Summary
Tinia, also written Tin, is the head of the gods among the Etruscans and the wielder of the thunderbolt, the counterpart of the Greek Zeus and the Roman Jupiter. His consort is Uni, his daughter Menrva came out of his head, and the twin brothers whom the Etruscans call "sons of Tin" are the Greek Dioskouroi. He is shown as a bearded man or as a beardless youth, the bolt in his hand.
No poem about Tinia's birth or wars has come down to us. His stories survive on engraved bronze mirrors and in what Romans wrote about the Etruscan science of divination. The Etruscans divided the sky into sixteen regions, and when lightning struck they asked from which region it came. Martianus Capella, giving this division under Roman names, puts Jupiter in the first region with the council of the gods, gives him a house in the second and two in the third. The sixteen regions are engraved round the rim of the bronze liver of Piacenza, a model of a sheep's liver against which a diviner compared the liver of a victim, and Tin's name stands on its right lobe among the gods of sky and light.
For the Etruscans a bolt of lightning was a word from Tinia. Pliny says their books name nine gods who throw thunderbolts, of eleven kinds, because Jupiter alone throws three. Seneca explains the three. The first warns and does no harm, and Tinia sends it on his own counsel. The second he sends only after calling the twelve gods to council; it sometimes does good, but never without harm. The third he sends only after consulting gods called the Superior or Veiled Gods, because it destroys what it strikes and changes the state of persons and cities: fire leaves nothing as it was. The Etruscans held, Seneca adds, that lightning comes from Jupiter because nothing is done without him.
On the mirrors Tinia holds the bolt to decide between others. On a mirror in the Vatican of about 470 BCE he stands with two kinds of bolt in his hands while two mothers plead with him: Thesan, the dawn, the Greek Eos, mother of Memnon, and Thethis, that is Thetis, mother of Achilles. He is weighing the fate of the two heroes before they meet. On an Etruscan amphora in the British Museum, Hercle, the Etruscan Heracles, quarrels with Uni, he with his club and she with her lance; Menrva stands behind him, Tin stands behind her with a bolt in his hand and takes his wife by the arm. On a bronze relief from a chariot at Perugia he throws two bolts between the two quarrellers and they hurt no one, because they are signs of his will, as at the end of the Odyssey Zeus throws a bolt that falls before Athena as Odysseus charges the men of Ithaca, and the fighting stops.
Beside Tinia stand Uni and Menrva. Experts in the Etruscan discipline, Servius reports, said that the founders of Etruscan cities did not count a city as properly founded unless it had three gates, three streets and three temples, to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva. The greatest witness of the triad is at Rome itself: the Capitoline temple, finished by the Etruscan king Tarquinius Superbus and dedicated in the first year of the Republic, 509 BCE, housed all three. Uni and Menrva have their own articles on this wiki under their Roman names, Juno and Minerva. At the port of Pyrgi the inscriptions name Tinia as the husband of Uni, whom the Phoenician text there calls Astarte. Servius on Aeneid 1.422; Giovanni Colonna, "Sacred Architecture", p. 155; Simon, p. 47.
Tin was also the guardian of boundaries. Three boundary stones found in Tunisia, set up by Etruscan settlers, read: "Boundaries of the Dardanians. Of Tin." And in the prophecy of Vegoia, the seeress whose books on lightning the Romans kept, Jupiter, when he claimed the land of Etruria for himself, ordered the fields measured and the plots marked, because he knew human greed; whoever moves a boundary stone to enlarge his land and shrink his neighbour's is condemned by the gods to disease and wounds, and storms and hail strike his crops.
The idea Tinia's stories turn on is that he is the one who decides. His bolt is a verdict given after counsel, and its weight follows who is consulted: himself alone for a warning, the twelve for a blow that mixes help and harm, the veiled gods for destruction. His name is written on the edges of fields, and whoever crosses them is punished. On the mirrors he is a judge who settles the quarrels of the gods and reconciles them. In the divine council he presides but does not decide the great matters alone, and among the pictures of the storm god in other lands his bolt is a sign of will more than a weapon of war.
We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. The genitive tinś means "of Tin", so the name is Tin, and the -ia of Tinia is an addition. Etruscan writing has no letter for d and writes it as t: Greek Adonis became Etruscan Atunis. The t of Tin may therefore be a d, and the name Arabic dīn. In Lane, dīn is a law, a statute, a judgment; dintuhu is "I ruled him, governed him, had authority over him"; dīn al-malik in the story of Joseph is the law of the king of Egypt; and ad-dayyān is the judge. On this reading Tinia is the ruler who judges, which is what the sources make him: his bolt a judgment given after counsel, his name on the boundaries of the land. It is a reading proposed on the method; the Roman essay reads the name of Diana from the same root, as dayyān.
Linguistic Root
Tin and dīn
| Form | Where |
|---|---|
| Tinia | the name on mirrors and in inscriptions |
| Tin | short form, on the Piacenza liver and the Capua tile |
| tinś | genitive, "of Tin", on the boundary stones from Tunisia |
| tinścvil | "gift to Tin", on the leg of the Chimaera of Arezzo |
| Tinas Cliniar | "sons of Tin", the Dioskouroi |
Lane gives dīn as judgment and decision; also law, obedience and requital; dintuhu, "I ruled him, governed him; I possessed it, had authority over it"; and dayyantuhu al-qawm, "I made him ruler of the affairs of the people". Lane explains fī dīn al-malik in the Joseph sura as the law and judgment of the king of Egypt. The family is one across the sister languages: dayyān, judge, in Hebrew, Aramaic and Akkadian, as the Diana article shows.
The sounds: the Etruscans took their letters from the Greeks but did not use d, b or g, so they wrote d as t: Adonis became Atunis, and Odysseus became Uthuze, with th for d. In the Juthoor tables t, ṭ, dh and ẓ form one group that becomes t or d in the European languages. An Etruscan t can therefore stand for d, t or ṭ. The n is n, and the long i after the t answers the y of dīn.
If the t is a ṭ, the name is ṭanna: in Lane, a thing ṭanna when it made a prolonged sound, and ṭanīn is the ringing of a hard thing struck, close to the thunder that comes with the bolt; this wiki reads the thunder word in the name of Thor with the same root. But Tinia's stories make the bolt a judgment and a matter of counsel more than a sound, so dīn is nearer to what he does. The limit that remains: Etruscan belongs to no known language family, and no Etruscan explanation of the word tin has reached us, so the reading is proposed on the method.
God and gods in the Roman essay
The Roman essay does not read Tinia's name, but it reads the Etruscan word for god, ais, plural aiser, as Semitic Īl, and rates the match very likely. It makes the Etruscans the go-betweens who carried to Rome what they had taken from the Phoenicians. Tinia heads these gods, and the twelve gods he consults before the second bolt are a council of those same aiser.
Key Mythic Narratives
The prophecy of Vegoia
The prophecy, preserved by Roman land surveyors, opens: "Know that the sea was separated from the sky", and goes on to Jupiter's taking of Etruria and his division of the fields. The seeress gave it to a man named Arruns Veltymnus; some scholars hear in his name that of Veltune, who stands bearded with a spear on a mirror from Tuscania, and take Veltune for another name of Tinia. On another mirror, from Vetulonia, the seeress herself appears winged, named Lasa Vecuvia, beneath an image of Tinia holding the bolt.
Witness to an adoption
On a mirror from Volterra Uni nurses Hercle, already a grown man, and the inscription says: "This picture shows how Hercle became Uni's son." Four gods stand as witnesses, among them an older god holding a trident or a bolt, either Nethuns, that is Neptune, or Tinia, who points to a written tablet. The two quarrellers Tinia parted with his bolts have become mother and son.
What Rome kept
Pliny says the Romans kept only two of the nine thunder-throwing gods: Jupiter for bolts by day and Summanus for bolts by night. Cicero mocks the sixteen regions of the sky as easy to invent: double the four quarters, then double again; and he asks what difference the direction makes and what it is supposed to foretell.
Symbolic Reading
The Roman rereading essay in this project reads Etruscan divination as observation of nature: the colour of the liver shows the health of the animal, the animal's health shows the health of the pasture, so a sound liver means a sound environment and a safe decision. In this system Tinia owns every sign: the direction of the bolt in the sky, his place on the rim of the liver, the edge of the field on the ground. Each sign ends in a human decision: whether the city fights or waits, whether a stone goes back to its place, whether an offering is made. Vegoia's prophecy joins nature and justice in one sentence: whoever moves the boundary will have his crops struck by hail.
Cross-Cultural Parallels
Zeus throws the thunderbolt and presides over the gods; Athena is born from his head as Menrva is born from Tinia's; and the Odyssey ends with a bolt he throws to stop the fighting, the same picture as on the Perugia relief. The Roman Jupiter takes Tinia's place in the Capitoline temple, with Juno and Minerva beside him. The council he consults before the great bolt has its counterpart in the council of El at Ugarit, where the father sits at the head of the gods and matters are brought before him, as in the divine council. His rule over boundaries has its Roman counterpart in Terminus, the boundary god who would not leave his place when the temple of the triad was built on the Capitol.