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Somewhere between 900 and 800 BC, the Italian peninsula was settled by a mysterious peoples called the Etruscans. We don't know where the Etruscans came from, but archaeologists suspect that they came from the eastern Mediterranean, possibly Asia Minor. We will, however, never really know where they came from or why they colonized Italy. We do know that when they came to Italy, they brought civilization and urbanization with them. They founded their civilizations in north-eastern Italy between the Apennines mountain range and the Tyrrhenian Sea. Their civilization stretched from the Arnos river in the north to the Tiber river towards the center of the Italian peninsula; it was on the Tiber river that a small village of Latins, the village that would become Rome, sat. So the Romans, who were only villagers during the rise of the Etruscan civilization, were in close contact with the Etruscans, their language, their ideas, their religion, and their civilization; the Etruscans were the single most important influence on Roman culture in its transition to civilization. |
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The Etruscans lived in independent, fortified city-states; these city-states would form small confederacies. In the earliest times, these city-states were ruled by a monarch, but were later ruled by oligarchies that governed through a council and through elected officials. Like the surrounding peoples, the Etruscans were largely an agrarian people, but they also had a strong military, and used that military to dominate all the surrounding peoples. These dominated populations were forced to do the agricultural labor on the Etruscan farms, so the Etruscans had time to devote to commerce and industry. In the seventh and sixth centuries, the Etruscan military had subjugated much of Italy, including Rome, and regions outside of Italy, such as the island of Corsica.
They were a sophisticated people, with an alphabet based on the Greek alphabet, a powerfully original sculptural and painting tradition, a religion based on human-type gods which they had learned from the Greeks, and a complicated set of rituals for divining the future, which they handed down to the Romans. Unlike most civilizations of the time, gender inequality seems not to have been very pronounced. While the Etruscans were busy building their power over Italy and engaging in active commerce with the east and with Africa, a city to their south began to grow precipitously, a city imitating Etruscans in many ways: the Roman kingdom. Richard Hooker |
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Ancient Etruscans Were Immigrants From Anatolia, Or What Is Now Turkey
ScienceDaily (June 18, 2007) — The long-running controversy about the origins of the Etruscan people appears to be very close to being settled once and for all, a geneticist will tell the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics today. Professor Alberto Piazza, from the University of Turin, Italy, will say that there is overwhelming evidence that the Etruscans, whose brilliant civilization flourished 3000 years ago in what is now Tuscany, were settlers from old Anatolia (now in southern Turkey).
Etruscan culture was very advanced and quite different from other known Italian cultures that flourished at the same time, and highly influential in the development of Roman civilization. Its origins have been debated by archaeologists, historians and linguists since time immemorial. Three main theories have emerged: that the Etruscans came from Anatolia, Southern Turkey, as propounded by the Greek historian Herotodus; that they were indigenous to the region and developed from the Iron Age Villanovan society, as suggested by another Greek historian, Dionysius of Halicarnassus; or that they originated from Northern Europe.
Now modern genetic techniques have given scientists the tools to answer this puzzle. Professor Piazza and his colleagues set out to study genetic samples from three present-day Italian populations living in Murlo, Volterra, and Casentino in Tuscany, central Italy. "We already knew that people living in this area were genetically different from those in the surrounding regions", he says. "Murlo and Volterra are among the most archaeologically important Etruscan sites in a region of Tuscany also known for having Etruscan-derived place names and local dialects. The Casentino valley sample was taken from an area bordering the area where Etruscan influence has been preserved."
The scientists compared DNA samples taken from healthy males living in Tuscany, Northern Italy, the Southern Balkans, the island of Lemnos in Greece, and the Italian islands of Sicily and Sardinia. The Tuscan samples were taken from individuals who had lived in the area for at least three generations, and were selected on the basis of their surnames, which were required to have a geographical distribution not extending beyond the linguistic area of sampling. The samples were compared with data from modern Turkish, South Italian, European and Middle-Eastern populations.
"We found that the DNA samples from individuals from Murlo and Volterra were more closely related those from near Eastern people than those of the other Italian samples", says Professor Piazza. "In Murlo particularly, one genetic variant is shared only by people from Turkey, and, of the samples we obtained, the Tuscan ones also show the closest affinity with those from Lemnos."
Scientists had previously shown this same relationship for mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in order to analyse female lineages. And in a further study, analysis of mtDNA of ancient breeds of cattle still living in the former Etruria found that they too were related to breeds currently living in the near East.
The history of the Etruscans extends before the Iron Age to the end of the Roman Republic or from c. 1200 BC to c. 100BC Many archaeological sites of the major Etruscan cities were continuously occupied since the Iron Age, and the people who lived in the Etruria region did not appear suddenly, nor did they suddenly start to speak Etruscan. Rather they learned to write from their Greek neighbours and thus revealed their language. Archaeologists and linguists are in agreement that the Etruscans had been developing their culture and language in situ before the first historical record of their existence.
"But the question that remained to be answered was -- how long was this process between pre-history and history"" says Professor Piazza. In 1885 a stele carrying an inscription in a pre-Greek language was found on the island of Lemnos, and dated to about the 6th century BC. Philologists agree that this has many similarities with the Etruscan language both in its form and structure and its vocabulary. But genetic links between the two regions have been difficult to find until now.
Herodotus' theory, much criticised by subsequent historians, states that the Etruscans emigrated from the ancient region of Lydia, on what is now the southern coast of Turkey, because of a long-running famine. Half the population was sent by the king to look for a better life elsewhere, says his account, and sailed from Smyrna (now Izmir) until they reached Umbria in Italy.
"We think that our research provides convincing proof that Herodotus was right", says Professor Piazza, "and that the Etruscans did indeed arrive from ancient Lydia. However, to be 100% certain we intend to sample other villages in Tuscany, and also to test whether there is a genetic continuity between the ancient Etruscans and modern-day Tuscans. This will have to be done by extracting DNA from fossils; this has been tried before but the technique for doing so has proved to be very difficult."
"Interestingly, this study of historical origins will give us some pointers for carrying out case-control studies of disease today," says Professor Piazza. "In order to obtain a reliable result, we had to select the control population much more carefully that would normally be done, and we believe that this kind of careful selection would also help in studies of complex genetic diseases."
Adapted from materials provided by European Society of Human Genetics, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
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Ancient Etruscans Unlikely Ancestors Of Modern Tuscans, Statistical Testing Reveals
ScienceDaily (May 26, 2006) — For the first time, Stanford researchers have used novel statistical computer modeling to simulate demographic processes affecting the population of Tuscany over a 2,500-year time span. Rigorous tests used by the researchers have ruled out a genetic link between ancient Etruscans, the early inhabitants of central Italy, and the region's modern day residents.
The findings suggest that something either suddenly wiped out the Etruscans or the group represented a social elite that had little in common with the people who became the true ancestors of Tuscans, said Joanna Mountain, assistant professor of anthropological sciences.
''Very often, we assume the most simple explanation for something,'' said Mountain, an expert in anthropological genetics. ''So when you find in a particular location the archeological remains of people, the simplest explanation is that those people are ancestral to whoever is living there now. How often do you get a chance to check that? Very rarely.''
The research advances the field of anthropological genetics by moving beyond simple storytelling about an ancient people to rigorous testing, using genetic data analysis, of a set of anthropological hypotheses, Mountain said.
The findings are documented in ''Serial Coalescent Simulations Suggest a Weak Genealogical Relationship Between Etruscans and Modern Tuscans,'' published May 15 in the online version of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Uma Ramakrishnan, a former Stanford postdoctoral fellow, and Elise M. S. Belle and Guido Barbujani of the University of Ferrara in Italy co-authored the paper with Mountain.
As the paper details, previous extensive archeological excavations have established that Etruscan culture existed in central Italy between the eighth and second centuries B.C. Its origins are still controversial: Some ancient historians, including Herodotus (circa 430 B.C.), suggested that the Etruscans came to Italy from Asia Minor. But most modern archaeologists, along with Dionysius of Halicarnassos (circa 100 B.C.), believe that the Etruscan civilization developed locally from the 10th century B.C. Iron Age Villanovan culture. In the second century B.C., the Etruscans were given Roman citizenship, and soon afterward their language disappeared from records, the paper explains.
''The Etruscans seem to be quite different in many ways from other ancient Italians, and archaeological evidence indicates that they spoke a non-Indo-European language,'' Mountain said. ''Because of the cultural and linguistic shifts, scholars see the Etruscans as an enigma.''
The Etruscans are the only preclassical European population to date that has been genetically analyzed, Mountain said. Two years ago, Italian geneticists extracted maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA from the bones of 27 people called Etruscans found in six different necropolises (burial sites) in Tuscany. The female lineage was investigated because, unlike the male Y chromosome, many copies of mitochondrial DNA are found in each cell and thus are easier to extract, Mountain explained. The data represent one of the best collections of ancient human DNA in existence. ''If you get DNA out of one bone, you can try to say something about the past,'' Mountain said. ''But they managed to get DNA out of quite a few bones.'' The DNA of 49 people living in the region today was also sampled. Although data from the two groups revealed several differences, Mountain said, the researchers could not interpret if these were meaningful or significant. ''What we did was address the question: Do the present-day people look like they could be descendents of the Etruscan population?''
The answer surprised Mountain. ''We did the simulation study and there was nothing we could do-we couldn't tweak it enough to get the modern people to look like they descended from the people in the Etruscan burial [sites],'' she said. ''We couldn't make it fit with the simple inheritance direct lineage model.''
The Stanford researchers used recently developed software called ''Serial SimCoal'' to simulate genetic data based on different population scenarios, such as small (25,000 females) or large (300,000 females) populations of constant size, an expanding population, and scenarios involving migration and selection. Despite the range of scenarios created, the scientists could not find a match between the observed archaeological data and the simulations.
Christian Anderson, a former Stanford undergraduate, developed the software while working with Elizabeth Hadly, associate professor of biological sciences. She has used the approach to analyze the ancient DNA of small mammals. ''I believe it's the first time it has been used to analyze ancient human DNA,'' Mountain said. ''It's computationally intensive and requires DNA data from many individuals.''
The finding is important because it questions the common assumption that residents of a particular place are descendants of its earlier inhabitants, Mountain said. ''Also, it raises a number of other questions-what happened to the Etruscans?'' she said. ''It's stimulating for archaeologists and other social scientists to look into what might have been the causes of this decline in the population. It may have been quite abrupt. Mostly, it's a matter of guessing.''
According to Mountain, the field of anthropological genetics is replete with such educated guesses. ''There's so much storytelling that goes on in our field where people will see a particular genetic sequence and go, 'Aha! That means these people moved here and there,''' she said. ''I tend to be fairly skeptical and say, 'That's a nice story.' Before [this study] you could tell a number of stories consistent with the data. What we've done is narrowed down these stories, which for me is a really great leap forward.''
Adapted from materials provided by Stanford University.