Ancient African adstrate in Etruscan

This subject, I feel, doesn't get enough attention and yet I think it's a fascinating topic: African loanwords in the Etruscan language. Considering what little Etruscanists currently seem to know about the language, unable even to explain conjugation and declension as I have attempted on this blog, it's probably unrealistic to expect that I should find a published mention of Punic or Berber adstrate in Etruscan, and yet, surely some African loans wandered their way into the vocabulary of ancient Italy, no?

The relationship of Etruria with Carthage is well proved ever since the Pyrgi Tablets were discovered. These are bilingual artifacts written in Etruscan and Punic. Punic, a dialect of Phoenician, was the official language of Ancient Carthage in what is now Tunisia. Berber dialects must also have been spoken in the Carthaginian region but Berber is a separate although related group to the Semitic and Egyptian languages traditionally to the east.

There is at least one word that may be considered Berber, at least based on the popular etymologies of the name Africa which source it either to afar 'dust' or to ifri 'cave, cavern' in allusion to local cave-dwelling. The name Afircina is recorded in ET AT 3.2 in the form of the type-I dative Avhircinasi 'to/for Afircina'. This mirrors Greek Ἀφρική 'Carthaginian region' and Latin Āfrica 'Carthaginian region'.

Now what about other African words, hmm? So far I've spied my eye on Proto-Berber *a-kal^[1] which bears a curious resemblance to Old Etruscan cal(u) 'earth', attested by calus 'of the earth' [TCap xv] and calusi-m 'and to the earth' [TLE 99]. Later, Etruscan a regularly rose to e before resonants like l. It should be noted that in Berber languages, noun stems are completed by additional gender prefixes like masculine singular *a- and feminine singular *ta-, so there's an unusual wealth of nouns with vowel onsets in their citation form.

Coincidentally Phoenix has been exploring the Berber language in great depth on his blog and I've been reading it avidly to guide me through this oft-neglected but fascinating and historically important language group.



NOTES
^[1] Phoenix in a comment below justifies Proto-Berber *a-ʔkal instead.

Around the African world in 730 days

Here's an interesting tale of explorational adventure in the classical world according to General History of Africa II, Ancient Civilizations of Africa, vol 2 (1981), p.448:

"According to Herodotus (fifth century), the Egyptian King Necho (c. -610 to -594) sent Phoenician mariners to sail down the Red Sea and thence to circumnavigate Africa. They are said to have taken two years on the journey, having twice halted to sow and reap a crop of wheat. Herodotus believed that the voyage had been successful and it is not impossible, but it had no repercussions at the time; if it took place, the vast size of the continent thus revealed must have removed any ideas of a route from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. The Carthaginians who, again according to Herodotus, believed that Africa could be circumnavigated, must have known of the venture, and of another of the early fifth century."

Phoenician-Etruscan comparisons of iconography

U of Penn's Professor Holly Pittman offers a long list of artifact images for us to peruse at her website. Under one directory, there are two interesting pictures, one labeled "Neo-Assyrian, Nimrud, NW Palace Harem, Pit AJ, Sacred Tree, 8th Phoenician Style" and the other "Neo-Assyrian, Nimrud, Ft Shalmaneser, SW12 Plaque, Phoenician Style". I show both photos below and they show a persistent Tree of Life pattern.



They're very similar to what's found on an Etruscan mirror suggesting Punic artistic influences via ancient Carthage.


Evidently then, if we want to crack the riddle of Etruscan mythology as a whole, we must learn to look past the "safe" but limited Roman and Greek comparisons. Egyptian, Hittite, Babylonian and Phoenician comparisons are also fair game because the Classical Mediterranean boasted a complex network of interrelated cultures which were very good at distributing ideas across surprisingly large distances.

Subtle truths about Etruscan letter-names

Long ago, I had privately indulged in tentatively reconstructing letter-names in the Etruscan alphabet based on the hunch that they could likely be related to those found in Greek (ie. alpha, beta, gamma, delta, etc. < West Semitic). Perhaps we could theorize something like *alφa, *peta, *camla, *talta, etc. Contrary to this, it seems that many specialists have assumed that the Etruscan letter-names had inspired, or were even identical to, the Latin names that the Western world now learns from gradeschool.^[1] The Latin alphabet rejected the original but arcane Semitic-derived names and had opted for a more phonetic naming system, as follows:

ā, bē, cē, dē, ē, ef, gē, hā, ī, kā, el, em, en, ō, pē, qū, er, es, tē, ū, ex (ix), hy (ī Graeca), zēta

I've never heard of conclusive facts proving the assumption that this is derived from Etruscan naming practices, however there are simple facts that can easily abolish this belief. For example, Latin maintains a contrast in the alphabet between bē and pē. This is patently impossible in Etruscan with only unvoiced stops. So if the claim were true, Latin's allegedly Etruscan antecedents could only have been *pe for both! The same contradiction immediately obstructs us concerning Latin dē and tē which can equally find no source in Etruscan due to a more restricted phonology. So evidently it was the Italic population that innovated these names, not the Etruscans who no doubt used the original Semitic-derived names familiar to Greeks. For Latin bē & pē, Etruscans can be predicted to have uttered *peta and *pei respectively.


NOTES
^[1] Arthur Gordon, On the origins of the Latin alphabet: Modern views (1969) (see link); Ullman/Brown, Ancient writing and its influence (1963), p.167 (see link).

How many fingers do you see?

Phoenix recently relayed a story told him by his teacher of Berber which was in turn recounted to him by an aged Morrocan professor about an interesting coincidence between the names Crete, Kos and Samos and the Berber numbers for 'three', 'four', and 'five'. This fun game of telephone may remind one of how Plato got his hands on the whole Atlantis scoop and how things got blown totally out of proportion thereafter.

Lest anyone take the hearsay seriously, I should stamp out that notion quickly. It's merely an idle novelty of factlessness, of course. I'm not sure about the real origins for the name of Crete or Kos offhand. However, I can manage to cut off one of these pernicious tentacles of ignorance by referring to dear Strabo who had long ago alluded to a connection between the name Samos and words for 'high' (Strab., Geo. 8.3.19) which, it turns out, are Semitic. Given its history, the naming of Samos is attributed therefore to Phoenicians and not to the counting proficiency of the Berber.

Pyrgi Tablets and the burial of the sun

One day, I was scouring the internet, assimilating new perspectives into my personal data collective as usual when I came across a comment by Douglas Kilday posted two years ago on the sci.lang forum. I actually appreciate a lot of his interesting comments and theories on Etruscan. He seems like an overall sensible guy, which is rather odd for this subject since most are loons like me. However, no one's perfect and he provided a translation to the Pyrgi Tablets that I think was sufficiently offtrack to distort what was being expressed in the artifact. The Pyrgi Tablets consist of gold sheets inscribed with both Phoenician and Etruscan texts, a kind of bilingual "Rosetta Stone", if you will. They were created to dedicate the erection of a temple to the goddess Uni-Ashtarte by a leader named Thefarie Veliana. Even though the text is referring to the same event in both languages, and even though Phoenician is fully deciphered, everyone still seems to be having oodles of trouble solving the "riddle" of these tablets. Gee, go figure. An alternative hypothesis for our ineptitude could be that riddles make more money than solutions but surely that can't be it, right?

Kilday mistranslated the vowelless Phoenician phrase b-yrḥ zbḥ šmš as "in (b-) the month (yrḥ) of the Feast (zbḥ) of the Sun (šmš)." Way off, I'm afraid. First of all it's vital that we understand that zbḥ is a pan-Semitic word describing religious sacrifice as in Hebrew זֶבַח zebaḥ (note Ehud Ben-Yehuda & David Weinstein, Ben-Yehuda's Pocket English-Hebrew/Hebrew-English Dictionary, p. 234) and Ugaritic dbḥ (see Stanislav Segert, A Basic Grammar of the Ugaritic Language, p.132) .

Sacrifice of the Sun? Yes, dammit, yes. And if you don't believe me, read here because I swear I did not make this up. The Good Shamash is not having a picnic, here. He's not having a fun outing. Etruscan worshippers seem to have commemorated each year the death and rebirth of the sun. Throughout the early world, this was a prevailing religious motif and a symbolism for the strengthening and weakening of the sun's force throughout the year, embodied as an example in the cyclical worship of the Akkado-Sumerian deity Tammuz-Dumuzi. This phrase in question refers to the cycle of the seasons and this understanding is further reinforced a few lines down when it mentions: b-ym qbr ʔlm = "on (b-) the day (ym) of the burial (qbr) of the divinity (ʔlm)". Again, the verb root qbr is well attested in Semitic languages to denote burial (Hebrew qbr "to bury", Ugaritic qbr "to bury"). So why are we still scratching our heads about it? How daft can we be? Sweet goddess, all the information is readily available if only we would check it out for ourselves.

Only by understanding the Phoenician text properly can we understand the Etruscan text. So when we see that we have a "sacrifice of the sun" and a "burial of the divinity (of the sun)", we can then get a hint as to what the month name Masan signifies. For some reason, Larissa Bonfante places a question mark beside this name of the Etruscan month as if she isn't sure that the name is a bona fide name or something else (Reading the Past - Etruscan (1990), p.60). Obviously she hasn't spent the time looking at the inscriptions available to her. The rest of us can be reassured that it is a true month of the Etruscan calendar because of the date θun-em cialχuś Masn "Masan 29th" written in the very last chapter of the Liber Linteus. The name must derive however from a word used for "burial" or "entombment" built on the verb mas since its participle form masu is found twice in the Cippus Perusinus (CPer A.xiv, A.xvii). One phrase reads: Velθina hinθa cape muni-cle-t masu = "Velthina below (hinθa) was entombed (masu) with the sarcophagus (cape) in this plot (muni-cle-t)."