Summary
Vanth is a woman of the world of the dead among the Etruscans, standing where the dead pass from life into the other house. She is shown sometimes winged and sometimes not, in a long dress or in a short one with high boots and two straps crossed on her breast like a huntress, holding a torch to light the hard road to the underworld, and sometimes holding snakes. Her face is stern, but she does not frighten as Charun does, and in most pictures she helps the dead rather than harming them. Her name is old: it was written in a dedication on a perfume flask from Marsiliana d'Albegna of about 640–620 BCE, centuries before her pictures become common.
No text tells her story; her story is the journey of the dead as the Etruscans carved and painted it on sarcophagi, urns and tomb walls. On the sarcophagus of Hasti Afunei from Clusium, of the second century BCE, a gate stands half open; a woman of the world of the dead named Culśu, "she of the gate", steps out of it, the one who opens, locks and guards it; beside the gate Vanth waits; at the other end a third woman drives the dead woman toward the gate, and along the way her family bid her farewell. On the wall of the Tomb of the Aninas at Tarquinii, of the third century BCE, Charun stands to the left of the tomb's door, fully clothed, with his fearsome face, and Vanth to the right, winged, unclothed where he is clothed, her skin smooth. The first door, the door of the tomb, pictures the second, the gate of the city of the dead, and each has its guard.
Vanth also enters Greek stories when the Etruscans paint them. In the François Tomb at Vulci, of 340–320 BCE, Achilles slaughters Trojan prisoners at the funeral of Patroclus, as in the Iliad, but the painter put Vanth and Charun into the scene, and they are not in the Greek poem. On an alabaster ash urn in the Metropolitan Museum, of the third century BCE, Greeks fight Amazons and Vanth stands at the right; the museum calls her presence a characteristically Etruscan addition to the Greek scene. On another urn Vanth sits on the banquet couch in the wife's place beside the dead man, looks at him sternly, holds a scroll, and touches his shoulder with one wing.
The idea her pictures turn on is that death is a road with a gate, and at the gate someone waits to go with the dead. Krauskopf holds that Vanth was at first a kind guide, as Hermes guides souls among the Greeks, and that painters later gave her the look of the Greek Furies, with their short dress and boots, so that some harshness crept into her image slowly. Pictures of an attack on the dead are very rare; mostly Vanth and Charun go with the dead and even defend them against the monsters of the road. She belongs to the pictures of the descent to the underworld, but here the one going down is every dead person, not a hero who comes back.
We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Vanθ has a w, since the Etruscan letter v is pronounced w; then n; then θ, which is th. So the name is wanth, and w and the glottal stop change places at the head of an Arabic word: in this very root Lane cites uqqitat for wuqqitat. So wanth is ʾanth, whence unthā, "female". Krauskopf notes that the name occurs seven times beside pictures of women of the world of the dead and may be the common name for all of them, so that Culśu would be "the Vanth of the gate". On this reading Vanth is "the female one", a common noun rather than a proper name, which is what the Etruscan evidence suggests. The same root gives annatha lahu, he was gentle with him, and in her pictures she keeps the dead company. Lane also records that ināthan in the Quran means, according to al-Farrāʾ, the female divinities of the Arabs such as al-Lāt and al-ʿUzzā. It is a reading proposed on the method.
Linguistic Root
Vanth and unthā
| Form | Where |
|---|---|
| vanθ | seven times beside pictures of women of the world of the dead, and in a seventh-century BCE dedication |
| Culśu | she of the gate on the sarcophagus of Hasti Afunei, perhaps "the Vanth of the gate" |
| culś- | gate, whence Culśanś, the two-faced god of doors |
Lane: unthā is the contrary of dhakar, male, and is said of anything of that sex; imraʾa unthā is a perfect woman, so called in praise, as a man is praised as rajul dhakar. Annatha lahu is "he acted gently towards him". Arḍ anītha is plain, soft land that produces much herbage, and ḥadīd anīth is soft iron. In the sura of the Women Ibn ʿAbbās reads uthunan for ināthan, and al-Farrāʾ says it is the plural of wathan, "idol", its w changed to a glottal stop as in uqqitat for wuqqitat; he adds that the Arabs called al-Lāt, al-ʿUzzā and the like female.
The sounds: the Etruscans took their letters from the Greeks, writing w with the letter v and th with θ. Arabic th answers Greek θ in the Juthoor tables. N is n. The glottal stop at the head of ʾanth answers the w, an exchange well known at the head of Arabic words, and the same exchange lets this wiki read the name of Venus as uns from wanas. All three consonants keep their order, and none is lost.
The limit that remains: Etruscan is not a Semitic language as far as scholars know, no Etruscan explanation of the word vanθ has reached us, and Krauskopf treats its use as a common name as a possibility not yet proven.
Key Mythic Narratives
The road and the ship
The Etruscans did not settle on one road to the afterlife. In the Tomb of the Blue Demons at Tarquinii, of about 400 BCE, demons drive a dead woman toward a ship in a kind of antechamber of the underworld; Charun the ferryman, though his figure is poorly preserved, stands at one end of it, a rock marking the edge of the world of the living stands at the other, and two figures come from the far side to welcome the newcomer. On a sarcophagus from Clusium the dead man rides a horse and then a sea monster waits for him, so that the journey is first by land and then by sea. Krauskopf says the road itself mattered to the Etruscans as much as its end, and the frightening demons show that the road had dangers not everyone overcame.
A woman with two torches
The British Museum has a limestone ash urn from Clusium of about 425–350 BCE, carved as a house or temple, at whose front sits a winged woman who once held two objects in her hands, probably torches. The catalogue does not name her, but she has the appearance scholars describe for Vanth.
Symbolic Reading
The Greek rereading essay in this project reads the underworld as knowledge of the ground beneath and of burial: the river that parts the living from the dead is the water table, the "crossing" is the body's passage from the world of the living into the soil, and the ferryman of the dead is a picture of the burial rite. Vanth's pictures set that passage at the tomb's own door: the dead are carried from the house to the cemetery, the family stop at a line they do not cross, and the woman with the torch receives the dead at the door. She is a picture of the hour of burial as the family lives it, the day they hand the dead over to someone they cannot see.
Cross-Cultural Parallels
At the Chinvat Bridge of the Avesta a beautiful, strong maiden with two dogs comes to the righteous soul and takes it across the bridge, telling it "I am your conscience". Vanth too is a woman who meets the dead at the boundary and goes with them, but the Avestan maiden is the image of a person's own deeds and comes to the righteous alone, while Vanth stands at the door of every dead person. Among the Greeks Hermes leads souls to the house of Hades, and Krauskopf makes him the nearest image to Vanth in her origins, a kind guide. Among the Etruscans doors are also guarded by two-faced Culśanś, whose Roman counterpart is Janus, and from his name comes that of Culśu, she of the gate of the dead.