Pyrgi Gold Plaques
The Pyrgi plaques, three thin sheets of gold found in 1964 at Santa Severa, the site of the Etruscan port of Pyrgi north of Rome, bear the earliest known bilingual text in Etruscan and Phoenician and are dated to about 500 BC. They record that Thefarie Velianas, ruler of the great Etruscan city of Caere, dedicated a temple, its sacred precinct, and a shrine to the Etruscan goddess Uni, identified in the Phoenician version with Astarte, in the third year of his rule, an offering that testifies to the close religious and commercial links between Etruscan Caere and the Phoenician world of the wes