Europe. It consists of Italian Peninsula, a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean Sea, with the Alps on its northern land b ...

, to write their language, from about 700 BC to sometime around

100 AD __NOTOC__ In the Roman Empire, it was sometimes referred to as year 853 ''ab urbe condita'', i.e., 853 years since the founding of Rome in 753 B.C. The denomination AD 100 for this year has been used since the Early Middle Ages, when the An ...

. The Etruscan

alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...

derives from the

Euboean alphabet Many local variants of the Greek alphabet were employed in ancient Greece during the archaic and early classical periods, until around 400 BC, when they were replaced by the classical 24-letter alphabet that is the standard today. All forms ...

used in the

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

colonies in southern Italy which belonged to the "western" ("red") type, the so-called

Western Greek alphabet Many local variants of the Greek alphabet were employed in ancient Greece during the Archaic Greece, archaic and Classical Greece, early classical periods, until around 400 BC, when they were replaced by the classical 24-letter alphabet that ...

. Several

Old Italic scripts The Old Italic scripts are a family of ancient writing systems used in the Italian Peninsula between about 700 and 100 BC, for various languages spoken in that time and place. The most notable member is the Etruscan alphabet, which was the i ...

, including the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

, derived from it (or simultaneously with it).

Origins

The Etruscan alphabet originated as an adaptation of the

used by the Euboean Greeks in their first colonies in

, the island of Pithekoussai and the city of

Cumae Cumae ( or or ; ) was the first ancient Greek colony of Magna Graecia on the mainland of Italy and was founded by settlers from Euboea in the 8th century BCE. It became a rich Roman city, the remains of which lie near the modern village of ...

Campania Campania is an administrative Regions of Italy, region of Italy located in Southern Italy; most of it is in the south-western portion of the Italian Peninsula (with the Tyrrhenian Sea to its west), but it also includes the small Phlegraean Islan ...

. In the alphabets of the West, X had the sound value , Ψ stood for ; in Etruscan: X = , Ψ = or (Rix 202–209). The earliest known Etruscan ''

abecedarium An abecedarium (also known as an abecedary or ABCs or simply an ABC) is an inscription consisting of the letters of an alphabet, almost always listed in order. Typically, abecedaria (or abecedaries) are practice exercises. Non-Latin alphabet ...

'' is inscribed on the frame of a

wax tablet A wax tablet is a tablet (disambiguation), tablet made of wood and covered with a layer of wax, often linked loosely to a cover tablet, as a "double-leaved" diptych. It was used as a reusable and portable writing surface in classical antiquity, ...

in ivory, measuring , found at

Marsiliana Marsiliana, known also as Marsiliana d'Albegna, is a village in Tuscany, central Italy, administratively a frazione of the comune of Manciano, province of Grosseto. At the time of the 2001 census its population amounted to 246. Geography Marsili ...

(near

Grosseto Grosseto () is a city and a ''comune'' in the central Italian region of Tuscany, the capital of the province of Grosseto and the main city of the Maremma region. The city lies from the Tyrrhenian Sea, at the centre of an alluvial plain on the ...

Tuscany Tuscany ( ; ) is a Regions of Italy, region in central Italy with an area of about and a population of 3,660,834 inhabitants as of 2025. The capital city is Florence. Tuscany is known for its landscapes, history, artistic legacy, and its in ...

). It dates from about 700 BC, and lists 26 letters corresponding to contemporary forms of the Greek alphabet, including

digamma Digamma or wau (uppercase: Ϝ, lowercase: ϝ, numeral: ϛ) is an Archaic Greek alphabets, archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. It originally stood for the sound but it has remained in use principally as a Greek numeral for 6 (number), 6. Whe ...

, san and qoppa, but not

omega Omega (, ; uppercase Ω, lowercase ω; Ancient Greek ὦ, later ὦ μέγα, Modern Greek ωμέγα) is the twenty-fourth and last letter in the Greek alphabet. In the Greek numerals, Greek numeric system/isopsephy (gematria), it has a value ...

, which had still not been added at the time.

Letters

The shapes of the Archaic Etruscan and Neo-Etruscan letters had a few variants, used in different places and/or in different epochs. Notably, opposite letters were used for and depending on the locality. Shown above are the glyphs from the Unicode Old Italic block, whose appearance will depend on the font used by the browser. These are oriented as they would be in lines written from left to right. Also shown are SVG images of variants shown as they would be written right to left, as in most of the actual inscriptions.

Development

The archaic form of the Etruscan alphabet remained practically unchanged from its origin in the 8th century BC until about 600 BC, and the direction of writing was free. From the 6th century BC, however, the alphabet evolved, adjusting to the phonology of the Etruscan language, and letters representing phonemes nonexistent in Etruscan were dropped. By 400 BC, it appears that all of

Etruria Etruria ( ) was a region of Central Italy delimited by the rivers Arno and Tiber, an area that covered what is now most of Tuscany, northern Lazio, and north-western Umbria. It was inhabited by the Etruscans, an ancient civilization that f ...

was using the classical Etruscan alphabet of 20 letters, mostly written from right to left. An additional sign , in shape similar to the numeral 8, transcribed as F, was present in Lydian, Neo-Etruscan and Italic alphabets of

Osco-Umbrian languages The Osco-Umbrian, Sabellic or Sabellian languages are an extinct group of Italic languages, the Indo-European languages that were spoken in central and southern Italy by the Osco-Umbrians before being replaced by Latin, as the power of ancient Ro ...

such as Oscan, Umbrian, Old Sabine and South Picene (Old Volscian). This sign was introduced in Etruscan around 600–550 BC and was not present in the Marsiliana tablet, the earliest example of the Etruscan alphabet. It is thought that the sign may have been an altered B or H or an ''ex novo'' creation. Formerly it was even suspected to have been an Etruscan invention, but an early Sabellian inscription suggests that it is instead an invention of speakers of a Sabellian language (Osco-Umbrian languages). Its sound value was and it replaced the Etruscan digraph FH that was previously used to express that sound. Some letters were, on the other hand, falling out of use. Etruscan did not have any

voiced stop In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lips ...

s, for which B, C, D were originally intended (, , and respectively). The B and D therefore fell out of use, and the C, which is simpler and easier to write than K, was adopted to write , mostly displacing K itself. Likewise, since Etruscan had no vowel sound, O disappeared and was replaced by U. In the course of its simplification, the redundant letters showed some tendency towards a

semi-syllabary A semi-syllabary is a writing system that behaves partly as an alphabet and partly as a syllabary. The main group of semi-syllabic writing are the Paleohispanic scripts of ancient Spain, a group of semi-syllabaries that transform redundant plosi ...

: C, K and Q were predominantly used in the contexts CE, KA, QU. This classical alphabet remained in use until the 2nd century BC, when it began to be influenced by the rise of the

. Soon after, the Etruscan language itself became extinct — so thoroughly that its vocabulary and grammar are still only partly known, in spite of more than a century of intense research. The Romans, who did have voiced stops in their language, after taking over the archaic Etruscan alphabet in the 7th century BC, continued to use B and D for and , and used C for both and , until they invented a separate letter G to distinguish the two sounds.

Legacy

The Etruscan alphabet apparently was the immediate ancestor for the

, as well as of several

used in Italy before the rise of

Rome Rome (Italian language, Italian and , ) is the capital city and most populated (municipality) of Italy. It is also the administrative centre of the Lazio Regions of Italy, region and of the Metropolitan City of Rome. A special named with 2, ...

, such as those used in the

Oscan Oscan is an extinct Indo-European language of southern Italy. The language is in the Osco-Umbrian or Sabellic branch of the Italic languages. Oscan is therefore a close relative of Umbrian and South Picene. Oscan was spoken by a number of t ...

Umbrian Umbrian is an extinct Italic language formerly spoken by the Umbri in the ancient Italian region of Umbria. Within the Italic languages it is closely related to the Oscan group and is therefore associated with it in the group of Osco-Umbr ...

, Lepontic,

Rhaetian The Rhaetian is the latest age (geology), age of the Triassic period (geology), Period (in geochronology) or the uppermost stage (stratigraphy), stage of the Triassic system (stratigraphy), System (in chronostratigraphy). It was preceded by the N ...

(or Raetic),

Venetic Venetic ( ) is an extinct Indo-European language, most commonly classified into the Italic subgroup, that was spoken by the Veneti people in ancient times in northeast Italy (Veneto and Friuli) and part of modern Slovenia, between the Po ...

, Messapian,

North North is one of the four compass points or cardinal directions. It is the opposite of south and is perpendicular to east and west. ''North'' is a noun, adjective, or adverb indicating Direction (geometry), direction or geography. Etymology T ...

and South Picene, and Camunic inscriptions.

Gallery

File:Etruscan cippus warrior head side.jpg, Etruscan grave marker from the necropolis Crocifisso del Tufo with an inscription in the Etruscan alphabet File:8669 - Museo archeologico, Grosseto - Bucchero con alfabeto etrusco, sec. VI a.C.. Foto Giovanni Dall'Orto, 1 novembre 2015.jpg, depicts the south variant of Etruscan alphabet

References

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Alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...