Etruscan civilization
The Etruscans created a civilization in Etruria in ancient Italy, with a common language and culture, and formed a federation of city-states. After adjacent lands had been conquered, its territory covered, at its greatest extent, roughly what is now Tuscany, western Umbria and northern Lazio, as well as what are now the Po Valley, Emilia-Romagna, south-eastern Lombardy, southern Veneto and western Campania.
A large body of literature has flourished on the origins of the Etruscans, but the consensus among modern scholars is that the Etruscans were an indigenous population. The earliest evidence of a culture that is identifiably Etruscan dates from about 900 BC. This is the period of the Iron Age Villanovan culture, considered to be the earliest phase of Etruscan civilization, which itself developed from the previous late Bronze Age Proto-Villanovan culture in the same region, part of the central European Urnfield culture system. Etruscan civilization dominated Italy until it fell to the expanding Rome beginning in the late 4th century BC as a result of the Roman–Etruscan Wars; Etruscans were granted Roman citizenship in 90 BC and in 27 BC the whole Etruscan territory was incorporated into the newly established Roman Empire.
The territorial extent of Etruscan civilization reached its maximum around 500 BC, shortly after the Roman Kingdom became the Roman Republic. Its culture flourished in three confederacies of cities: that of Etruria, that of the Po Valley with the eastern Alps, and that of Campania. The league in northern Italy is mentioned in Livy. The reduction in Etruscan territory was gradual, but after 500 BC the political balance of power on the Italian peninsula shifted away from the Etruscans in favor of the rising Roman Republic.
The earliest known examples of Etruscan writing are inscriptions found in southern Etruria that date to around 700 BC. The Etruscans developed a system of writing derived from the Euboean alphabet, which was used in the Magna Graecia coastal areas in Southern Italy. The Etruscan language remains only partly understood, making modern understanding of their society and culture heavily dependent on much later and generally disapproving Roman and Greek sources. In the Etruscan political system authority resided in its individual small cities and probably in its prominent individual families. At the height of Etruscan power, elite Etruscan families grew very rich through trade with the Celts to the north and the Greeks to the south, and they filled their large family tombs with imported luxuries.
Legend and history
Ethnonym and etymology
According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus the Etruscans called themselves Rasenna, a stem from the Etruscan Rasna, the people. Evidence of inscriptions as Tular Rasnal, "boundary of the people", or Mechlum Rasnal. "community of the people", attest to its autonym usage. The Tyrsenian etymology, however, remains unknown.In Attic Greek the Etruscans were known as Tyrrhenians, from which the Romans derived the names Tyrrhēnī, Tyrrhēnia, and Mare Tyrrhēnum.
The ancient Romans referred to the Etruscans as the Tuscī or Etruscī. Their Roman name is the origin of the terms Toscana, which refers to their heartland, and Etruria, which can refer to their wider region. The term Tusci is thought by linguists to have been the Umbrian word for Etruscan, based on an inscription on an ancient bronze tablet from a nearby region. The inscription contains the phrase turskum... nomen, literally 'the Tuscan name'. Based on a knowledge of Umbrian grammar, linguists can infer that the base form of the word turskum is *Tursci, which would, through metathesis and a word-initial epenthesis, be likely to lead to the form, E-trus-ci.
As for the original meaning of the root, *Turs-, a widely cited hypothesis is that it, like the Latin turris, means 'tower' and comes from the ancient Greek word for tower: τύρσις, likely a loan into Greek. On this hypothesis, the Tusci were called the 'people who build towers" or "the tower builders". This proposed etymology is made the more plausible because the Etruscans preferred to build their towns on high precipices reinforced by walls. Alternatively, Giuliano and Larissa Bonfante have speculated that Etruscan houses may have seemed like towers to the simple Latins. The proposed etymology has a long history, Dionysius of Halicarnassus having observed in the first century BC, "here is no reason that the Greeks should not have called by this name, both from their living in towers and from the name of one of their rulers." In his recent Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Robert Beekes claims the Greek word is a "loanword from a Mediterranean language", a hypothesis that goes back to an article by Paul Kretschmer in Glotta from 1934.
Origins
Ancient sources
Literary and historical texts in the Etruscan language have not survived, and the language itself is only partially understood by modern scholars. This makes modern understanding of their society and culture heavily dependent on much later and generally disapproving Roman and Greek sources. These ancient writers differed in their theories about the origin of the Etruscan people. Some suggested they were Pelasgians who had migrated there from Greece. Others maintained that they were indigenous to central Italy.The first Greek author to mention the Etruscans, whom the Ancient Greeks called Tyrrhenians, was the 8th-century BC poet Hesiod in his work the Theogony. He mentioned them as residing in central Italy alongside the Latins. The 7th-century BC Homeric Hymn to Dionysus referred to them as pirates. Unlike later Greek authors, these authors did not suggest that Etruscans had migrated to Italy from the east and did not associate them with the Pelasgians.
It was only in the 5th century BC, when the Etruscan civilization had been established for several centuries, that Greek writers started associating the name "Tyrrhenians" with the "Pelasgians", and even then some did so in a way that suggests they were meant only as generic, descriptive labels for "non-Greek" and "indigenous ancestors of Greeks" respectively. The 5th-century BC historians Herodotus, and Thucydides and the 1st-century BC historian Strabo, did seem to suggest that the Tyrrhenians were originally Pelasgians who migrated to Italy from Lydia by way of the Greek island of Lemnos. They all described Lemnos as having been settled by Pelasgians, whom Thucydides identified as "belonging to the Tyrrhenians". As Strabo and Herodotus told it, the migration to Lemnos was led by Tyrrhenus / Tyrsenos, the son of Atys. Strabo added that the Pelasgians of Lemnos and Imbros then followed Tyrrhenus to the Italian Peninsula. According to the logographer Hellanicus of Lesbos, there was a Pelasgian migration from Thessaly in Greece to the Italian peninsula, as part of which the Pelasgians colonized the area he called Tyrrhenia, and they then came to be called Tyrrhenians.
There is some evidence suggesting a link between Lemnos and the Tyrrhenians. The Lemnos stele bears inscriptions in a language with strong structural resemblances to the language of the Etruscans. The discovery of these inscriptions in modern times has led to the suggestion of a "Tyrrhenian language group" consisting of Etruscan, Lemnian, and the Raetic spoken in the Alps.
Τhis is aligned with the famous and largely debated testimony of Herodotus:
"The emigrants went down to Smyrna and built ships, and sailed away in search of a livelihood. After passing many nations, they came to the land of the Ombricans, where they built cities and have lived ever since. They no longer called themselves Lydians, but after the name of the king's son who led them out, they called themselves Tyrrhenians."
Herodotus also mentions the existence of a tribe called Tyrsenioi/Tyrrhenoi in Central Macedonia:
"based on the Pelasgians, who even now dwell above the Tyrrhenians in the city of Creston and who were once neighbors of those now called Dorians."
By this Herodotus refers to Creston, a city/region in Macedonia, and that Pelasgians are residing above the Tyrsinoi that are known by Thucydides to dwell in the Athos Peninshula.
In Acte were settled barbarian peoples, mixed and bilingual, and a small number of Chalcidians; but the greater part were Pelasgians Tyrrhenians from Lemnos and Athens, alongside Visaltai, Kristones, and Idones.
But the 1st-century BC historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek living in Rome, dismissed many of the ancient theories of other Greek historians and postulated that the Etruscans were indigenous people who had always lived in Etruria and were different from both the Pelasgians and the Lydians. Dionysius noted that the 5th-century historian Xanthus of Lydia, who was originally from Sardis and was regarded as an important source and authority for the history of Lydia, never suggested a Lydian origin of the Etruscans and never named Tyrrhenus as a ruler of the Lydians.
The credibility of Dionysius of Halicarnassus is arguably bolstered by the fact that he was the first ancient writer to report the endonym of the Etruscans: Rasenna.
Similarly, the 1st-century BC historian Livy, in his Ab Urbe Condita Libri, said that the Rhaetians were Etruscans who had been driven into the mountains by the invading Gauls; and he asserted that the inhabitants of Raetia were of Etruscan origin.
The first-century historian Pliny the Elder also put the Etruscans in the context of the Rhaetian people to the north, and wrote in his Natural History'' :
Archeological evidence and modern etruscology
The question of the Etruscans' origins has long been a subject of interest and debate among historians. In modern times, all the evidence gathered by prehistoric and protohistoric archaeologists, anthropologists, and etruscologists points to an autochthonous origin of the Etruscans. There is no archaeological or linguistic evidence of a migration of the Lydians or Pelasgians into Etruria. Modern etruscologists and archeologists, such as Massimo Pallottino, have shown that early historians' assumptions and assertions on the subject were groundless. In 2000, the etruscologist Dominique Briquel explained in detail why he believes that ancient Greek narratives on Etruscan origins should not even count as historical documents. He argues that the ancient story of the Etruscans' 'Lydian origins' was a deliberate, politically motivated fabrication, and that ancient Greeks inferred a connection between the Tyrrhenians and the Pelasgians solely on the basis of certain Greek and local traditions and because there had been trade between the Etruscans and Greeks. He noted that, even if these stories include historical facts suggesting contact, such contact is more plausibly traceable to cultural exchange than to migration.Several archaeologists specializing in Prehistory and Protohistory who have analyzed Bronze Age and Iron Age remains that were excavated in the territory of historical Etruria have pointed out that no evidence has been found, related either to material culture or to social practices, to support a migration theory. The most marked and radical change that has been archaeologically attested in the area is the adoption, starting in about the 12th century BC, of the funeral rite of incineration in terracotta urns, a Continental European practice derived from the Urnfield culture; nothing about it suggests an ethnic contribution from Asia Minor or the Near East.
A 2012 survey of the previous 30 years' archaeological findings based on excavations of the major Etruscan cities showed a continuity of culture from the last phase of the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. This is evidence that the Etruscan civilization, which emerged around 900 BC, was built by people whose ancestors had inhabited that region for at least the previous 200 years. Based on this cultural continuity, there is now a consensus among archeologists that Proto-Etruscan culture developed, during the last phase of the Bronze Age, from the indigenous Proto-Villanovan culture and that the subsequent Iron Age Villanovan culture is most accurately described as an early phase of the Etruscan civilization. It is possible that there were contacts between northern-central Italy and the Mycenaean world at the end of the Bronze Age, but contacts between the inhabitants of Etruria and inhabitants of Greece, Aegean Sea Islands, Asia Minor, and the Near East are attested only centuries later, when Etruscan civilization was already flourishing and Etruscan ethnogenesis was well established. The first of these attested contacts relate to the Greek colonies in Southern Italy and Phoenician-Punic colonies in Sardinia, and the consequent orientalizing period.
One of the most common mistakes for a long time, even among some scholars of the past, has been to associate the later Orientalizing period of Etruscan civilization with the question of its origins. Orientalization was an artistic and cultural phenomenon that spread among the Greeks themselves and throughout much of the central and western Mediterranean, not only in Etruria. The Etruscan orientalizing period was due, as has been amply demonstrated by archeologists, to contacts with the Greeks and the Eastern Mediterranean and not to mass migrations. The facial features in the frescoes and sculptures and the depiction of reddish-brown men and light-skinned women, influenced by archaic Greek art, followed the artistic traditions from the Eastern Mediterranean that had spread even among the Greeks themselves, and to a lesser extent also to several other civilizations in the central and western Mediterranean up to the Iberian Peninsula. Actually, many of the tombs of the Late Orientalizing and Archaic periods, such as the Tomb of the Augurs, the Tomb of the Triclinium and the Tomb of the Leopards, as well as other tombs from the archaic period in the Monterozzi necropolis in Tarquinia, were painted by Greek painters or at least foreign artists. These images have, therefore, a very limited value for a realistic representation of the Etruscan population. It was only from the end of the 4th century BC that evidence of physiognomic portraits began to be found in Etruscan art and Etruscan portraiture became more realistic.