recovered most of this treasure, is thought to have given up more valuables than any other ancient site with the exception of Pompeii.
News of the Vulci bonanza whistled through Italy and across Europe while Lucien Bonaparte’s neighbors began to contemplate their own fields with deep interest. As a result, more tombs were ripped open and stripped of marketable merchandise, and Prosper Mérimée felt inspired to write The Etruscan Vase. The vase that excited him was not Etruscan, it happened to be Greek, either imported or manufactured in a south Italian Greek pottery shop; but Mérimée did not know this, for which we may be mildly grateful. Le Vase Étrusque is not classified as a masterpiece but we need all the literature we can get, even if it’s written under a misapprehension.
One by one the sites and the important relics were catalogued, scholarly papers rustled, and archaeologists took to quarreling over the debris. They still quarrel, mostly because the language cannot quite be understood and because nobody has proved beyond doubt where the Etruscans came from.
At present we have two legitimate theories concerning their homeland, and a third theory which once was greeted with respect but now is not. Wherever they originated, these people dominated the central Mediterranean for several centuries. We are told by Livy that Etruria’s renown “filled the lands and the waters from one end of Italy to the other, from the Alps to the Straits of Messina.”
Herodotus thought they emigrated from Asia Minor:
“During the reign of Atys, son of Manes, there was famine throughout Lydia. For a while the Lydians persisted in living as they always had, but when the famine lengthened they looked for a way to alleviate their misery—some suggesting one thing, some another. At this time they invented dice games, knucklebone games, handball games, and other games—except draughts, which they did not invent. They would play all day for two days in order to distract themselves and on the third day they would eat. For eighteen years they lived like this. . . .”
At last, continues Herodotus, the king divided his subjects into two groups and chose by lot which would remain in Lydia and which must go in search of a new home. The king himself remained, while those who were to leave he put in charge of his son Tyrsenos. Then all those who were departing went down to Smyrna where they built ships, and after loading the ships with their possessions they sailed away and “passed by many nations in turn” until they reached the land of the Umbrians.
Summarizing the exodus in this manner makes it sound like a ten-day cruise. The reality—if we are discussing reality—must have been quite different. Assuming a degree of truth in the legend, it seems unlikely that there could have been one vast embarkation; more probably there would be numerous small embarkations over a period of years, just as bands of Crusaders straggled toward the Holy Land for 200 years, in contrast to the popular view of seven Christian armies one after another clanking through Syria. And Herodotus’ remark about passing many nations in turn could mean that the emigrants settled here and there, then some of their descendants drifted along, and theirs wandered farther, until at last—centuries after Tyrsenos left home—people with Lydian blood and Lydian traditions reached Italy.
That there was famine in Asia Minor during the thirteenth century B.C. cannot be doubted. Pharaoh Merneptah shipped grain to “Kheta,” land of the Hittites, and a communiqué from one Hittite ruler alludes to starvation. There is also the account of a provincial king with an unpronounceable name who led his famished subjects to the court of the Hittite emperor.
Egyptian hieroglyphs speak of an attempted invasion by “Peoples of the Sea” during the reign of Pharaohs Merneptah and Ramses III, between 1230 and 1170 B.C., and it’s possible that among these half-identified sea people were some Lydians. Whether or not this is so, the course of the emigrants is reasonably clear: they sailed past Malta and Sicily, at which point a few might have continued west to the famous city of Tartessus in Spain. A majority, however, must have turned north to the Italian mainland where they settled along the coast between the Tiber and the Arno, north of the marsh that eventually would become Rome. Here, in Tuscany, among a Bronze Age people called Villanovans, they built those cities we dimly remember from school—Cerveteri, Tarquinia, Populonium, and the others—and here they became known to the Greeks as Tyrsenoi, to the Latins as Etrusci.
The evidence for such a theory is persuasive. In the first place, Herodotus was not the only historian to describe an ancient Lydian migration. Secondly, it is a fact, with little disagreement among archaeologists, that during the eighth and ninth centuries B.C. a noticeable change occurred in the Tuscan way of life. This commonly is called the “Orientalizing” period. It included the substitution of burial for cremation and the appearance of chambered tombs beneath a dromo, or mound, very similar to the earliest tombs in Asia Minor. Religion, too, assumed a different form, apparently related to the eastern Mediterranean. Even the Tuscan devils evolved into first cousins of Assyrian and Chaldean devils. And the livers of sacrificed animals were examined for signs, a Babylonian practice.
Furthermore, the social organization began to display Eastern characteristics, particularly the attitude toward women. The Greeks, in fact, were shocked to learn that Etruscan men treated women as equals. To the Greeks, and later to the Romans, this seemed degenerate.
The style of dress became Eastern. Fashionable ladies wore the round or pointed cap that had been popular with Hittite women. Men wore a belted jerkin with a cloak thrown across one shoulder—which developed into the Roman toga. Men and women both wore pointed shoes with turned-up toes, very much like Hittite shoes.
Then there are linguistic arguments for supposing that these people came from Asia Minor, because Etruscan is not one of the Indo-European languages. Its alphabet is Greek, but the words and sentence construction are not. Nobody has been able to relate Etruscan to any other language, though just about everything has been tried: Sanskrit, Albanian, Hebrew, Basque, Hungarian, and various Anatolian languages. That it should still be indecipherable is not just curious but rather outrageous, because Etruscan was spoken in Tuscany right up to the opening of the Christian era and was used by Etruscan priests as late as the fifth century A.D. This being so, how could it absolutely disappear? We have no explanation, although there are reasons for thinking that the Christian Church obliterated it, just as the Church attempted to silence Aztec, Mayan, and other such ungodly tongues.
However, remnants of a lost civilization tend to be as durable as pottery shards. The archbishop’s staff, for instance, developed from the coiled wand of an Etruscan soothsayer. And the mallet used by Charun to smash the skulls of Etruscan dead is employed whenever a pope dies. Not long ago, you may remember, the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Villot, tapped John Paul’s forehead three times with a silver hammer, calling him by his given name: “Albino, Albino, Albino. Are you dead?” People everywhere, including many who are not Catholic, must have prayed that the elfish little pontiff would smile and sit up. Alas, there was no response; the September pope was gone. Cardinal Villot grasped John Paul’s hand, withdrew the gold ring of the fisherman, and smashed it.
And occasionally we speak or write an Etruscan word: tavern, cistern, letter, person, ceremony, lantern. But except for these, only about 100 Etruscan words have been deciphered, mostly funeral announcements which occur again and again so that their meaning is not much in doubt. Eca suthi, let us say, followed by a name.
One of the strongest linguistic pillars supporting the Eastern theory is a stela from the seventh century B.C. which was uncovered in 1885 on the island of Lemnos in the Aegean. It depicts a warrior holding a lance and it bears two inscriptions using the Greek alphabet. The language, though, is not Greek; it is Etruscoid. Other fragments of this language have since been found on Lemnos, which does away with the idea that the stela might have been imported. What all of this suggests is that Etruscan-speaking Lydians might have settled there.
Take a narrow look at the statues, pots, tripods, jewelry, sword hilts, murals. So much hints at Oriental
