Uni

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A king of an Etruscan harbor town, about the year 500 before the common era, laid up in a sacred place three thin leaves of beaten gold. Two he had inscribed in his own Etruscan tongue, the third in the language of Phoenician traders who put in at his port; on all three he recorded that he had raised a holy place to a goddess. In the Etruscan he named her Uni. In the Phoenician he named her Astarte. The leaves were folded away and forgotten for two and a half thousand years, and when they were found again they proved to be among the longest Etruscan texts in existence and the nearest thing the language possesses to a bilingual key. The goddess at the center of them was the highest the Etruscans knew: the queen of their heaven, the lady of their cities, the sovereign mother of the pantheon.

The sovereign mother

Uni stood at the summit of the Etruscan order of the gods, the supreme female power answering to the supreme male power. Her consort was Tinia, the sky-king whose three lightnings the diviners read, and with him and with Menrva she formed the great triad that the cities honored — the sky-father, the queen, and the armed wisdom born of the father’s head. The grouping is one that a later age would recognize at once, for Rome’s Capitoline temple set Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva in three adjoining chambers, and the scholarly consensus is that the Roman arrangement followed the Etruscan one rather than the reverse. Where it survives in Etruscan dress the triad gives the goddess a weight her Roman shadow does not always keep: Uni and Menrva loom larger in the Etruscan reckoning than Juno and Minerva do in the Roman.

To the Romans she was their own Juno, and to the Greeks their Hera, by the long habit of cross-naming that the ancient world applied to foreign gods. These equations are real and useful, and the Etruscans themselves practiced the same art of identification; but they are comparisons rather than identities, and Uni keeps her own shape behind them. She is the goddess of marriage and of childbirth, of the household and of women — the offerings dug from her sanctuaries are heavy with the concerns of mothers — and at the same time she is the goddess of rule, the queen whose protection a ruler invoked over his city. The two faces are not separate. The maternal power that guards the people and the sovereign power that guards the town are, in her, a single thing.

The name is her own, descended within the Italic world rather than borrowed from the Greek. The Etruscans took many gods and many myths from the Greeks they traded with, renaming Heracles as Hercle and Aphrodite’s domain as the domain of Turan; but Uni belongs to the older native stratum, a goddess whose worship reaches back into the Iron Age cultures from which Etruria grew. Her temples rose in the great cities — at Veii, at Cerveteri and its harbor, at the inland town the Romans would call Perusia and know as the seat of her cult. She received the votive gifts of the sanctuaries in their hundreds: at the port-shrine of Gravisca, the offerings included models of the womb and figures of swaddled infants, the plain currency of a goddess of birth.

Where she stood in the cosmos can be read, in part, from the science by which the Etruscans ordered the heavens. The disciplina Etrusca — the revealed body of divinatory learning that Rome would study and preserve — divided the sky into regions, each the seat of a god, and the diviner who read a sheep’s liver or the path of a lightning-bolt was reading a map of those regions onto the omen before him. In the schemes of the heavenly regions that survive, Uni and Tinia hold the favorable quarters of the sky, the high northeast where the most auspicious signs were looked for. Her place in that order is not a poet’s metaphor but a fixture of the divinatory system: the queen of heaven seated in heaven’s best quarter, from which her tokens came. The Etruscans were remembered by the ancients as the most religious of peoples precisely for this science, and Uni’s standing within it is one measure of her rank.

She is named and figured, too, on the engraved bronze mirrors that are among the most eloquent witnesses to Etruscan belief — polished disks whose backs were incised with scenes of the gods, labeled in the Etruscan script. On one famous mirror from a tomb at Tarquinia she appears in a scene found nowhere in Greek art in quite this form: the adult hero Hercle kneels and is suckled at her breast, while Tinia and the other gods look on and a tablet declares that this is how Hercle became Uni’s son. The Greeks told of the infant Heracles set to Hera’s breast by a trick; the Etruscans made of it a solemn rite of adoption, a grown demigod taken formally into the goddess’s family, and the developed scene is reckoned an Etruscan invention. It is a glimpse of how the borrowed and the native met in her cult — a Greek motif reworked into something that turns on her sovereign power to make a god her child.

Engraved bronze mirror, 4th century BCE, from a tomb at Tarquinia: Uni nurses the adult Hercle while the gods witness his adoption. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The gold tablets of Pyrgi

The harbor was called Pyrgi, the port of the great city of Caere — the modern Cerveteri — on the Tyrrhenian coast north of the Tiber’s mouth. It was a place where the trade of peoples met: Etruscan ships and Greek ships and the ships of the Phoenicians, the Levantine merchants whose network bound the western Mediterranean to the cities of the eastern shore. At Pyrgi the Etruscans built a sanctuary of two temples, and there, in the summer of 1964, the archaeologist Massimo Pallottino’s excavation lifted from the ground three leaves of gold.

They had been rolled up, with the bronze nails that once fixed them to a wall or a chest folded inside. Unrolled and read, they carried a dedication. The ruler of Caere, named Thefarie Velianas, had founded a holy place and given it to a goddess. The longer Etruscan leaf and the Phoenician leaf record substantially the same act in their two tongues, with a shorter Etruscan leaf beside them; and it is the pairing of the languages that makes the find precious. The Phoenician text is fully legible, an eastern Semitic language well understood; set against it, the parallel Etruscan gives scholars a rare anchor for a language that is otherwise read only with difficulty, having no close surviving relatives and no native literature to lean on. The tablets are, for this reason, among the most studied objects in the whole Etruscan record — one of the longest connected Etruscan texts known, and the nearest thing the field has to a Rosetta of its own.

The two texts do not name the goddess the same way, and the difference is the heart of the matter. In the Etruscan she is Uni. In the Phoenician she is Astarte — ʿštrt, the great goddess of the Phoenicians and Canaanites, lady of love and of sovereignty, whose worship ran from Tyre and Sidon across the sea to Carthage and the Phoenician west. Thefarie Velianas, dedicating his temple, set the two as one: the Etruscan queen of heaven and the Phoenician queen of heaven named in a single act of devotion. The identification with Astarte belongs to this place and this moment — a syncretism made at the edge of the Tyrrhenian Sea, where two trading peoples met and found that each other’s high goddess could be called by the name of their own. It is not that Uni simply was Astarte, everywhere and always; it is that here, at Pyrgi, an Etruscan ruler chose to honor them as the same power, and in doing so left the single greatest monument to the contact of the Etruscan and the Punic worlds.

So close was the binding of the two names that the Etruscan text appears to fuse them. Where the Phoenician has Astarte, one reading of the Etruscan gives the compound Unialastres — Uni-Astarte spoken as a single name, the two goddesses welded into one word for the act of dedication. The reading is debated, as much in the difficult Etruscan is debated, but the impulse behind it is plain on the gold: a ruler reaching for a name large enough to hold both the goddess of his own people and the goddess of the sea-traders whose favor his harbor depended on. The fullest modern accounts of the find, such as the entry in the Pyrgi tablets record, set the bilingual dedication at the center of what can be known of Etruscan religion in its own contemporary voice.

The texts give Thefarie Velianas different titles in the two languages, and the difference has been much discussed. The Phoenician calls him king over the Caerites; the Etruscan uses a magistrate’s title, zilac, the office of an elected ruler rather than a hereditary throne. Whether he is to be read as a king, a magistrate who reached for kingly power, or a tyrant in the Greek sense is debated, and the tablets do not settle it. What they fix beyond doubt is the deed: a ruler of Caere, around 500 BCE, built and dedicated a temple to his city’s sovereign goddess, and reached across the language barrier of the harbor to name her by the name his Phoenician guests would know.

The three Pyrgi gold tablets, c. 500 BCE — two in Etruscan, one in Phoenician — recording Thefarie Velianas’s dedication of a temple to Uni-Astarte. Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, Rome. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Why the king of Caere should have honored a Phoenician goddess at his port is a question of history rather than of myth. Pyrgi looked out on the sea-lanes that the Phoenicians and their Carthaginian heirs worked, and Caere’s interests ran with theirs: not long before, the Etruscans of Caere and the Carthaginians had fought together, off Corsica, against the Greeks who were pressing into the western sea. A temple at the harbor naming the city’s own goddess in the goddess of the Phoenicians reads, in that light, as an act with a diplomatic edge as well as a devotional one — a sovereignty declared and an alliance affirmed at the water’s edge. The gods of trade and the gods of rule were never far apart, and at Pyrgi they were the same goddess under two names.

Recovery and reckoning

For most of recorded history Uni was a name without a voice — known from the Roman antiquarians who reported the Etruscan gods, from the cross-naming that made her Juno, from her image on mirrors and the dedications in her sanctuaries, but never speaking in a document of her own. The Etruscans left no literature to survive them. What is known of their gods is pieced together from their monuments and inscriptions on one side, and from the later Roman writers who preserved and systematized the Etruscan sacred science on the other — external witnesses at their own distance, valuable but interpretive. A goddess reconstructed from such materials is a goddess seen partly through other eyes.

The Pyrgi tablets changed the standing of the evidence. Here at last was a contemporary Etruscan text, dated to the goddess’s own living cult, in which she is not described by an outsider but invoked by name in the act of worship — and invoked, moreover, beside a goddess of a wholly different people, so that the document fixes a moment of religious contact that no later report preserves. The find of 1964 was at once an archaeological event of the first order and a windfall for the study of the Etruscan language, and the tablets passed into the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia in Rome, where they remain among its chief treasures. Decades of scholarship have turned on them: on the reading of the Etruscan against the Phoenician, on the exact force of Thefarie Velianas’s titles, on what the dedication says about Caere’s place in the politics of the sixth-century Mediterranean.

Uni’s reach extended beyond the Etruscan cities proper, into the Italic peoples who lived among and beside them. The neighbors of Etruria worshiped their own sovereign goddesses, and the cross-naming that made Uni a Juno worked in their tongues as well: the Faliscans, an Italic-speaking people set within the Etruscan orbit, honored a Juno of their own at Falerii, and the great Italic and Roman cult of Juno drew on a current of belief that ran through Etruria as much as through Latium. Unlike the Etruscans, several of these peoples speak in their own surviving hand — the Umbrians in the bronze tablets of their priesthood, the Veneti in the offerings to their goddess at Este — so that the historian can sometimes hear an Italic sovereign goddess named by her worshipers directly, a thing the Etruscan record grants only rarely, and at Pyrgi most of all. Against that wider Italian background Uni is not an isolated figure but the Etruscan face of a power the whole peninsula knew: the queen who guards the city and the marriage-bed, named differently from valley to valley and worshiped under each name as supreme.

The identification of Uni with Astarte has drawn its own long inquiry. To the historian it is a documented syncretism, plainly attested and plainly localized — the surest example of an Etruscan deity equated with an eastern one, set down by the very people who made the equation. How deep the theological union ran, whether the two goddesses were felt to be one being or merely honored together as fellow sovereigns of heaven, is a question the tablets pose without resolving, and one that belongs to the inner life of a religion whose inner life is largely lost to us. What is not in doubt is the act of naming. An Etruscan king found in the Phoenician Astarte a fitting name for his own great goddess, and the two names lie together still on the gold he dedicated.

So Uni comes down through three kinds of testimony, and they are best kept apart. There is the matter of record — the tablets, the mirrors, the votive sanctuaries, the dated find at Pyrgi and the museum that holds it — which is firm. There is the matter of comparison — Uni as Juno, as Hera, as Astarte at Pyrgi — which is real and illuminating but is comparison, not equation, and which the Etruscans themselves treated as a living art rather than a fixed law. And there is the goddess as her worshipers held her: the sovereign mother, the queen of the heaven over Etruria, the lady to whom the cities raised their temples and whom a king could name in one breath with the great goddess of a foreign sea. The first of these we can verify; the second we can trace; the third the gold tablets let us hear, for once, in the worshiper’s own words.

→ Related: Tinia · Menrva · Turan Goddess · Aita · Pyrgi · Cerveteri · Tarquinia · Veii · Etruscans · Villanovan · The Faliscans · The Umbrians · The Veneti · Juno · Jupiter · Astarte Goddess · Venus · Apollo · Divination