New Discoveries Helping to Lift the Veil of Mystery Surrounding Ancient Etruscans

Fresh discoveries near this hilltop town and elsewhere in western Italy are helping to lift a veil of mystery from the ancient Etruscans, the enigmatic people who taught the French how to make wine, the Romans how to build roads and bridges and the rest of Europe how to write and thereby become civilized.

For more than 2,000 years, so little was known about the elusive people who made a rich civilization in Italy from about 1000 B.C. to the 1st Century B.C.--for much of that time, the earliest Romans were still tending sheep--that they were treated by many scholars as a historic aberration.

Their language was considered an impenetrable mystery, their daily lives a historical blank. Because the remains of their obviously opulent civilization consisted almost solely of tombs and funerary artifacts, they were thought to have been more absorbed by death than by life.

Pictures in their tombs and on their pottery depicted happy-go-lucky games and feasts along with some of the most gruesome scenes of death and torture in ancient history, leading some scholars to dismiss them as frivolous but bloodthirsty numbskulls. Until a flood of new finds and new information began in the 1960s, that view was shared by many.

But during the last two decades, the rapid pace of new archeological and linguistic finds that one specialist says are coming “almost weekly” has vastly expanded the experts’ understanding of a people who were refined and sophisticated and who, under Phoenician and Greek tutelage, sowed the seeds of European civilization--and apparently had a lot of fun doing it.

In the first six months of this year alone, archeologists have found the remains of two Etruscan cities, one of them only a stone’s throw from the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the other near Bolsena, north of Rome.

Neither has been excavated yet, but each is expected to yield major insights into the daily lives of a people who archeologists now see as among the ancient world’s greatest engineers and city planners, according to Ludovico Magrini, editor of the Rome-based journal Archeologia, which focuses on Etruscan discoveries.

Another fresh find, in May, was a tomb carved into the rock beneath a modern highway in Tarquinia, one of the great cities of antiquity, overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. Prof. Paola Pelagatti, director of Rome’s treasured Etruscan museum, the Villa Giulia, says the find, already known as the Blue Demon tomb because of its wall decorations, may be the most important painted tomb discovered in the last two decades. The demons appear in a wall painting of the netherworld opposite another wall painting that depicts a triumphal parade and adjoining a third that shows a traditional Etruscan banquet, with men and women happily wining and dining together while reclining on couches.

Dating from the 5th Century B.C., it is the oldest of thousands of Etruscan tombs to show underworld demons and the only one to depict Charon, the mythological Greek spirit, ferrying souls across the river Styx in his canoe-like boat. The tomb thereby underscores the importance of Greek mythology to Etruscan religious practices.

Like most other Etruscan discoveries, one made a few months ago at the ancient town of Ceri, north of Rome near Cerveteri, was almost accidental. Volunteer diggers from the mostly amateur Gruppo Archeologico Romano, a club of ancient history buffs, were excavating a long-known Etruscan highway that was constructed centuries before any roads led to Rome. In the course of their labors, they found 30 previously untouched tombs. None was richly painted or treasure laden, but together they did yield almost 300 vases and pieces of bronze that will add to the knowledge of the people who made them, Magrini said.

Discoveries are coming at such a fast pace that specialists “stand more of a chance of learning of a new find from the newspaper than from a book,” marveled Larissa Bonfante, professor of classics at New York University and an internationally known expert on the Etruscan language.

Although the growing number of archeological finds has been vital in lifting the veil from the once dimly seen Etruscans, the experts say that patient scholarship, including painstaking re-examination of ancient Greek and Roman texts as well as of the long-dead civilization’s own skimpy writings, has been just as important.

The result has been an increasingly well-rounded knowledge of 900 years of Etruscan history, according to Bonfante.

“The problem with studying them is that there is no Etruscan literature,” she said in a recent interview in Rome. “What we know has had to be ‘read’ from their remains--tombs, monuments, artworks and mostly epigraphic inscriptions. Greek and Roman historians like Livy and Dionysius wrote about them, but by then Etruscan civilization was fading into history, and a lot of what they wrote was misleading or inaccurate.”

The sex life of the Etruscans, for example, was considered scandalous by the Greeks, Bonfante said, at least in part because it was misreported by a writer named Atheneus in A.D. 200, long after the last visible trace of Etruscan civilization had been absorbed by Rome.

Atheneus said the women were promiscuous and “dine not with their husbands but with any man who happens to be present; they toast anyone they want to”--a boldness apparently unheard of at the time. They “expose their bodies even before men . . . (and) raise all the children that are born, not knowing who the father is of each one.”

To clinch the case for Etruscan depravity, he wrote that after a drinking party among Etruscan men, “the servants bring in to them--with the lights on--either concubines, party girls or very beautiful boys, or even their wives.”

Bonfante and other experts believe that Atheneus was being fanciful, possibly because he wrote at a time of puritanism in Greece and possibly because Greeks of his time thought it scandalous that men and women dined together. But there is evidence that the ancient people were unabashed and uninhibited in relations between and among the sexes. Erotic tomb paintings at Tarquinia explicitly depict both heterosexual and homosexual acts.

On a more serious plane, the international life of the Etruscans is now well documented, with proven trade and cultural contacts not only with the Greeks, who came upon them as an illiterate but advanced civilization in about 775 B.C., but also with the Phoenicians and their colonial offshoots, the Carthaginians of North Africa.

The people of Etruria, as the Romans called the region between the Tiber and the Arno rivers where they lived, adopted a modified Greek alphabet and learned to write soon after their first contact with the Greeks, according to Bonfante and other experts.

As evidence of their capricious nature, the first-ever example of Etruscan writing was found on what is now called Nestor’s Cup, which dates from 725 B.C. to 700 B.C. “Nestor’s cup was sweet to drink,” the inscription states, “but whoever drinks from this cup, immediately the desire for Aphrodite . . . will seize him.” (Aphrodite was the Greek goddess of erotic love.)

There also is ample evidence that the Etruscans reached far north of the Mediterranean in their foreign trading and piracy, a seagoing skill at which ancient historians said they excelled.

Bonfante and her father, the noted linguistic specialist Giuliano Bonfante, have examined German, English, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish runes inscribed in the Etruscan alphabet.

“They introduced into Europe the art of writing, and thereby the beginning of the civilization we know,” the Bonfantes wrote in their 1983 book, “The Etruscan Language.”

Both scoff good-naturedly at the longstanding public perception of the Etruscan language as a “mystery” tongue that remains “undeciphered.”

“The ‘mystery’ of Etruscan, like that of the Great Pyramids, holds a fatal fascination for crackpots convinced that they can decipher the language, crack the code and find the key,” wrote the elder Bonfante. But there is no mystery; the alphabet has been clear and readable for almost 2,700 years. The problem is that there isn’t much Etruscan still around to read, and so knowledge of the Etruscan vocabulary is very limited.

Although pagan priests in early Christian Rome preserved the language for ritual use until at least A.D. 408--its last recorded use--there are virtually no traces of the linen books for which the Etruscans were famous, nor of any lengthy texts. Time has obliterated them, and the Greeks and Romans made no copies for today’s scholars to study.

That last recorded use of Etruscan was when Pope Innocent I called upon the still-active pagan soothsayers of Rome to stir up some lightning that would scare off Alaric, the barbaric king of the Visigoths. Alaric sacked the city anyway.

Etruscan priests were believed to have magic powers over lightning, a fact that has led Magrini to speculate that they may have had some form of gunpowder for use in pyrotechnic religious ceremonies. Other Etruscanologists such as Pelagatti and Bonfante doubt Magrini’s theory, but the business about a concern for lightning is a matter of record. The Emperor Nero’s tutor, Seneca, wrote in the 1st Century A.D. that “the difference between us and the Etruscans is the following: While we believe that lightning is released as a result of the collision of clouds, they believe that clouds collide so as to cause lightning.”

The lengthiest single example of Etruscan writing, 1,200 readable words, came through the ages like most other relics of the ancient people--by accident. The mummy of a young Egyptian or Greek woman, taken from Alexandria, Egypt, to Zagreb by a Croatian traveler in the 19th Century, was found to have been wrapped in linen that proved to be strips from an Etruscan religious scroll. Experts think that an Etruscan, perhaps a priest, died in Egypt, or discarded one of his books there, and the cloth was subsequently used to wrap an Egyptian corpse.

But the text is entirely taken up with repetitious religious ritual, so it is not very revealing and provides little to expand the experts’ sparse Etruscan vocabulary. Despite years of study, only about 250 everyday words of the language are known.

But if more texts were found, Bonfante said, there would be no trouble interpreting them, because there are plenty of clues concerning context in the 13,000 Etruscan inscriptions that have been discovered, and the rules of grammar and pronunciation in the language are known.

Even on the basis of fragmentary writings, speakers of modern English and all other languages that are descended from Latin must be indebted to the Etruscans for at least a few words, she said. The words tavern , triumph , histrionics , letter and tunic are among those absorbed by the Romans and passed along to us, she said.

The Romans also adopted Etruscan styles of clothing, she said, and one of them, the alb, is still worn by Roman Catholic and Episcopalian priests in religious ceremonies.

Bonfante said Etruscans also taught wine making to the French--or the Gauls, as they then were known. Some Gauls hired on as mercenaries to a northwest Etrurian city-state and liked it so much that they stayed to learn about grapes. The Etruscans had learned wine making from the Greeks, who also taught them how to raise olives and press olive oil, an invaluable legacy for today’s Italians.

No one knows where they learned dentistry, but remains found in tombs have yielded fancy gold-wire bridgework that has been praised by modern dentists.

Ancient historians believed that Italy was inhabited by barbarians at the time the Etruscan civilization sprang up and, because the Etruscans knew so much and had such a wealthy and sophisticated culture, argued that they must have come from someplace other than Italy. The Aegean islands, Persia, Turkey and the Caucuses were cited as possible places of origin.

Some more modern historians supported this theory, taking their clues from ancient texts. But Etruscanologists today are almost united in the view that the people were native to the Italian peninsula and that their culture slowly developed until, by the year 1000 B.C., they had a civilization.

“There was a tendency to think that they came into being and began to speak Etruscan in the 7th Century B.C.,” said Bonfante. “That’s merely when they learned how to write from their Greek neighbors.”

Whatever the dates, evidence of their engineering skills and, to a degree, their art leaves no doubt that they formed a great civilization in their day and had a powerful influence on the Romans, who later conquered and absorbed their civilization.

Some of the engineering still exists. Rome’s Cloaca Maxima, which still carries sewage to the Tiber River, was built by an Etruscan king in about 400 B.C., and the ruins of the Circus Maximus, memorably portrayed as the site of the great chariot race in the film “Ben Hur,” still draws crowds of tourists, and occasional joggers. Etruscans and Romans raced horses there.

The artworks, strongly influenced by the Greeks, are visible in most of the world’s major museums in the form of bronze statues, statuettes and artifacts, and exquisitely decorated pottery.

Some experts even lament the fact that there is so much art and so few words in Etruscan to explain it.

“Etruscan art is full of vigor, motion, color, emotion--sometimes jocular, often gloomy,” writes Emeline Richardson, professor emeritus of classical archeology at the University of North Carolina in a book to be published this month.

“Unfortunately, the words expressing those feelings have not come down to us.”