Turms

author: High Priest Zevios Metathronos
co-author: Karnonnos

Hieratic Information about Turms

Divine Symbols
The Caduceus The Winged Petasos The Winged Sandals The Traveller's Chlamys

I. The Name

Three explanations of the name Turms are in circulation. Bernard Combet-Farnoux saw it as a native Etruscan formation, grouping it with Fufluns, opposed to the openly borrowed Hercle and Apulu. Alternatively, Ambros Josef Pfiffig linked it instead to the name of Turan and to the Etruscan root tur, "give," which would make the god a giver and his consort-in-name a giving. James Clackson has argued against both.^1,2,3

The suffix that would have to produce turm- from tur- has no parallel anywhere in Etruscan. He proposed instead that Etruscan speakers heard the Greek name of Hermes in the form in which Greek dedications most often gave it, preceded by the definite article and contracted with it. Archaic graffiti supply the shape: torméō on a kylix from Olbia, t[o]rma at Pantikapaion, tormai in a sacred law from Arcadia. A Greek long o in a first syllable is regularly taken into Etruscan as u, as in qutun from kōthōn and truile from Trōilos. The final s then follows the pattern of other Etruscan masculine divine names in -ns and -ms: Fufluns, Culsans, Neθuns, Selvans, Śeθlans.³

If Clackson is right, the god carries a Greek name wearing a Greek article, mistaken for part of the word and kept for two centuries because it happened to resemble the Etruscan verb for giving.

The written forms vary more than most. The nominative appears thirteen times as turms, once as turmś, once as turmus, and once, on a late mirror, reduced to turm. A longer turamś stands beside the god on a mirror of 460 to 450 BCE attributed to Vulci. A genitive turmsal, otherwise unattested, opens the inscription on a bronze weight from Caere. The earliest images of the god belong to the end of the sixth century BCE, where Maurizio Harari's catalogue identifies him by hat, cloak, winged sandals and caduceus.^3,4,5

Language	Name	Earliest Secure Attestation
Etruscan	Turms	Engraved bronze mirrors (sixth century BCE)

Sources: Combet-Farnoux for the native-Etruscan reading;¹ Pfiffig for the derivation from tur;² Clackson for the Greek loan and for the tally of written forms;³ Meiser's edition of the Etruskische Texte for the individual inscriptions;⁴ Harari for the earliest images.⁵

II. Greek Myth in Etruscan Art

The Judgement of Elcsntre

Turms has the same function in the Etruscan version of the contest of the three goddesses as he does in the Greek version. He carries the prince to be judged; he is near the scene of judgment. The prince is Elcsntre (Paris or Alexandros), and the competitors are Menrva, Turan and Uni. Nancy de Grummond lists Turms as standing at the side of the group on her catalog of the Judgement mirrors. He is gesturing. He is holding the caduceus. He is performing the duties of a herald, but not as a participant.^6,7

This is where almost all of his representations show him. He escorts; he announces; he leads... Combet-Farnoux based his understanding of the god on this concept; he describes Turms as serving, with "ministerium," the other gods, particularly Tinia, his master.¹

Turms Aitaś and the Summoning of the Dead

A fourth-century bronze mirror in the Vatican Museums names four figures. Uθuze is Odysseus. Terasias is Tiresias, and the word hinθial beside him marks him as a shade rather than a man. The god who has brought him up is labelled Turms Aitaś, Turms of Aita, Turms belonging to the lord of the dead.¹

The scene follows the eleventh book of the Odyssey (Nekyia), where Odysseus digs his trench at the edge of the world and the dead come up to the blood, and the seer of Thebes comes among them to tell him the road home.⁸ Homer sends no god to fetch Tiresias. The Etruscan engraver for whatever reason has one.

Turms Aitaś is the same god described by whose errand he is on, which is exactly how the mirrors treat him elsewhere.¹

III. In the Rite of Turms

Here the record thins to almost nothing. L. Bouke van der Meer's analysis of the bronze liver from near Gossolengo works through the names inscribed on its regions one by one, twenty-eight entries covering Tin, Neθ, Uni, Mae, Tecvm, Lvsa, Caθa, Fufluns, Selva, Leθam, Tluscv, Cel, Cvl, Alp, Vetis, Cilens, Θufltha, Tul, Lasa, Tvath, Maris, Lar, Hercle, Velch, Satre, Metlvmth, Tiv and Usil. Turms is not among them.⁹

Clackson wrote that all but one come from engraved mirrors.³ Mirrors are toilet articles and grave goods. They record what an Etruscan family wished to look at.

Where the god becomes part of the mechanism of religion; that part is the mechanism of death, possibly as psychopomp. Fernando Gilotta has studied a late 5th century BCE red figure column krater (or vase) that was likely found in a burial ground at Bettolle and now housed at Chiusi. This vase depicts a bearded man who appears as if he is getting ready to leave and is being helped by Turms Aitaš. Gilotta noted that the vases created by this workshop had their interior surfaces left unglazed which indicates that these vessels were intended for holding ash remains rather than wine. Combet-Farnoux also records the god again on sarcophagi, in one case besie Charun and Cerberus.^1,10

A god heavily present at Etruscan funerals and absent from Etruscan divination. The pattern holds across the whole surviving corpus.

IV. Objects

There are, in the strict sense, none. Turms is among the most frequently pictured figures in Etruscan art and among the least worshipped from what we know, and the scholarship does say that in the plainest terms imaginable: Pfiffig, Mauro Cristofani, Erika Simon and Daniele Maras all conclude that he was not the subject of a cult.^2,3,11

Caere

A bronze weight dated approximately 350 B.C.E., published by Cristofani as an "aequipondium etruscum", contains ten lines of Etruscan. The opening lines contain the genitive forms of Raθ (the god) and Turms (the god), along with names of a "meθlum" and a "zilaχ-magistracy". This is likely the only known text dedicated to Turms; this is the only reference in the literature to the genitive form of the name Turms.^3,12,13

The weight has been read several times since. Giulio Facchetti and Koen Wylin produced preliminary notes on it, Adriano Maggiani discussed it in the Veio-Cerveteri-Vulci catalogue, Mario Torelli approached it from the institutional side, and Valentina Belfiore has published a lexical re-reading.^14,15,16,17

The Candelabrum at Florence

A fifth-century bronze candelabrum in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale at Florence has long been read with a word given as lursnal or lursl. Maras now reads turmsal.^3,13 If the new reading holds, this becomes the earliest Etruscan dedication to the god by roughly a century, and the only one from outside Caere.

Cortona

Combet-Farnoux took one dedication to indicate that a temple of Turms had stood at Cortona.¹ The inference is his rather than the stone's. It has not been taken up by the later literature on Etruscan cult inscriptions, and it should be held loosely.

Three candidates, one of them contested in its reading, one of them contested in its function, and one of them an inference. Against several hundred images. No sanctuary anywhere in Etruria has yet produced a votive deposit that belongs to him, unless the substance of the mirrors are misunderstood.

V. Objects and Places of Found Objects

The material divides sharply by medium. Mirrors carry the name and almost nothing else; the two objects that might carry a cult carry no image. Findspots are recorded for the funerary material and lost for much of the rest, since mirrors reached collections through the antiquities trade in large numbers and without their tombs.

Object	Date	Ancient Provenance	Present Collection	Status of Identification
Bronze weight, aequipondium etruscum	c. 350 BCE	Caere	Not specified in the sources cited here	Securely named turmsal; function disputed
Bronze mirror with Uθuze, Turms Aitaś and the shade of Terasias	Fourth century BCE	Not recorded in the sources cited here	Vatican Museums	Securely named Turms Aitaś
Bronze mirror with the form turamś	c. 460–450 BCE	Findspot uncertain; attributed to Vulci	Not specified in the sources cited here	Securely named; longer form of the name
Red-figured column krater	Late fifth century BCE	Probably a necropolis at Bettolle	Chiusi	Securely named Turms Aitaś
Bronze candelabrum	Fifth century BCE	Faliscan territory	Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Florence	Reading turmsal proposed; provisional

Sources: Cristofani and Belfiore for the weight from Caere;^12,17 Combet-Farnoux for the Vatican mirror;¹ Clackson and Meiser for the mirror with turamś and for the candelabrum;^3,4 Gilotta for the krater;¹⁰ Maras for the re-reading of the candelabrum inscription.¹³

The Weight from Caere

The aequipondium is the counterweight of a steelyard balance, the sliding mass that sets the reading. An inscription of ten lines on such an object is extraordinary, and the length is what has drawn the successive re-readings.^12,14,17

Raθ, whose genitive stands first, is a god of Caere known from that city's sanctuaries. Turms follows him. Beyond that the text runs into vocabulary that is either unattested elsewhere or attested too thinly to translate, and the published renderings diverge from one another well before the end of the first line.^12,15,16,17

The issue here is whether the weight was given as a "gift" to Turmus, or if it was merely documented as being guaranteed by him. The Etruscans will not allow their position on this matter to be defined. This leaves us with nothing but procedure.

VI. Turms, Mercurius and the Aventine

Camillus

Certain Roman accounts have some information. Macrobius reported in his works that the Etruscans had another name for the god. Citing Statius Tullianus citing Callimachus, he writes that the Tusci called Mercury Camillus, a word meaning an attendant of the gods, and adds that this is why Virgil's Metabus gave his daughter the name Camilla, an attendant of Diana.¹⁸

As Combet-Farnoux showed so well he was able to use Macrobius' Camillus alongside the Cadmilos of the Samothracian mysteries (whom a scholiast on Callimachus describes as the Hermes of Tyrrhenia), and treat them as being names for the same figure. According to Combet- Farnoux the servant role is an even earlier form of the god than the commerce, that existed in both Etruria and Latium at least prior to each having temples for him¹

All things considered the line of transmission needs to be evaluated fairly. A Latin compiler from the 5th century quotes a glossographer from the 4th century who quoted an Alexandrian scholar from the 3rd century about a language none of those men knew. No Etruscan texts give the god the name Camillus.

The Temple by the Circus

The Roman cult was placed by the Annals into the early years of the Republic. According to Livy, the Temple of Mercury was dedicated around 495 B.C.E. He stated that there was a dispute between Consul Appius Claudius and Consul Publius Servilius as to which one would be allowed to dedicate the temple. Therefore, the senate decided to let the people decide and they chose a Centurion. The Centurion arrived along with a ship carrying grain (the annual shipment) and he brought a merchant association with him. The same episode can be found preserved in Valerius Maximus.20 The location of the Temple of Mercury has been noted as being located at the base of the Aventine Hill, north of the Circus Maximus. It also faced the Circus.^19,20,21

Ovid describes what the merchants did there. On the Ides of May they went to the spring near the Porta Capena, drew the water, wet a laurel branch in it and sprinkled their goods and their own heads, asking the god to wash off the profits of their lying.²²

In conclsuion, the Etruscans depicted Turms more often than they depiced almost any deity, which would suggest some level of popularity for Turms, but the evidence of a physical presence in a holy context at present is on the scanter side.