My favorite science story about the Etruscan language is using statistics of dice to clarify the words for numbers.<p>Dice were popular in ancient Mediterranean cultures. The older number arrangement put usually 1 opposite 2; 3 opposite 4; 5 opposite 6. At some point it shifted to the more modern 1-6; 2-5; 3-4 arrangement.<p>Usually dice used dots or "pips" as today, but an example was found numbered with Etruscan words. Arguing from statistics of how dice were numbered, they convincingly identified the pairs of numbers. This resolves an ambiguity from other literary sources about the Etruscan words for 4 and 6.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.academia.edu/download/44616033/GAMBLING_WITH_ETRUSCAN_DICE_A_TALE_OF_NU20160411-9102-1hk178p.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.academia.edu/download/44616033/GAMBLING_WITH_ETRU...</a>
Recall that the Ptolemaic Kingdom was created out of the break-up of the Alexander the Great's empire. The Wikipedia article gives 320BC to 30BC. Its leaders were Macedonian Greeks. The Greeks had trading cities along the Italian Peninsula as far back as the 600 BC era, in part to trade with the Etruscans. It's not that difficult to conceive of this cloth(250BC,) being included in some trade shipment that ended up in Alexandria and then carried up the Nile to Thebes.
If only we have a Rosetta Stone of Etruscan and Minoan. Pre-Indo-European central Mediterranean will perhaps remain obscure for us forever...<p>Still, the fact that an Egyptian got buried in a recycled religious treatise of another people across the sea is quite interesting. Especially post-250BC is quite deep in Ptolemaic rule in Egypt and Roman conquest of Etruria.
I think AIs will be good at deciphering things like this. They can wear a text like this as a pair of glasses and wander a virtual Earth, read other texts, time travel, and wait millions of man-years for a single affordance.<p>The same work an amateur anthropologist does, but with more patience and better scrapbooking skills, basically.<p>Although by the time AIs exist that can do this, amateur anthropologists will have much better digital tools as well.