Turan

Turan, the name seems to mean "the lady" or "mistress," from a root of lordship, was the patron goddess of the city of Vulci, and, like Menrva, she is known above all from the engraved mirrors, of which she is a favourite subject. On them she is winged, attended by her companions the Lasa, minor winged spirits of love and fate, and she appears in the great set-pieces of Greek myth as the Etruscans received them: the Judgement of Paris, where the Trojan prince (Etruscan Elcsntre) awards her the prize, and countless scenes of love, adornment and courtship. The dove and the swan are hers. Turan shows how Etruscan religion could take a figure fully within the shared Mediterranean iconography of the love-goddess, recognisably the same visual language as Greek Aphrodite, while keeping her own name, her own city, and her own retinue of spirits.

Outside Vulci, Turan had a major sanctuary at Gravisca, the harbour town of Tarquinia that traded heavily with Greek merchants, where inscribed votive gifts bearing her name have been recovered in some quantity. One dedication there calls her Turan ati, "Mother Turan," a title scholars have connected to the later Roman cult of Venus Genetrix, Venus as ancestral mother, suggesting that the maternal, lineage-founding side of the Roman goddess may have Etruscan roots reaching back through Turan.

Alongside her appearance in the Judgement of Paris and her general role as the Etruscan counterpart of Aphrodite, Turan has a specific mythic consort of her own drawn from the same story cycle that gave Greek Aphrodite her beloved Adonis: Atunis, the Etruscan rendering of the same figure, a beautiful young mortal loved by the goddess and shown together with her on a number of engraved mirrors in scenes of embrace and courtship that closely parallel, without simply copying, the visual conventions Greek and later Roman art used for Aphrodite and Adonis. The pairing of Turan and Atunis demonstrates that the Etruscans received not merely the general iconographic type of a winged, beautiful love goddess but the specific attendant mythology surrounding her, including a doomed mortal lover, and reworked it into their own visual and narrative tradition on the engraved bronze mirrors that served, in Etruscan households, something like the function later Greek vase painting served for transmitting mythological scenes into everyday domestic objects.

Etruscan versions of the Turan and Atunis story do not survive as connected written narrative the way the Greek Adonis myth does in later mythographers, and what can be reconstructed comes entirely from reading the visual conventions of the mirror scenes themselves, comparing recurring poses, attendant figures and inscriptions naming the pair, rather than from any surviving Etruscan text describing the myth in words. This makes Turan and Atunis a useful reminder that a considerable portion of what is known about Etruscan mythology exists only in this visual, captioned form, requiring art historians to reconstruct narrative content that a Greek audience would simply have read in a poem.