Katherine wasn’t the only person thinking about Etruscan around Christmas (see her post below). On Boxing Day I went to the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia in Rome to see their fantastic collection of Etruscan finds. They’ve got some spectacular stuff including the sarcophagus of the spouses (of which there’s a picture in Katherine’s post), and three gold tablets from Pyrgi which are written in Etruscan and Punic (pictured below). In real life they’re surprisingly small, but just as golden as they look here (Etruscan on the right and left, Punic in the middle). It’s thanks to these tablets – which aren’t direct translations of each other, but contain similar material – that we know the Etruscan word for ‘three’, which is ci. The museum has a particularly good section on writing and the alphabet.
What, you may be asking, does all this have to do with mirrors?…
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Contemplations 