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He captured their cities. He took their lands. He absorbed their nobility. Their language disappeared. Their books were lost. And within a few centuries, the Etruscan people ceased to exist as a force in their own right. At first glance, this is an ordinary story from the ancient world. The winner survived. The one who is defeated has disappeared. But there is a problem. After the victory, Roman priests continued to read the future from animal livers according to Etruscan rules. The fascia, a bundle of rods with an axe, the main symbol of Roman power, was an Etruscan invention. The Latin alphabet came to Rome through Etruria. So, we have something strange.
Rome destroyed Etruria politically, but Rome itself turned out to be so saturated with Etruscan culture that today it is sometimes difficult to draw a line between what began in Rome and what came to it from its northern neighbors. And this makes the Etruscans one of the strangest disappeared civilizations in history, because they lost and then continued to live inside the victor. To understand how this is even possible, we need to go back to a time when Rome was not yet Rome. This is the mysterious story of the Etruscans. If you were standing in Italy in the 8th century BC and placing a bet on who would build the Colosseum, conquer Egypt, and create the legal system that still holds the modern world together, you wouldn't bet on Rome. At that moment, Rome was a
miserable cluster of mud huts around a swamp on the Tiber River, a veritable bay. The nearest Etruscan city, Veii, was about 7 miles away, a day's walk, and you literally found yourself in another civilization. Etruria, the heart of modern Tuscany, the land between the Tiber and the Arno, was a confederation of 12 wealthy city-states, each with its own walls, its own king, and its own army. Etruscan influence extended from the Adriatic to the Gulf of Naples, and both seas washing Italy still bear Etruscan names. Tyrrhenian, from the Greek name for the Etruscans, Tyrrhenians, and Adriatic, from the Etruscan port of Adria. Where they come from is a big mystery. Their language is unlike any
other language on Earth, not Indo-European, not Semitic, not anything at all. Linguists call it a linguistic insulator. We can read their inscriptions. They wrote in the Greek alphabet, but we can barely understand what they were saying. 13,000 inscriptions and a vocabulary of 300 words. It's like hearing someone's conversation, distinguishing every sound and not understanding a single sentence. No one can read Etruscan, but your like and subscription will be read instantly. So like, subscribe to the channel, and let's get back to the story. Herodotus claimed that the Etruscans sailed from Lydia on the coast of modern-day Turkey.
Wonderful story. The Lydian king Attis sent his son Tyrrhenus into exile, and he sailed west with a group of emigrants and settled in Italy. By the way, this is where the Greek name for the Etruscans, the Tyrrhenians, comes from. But there is a problem. Lydian was an Indo-European language, but Etruscan was not. Most likely, it was Lydian propaganda. At that time, the king of Lydia actively traded with Etruria, and the myth of common roots fits suspiciously well with economic interests. It seems that Herodotus was simply deceived. On the other hand, Herodotus never claimed to be accurate. He told interesting stories he had heard somewhere. A DNA study conducted in 2021 showed the opposite.
Genetically, the Etruscans were local, indigenous to Italy. But then where did a language come from that has no relatives anywhere on the continent? The only two related languages were found on the island of Lemnos in the Aegean Sea and in the Alpine region . Both are dead, both are even more poorly documented. One theory holds that all these peoples spoke variants of the same pre- Indo-European language family, and that the Etruscans somehow survived the wave of Indo-European languages in the second millennium BC. If this is true, then we are dealing with one of the last fragments of the world that existed before the appearance of the Indo-Europeans. A people who somehow held on while the entire continent around them began speaking other
languages. Now let's review the list of what Rome borrowed from its northern neighbors. The list is long, and each item on it disrupts the usual pattern. Let's start with the gods. The entire Capitoline Triad -Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, the three chief deities of Rome-was imported from Etruria. The cult of Apollo also came to Rome through the Etruscans. Moreover, the Etruscans initially had no gods at all in the usual sense. They prayed not to characters, but to forces, fire, lightning, earth. It was the Greeks who taught them to give faces and names to the gods, and the Etruscans then passed this habit south to the Romans. Even after the gods became men, the old abstraction still showed through. The Etruscan gods were extremely
collegial. Where the Greek Zeus did whatever he pleased, the Etruscan supreme god Tinia could not even throw a lightning bolt without consulting his wife Una and the other gods. Decisions were made collectively, like a board of directors. And one more detail that distinguished the Etruscan religion from all its neighbors. If you were struck by lightning, it was not a punishment. It was a blessing. God singled you out, promoted you, gave you an A+ grade. The complete opposite of the Greeks, for whom lightning from Zeus was a punishment.
Divination by animal entrails, the famous haruspices, priests who cut open a sacrificial goat and read the future by its liver, was an Etruscan invention. In Rome, no war was started, and no great office was confirmed without the haruspices reading the signs. Even a bronze model of the liver has survived, marked as a teaching aid for priests and divided into 16 sections, each corresponding to a specific area of the sky. And the Etruscans explained the origin of this tradition with a myth that sounds like the introduction to a horror movie. The farmer was plowing the land when suddenly the soil started to move. He pushed the lumps aside, and beneath the ground lay a child, or something that only looked like a child, wrinkled, with a full set of
teeth and the voice of an adult. This being, Tages, dictated the first rules of viscera reading, and then disappeared. His words were recorded as the sacred book of the haruspices. Haruspices still existed even in Imperial Rome. The last mention of them dates back to 410 AD during the Gothic siege of Rome. In a panic, the Romans summoned the Etruscan priests and begged them to send lightning upon the barbarians. The priests read the signs and replied, "The liver says you are doomed." For a thousand years, Rome listened to the Etruscan priests, and the last thing it heard from them was a prophecy of its own destruction.
Gladiatorial combat, Etruscan funeral rites, Roman theater from the Etruscans, and even the Latin word for actor, histrio, are of Etruscan origin. Arch, Etruscan. The Roman sewer system, the famous Cloaca Maxima, was built by Etruscan engineers. Urban planning with street grid and drainage, Etruscan form. Temple architecture, Etruscan. Toga, Etruscan clothing. Fascia, a bundle of rods with an axe, a symbol of power that gave us the word fascism, an Etruscan symbol used in Etruria before it was used in Rome. And most importantly - writing. The alphabet has come a long way.
The Phoenicians invented it, the Greeks adapted it, the Etruscans reworked it for themselves, discarding what they didn't need, adding what they did need, and passed it on to the Romans. Today, two and a half billion people use the Latin alphabet , but it came to them through Etruria, and it still bears the fingerprints of the Etruscans. Let's take the letter C. Why does Latin read it as K? Because the Etruscans did not distinguish between the sounds G and K. For them, they merged into one letter . And when the Romans borrowed the alphabet, they inherited this confusion. Every time you hear the letter "K" in the word "Kaiser," you hear an Etruscan error. Even a three-part Roman name, such as Gaius Julius Caesar, was an Etruscan invention. And some
names, such as Mark, are of Etruscan origin. According to tradition, the last three of the seven Roman kings were Etruscans: Tarquinius the Elder, Servius Tullius, and Tarquinius the Proud. And Servius Tullius is a Romanized name. His real Etruscan name was Mastarna. And among the Etruscans themselves, he was known as a powerful military leader, whose name is mentioned in Etruscan sanctuaries. Later, the Romans wrote him a beautiful biography, the son of a slave girl who rose from nothing. In reality, he was an Etruscan aristocrat who, for unknown reasons, came to rule Rome. And there are many such questions. Officially, Rome claims to have never been part of the Etruscan Confederation, but look at the map.
The Etruscans controlled the territory to the north, the Etruscans controlled the territory to the south, and in between was a supposedly independent Rome, surrounded on all sides. This looks suspicious. Each of the three Etruscan kings built on a monumental scale. It was because of them that Rome transformed from a village into a city. The great temple of Jupiter on Capitoline Hill, the one after which every capital is named, was the work of Etruscan engineers. Lictors, officials who wore fascias, appeared under the Etruscan kings. The curule chair, a folding seat that designated a magistrate, was another Etruscan borrowing, and there is one detail that makes your hair stand on end.
It is said that Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, left behind books, memoirs, and a history of the founding of the city. When his tomb was opened in 181 BC and the books were found, the Roman Senate read them and ordered them burned, officially because the writings would corrupt the citizens. What was in these books? We will never know. But the fact that the Senate chose to destroy its own ancient history rather than show it to the people speaks volumes. Perhaps they contained something Rome did not want to know about itself. Even the very word " Rome", "Ruma", may be Etruscan. It means "nipple" and refers to a hill rising from the plain. Hence the myth of the she-wolf who breastfed Romulus and Remus, the founders of the city,
who fed the beast. The famous bronze Capitoline She-wolf was also long thought to be an Etruscan work, although in 2012 it was proven to be medieval. But the image itself is Etruscan. And if Rome was named not after the mythical Romulus, but after an Etruscan word meaning "nipple," then the entire founding myth falls apart. And behind it is the question of who actually founded the city? If the Etruscans were known for something that shocked the entire ancient world, it was the status of their women. The Greek historian Theopompus in the 4th century BC describes Etruscan women with undisguised horror. They drink wine just as much as men. They play sports naked. At banquets, they sit next to other men, not with their husbands. For a Greek
or Roman, this was depravity beyond all bounds. For the Etruscans, this was normal. Diodorus Siculus described it as a terrible scandal that an Etruscan woman at a banquet could drink with a man as an equal. Coming from him, it sounded like evidence of utter barbarity. Etruscan women inherited property. They had their own personal names, not just surnames like Roman women, where every woman from the Julia family was simply Julia. On the sarcophagi, married couples are depicted embracing, husband and wife as equals side by side with the same smile. In tombs, women were given as much space, as much property, and as much honor as men. For archaeologists accustomed to the Greeks and Romans, this is always a shock. At sea, the Etruscans were masters and pirates. The Greeks
cried out about the bloody massacres caused by the Etruscan pirates who terrorized the entire Tyrrhenian Sea. Their military fleet consisted of fifty-oared ships that could both trade and raid. It was the Etruscans who invented the sea ram-a bronze projection mounted on the bow of a ship. The idea arose from practice. They captured so many enemy ships that they began sawing off the bows and nailing them to their own ships to increase their striking power. From this improvised trick grew a specially constructed bronze rostrum, which the Greeks immediately
copied. But the idea was Etruscan. In 480, allied with Carthage, the Etruscans drove the Greeks out of Corsica, one of the few victories in which the Etruscans and Phoenicians fought as allies. Their main export was grain. Southern Etruria produced so much of it that it fed Greek colonies along the entire coast. The second is metal. Tuscany was located on some of the richest deposits of copper, tin, zinc, lead, and iron in the region. The island of Elba, which belonged to the Etruscans, was so rich in iron ore that it was mined from the surface. Greek visitors described an impressive amount of metal.
Today, there is no iron left in Tuscany. Over the millennia, it has all been dug up. First by the Etruscans, then by the Romans. And Etruscan jewelry is still impressive. The technique of granulation and filigree processing - tiny gold beads, each smaller than a grain of sand, are deposited on the surface of a piece of jewelry, forming patterns of incredible finesse - was brought by the Etruscans to a level that modern jewelers cannot always reproduce. Their gold appears throughout the Mediterranean, and some of the finest examples can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum.
Their black polished pottery, bucchero, traveled from Sicily to the Baltic. The Greeks made painted amphorae, while the Etruscans found their own niche - solid colors, but with a shine that no one else could replicate. And there is another detail that sounds crazy, but is considered the leading theory. The Scandinavian runes, the Elder Futhark itself, may have originated from the Etruscan alphabet. Etruscan vessels and inscribed amulets spread throughout the Celtic world and further north to the Baltic. And local tribes, seeing strange signs on them, may have reinterpreted them as magical symbols, from trade labels on pottery to the sacred writing of the
Vikings. But the most amazing thing the Etruscans left behind were their tombs. And here we need to explain why we know the Etruscans mostly through their dead, and not through their living. The fact is that Etruscan cities stand exactly where Bologna is the Etruscan Felsina. Perugia is Etruscan. Orvieto is Etruscan. We can't ask the people of Bologna to pack their bags and move so we can dig up an Etruscan city under their homes. So we only have necropolises standing aside. And what kind of necropolis is this? The Etruscans built cities of the dead, which were more luxurious than the cities of the living. The Banditaccia Necropolis in Cerveteri is a whole city of mounds with streets and neighborhoods. And it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. These
mounds are not small piles of earth. These are huge stone mounds reaching dozens of feet underground, with rooms, corridors, and vaulted ceilings. Inside, everything is arranged like a real house. Beds, doors, windows, furniture-everything is carved from stone. The walls are covered with frescoes depicting dancing, feasting, music, dolphins, and erotic scenes. One of the early Etruscan customs was to bury ashes in urns made as exact replicas of the deceased's house. Later, when cremation gave way to burial, the tombs themselves became homes. Interesting detail. For centuries, Italian farmers noticed that
crops grew better in certain places than in neighboring fields. They called this soil terra grassa, fat earth. It turned out that these fields lay directly above ancient necropolises, and the richness of the soil was literally nutrients from millennia-old burials. The Etruscan afterlife was not a gloomy pit, but a continuation of a good life with wine, music, and the person you loved by your side. They imagined the transition into it as an immersion. You stand in our world, dive into the lake, and emerge on the other side. There the god Paha, the Etruscan Bacchus, awaits you with an eternal feast. You could travel to the afterlife on a giant seahorse, a
hippocampus, or on horseback. But by the 5th-4th centuries BC, when the Etruscan civilization began its decline, the tone of the paintings changed. Cheerful scenes gave way to blood, demons with hammers, crested snakes, creatures with the head of a jellyfish and dolphin tails instead of legs. The famous blue demon, a figure whose meaning has never been deciphered, stares from the walls of later tombs as a harbinger of the end.
Everywhere someone is being cut, disemboweled, blood is flowing. It's as if people who sense their end have begun to paint their fear on the walls of their last home. The Etruscans were destroyed not by one event, but by four consecutive blows. The first was the loss of the sea. In 480 BC, the Greeks, strengthened after the Persian Wars, defeated the Etruscan fleet off the coast of Sicily. In 474 they did it again at Cumae. Having lost control of the sea routes, the Etruscans lost their main source of wealth - transit trade. The second was the invasion of the Celts.
Around 400 BC, Celtic tribes crossed the Alps and swept away all of northern Etruria. The Po River valley, where the Etruscan colonies stood, was lost forever. The future Bologna, founded by the Etruscans, became Celtic. The third was Rome. The Romans dismantled the 12 cities of the Etruscan League one by one, methodically, over a century and a half. The Etruscans never managed to act together. Each city fought independently, and some, such as Cera, even helped Rome against their neighbors. When the Gauls besieged Rome in 390, the Roman aristocracy found refuge in Ceria, and the Etruscans gave them shelter. The first to fall was Veii, the same city that stood about 7 miles from Rome. The siege lasted, according to
legend, 10 years. The Roman historian Livy described this as a new siege of Troy. In reality, it was more of a protracted rural feud, but after the fall of Veii, the Roman Senate seriously debated whether to move to the conquered city. Veii was so much richer and more beautiful than Rome that the senators hesitated. In the end, they stayed, and that decision may have shaped the entire subsequent history. There would be no Roman Empire. It would be Byzantine. The fourth blow was the Etruscans themselves. They were not destroyed like Carthage. They broke up. Etruscan leaders moved to Rome, became Roman aristocrats, and received citizenship. Some Roman emperors came from old Etruscan families, and no
one considered them foreigners. The culture that gave Rome everything: gods, the alphabet, engineering, symbols of power, simply ceased to be separate. Etruscan became Roman, and then everyone forgot that it had once been Etruscan. A telling episode is when Hannibal crossed the Alps and passed through Etruria, counting on the recently conquered Etruscans to come over to his side. Most of them didn't The haruspices read the signs en masse and announced: " The liver says that the Romans are our brothers." Our time has passed, and we will survive by becoming part of Rome." An entire people chose assimilation, consciously, on the advice of their own priests. By the 1st century BC, the Etruscan language had died out. Its last bearers
were antiquarians rather than living Etruscans. In the 1st century AD, Emperor Claudius was still writing a great history of the Etruscans, and of course, not a single copy survives. This is a typical curse from Etruscan sources. Other ancient authors quote this work, as if to say: "Read Claudius, everything is there." And we can't, because the book is lost. The longest Etruscan text has come down to us miraculously and in the strangest way imaginable. An Etruscan priest, probably a haruspices, traveled to Egypt and died there. He had a sacred book written on linen. The Egyptians looked at the long linen rolls and decided: "Wonderful bandages for a mummy."
They cut the book into strips and wrapped the body in it. Thousands of years later, the mummy was found and unwrapped. And there were Etruscan inscriptions on the bandages. The so- called Zagreb Mummy contains the longest continuous Etruscan text we have, 1,350 words. For comparison, the Gettysburg Address contains 272 words. And this record-breaking text is nothing more than a calendar of religious holidays. So, this is where we end up. The Etruscans lost, but they did not disappear. They entered the body of the monster that swallowed them and continued to live inside it. No one dreams of eternal Etruria. Many people dream of an eternal Rome, and they don't realize that when they dream of Rome, they also dream of the Etruscans.
