Bonarota and Lanzi (1789) had given their attention to these tablets, and they were afterwards treated by O. Müller in his “Etruscans,” and there for the first time handled in a critical though by no means exhaustive manner. On the 30th of December, 1831, Lepsius, while yet at Göttingen, writes to his father: “I have found an excellent subject for investigation. Müller first drew my attention to it, and if I can make anything out of it I will perhaps choose it for my doctor’s dissertation. It is the seven Eugubian Tablets, the sole but important relic of the Umbrian language. So far, no one understands them, but they would be of the greatest consequence for the old Italian forms of worship and sacrificial customs, since it is easy to conjecture that the inscriptions upon them are sacrificial formulas. Müller has already attempted to determine the terminations of some of the declensions in his “Etruscans;” a considerable resemblance to the Latin and also to the Greek, is unmistakable, and I am convinced that a great deal can yet be made out, though it would cost much time and labor. With regard to this, it is of great moment that five of the tablets are in Etruscan characters, and two in Latin, which gives a clue to the relations of many of the sounds in Umbrian, especially since there are an extraordinary number of repititions, and both the Latin tablets, as I have already discovered, are only the farther continuation of an Etruscan, so that I have already made out almost all the words of this Etruscan tablet on those in Latin, and written them over the Latin words. I have also already discovered two new alphabetical characters which were known neither to Müller nor the earlier commentators on the ‘Eugubian Tablets.’” Thereupon he gives his father a specimen, in which he writes the Latin text in black ink and the Etruscan above it in red.