This month's museum pick...

University of Pennsylvania Museum of  Archaeology and Anthropology (UPM)

By Patrick Totty

Ancient Etruscans and Romans Meet Again at UPenn’s Museum

If only some Italian scribe 2,500 years ago had chiseled a stone slab bearing side-by-side versions of the same message in Etruscan and Latin. He would have given us another Rosetta Stone, and one just as useful.

For the Etruscans, the often shadowy people who preceded the Romans as central Italy’s great cultural and military power, had a deep effect on Rome’s own culture and political fortunes. From the Etruscans the Romans’ inherited their alphabet and numerals, many of their building methods and their religious rituals. Early Rome was even ruled by Etruscan kings. But over several centuries the Etruscan nation moved from being Rome’s mentor to its equal, to its rival and, finally, to the status of a vanquished and fading foe. In the process, despite the intense relationship between the two peoples, the Romans never recorded the Etruscan language.

We have thousands of written records from the Etruscan era, put down in a script related to the primitive Euboean Greek alphabet. But we don’t know what the words they spell mean, or even what language family Etruscan belonged to. Theirs wasn’t a Indo-European tongue, so comparing it to Latin, Greek, Sanskrit or Persian reveals nothing about its grammar. Comparisons to non-Indo-European language families, such as Hamito-Semitic or Altaic, also draw blanks.

Further complicating attempts at deciphering Etruscan is that the writings themselves are mostly funerary inscriptions. As one writer put it, “Imagine trying to decipher English based on the names and brief inscriptions from tombstones.” The most you’d learn is some proper and place names, nouns for family members, some dates, and perhaps an attribute or two (“beloved,” “dearly departed,” etc.).

They did leave behind artifacts easier than their language to appreciate. The Etruscans had a complex culture that produced sophisticated architecture, art and tools. Although the Romans indifferently allowed Etruscan culture to fall into the margins, and eventually into extinction, they never sought to destroy Etruscan relics wholesale or erase them from memory.

So, we have a very good idea of Etruscan culture. One of the best places in the U.S. to see an extensive array of its artifacts first-hand will be at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of  Archaeology and Anthropology (UPM) on October 26 when it opens its renovated Etruscan, Roman and Classical World galleries in a show called, Worlds Intertwined: The Etruscans, Greeks and Romans. It will mark completion of a $3 million improvement project of UPM’s renowned 30,000-piece Mediterranean collection.

The exhibit will feature 1,000 objects selected from among the collection, including pottery, sculptures, jewelry, mosaics and glassware. The juxtaposition of Etruscan and Roman objects, as well as Greek, will serve to show the influences that each culture had on the other, including the indirect effect of the Greeks upon the Romans via the Etruscans – a development that preceded the direct and decisive confrontation between Greece and Rome by several hundred years.

The museum itself is one of the best of its kind in the world. The University of Pennsylvania, a member in good standing of the Ivy League, has a tradition of exploration and scientific inquiry dating back to the museum's founding in 1887. Since then, UPM  has sent more than 350 scientific expeditions to various lands, bringing back more than 1 million artifacts over the years.

UPM has strong collections in other areas, too, including galleries that cover Egypt, Mesopotamia, ancient Canaan and Israel, Buddhism, Africa, China, native Alaskans, Polynesia, the southwestern U.S. and Polynesia. It also sponsors a lively summer program of ethnic music that ranges from Italian-style pop offerings, to Chinese ribbon and sword dances, to African drumming and storytelling.

Located just southwest of downtown Philadelphia, across the Schuylkill River, UPM’s location is convenient to virtually every important site in the city. Subway, bus and rail links are nearby.

The museum’s web site is fairly comprehensive. Don’t be put off by the sometimes vastly  different looks among pages – UPM recently redesigned it and is still working out minor kinks: