At the beginning of the 7th century BC the Etruscans adopted the Phoenician alphabet from which the Greek and Latin scripts are also derived. It consists of twenty-six letters, which, unlike Classical Greek and Latin, were written from right to left. Over the six centuries that it was in use it was modified considerably.
Although reading an Etruscan text is straightforward, the interpretation is more difficult. This is firstly because Etruscan was not an Indo-European language, and secondly because no Etruscan literature survives. What remains are some 30,000 inscriptions, which are often brief and highly repetitive. The Etruscan language, therefore, remains partly unknown.
