Modern research on Raetic

Early finds and compilations in the 19^th century

Modern research on the Raeti and Raetic based on both the classical sources and archaeological data begins with the work of Conte Benedetto Giovanelli, mayor of Trient, who published his book Trento. Città de’ rezj e colonia romana in 1825. Giovanelli referred to the information given by the classical historiographers (p. 53, n. 43) and assumed kinship of Raeti and Etruscans, but argued a differing view considering the origin of the alpine Raeti: Following the French historian Nicolas Fréret, he held that it was the Etruscans who migrated to Central Italy from the North. (Giovanelli 1844; see also Niebuhr, Römische Geschichte ??? and Mommsen, Römische Geschichte Bd 1, 6. Aufl, 1874: 120.) He connected the historical Raeti with inscriptions found to the north of the Etruscan realm: the inscription on the situla di Cembra, also Situla Giovanelli, bought by him in 1825 and published in 1844, and WE-1, also on a situla, found in 1845 during excavations prompted by Giovanelli himself, and published by him in an optimistically titled work in 1845.

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 Transpadania. He published a collection of all such inscriptions then known, including those on coins, which contained Giovanelli’s finds, as well as the then lost Spada di Verona and the Negau helmets A and B which had already been put into Raetic context by Giovanelli. Mommsen, who had been engaged in the Cispadanian Italic dialects, determined the alphabets to be closely related to the Etruscan script, and hence coined the term "Nordetruskische Alphabete". His 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 different alphabets, among them a Swiss alphabet (the inscriptions today called Lepontic), an alphabet of Padua/Este (Venetic), as well as a Styrian alphabet on the Negau helmets, an alphabet of Verona on the spada, and a Tyrolian alphabet on Giovanelli’s finds. Concerning the latter, he stated: "Es liegt nichts näher als dieselben in Verbindung zu bringen mit der bekannten Angabe des Livius, dass die Räter Etrusker seien und ein verdorbenes Etruskisch noch in der augusteischen Zeit redeten; ich will dem nicht widersprechen, aber abgemacht ist die Frage durch die Auffindung einer dem tuskischen Alphabet verwandten rätischen Schrift noch keineswegs, so lange nicht die Identität der Idiome dargethan ist." (p. 230) Luigi Lanzi

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 the North-Etruscan inscriptions in his Corpus Inscriptionum Italicarum; Wilhelm Corssen discussed them in his Die Sprache der Etrusker. While Oberziner 1883b: XI still held all the documented languages of Northern Italy to be related to Etruscan, and counted the Lepontic and some of the Venetic inscriptions among the Raetic, the philologist Carl Pauli in his 1885 edition Altitalische Forschungen, relying on a corpus increased by twofold (with mainly Venetic finds), continued Mommsen's groundwork and laid the foundation for detailed research. He distinguished four script provinces or alphabets – Este, Lugano, Sondrino and Bozen – and perceived the Indo-European affiliation of the first two (today known to write Italic Venetic and Celtic Lepontic). The languages of the Bozen and Sondrino alphabets he tentatively connected with Etruscan.

A growing corpus and the PID

The end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th century saw a host of new inscriptions found – among them the longest document of the Raetic language on the Paletta di Padova – which were only published seperately. In 1918, Giuseppe Pellegrini published the considerable find of Magrè, and connected the script and language with Pauli’s Bozen alphabet. Only in 1933 the North-Italic inscriptions, and with them those considered to be Raetic, were again published together in the copious edition of Robert Seymour Conway and his student Joshua Whatmough, The Pre-Italic Dialects of Italy (PID). The PID was a very ambitious project, both in scope and in method – the editors attempted to have all the inscriptions autopsied by themselves or at least a trustworthy colleague. The entries include complete bibliographical references. Whatmough also made a point of recording the context of the inscriptions, i.e. the size, shape and material of the object, its possible function, and – most importantly – the circumstances of the finding. The interpretations, however, are Whatmough’s own, and many of them must today be abandoned: Whatmough assumed that the inscriptions were mainly votives, and accordingly read almost exclusively anthroponyms and theonyms, which he explained by comparing them to established names in varios Old Italic languages.

After 1945, excavations conducted in South Tyrol and the Trentino brought important new finds to light. The bronze statuettes 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 Etsch. They were published in 1950 by Giacomo Roberti, and again in 1951 with a linguistical focus by Giovan Battista Pellegrini. Together with Giulia Fogolari, Pellegrini also published the inscription on the belt plaque of Lothen; Michel Lejeune followed suit with the inscription of Castelciés. In 1957, the discovery of the "petrographs of Steinberg" (in fact Brandenberg), published by Vetter, and three inscribed objects from the Himmelreich, both in North Tyrol, extended the domain of Raetic script to the north of the Brenner. The "stagshorns" from the Montesei di Serso were published by Pellegrini in 1965. Unfortunately, the new sources did nothing to clear up any of the old problems. On the contrary, both the Lothen and Steinberg inscriptions displayed yet more alphabet variants, and the identity of the Raeti, their language and script became ever more foggy.

The "Räterfrage"

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 even 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 Italian side has traditionally favored the Etruscan theory, thereby proposing a Mediterranean drift into the Alps since pre-Roman times, while the Austrian camp preferred to identify the Raeti with the omnipresent Illyrians. Especially the 1920ies and 1930ies witnessed a heated argument conducted, mainly in the journals Glotta, Studi Etruschi (SE) and the nationalistic Archivio per l’Alto Adige (AAA), between the leading scholars on the field, including Joshua Whatmough, Rudolf Thurneysen, Paul Kretschmer, Emil Vetter, Carlo Battisti, Francesco Ribezzo, Vittore Pisani and Giuliano Bonfante Cortsen. The theories put forward ranged from assuming a Raetic "Urbevölkerung" of Italy that was neither Etruscan nor Indo-European, via a mixed population of variable Etruscan, Illyrian, Ligurian, Euganean and Indo-European quota, to the identification of the writers of the inscriptions with Etruscan fugitives, as proposed by Pompeius Trogus. Such a profusion of fuzzy and contradictory propositions lay rooted in the confusion or, even worse, the equation of the classical name Raeti, whose ancient meaning was to be identified, and the epigraphical finds defined, inconsistently over the time, as linguistically or alphabetically Raetic.

Linguistically oriented research in the 1970ies

The 1970ies saw a break in the reaserch on Raetic, effected 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 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 inscriptions that are neither written in the alphabets of Este (Venetic), nor Lugano (Lepontic) or Sondrino, or that of the Val Camonica (Camunic). 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 Raetc 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 general 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, Alberto Mancini, a student of Prosdocimi, 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 Sondrino 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. He collected the new inscriptions, presented them with the relevant literature, and also included some unpublished material, mainly from the Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum. 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. 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.

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 in a book entitled La lingua dei Reti (1981) has made a brave attempt at a complete edition, including many very useable pictures, but his readings are bogus. Linus Brunner, also in 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.

Breakthrough in Raetic archaeology

In 1968, a symposium on Raetic was held in Chur, Switzerland, whose 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. The focus of the symposium was on archaeology, including only one paper on linguistic matters by Ernst Risch. Nevertheless, 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.

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. Steinberg 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. This 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 by Mancini 1991 and 1999, Marinetti 1992, Schmeja 1996 and Morandi 1999. In 2004, Schumacher updated his collection for a second edition, augmenting it by a summarisation of the recent findings and a couple of newfound inscriptions. In the same year, Marinetti published a group of new inscriptions (VR-5 to VR-28) from the South of the Raetic compass. The most important new finds of recent years, however, come from North Tyrol and Bavaria: IT-4, IT-5, and the petrographs ??? and UG-1/UG-2. Mancini

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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