Modern research on Raetic

Early finds and compilations in the 19^th century

Modern research on the Raetians and Raetic based on both the classical sources and archaeological data begins with the work of Conte Benedetto Giovanelli, mayor of Trento, who published his book Trento. Città de’ rezj e colonia romana in 1825. Giovanelli 1825: 53 (n. 43) referred to the information given by the classical historiographers and, following Pompeius Trogus and Livy, assumed kinship of Raetians and Etruscans – though he argued a differing view considering the connection between the two peobles, holding that it was the Etruscans who migrated to Central Italy from the north ((Giovanelli 1844; see also Niebuhr 1811–32 I (sub "Die Tusker oder Etrusker") and Mommsen 1854–85 I (ch. 9).) Giovanelli associated the historical Raetians with two inscriptions found in places which lie in the area indicated by the ancients: the inscription(s) on the Situla di Cembra, also "Situla Giovanelli", bought by him in 1825 and published in 1834, and WE-1, also on a situla, found in 1845 during excavations prompted by Giovanelli himself, and published by him in 1845. The Matrei situla handle would remain the most northerly Raetic inscription find for more than a century.

As early as 1853, the ancient historian Theodor Mommsen found occasion to lament "die über alle Begriffe elende Schrift" (p. 199) encountered in the inscriptions of Northern Italy generally. He published a collection of all such inscriptions then known, including those on coins, which contained Giovanelli's finds, as well as the inscriptions on the Negau A and Vače helmets, which had already been put into Raetic context by Giovanelli himself, and the then lost Spada di Verona. Mommsen perceived the alphabets to be closely related to the Etruscan script, and hence coined the term "Nordetruskische Alphabete". Mommsen's work is distinguished by great methodological care and repeated caveats against drawing hasty conclusions from insufficient data. Considering this, it is even more baffling that, in spite of his small database – 44 items in all –, Mommsen succeded in correctly discriminating between different alphabets, among them a "Swiss alphabet" in the west, an alphabet of Padova/Este, a "Styrian alphabet" on the Negau helmets, an "alphabet of Verona" on the Spada di Verona, and a "Tyrolian alphabet" on Giovanelli's finds. Concerning the latter, he agreed with Giovanelli that the association of the finds with Livy's Raetians suggested itself, but observed that a relationship of alphabets did not prove a relationship of the underlying languages (p. 201, 230). For the identification of languages, Mommsen considered the available data insufficient.

Only two years later, Giuseppe Giorgio Sulzer published drawings of the inscriptions on the warrior statuette from Sanzeno and the stela from Pfatten, found in 1846 and 1854, respectively. In 1867, Ariodante Fabretti included all the "North Etruscan" inscriptions in his Corpus Inscriptionum Italicarum, adding, amongst a number belonging to other alphabet groups, Raetic BZ-4, which had been published by Conestabile in 1863. Wilhelm Corssen discussed the North Etruscan inscriptions in Die Sprache der Etrusker (p. 919 ff.), interpreting the lot as documents of Etruscan, which in turn he took to be an Indo-European language of the Italic branch. This view was echoed in Giovanni Amennone Oberziner's compendium I Reti in relazione cogli antichi abitatori d'Italia, which strove to link the historical sources with recent archaeological findings and linguistic theories. Oberziner, like Corssen, counted Mommsen's Swiss/Western inscriptions and some new Eastern Alpine inscriptions among the Raetic ones, ruling that "etnograficamente parlando i Reti non sono un popolo a sè, che pe' suoi caratteri si distingua dagli altri che abitarono l'Italia nostra, ma sono il complesso di parecchie sovrapposizioni etniche che ricevettero il nome comune di Reti probabilmente solo nel tempo abbastanza tardo degli Etruschi, ci conviene rintracciare queste varie civiltà nei monumenti" (XI). Despite this differing application of the term "Raetic", Oberziner's further subdivision of the script turned out fairly similar to that of Mommsen: he distinguished "retico centrale", "orientale", "occidentale" and "settentrionale" (the last group encompassing the above-mentioned new inscriptions from the Gurina (Gt 13–23) and those on the Negau helmets; p. 220, tab. 30). Linguistically, he held all the documented languages of Northern Italy to be related to Etruscan and the other languages of Italy.

It was the philologist Carl Pauli in his 1885 edition Die Inschriften des nordetruskischen Alphabets, who, relying on a corpus increased by twofold, continued Mommsen's groundwork and laid the foundation for detailed research. The largest and most important new group of documents at Pauli's disposal were the alphabet tablets from Este; as concerns Raetic, the only addition was the the horse bronze from Dercolo. (The inscription on the key from Dambel, included by Corssen, was judged by Pauli (p. 37–41) to be an imitation of CE-1 on a mediaeval object.) Pauli distinguished four script provinces and assigned them new, un-interpretative names according to the main find places: the alphabets of Este, Bozen, Sondrio and Lugano (p. 46–58). While in at least two cases the epicentres of the alphabet provinces have shifted in terms of the numbers of finds, Pauli's names are still used today, even though they were intended only as provisional (p. 58) – Pauli himself wanted to change "Bozen alphabet" into "Trient alphabet" a few years later (AIF III: 189), but could not establish the new name. While he regarded the Bozen and Lugano alphabets as daughter alphabets of the Etruscan script, he believed the alphabets of Este and Sondrio to be derived from a Greek source on the Adriatic coast, and consequently distinguished between "North Etruscan" and "Adriatic" alphabets (p. 58–68; see also AIF III: 231). Based on the increased data, Pauli also attempted to identify the languages of the inscriptions, and correctly perceived the Indo-European affiliation of those written in the Este and Lugano alphabets, coining the terms "Venetic" and "Lepontic". The languages of the Bozen and Sondrio alphabets he connected with Etruscan, and suggested – combining his findings with both conflicting theories concerning the origin of the Raetians – that while the latter was used by the population left behind when the Etruscans migrated into Italy, the first was the script of those Etruscan tribes which were later dispersed to the north by the Gaulish invasion (p. 96–112; see also AIF II,2: 181–199).

A growing corpus and the PID

The late 19^th and early 20^th century saw a number of new inscriptions found, which were only published seperately and sometimes rather obscurely. Luigi Campi di Montesanto conducted excavations in and around the Nonsberg, which brought to light NO-1, NO-3, NO-4, NO-5, NO-6 and NO-10, published between 1887 and 1905. A propos of his comments on the Mechel / Meclo inscriptions, Pauli mentioned VR-1 and VR-2, the former having been published by Cipolla in 1884. Pauli was also consulted by von Wieser about marks on two cists from Moritzing (BZ-7, BZ-8). In 1889, von Wieser reported the discovery of BZ-2 and BZ-3 at a meeting of the Anthropologische Gesellschaft in Vienna. Oswald Menghin published RN-1 in 1914. A particularly important find came from the South: the Paletta di Padova, found in January 1899 during the extension of a church and published by Ghirardini two years later. In 1918, the archaeologist Giuseppe Pellegrini published the considerable find of Magrè. He defined an "alphabet of Magrè", distinct from Pauli's Bozen alphabet and with similarities to the Venetic alphabets, documented on the 21 pieces of antler, and also considered the southern inscriptions VR-3, which Pauli hadn't been able to place, and PA-1 to belong in this group. He did, however, perceive the similarity of the linguistic forms recorded in the Magrè and Bozen alphabets, and tentatively suggested a difference between a northern and a southern "Raetic" population, where the former had mixed with the Gauls, whereas the latter, termed "Euganei", was heavily influenced by (but not necessarily related to) the Etruscans.

Only in 1933 were the Transpadanian inscriptions again published together in the copious edition of the British philologist Robert Seymour Conway and his student Joshua Whatmough, The Pre-Italic Dialects of Italy (PID). Conway, who had been working on this project since 1907, limited himself to editing volume I containing the Venetic inscriptions, so that the others (vol. II) were effectively attended to by Whatmough alone, but drawing heavily on Conway's notes. The PID was a very ambitious project, both in scope and in method: The editors of the PID attempted to have all the inscriptions autopsied by themselves or at least a trustworthy colleague. The sub-corpus presented as "Raetic" by Whatmough, in addition to the inscriptions already listed by Pauli as written in the Bozen alphabet and the ones mentioned in the preceding paragraph, included RN-2 (found in 1924) and thirteen inscriptions on various objects from Sanzeno preserved in the Ferdinandeum (SZ-17 to SZ-29). Whatmough also republished BZ-9, which had already been published loco obscuro by Orgler in 1866. Of inscriptions previously assigned to other groups, he included the inscriptions from the Val d'Astico AS-1 to AS-14, which had been published as belonging to the Venetic corpus, but which he associated with Pellegrini's Magrè alphabet, as well as VR-5 (filed as Lepontic by Pauli). He also counted the inscriptions in the Sondrio alphabet as Raetic, but considered them both alphabetically and linguistically deviant. HU-1 and BZ-17 were mentioned in the appendix. Whatmough, who had basically finished his volume by 1925 and published a preliminary paper in 1923, agreed with Pellegrini that the language connected the Magrè with the Bozen group. In opposition to Pauli he argued that this language was not Etruscan or Etruscoid, but "the remnants of the speech of some tribe, the chief constituent of whose population was Western Indo-European, probably of mixed Celtic-Illyrean stock, which had been at some period of its history affected by considerable Etruscan intermixture and influence" (Whatmough 1923: 69). He assumed that the inscriptions were mainly votives, and accordingly read almost exclusively anthroponyms and theonyms, which he explained by comparing them to established names, mainly of Celtic or "Illyrian" origin. As concerns the alphabet, Whatmough also dissented from Pauli in that he saw all the Transpadanian alphabets as directly derived from the Etruscan, with the Magrè alphabet very similar to the Venetic alphabets, and the Bozen alphabet particularly close to the original Etruscan.

The "Räterfrage" and Tyrolean toponymy

The discussion of Raetic has long been impeded by nationalistic feeling on both the Austrian/German and the Italian side, because the question of Raetic identity and affiliation was regarded as relevant to the political, linguistical and ethnic situation of what used to be the Habsburg Kronland of Tyrol up to 1918. The debate has centered on the "Räterfrage" – the origin and composition of a hypothetical Raetic people. The profusion of usually fuzzy and sometimes contradictory propositions put forth on this topic lay rooted in the confusion or even equation of the classical name Raeti, whose ancient purport was to be identified, and the epigraphical finds defined, inconsistently over time (see above), as linguistically or alphabetically Raetic. The Italian side has traditionally favored the Etruscan theory, proposing a Mediterranean drift into the Alps since pre-Roman times as suggested by the classical historiographers, while the Austrian camp preferred to identify the Raeti with the omnipresent Illyrians: With regard to Pauli's results concerning the Etruscan character of the inscriptions found in the Bozen area and as far north as Matrei am Brenner, Friedrich Stolz conceded that Etruscans dwelled "im südlichen Theile des Landes" (Stolz 1892: p. 37) – that is, where an Italian-speaking population existed in his own time. (Literature on the ethnicity of the Raeti before Stolz in Anm. 14.) Stolz regarded the name Raeti as a cover term, which allowed him to look for other ethnicities with which to identify the northern population. He introduced a comment made by Strabon (IV,206) into the discussion, which mentions the Inntal tribes of the Breuni and the Genauni as being Illyrians, thereby mitigating the controversy: The Illyrians were associated with neither Italy nor Central Europe, but the Balkans. Stolz then channelled the problem into toponymy, with the pre-Roman toponyms of Tyrol being widely regarded as Illyrian in the first place. Stolz' writings have influenced prehistoric research in Austria and Germany until the cessation of "Panillyrism" in the 1950ies, among others Oswald Menghin and Ferdinand Haug. Even Pauli, who had identified the Venetic tribes with the Illyrians, acknowledged the relevance of Strabon and had his Illyro-Veneti settle in the greater part of north-western Tyrol, with the Etruscans only migrating along the valley of the river Etsch to Matrei (p. 242 f.).

The 1920ies and 1930ies witnessed a linguistically based argument between the leading philologists in the field, conducted mainly in the journals Glotta, Studi Etruschi (SE) and the nationalistic Archivio per l’Alto Adige (AAA). Whatmough's opinions (also 1934) were accepted by Giuliano Bonfante, who took the Raeti for Illyrians. They were opposed by Rudolf Thurneysen, who found the equation of Raetic þinaχe with Etruscan zinace, and Cortsen 1935: 181. Paul Kretschmer (also Kretschmer 1932b, Kretschmer 1940 and 1943, Kretschmer 1949), Vittore Pisani and Francesco Ribezzo (also Ribezzo 1934b) also recognized similarities between Raetic and Etruscan, but argued a common ancestor: While the former two saw Raetic as an autochthonous pre-IE language related to Minor Asian Etruscan, which at the time of the inscriptions was already being Indo-Europeanized, Ribezzo preferred to have speakers of a pre-IE substratum including Raetic and Etruscan immigrate from Central Europe. Italian nationalism was represented by Carlo Battisti (numerous papers, see bibliography), who stuck with the ancients by identifying the Raeti with Etruscan fugitives, and fit this theory into an overall picture of migration from the South (and East) into the Alps. On the other end of the scepticism scale, Emil Vetter, who was responsible for the bibliographical reviews concerning Italic languages in Glotta, joined the debate in 1935 (p. 205) by remarking that he did not consider the Raetic–Etruscan equations compelling. He maintained his sceptical outlook in 1943, suggesting that the Sondrio inscriptions ought to be kept apart from the Raetic ones and that possibly even the Bozen and Magrè groups were not as close as generally assumed (70 f. and 77 resp.), but later reverted to Kretschmer's position based on the finds of the 1940ies and 1950ies.

New finds and findings in the 1950ies and 1960ies

After 1945, excavations conducted in South Tyrol and the Trentino brought important new finds to light. The bronzes of Sanzeno (inscriptions SZ-1 to SZ-15), found in 1947, shifted the epicentre of Pauli’s Bozen alphabet to the right of the river Adige. They were published in 1950 by Giacomo Roberti, and again in 1951 with a linguistical focus by Giovan Battista Pellegrini, who also mentioned SZ-38, SZ-39, and the inscriptions on bronze handles SZ-40 and SZ-53. SZ-31 on a simpulum came to light two years later, and was also published by Pellegrini, as well as two inscriptions from the Puster Valley: the inscription on the girdle plate from Lothen in 1951, and, together with Loredana Calzavara Capuis, one on an Etruscan-style stone amulet. Another find from the eastern border of the distribution area, the inscription of Castelciés, which had been known among archaeologists for two centuries, was edited and assigned to the Raetic corpus by Michel Lejeune. Vetter discovered BZ-11 on a cist published a few years earlier. Throughout the 1950ies and early 1960ies, Leonhard Franz and Karl M. Mayr of the Tyrolean State Museum added a number of finds from the northern area to the corpus. Mayr published separately another inscription (though less relevant) from the Puster Valley, the first inscription from the Vintschgau in the western North, and from Bozen, besides BZ-6 and BZ-14, the first inscription possibly displaying a mixture of Raetic and Roman features. The Non Valley corpus was augmented with NO-2 and NO-7. Franz as the museum's "Fachdirektor" made an effort to unearth all the relevant material preserved in his house, publishing not only the interesting SZ-68, but also a fair number of objects bearing rather doubtful characters, mainly from Sanzeno (see Franz 1957 and Franz 1959).

In 1957, the discovery of inscriptions displaying Raetic affinity in both script and language in North Tyrol – the "petrographs of Steinberg" (in fact situated in the community Brandenberg), published by Vetter, and two inscribed objects from the Himmelreich, published by Alfons Kasseroler – extended the domain of Raetic to the North of the Brenner. The Steinberg find especially made an impact, since it was the first petrograph found in the Raetic realm, and completely unlike the obvious comparanda, the petrographs in the Val Camonica. Also, both the Steinberg and the Lothen inscriptions displayed yet more alphabet variants, apparently akin to the Venetic. The "stagshorns" from the Montesei di Serso on the other hand, found between 1962 and 1964 and published by Pellegrini in 1965, represented a subcorpus very similar to that of Magrè, and established the inscribed piece of antler as a typically "Raetic" artefact.

While there was still some doubt as to the linguistic affiliation of Raetic (for example Pulgram 1958: 209), some progress was made in detail: Pellegrini, though he later (p. 47 f.) lost his faith in the Etruscan theory, restated and expanded Thurneysen's zinace-equation (p. 321), and observed that the lack of a character for o could be interpreted as an Etruscan feature (Pellegrini 1959: 192). He also reintroduced the inscription on the Vače helmet, which had been put into Raetic context on graphematic grounds by Marstrander in the original publication, and had now a parallel from the Montesei di Serso. Vetter detected the patronymic suffix; his finding was supported by Jürgen Untermann in the course of his careful reevaluation of the name material of Northern Italy. In 1968, Ernst Risch, who had been invited as the token linguist to speak at an archaeological symposium on the Raeti in Chur (see below), gave an overview of the current state of research. He addressed methodological problems such as the doubtful homogeneity of ethnicity and language in Alpine regions and apparent linguistic and epigraphic variants in the inscription, but tentatively presumed a genetic relationship of the surmised Raetic dialects with Etruscan. Furthermore, he definitively excluded the rock inscriptions of the Val Camonica and the other testimonies written in the Sondrio alphabet from the Raetic corpus.

Prosdocimi, Mancini and the Iscrizioni retiche

Risch's tackling of basic questions of method and definition was pursued by Aldo Luigi Prosdocimi, who adressed himself to methodological criticism, especially on the popular practice of interpreting inscriptions whose reading was not certain. He took an important step by explicitly defining the denotations and limitations of the term "Raetic":

1. The term "Raetic" is defined by nothing but the script, in that it is applicable to those North Italic (North Etruscan) inscriptions that are written in neither the alphabet of Este nor in those of Lugano or Sondrio.
2. There are overlaps with neighbouring script provinces, and also offshoots on the margins.
3. The Raetic script shows variants.
4. The Raetic script might accommodate different languages, possibly including those customarily written in neighbouring alphabets. Accordingly, a language or dialect associated with the Raetic script could occasionally be found in an inscription in a non-Raetic alphabet.
5. The Etruscan features of the Raetic language could be due to a genetic relationship, to one being a younger stage of the other, to secondary influence of one on the other, or result simply from the constricted view of the Indo-Europeanists, to whom all non-IE languages look vaguely similar.

In 1973, Prosdocimi's student Alberto Mancini produced a list of questions that he deemed most urgent, including problems of phoneme-grapheme-relation, forms of graphemes, and also the still doubtful role of the Sondrio alphabet. Two years later, he published a lengthy article entitled Iscrizioni retiche (IR) in which he strove to update and amend the Raetic corpus as presented by Whatmough. Mancini’s is not a corpus as such, it merely serves as a supplement to the PID. Where he considered the readings of Whatmough or earlier scholars to be wrong or in some way amendable, he gave alternative interpretations by himself or others according to the 1973 state of the art. He collected the new inscriptions, including, besides most of the finds mentioned in the preceding section, entirely new material which he found in museums, mainly the Ferdinandeum and the Castello del Buonconsiglio. Apart from the considerable, but fragmented inscription on the Sanzeno situla, the linguistically important NO-13 and a number of minor testimonies, he augmented the corpus with "sigle" similar to the marginal material in Franz 1959, thereby being responsible for a good portion of the doubtful inscriptions and script-like scratchings which inflate especially the Sanzeno subcorpus (e.g. on Sanzeno bowls, scythe rings and various other iron implements). The work’s great virtue, especially compared to the unillustrated PID, is the abundance of photographs and drawings, even if the quality of the latter is inferior.

Professional modern researchers have largely heeded Prosdocimi’s advice, apart from Maria Grazia Tibiletti Bruno, who unfortunately was chosen to contribute on Raetic to an important and much read compendium on the languages and dialects of ancient Italy in 1978. In the second edition of the proceedings of the Chur symposium, Risch's 1970 paper appeared in a revised version in which the author back-pedalled on the matter of Raetic–Etruscan cognation.

"Raetic" archaeology

The above-mentioned symposium on Raetic held in 1968 in Chur, Switzerland, had an archaeological focus and was mainly concerned with the problem of establishing a methodologically sound connection between the historical Raeti, the inscriptions, and their potential archaeological context. Its results were published in 1970 as Der heutige Stand der Räterforschung, and again in 1984 under the title Das Räterproblem in geschichtlicher, sprachlicher und archäologischer Sicht. It gave a fresh impetus to research and presented some innovative ideas on the "Räterfrage". In 1981, Reimo Lunz (p. 198 ff.) asserted that, nebulous as the Raeti as a people remained, the domain of the inscriptions coincided with an archaeological group of the Tyrolean younger iron age, the Fritzens-Sanzeno culture.

Fringe scholarship on Raetic

Like all epigraphic riddles, the Raetic inscriptions have attracted the attention of numerous fringe scholars and laymen, who are responsible for some of the more curious theories and also a couple of "decipherments". They have been the cause for no little confusion and mystification about Raetic matters in fields that are only marginally concerned with the problem, and also in the public. Ferruccio Bravi 1979 in a book entitled La lingua dei Reti (1979–80) has made a brave attempt at a complete edition, including many very useable pictures, but his readings are bogus. The classical philologist Linus Brunner, who published various papers throughout the 1980ies, believed the inscriptions to encode a Semitic language; the chemicist Herbert Zebisch, who also put forward decipherments of the Phaistos disc and Linear A, preferred to read Iberian. Nevertheless, there is also useful work done by non-specialists, most prominently Adolfo Zavaroni, who is the host of a preliminary online collection of North Italic sources.

Recent finds and compilations

After Mancini’s update, new finds were uncovered in South Tyrol, the Trentino, and the Veneto, where the spada di Verona, which had gone missing 300 years ago, was recovered and republished by Anna Marinetti in 1987 – an important work, where for the first time a segmentation of the text on purely structural grounds was attempted. Marinetti also published a new inscription from Castelrotto near to Verona in 1991; FI-1 was published in 1981 by Carlo Sebesta. From the northern area, inscriptions from the Eisack Valley and the Puster Valley were published by Dal Rì 1987; while the latter is illegible, more utilisable finds from that site (PU-5–PU-11) were published by Marinetti 1992.

In 1992, Stefan Schumacher’s Die rätischen Inschriften, intended as a preliminary work to a proper corpus, sought to combine the data from the PID and the IR and contains a collection of all inscriptions then known, sorted by find spot following the example of Pellegrini & Prosdocimi 1967 for the Venetic corpus. New material presented by Schumacher includes additional finds from the Inn Valley, the Eisack Valley and the Vintschgau (VN-2–VN-4), minor inscriptions from the Non Valley – the most interesting ones on a helmet –, a number of finds from Bozen, and a ceramic fragment bearing characters from the Engadin to the West of the distribution area, mentioned in Risch 1984, the attribution of which is debatable. Schumacher’s work made possible an overall view of the inscriptions and the language they encoded, and laid the basis for new insights, published mainly by Schumacher (also 1993 and 1998) and Helmut Rix, who devoted a small monograph to these matters in 1998. Raetic was determined to be more homogenic than expected, and indeed related to Etruscan. Important contributions have been made in the 1990ies by Schumacher himself, who published more bone objects from the Vintschgau and two newfound bronzes (HU-5 and HU-6; see also Schumacher 1994b), Mancini (see Bibliography), who republished four inscriptions from Trissino in 1995, Schmeja 1996, Morandi 1999, and the 1992 compendium Die Räter / I Reti.

In 2004, Schumacher updated his collection for a second edition, augmenting it with a summarisation of the recent findings and a couple of newfound inscriptions. Apart from yet more bone objects with short inscriptions from the Vintschgau, he published the substantial IT-4 on an elaborately carved piece of antler, and included the latinoid inscription on a stone from Bozen published by Mayr (as BZ-I), and an inscription on a silver ring from the very North of the distribution area, published by Ziegaus & Rix 1998. He also decided to finally introduce the Slovenian helmets into the corpus. Also in 2004, Marinetti published a group of potentially Raetic inscriptions from Montorio and San Giorgio di Valpolicella, both near to Verona.

In 2009/2010, Mancini put forward a new edition, which presented no progress in the field of Raetic epigraphy. The focus of the work lies on "producing an edition of inscriptions rather than on language issues" (transl. p. VII) – accordingly, Mancini included almost all the relevent testimonies (leaving out the new material in Schumacher 2004, and failing to include Marinetti's new material as well as the inscription on the situla in Providence, which had been conclusively shown to be Raetic by Schürr 2003) with a complete list of literature and previous readings, but no further commentary. However, the work does not present the most recent state of research (e.g. in the presentation of the inscriptions of Steinberg, which had been reread and conclusively interpreted by Schumacher 2004 – indeed, Mancini appears not to have read the work). The photographs and drawings are the same as provided in the Iscrizioni retiche, but printed in considerably worse quality. No autopsies seem to have been conducted for this edition. For reasons unknown, Mancini felt the necessity to provide the inscriptions with new sigla and rearrange them, but no table of concordance is provided for the convenience of the reader. The arrangement is not only pointless, but bound to irritate and confuse future readers: Mancini's sigla groups are based on largely the same rough regions as determined by Schumacher 1992; in consequence some sigla are identical but refer to different inscriptions (e.g. in the BZ-group). Furthermore, Mancini decided to enlarge the corpus even further, with the inclusion of such old museum finds of "sigle" as he had already excluded in 1975. (TIR has decided not to include the lot, see Raetica.)

As of 2014, the Raetic corpus can be augmented with a number of linguistically relevant finds: From the Inn Valley come the considerable inscription on a bronze tablet, published in detail in De Simone & Marchesini 2013, as well as the shorter IT-6, IT-7 and IT-8. In two locations in the Inn Valley and the Ammergau in Bavaria did the ANISA – Association for rock art and settlement in the Alps discover rocks bearing Raetic inscription comparable to the ones at Steinberg. Only this year, three very utilisable new inscriptions from the Non Valley (NO-15, NO-16, NO-17) were published by Simona Marchesini.

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Mayr 1954	Karl M. Mayr, "Webstuhlgewicht mit rätischen Schriftzeichen", Der Schlern 28 (1954), 552–553.
Mayr 1956	Karl M. Mayr, "Räto-römischer Grabstein mit Inschrift aus Maderneid in Eppan", Der Schlern 30 (1956), 175–176.
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Main Chapter Pages:
Ancient sources I Archaeology in the Raetic area I Bibliography I Concordance I Index I Modern research on Raetic I Non-script notational systems I Raetic epigraphy I Raetica I Script I The Raetic language