An ancient civilization preluding the Roman Empire comprised of a group of people called Etruscans from Etruria, Italy, whose funerary practices revealed much about the elite status and social roles of women through symbols and portraits marked on sarcophagi. A woman's role in antiquity held varying levels or types of value depending on the society in which she lived. Primary sources are invaluable for understanding female roles in Etruscan culture, yet, no primary source Etruscan literature remains that explains the role of women in their own society. Viewers can use sarcophagus portraits to look for similarities and build a list of references that indicate the iconographic values Etruscan families wished to advertise in their female members. Humans navigate the world through constructions of narrative and the Etruscans created symbols to make explicit social structure an interpretation of meaning in daily life. Scholar Ian Morris explains that close observation of funerary and burial practices shift from the “analysis of burials” to “the analysis of symbolic action.” The visual narrative of a woman's role within the family, her economic wealth, trade connections, and her individual identity blend together and form an idealized construction of the physical likeness of her personhood. Death becomes an assembly of carefully chosen elements from an individual's life, arranged to symbolize a visually iconographic, unified presentation of the deceased and what his or her life meant to those who remain. These values become extensions of the living and transferred into death with the women for eternity in the form of visual signifiers of elements sculpted on the woman's sarcophagi or cinerary urn.