The similarity between Charun and Charon has caused genuine confusion in both ancient reception and modern popular writing, and untangling it is worth doing carefully rather than treating the two as simply the same figure under two spellings. Charun belongs to a specifically Etruscan visual and religious tradition attested from tomb paintings and grave goods, functioning as a threshold demon who attends the moment and place of death itself; Charon belongs to Greek, and later Roman, literary and mythological tradition, functioning as a ferryman who transports the souls of the dead across the river Styx or Acheron in exchange for a coin payment, a role with no meaningful equivalent in the Etruscan material Charun appears in. The names sharing a root does not, on its own, establish that one tradition borrowed the figure from the other rather than the two developing independently or converging on similar sounds by coincidence, and this atlas records both without asserting a settled account of the relationship between the names.
What can be said with more confidence is that later reception, particularly Roman-era art and literature produced after direct contact between Etruscan and Greek culture had been underway for centuries, sometimes blended details of the two figures, occasionally giving a boat-associated death-demon Charun-like features or a hammer, evidence of genuine cultural exchange rather than of the two having always been one figure. Keeping the Etruscan Charun and the Greek Charon as separate entries, as this atlas does, preserves exactly the distinction that later blending tends to erase: two independently documented death-servant figures from two different, if neighboring, ancient religious traditions.