The International Etruscan Sigla Project

This paper makes a beginning of a joint project of the University of Milan and Florida State University, aiming to investigate the potential for communication in markings commonly referred to as “Etruscan sigla”. Hundreds of these markings have been discovered at numerous Etruscan archaeological sites, including cemeteries, habitation sites and sanctuaries, dating from around 700 BCE to the first century BCE. They normally consist of one or two letters, numbers or symbols, scratched (“graffiti”), incised, painted or stamped on objects of many different types made of clay, metal, bone, ivory and stone. Sometimes two different kinds of sigla will be found together or a siglum may occur in combination with a text. Little understood but frequently regarded as nonverbal, these markings are often relegated to the background in Etruscan studies in favor of letters that form words and can therefore be studied from a linguistic perspective. The presenters, having worked independently on Etruscan sigla, have now begun a joint undertaking to integrate their past different experiences. The International Etruscan Sigla Project, gathering a team from the US and Italy, will create a semantic network that enables to integrate different data to recognize and group similar items to verify the existence of recurrent associations among similar sigla, between sigla and their location on the artifact and between sigla and their archaeological contexts. The international team will develop terminology, methodology and software in multiple languages for the new systematic tool. This paper will present some of the preliminary results of the collaboration and will suggest directions for future research.