ETRUSCAN CULTURE
It is only since the eighth century BCE that we can legitimately speak of the “Etruscans”, as it is from this time that they began to write their distinctive, non- Indo-European language.
They wrote using the alphabet they borrowed and adapted from the Greeks colonizing Italy at that time - but there is no doubt that this unique culture and ethnic group had already been in Italy for some time, probably since the Neolithic. By the dawn of the Italian Iron Age, shortly before 1000 BCE, all the elements of early Etruscan culture can be detected in the region of Etruria (Tyrrhenian Tuscany), in pockets in the Po Valley/Upper Adriatic, and in Campania (Bay of Naples). This protohistoric material culture is arbitrarily called the Villanovan culture, named after an archaeological site outside Bologna (Etruscan Felsina).Extensive contacts with settlers and traders from the Levant (Phoenicia, Syria) and Greece (especially Euboea, Corinth and, later, Athens) seeking metals and other resources resulted in rich hybrid traditions of urbanism, literacy, figurative art, and some of the trappings of formalized religion as practised in the eastern Mediterranean and Near East. Early commercial contact of Etruscan arms/metal dealers with northern Europe is attested as well, by finds of inscribed armour, illustrating the means by which the Etruscan alphabet reached the far north and became the model for the runic futhark; apparently cross-fertilization between the cultures was more extensive than generally recognized (see G. Bonfante 1981).
From the Iron Age onwards, Etruscan cities interacted intensively with their Italic neighbours, and inscriptions, votive offerings and the accounts of ancient historians attest to intermarriage and shared religious cults, especially between Etruscans and Faliscans, Latins, Umbrians and Campanians. The art and iconography of votive offerings and mythological illustrations drew deeply upon Greek models from the seventh century to the end of Etruscan autonomy (and domination of Rome, by the first c.
BCE). During the late Roman Republic and Augustan period, many Etruscans had become integrated into Roman society, and Roman authors note the special cachet of Etruscan religious teachings.To the third-century Christian author Arnobius, Etruria was genetrix et mater superstitionis (“the begetter and mother of superstition”, Adversus nationes [Against the Pagans] 7.26).1 In the first century BCE, Livy (5.1.6) had called the Etruscans “a people more than any others dedicated to religion, the more as they excelled in practicing it” (de Grummond 2006b: 191). From the seventh to first centuries BCE, Etruscan religious structures, art, mythology and ceremony were the most dramatic and distinctive in the Italian Peninsula, their strong influence acknowledged even by such Roman sceptics as the famous statesman Cicero. Literary evidence for Etruscan religion is highly politicized, the product of alien and hostile observers; we are even obliged to use Latin terminology since most Etruscan terms are lost. Archaeological evidence is indispensable for a critical appraisal of the etrusca disciplina.