The Pyrgi Tablets and a Mediterranean Goddess

The single most important document for Uni is a set of three thin gold sheets found at Pyrgi, the port of the Etruscan city of Caere, and dated about 500 BCE. Two are in Etruscan and one in Phoenician, and they record the dedication of a sanctuary by the ruler Thefarie Velianas, crucially, they identify Uni with the Phoenician goddess Astarte.

The tablets matter twice over: as a rare bilingual they are a key to the still-imperfectly-understood Etruscan language, and they show Uni standing at the meeting point of the western Mediterranean's religious worlds, equated with a great Near Eastern goddess through Etruria's trade and contact with Carthage. A goddess of sovereignty, marriage and the destiny of cities, chief deity of several Etruscan towns, Uni is here caught in the act of being translated between cultures, the same goddess the Romans would receive again, under a different name, as Juno.