ETRURIA CAPTA. 167 



profess to exhaust the syllabary or any department of Etruscan 

 philology, but to communicate what I know to those who with more 

 abundant leisure and facilities may be able to reduce to scientific 

 exactness of proportion the stones of a new edifice, which with 



alphabet is extant. It was discovered in a tomb at Bomarzo by Mr. Dennis, inscribed round 

 tlie foot of a cup, and probably had been a present for a child. The letters ran from left to 

 right, and are as follows " : — 



8IOVY2DM \NmLI0B3FECA 

 Reversing this we obtain : 



ACBF3BOILmN/lMD2YVOI8 

 Here, also, B represents square 8 ; the N is similar to that of the preceding alphabet ; the T 

 carries the perpendicular beyond- the horizontal or diagonal ; the i is like the Greek * ; and 

 the F is inverted. There is also a new character something like the figure 3. 

 The correspondences are : 



Caere. ABCDEFl801KL(m)MaOPNP2TVTOX 

 Bomarzo. A-C-EF3B0I -L m D2YV 



N/M 018 



I confess that ABCDEP in succession might easily carry conviction to the mind even of the 

 critical student that the powers of the Etruscan alphabet were those of the Latin. I there- 

 fore ask the reader to return to this note after having studied the inscriptions in the text. Mr. 

 VanderSmissen suggests the likelihood of the Etruscans in the later period of their history 

 ado';iting the Greek and Roman alphabets and a complete vowel system. Of this, however, I 

 have no evidence. I incline rather to the belief that they did noc adopt the Roman alphabet 

 until they adopted the Latin language. The monuments plainly indicate that the Etruscan 

 scribes assimilated the forms of their characters to those of the Roman letters, but without in 

 the least affecting their phonetic values. As for the order of writing it is just possible that 

 inscriptions reading from right to left may have been modelled on the Roman. But the various 

 inscriptions which I have classed with the Etruscan, namely, Celtiberian, Pictish, Phrygian, 

 Hittite, Indian, Siberian, &c., exhibit little consistency of order, reading generally indeed from 

 right to left, but often from left to right and boustrophedon. 

 To return to the supposed alphabets, I read that of Bomarzo thus : 

 ACEP3B0I LmN /IM D 2 Y V O X 8 

 er ze in ag ti la mai su mi ka bano ta ne ku be ma go la 

 Basque : erre zein gatillu mai su imi ka bana tanka bu makilla 



burn who vase tablet lire placing by within strike let the stick 



Let the stick strike him who burns the tablet (inscription) of the vase by putting 

 tire into it. 

 Here it will be observed that I read 3 as if it were ||. This I do on the authority chiefly of 

 the Siberian inscriptions, which use U, j- j- , r and 3 for ti, te, &c.. The corresponding Caere 

 character is I. The only word which is not modern Basque is hana, and this I take to be a 

 form of barrewa, within. M. Van Eys derives tailca,tankatu from the Provencal tancar. It 

 cannot, however, be other than the Japanese tataku, the Choctaw timik-lih, the Iroquois 

 tekkentoks, and the Aztec tzntsona, all meaning to beat, strike, thump, knock. Although mai 

 now means a table, it must originally have de.signated a space upon any object on which sub- 

 jects might be portrayed or characters written. The Japanese hi-mei denotes an inscription on 

 a monument. 



The Caere alphabet is : 



ABCDEFI80 1 KLmM D 0PNP2TVT0X 



ir aul zi dune ge te la mai utz su mi no ma mi ta ka ta ne ku be ku mago 



