The decipherment of the Etruscan alphabet. A tale of Enlightenment thinkers and neverending misconceptions
In 1789 Luigi Lanzi (1732-1810) succeeded in understanding all the most common Etruscan letters, except one. This decipherment, which required a major paradigm shift, was an outstanding achievement of the Italian Enlightenment. The missing letter was finally deciphered some decades later, while the understanding of the less common graphemes had to wait until the twentieth century. Despite all this, "the decipherment of Etruscan" is often listed, even in the present day, among the future goals of research; this is due, at least partially, to a lasting confusion between "deciphering" a writing system and "translating" a language. Long-lived misconceptions about the "spirit" of Etruscan civilization and the "national character" of the Etruscan people make it difficult to accept that they developed a relatively unexceptional alphabetic script, closely related to Greek and Latin.
