Pyrgi

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The road ran straight from the city to the sea — ten meters wide, twelve kilometers long, laid across the coastal plain so that the great inland city of Caere and its harbor were a single thing strung along one line. At the shore end of it stood Pyrgi, the chief of three ports that served Caere, on the stretch of the Tyrrhenian coast that is now called Santa Severa, in the comune of Santa Marinella in the metropolitan city of Rome. A medieval castle crowns the spot today; beneath and beside it lie the foundations of two Etruscan temples and the precinct between them, and from that ground, in the summer of 1964, came three thin leaves of inscribed gold that rank among the most important documents the Etruscan world has left.

The harbor of Caere

Pyrgi was not a town that happened to have a sanctuary. It was a sanctuary that was also a harbor — an emporion, a trading-place under the protection of the gods, where the commerce of the western sea was conducted within sight of the temples and the temples grew rich on the traffic. Caere, the Etruscan city a dozen kilometers inland, was one of the largest and wealthiest in Etruria, and it reached the sea through three landings: Alsium and Punicum and, the greatest of them, Pyrgi. The Greeks who sailed this coast knew the city as Agylla and the port by the name Pyrgi, “the towers,” and they knew it as a place of wealth. So did the Phoenicians, whose ships worked the same routes; competition over those routes drew Caere and the other Etruscan cities into common cause with Carthage against the Phocaean Greeks who were pressing into the western basin. Pyrgi sat exactly where those currents met. It was a frontier of trade and a meeting-ground of peoples, and the cult that grew up there carries the mark of the meeting.

The standard cultural account of the city stresses that Caere’s prosperity ran through its coast: the World History Encyclopedia entry on Cerveteri sets the wealth of the inland city beside the temples of its port and the gold plaques found nailed within one of them. The harbor was the city’s hand on the sea, and the sanctuary was the harbor’s claim on the gods.

The two temples and the precinct

The sacred area, excavated by the Sapienza University of Rome from 1957 onward, resolves into a small but legible plan. Two temples stand side by side, labeled in the order of their building, with a precinct of shrines between and around them.

The older is the one called Temple B. It was raised about 510 BCE, a square single-chambered building set within a colonnade on the Greek manner, and it was dedicated to the sovereign Etruscan goddess Uni, whom the dedication identifies with the Phoenician Astarte. Beside it ran a row of small chambers — the “Twenty Cells,” a long building of separate rooms whose function is debated; and an adjoining precinct, the one excavators call area C, held a cylindrical altar and a pit for offerings to the powers below, a chthonic cult bound to the deities Suri and Cavatha. The whole forms the oldest sanctuary of this kind yet known in Etruria.

The later and larger is Temple A, built in the first half of the fifth century, about 470–460 BCE, on the city’s own initiative — raised, the excavators read, to reassert Caere’s standing after the Etruscan reverse at Cumae. Where Temple B faced the Greek world in its plan, Temple A carried its Greek learning in its ornament. Its high-relief terracotta plaque, recovered in some two thousand fragments and painstakingly reassembled, shows the most violent scene the Greek epic cycle offered: the Theban war of the Seven, and within it the dying Tydeus seizing the head of his fallen enemy Melanippus. It is one of the masterworks of Etruscan terracotta sculpture. The two temples between them carried the gods of the Tyrrhenian and the gods of the Aegean at the same threshold.

Fragment of the high-relief terracotta from the pediment of Temple B at Pyrgi, about 510 BCE, now in the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, Rome. Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The gold tablets

On the eighth of July, 1964, in the course of the Sapienza excavation directed by Massimo Pallottino — the scholar who did more than any other to found the modern study of the Etruscans — the diggers came on three small sheets of gold, folded over and laid where they had been hidden between the temples, with the bronze nails that had once fastened them to a temple door still by them. Unrolled, they proved to be inscribed: two of them in the Etruscan language, the third in Phoenician. They are dated to about 500 BCE.

The text on them is a dedication. A ruler of Caere named Thefarie Velianas records that he has given a holy place to the goddess. The two languages name him by two different titles — the Phoenician text uses a word for sole rule, the Etruscan a word nearer to “magistrate” — so that he stands between kingship and the chief office of a city-state, and modern accounts tend to describe him as a tyrant in the Greek sense. The two languages also name the goddess by two names. In the Etruscan she is Uni, the queen of the Etruscan heaven; in the Phoenician she is Astarte, the great goddess of the Levantine coast. To set the two names over one dedication was to say that they were one power — the equation that scholars call the Uni–Astarte identification, a documented act of syncretism made on the Tyrrhenian shore around 500 BCE.

The find is read on three counts at once. It is one of the longest connected Etruscan texts known, and so a substantial witness to a language that survives mostly in short funerary and votive scraps. It is a near-bilingual: the Phoenician text is not a word-for-word translation of the Etruscan, but it runs close enough that a tongue already legible — Phoenician — can be laid beside the Etruscan and used to test the reading of it, a rare aid for a language that stands largely alone and is understood only in part. And it is the single great monument of contact between the Etruscan and the Punic worlds: a document in which an Etruscan ruler names his own goddess in the language of the Phoenician sailors who shared his harbor, and gives her their goddess’s name. The standard reference accounts treat the tablets as a landmark of twentieth-century Italian archaeology; the Wikipedia summary of the Pyrgi Tablets records the discovery, the three sheets, the dual naming, and the dedicator’s contested title.

The three Pyrgi gold tablets — two in Etruscan, one in Phoenician — recording Thefarie Velianas’s dedication to Uni/Astarte, about 500 BCE, in the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, Rome. Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

What the tablets do not settle is the whole of their own meaning. The Phoenician and the Etruscan texts diverge in their wording, and the precise sense of several Etruscan phrases — the nature of the rite the dedication founds, the festival or the month it names — remains argued. The two languages let each illuminate the other, but they do not produce a clean gloss, and where the Etruscan reading is uncertain the honest account leaves it uncertain. The cult itself — that Uni was the sovereign goddess to whom a ruler owed his city’s holy place, that to name her Astarte was to honor the same power under a friend’s word — belongs to the world the tablets speak from. The reading of the language belongs to the long labor of the scholars who have worked at them since 1964.

The raid of Dionysius

That the sanctuary was rich was known well beyond Etruria, and its wealth once drew a fleet against it. In 384 BCE Dionysius I, the tyrant of Syracuse, in need of money, sailed north against the Tyrrhenian coast. The historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BCE, gives the account: the pretext was the suppression of pirates, but the object was plunder, and the target was a temple “richly provided with dedications” in the port of the Tyrrhenian city of Agylla — the port, Diodorus says, being named Pyrgi. Putting in by night and attacking at daybreak, Dionysius overpowered the few guards, sacked the temple, and carried off no less than a thousand talents of gold and silver. The episode, in the fifteenth book of Diodorus’s Library of History, is the chief notice of Pyrgi in the surviving ancient writers, and it fixes the sanctuary in the wider Mediterranean record as a place worth crossing the sea to rob. It is a measure, in its way, of what the harbor had gathered: a treasury great enough that a Sicilian war was financed by emptying it.

Recovery and standing

Pyrgi today is an archaeological area on the Lazio coast, the excavated sanctuary lying beside and beneath the medieval Castello di Santa Severa, with an antiquarium nearby that holds the finds of more than four decades of digging. The recovery began with the Sapienza campaigns in 1957 and reached its great moment with the gold tablets in 1964; the work has gone on since, turning up the cult of Suri and Cavatha and the Demetriac area among the oldest of their kind in Etruria, and steadily filling in the plan of the two temples and the precinct between them. The tablets themselves are kept in the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia in Rome, the great national collection of Etruscan antiquities, where they are among the most studied objects in the museum.

Their afterlife has been mostly a matter of reading. From the moment they were unrolled, the tablets entered two long conversations at once — the study of the Etruscan language, for which a near-bilingual of this length is a rare gift, and the study of Etruscan and Phoenician contact, for which the dual naming of the goddess is the central evidence. Each new treatment of Etruscan grammar must reckon with them; each account of the western Phoenician world turns to them for the case of a coast where an Etruscan ruler honored a Levantine goddess under her own name. They sit, that is, at the join of two fields that rarely meet, and they hold the join open.

What Pyrgi keeps is a particular kind of evidence, scarce in the Etruscan record and precious for it. The Etruscans left no literature that has come down to us; their religion survives in their tombs and their bronze mirrors, in the bronze liver of Piacenza and the linen book reused as a mummy-wrapping, and in the later Roman writers who inherited and codified their divinatory science at a distance. The Pyrgi tablets are different. They are the Etruscans’ own hand, in gold, naming their own goddess — and naming her twice, once in their own tongue and once in the tongue of the sea-faring people who shared their port. The harbor where the trade of the Tyrrhenian passed was also the place where a ruler set down, for the goddess and for whoever should read it, that Uni and Astarte were one.

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