[HN Gopher] New work sheds light on the Etruscans, who may have ...
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New work sheds light on the Etruscans, who may have founded Rome
Author : demail
Score : 131 points
Date : 2021-09-27 17:08 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Talk 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-s...]
| Lucasoato wrote:
| History is written by the victor; it's definitely curious that
| among the famous seven kings of Rome the last three have Etruscan
| origin.
| OneTimePetes wrote:
| Its better to be a mad emperor, then to be a unknown emperor..
| ;)
| kragen wrote:
| Not the emperors, the kings. Before the Republic, not after
| it.
| avereveard wrote:
| They 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 wrote:
| What 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 wrote:
| I was lucky enough to stealth camp near one of their necropolis,
| a proper eerie experience
| silvanocerza wrote:
| Am curious, where? There are tons of them in the centre of
| Italy.
| disillusioned wrote:
| Those darn Etruscans.
| tomcam wrote:
| Discovered 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 wrote:
| The National Etruscan Museum in Rome
| (https://www.museoetru.it/) holds one of the largest
| collections of Etruscan art. Do not miss if you happen to be in
| Rome.
| mapster wrote:
| Seems 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 wrote:
| You mean, I believe, Sassoferrato (which was actually
| Sentinum in roman times).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinum
|
| 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 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
| _...
|
| Disclaimer:
|
| the founder of the museum of Sassoferrato:
|
| https://www.sassoferratoturismo.it/museo-civico-
| archeologico...
|
| was my grandfather, and all I know about the matter comes
| from family stories.
| _1tan wrote:
| Seconded - affordable and not crowded as well!
| convFixb wrote:
| Thirded - 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 wrote:
| Fourthed - 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.
| notorandit wrote:
| I 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...) is one among them.
|
| Everyone forgets about the Samnites, who required Rome to
| fight 70 years before getting rid of them!
| spockz wrote:
| In 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.
| gumby wrote:
| I 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.
| danjac wrote:
| Some Etruscan words may have found their way into very modern
| English:
|
| - antenna
|
| - satellite
|
| - people/person
|
| - ceremony
|
| - serve
| orangepanda wrote:
| Also: mantissa
|
| Can blame the Etruscans for IEEE 754
| riffraff wrote:
| My 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 :)
| signal11 wrote:
| For anyone who likes this sort of thing, the initial few
| episodes of the History of English podcast[1] is amazing. It
| dives into the history right from Proto-Indo European and in
| fact covers the Greek and Etruscan influences, and spends time
| speaking about the people and their culture.
|
| [1] https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/
| folli wrote:
| One, 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".
| roywiggins wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Augustus was Caesar's heir, and the name was part of his
| inheritance.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| The 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.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Yeah, but it didn't become a _title_ until the Julio-
| Claudians started using it to designate their heirs. When
| Augustus took it on, it was just a powerful family name.
| Once the Julio-Claudians were finished, it was a title.
|
| It seems overwhelmingly likely that when later emperors
| kept using it, they were referencing the dynasty that
| Augustus founded, not Julius Caesar personally.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_(title)#Sole_Roman_E
| mpe...
| mason55 wrote:
| Also the source of czar and tsar!
| notorandit wrote:
| That 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.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| When 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.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| A 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.
| fsckboy wrote:
| Isn'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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| I 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)
| danjac wrote:
| > Vascon and Etruscan survived (and possibly others)
|
| How about Finno-Ugric? While the Hungarians only arrived
| about 1000 years ago, the ancestors of the Finns, Sami and
| related groups have lived in North-East Europe possibly
| since the last Ice Age (although this is much disputed, and
| it could be they adopted Proto-Finnic from some later
| migration).
| fogihujy wrote:
| It depends on how you look at things. The Nordic Bronze
| age spread around the entire Baltic as well, and genetic
| markers associated with Finnic cultures appeared much
| later, and in areas further north and east.
|
| However, as the article mentions, it's unwise to assume
| there is a 100% correlation between genetic markers and
| culture/language. The Baltic Sea region has been a trade
| hub since before the the first indo-european migrations
| into the area, and some genetic mixing must have been
| unavoidable.
| Tagbert wrote:
| You're comment about not assuming a correlation of
| language and genetics is spot on for this topic. In the
| linked article (or maybe it was another article on this
| topic) they mention that genetic research shows that
| Etruscans shared much of the same step-derived ancestry
| as the Latin speaking Italians. It appears that, when
| then step invaders came in, at least one group of them
| picked up a local non-IE language even while their
| genetics overcame the original speakers.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| The steppe people evolved to raid and invade agricultural
| communities; and those communities evolved to grow larger
| to fend off the raids.
|
| "pressure from the steppe selected for the unification and
| scaling-up of agricultural societies into larger groups to
| more effectively counteract these incursions. This in turn
| would select for greater size in pastoralist communities,
| and also other neighbouring agricultural groups who were
| now relatively smaller and at a competitive disadvantage
| with their neighbours. This effect would be amplified by
| the diffusion of such military technology from the steppe"
|
| From this awesome modeling paper
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0516-2
| morpheos137 wrote:
| This not true. Indo-European diffusion in Europe preceeded
| Roman influence by at least a half to a full milenium. For
| example in 500 BC the Celts, the Germans and the Scythians
| were all speaking indo european tongues while rome was a
| relatively small republic or kingdom in italy. The italic
| peoples surrouding the latins all spoke indo european
| languages except for the etruscans.
| sayonaraman wrote:
| May be thousands of years before Genghis Khan the hords of
| steppe people conquered the territory of modern Italy in the
| same way mongols conquered most of Europe and Asia much later.
|
| The fact Etruscans preserved their language could be either
| because they fought really well or may be had some diplomatic
| relations and mutual trade with the "migrants", or both.
|
| It's funny we have the names of say Alexander the Great or
| Genghis but leaders of those long gone civilizations before
| them are completely unknown. May be they intermarried and the
| steppe people' benevolent leader allowed some of the conquered
| tribes to keep their language, who knows.
| ithkuil wrote:
| History is a very interesting topic and there are a lot of
| great sources to study; books but also very good youtube
| channels nowadays. There are a lot of things that we don't
| know, but there is also a lot we do know; I'd recommend to
| anybody who is interested to read more about the actual
| history.
|
| There are so many interesting details that can give more
| depth to the struggle of human existence; migration,
| ingenuity, cooperation, dominance, trade, war, culture,
| religion.
|
| Reducing everything to a couple of famous names is an
| unfortunate oversimplification that glosses over much more
| interesting aspects I wholeheartedly recommend to research.
| Bayart wrote:
| It's usually explained away by technological superiority,
| namely the mastery of horse husbandry and cart-making. But
| social structures geared towards war and conquest might have
| played a role too.
| kragen wrote:
| An 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 wrote:
| "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
| seanw444 wrote:
| I'm disappointed the list ends there.
| kragen wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| one amateur scribe was responsible for such an enormously
| consequential bottleneck event?
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