BEGINNING OF WRITING
During the eighth century, writing came to Italy, and written texts now supple¬ment the archeological evidence. Around 740, someone in the Greek settlement of Pithecusa scratched into the surface of a jug a short text in Aramaic, a script and language of Syria. At about the same time, mourners placed in a grave a cup inscribed in Greek, one of the earliest examples of the Greek alphabet found any-where in the Mediterranean world.
The Greek language and script were to have a long life in Italy and would exert great influence there. By 700, texts in one or another of the languages of Italy itself appear, written in scripts derived from the Greek. The earliest known Etruscan documents date from the very beginning of the seventh century; known texts of the seventh and sixth centuries now number in the many hundreds. Early documents in Latin are less common: Only a very few can be placed in the seventh century, and less than one hundred in the sixth and fifth centuries.
The surviving texts of the eighth through the fifth centuries are generally short, difficult to interpret, hard to date, and not very informative. Inscribed on stone, bronze, or pottery, their contents generally are brief and formulaic, and the languages in which they are written are often not well understood today. Some identify the occupants of tombs. Others proclaim the owner or maker of an object. Still others record the dedication of gifts placed in temples and shrines. A few are longer, but these are only preserved in fragments for the most part, and their contents are obscure. No evidence survives of a bureaucratic use for writing, such as one finds in some other Mediterranean societies. Despite the absence of a bureau-cratic purpose, however, writing in Italy was closely associated with the elites of its cities, and the earliest written texts accompany their activities.