Umbri Erotic

The Umbri were an Italic people of central Italy who held the upper Tiber valley and the Apennine hill country east of it from the early Iron Age until Rome absorbed them, and their language had fallen silent by the first century AD. They left their name on the modern region of Umbria, whose people descend from them only in the loose way that everyone in central Italy descends from the peninsula's ancient inhabitants. What made the Umbri a people, to themselves and to their neighbors, was speech and rite. Umbrian belonged to the Sabellic branch of Italic, close kin to Oscan and to the tongues of the Sabines and Samnites, a cousin of Latin rather than a sibling. They wrote it right to left in an alphabet borrowed from the Etruscans, and later in Latin letters. The neighbors were not gentle. Etruscans held the west bank of the Tiber, including Perugia, which ancient writers said had once been Umbrian. Gaulish Senones seized the Adriatic coast around 400 BC. Rome, after breaking an Umbrian, Samnite, Etruscan and Gaulish coalition at Sentinum in 295 BC, planted colonies at Narni and Spoleto and drove the Via Flaminia straight through Umbrian country. Citizenship came with the Social War in 90 BC, and Augustus filed what remained under Regio VI, Umbria.

Nearly everything intimate we know about them comes from seven bronze tablets dug up at Gubbio in 1444. The Iguvine Tablets are the longest text in any ancient Italic language other than Latin, not laws or epic but a liturgical manual for a priestly brotherhood, the Atiedian Brethren. They lay out the yearly purification of the town: take the auspices from named birds in named quarters of the sky, sacrifice oxen at each of three gates to Jupiter, Mars and Vofionus, each carrying the title Grabovius, then lead the assembled citizens around the walls while the priest curses the Etruscans, the people of Tadinum and other enemies by name. Vofionus and the goddess Tursa have no clean Roman equivalent. This was its own religion, not a provincial copy. An Etruscan-made bronze warrior found near Todi, the Mars of Todi, carries an Umbrian dedication from a man called Ahal Trutitis: an Umbrian buying art from the neighbors and signing it in his own language. Pliny the Elder called them the oldest people in Italy, and the Greeks told a story that their name meant they had survived the flood. Rome got two writers out of them that it still reads, the comic playwright Plautus from Sarsina and the poet Propertius from Assisi, both in Latin. That is the arc: a people whose tongue was swallowed by the state it helped build, and whose rites survive because someone in Gubbio put the instructions in bronze.