The long-awaited publication of the new edition of Etruskische Texte is a cause for celebration. The original 1991 edition of the first full corpus of all surviving Etruscan texts, by Helmut Rix, is now seriously out-of-date, and contains a number of errors. Gerhard Meiser reckons that there are around 1,100 more texts in the 2014 Etruskische Texte than in the 1991 version, a 12 per cent increase, and these new texts include the important bronze legal text from Cortona discovered in 1992. Many other texts are now assigned a different provenance, and the readings of roughly a fifth of the texts have been changed.

The new edition keeps the basic structure of Rix's Etruskische Texte, a marvel for its concise rendition of information. The first volume comprises a lengthy introduction and guide to the user on the presentation of the texts; an extensive bibliography; a greatly expanded concordance matching text numbers to those in the Corpus Inscriptionum Etruscarum (CIE) and other publications; and a word index and reverse index. The second volume presents the texts themselves, arranged and accompanied by sigla which together give the provenance and text type, the inscribed material, the findspot, the date of the inscription, indications of previous publications, photographs, and of whose reading the text follows. No other corpus with which I am familiar gathers so many inscriptions into such a comprehensive, clear and authoritative edition (and the price is not exorbitant). To have revised, updated and corrected Etruskische Texte is an outstanding achievement, and M. deserves the praise and thanks of all scholars interested in Italy in the first millennium b.c.e.

The remarkable compression of material in the first edition of Etruskische Texte has sometimes made it difficult to use for the first-time reader. The introduction to the new edition largely reproduces that of its predecessor, but through an increased number of examples and better arrangement on the page, with text-boxes and spacing, it seemed to me to be more user-friendly. Even so, the reader has to do some work: for example, take the ten-line text given as Cr 4.22, first published in 1996. The reference number tells us this is a text from Caere (abbreviation Cr) and that this is a text with some religious significance (class 4), although not a votive inscription. The material is given as pnae, which does not exactly correspond to any of the abbreviations listed in vol. I, p. 22, although comparison with pnfi glossed as ‘pondus ficile’ (sic, for ‘fictile’) and ae ‘aeneus’ will enable the reader to work out that this is a bronze weight. The cryptic 4f3i dates the text to the late fourth/early third century, and -24, at the end of the line, directs the reader to the exact findspot, San Antonio, listed at the beginning of the Caere section. There are also short references to the editio princeps and two other publications with photographs (with full bibliographic details given in vol. 1), and the abbreviation Magg indicates that Adriano Maggiani is to be credited for the adopted reading. It is unfortunate that all the index references to words in this text are wrongly given as Cr 4.21.

The biggest departure from Rix's edition is a revision of the transcription of sibilants. In Etruscan inscriptions different letters, sigma and san (in most varieties), represent phonemically distinct s-sounds. In the CIE, the Thesaurus Linguae Etruscae and most Italian works, sigma is always transcribed as s, and san as ś. Scholars have long known, however, that the values accorded to the letters vary, with the sound [š] represented by san in the south and sigma in the north of Etruria. Rix tried to make the underlying phonemic system clearer by allocating a single letter, σ, for [š], with extra diacritics to show whether the text itself uses sigma or san. Rex Wallace, adopted a different, and more consistent system in his excellent introductory textbook, Zikh Rasna: A Manual of the Etruscan Language and Inscriptions (2008), but made the mistake of using the same letters and diacritics as Rix, according them different values. In this already complicated environment, M. has adopted another new system, although his chosen means of representing [š], s, is at least different from any previous suggestion and it is easier to reproduce ś with word-processors than an accented σ.

New Etruscan texts are still being found, with the publication of a lengthy new inscription promised for summer 2017. It is likely that further corrections and additions to Etruskische Texte will be online; all of the texts in this edition have been assigned numbers at http://www.trismegistos.org.