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142-627: Clusium ( Clevsin or Camars in Etruscan ) was one of the more powerful cities in the Etruscan League of twelve peoples. Chiusi came under the influence of Rome in the 3rd century BC and was involved in the Social War . According to a Roman historical tradition Arruns of Clusium invited Gaul mercenaries from the Po Valley into Clusium to seek revenge for a domestic conflict concerning his wife. However

284-483: A pi ", and is also of medieval origin. The letter's original name in antiquity is not known. It has been proposed that sampi was a continuation of the archaic letter san , which was originally shaped like an M and denoted the sound [s] in some other dialects. Besides san , names that have been proposed for sampi include parakyisma and angma , while other historically attested terms for it are enacosis , sincope , and o charaktir . As an alphabetic letter denoting

426-626: A "crooked object", used because of the hook-like shape of the letter. In the Greco–Iberian alphabet , used during the 4th century BC in eastern Spain to write the Iberian language (a language unrelated to Greek ), sampi was adopted along with the rest of the Ionian Greek alphabet, as an alphabetic character to write a second sibilant sound distinct from sigma. It had the shape [REDACTED] , with three vertical lines of equal length. Its pronunciation

568-523: A 26-letter alphabet, which makes an early appearance incised for decoration on a small bucchero terracotta lidded vase in the shape of a cockerel at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ca. 650–600 BC. The full complement of 26 has been termed the model alphabet. The Etruscans did not use four letters of it, mainly because Etruscan did not have the voiced stops b , d and g ; the o was also not used. They innovated one letter for f ( 𐌚 ). Writing

710-452: A 9th or 10th century bilingual Greek—Latin manuscript, has episimôn , enacôse and cophê respectively (with the latter two names mistakenly interchanged for each other.) Another medieval manuscript has the same words distorted somewhat more, as psima , coppo and enacos , Other, similar versions of the name include enacosin and niacusin , or the curious corruption sincope , A curious name for sampi that occurs in one Greek source

852-526: A bilingual text in Etruscan and Phoenician engraved on three gold leaves, one for the Phoenician and two for the Etruscan. The Etruscan language portion has 16 lines and 37 words. The date is roughly 500 BC. The tablets were found in 1964 by Massimo Pallottino during an excavation at the ancient Etruscan port of Pyrgi , now Santa Severa . The only new Etruscan word that could be extracted from close analysis of

994-539: A bit longer, and that a survival into the late 1st century AD and beyond "cannot wholly be dismissed", especially given the revelation of Oscan writing in Pompeii 's walls. Despite the apparent extinction of Etruscan, it appears that Etruscan religious rites continued much later, continuing to use the Etruscan names of deities and possibly with some liturgical usage of the language. In late Republican and early Augustan times, various Latin sources including Cicero noted

1136-411: A cross-linguistically common phonological system, with four phonemic vowels and an apparent contrast between aspirated and unaspirated stops . The records of the language suggest that phonetic change took place over time, with the loss and then re-establishment of word-internal vowels, possibly due to the effect of Etruscan's word-initial stress . Etruscan religion was influenced by that of

1278-530: A didactic text about arithmetics attributed to the Venerable Bede , the three Greek numerals for 6, 90 and 900 are called "episimon", "cophe" and "enneacosis" respectively. the latter two being evidently corrupted versions of koppa and enneakosia . An anonymous 9th-century manuscript from Rheinau Abbey has epistmon [ sic ], kophe, and ennakose . Similarly, the Psalterium Cusanum ,

1420-534: A few dozen Etruscan words and names were borrowed by the Romans, some of which remain in modern languages, among which are possibly voltur 'vulture', tuba 'trumpet', vagina 'sheath', populus 'people'. Inscriptions have been found in northwest and west-central Italy, in the region that even now bears the name of the Etruscan civilization , Tuscany (from Latin tuscī 'Etruscans'), as well as in modern Latium north of Rome, in today's Umbria west of

1562-733: A few lexical correspondences are documented, at least partly due to the scant number of Raetic and Lemnian texts. On the other hand, the Tyrsenian family, or Common Tyrrhenic, is often considered to be Paleo-European and to predate the arrival of Indo-European languages in southern Europe. Several scholars believe that the Lemnian language could have arrived in the Aegean Sea during the Late Bronze Age , when Mycenaean rulers recruited groups of mercenaries from Sicily , Sardinia and various parts of

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1704-515: A marginal note in an earlier Glagolitic version, the letter names "sampi" (" сѧпи ") and "koppa" (" копа ") are used for the Greek numerals. Witnesses of this textual variant exist from c.1200, but its archetype can be dated to before 1000 AD. The first reference to the name sampi in the western literature occurs in a 17th-century work, Scaliger 's discussion of the Aristophanes scholion regarding

1846-523: A modern edition, with problematic words marked:  κοππατίας ἵππους ἐκάλουν οἷς ἐγκεχάρακτο τὸ κ[?] στοιχεῖον, ὡς σαμφόρας τοὺς ἐγκεχαραγμένους τὸ σ. τὸ γὰρ σ[?] κατὰ[?] τὸ ϻ[?] χαρασσόμενον ϻὰν[?] ἔλεγον. αἱ δὲ χαράξεις αὗται καὶ μέχρι τοῦ νῦν σῴζονται ἐπὶ τοῖς ἵπποις. συνεζευγμένου δὲ τοῦ κ[?] καὶ σ[?] τὸ σχῆμα τοῦ ἐνακόσιοι[?] ἀριθμοῦ δύναται νοεῖσθαι, οὗ προηγεῖται τὸ κόππα[?]· καὶ παρὰ γραμματικοῖς οὕτω διδάσκεται, καὶ καλεῖται κόππα ἐνενήκοντα.  "Koppatias" were called horses that were branded with

1988-460: A much earlier dating than was often assumed earlier, actual occurrences of the letter sampi in this context have as yet not been found in any early examples. According to Threatte, the earliest known use of numeric sampi in a stone inscription occurs in an inscription in Magnesia from the 2nd century BC, in a phrase denoting a sum of money (" δραχ(μὰς) ϡʹ ) but the exact numeric meaning of this example

2130-423: A multiplicator for 1000, since a way of marking thousands and their multiples was not yet otherwise provided by the alphabetic system. Writing an alpha over sampi ( [REDACTED] or, in a ligature, [REDACTED] ) meant "1×1000", a theta over sampi ( [REDACTED] ) meant "9×1000", and so on. In the examples cited by Gardthausen, a slightly modified shape of sampi, with a shorter right stem ( [REDACTED] ),

2272-399: A rare case from this early period of a female (Venalia) dedicating the votive. A speculum is a circular or oval hand-mirror used predominantly by Etruscan women. Speculum is Latin; the Etruscan word is malena or malstria . Specula were cast in bronze as one piece or with a tang into which a wooden, bone, or ivory handle fitted. The reflecting surface was created by polishing

2414-691: A sibilant sound, sampi (shaped [REDACTED] ) was mostly used between the middle of the 6th and the middle of the 5th centuries BC, although some attestations have been dated as early as the 7th century BC. It has been attested in the cities of Miletus , Ephesos , Halikarnassos , Erythrae , Teos (all situated in the region of Ionia in Asia Minor ), in the island of Samos , in the Ionian colony of Massilia , and in Kyzikos (situated farther north in Asia Minor, in

2556-601: A symbolic motif: Apollo , Zeus , Culsans , Athena , Hermes , griffin , gorgon , male sphinx , hippocamp , bull, snake, eagle, or other creatures which had symbolic significance. Wallace et al. include the following categories, based on the uses to which they were put, on their site: abecedaria (alphabets), artisans' texts, boundary markers, construction texts, dedications, didaskalia (instructional texts), funerary texts, legal texts, other/unclear texts, prohibitions, proprietary texts (indicating ownership), religious texts, tesserae hospitales (tokens that establish "the claim of

2698-463: A triplet with the Greek letters for /ks/ and /ps/ . Among the earliest known uses of sampi in this function is an abecedarium from Samos dated to the mid-7th century BC. This early attestation already bears witness to its alphabetic position behind omega (i.e. not the position of san ), and it shows that its invention cannot have been much later than that of omega itself. The first known use of alphabetic sampi in writing native Greek words

2840-461: Is "παρακύϊσμα" ( parakyisma ). It occurs in a scholion to Dionysius Thrax , where the three numerals are referred to as "τὸ δίγαμμα καὶ τὸ κόππα καὶ τό καλούμενον παρακύϊσμα". The obscure word ("… the so-called parakyisma ") literally means "a spurious pregnancy", from "παρα-" and the verb "κυέω" "to be pregnant". The term has been used and accepted as possibly authentic by Jannaris, Uhlhorn and again by Soldati. While Jannaris hypothesizes that it

2982-544: Is a set of 25 metal tokens, each stamped with one of the letters from alpha to sampi, which are dated to the 4th century BC and were probably used as identification marks for judges in the courts of the Athenian democracy. In papyrus texts from the Ptolemaic period onwards, numeric sampi occurs with some regularity. At an early stage in the papyri, the numeral sampi was used not only for 900, but, somewhat confusingly, also as

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3124-515: Is an inscription found on a silver plate in Ephesus , which has the words " τέͳαρες " ("four") and " τεͳαράϙοντα " ("forty") spelled with sampi (cf. normal spelling Ionic " τέσσαρες/τεσσαράκοντα " vs. Attic τέτταρες/τετταράκοντα ). It can be dated between the late 7th century and mid 6th century BC. An inscription from Halicarnassus has the names "Ἁλικαρναͳέ[ω]ν" ("of the Halicarnassians") and

3266-451: Is considered to have possibly been able to read Etruscan, and authored the Tyrrhenika , a (now lost) treatise on Etruscan history ; a separate dedication made by Claudius implies a knowledge from "diverse Etruscan sources", but it is unclear if any were fluent speakers of Etruscan. Plautia Urgulanilla , the emperor's first wife, had Etruscan roots. Etruscan had some influence on Latin, as

3408-483: Is disputed. In Athens, the first attestation is only from the beginning of the 2nd century AD, again in an inscription naming sums of money. Earlier than the attestations in the full function as a numeral are a few instances where sampi was used in Athens as a mark to enumerate sequences of things in a set, along with the 24 other letters of the alphabet, without implying a specific decimal numeral value. For instance, there

3550-404: Is no agreement on what was originally meant by this passage. While Scaliger in the 17th century believed that the scholiast spoke of san as a synonym for sigma , and meant to describe the (modern) shape of sampi (ϡ) as being composed of an inverted lunate sigma and a π, the modern editor D. Holwerda believes the scholiast spoke of the actual M-shaped san and expressed a belief that modern sampi

3692-419: Is not normally rendered with the modern numeral character in print. In specialized epigraphical or palaeographic academic discussion, it is either represented by a glyph [REDACTED] , or by a Latin capital serifed T as a makeshift replacement. As this character has in the past never been supported in normal Greek fonts, there is no typographical tradition for its uppercase and lowercase representation in

3834-420: Is one explanation of the Etruscan "impossible" consonant clusters. Some of the consonants, especially resonants , however, may have been syllabic, accounting for some of the clusters (see below under Consonants ). In other cases, the scribe sometimes inserted a vowel: Greek Hēraklēs became Hercle by syncopation and then was expanded to Herecele . Pallottino regarded this variation in vowels as "instability in

3976-403: Is problematic as it implies a very early date of the emergence of the name, since after the archaic period the original position of san was apparently no longer remembered, and the whole point of the use of sampi in the numeral system is that it stands somewhere else. Yet a different hypothesis interprets san-pi in the sense of "the san that resembles pi ". This is usually taken as referring to

4118-434: Is published in its own fascicle by diverse Etruscan scholars. A cista is a bronze container of circular, ovoid, or more rarely rectangular shape used by women for the storage of sundries. They are ornate, often with feet and lids to which figurines may be attached. The internal and external surfaces bear carefully crafted scenes usually from mythology, usually intaglio, or rarely part intaglio, part cameo . Cistae date from

4260-441: Is still in force and relatively often referred to is "Νόμος ͵ΓϠΝʹ/1911" (i.e. Law Number 3950 of 1911), "Περί της εκ των αυτοκινήτων ποινικής και αστικής ευθύνης" ("About penal and civil responsibility arising from the use of automobiles"). However, in informal practice, the letter sampi is often replaced in such instances by a lowercase or uppercase π. With the advent of modern printing in the western Renaissance , printers adopted

4402-630: Is that Etruscan, and therefore all the languages of the Tyrrhenian family, is neither Indo-European nor Semitic, and may be a Pre–Indo-European and Paleo-European language. At present the major consensus is that Etruscan's only kinship is with the Raetic and Lemnian languages. The idea of a relation between the language of the Minoan Linear A scripts was taken into consideration as the main hypothesis by Michael Ventris before he discovered that, in fact,

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4544-457: Is thought to have died out, Ammianus Marcellinus reports that Julian the Apostate , the last pagan Emperor, apparently had Etruscan soothsayers accompany him on his military campaigns with books on war, lightning and celestial events, but the language of these books is unknown. According to Zosimus , when Rome was faced with destruction by Alaric in 408 AD, the protection of nearby Etruscan towns

4686-499: Is today used properly as a generic cover term for all three extra-alphabetic numeral signs, but was used specifically to refer to 6 (i.e. digamma / stigma ). In some early medieval Latin documents from western Europe, there are descriptions of the contemporary Greek numeral system which imply that sampi was known simply by the Greek word for its numeric value, ἐννεακόσια ( enneakosia , "nine hundred"). Thus, in De loquela per gestum digitorum ,

4828-548: Is uncertain, but it is transliterated as ⟨s⟩ . The Greek script was also adapted in Hellenistic times to write the Iranian language Bactrian , spoken in today's Afghanistan. Bactrian used an additional letter " sho "(Ϸ), shaped like the later (unrelated) Germanic letter "thorn" (Þ), to denote its sh sound ( š , [ʃ] ). This letter, too, has been hypothesized to be a continuation of Greek sampi, and/or san. During

4970-446: Is used. This system was later simplified into one where the thousands operator was marked just as a small stroke to the left of the letter (͵α = 1000). In early stone inscriptions, the shape of sampi, both alphabetic and numeric, is [REDACTED] . Square-topped shapes, with the middle vertical stroke either of equal length with the outer ones [REDACTED] or longer [REDACTED] , are also found in early papyri. This form fits

5112-404: The /ss/ sound only ever occurred in the middle of words and therefore could not have been used in the beginning of its own name. As for the name sampi itself, it is generally agreed today that it is of late origin and not the original name of the character in either its ancient alphabetic or its numeral function. Babiniotis describes it as "medieval", while Jannaris places its emergence "after

5254-656: The Anatolian branch . More recently, Robert S. P. Beekes argued in 2002 that the people later known as the Lydians and Etruscans had originally lived in northwest Anatolia , with a coastline to the Sea of Marmara , whence they were driven by the Phrygians circa 1200 BC, leaving a remnant known in antiquity as the Tyrsenoi . A segment of this people moved south-west to Lydia , becoming known as

5396-532: The Florence–Rome railway , which connects Chiusi to major cities in Italy. 43°01′N 11°57′E  /  43.017°N 11.950°E  / 43.017; 11.950 This Province of Siena location article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Etruscan language Etruscan ( / ɪ ˈ t r ʌ s k ən / ih- TRUSK -ən ) was the language of the Etruscan civilization in

5538-559: The Lydians , while others sailed away to take refuge in Italy, where they became known as Etruscans. This account draws on the well-known story by Herodotus (I, 94) of the Lydian origin of the Etruscans or Tyrrhenians, famously rejected by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (book I), partly on the authority of Xanthus, a Lydian historian, who had no knowledge of the story, and partly on what he judged to be

5680-584: The Middle Ages , and did not recover until the Valdichiana was drained in the 18th century. The lowlands around Chiusi house numerous troves of tombs for this civilization. The Etruscan Museum of Chiusi is one of the most important repositories of Etruscan remains in Italy. Other sights include: Chiusi is served by an interchange of the Autostrada A1 . It is also served by Chiusi-Chianciano Terme station on

5822-591: The Roman Republic of the fourth and third centuries BC in Etruscan contexts. They may bear various short inscriptions concerning the manufacturer or owner or subject matter. The writing may be Latin, Etruscan, or both. Excavations at Praeneste , an Etruscan city which became Roman, turned up about 118 cistae, one of which has been termed "the Praeneste cista" or "the Ficoroni cista" by art analysts, with special reference to

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5964-665: The Tiber , in the Po Valley to the north of Etruria, and in Campania . This range may indicate a maximum Italian homeland where the language was at one time spoken. Outside Italy, inscriptions have been found in Corsica , Gallia Narbonensis , Greece , the Balkans . But by far the greatest concentration is in Italy. In 1998, Helmut Rix put forward the view that Etruscan is related to other extinct languages such as Raetic , spoken in ancient times in

6106-558: The University of Utrecht . Alinei's proposal has been rejected by Etruscan experts such as Giulio M. Facchetti, Finno-Ugric experts such as Angela Marcantonio, and by Hungarian historical linguists such as Bela Brogyanyi. Another proposal, pursued mainly by a few linguists from the former Soviet Union, suggested a relationship with Northeast Caucasian (or Nakh-Daghestanian) languages. None of these theories has been accepted nor enjoys consensus. The Latin script owes its existence to

6248-474: The Villanovan period to about 100 BC, when presumably the cemeteries were abandoned in favor of Roman ones. Some of the major cemeteries are as follows: One example of an early (pre-fifth century BC) votive inscription is on a bucchero oinochoe (wine vase): ṃiṇi mulvaṇịce venalia ṡlarinaṡ. en mipi kapi ṃi(r) ṇuṇai = "Venalia Ṡlarinaṡ gave me. Do not touch me (?), I (am) nunai (an offering?)." This seems to be

6390-490: The eastern Alps , and Lemnian , to which other scholars added Camunic language , spoken in the Central Alps . Rix's Tyrsenian language family has gained widespread acceptance among scholars, being confirmed by Stefan Schumacher, Norbert Oettinger, Carlo De Simone , and Simona Marchesini. Common features between Etruscan, Raetic, and Lemnian have been found in morphology , phonology , and syntax , but only

6532-509: The minuscule version of the numeral sign, ϡ, for their fonts. The typographic realization of Sampi has varied widely throughout its history in print, and a large range of different shapes can still be found in current electronic typesetting. Commonly used forms range from small, π-like shapes ( [REDACTED] ) to shapes with large swash curves ( [REDACTED] ), while the stems can be almost upright ( [REDACTED] ) or almost horizontal ( [REDACTED] ). More rarely, one can find shapes with

6674-531: The "Aramaic" spoken by Noah and his descendants, founders of the Etruscan city Viterbo . The 19th century saw numerous attempts to reclassify Etruscan. Ideas of Semitic origins found supporters until this time. In 1858, the last attempt was made by Johann Gustav Stickel , Jena University in his Das Etruskische durch Erklärung von Inschriften und Namen als semitische Sprache erwiesen . A reviewer concluded that Stickel brought forward every possible argument which would speak for that hypothesis, but he proved

6816-443: The 2nd century BC, still alive in the first century BC, and surviving in at least one location in the beginning of the first century AD; however, the replacement of Etruscan by Latin likely occurred earlier in southern regions closer to Rome. In southern Etruria , the first Etruscan site to be Latinized was Veii , when it was destroyed and repopulated by Romans in 396 BC. Caere ( Cerveteri ), another southern Etruscan town on

6958-420: The 3rd century BC. Jeffery states that the system as a whole can be traced much further back, into the 6th century BC. An early, though isolated, instance of apparent use of alphabetic Milesian numerals in Athens occurs on a stone inscribed with several columns of two-digit numerals, of unknown meaning, dated from the middle of the 5th century BC. While the emergence of the system as a whole has thus been given

7100-467: The 4th-century AD Latin writer Maurus Servius Honoratus , a fourth set of Etruscan books existed, dealing with animal gods, but it is unlikely that any scholar living in that era could have read Etruscan. However, only one book (as opposed to inscription), the Liber Linteus , survived, and only because the linen on which it was written was used as mummy wrappings. By 30 BC, Livy noted that Etruscan

7242-581: The British scholar Isaac Taylor brought up the idea of a genetic relationship between Etruscan and Hungarian , of which also Jules Martha would approve in his exhaustive study La langue étrusque (1913). In 1911, the French orientalist Baron Carra de Vaux suggested a connection between Etruscan and the Altaic languages . The Hungarian connection was revived by Mario Alinei , emeritus professor of Italian languages at

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7384-520: The Carian letter 25 " [REDACTED] ", transcribed as ś . This would fit in with the "plausible, but not provable" hypothesis that the root contained in the Carian-Greek names spelled with sampi, "Πανυασσις" and "Οασσασσις", is identical with a root * uś-/waś- identified elsewhere in Carian, which contains the Carian ś sound spelled with [REDACTED] . Adiego follows this with the hypothesis that both

7526-437: The Carian letter and sampi could ultimately go back to Greek Ζ ( [REDACTED] ). Like the san–sampi hypothesis, the Carian hypothesis remains an open and controversial issue, especially since the knowledge of Carian itself is still fragmentary and developing. While the origin of sampi continues to be debated, the identity between the alphabetic Ionian sampi ( /ss/ ) and the numeral for 900 has rarely been in doubt, although in

7668-506: The Cyrillic "thousands sign" ҂ . In Armenian , the letter Ջ ( ǰ ) stands for 900, while Ք ( kʿ ), similar in shape to the Coptic sign, stands for 9000. Together with the other elements of the Greek numeral system, sampi is occasionally still used in Greek today. However, since the system is typically used only to enumerate items in relatively small sets, such as the chapters of a book or

7810-683: The Early Iron Age Latins , and that the Etruscan language, and therefore the other languages of the Tyrrhenian family, may be a surviving language of the ones that were widespread in Europe from at least the Neolithic period before the arrival of the Indo-European languages, as already argued by German geneticist Johannes Krause who concluded that it is likely that the Etruscan language (as well as Basque , Paleo-Sardinian and Minoan ) "developed on

7952-498: The Etruscan alphabet, which was adapted for Latin in the form of the Old Italic script . The Etruscan alphabet employs a Euboean variant of the Greek alphabet using the letter digamma and was in all probability transmitted through Pithecusae and Cumae , two Euboean settlements in southern Italy. This system is ultimately derived from West Semitic scripts . The Etruscans recognized

8094-545: The Etruscan apogee from the second half of the sixth to the first centuries BC. The two main theories of manufacture are native Etruscan and Greek. The materials are mainly dark red carnelian , with agate and sard entering usage from the third to the first centuries BC, along with purely gold finger rings with a hollow engraved bezel setting . The engravings, mainly cameo, but sometimes intaglio, depict scarabs at first and then scenes from Greek mythology, often with heroic personages called out in Etruscan. The gold setting of

8236-462: The Etruscan language found its modern origin in a book by a Renaissance Dominican friar, Annio da Viterbo , a cabalist and orientalist now remembered mainly for literary forgeries. In 1498, Annio published his antiquarian miscellany titled Antiquitatum variarum (in 17 volumes) where he put together a theory in which both the Hebrew and Etruscan languages were said to originate from a single source,

8378-490: The Etruscans preserved the Greek alphabet. The Etruscan alphabet contains letters that have since been dropped from the Greek alphabet, such as the digamma , sampi and qoppa . Grammatically, the language is agglutinating , with nouns and verbs showing suffixed inflectional endings and some gradation of vowels . Nouns show five cases , singular and plural numbers , with a gender distinction between animate and inanimate in pronouns . Etruscan appears to have had

8520-560: The Gauls sacked the city instead and settled in the region. In 540 AD it was occupied by the Ostrogoths and was later seat of a Lombard duchy. From the 11th century it was under the rule of the local bishop, and was later contended for by Orvieto and, from 1231, Siena , belonging to the latter until 1556, when it was annexed to the Grand duchy of Tuscany . The region was devastated by malaria in

8662-608: The Greeks , and many of the few surviving Etruscan-language artifacts are of votive or religious significance. Etruscan was written in an alphabet derived from the Greek alphabet ; this alphabet was the source of the Latin alphabet , as well as other alphabets in Italy and probably beyond. The Etruscan language is also believed to be the source of certain important cultural words of Western Europe such as military and person , which do not have obvious Indo-European roots. Etruscan literacy

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8804-420: The Greeks regarded it as being composed of an inverted sigma , which is called ἀντίσιγμα , and from πῖ " ("Graeci putarunt ex inverso sigma, quod ἀντίσιγμα vocatur, et ex πῖ compositum esse"). The etymology of sampi has given rise to much speculation. The only element all authors agree on is that the -pi refers to the letter π, but about the rest accounts differ depending on each author's stance on

8946-529: The Hebrew tsade. In Cyrillic , in contrast, the character Ѧ ( small yus , /ẽ/ ) was used initially, being the one among the native Cyrillic letters that resembled sampi most closely in shape. However, the letter Ц ( tse ), the equivalent of the Glagolitic sign, took its place soon later. It has been proposed that sampi was retained in its alternative function of denoting multiplication by thousand, and became

9088-515: The Italian peninsula. Scholars such as Norbert Oettinger, Michel Gras and Carlo De Simone think that Lemnian is the testimony of an Etruscan commercial settlement on the island that took place before 700 BC, not related to the Sea Peoples. A 2021 archeogenetic analysis of Etruscan individuals, who lived between 800 BC and 1 BC, concluded that the Etruscans were autochthonous and genetically similar to

9230-641: The Latin author Aulus Gellius mentions Etruscan alongside the Gaulish language in an anecdote. Freeman notes that although Gaulish was clearly still alive during Gellius' time, his testimony may not indicate that Etruscan was still alive because the phrase could indicate a meaning of the sort of "it's all Greek (incomprehensible) to me". At the time of its extinction, only a few educated Romans with antiquarian interests, such as Marcus Terentius Varro , could read Etruscan. The Roman emperor Claudius (10 BC – AD 54)

9372-560: The Latins, bringing the alphabet from Anatolia. For historical, archaeological, genetic, and linguistic reasons, a relationship between Etruscan and the Indo-European Anatolian languages (Lydian or Luwian) and the idea that the Etruscans initially colonized the Latins, bringing the alphabet from Anatolia, have not been accepted, since the account by Herodotus is no longer considered reliable. The interest in Etruscan antiquities and

9514-465: The Roman era. In the late Roman period, the arrow-shaped or rounded forms are often written with a loop connecting the two lines at the right, leading to the "ace-of-spades" form [REDACTED] , or to [REDACTED] . These forms, in turn, occasionally have another decorative stroke added on the left ( [REDACTED] ). It can be found attached in several different ways, from the top ( [REDACTED] ) or

9656-527: The absence of a proper name, there are indications that various generic terms were used in Byzantine times to refer to the sign. Thus, the 15th-century Greek mathematician Nikolaos Rabdas referred to the three numerals for 6, 90 and 900 as "τὸ ἐπίσημον", "τὸ ἀνώνυμον σημεῖον" ("the nameless sign", i.e. koppa ), and "ὁ καλούμενος χαρακτήρ" ("the so-called charaktir ", i.e. just "the character"), respectively. The term "ἐπίσημον" ( episēmon , literally "outstanding")

9798-458: The alphabetic numeral system , which was probably invented in Miletus and is therefore sometimes called the "Milesian" system, there are 27 numeral signs: the first nine letters of the alphabet, from alpha (A) to theta (Θ) stand for the digits 1–9; the next nine, beginning with iota (Ι), stand for the multiples of ten (10, 20, etc. up to 90); and the last nine, beginning with rho (Ρ), stand for

9940-518: The ancient region of Etruria , in Etruria Padana and Etruria Campana in what is now Italy . Etruscan influenced Latin but was eventually completely superseded by it. The Etruscans left around 13,000 inscriptions that have been found so far, only a small minority of which are of significant length; some bilingual inscriptions with texts also in Latin, Greek , or Phoenician ; and a few dozen purported loanwords . Attested from 700 BC to AD 50,

10082-413: The anonymous scholiast adds a digression that appears to be meant to further explain the name and function of "san", drawing some kind of link between it and the numeral sign of 900. However, what exactly was meant here is obscure now, because the text was evidently corrupted during transmission and the actual symbols cited in it were probably exchanged. The following is the passage in the reading provided by

10224-455: The assumption is the systematicity in the development of the letter inventory: there were three archaic letters that dropped out of use in alphabetic writing ( digamma/wau , koppa , and san), and three extra-alphabetic letters were adopted for the Milesian numeral system, two of them obviously identical with the archaic digamma and koppa; hence, it is easy to assume that the third in the set had

10366-408: The bearer to hospitality when travelling" ). Sampi Sampi (modern: ϡ; ancient shapes: [REDACTED] , [REDACTED] ) is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet . It was used as an addition to the classical 24-letter alphabet in some eastern Ionic dialects of ancient Greek in the 6th and 5th centuries BC, to denote some type of a sibilant sound, probably [ss] or [ts] , and

10508-671: The bezel bears a border design, such as cabling. Etruscan-minted coins can be dated between the 5th and 3rd centuries BC. Use of the 'Chalcidian' standard, based on the silver unit of 5.8 grams, indicates that this custom, like the alphabet, came from Greece. Roman coinage later supplanted Etruscan, but the basic Roman coin, the sesterce , is believed to have been based on the 2.5-denomination Etruscan coin. Etruscan coins have turned up in caches or individually in tombs and in excavations seemingly at random, and concentrated, of course, in Etruria . Etruscan coins were in gold, silver, and bronze,

10650-417: The birthplace of the numeral system and thus of the later numeric use of sampi. It has been suggested that there may be an isolated example of the use of alphabetic sampi in Athens. In a famous painted black figure amphora from c.615 BC, known as the " Nessos amphora ", the inscribed name of the eponymous centaur Nessus is rendered in the irregular spelling "ΝΕΤΟΣ" (Νέτος) . The expected regular form of

10792-450: The bottom ( [REDACTED] ). From these shapes, finally, the modern form of sampi emerges, beginning in the 9th century, with the two straight lines becoming more or less parallel ( [REDACTED] , [REDACTED] , [REDACTED] ). In medieval western manuscripts describing the Greek alphabet, the arrowhead form is sometimes rendered as [REDACTED] . Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, many authors have assumed that sampi

10934-519: The classification of Etruscan remained problematic for historical linguists, though it was almost universally agreed upon that Etruscan was a language unlike any other in Europe. Before it gained currency as one of the Tyrrhenian languages, Etruscan was commonly treated as a language isolate . Over the centuries many hypotheses on the Etruscan language have been developed, most of which have not been accepted or have been considered highly speculative since they were published. The major consensus among scholars

11076-520: The coast 45 kilometers from Rome, appears to have shifted to Latin in the late 2nd century BC. In Tarquinia and Vulci , Latin inscriptions coexisted with Etruscan inscriptions in wall paintings and grave markers for centuries, from the 3rd century BC until the early 1st century BC, after which Etruscan is replaced by the exclusive use of Latin. In northern Etruria, Etruscan inscriptions continue after they disappear in southern Etruria. At Clusium ( Chiusi ), tomb markings show mixed Latin and Etruscan in

11218-561: The continent in the course of the Neolithic Revolution ". The lack of recent Anatolian-related admixture and Iranian-related ancestry among the Etruscans, who genetically joined firmly to the European cluster, might also suggest that the presence of a handful of inscriptions found at Lemnos, in a language related to Etruscan and Raetic, "could represent population movements departing from the Italian peninsula". For many hundreds of years

11360-418: The data base on which it is founded. A part of the discussion about the identity of san and sampi has revolved around a difficult and probably corrupted piece of philological commentary by an anonymous scholiast , which has been debated ever since Joseph Justus Scaliger drew attention to it in the mid-17th century. Scaliger's discussion also contains the first known attestation of the name "san pi" (sampi) in

11502-455: The decision of Unicode to encode separate character codepoints for uppercase and lowercase sampi. Several different designs are currently found. Older versions of the Unicode charts showed a glyph with a crooked and thicker lower stem ( [REDACTED] ). While this form has been adopted in some modern fonts, it has been replaced in more recent versions of Unicode with a simpler glyph, similar to

11644-504: The different languages, laws, and religions of the two peoples. In 2006, Frederik Woudhuizen went further on Herodotus' traces, suggesting that Etruscan belongs to the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European family, specifically to Luwian . Woudhuizen revived a conjecture to the effect that the Tyrsenians came from Anatolia , including Lydia , whence they were driven by the Cimmerians in

11786-409: The earliest attested verbal description of the shape of sampi as a numeral sign in the ancient literature, which occurs in a remark in the works of the 2nd-century AD physician Galen . Commenting on the use of certain obscure abbreviations found in earlier manuscripts of Hippocrates , Galen says that one of them "looks like the way some people write the sign for 900", and describes this as "the shape of

11928-412: The early Iron Age, 750–675 BC, leaving some colonists on Lemnos . He makes a number of comparisons of Etruscan to Luwian and asserts that Etruscan is modified Luwian. He accounts for the non-Luwian features as a Mysian influence: "deviations from Luwian [...] may plausibly be ascribed to the dialect of the indigenous population of Mysia." According to Woudhuizen, the Etruscans were initially colonizing

12070-399: The esteemed reputation of Etruscan soothsayers . An episode where lightning struck an inscription with the name Caesar, turning it into Aesar, was interpreted to have been a premonition of the deification of Caesar because of the resemblance to Etruscan aisar , meaning 'gods', although this indicates knowledge of a single word and not the language. Centuries later and long after Etruscan

12212-427: The evidence, came to the conclusion that it was a plausible hypothesis but unprovable. The discussion has continued until the present, while a steady trickle of new archaeological discoveries regarding the relative dating of the various events involved (i.e. the original emergence of the alphabet, the loss of archaic san, the emergence of alphabetic sampi, and the emergence of the numeral system) have continued to affect

12354-484: The extra-alphabetic numerals would have been "παράσημον" ( parasēmon , lit. "extra sign"). A redactor could have written the consonant letters "π-σ-μ" of "παράσημον" over the letters "χ-κτ-ρ" of "χαρακτήρ", as both words happen to share their remaining intermediate letters. The result, mixed together from letters of both words, could have been misread in the next step as "παρακυησμ", and hence, "παρακύϊσμα". An entirely new proposal has been made by A. Willi, who suggests that

12496-399: The first half of the 1st century BC, with cases where two subsequent generations are inscribed in Latin and then the third, youngest generation, surprisingly, is transcribed in Etruscan. At Perugia , monolingual monumental inscriptions in Etruscan are still seen in the first half of the 1st century BC, while the period of bilingual inscriptions appears to have stretched from the 3rd century to

12638-415: The first millennium AD, several neighboring languages whose alphabets were wholly or partly derived from the Greek adopted the structure of the Greek numeral system, and with it, some version or local replacement of sampi. In Coptic , the sign "Ⳁ" ( [REDACTED] , which has been described as "the Greek [REDACTED] with a Ρ above" ), was used for 900. Its numeric role was subsequently taken over by

12780-459: The flat side. A higher percentage of tin in the mirror improved its ability to reflect. The other side was convex and featured intaglio or cameo scenes from mythology. The piece was generally ornate. About 2,300 specula are known from collections all over the world. As they were popular plunderables, the provenance of only a minority is known. An estimated time window is 530–100 BC. Most probably came from tombs. Many bear inscriptions naming

12922-553: The generic Latin title Etrusca Disciplina . The Libri Haruspicini dealt with divination by reading entrails from a sacrificed animal, while the Libri Fulgurales expounded the art of divination by observing lightning . A third set, the Libri Rituales , might have provided a key to Etruscan civilization: its wider scope embraced Etruscan standards of social and political life, as well as ritual practices. According to

13064-507: The gold and silver usually having been struck on one side only. The coins often bore a denomination, sometimes a minting authority name, and a cameo motif. Gold denominations were in units of silver; silver, in units of bronze. Full or abbreviated names are mainly Pupluna ( Populonia ), Vatl or Veltuna ( Vetulonia ), Velathri ( Volaterrae ), Velzu or Velznani (Volsinii) and Cha for Chamars ( Camars ). Insignia are mainly heads of mythological characters or depictions of mythological beasts arranged in

13206-431: The hundreds (100 – 900). For this purpose, the 24 letters of the standard classical Greek alphabet were used with the addition of three archaic or local letters: digamma / wau (Ϝ, [REDACTED] , originally denoting the sound /w/ ) for "6", koppa (Ϙ, originally denoting the sound /k/ ) for "90", and sampi for "900". While digamma and koppa were retained in their original alphabetic positions inherited from Phoenician,

13348-520: The language behind the later Linear B script was Mycenean , a Greek dialect . It has been proposed to possibly be part of a wider Paleo-European "Aegean" language family, which would also include Minoan , Eteocretan (possibly descended from Minoan) and Eteocypriot . This has been proposed by Giulio Mauro Facchetti, a researcher who has dealt with both Etruscan and Minoan, and supported by S. Yatsemirsky, referring to some similarities between Etruscan and Lemnian on one hand, and Minoan and Eteocretan on

13490-653: The language disappeared. In addition to being the source of the Roman and early Oscan and Umbrian alphabets, it has been suggested that it passed northward into Veneto and from there through Raetia into the Germanic lands, where it became the Elder Futhark alphabet, the oldest form of the runes . The corpus of Etruscan inscriptions is edited in the Corpus Inscriptionum Etruscarum (CIE) and Thesaurus Linguae Etruscae (TLE). The Pyrgi Tablets are

13632-514: The late 1st century BC. The isolated last bilinguals are found at three northern sites. Inscriptions in Arezzo include one dated to 40 BC followed by two with slightly later dates, while in Volterra there is one dated to just after 40 BC and a final one dated to 10–20 AD; coins with written Etruscan near Saena have also been dated to 15 BC. Freeman notes that in rural areas the language may have survived

13774-508: The latter in a number of local alphabets until the 5th century BC. It is generally agreed to be derived from Phoenician tsade . The hypothetical identification between san and sampi is based on a number of considerations. One is the similarity of the sounds represented by both. San represented either simple [s] or some other, divergent phonetic realization of the common Greek /s/ phoneme. Suggestions for its original sound value have included [ts] , [z] , and [ʃ] . The second reason for

13916-453: The letter Π with a vertical line in the middle" (" ὁ τοῦ π γραμμάτος χαρακτὴρ ἔχων ὀρθίαν μέσην γραμμὴν, ὡς ἔνιοι γράφουσι τῶν ἐννεακοσίων χαρακτῆρα "). From the time of the earliest papyri, the square-topped forms of handwritten sampi alternate with variants where the top is rounded ( [REDACTED] , [REDACTED] ) or pointed ( [REDACTED] , [REDACTED] ). The rounded form [REDACTED] also occurs in stone inscriptions in

14058-406: The letter κ[?], just as "Samphoras" were those branded with σ[?]. For the "σ"[?] written like [or: together with?] ϻ[?] was called san[?]. These brandings can still be found on horses today. And from a "κ"[?] joined together with "σ"[?], one can see how the number sign for 900[?] is derived, which is preceded by koppa [?]. This is also taught by the grammarians, and the "90" is called "koppa". There

14200-491: The link between alphabetic and numeral sampi is universally accepted. Despite all uncertainties, authors who subscribe to the hypothesis of a historical link between ancient san and sampi also often continue to use the name san for the latter. Benedict Einarson hypothesizes that it was in fact called * ssan , with the special quality of the sibilant sound it had as Ionian [REDACTED] . This opinion has been rejected as phonologically impossible by Soldati, who points out that

14342-498: The lower end curving outwards, forming an "s" curve ( [REDACTED] ). In its modern use as a numeral (as with the other two episema , stigma and koppa) no difference is normally made in print between an upper case and lower case form; the same character is typically used in both environments. However, occasionally special typographic variants adapted to an upper case style have also been employed in print. The issue of designing such uppercase variants has become more prominent since

14484-409: The lowercase forms ( [REDACTED] ). Many fonts designed for scholarly use have adopted an upright triangular shape with straight lines and serifs ( [REDACTED] ), as proposed by the typographer Yannis Haralambous. Other versions include large curved shapes ( [REDACTED] ), or an upright large π-like glyph with a long descending curve ( [REDACTED] ). The epigraphic ancient Ionian sampi

14626-402: The main source of Etruscan portables, provenance unknown, in collections throughout the world. Their incalculable value has created a brisk black market in Etruscan objets d'art – and equally brisk law enforcement effort, as it is illegal to remove any objects from Etruscan tombs without authorization from the Italian government. The magnitude of the task involved in cataloguing them means that

14768-445: The modern ϡ shape, presupposing that the name san alone had persisted from antiquity until the time the sign took that modern shape. None of these hypotheses has wide support today. The most commonly accepted explanation of the name today is that san pi ( σὰν πῖ ) simply means "like a pi ", where the word san is unrelated to any letter name but simply the modern Greek preposition σαν ("like", from ancient Greek ὡς ἂν ). In

14910-425: The name angma referred to the [ŋ] sound because that sound happened to occur in the name itself. However, Ion, in speaking of a "25th letter of the alphabet", meant not just a different pronunciation of some other letters but an actual written letter in its own right, namely sampi. According to Willi's hypothesis, the name angma would have been derived from the verbal root * ank- , "to bend, curve", and referred to

15052-438: The name would have been either Attic " Νέττος " – with a double "τ" – or Ionic " Νέσσος ". Traces of corrections that are still visible underneath the painted "Τ" have led to the conjecture that the painter originally wrote Νέͳος , with sampi for the σσ/ττ sound. A letter similar to Ionian sampi, but of unknown historical relation with it, existed in the highly deviant local dialect of Pamphylia in southern Asia Minor. It

15194-506: The names of rulers in a dynasty, the signs for the higher tens and hundreds, including sampi, are much less frequently found in practice than the lower letters for 1 to 10. One of the few domains where higher numbers including thousands and hundreds are still expressed in the old system in Greece with some regularity is the field of law, because until 1914 laws were numbered in this way. For instance, one law which happens to have sampi in its name and

15336-502: The native character Ϣ ( shei , /ʃ/ ), which is related to the Semitic tsade (and thus, ultimately, cognate with Greek san as well). The Gothic alphabet adopted sampi in its Roman era form of an upwards-pointing arrow ( [REDACTED] , 𐍊) In the Slavic writing system Glagolitic , the letter [REDACTED] ( tse , /ts/ ) was used for 900. It too may have been derived from a form of

15478-462: The older literature it was sometimes mentioned only tentatively, An isolated position was expressed in the early 20th century by Jannaris, who – without mentioning the alphabetic use of Ionian /ss/ – proposed that the shape of numeric sampi was derived from a juxtaposition of three "T"s, i.e. 3×300=900. (He also rejected the historical identity of the other two numerals, stigma (6) and koppa (90), with their apparent alphabetic predecessors.) Today,

15620-489: The one manufactured by Novios Plutius and given by Dindia Macolnia to her daughter, as the archaic Latin inscription says. All of them are more accurately termed "the Praenestine cistae". Among the most plunderable portables from the Etruscan tombs of Etruria are the finely engraved gemstones set in patterned gold to form circular or ovoid pieces intended to go on finger rings. Around one centimeter in size, they are dated to

15762-403: The opposite of what he had attempted to do. In 1861, Robert Ellis proposed that Etruscan was related to Armenian . Exactly 100 years later, a relationship with Albanian was to be advanced by Zecharia Mayani , a theory regarded today as disproven and discredited. Several theories from the late 19th and early 20th centuries connected Etruscan to Uralic or even Altaic languages . In 1874,

15904-509: The original name of the letter in ancient Greek was angma ( ἄγμα ). This proposal is based on a passage in a Latin grammarian, Varro , who uses this name for what he calls a "25th letter" of the alphabet. Varro himself is clearly not referring to sampi, but is using angma to refer to the ng sound [ ŋ ] in words like angelus . However, Varro ascribes the use of the name angma to an ancient Ionian Greek author, Ion of Chios . Willi conjectures that Varro misunderstood Ion, believing

16046-481: The other hand, many inscriptions are highly abbreviated and often casually formed, so the identification of individual letters is sometimes difficult. Spelling might vary from city to city, probably reflecting differences of pronunciation. Speech featured a heavy stress on the first syllable of a word, causing syncopation by weakening of the remaining vowels, which then were not represented in writing: Alcsntre for Alexandros , Rasna for Rasena . This speech habit

16188-427: The other. It has also been proposed that this language family is related to the pre-Indo-European languages of Anatolia, based upon place name analysis. The relationship between Etruscan and Minoan, and hypothetical unattested pre-Indo-European languages of Anatolia, is considered unfounded. Some have suggested that Tyrsenian languages may yet be distantly related to early Indo-European languages , such as those of

16330-471: The personal names "Ὀαͳαͳιος" and "Π[α]νυάͳιος". All of these names appear to be of non-Greek, local origin, i.e. Carian . On a late 6th century bronze plate from Miletus dedicated to the sanctuary of Athena at Assesos , the spelling " τῇ Ἀθηνάηι τῇ Ἀͳησίηι " ("to Athena of Assessos") has been identified. This is currently the first known instance of alphabetic sampi in Miletus itself, commonly assumed to be

16472-655: The persons depicted in the scenes, so they are often called picture bilinguals. In 1979, Massimo Pallottino , then president of the Istituto di Studi Etruschi ed Italici initiated the Committee of the Corpus Speculorum Etruscanorum , which resolved to publish all the specula and set editorial standards for doing so. Since then, the committee has grown, acquiring local committees and representatives from most institutions owning Etruscan mirror collections. Each collection

16614-476: The quality of vowels" and accounted for the second phase (e.g. Herecele ) as " vowel harmony , i.e., of the assimilation of vowels in neighboring syllables". The writing system had two historical phases: the archaic from the seventh to fifth centuries BC, which used the early Greek alphabet, and the later from the fourth to first centuries BC, which modified some of the letters. In the later period, syncopation increased. The alphabet went on in modified form after

16756-414: The question of the historical identity between sampi and san. According to the original suggestion by Scaliger, san-pi means "written like a san and a pi together". Here, "san" refers not to the archaic letter san (i.e. Ϻ) itself, but to "san" as a mere synonym of "sigma", referring to the outer curve of the modern ϡ as resembling an inverted lunate sigma . This reading is problematic because it fits

16898-477: The region of Mysia ). In addition, in the city of Pontic Mesembria , on the Black Sea coast of Thrace , it was used on coins, which were marked with the abbreviation of the city's name, spelled " ΜΕͲΑ ". Sampi occurs in positions where other dialects, including written Ionic , normally have double sigma ( σσ ), i.e. a long /ss/ sound. Some other dialects, particularly Attic Greek , have ττ (long /tt/ ) in

17040-521: The relation of Etruscan to other languages has been a source of long-running speculation and study, with it mostly being referred to as one of the Tyrsenian languages , at times as an isolate , and a number of other less well-known hypotheses. The consensus among linguists and Etruscologists is that Etruscan was a Pre-Indo-European and Paleo-European language , closely related to the Raetic language that

17182-414: The same history. Objections to this account have been related to the fact that sampi did not assume the same position san had had, and to the lack of any obvious relation between the shapes of the two letters and the lack of any intermediate forms linking the two uses. Among older authorities, Gardthausen and Thompson took the identity between san and sampi for granted. Foat, in a skeptical reassessment of

17324-453: The same words (e.g. θάλασσα vs. θάλαττα 'sea', or τέσσαρες vs. τέτταρες 'four'). The sounds in question are all reflexes of the proto-Greek consonant clusters *[kj], *[kʰj], *[tj], *[tʰj], or *[tw] . It is therefore believed that the local letter sampi was used to denote some kind of intermediate sound during the phonetic change from the earlier plosive clusters towards the later /s/ sound, possibly an affricate /ts/ , forming

17466-441: The shape only of the modern (late Byzantine) sampi but presupposes active use of an archaic nomenclature that had long since lost currency by the time that shape emerged. According to a second hypothesis, san-pi would originally have meant "the san that stands next to pi in the alphabet". This proposal thus presupposes the historical identity between sampi and ancient san (Ϻ), which indeed stood behind Π. However, this account too

17608-537: The style of a normal text font. Since its inclusion in the Unicode character encoding standard, experimental typographical stylizations of a lowercase textual Sampi have been developed. The Unicode reference glyph for "small letter archaic sampi", according to an original draft, was to have looked like the stem of a small τ with a square top at x height , but was changed after consultation with Greek typesetting experts. The glyph shown in current official code charts stands on

17750-472: The tablets was the word for 'three', ci . According to Rix and his collaborators, only two unified (though fragmentary) long texts are available in Etruscan: Some additional longer texts are: The main material repository of Etruscan civilization , from the modern perspective, is its tombs, all other public and private buildings having been dismantled and the stone reused centuries ago. The tombs are

17892-457: The third archaic Phoenician character, san /tsade (Ϻ, denoting an [s] sound), was not used in this way. Instead, sampi was chosen, and added at the end of the system, after omega (800). From this, it has been concluded that the system must have been invented at a time and place when digamma and koppa were still either in use or at least still remembered as parts of the alphabetic sequence, whereas san had either already been forgotten, or at least

18034-567: The thirteenth century". However, the precise time of its emergence in Greek is not documented. The name is already attested in manuscript copies of an Old Church Slavonic text describing the development of the alphabet, the treatise On Letters ascribed to the 9th-century monk Hrabar , which was written first in Glagolitic and later transmitted in the Cyrillic script . In one medieval Cyrillic group of manuscripts of this text, probably going back to

18176-413: The total number of tombs is unknown. They are of many types. Especially plentiful are the hypogeal or "underground" chambers or system of chambers cut into tuff and covered by a tumulus . The interior of these tombs represents a habitation of the living stocked with furniture and favorite objects. The walls may display painted murals , the predecessor of wallpaper. Tombs identified as Etruscan date from

18318-515: The vasirwotas, son of Lwaramus, dedicated this to the Queen of Perge"). The same title "Queen of Perge", the local title for the goddess Artemis , is found on coin legends: Ͷανά [REDACTED] ας Πρειιας . As Ͷανά [REDACTED] α is known to be the local feminine form of the archaic Greek noun ἄναξ/ϝάναξ , i.e. (w)anax ("king"), it is believed that the [REDACTED] letter stood for some type of sibilant reflecting Proto-Greek */ktj/ . In

18460-407: The western literature, and the first attempt at explaining it. The passage in question is a scholion on two rare words occurring in the comedies of Aristophanes , koppatias ( κοππατίας ) and samphoras ( σαμφόρας ). Both were names for certain breeds of horses, and both were evidently named after the letter used as a branding mark on each: "koppa" and "san" respectively. After explaining this,

18602-401: The word samphoras (see above). Some modern authors, taking Scaliger's reference as the first known use and unaware of earlier attestations, have claimed that the name itself only originated in the 17th century and/or that Scaliger himself invented it. A related term was used shortly after Scaliger by the French author Montfaucon, who called the sign " ἀντίσιγμα πῖ " ( antisigma-pi ), "because

18744-490: Was abandoned when the sound disappeared from Greek. It later remained in use as a numeral symbol for 900 in the alphabetic (" Milesian ") system of Greek numerals . Its modern shape, which resembles a π inclining to the right with a longish curved cross-stroke, developed during its use as a numeric symbol in minuscule handwriting of the Byzantine era. Its current name, sampi , originally probably meant " san pi ", i.e. "like

18886-541: Was attributed to Etruscan pagan priests who claimed to have summoned a raging thunderstorm, and they offered their services "in the ancestral manner" to Rome as well, but the devout Christians of Rome refused the offer, preferring death to help by pagans. Freeman notes that these events may indicate that a limited theological knowledge of Etruscan may have survived among the priestly caste much longer. One 19th-century writer argued in 1892 that Etruscan deities retained an influence on early modern Tuscan folklore. Around 180 AD,

19028-453: Was essentially a historical continuation of the archaic letter san ( Ϻ ), the M-shaped alternative of sigma (Σ) that formed part of the Greek alphabet when it was originally adopted from Phoenician . Archaic san stood in an alphabetic position between pi (Π) and koppa (Ϙ). It dropped out of use in favour of sigma in most dialects by the 7th century BC, but was retained in place of

19170-408: Was from right to left except in archaic inscriptions, which occasionally used boustrophedon . An example found at Cerveteri used left to right. In the earliest inscriptions, the words are continuous. From the 6th century BC, they are separated by a dot or a colon, which might also be used to separate syllables. Writing was phonetic; the letters represented the sounds and not conventional spellings. On

19312-478: Was meant to evoke the oblique, reclining shape of the character, Soldati suggests it was meant to evoke its status as an irregular, out-of-place addition ("un'utile superfetazione"). Einarson, however, argues that the word is probably the product of textual corruption during transmission in the Byzantine period. He suggests that the original reading was similar to that used by Rabdas, "ὁ καλούμενος χαρακτήρ" ("the so-called character"). Another contemporary cover term for

19454-426: Was no longer remembered with its original alphabetic position. In the latter case, according to a much debated view, sampi itself may in fact have been regarded as being san, but with a new position in the alphabet. The dating of the emergence of this system, and with it of numeric sampi, has been the object of much discussion. At the end of the 19th century, authors such as Thompson placed its full development only in

19596-420: Was once widely taught to Roman boys, but had since become replaced by the teaching of Greek, while Varro noted that theatrical works had once been composed in Etruscan. The date of extinction for Etruscan is held by scholarship to have been either in the late first century BC, or the early first century AD. Freeman's analysis of inscriptional evidence would appear to imply that Etruscan was still flourishing in

19738-412: Was related to it. An alternative hypothesis to that of the historical identity between san and sampi is that Ionian sampi may have been a loan from the neighbouring Anatolian language Carian , which formed the local substrate in the Ionian colonies of Asia Minor. This hypothesis is mentioned by Jeffery and has been supported more recently by Genzardi Brixhe suggested that sampi could be related to

19880-429: Was shaped like [REDACTED] . According to Brixhe it probably stood for the sounds /s/ , /ss/ , or /ps/ . It is found in a few inscriptions in the cities of Aspendos and Perge as well as on local coins. For instance, an inscription from Perge dated to around 400 BC reads: Ͷανά [REDACTED] αι Πρειίαι Κλεμύτας Λϝαράμυ Ͷασιρϝο̄τας ἀνέθε̄κε (= "Vanássāi Preiíāi Klemútas Lwarámu Vasirwōtas anéthēke" , "Klemutas

20022-459: Was spoken in the Alps , and to the Lemnian language , attested in a few inscriptions on Lemnos . The Etruscan alphabet is similar to the Greek one. Therefore, linguists have been able to read the inscriptions in the sense of knowing roughly how they would have been pronounced, but have not yet understood their meaning. A comparison between the Etruscan and Greek alphabets reveals how accurately

20164-479: Was widespread over the Mediterranean shores, as evidenced by about 13,000 inscriptions (dedications, epitaphs , etc.), most fairly short, but some of considerable length. They date from about 700 BC. The Etruscans had a rich literature, as noted by Latin authors. Livy and Cicero were both aware that highly specialized Etruscan religious rites were codified in several sets of books written in Etruscan under

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