City

Tarquinia

Southern Etruria, on the coast of central Italy · c. 750 BCE – 100 CE developing

Also known as: Tarχna, Tarquiniī

Tarquinia was one of the great cities of the Etruscan league, set on a ridge above the coast of southern Etruria, and in legend the oldest and most senior of them, the seat of the seer Tarchon and the place where the Etruscan religion of divination was first revealed. It is famous above all for its painted tombs, whose frescoes of banquets, dancers, and the sea are the richest surviving record of Etruscan life. It gave early Rome its kings, the Tarquins, and remained an important city until Rome absorbed it; the modern town of Tarquinia keeps the name.

The city’s Etruscan name, Tarχna, is one of the better-anchored Etruscan toponyms, though by an indirect route. What is actually attested in Etruscan is the gens, the family name Tarchunies, most strikingly in the François Tomb at Vulci, where a painted figure is labeled Cneve Tarchunies Rumach, “Gnaeus Tarquinius of Rome,” an Etruscan record of the very dynasty Roman tradition remembered as its kings, Tarquinius Priscus and Tarquinius Superbus. From that attested name-stem the city-form Tarχna is drawn, and from it the Romans made Tarquiniī. So the name of the city passed into Rome twice over, once as a place and once as a royal house, and the Etruscans themselves recorded a Tarquin who was “of Rome” before the Romans drove the Tarquins out.

Name families

Cognate names grouped by shared root. An indented name is borrowed from the form above it; names at the same level are parallel descendants.

The Tarχna family

The name of the Etruscan city Tarquinia, Etruscan Tarχna (attested in the gens Tarchunies, the family whence Rome took its Tarquin kings) and Latin Tarquiniī; the dynastic Tarquinius and the modern Tarquinia both descend from it.

Transmission map

Each form at the homeland of its language; arcs follow asserted borrowing paths. Slide to a year to see which names were in use.

Etruscan · Tarχna · Tarquinia · c. 700 BCE – 100 BCE Tarχna Latin · Tarquiniī · Rome · c. 600 BCE – 400 CE Tarquiniī
700 BCE

in use at this year · formerly in use · not yet attested

◆ Tarquinia, the city

Attestation timeline

When each name is attested, earliest first. Dates bound the name's use, not the language's lifespan.

Etruscan Latin

Names across languages

Etruscan c. 700 BCE – 100 BCE #

𐌕𐌀𐌓𐌙𐌍𐌀

Transliteration
Tarχna
IPA
/ˈtarkʰna/
Meaning
“Tarquinia”
Confidence
attested

The Etruscan name of the city, Tarχna, written in the Etruscan alphabet from right to left, with the letter chi for the aspirate. It is attested as the great gentilicial name Tarchunies / tarχna, the clan that the legend of the seer Tarchon and the history of the Tarquin kings both attach to the city; the most famous instance is in the François Tomb at Vulci, where the figure Cneve Tarchunies Rumach, “Gnaeus Tarquinius of Rome,” appears among the painted heroes. The city-toponym is the accepted reading of this attested name-stem.

Tarχna is the Etruscan original behind one of the most consequential names Rome inherited. From it the Romans formed both the city-name Tarquiniī and the dynastic Tarquinius, the family of Rome’s fifth and seventh kings, whose expulsion founded the Republic. That an Etruscan tomb-painting should label one of these Tarquins Rumach, “the Roman,” is a striking thing: the Etruscans were recording a member of the house as belonging to Rome at about the time Rome was making the name a byword for the monarchy it had overthrown. The kings were driven out; the name they brought from Tarχna stayed.

Sources (2)
  1. The François Tomb, Vulci, inscription Cneve Tarchunies Rumach ("Gnaeus Tarquinius of Rome"), 4th c. BCE.
  2. Bonfante, Giuliano, and Larissa Bonfante. The Etruscan Language: An Introduction. Rev. ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002, s.v. Tarχna.
Cite this entry

Rajagopal, Shriram. "Tarχna (Etruscan name for Tarquinia)." Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names. https://onomastikon.org/civilizations/tarquinia#etruscan-tarchna.

Latin c. 600 BCE – 400 CE #

Tarquiniī

Transliteration
Tarquiniī
IPA
/tarˈkʷiː.ni.iː/
Meaning
“Tarquinia”
Derived from
Etruscan Tarχna
Confidence
attested

The Latin name of the city, Tarquiniī, a plural like the names of other Etruscan towns, taken from the Etruscan Tarχna; from the same stem came the dynastic name Tarquinius and the adjective Tarquiniēnsis. To Rome, Tarquinii was the city of its own early kings, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus and Tarquinius Superbus, the last king of Rome, whose overthrow in 509 BCE Roman tradition made the birth of the Republic.

Tarquiniī is the Etruscan name in Roman form, and it is the form that survived, in the modern Tarquinia and in the historians’ “Tarquin.” The Greek writers who treated Roman history, Dionysius and the rest, knew the city only under this Latin name, so it has no separate Greek form on this page. The city thus reaches us doubly through Rome: as the home of the kings Rome remembered expelling, and in the Latinized shape of the Etruscan name Rome kept long after the Etruscans themselves were gone.

Sources (1)
  1. Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 1 (the Tarquin kings); Lewis, Charlton T., and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879, s.v. Tarquinii, Tarquiniensis.
Cite this entry

Rajagopal, Shriram. "Tarquiniī (Latin name for Tarquinia)." Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names. https://onomastikon.org/civilizations/tarquinia#latin-tarquinii.

Cite this page

Rajagopal, Shriram. "Tarquinia." Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names. https://onomastikon.org/civilizations/tarquinia. 

@misc{onomastikon-tarquinia,
  author = {Rajagopal, Shriram},
  title = {Tarquinia},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://onomastikon.org/civilizations/tarquinia}},
  note = {Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names}
}

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