The ultimate question, though, toward which all inquiries bend, and which carries a hint of menace, is not where or when or why we came to be as we are, but how the future will unfold.
2
Eca Suthi . . .
I N 1828 A PEASANT WHO WAS plowing on the Italian estate of Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, crashed through the roof of an Etruscan burial vault.A bailiff was ordered to investigate, and what he saw underground promptly caused Lucien to start raking the countryside for more tombs. Hundreds were found and looted, yielding thousands of painted dishes, statuettes, jewels, rings, bracelets, and so on. The Vulci necropolis, from which Bonaparte recovered most of this treasure, is thought to have given up more valuables than any other ancient site with the exception of Pompeii.
News of the Vulci bonanza whistled through Italy and across Europe while Lucien Bonaparte’s neighbors began to contemplate their own fields with deep interest. As a result, more tombs were ripped open and stripped of marketable merchandise, and Prosper Mérimée felt inspired to writeThe Etruscan Vase. The vase that excited him was not Etruscan, it happened to be Greek, either imported or manufactured in a south Italian Greek pottery shop; but Mérimée did not know this, for which we may be mildly grateful. Le Vase Étrusque is not classified as a masterpiece but we need all the literature we can get, even if it’s written under a misapprehension.
One by one the sites and the important relics were catalogued, scholarly papers rustled, and archaeologists took to quarreling over the debris. They still quarrel, mostly because the language cannot quite be understood and because nobody has proved beyond doubt where the Etruscans came from.
At present we have two legitimate theories concerning their homeland, and a third theory which once was greeted with respect but now is not. Wherever they originated, these people dominated the central Mediterranean for several centuries. We are told by Livy that Etruria’s renown “filled the lands and the waters from one end of Italy to the other, from the Alps to the Straits of Messina.”
Herodotus thought they emigrated from Asia Minor:
“During the reign of Atys, son of Manes, there was famine throughout Lydia. For a while the Lydians persisted in living as they always had, but when the famine lengthened they looked for a way to alleviate their misery—some suggesting one thing, some another. At this time they invented dice games, knucklebone games, handball games, and other games—except draughts, which they did not invent. They would play all day for two days in order to distract themselves and on the third day they would eat. For eighteen years they lived like this. . . .”
At last, continues Herodotus, the king divided his subjects into two groups and chose by lot which would remain in Lydia and which must go in search of a new home. The king himself remained, while those who were to leave he put in charge of his son Tyrsenos. Then all those who were departing went down to Smyrna where they built ships, and after loading the ships with their possessions they sailed away and “passed by many nations in turn” until they reached the land of the Umbrians.
Summarizing the exodus in this manner makes it sound like a ten-day cruise. The reality—if we are discussing reality—must have been quite different. Assuming a degree of truth in the legend, it seems unlikely that there could have been one vast embarkation; more probably there would be numerous small embarkations over a period of years, just as bands of Crusaders straggled toward the Holy Land for 200 years, in contrast to the popular view of seven Christian armies one after another clanking through Syria. And Herodotus’ remark about passing many nations in turn could mean that the emigrants settled here andthere, then some of their descendants drifted along, and theirs wandered farther, until at last—centuries after Tyrsenos left home—people with Lydian blood and Lydian traditions reached Italy.
That there was famine in Asia Minor during the thirteenth century B.C. cannot be doubted. Pharaoh Merneptah shipped grain to “Kheta,” land of the Hittites, and a communiqué from one Hittite ruler alludes to starvation. There is also the account of a provincial king with an unpronounceable name who led his famished subjects to the court of the Hittite emperor.
Egyptian hieroglyphs speak of an attempted invasion by “Peoples of the Sea” during the reign of Pharaohs Merneptah and Ramses III, between 1230 and 1170 B.C., and it’s possible that among these half-identified sea people were some Lydians. Whether or not this is so, the course of the emigrants is reasonably clear: they sailed past Malta and Sicily, at which point a few might have continued west to the famous city of Tartessus in Spain. A majority, however, must have turned north to the Italian mainland where they settled along the coast between the Tiber and the Arno, north of the marsh that eventually would become Rome. Here, in Tuscany, among a Bronze Age people called Villanovans, they built those cities we dimly remember from school—Cerveteri, Tarquinia, Populonium, and the others—and here they became known to the Greeks as Tyrsenoi, to the Latins as Etrusci.
The evidence for such a theory is persuasive. In the first place, Herodotus was not the only historian to describe an ancient Lydian migration. Secondly, it is a fact, with little disagreement among archaeologists, that during the eighth and ninth centuries B.C. a noticeable change occurred in the Tuscan way of life. This commonly is called the “Orientalizing” period. It included
