Inscribed Identities

The necropoleis of Chiusi are the source of an overwhelming number of Etruscan inscriptions dating from the Hellenistic period, the majority of which come from tomb contexts containing cremation urns bearing the names of the deceased. The number of individuals with access to formal burial increased exponentially at this time, most visible in the substantial corpus of mold-made, serially-produced terracotta cremation urns inscribed with the name of the deceased. In the later second century, Latin name inscriptions began to appear on these cremation urns, often in the same tomb as urns with Etruscan inscriptions. The Latin language circulated widely in inland Etruria, even before Chiusi became a foedus of Rome, but the prevalence of one tongue over the other as a spoken language in Chiusine territory remains unknown. Scholarship has demonstrated that the name inscriptions on these terracotta urns show every stage of the linguistic transition process, from the shift to a Latin alphabet to the full Latinization of the Etruscan onomastic formula. When examining the language shift in conjunction with the urn forms, however, it becomes apparent that urns with Latin inscriptions consistently shun the uniquely Etruscan iconography for a more generic, simpler depiction of the deceased. This paper investigates bilingual tomb contexts at Chiusi in order to examine the ties between linguistic and iconographic shifts in late Etruscan funerary culture, as well as to consider the role language plays in the construction of individual and familial identity

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Epigraphy · Iconography · Inscribed figure · Scholarship · Terracotta · Ancient and Medieval Archaeology Studies · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classics · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · History

• The Early Roman Expansion into Italy

  Open Access•Nicola Terrenato•Early Roman Expansion into Italy•2019

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