Vatican Museums

The term “inkwell” to describe this type of vessel was introduced by George Dennis in the nineteenth century and is purely conventional; it does not identify its real use as a container for ink. A small bottle-shaped vase, with a narrow cylindrical neck, it remains unique within the field of Caeratan bucchero work. A syllabary is engraved around the body, and around the ring of the base there is an alphabet; both proceed from left to right. It constitutes a genuine Etruscan “alphabet-book”, in which the consonants used commonly in the spoken language are presented both in sequence and combined with vowels (in the order i, a, u, e). In the ring of the base the is the full Greek alphabet sequence adopted in Etruscan writing, and therefore complete with all the letters (with the sole omission of the q) including the “dead” letters not used by the Etruscans, such as the b and the d, the Phoenician samekh and the vowel o.