Revisiting TLE 193 and 'The City of Dirt'

I don't want to fill up my blog with too much nonsense about other unmentionable blogs with poor commentbox moderation. This is strictly about linguistics :)

My mind has been on the Etruscan inscription TLE 193 again. There's something so fishy about it and I can't let it go. Readers may remember that I previously flipflopped on whether to interpret uples in TLE 193 as a name or a word. This artifact is an inscribed urn which contained crematory remains of an individual female discovered in Tuscania during the middle of the 19th-century. (I still haven't uncovered a picture of it. Was it stolen from a museum somewhere along the way?) To refresh our memories, let's look at the inscription again:

larθi . ceisi . ceises . velus . velisnal . ravnθus . seχ
avils . śas . amce . uples

I'm looking at that perplexing last word, uples, and not knowing whether to interpret it as Upaliie, a gentilicium or as a reflex of a seperate word ufli which is found in the Liber Linteus mummy text and which cannot possibly be a name because of its context (LL 11.ix-xi) :

θui . useti . catneti . slapiχun . slapinaś . favin . ufli . spurta . eisna . hinθu . cla . θesns

As usual, the Etruscan specialists are even more indecisive about what ufli means than I am. It appears that there is no well-argued reason for interpreting uples as a last name in TLE 193 other than the existence of the Italic-derived name Upaliie (from Oscan Upfals) elsewhere.

However as I scrub for data even harder, I'm noticing that there is an interesting pattern in the way that this inscription has been translated over the past couple of centuries. Right after it was discovered, we see that throughout the 19th century, the phrase śas amce is simply considered the age of the deceased. Due to competing theories at the time, people argued back and forth whether this numeral was '4', '5' or '6'. We now know that it signifies '6'^[1]. Regardless of the debate at the time, it seemed to be agreed that this was the tragic remains of a young prepubescent girl.

This is odd, because after Pallottino's academic career came into full swing in the 20th century, I notice that some scholars were swayed to the idea that this artifact speaks of a grown woman married to a man named Uple for 'four' or 'six' years. When I assimilated evidence for the name Upaliie from other inscriptions, it gave me a pang of fear that I may be wrong about my initial reading and needed to be honest to my readers. So I promply wrote an apology even though it was technically in keeping with earlier views. However, this more modern interpretation is full of even larger holes than the original reading when I think about it more.

It seems insurmountably odd, amid all the known inscriptions available where age of the deceased is consistently recorded in funerary inscriptions, for this one mysterious artifact to go astray and replace the expected number of years lived with the duration of her marriage. Women's ages were just as important as the men's to Etruscans. And yet, how do we deal with uples? So I'm revisiting my original idea that uples is indeed the same word as the locative noun ufli (for earlier *upil-i). If the value is 'dirt' then avils śas amce uples would read "At six years, (she) was (given) to the dirt", a circumlocutive euphemism for the burial of her urn. Here, I think we could interpret uples not as a genitive form (which should be *upil-s, by the way), but the directive case in -iś (uples < *upil(a)-iś). The directive case is observed in the Liber Linteus indicating 'to' or 'toward'. But you may wonder why I insist on the value of 'dirt'.

Aside from 'dirt' fitting well with TLE 193, I noticed that it may completely unlock the phrase in the Liber Linteus ufli spurta eisna hinθu. We are told that spur means 'city', eisna means 'divine' and hinθu means 'below'. Upon reading something about Ugaritic mythos a while back, I noticed that it kind of sounds a lot like the Ugaritic city of the underworld which they called Qrt Hmry^[2] 'City of Mire', doesn't it? Thus "ufli (in dirt) spur-ta (the city) eisna (divine) hinθu (below)" = "the divine city in the dirt below".

Since we know that Etruscans did indeed believe in a city in the underworld^[3] because of carved reliefs that depict it, we have yet another tempting association with the Near East that critics can't seem to absorb yet. Nifty idea, no? Yes, I know. You can thank me later, hehe.


NOTES
^[1] We know that śa means 'six' because of TLE 181 where the age recorded (avils : XX : tivrs : śas) can only sensibly read "20 years (and) six months old" (i.e. "20 and a half years old"). I'm sure you'll all agree that "20 years and four months old" is by contrast quite unusual to find in any funerary inscription worldwide, past or present. In fact, such a thing would almost seem sacrilegious. The Bonfantes et alia remain completely unaware of this simple deduction. Note Bonfante/Bonfante, The Etruscan Language (2002), rev.ed., p.94 (see link) as a typical example.
^[2] Watson/Wyatt, Handbook of Ugaritic Studies (1999), p.187 (see link): "Mot's domain is described as being a town (qrt) called 'Miry' (hmry), in a land called 'Filth or Mud' [...]"
^[3] Bonnefoy, Roman and European Mythologies (1992), p.35 concerning the Etruscans: "The realm of the hereafter was represented as a city lined with towers, whose door is guarded by demons." (see link)