Runes and ancient Italy: the North Etruscan alphabets of the Alps

Before the Germanic peoples carved their runes, the Alpine valleys had known writing for centuries. Between the seventh and fifth centuries BC, various peoples of northern Italy adapted the Etruscan alphabet to their own languages, creating a family of scripts that scholars call North Etruscan or North Italic. It is in these alphabets that some have sought the model for the runes.

A family of alphabets

The Lugano alphabet, or Lepontic, was used by the Celts of the lakes region, between Ticino, Lombardy and Piedmont. Among its most famous witnesses is the Prestino inscription near Como, carved on a stone block in the fifth century BC. The Sondrio alphabet, also called Camunic, is found above all on the rocks of Val Camonica, famous for its thousands of rock carvings and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979.

The Bolzano alphabet, or Raetic, served for the language of the Raetians, an Alpine people whose language seems related to Etruscan. Finally, Venetic was written in the area of Este and Padua, where many inscriptions appear on bronze votive tablets and on writing styluses offered to the goddess Reitia. All these alphabets were often written from right to left, like Etruscan.

The Negau helmet

In 1811, at Ženjak in present-day Slovenia, near the place then called Negau, twenty-six bronze helmets of Etrusco-Alpine type were discovered, buried together. Two of them bear inscriptions in a North Etruscan alphabet. On the one now known as helmet B there is a sequence that many scholars interpret as harigasti teiva, which could be a Germanic name, Harigast, accompanied by a word denoting a god or a sacred title.

The dating is debated: the helmets are older, but the inscription may have been added between the third and first centuries BC. If the reading is correct, it would be one of the oldest records of a Germanic language, written however in an Italic alphabet. Helmet B is now kept in Vienna, at the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

The North Italic theory

In 1928 the Norwegian linguist Carl Marstrander proposed that the runes derived from the North Italic alphabets. In support of the theory were the similarities of certain shapes, such as those of S, T, L or A, and the possibility that Germanic peoples had encountered these scripts in the Alps or along the amber routes. Other scholars took up the idea in various forms during the twentieth century.

Against it weighs above all the chronological gap: the Alpine alphabets were in decline when the first runes appear, in the second century AD, and the Latin alphabet was by then dominant. Many today think of a mainly Latin model, with possible Alpine influences on some signs. The question remains open, and the Negau helmet is its most evocative symbol.

Beyond the origin of the runes, the North Etruscan alphabets deserve attention in their own right. They tell of a multilingual ancient Italy, in which Celts, Raetians, Veneti and Camunni borrowed writing from the Etruscans and transformed it, leaving on rocks, bronzes and gravestones the memory of languages now lost.