Etruscan Origins and the Ancient Authors

Abstract

One aspect of the Etruscan mystery and the fascination that they evoke in the public, in addition to the persistent obscurity of their language, is the question of their origins. Massimo Pallottino designated this as “l’annosa questione delle origini etrusche”1 (“the age-old question of Etruscan origins,” see Chapter 2). This is in fact one of the classic issues that arise concerning the Etruscans: we do not know how this people was formed, or whence its formative elements and characteristic features were derived; its language, as Dionysius of Halicarnassus noted (1.30.2), was like no other known. Any treatise on Etruscology will include a section dealing with the question of origins: one can only note that the debate remains open and that contradictory theories have been proposed, none of which can claim to be convincing. Three main theses have been advanced in the history of Etruscan studies that may be considered to be based on scienti cally admissible arguments. Two were inherited from Antiquity: that which maintains that the Etruscans came from the East and that which considers them an extension of the oldest established populations of the locales where we know them in historic times, that is to say by making them autochthonous, natives of Italy. A third was added in modern times, rst by the Frenchman Nicolas Freret, in his Recherches sur l’origine et l’ancienne histoire des differents peuples de l’Italie (“Researches on the origin and history of various ancient peoples of Italy”) published in 1753. It was reprised by the big names of German learning of the nineteenth century, such as B. G. Niebuhr and T. Mommsen in their histories of Rome, published respectively in 1811 and 1856: this was the requirement that the ancestors of the Etruscans came over the Alps from the north, in the region where we know the Rhaetians. Their name had appeared to evoke the name Rasenna that, according to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the Etruscans gave themselves in their own language (1.30.3); inscriptions show that the Rhaetians actually spoke a language related to Etruscan.