Furthermore, the social organization began to display Eastern characteristics, particularly the attitude toward women. The Greeks, in fact,were shocked to learn that Etruscan men treated women as equals. To the Greeks, and later to the Romans, this seemed degenerate.
The style of dress became Eastern. Fashionable ladies wore the round or pointed cap that had been popular with Hittite women. Men wore a belted jerkin with a cloak thrown across one shoulder—which developed into the Roman toga. Men and women both wore pointed shoes with turned-up toes, very much like Hittite shoes.
Then there are linguistic arguments for supposing that these people came from Asia Minor, because Etruscan is not one of the Indo-European languages. Its alphabet is Greek, but the words and sentence construction are not. Nobody has been able to relate Etruscan to any other language, though just about everything has been tried: Sanskrit, Albanian, Hebrew, Basque, Hungarian, and various Anatolian languages. That it should still be indecipherable is not just curious but rather outrageous, because Etruscan was spoken in Tuscany right up to the opening of the Christian era and was used by Etruscan priests as late as the fifth century A.D. This being so, how could it absolutely disappear? We have no explanation, although there are reasons for thinking that the Christian Church obliterated it, just as the Church attempted to silence Aztec, Mayan, and other such ungodly tongues.
However, remnants of a lost civilization tend to be as durable as pottery shards. The archbishop’s staff, for instance, developed from the coiled wand of an Etruscan soothsayer. And the mallet used by Charun to smash the skulls of Etruscan dead is employed whenever a pope dies. Not long ago, you may remember, the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Villot, tapped John Paul’s forehead three times with a silver hammer, calling him by his given name: “Albino, Albino, Albino. Are you dead?” People everywhere, including many who are not Catholic, must have prayed that the elfish little pontiff would smile and sit up. Alas, there was no response; the September pope was gone. Cardinal Villot grasped John Paul’s hand, withdrew the gold ring of the fisherman, and smashed it.
And occasionally we speak or write an Etruscan word:tavern, cistern, letter, person, ceremony, lantern. But except for these, only about 100 Etruscan words have been deciphered, mostly funeral announcements which occur again and again so that their meaning is not much in doubt. Eca suthi , let us say, followed by a name.
One of the strongest linguistic pillars supporting the Eastern theory is a stela from the seventh century B.C. which was uncovered in 1885 on the island of Lemnos in the Aegean. It depicts a warrior holding a lance and it bears two inscriptions using the Greek alphabet. The language, though, is not Greek; it is Etruscoid. Other fragments of this language have since been found on Lemnos, which does away with the idea that the stela might have been imported. What all of this suggests is that Etruscan-speaking Lydians might have settled there.
Take a narrow look at the statues, pots, tripods, jewelry, sword hilts, murals. So much hints at Oriental ancestry.
If you study the Cerveteri sarcophagus which is now in Rome’s Villa Giulia it becomes very difficult to think of these people as primitive Italians: the husband’s tilted eyes and stiff Turkish beard, the wife’s little cap and pointed slippers, the languorous sensuality surging like a wave between them.
And in the Louvre, not fifty yards from the Winged Victory in her stone nightgown, rests another Etruscan sarcophagus—less erotic than the Italian, a bit more crisp, more architectonic, although they were produced at about the same time in the same city, perhaps in the same workshop. Once again you meet those tilted eyes, the complacent wife’s up-curled slippers, the mild husband’s carefully shaped beard. And, if you walk around behind the sarcophagus, you see how the hair has been styled in tight Babylonian ringlets.
New York’s Metropolitan used to display three impressively sculpted Etruscans with somewhat Asiatic features: a gigantic helmeted head; a six-foot, eight-inch warrior; and the “Big Warrior” who stood eight feet tall. They turned out to be fakes, manufactured sixty years ago by a quartet of young entrepreneurs in Orvieto, but that’s not the point; the point is that even a fraudulent Etruscan seems less Italian than Eastern.
I remember the big warrior. I looked at him a number of times when he was considered authentic, and I always felt surprised that such an enormous antique could be in such good condition. When I heard he was a fake I felt incredulous, but only for an instant. Almost at once I heard myself muttering “Of course! Yes, of course! Anybody could see that!”
And what puzzled me then, as it does today, is why the experts were deceived. Because if somebody with no particular knowledge ofEtruscan art could half suspect the truth, as I did—well then, how could professionals be so blind? But for twenty-eight years most of them saw nothing wrong. One or two had doubts. One or two called these giants bogus. As for the rest: they came to marvel, to offer learned praise.
Now in Copenhagen, in the
