Etruscan is written in an alphabet derived from Greek and can be read aloud without difficulty. Understanding it is another matter. The language is not Indo-European and has no close relatives beyond the Lemnian of a single stele and the Raetic of the Alps, so its vocabulary has to be recovered from context, from bilingual objects and from the repeated formulas of funerary inscriptions.
Most of the surviving corpus is short and formulaic, which is why the Liber Linteus matters so much. It is a linen ritual calendar, the longest Etruscan text known, and it survives because it was cut into strips and used to wrap a mummy in Ptolemaic Egypt before reaching Zagreb in the nineteenth century. L. B. van der Meer's commentary works through what can be established of its prescriptions, which are dated instructions for offerings to named gods.
The Etruscan cities were absorbed by Rome across the fourth and third centuries BCE and their language gave way to Latin, with the last inscriptions falling around the turn of the era. The emperor Claudius wrote a history of them in twenty books, now lost, which is one of the more painful absences in the record. What remains is archaeology: painted chamber tombs at Tarquinia, the necropolis at Cerveteri, bronze mirrors engraved with named mythological scenes, and the terracottas from temple roofs.