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ETRUSCAN AND ITALIC ALPHABETS
497 Last Stage of Etruscan Alphabet The spelling of the late Etruscan inscriptions is not exact; there are frequent interchanges in the employment of t and th, C and kh, of the various sibilants, and so forth. The Etruscan punctuation consisted of three (or even four) points, two points or one point only. The direction of writing, which, as already mentioned, was originally from right to left, became under Latin influence from left to right, after a certain period of vacillation and boustrophedon or serpentine form.
In the later period Latin-Etruscan bilingual inscriptions appear, or Etruscan inscriptions either in Latin characters, or in Etruscan letters which gradually assumed the Latin form. Etruria, after having lost her political independence, progressively gave up her script and her language. She, who had been the political and cultural master of Rome, became her servile lackey. The last datable Etruscan inscriptions belong to the early years of the Christian era, although the Etruscan language continued to be employed for some centuries, and the Etruscan pronunciation influenced the Tuscan dialect which became the modern hella lingua.
Offshoots of the Etruscan Alphabet The Etruscan alphabet had thus a miserable end, but the influence of its glorious life was widespread and durable.
The most famous of all the scripts in the history of writing, the Latin or Roman alphabet, was the most important offshoot of the Etruscan. It will be dealt with in the next chapter.
Alphabet of the Piceni "The ancient Piceni, a non-Italic population, inhabited the modern central Italian regions of the Marches, particularly its southem part, and the adjoining northern portion of the Abruzzi, situated on the Adriatic coast. About ten inscriptions (Fig. 224) found in that zone are written in a language which has not been deciphered, but is considered by some scholars to be Illyrian. At a later period, the Picenti, an Italic people speaking an Oscan-Umbrian language, inhabited that same region, but none of their inscriptions have been preserved.
The alphabet (Fig. 226) employed by the Piceni, termed improperly "East Italic" or "Sabellic" or else "proto-Sabellic" or "Old Sabellic" or "pre-Sabellic," was perhaps already in existence at the end of the seventh century B.C., if the attribution of the inscription of the "Warrior from Capestrano (Fig. 224) to the sixth century B.C., as suggested by the discoverer, Professor Moretti, is correct. Professor Rhys Carpenter considers it as "highly improbable that it is older than the fifth century B.C.," basing his opinion not in the main on archæological criteria but on the consideration that "all fixed dates are lacking in East Italic letters."
