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New work sheds light on the Etruscans, who may have founded Rome
- tomcam 5y agoDiscovered Etruscan art during a random walk that led past a small museum in Rome. It is elegant, unique, and weirdly anachronistic for its era; has a futuristic feel to me.
- koevet 5y agoThe National Etruscan Museum in Rome (https://www.museoetru.it/ https://www.museoetru.it/) holds one of the largest collections of Etruscan art. Do not miss if you happen to be in Rome.
- _1tan 5y agoSeconded - affordable and not crowded as well!
- notorandit 5y agoI think you would need a whole year of museum visiting just to have a glimpse of all pre-Roman civilizations in Italy. The Museo Sannitico in Campobasso (https://www.musei.molise.beniculturali.it/musei?mid=208&nome=museo-sannitico https://www.musei.molise.beniculturali.it/musei?mid=208&nome...) is one among them. Everyone forgets about the Samnites, who required Rome to fight 70 years before getting rid of them!
- spockz 5y agoIn high school we did a two week tour of Italy. I can really recommend it to everyone. My uncle has taken my nieces for holidays all over Italy for 16 years to show all the nice places and art.
- convFixb 5y agoThirded - Like many of the less-touristy museums in Rome, it's a museum for grown-ups. I think the average HN'er would appreciate it :)
- 0xbadcafebee 5y agoFourthed - it's also a gorgeous museum, in that it's covered with beautiful Etruscan frescoes, and the grounds feel more ancient and down to earth without pandering. And it's pretty hard to find Etruscan artifacts, so it's a one-stop-shop.
- mapster 5y agoSeems there are collections all thru Italy. I’ve been to two museums with impressive Etruscan collections just in Le Marche alone (Ancona, Sasso Feratto)
- jaclaz 5y agoYou mean, I believe, Sassoferrato (which was actually Sentinum in roman times). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sassoferrato https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sassoferrato I think that all was found there comes not from Etruscan settlements, but rather from the battlefield: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Sentinum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Sentinum or from the umbri and sanniti, or from the later romans, etruscans were reknown and appreciated for their art, particularly ceramics, even in those times. Etruscans cities were in central western Italy, mainly Tuscany, and Lazio with extensions to the north (Emilia Romagna and Veneto) and to the south (Campania): https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruschi#/media/File:Etruscan_civilization_italian_map.png https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruschi#/media/File:Etruscan_... Disclaimer: the founder of the museum of Sassoferrato: https://www.sassoferratoturismo.it/museo-civico-archeologico/ https://www.sassoferratoturismo.it/museo-civico-archeologico... was my grandfather, and all I know about the matter comes from family stories.
- mapster 5y agoYes, sorry, Sassoferrato. Thanks for the clarification. The museum and town are a great way to spend an afternoon. You must really have some good stories.
- jaclaz 5y agoYou are welcome of course, only FYI those museums you cite are only very small ones, compared with the "main" ones, if you happen to be back to Italy, and you like the Etruscan art, you should visit the Etru in Rome (I believe it is the largest one) and the Guarnacci in Volterra: https://www.museoetru.it/discover-the-museum https://www.museoetru.it/discover-the-museum https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museo_etrusco_Guarnacci https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museo_etrusco_Guarnacci
- notorandit 5y agoThat doesn't sound to me as any news. Etruscans settled a lot of colonies in the southern part of the peninsula, down to Pompeii (which was founded by Etruscans and taken over by Samnites) and Melfi. And they were ahead of all other local cultures by far, especially in the metallurgic technologies and writing. They were not a single kingdom but a group of city-kingdoms. So I can think of Rome more like a colony that took over the mother city-kingdom first, then the whole peninsula. Moreover, the names of the first traditional kings of Rome are Etruscans too.
- ramraj07 5y agoA lot of times what's kinda obvious to experts can take a while to be proven definitively. Like the presence of exo planets for example.
- Eric_WVGG 5y agoWhen I was a kid, there was a traveling museum thing about the Etruscans. I will never forget the slogan: “Rome wasn’t built in a day. And it wasn’t built by the Romans.” Genius.
- fsckboy 5y agoIsn't it a bigger/more important mystery why proto-indo european language was so successful at supplanting the local languages it intermixed with? Rather than why the Etruscans kept speaking their own language. I'm really curious if there were positive "network effects" of increasingly large populations of neighbors speaking compatible languages (even if they formed a gradient as the Romance languages did from Rome to Portugal and northern France) Otherwise, it would make more sense for a successful prosperous culture to keep their own language and it would not be surprising at all.
- est31 5y agoThe romance languages formed due to the legacy of the Roman empire, so their success is largely due to the Roman success. People say that the roman empire ended, and while indeed Rome lost its central role in many ways, the roman empire's legacy is still felt. Before the Romans though, there have been the greeks as well as the hittites, both speaking indo european languages. Romans pretty much copied a lot of greek culture as well as their strategy of building trading outposts everywhere.
- ithkuil 5y agoI think a similar argument can be made for the legacy of the indo europeans. You just have to go a bit further back, before greek and hittite and celt and iranian/aryan and vedic cultures where a distinct thing, there was one single culture speaking a single language: the proto indo european people and culture. They had a lot of success (horse drawn carts with wheels, bronze working). They slowly spread east and west and slowly diverged for several millenia until we reach the time frame you were talking about. Those descendent cultures didn't branch and stay isolated forever after; as you correctly point out, they did influence one another again and again in successive waves. The original question in this thread was: why was PIE culture so successful that it supplanted almost all existing PRE-indo-eurpean languages. Vascon and Etruscan survived (and possibly others), the former evolving into modern Basque, and Etruscan slowly dying out (very likely by the end of first century AD there were no more etruscan speakers)
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- Lucasoato 5y agoHistory is written by the victor; it's definitely curious that among the famous seven kings of Rome the last three have Etruscan origin.
- OneTimePetes 5y agoIts better to be a mad emperor, then to be a unknown emperor.. ;)
- kragen 5y agoNot the emperors, the kings. Before the Republic, not after it.
- 8bitsrule 5y agoTalk about important work in 'founding': The Etruscans laid the first underground sewers in the city of Rome around 500 BC. These cavernous tunnels below the city's streets were built of finely carved stones, and the Romans were happy to utilize them when they took over the city. [https://phys.org/news/2015-11-toilets-sewers-ancient-roman-sanitation.html https://phys.org/news/2015-11-toilets-sewers-ancient-roman-s...]
- riffraff 5y agoMy favourite part of the Etruscan language legacy is the letter "C" ("K" sound). It was originally a gamma ("G" sound), but the Etruscan language did not need it and they just used it as K. Then the Romans adopted the Etruscan alphabet, but they _did_ have both K and G sounds and so had to invent a new letter, even tho the original greek alphabet (and all its predecessors) already had it to begin with :)
- folli 5y agoOne, quite famous, Roman surname is Caesar. Unlike the modern english pronunciation of his name, the pronunciation follows what you have written: Kaesar. In Germanic this morphed into "Kaiser", which is the german word for "Emperor". I find it quite interesting how the status and power of this one man was so widely recognized, that his surname was already used during Roman times (and still is in the German language) as a title for someone holding utmost power. Originally, the name Caesar likely just meant "a hairy person".
- mason55 5y agoAlso the source of czar and tsar!
- roywiggins 5y agoI think it might derive more from Augustus' use of the name- he was the first Roman emperor, though Caesar did rule as dictator for a little while.
- quickthrowman 5y agoAugustus was Caesar’s heir, and the name was part of his inheritance.
- kaesar14 5y agoThe same way Gaius Julius received it as an inheritance from his forebears. OP is totally right that the name and its power emanates from Octavian’s prestige and domination of the Roman world for near half a century.
- disillusioned 5y agoThose darn Etruscans.
- avereveard 5y agoThey likely dominated Rome at some point, but founded is quite a strong claim given the marked cultural, linguistical and artistical differences. There's no continuity at all to justify a colony outgrow.
- 0xbadcafebee 5y agoWhat I had heard was that the people of Rome lived around the hills, and the Etruscans sort of did the work of building a city and government, and the native Romans adopted their culture, grew through conquest of neighboring native tribes, and ultimately overthrew the Etruscans - but not before eliminating the legacy of their former masters.
- tomcooks 5y agoI was lucky enough to stealth camp near one of their necropolis, a proper eerie experience
- silvanocerza 5y agoAm curious, where? There are tons of them in the centre of Italy.
- danjac 5y agoSome Etruscan words may have found their way into very modern English: - antenna - satellite - people/person - ceremony - serve
- orangepanda 5y agoAlso: mantissa Can blame the Etruscans for IEEE 754
- kragen 5y agoAn interesting thing the article somehow doesn't mention is that the Roman alphabet in which I'm more or less typing this (IN VVHICH I'M MORE OR LESS TYPING THIS) descends from the very scarce Etruscan letters, which descend from Greek. This is why the Roman alphabet revives letters like digamma and qoppa that had been obsolete in Greek for centuries.
- 1cvmask 5y ago“The Latin alphabet evolved from the visually similar Etruscan alphabet, which evolved from the Cumaean Greek version of the Greek alphabet, which was itself descended from the Phoenician alphabet, which in turn derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet
- seanw444 5y agoI'm disappointed the list ends there.
- kragen 5y agoThe Egyptian hieroglyphics might be derived from cuneiform, but the more popular hypothesis is that they were invented by someone who didn't know how to read or write.
- ChainOfFools 5y agoone amateur scribe was responsible for such an enormously consequential bottleneck event?
- kragen 5y agothe word we usually use around here is not "amateur" but "hacker"
- hasmanean 5y ago
- gumby 5y agoI is funny how few words (more proper nouns though) survived into (or were absorbed into) Latin. One of my favorite Latin words, Uxor, is an Etruscan loan word. I have always loved it for its alien sound, and then later for its meaning.