(August 2, 2023 at 1:04 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote:(August 2, 2023 at 12:25 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: Not much of a mystery. The earliest attested Runic script doesn’t necessarily mean the first Runic script - it’s just the earliest one we know of. It’s possible that the Germanic people were using runes well before 100AD, which, coincidentally is roughly when the remaining Etruscans abandoned their script for the Latin alphabet.
Boru
It seems likely Etruscan script was transmitted to the Germans via a Celtic intermediary at an earlier date when Etruscan cultural and commercial influence in Northern Italy was still strong, maybe before 2nd - 3rd century BC. the mystery is we have no other evidence if it so we don’t know how that happened. We know by 60AD Etruscan has fallen completely out of daily use and the number of people who could read Etruscan script or even understand the spoken language was very few, and the Emperor Claudius felt compelled to compiled a dictionary to preserve the language because many of Rome’s traditional religious rites and texts were inherited from the Etruscans, and these still held a revered central role in Roman religion despite the effective death of the language itself.
Rome had a presence in Germania from about 12BC. It’s not unreasonable to suppose that there were some Etruscan auxiliaries (or at least some Roman levies who knew Etruscan) among the legions.
Admittedly, that’s a bit of a stretch. I think your notion of a Celtic intermediary is much more likely. By 500BC, the Etruscans had expanded north of the Po, very near the border of Gaul, which was absolutely lousy with Celts. Five or six centuries would be ample time for the diffusion of Etruscan script and its modification into German runes.
Boru
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