Epigraphic Notes on a Chiusine Cinerary Urn in the British Museum

The inscription discussed in this note is not yet entered into the corpus of Etruscan inscriptions. It was painted on a Chiusine terracotta cinerary urn of the Hellenistic period, now in the collections of the British Museum (inv. no. 1856,1226.542). The epitaph was published in the Museum's 1903 catalogue, but with a long lacuna in the middle. Our reading replaces the lacuna with the deceased's family name, peśumśnei, which permits us to connect the epitaph on the cinerary urn to the peśumśne epitaph recorded on a Chiusine terracotta tile once used to seal a burial niche. We conclude by discussing the reasons for the differences in the spelling of the final syllable of the names, peśumśnei and peśumśne, on the urn and the tile.