The Etruscan alphabet apparently originated as an adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet used by the Euboean Greeks in their first colonies in Italy, the island of Pithekoussai and the city ofCumae in Campania. In the alphabets of the West, X had the , Ψ stood for ; in Etruscan: X =, Ψ = or . The earliest known Etruscan abecedarium is inscribed on the frame of a wax tablet in ivory, measuring 8.8×5 cm, found at Marsiliana. It dates from about 700 BCE, and lists 26 letters corresponding to contemporary forms of the Greek alphabet, including digamma, san and qoppa, but not omega which had still not been added at the time.
The shapes of the Archaic Etruscan and Neo-Etruscan letters had a few variants, used in different places and/or in different epochs. 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 7th century BCE until about 600 BCE, and the direction of writing was free. From the 6th century, however, the alphabet evolved, adjusting to the phonology of the Etruscan language, and letters representing phonemes nonexistent in Etruscan were dropped. By 400 BCE, it appears that all of Etruria 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 both Lydian and Etruscan. Its origin is disputed; it may have been an altered B or H or an ex novo creation. 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 stops, for which B, C, D were originally intended. 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 /k/, mostly displacing K itself. Likewise, since Etruscan had no /o/ 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: C, K and Q were predominantly used in the contexts CE, KA, QU. This classical alphabet remained in use until the 2nd century BCE when it began to be influenced by the rise of the Latin alphabet. The Romans, who did have voiced stops in their language, revived B and D for /b/ and /d/, and used C for both /k/ and /g/, until they invented a separate letter G to distinguish the two sounds. 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.
