ABSTRACT
When Alice goes Through the Looking-Glass, what she finds is a back-to-front world of speaking plants, backwards words and inverse actions. However, this backwards world is not entirely random: Carroll’s Looking-glass world succeeds because it is a reversal of the ‘real’ world from which Alice has come. Inanimate objects move and speak, dry biscuits quench thirst, and the future is remembered (Carroll 1994: 20-1; 30-1; 67-8). The relationship between reality and the mirror-world is not arbitrary: the two are linked and mediated by constantly questioning each other. Though the mirror image is not the same as the real image, the former is intricately linked to the latter. Thus, when we go through the Etruscan looking-glass, the images we see are reflections or distortions of Etruscan society. The mirror images the Etruscans have left are not necessarily exact reproductions of reality but the two are closely associated. The image in a mirror is never ‘true’; it can only be interpreted with the knowledge that it is back-to-front: when we see a smudge on our face in a mirror, we know to wipe the opposite side. Such actions are so engrained as to have become automatic. In the same way, when looking at the images on Etruscan mirrors, we must be careful not to read them as unproblematically ‘true’. Rather, because they are reflections, we must acknowledge the possibility of distortion and reversal. We need to be aware of the interpretative distance between the image and the original.
