The Etruscan Question, Part 1

Incorporating the Pelasgian Question, the Aegean Question, the Tyrrhenic Question, and the Minoan Question, which are, in fact, the Same Question. Or: an in-depth analysis of "-inth".

Short version

Analysis of pre-Greek borrowings in light of Etruscan evidence suggests that the Etruscans likely originated as a “Pelasgian” speaking colony that settled in northern Italy in the very late Bronze age or very early Iron age.

This group’s westward progression was likely facilitated by extensive trade, military, and diplomatic contact with central European states dating back to the Middle Bronze Age.

If none of the above has put you off, please continue reading.

Long version

People have been speculating about the origin of the Etruscans since antiquity. The Greeks and Romans had several conflicting theories on the question, with the most popular answer being “somewhere in Anatolia.”

There is not, however, much evidence that this is the case, and Etruscan genetic evidence seems to put the idea to bed fairly decisively. In the main, Etruscans were very similar to other ancient Italians, despite speaking a non-Italic, non-Indo-European language.

This might naturally lead you to think the Etruscans are “indigenous” Italians, perhaps a survival from the Neolithic. But this seems equally unlikely. For one thing, Etruscan is remarkably uniform, with little in the way of dialectical variation despite its speakers having occupied a relatively large area for an extended period. This suggests it’s a language whose speakers expanded out rapidly from a central point immediately before the period of its attestation.

Further supporting this idea is the fact that the Etruscan lexicon contains – alongside many obvious Latin loans – several words that are clearly Indo-European, and of considerable antiquity. Too antique, in fact, for them to represent borrowings from Latin or even Proto-Italic. This suggests a community which had been in extensive contact with Indo-European speakers long before arriving in its attested distribution. We’ll talk a little about this in a later post.

The Etruscans in brief

The earliest identifiably “Etruscan” culture in Italy is the Iron Age Villanovan culture, datable to around 960-720BC. Villanovan settlements are found in Etruria, Emilia-Romagna, the March, and even as far south as Latinum. After around 720BC, contact with Greeks and other cultures from the east sees the end of the Villanovan culture in the “core” part of its range and the beginning of the “Orientalising period”. But in the northernmost reaches of its area of influence (around Bologna) it continues as late as 540BC.

The Villanovan culture follows a “proto-Villanovan” culture of the late Bronze Age, which is itself an (almost) direct continuation of the central European Urnfield culture.

For now, we should note that archaeological evidence gives us some rough terminus post and terminus ante quem dates for the emergence of “Etruscans” as a distinct cultural group: they were more or less “fully” established with the emergence of the Villanovan culture at the beginning of the first millennium, and most likely have their roots in an offshoot of the Urnfield culture, which lasted from around 1200BC to 950BC. The connection to Urnfield (and its precise nature) will become important later.

Those Pelasgians in full

As I mentioned in an earlier piece attempting (rather successfully if I do say so myself) to decipher a non-Greek text from Hellenistic Cyprus: groups the Greeks called “Pelasgians” are mentioned to have inhabited large parts of the mainland Balkan peninsula, Crete, the northern Aegean islands, and the Troad well into historical times.

Homer identifies multiple groups of Pelasgians fighting on both sides of the Trojan war, indicating their wide historical spread. The Trojan Battle Order (Il. II.840) mentions Trojan-aligned Pelasgians between the armies of Asius in the Dardanelles and the Thracians bounded by the Hellespont. He also gives them a city named Larissa. Remember this name for later.

Pelasgians are also noted in Il. 10 to have camped close to Trojan allies from southern Anatolia and what would later become Macedonia, suggesting a Greek folk memory of their presence in these regions.

The Catalogue of Ships also mentions Achaean-aligned Pelasgians from Ἄργος Πελασγικόν, “Pelasgian Argos”, which is likely located on the Plain of Thessaly (in a region still referred to as “Pelasgiotis” in later periods), and a “Pelasgic Zeus” is described as ruling over Dodona in Epirus to the west of Thessaly.

Odysseus mentions Pelasgians among the inhabitants the 90 cities of Crete, but doesn’t elaborate on their exact position. Hesiod reaffirms a connection with Dodona, and also suggests a connection to Arcadia in the Peloponnese.

Post-Homeric authors cite even more locations as formerly (or currently) “Pelasgian”. Herodotus claims that the entirety of Greece was once “Pelasgia”, and also suggests that the Greeks were originally “separated” from the Pelasgians but later joined by them and a “multitude of other barbarians”. He specifically identifies Attica, the islands of Lemnos and Imbros, the rest of the Aegean islands, the Macedonian city of Kreston, two cities in the Hellespont, Samothrace and the Troad, and parts of the Peleponnese (specifically the area historically known as Achaea).

Thucydides identifies the Pelasgians as the original inhabitants of Greece, only eventually suborned to the Greeks themselves after the activities of the sons of Hellen. He intriguingly mentions that a plot of land below the Acropolis in Athens was identified as “Pelasgian” and considered cursed until the Athenians settled it.

Other historians paint a similar picture: the Pelasgians are repeatedly described as being autochthonically “Greek”, even if they were not themselves Hellenes.

In literature, Aeschylus’s Suppliants makes extensive mention of the Pelasgians. The Danaids, fleeing Egypt, seek asylum with a king Pelasgus in “Argos”, a territory which appears to extend from the region north of Thessaly down to the Peloponnese. Pelasgus claims to rule over this country as the king of the Pelasgians. A fragment of Sophocles makes mention of Tyrensian-Pelasgians (a name that probably doesn’t signify a genetic link, as Tyrensian and Tyrrhenian were used both to refer to the Etruscans specifically and non-Greek piratic peoples more generally).

Tyrensian Pelasgians

There have been attempts to link the Etruscans to the Pelasgians since antiquity, and with good reason. Eastward colonisations of Italy from the Balkans and Near East are a well-attested phenomenon in the historical period, and there is clear evidence of groups related in some way to the Etruscans in Greece in the classical period (Lemnian, most prominently, is a language closely related to Etruscan, even if it is only attested in 2 short inscriptions). There is also a noticeable dearth of other candidates.

Hellanicus of Lesbos, a contemporary of Herodotus, is the first Greek historian to explicitly connect the Pelasgians to the Etruscans, claiming the latter were driven out of Thessaly by the Greeks before colonising Tyrrhenia from the mouth of the Po near what would later become the Etruscan city of Spina, before capturing a city he calls “Crotona”, most likely the eastern Etrurian city of Curtun. The details of this episode are most likely garbled, but interesting nevertheless.

This line of enquiry has been relatively cold for the past several decades, however, due to a lack of direct evidence and due to an increase in circumstantially negative evidence, including recent genomic studies which seem to show Etruscans as little different from contemporary Italian populations.

That being said, the philological evidence is there if you look hard enough for it, and accessing and collating it has never been easier than it is now. As mentioned above, in a previous post I (hopefully) demonstrated that there are potentially unconfirmed links between the Etruscans and the Aegean that are languishing un- or under-investigated purely because doing so has been written off as a dead end, or simply as “too difficult”.

Because I have an abundance of time in which to do it and a particularly stubborn streak of autism, I’ll be investigating these links more fully here over the course of the next few posts. I had originally intended this to be a single article, but we’re about 1500 words in at the moment and this is only the introduction. I doubt either of my two readers wants to wade through another 10000 word monstrosity about implosives.

As usual, none of what I’ll be covering here is truly primary research: other people have already dug this stuff up, I’m simply going to be arranging it in as accessible a way as I can and adding my own layer of interpretation on what other people have already noticed.

Onomastica

If we disregard the Beekesian tendency to attribute all aspects of the Greek language to “Pre-Greek”, one of the most obvious traces of “Pre-Greek” language comes in the form of obviously non-Greek toponyms. If you have any interest in the subject, you’ll probably be able to guess which ones I’m going to be focusing on: -inth-, -ēna-, and -ss-/-tt.

We’ll also consider a few other obviously non-Greek toponyms for which we can find close Etrurian parallels.

In this piece, I’m going to focus exclusively on -inth, both because it’s quite a rich vein and also to prove a point. Pre-Greek survivals are neither insoluble problems or inscrutable formations: they can be interpreted very plausibly as close relatives of Etruscan forms even if there’s some ambiguity in their exact realisation, and some are more clear-cut than others.

We can use these relationships, and in fact will use them, to build up a complete picture of the relatedness of “Pre-Greek”, Etrurian, and Minoan, and we will, at length, use this system to posit a sensible theory of the shared origin of the speakers of these languages.

-(i)nth-

-(i)(n)th- is probably the most characteristically “Pre-Greek” onomastic sequence in Greek, appearing in the names of multiple major cities and regions. In most of instances, it appears with the vowel -i-, but a few instances in -y- also occur. Most obviously, we have the toponyms Κόρινθος, but also Προβάλινθος, Τρικόρυθος/Τρικόρυνθος/Τρικόρινθος, and Ζάκυνθος, and more abstractly, λαβύρινθος. We also see it in the personal name Ῥαδάμανθυς.

This element appears also to occur in many Pre-Greek words: πλίνθος “brick”, βόλινθος “aurochs”, κολοκύνθος “bottle gourd”, κάνθων “packmule”, μύρινθος “thread”, ἀψίνθιον “wormwood”, τερέβινθος/τέρμινθος “terebinth”, ἐρέβῐνθος “chickpea”.

Of the toponyms, all are located in areas associated with Pelasgian activity: the upper Peloponnese, Attica, and the Ionian islands. Two of them, Προβάλινθος and Τρικόρυθος, are cities in Attic Tetrapolis along with the equally non-Greek sounding Μαραθών and Οἰνόη.

The *-nth- element is probably our most clear-cut case of a Pre-Greek or “Pelasgian” element reflecting well-attested Etruscan formations.

In Etruscan, -θ creates a participle with continuous aspect that’s usually deployed to describe actions contemporaneous with a primary verb (e.g. trinθ “while speaking”). It also occasionally functions as a second-person imperative.

This -θ is also clearly linked to the ordinary locative case marker -θ(i), suggesting its use in both verbal and nominal contexts carries approximately the same force (“in or at x” is roughly equivalent to the deverbal “in, during, at the time of (his/her) x-ing”).

A locative/coordinative element makes a lot of sense for an element encountered in toponyms. But what about *-in?

Etruscan -in is usually considered to mark the passive voice in verbs. In a straightforward example, lup(h)- “cross over”, euphemistically “die”, + in gives lupin- “be crossed”, as of a river or street.

However, with a little more extended leeway, tau “see” + in gives tvin “appear”, am “be” + in = arin “rise”, both of which are strictly speaking more factitive or fientive than they are “passive” in the strictest possible sense, although we can say they’re “middle” as well.

It also appears, often as a fossilised or “bound” morpheme, in a variety of other contexts, most commonly as an adjectival suffix and as a suffix of possession or reference (including as a very archaic genitive, and as a locative ending on some pronouns).

Orienting morphosyntactic alignment is clearly only one function of this affix, which really appears to have a general function of marking pertinence.

This explains its force as an adjectival marker on nominals, where we can interpret it almost as signifying “the relevant x for y”, where y is the noun to which it is subordinated (this also explains its function as a pronominal locative: ca “this” > ca-i(n) “at/in this”, literally “with immediate proximal relevance to this”).

In verbs, its force can be described as applicative: it gives us information about how the force of the verb is being brought to bear on a particular noun, and potentially by whom. This means it can be deployed to change a root with a simple active transitive sense into a passive or middle form, but also to create causative, factitive, fientive, or even reflexive senses in a similar manner.

The three examples above illustrate potentially all of these functions: lupin- as “be crossed” is literally “cause to be crossed (by x)”. tvin- “appear” could potentially mean any one of “cause to be seen (by x)”, “make visible”, “become visible”, “make oneself seen”, etc.

For intransitive verbs like am- > arin- “rise”, we can also see some of this force applied almost in a reflexive sense (“rise” e.g. can be seen as a semantic extension of “bring oneself up/into being”).

This type of behaviour is quite typical of “active-stative” alignment: the meaning of an identically modified (or unmodified!) verb will depend entirely on the nouns that form its argument. (For a reasonably well documented example of this, where a single modifier can be used to create multiple different “verbs of application” depending on the arguments applied to it, see Chinook Jargon’s mamuk- verbs, which are often described as “causatives” but have a similar spread of meanings to -in).

Etruscan, of course, really makes us work hard to figure stuff like this out, as the nominative and accusative are both unmarked on most nouns, making it much harder to tell when we’re dealing with agents or patients.

Yo dawg we heard you like suffixes

This spread of meanings for both suffixes is characteristic of Etruscan, and it neatly illustrates a huge part of the struggle to link Etruscan to other languages even if there are links to be found. Indo-European spoils us because the entire family has a relatively conservative attitude to word formation. Roots are suffixed with a handful of more or less transparent modifying morphemes in a predictable way. Different languages have different preferences among these, some are more popular than others, but virtually all branches can be shown to use most of them.

Etruscan (and Pelasgian by my reckoning), on the other hand, handles word formation almost entirely via Suffixaufnahme or case stacking: a noun or verb is derived from a root by the application of a suffix, and then further derived words are created through the addition of further suffixes which “reorient” the sense of each preceding suffix.

Language families which engage in this kind of game can have descendants which take radically different approaches to word formation even if they’re using the same sets of morphemes. Over a long enough time (and with enough sound changes), this can make spotting genetic relationships a great deal harder.

Anyway, back to -nθ

Through the lens of Suffixaufnahme, we can see -θ as a general purpose static local marker, and -(i)n as a general purpose marker of pertinence. -in may itself decompose to *i+*n, reflecting a primitive relational/comitative element combined with a general adjectival element that also becomes a marker of the genitive and accusative and even the locative under other circumstances.

In other words, these are both generally coordinating suffixes. The passive force of -in can be understood with reference to a highly artificial English construction “by means of being x”.

This is also, by the way, why the combined Etruscan formulation -nθ-, despite decomposing to elements that mean nothing of the sort, acts as both an agentive ending and an active participle.

Don’t worry, all of this will become much less clear as we go on. And if you really want to drive yourself mad, try and figure out where borrowings of the PIE *-(e/o)nt might figure in to all this, because they almost certainly do.

Depending on how these elements might have evolved independently between “Pelasgian” and Etruscan, our Pre-Greek *-ινθ- could carry one of a couple of different forces: in toponyms, we might expect it to mean “the place of the thing that is x (or has been made x)” or “at the thing that pertains to/has the quality of x”. In basic nouns and proper names, it might carry an agentive sense as in Etruscan, or an adjectival sense indicating habitual behaviour, ongoing state, or subordinated quality.

Let’s see where we get to if we try to analyse our examples.

Toponymths

We can decompose “Corinth” as either Κόρ+ινθ+ος or Κόρ+ιν+θ+ος. -ος we can obviously disregard as a secondary Greek case ending. But what can we do with *kor-?

Etruscan suggests a couple of candidates: cur- and car-.

In keeping with usual Etruscan standards of clarity, both of these might actually reflect the same underlying root. We last met this in our discussion of the Amathus Bilingual, where we saw that this root also has a form cer-.

The general sense of cer- or car- is something “to make, build, care for or attend to, protect, guard”. Derived words include cara “dear one, beloved”, carcu(na) “guard, protector” (whence Latin carcer), ceren- “to discern”, cerene “discernment” (noun, as in image or vision, but also adjectivally “discerning”).

The quality of the vowel appears to be influenced by affixed vowels but is quite unstable. The root cur- also looks to be related, and is apparently the origin of Latin curare “care for”, but also a variety of Sabine and Latin words related to the armed nobility: curiales “young noblemen”, curis “spear”, curia “meeting place of the curi”.

It’s quite obvious that this root is also coordinate with Amathusian kera “noble” (I missed this when I examined the bilingual, but trust me, nothing in Etruscan is straightforward or intuitive, so give me some grace). Tantalisingly, this may also be related to the Linear B word ko-ro/ko-re “attendant”, with all having evolved from the sense of “one who is willing or able to fight, armed man, protector” etc.

Cur- also appears as an element in the place name Curtun whence Latin Cortona.

There appear to be a number of similarly formed names scattered across Greece as well: Thessalonian Γυρτών Gyrton, multiple settlements called Γόρτυνα (in Arcadia, Crete, and Macedonia), Boeotian Κυρτώνη Kyrtone. You’ll note that these are all located in supposed Pelasgian strongholds, of course.

On top of these, we also have curuna, whence Latin corona “crown”. The element -un(a) is another agglutinated adjectival formation, probably decomposing to -u (which forms derived adjectives or nouns of quality, but which also forms perfective participles as in lupu “dead, crossed over” in another example of an identical morpheme modifying both nouns and verbs) and -na “the one that is, that (which is) of”. We can therefore decompose curuna to “that which has or denotes the quality of cur”.

Curtun likewise can be analysed as Cur+t+un, where -t is a nominalising suffix associated with the -θ suffix that provides the locative etc as mentioned above, and which can also appear as a nominal ending, and -un is an archaic genitive/adjectival singular. It presumably, quite literally, means “town” or “settlement”, literally “place where there is construction”, or possibly “fortified settlement” if cur- is to be taken as referring specifically to protection or a nobleman’s encampment.

Κόρινθος may reflect a name with very similar or identical meaning *curinθ- “principle fortified settlement”. Its alternative name in myth, Ἐφύρα, actually supports this, as it closely resembles Etruscan *(e)pur-, a root indicating superiority and appearing in the names of many types of senior Etrurian magistracy: (e)purθ, purθ, purt, eprθne. Both names would mark Corinth as the the seat of the local suzerain.

The name of the famous Spartan magistrates could also be linked to this formation: ἔφορος is traditionally analysed as a contraction of ἐπίουρος, literally “overseer”, but there’s no good reason for an aspirate to appear in such a contraction, so we might be dealing with a Pre-Greek word for “leader” here with one of Greek’s typical inventive folk etymologies.

Τρικόρυθος probably has a similar origin (the -n- is most likely intrusive by analogy to “Corinth”), with the initial tri- reflecting Tyrrhenic tru- “power, command”.

Προβάλινθος is a bit more exotic but also interpretable by analogy to Etruscan. Προβάλ- is obviously a compound of some kind just like Τρικόρ-, which has been interpreted by Greek speakers with reference to commonly occurring Greek compound elements. My best guess for the βάλ- element is that it’s cognate to Etruscan val-, vel- most likely originally “strike” and which appears in a number of names referring to martial prowess, including Velχ, the “Etrurian Mars”. The sound represented by the letter v here is most probably a voiced bilabial β (either fricative or approximant) matched against a voiceless ɸ represented by the letter f.

My supposition here is based on the fact that a β~ɸ sound can also be reconstructed for Minoan, and that signs used to represent it in Linear A have been sporadically adapted to represent aspirates in Linear B. These sounds would have been lost from Latin by the time of its contact with Etruscan, and thus used to represent the next-nearest phonemic approximations w and f. (We’ll talk about this in a great deal more depth in a later post).

Pro- here may well reflect fra-/pra-, an element isolatable from frast “sense, intellect” (see also nomen gentillicum Prastna) and the male cognomen Pres(e)nte “ready, resolute”.

Also of note here is the Pelasgian gloss of Tetrapolis given by Stephanus of Byzantium: Ὑττηνία or Huttēnia. This is so obviously a continuation of a name in the same stem as Etruscan huθ- “four” that it seems beyond argument, and I’m surprised more hasn’t been made of it. We’ll talk about its exact formation in Part 2 when we get to -āna.

Marginal cases

Ζάκυνθος and Ῥαδάμανθυς we can consider together, as even though Zakynthos is a place name, it’s also said to be a personal name in Homer’s origin story, being adopted from the son of the Arcadian king Dardanos who originally captured the island, before which it was called Hyrie.

Ζάκυ- corresponds closely to etruscan zax-, śax-, śac- “point”, from which we find extended forms śacu- and śaxu- “acute, wise, discerning” from which also Latin sagax “shrewd, acurate, sagacious”. A personal name *śaku-(i)n-θ- can be readily interpreted in the Etruscan framework as “exercising shrewdness” “wily” “skillful” or “clever”.

Remember how we briefly mentioned that -in-θ- also functions as an agentive marker when applied to nouns? Let’s cover that in slightly more detail.

If -in has a generally applicative sense, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a passive marker, but a marker that creates a verbal adjective with no specified voice.

-θ as we’ve also seen is a local marker, but it has an extended temporal function as well: it can be applied to verbs to create a kind of imperfective/continuous non-past participle.

Viewed in this light, you can see, if you squint, why -inθ can also be applied to create a nominal with the force “(one who) habitually performs the action or quality of this particular root”. Or, roughly, an analogous form to the PIE Caland deverbal element *-ont, which we examined in the Anatolian article.

For want of a better term, I will summarise this as a locally-temporalised verbal adjectnoun.

The older name Hyrie also has a few strong candidates for an Etruscan cognate, but is a little more obscure since an initial h- in Greek in this context could either be a secondary development of a word originally beginning in *u-, a reflection of an earlier *s-, or possibly a reflection of earlier *w-.

Etruscan sure/śure appears to refer adjectivally to bronze, but the variable ś makes it unlikely in my opinion unless this consonant resolves differently in “Pelasgian”, which it might well do considering the example of Zakynthos. ur- has something to do with water, and could therefore neatly reflect a toponym for an island. Hur- refers to weight or gravity.

Ῥαδάμανθυς can be decomposed to reveal a highly appropriate meaning: *rat-/raθ- is an Etruscan root with a basic meaning “evaluate, count, calculate”, which surfaces in ratum “accurately, according to law”, raθiu “number” (> Latin ratio “count, reckoning”), raθlθ “haruspex, diviner” and possibly “engraver”.

*man is a root that probably originally carried the sense of “linger, remain”, but is almost exclusively used to refer to the spirits of the dead (Latin manes, possibly also maiores “ancestors”, the Etruscan god Mantus and Mantua, the city of which he is patron). *Rata-manθu, appropriately enough for a judge of dead souls in the underworld, is therefore “assayer of souls”.

Note that this is an accidental -nθ formation. manθ appears as a nominal form for the dead on its own, and the n is an inseparable part of the root. Let’s quickly analyse it on its own terms:

The -a element here is either a simple non-preterite active verb, or a deverbal with a sense of inevitability, obligation, etc which in Etruscan grammar is sometimes referred to as a jussive mood because of its typical use in inscriptions to compel the reader to do or not do something (in this use, it’s contrasted with an element -ri which carries a similar force in the passive and is used equivalently to the Latin gerundive).

The -u we’ve already described above as an adjectival marker of attained (perfective) state. These often form a genitive in -us which would then function itself as an unmarked substantive and be interpreted in Greek as a 3rd declension masculine noun.

In case you’re not already convinced

Here’s a quickfire round of some of the other -inθ stems mentioned earlier:

ἀψίνθιον “wormwood”, *aw-s- or *aβ-s- “welfare, health”, in reference to the plant’s use as a medicinal herb (perhaps “bringer/maker of health”).

βόλινθος “aurochs”, possibly a confusion of two or three roots: *βal- “strike, crush” (whence also > vel-), *pul- “shine, be glorious/splendid”, and *pal- “cover, support, sky”. Both of the latter appear with initial ɸ.

κάνθων “packmule”: from a root can, cen “bear, carry, hold, bring”, also with the sense “gift” (that which is borne) in derived forms. Possibly related to Etruscan canθu “support, carry”. The name of the dung beetle κάνθαρος is probably related, as is Latin cantērius, also meaning “packmule”.

μύρινθος “thread, cord”: perhaps an agentive formation of the root mur- which in Etruscan is associated with death but also hesitation, and might originally mean “to rest, to stay, to remain”. A mur-inth then would be “one which causes to stay or prevents movement”. Likely cognate also with Latin mora “delay, hindrance”. This may itself reflect an ancient borrowing from PIE *mer- or *mor-.

πλίνθος “brick”, < *pel “support, cover”, see also βόλινθος.

There also exist a few other “false” -nth words like μίνθη (mint, cognate to Latin menta and mist likely derived from a formation of a root *min/men + either -ta or -t-a) which I won’t treat here. τερέβινθος/τέρμινθος “terebinth” and ἐρέβῐνθος “chickpea” might also fall within this category : ἐρέβῐνθος in particular appears to be related to Latin ervum and Proto-Germanic *arwīts, along with Greek ὄροβος and probably does constitute a substrate term, but it’s difficult to analyse at present.

Mousetrap

Two further -inth formations deserve special attention. These are σμίνθος, “mouse”, and λαβύρινθος.

σμίνθος appears to correspond directly to Etruscan sminθe “wretched, diminutive, weak”, which is also coordinate to smelθa “tight, narrow” and isminθians “immiserator, destroyer”, an epithet of Mars. This might ultimately be the origin of the epithet used of Apollo in the Iliad by the priest Chryses, Smintheus.

This is generally taken to correspond to "Lord of Mice” in line with the god’s function as a bringer of plague, but it may be that both the term for mouse and the active participle form seen in Smintheus are simply derivatives of the same Pelasgian root which, like its Etruscan cognate, means “be small” at the most basic level and is augmented to “make small” via suffixes. The confusion between the two would be understandable if the original meaning of Smintheus as “destroyer” had been lost by classical times.

In this interpretation, the town of Sminthe or Sminthos in the Troad associated with this aspect of Apollo takes its name from the god, and not the god from the town, corroborating an ancient Pelasgian presence in the area. We’ll talk in more detail about this later, but for now it’s enough to note that this is in line with Homer’s estimation of the territories currently or previously occupied by Pelasgians.

λαβύρινθος is a bit more complicated but also easily decomposable. The Mycenaean precursor to this word is, famously, da-pu₂-ri-to (𐀅𐁆𐀪𐀵), reflecting a common d~l alternation seen in some Pre-Greek borrowings which probably reflects a dental/alveolar equivalent of the β~ɸ distribution.

The pu₂ sign 𐁆 has been shown convincingly to have been used for the aspirated stop pʰ by Mycenaean scribes. Interestingly, “Labrynth” is also written with pu 𐀢 (𐀅𐀢𐀪𐀵), suggesting some confusion to Greek speakers as to the precise nature of this sound.

This makes me think we should reconstruct the underlying Minoan word as something like *ɬaβrinθ. We can get more exotic with the sound I’m assuming is ɬ, it could for instance be something like tɹ̝̊,.

What’s important to note is that it’s probably some kind of alveolar fricative to match the bilabial fricative we’ve already discussed. This sound was probably allophonically voiced or voiceless depending on its position, just like β~ɸ. We’ll identify it for the purposes of the argument as ɬ~ɮ to reflect this

The element da-pu₂-r() corresponds to Linear A du-pu₂-re. Du-pu₂-re (*ɬuβure or *ɬuβre maybe?) appears to be a general term meaning “master” or “governor” and appears widely in association with toponyms, perhaps denoting either a human administrator or a divine patron. A labrynth, therefore, is a place associated with one or more such figures. The fact that caves near Gorytna were referred to with this name as late as the 1st century AD suggests a preservation of this idea, with the caverns perhaps having once been the home of an important chthonic presence, a relative of which is also preserved in the tale of the Minotaur.

Analysing this word is a bit tricky. The element *ɬaβ-/*ɬuβ- could have several corresponding forms in Etruscan for the purposes of cognate hunting. We might expect tap or θap, θaf or taf, or even tau, or we might expect the first consonant to surface as l.

This gives us several potential candidates:

lup/luf: “to cross” “to die”, plausible if we consider that a *ɬuβre in Minoan religion might have held an important function as the “owner” of a place of especial significance in connecting the worlds of the living and the dead.

θup/θuf/tupʰ etc: “oppress, punish, strike” but also apparently “oath” and “stone”. It’s possible that these are related meanings if this word originally referred to the act of punishment by stoning, and to a stone on which oaths were taken. The associations here should be obvious.

θap/θaf: a root connected with banqueting and sacrificial feasting, which is also reflected in Greek and Latin and their IE neighbours as the suspect root *dap-. Plausible if a *ɬuβre was originally the “host” of the proceedings or one in whose honour such festivities are held.

Things are complicated by the fact that we can analyse -ure in a few different ways. +ur in Etruscan functions to create abstract collectives in the handful of words in which it’s attested, while -e is another strumental or pertinitive suffix. u+re on the other hand might reflect a denominal of state or quality plus a variant of the Etruscan gerundive element -ri.

We could therefore be dealing, variously, with one who administers oaths, one who delivers judgements, one who presides over feasts, one who stands at crossroads, or whichever combination of elements most tickles your individual fancy. We’ll leave this an open question for now.

And that’s not all

I hope I’ve at least been able to demonstrate with this post that I’m not descending into psychosis and that there is a plausible backing for my hypothesis. Even a relatively shallow examination reveals clear links. We’ll deepen the connection later with examinations of more Pre-Greek toponyms and similarly-formed words, and we’ll also incorporate elements, where applicable, from Linear B and even, to a lesser extent, Linear A.