Classics or classical studies is the study of classical antiquity. In the Western world,classics traditionally refers to the study of Classical Greek and Roman literature and their related original languages,Ancient Greek and Latin. Classics also includes Greco-Roman philosophy,history,archaeology,anthropology,art,mythology and society as secondary subjects.
Etruscan was the language of the Etruscan civilization in the ancient region of Etruria,in Etruria Padana and Etruria Campana in what is now Italy. Etruscan influenced Latin but was eventually completely superseded by it. The Etruscans left around 13,000 inscriptions that have been found so far,only a small minority of which are of significant length;some bilingual inscriptions with texts also in Latin,Greek,or Phoenician;and a few dozen purported loanwords. Attested from 700 BC to AD 50,the relation of Etruscan to other languages has been a source of long-running speculation and study,with it mostly being referred to as one of the Tyrsenian languages,at times as an isolate and a number of other less well-known theories.
The Italic languages form a branch of the Indo-European language family,whose earliest known members were spoken on the Italian Peninsula in the first millennium BC. The most important of the ancient languages was Latin,the official language of ancient Rome,which conquered the other Italic peoples before the common era. The other Italic languages became extinct in the first centuries AD as their speakers were assimilated into the Roman Empire and shifted to some form of Latin. Between the third and eighth centuries AD,Vulgar Latin diversified into the Romance languages,which are the only Italic languages natively spoken today,while Literary Latin also survived.
The Etruscan civilization was an ancient civilization created by the Etruscans,a people who inhabited Etruria in ancient Italy,with a common language and culture who formed a federation of city-states. After conquering adjacent lands,its territory covered,at its greatest extent,roughly what is now Tuscany,western Umbria,and northern Lazio,as well as what are now the Po Valley,Emilia-Romagna,south-eastern Lombardy,southern Veneto,and western Campania.
The Old Italic scripts are a family of ancient writing systems used in the Italian Peninsula between about 700 and 100 BC,for various languages spoken in that time and place. The most notable member is the Etruscan alphabet,which was the immediate ancestor of the Latin alphabet used by more than 100 languages today,including English. The runic alphabets used in northern Europe are believed to have been separately derived from one of these alphabets by the 2nd century AD.
Etruscan religion comprises a set of stories,beliefs,and religious practices of the Etruscan civilization,heavily influenced by the mythology of ancient Greece,and sharing similarities with concurrent Roman mythology and religion. As the Etruscan civilization was gradually assimilated into the Roman Republic from the 4th century BC,the Etruscan religion and mythology were partially incorporated into ancient Roman culture,following the Roman tendency to absorb some of the local gods and customs of conquered lands. The first attestations of an Etruscan religion can be traced back to the Villanovan culture.
Tyrrhenians or Tyrsenians was the name used by the ancient Greeks authors to refer,in a generic sense,to non-Greek people,in particular pirates.
Rhaetic or Raetic,also known as Rhaetian,was a Tyrsenian language spoken in the ancient region of Rhaetia in the eastern Alps in pre-Roman and Roman times. It is documented by around 280 texts dated from the 5th up until the 1st century BC,which were found through northern Italy,southern Germany,eastern Switzerland,Slovenia and western Austria,in two variants of the Old Italic scripts. Rhaetic is largely accepted as being closely related to Etruscan.
The Lemnian language was spoken on the island of Lemnos,Greece,in the second half of the 6th century BC. It is mainly attested by an inscription found on a funerary stele,termed the Lemnos stele,discovered in 1885 near Kaminia. Fragments of inscriptions on local pottery show that it was spoken there by a community. In 2009,a newly discovered inscription was reported from the site of Hephaistia,the principal ancient city of Lemnos. Lemnian is largely accepted as being a Tyrsenian language,and as such related to Etruscan and Raetic. After the Athenians conquered the island in the latter half of the 6th century BC,Lemnian was replaced by Attic Greek.
Tyrsenian,named after the Tyrrhenians is a proposed extinct family of closely related ancient languages put forward by linguist Helmut Rix (1998),which consists of the Etruscan language of northern,central and south-western Italy,and eastern Corsica (France);the Raetic language of the Alps,named after the Rhaetian people;and the Lemnian language of the Aegean Sea. Camunic in northern Lombardy,between Etruscan and Raetic,may belong to the family as well,but evidence of such is limited. The Tyrsenian languages are generally considered Pre-Indo-European and Paleo-European.
South Picene is an extinct Italic language belonging to the Sabellic subfamily. It is apparently unrelated to the North Picene language,which is not understood and therefore unclassified. South Picene texts were at first relatively inscrutable even though some words were clearly Indo-European. The discovery in 1983 that two of the apparently redundant punctuation marks were in reality simplified letters led to an incremental improvement in their understanding and a first translation in 1985. Difficulties remain. It may represent a third branch of Sabellic,along with Oscan and Umbrian,or the whole Sabellic linguistic area may be best regarded as a linguistic continuum. The paucity of evidence from most of the 'minor dialects' contributes to these difficulties.
The Trojan language was the language spoken in Troy during the Late Bronze Age. The identity of the language is unknown,and it is not certain that there was one single language used in the city at the time.
Etruscan history is the written record of Etruscan civilization compiled mainly by Greek and Roman authors. Apart from their inscriptions,from which information mainly of a sociological character can be extracted,the Etruscans left no surviving history of their own,nor is there any mention in the Roman authors that any was ever written. Remnants of Etruscan writings are almost exclusively concerned with religion.
Etruscan society is mainly known through the memorial and achievemental inscriptions on monuments of Etruscan civilization,especially tombs. This information emphasizes family data. Some contractual information is also available from various sources. The Roman and Greek historians had more to say of Etruscan government.
Larissa Bonfante was an Italian-American classicist,Professor of Classics emerita at New York University and an authority on Etruscan language and culture.
In classical antiquity,several theses were elaborated on the origin of the Etruscans from the 5th century BC,when the Etruscan civilization had been already established for several centuries in its territories,that can be summarized into three main hypotheses. The first is the autochthonous development in situ out of the Villanovan culture,as claimed by the Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus who described the Etruscans as indigenous people who had always lived in Etruria. The second is a migration from the Aegean sea,as claimed by two Greek historians:Herodotus,who described them as a group of immigrants from Lydia in Anatolia,and Hellanicus of Lesbos who claimed that the Tyrrhenians were the Pelasgians originally from Thessaly,Greece,who entered Italy at the head of the Adriatic sea in Northern Italy. The third hypothesis was reported by Livy and Pliny the Elder,and puts the Etruscans in the context of the Rhaetian people to the north and other populations living in the Alps.
Gennaro Chierchia is an Italian linguist and educator. Chierchia is currently the Haas Foundation Professor of Linguistics and Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. His work and study focus on areas including semantics,pragmatics,philosophy of language,and language pathology.
The Latins,sometimes known as the Latials or Latians,were an Italic tribe which included the early inhabitants of the city of Rome. From about 1000 BC,the Latins inhabited the small region known to the Romans as Old Latium,that is,the area between the river Tiber and the promontory of Mount Circeo 100 km (62 mi) southeast of Rome. Following the Roman expansion,the Latins spread into the Latium adiectum,inhabited by Osco-Umbrian peoples.
Örjan Wikander is a Swedish classical archaeologist and ancient historian. His main interests are ancient water technology,ancient roof terracottas,Roman social history,Etruscan archaeology and epigraphy.
Andries W. Coetzee is Professor of Linguistics,and served as Director of the African Studies Center (2019-22) at the University of Michigan. Since receiving his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2004 he has been a major contributor in research in the fields of Phonetics and Phonology. His career has been spent teaching in South Africa and at the University of Michigan,and being heavily involved with the Linguistics Institute of the Linguistic Society of America. In 2011 he received the first ever Early Career Award from the Linguistic Society of America,and in 2015 was inducted as a fellow of this Society.
