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, and 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.
The territorial extent of Etruscan civilization reached its maximum around 500 BC, shortly after the Roman Kingdom became the Roman Republic. Beginning in the late 4th century BC, it succumbed to the expanding Rome during the Roman–Etruscan Wars; Etruscans were granted Roman citizenship in 90 BC, and by 27 BC the whole Etruscan territory was incorporated into the newly established Roman Empire.
Its culture flourished in three confederacies of cities: Etruria (Tuscany, Latium and Umbria); the Po Valley, including the eastern Alps; and Campania.The topic of the "League of Etruria" is covered in Freeman, pp. 562–65. The league in northern Italy is mentioned by Livy in his Ab Urbe Condita.The entire subject with complete ancient sources in footnotes was worked up by George Dennis in his Introduction. In the LacusCurtius transcription, the references in Dennis's footnotes link to the texts in English or Latin; the reader may also find the English of some of them on WikiSource or other Internet sites. As the work has already been done by Dennis and Thayer, the complete work-up is not repeated here. In the Etruscan political system, authority resided with individual cities and likely with 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.
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.
Legend and history
Ethnonym and etymology
According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the Etruscans called themselves Rasenna (Greek Ῥασέννα), a stem from the Etruscan Rasna (𐌛𐌀𐌔𐌍𐌀): "the people". Evidence of inscriptions as Tular Rasnal (𐌕𐌖𐌋𐌀𐌛 𐌛𐌀𐌔𐌍𐌀𐌋), "boundary of the people", or Mechlum Rasnal (𐌌𐌄𐌙𐌋 𐌛𐌀𐌔𐌍𐌀𐌋), "community of the people", attest to its autonym usage. The Tyrsenian etymology, however, remains unknown.Rasenna comes from The syncopated form, Rasna, is inscriptional and is inflected.The topic is covered in Pallottino, p. 133.Some inscriptions, such as the cippus of Cortona, feature the Raśna (pronounced Rashna) alternative, as is described at
In Attic Greek, the Etruscans were known as Tyrrhenians (, Tyrrhēnoi, earlier Tyrsēnoi),, . from which the Romans derived the names Tyrrhēnī, Tyrrhēnia (Etruria), and Mare Tyrrhēnum (Tyrrhenian Sea).
The ancient Romans referred to the Etruscans as the Tuscī or Etruscī (singular Tuscus).According to Félix Gaffiot's Dictionnaire Illustré Latin Français, the major authors of the Roman Republic (Livy, Cicero, Horace, and others) used the term Tusci. Cognate words developed, including Tuscia and Tusculanensis. Tuscī was clearly the principal term used to designate things Etruscan; Etruscī and Etrusia/Etrūria were used less often, mainly by Cicero and Horace, and they lack cognates.According to the the English use of Etruscan dates from 1706. 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 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, it means 'tower' and comes from the ancient Greek word for tower: ,The Bonfantes (2003), p. 51.. likely a loan into Greek. In this hypothesis, the Tusci were called the 'people who build towers" or "the tower builders".Partridge (1983) 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, with Dionysius of Halicarnassus having observed in the first century BC, "[T]here is no reason that the Greeks should not have called [the Etruscans] by this name, both from their living in towers and from the name of one of their rulers."Book I, Section 30. 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.Beekes, R. Etymological Dictionary of Greek Brill (2010) pp.1520-1521Kretschmer, Paul. "Nordische Lehnwörter im Altgriechischen" in Glotta 22 (1934) pp. 110 ff.
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, while 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.Hesiod, Theogony 1015. The 7th-century BC Homeric Hymn to DionysusHomeric Hymn to Dionysus, 7.7–8 referred to them as pirates.John Pairman Brown, Israel and Hellas, Vol. 2 (2000) p. 211
In the 5th century BC, some Greek writers began to associate "Tyrrhenians" and Pelasgians, with some using these terms merely as generic labels for "non-Greeks" and for the supposed indigenous ancestors of the Greeks.Strabo. Geography. Book VI, Chapter II. Perseus Digital Library. Tufts University. Archived from the original on 2 September 2022. Retrieved 2 September 2022. The logographer Hellanicus of Lesbos, derived the Tyrrhenians from a Pelasgian migration from Thessaly that colonized the region he called Tyrrhenia.
Herodotus also placed the origins of the Tyrrhenians in the East. In an account explicitly attributed to the Lydians themselves, part of the people of Lydia, led by Tyrrhenus, son of king Atys, emigrated by sea and settled in central Italy, where they took their leader's name.1.94
Later Greek authors combined and reworked these stories, often inconsistently. Thucydides4.109 and StraboStrabo. Geography. Book V, Chapter II. Perseus Digital Library. Tufts University.Archived from the original on 2 September 2022. Retrieved 2 September 2022. associated the Tyrrhenians with the Pelasgians of Lemnos, and Strabo had the Pelasgians of Lemnos and Imbros follow Tyrrhenus to Italy. In this literature "Tyrrhenian", like "Pelasgian", was a fluid label applied to various non-Greek peoples of the northern Aegean, such as a group near Creston in Macedonia mentioned by Herodotus6.137 and the mixed "Pelasgian Tyrrhenian" population of the Athos peninsula described by Thucydides; these notices reflect the vagueness of the ethnonyms rather than any documented migration of the Etruscans.
A separate strand of the question is linguistic. The Lemnos stele is inscribed in a language structurally close to Etruscan, which has led modern scholars to posit a Tyrsenian language family linking Etruscan, Lemnian and the Alpine Raetic. This is a matter of language classification, however, and does not in itself confirm the ancient migration narratives: the nature, direction and date of the connection remain debated.
However, 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 (AD 79):
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 (1947), 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.