One of the treasures on display at the Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia in Rome are these three small gold leaves, about 20 cm height. Imagine how they could date back to the VI century b.C.! Just for this reason you should run here, at the Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia, to be amazed by wonderful ancient artifacts like them. Imagine how, after a tour here with me, my tourists always claim that this museum was simply amazing. I'm agree...
I’m talking about works of art that are more than 2600 years old which were found, in the course of archaeological excavations realized during the XIX century, in the area where once stood the ancient etruscan city of Pyrgi. This urban centre was located where today there is Santa Severa, a nice place on the beach that is not so far from Rome. Pyrgi grew and developed thanks to its proximity with the sea and its extraordinary vein of trade. Trade with peoples far away, as the settlement came from Greece for example, that brought a great artistic and cultural vitality, so much to give rise, in the city, a monumental complex of religious and famous all over the known world. I'm talking about the sanctuary of Pyrgi, consisting of more temples. The first, called the Temple A, having three cells and dating back to 470 b.C.. And in the so-called Temple B (peripteral, having a single cell from the end of the VI century b.C.) were found these small plates which are considered as one of the earliest examples of italic language ever to be found.
Two foils are in the etruscan language (the middle one and the last on the right), and one is carved using the phoenician language. It is a devotional and sacred text that was dedicated to the etruscan Goddess called Uri. She could be link with the phoenician deity named Astarte. For example, we read “To the Lady Astarte. This is the sacred place that has done and has given to us”. A clear sign of cultural and religious assimilation that developed thanks to the human and business relation. In these texts, a high-ranking magistrate of Caere (now Cerveteri), the city-state which ruled Pyrgi, thanks the goddess describing the ritual that a public and political figure like him must reserve to her. In short the three golden leaves are a way to advertise and to see how he could worry about thank the right gods, winking a eye to cultures distant from their own. The text is bilingual, although with some small differences. It doesn't matter, because these plates represent an important document for an understanding of the cultural flows that, in the ancient populations, were also used to grow and search for new artistic forms.
The Gold Foils of Pyrgi are, therefore, as a kind of Rosetta Stone: a magnificent document that is important in order to get in touch with those ancient peoples who, even today, are in part, shrouded in mystery. You can understand why they are like clear documents that, in some degree, could display us something more the Etruscan civilitazion which has, still today, several mysteries that should be revealed. But don’t forget how the Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia of Rome is the perfect place to know something more about this ancient civilization (for example try to click here).