A small terracotta vase shaped like a cockerel, or young male chicken, with human feet preserves 26 letters of the Etruscan alphabet on a language that has never been fully decoded, Live Science reported. The vessel, dated to about 650 to 600 B.C. and just over 4 inches (10 centimeters) tall, is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It was made in central Italy, possibly found in a grave in one of the cemeteries around Viterbo, an Etruscan town about 50 miles (80 kilometers) northwest of modern Rome, though its exact findspot is unclear.
The dark-black ceramic, known as bucchero, was made with a firing method that kept oxygen out of the kiln so the clay absorbed carbon. Bucchero is considered the trademark ceramic of this pre-Roman society and was produced from the seventh to the fourth centuries B.C. According to The Met, the vase may have been a portable inkwell used by someone learning to write. The cockerel's head was the stopper, loosely attached to the body by a cord through a set of loops. The inscription on the body is an abecedarium, a sequential list of letters in an alphabet.
The Etruscan alphabet is well known because it was adopted from a regional version of the Greek alphabet in the early eighth century B.C. There were 26 letters, but one letter on this vase is incorrect. A close look at the end of the alphabet shows that someone inscribed an S twice; the second one should look more like an X, The Met says. Archaeologist Gisela Richter wrote in a 1930 catalog of The Met's classical artifacts that the cockerel vase was one of several Etruscan objects that helped experts partially decode the language, because it preserved the order of the letters in the early alphabet.
Thanks to that Greek-derived script, it is possible to sound out Etruscan. But although more than 10,000 Etruscan inscriptions have been found, the language is still only partly understood. Most of those inscriptions are short, and any lengthy Etruscan literature that once existed has been lost. The vase is therefore both a charming object and a limited key: it shows the alphabet a student might have copied, including a mistake, without giving scholars a long enough text to finish the translation. The verified artifact is in The Met, the dating and ceramic type are well established, and the language remains only partly read.