Turan- Etruscan GodDeity"The Lady"

The Bronze Mirrors

No Etruscan poet survives to sing of Turan. What survives instead are hundreds of bronze mirrors, polished on one face and engraved on the other, pulled from tombs across Etruria. Workshops at Vulci and Praeneste turned them out between the fifth and third centuries BCE, and on their backs they carved the gods. Turan appears again and again. Her name runs in Etruscan script beside her image, embracing her lover or receiving the apple. Each mirror was a woman's possession and a votive offering, placed in the grave to accompany the dead.

Turan and Atunis

On a mirror from Tuscania, now in the Museo Archeologico in Florence, Turan holds Atunis in a close embrace. Both names are cut into the bronze. He is young, beardless, vital. She leans into him. Lasa spirits hover at the edges, wreaths and perfume vessels in hand.

The Etruscan artists who engraved Atunis never showed his death. Where Greek vase painters lingered on the boar's gore and Aphrodite's grief, the mirror-makers of Etruria chose the living bond: Turan and Atunis exchanging glances, seated together, touching. Across dozens of surviving mirrors, the story stays in its warmest hour. The boar does not come. The blood does not spill. Whatever the Etruscans knew of the ending, they preferred to keep their goddess in the arms of her lover.

The Judgment of Elcsntre

Three goddesses stand before a young man. On a fourth-century mirror now in the British Museum, their names are cut into the bronze: Turan, Uni, Menrva. The young man is Elcsntre. He holds the apple. He must choose.

Turan stands with her dove and a confidence the other two do not share. Etruscan artists gave the scene their own cast: Lasa spirits drift at the margins, and additional deities watch from above. Turan is sometimes nude, sometimes draped, but always at the center of the composition. The outcome was never in doubt.

The Lasa Spirits

Turan seldom appeared alone. Winged women attended her, each with her own name cut into the bronze: Lasa Sitmica and Lasa Vecuvia among them. They carried wreaths and alabastra.

On some mirrors a single Lasa holds a mirror before Turan's face. On others, two flank her in formal symmetry, raising perfume and fillets. They were not servants. They carried the instruments of transformation: the wreath that crowns and the scroll whose contents no one living can read. Wherever Turan arrived, the Lasas had already set the stage.

Among the Dead

Bronze mirrors were grave goods. At Vulci and Praeneste, excavators found them placed beside women in their tombs, the engraved faces turned upward. Turan's image went into the earth with the dead.

At Gravisca, the port sanctuary of Tarquinia, worshippers deposited terracotta figurines of a goddess holding doves and wreaths. Mirror fragments mixed with the offerings. At Tarquinia itself, in the Tomb of the Shields, banquet scenes painted on the chamber walls show divine and mortal figures reclining together. Wine pours. Garlands hang.

On the Piacenza Liver, a bronze model of a sheep's liver used by haruspices to read the will of the gods, Turan's name occupies its own sector of the outer ring. The liver maps the Etruscan sky onto the surface of an organ. Each god holds a region. Turan holds hers. Whatever else has been lost, that small bronze object confirms she had a fixed place in the cosmos. The sky was divided, and one part of it belonged to love.