In Our Time - The Etruscan Civilisation

Episode Date: September 29, 2011

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Etruscan civilisation.Around 800 BC a sophisticated civilisation began to emerge in the area of Italy now known as Tuscany. The Etruscans thrived for the next eight hundred years, extracting and trading copper and developing a sophisticated culture. They were skilled soldiers, architects and artists, and much of their handiwork survives today. They are also believed to have given us the alphabet, an innovation they imported from Greece. Eventually the Etruscan civilisation was absorbed into that of Rome, but not before it had profoundly influenced Roman art and religion, and even its politics.With:Phil PerkinsProfessor of Archaeology at the Open UniversityDavid RidgwaySenior Research Fellow at the Institute of Classical Studies at the University of LondonCorinna RivaLecturer in Mediterranean Archaeology at University College London.Producer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in the late 1920s, D.H. Lawrence spent several years living in Italy. There, he became fascinated by the tombs and artistic works of a civilization which had flourished in Tuscany in the first millennium BC.

Not the ancient Romans, but their neighbours, the Etruscans. In one of his last books, Etruscan places, Lawrence wrote, Italy today is far more Etruscan in its pulse than Roman, and will always be so. For around 800 years, the Etruscans controlled much of Western Italy. They built cities with grand temples and created beautiful works of art. They're also credited with introducing the alphabet to Western Europe.

But the Etruscans have received much less attention in the Romans, perhaps because few of their written records of surveillance. although modern scholarship has much to tell us about who they were and what they did. With me to discuss the Etruscan civilization are Phil Perkins, as a professor of archaeology at the Open University, David Ridgway, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Classical Studies at the University of London, and Karina Riva, lecturer in Mediterranean archaeology at University College London. Phil Perkins, can you just tell us who the Etruscans were and why they came from?

The Etruscans were the people who lived in what is now modern Italy, the northern part of it, between Rome and Florence, traditionally between the River Tiber and the River Arno. So that is the whole of modern Tuscany and part of what is now Latzio. And this is their home territory, their core territory. Later on in their history, they expanded across other bits of Italy, down towards the south, into the area around Naples. also north into the Po Valley, into the area around Bologna, but that's part of the later story.

But before you say where the Etruscans lived, you've got to think about what do you mean by that question? And to answer to that, you've got to say, who were the Etruscans in the first place? And this has been one of the central, well, it's often called the big Etruscan mystery, who were the Etruscans? And it's something that's attracted scholars ever since, well, the 5th century BC, when the first historian, as we like to think of him, Herodotus, tells a story, which is a story of the origin of the Etruscans. And according to him, he was told, he doesn't actually say he necessarily believes it, but he was told that the Etruscans were people who came from Lydia and they left following the famine. And half the people there left their homeland. Lydia being.

Lydia being in what is now southwestern Turkey. So right at the other end of the Mediterranean, the eastern Mediterranean. And half the people left there and went across the Mediterranean and settled in Italy. And for Herodotus, the story he presents, that is the origin of the Etruscans. And so they came to Italy from what is modern Turkey.

What does DNA say about this, though? Well, this is interesting because if we just go back a little bit, in ancient world, in the Roman times, everybody believed Herodotus' story that the Etruscans came from what is now Turkey. And everybody believed this, all the other ancient historians or authors. Well, they did it? No, but he was the first one, or the only one,

and he was writing much later in about 9 AD, he was the only one who had the other version of the story, which is that they actually came from Italy itself, and that they had always been in Italy. They were what we call an autothoctophanous people. And this has been the debate ever since, really. What's the current state of the debate? The current state of the debate is that the archaeology

that's been discovered largely through the 20th century tells us that there is no doubt about it that the Etruscans were native people in Italy. And what does the DNA tell us? The DNA, well, a few years ago, the media was full of reports telling us that all of Herodotus, all of archaeology was wrong, and the Etruscans weren't from Italy,

they were actually from Anatolia, modern Turkey. And what had happened is a few DNA studies have been done that managed to detect what looked like fragments of DNA that originated in the Near East in the modern population of Tuscany. And the only way, according to these scientists, that it could have got there,

was that if people had moved from Anatolia, from Turkey, at some point in the past, bringing their DNA and DNA's distinctive, depending on which bit of the world you're from, bringing their own DNA from Anatolia into Italy. And the traces of that DNA are still findable in the modern populations of Italy. However, it's not as simple as that because actually we've all got near Eastern DNA in us

because after the last Ice Age, Europe was repopulated by people who came from South West Asia. So we've got a little bit of Turkey around the table? We've got a little bit of Turkey around. It's not even Christmas yet. It's true. But it's not, the DNA doesn't actually say Turkey either. It says southwest Asia, so it's not as precise as that.

But anyway, it doesn't tell us that we're wrong. It tells us that people did move around the Mediterranean in the past. Yes, we underestimate the mobility of the First Millennium BC, which was immense. David Ridgway, in the case of the Romans, we've got immense number of artefacts, buildings, objects, writings, but we've bought evidence. do we have for the Etruscans? Well, we have plenty of artefacts and we have plenty

of sites. I mean the area that Phil was just defined between the Arno and the Taibo, even by Italian standards which are very high indeed, it has far more than its fair share of marvellous sites,

cemeteries, sanctuaries and city... Definedly, Etruscan. Sorry? They are Eutriscan. sites we're talking about. Yes, yes indeed. They may have Roman layers on top but I mean you don't go to Tarquinia to look at the Roman things

you go there to look at for example the absolutely marvellous painted tombs that sort of thing and they made things they had their own sort of pottery I mean the one thing the Etruscans invented is Buccaro potter. which is a special way of firing pot so that they come out black

and they're black all the way through and they're very attractive and Phil has just produced a marvellous catalogue of the holdings of the British Museum which are very important and they were clearly very good metal workers and I think really the secret of Etruscan success is the fact that they had wonderful mineral resources in the area

we now know as Tuscany, there's an area known as the metal-bearing hills, the Colline metalliferre, where, for example, you get both tin and copper. This was tremendously interesting to the outside world, especially to the Greeks, and it accounts, I think, for Etruscan prosperity, and they were very prosperous indeed,

and they could commission good craftsmen from Greece and elsewhere to come and do things for them, do things their way as well. It was a good example that art goes where money is, isn't it? I mean, they're wealthy, they drew in artists, but one thing is we have to say, and the monuments, the tombs you talked about, the paintings and so on

but so little written evidence. We're talking about 800 years, we're talking about great wealth, we're talking about we're going to talk about their influence on Rome in many ways but there don't seem to be any histories. Claudius wrote a history but 20 volume we're told much later, no one knows anything about it. They don't see

be any sacred books, they don't seem to be any military books. Now why is, there's a few dockets, a few hundred dockets, but they're just saying sale of copper to Phoenicians, whatever. So why this lack of written evidence? Well, there are various theories. James Byers, a Scottish traveller in the 18th century, he was quite clear that the Romans

destroyed all the Etruscan archives because they were afraid of being compared to the Etruscans because the Etruscans were so superior to the Romans. moments. That was his theory. Did he have any evidence for that? No. Oh dear.

No. Well, he was a Scot, a Scottish exile. And it is thought he may have been sort of talking indirectly about relations between Scots and English. And we won't go down that road. I'd better not. No. The real awful thing is, as you said, no native Etruscan literature has survived. I mean, no plays, no poetry, and above all, no historical narratives. We simply don't know what the Etruscans thought about themselves

and about their past. It's so unusual, given the sophistication of that civilization and the influence they had on Greeks and Greeks had on them, they had on Phoenicians, Phoenicians, so on and so forth. I mean, buyers, the idea of there being a catastrophic cull might not be so foolish after all. It might not. It might not. And it's a great pity because the Greek and Roman sources are really very uncomplimentary. Why do you think they are?

So we rely now in the Greek and Roman writings and they're uncomplimentary. Is it competitive envy? Yes, I think it is. I mean the Greeks refer to the Etruscans as pirates

I mean in Greek literature they often come up like the Phoenicians did before them the Etruscans are pirates and then there is the there are the surviving fragments of the 4th century Greek historian Theopompus

who gives us a real rant about the disgraceful immoral behaviour of Etruscan women. Well, I think it has to be said, the Greeks are like that. The point being... You mean ranters? Well, they... I'm trying to work out what like that means in this context.

Well, they were like that in that in that they regarded the Etruscans as Barbaroi, that is not really barbarians, people who didn't speak Greek, therefore inferior, but they lived in a much richer and more fertile land, and the Greeks themselves did. They were successful traders, they were very prosperous. So for your average Greek, that meant they were obviously cheating, therefore they were pirates.

Corina, can I take it over to you now? Can we just give us, from an archaeological, your perspective, What was the economic basis of their society? It's been mentioned by the two previous speakers by Phil and David. Can you just develop that little? Yes. In a sense, David hit one of the main points that really formed the economic basis of a trust in society, and those are the mining resources.

The so-called colline metallifere, which are the, well, I suppose they can be translated in English metal-bearing hills, were one of the richest mineral resource area in the whole of the Mediterranean, particularly for tin and copper, which were the basic elements for creating bronze, and bronze being an important and extremely important metal in the ancient world, not just for functional objects, but also for more beautiful objects or ceremonial objects. and in terms of the mineral resource potential of Erituria, I guess another area that is really worth mentioning is the island of Elba,

which is just opposite the metal-bearing hills and was, again, a very rich mineral resource area, not just for copper-bos or iron ores. And we know that mining and mineral resources must have been one of the reasons why the Atraski began to trade with the outside world. One, even if it's a tiny piece of evidence, but certainly important, is the evidence we have from the island of Iskia,

where the site of Pitekousai is located. Peter Kusay was one of the earliest, if not the earliest, Greek settlement in the Central Mediterranean. earliest being what date? 770. I guess David being one of the excavators. of the site would know better. But I wanted to add... You've got a thumbs up from across the table.

But the interesting part about the Etruscan richness of mineral resources in Pitekosa is that Pitekousai has an industrial quarter, had an industrial quarter, for metal working. And in that area of the site, scraps of metal and... pieces of iron ores were found that originated from Elba. And there's strong evidence of dealings with the Phoenicians, for instance, a very powerful element in the Mediterranean, with some gold bars, gold enabling them to trade with each other. What exactly is that?

Well, I think we need to understand that the end of the 8th and the 7th century is a particular moment in the history of the Central Mediterranean, because it's the moment when not only do we have Greek settlements, but also Phoenician colonial settlements on the west coast of Sicily and in Sardinia. And there's certainly a case in the archaeological evidence that demonstrates that interaction, for example, between Sardinia and Etruria, intensified once the Phoenicians arrived. Lawrence, H. Lawrence, whom I quoted at the beginning of the railroad,

described these Truskans as vicious. Were they warlike people? Well, the quick answer to that, well, the quick answer to that would be that there were warlike as much as the Greeks or the Phoenicians or anyone else across the Mediterranean. Warfare in the first millennium BC must have been pretty endemic across the Mediterranean. And there is no reason to think that the Etruscans were more warlike or vicious than anyone else, including the Romans. But what's interesting about the Etruscans is that there's a certain, the certain sense, if one looks at the archaeological record, that military status was very important to the Etruscans.

And one is seen, one sees that in the burial evidence, for example, more in certain periods than others. So for example, in the early Iron Age, we have a series of what archaeologists call warrior graves that are characterized by grave goods, such as weaponry, both weapons, offensive and defensive weapons, shields, helmets, but that's for the early Iron Age.

Phil Perkins, we're talking now, can we go to the 7th and 6th century, BC and remind listeners that the Greek civilization is just, as it were, grinding into life there. The Romans aren't really much on the horizon. Let's leave it at that. The Phoenicians are colonizing a bit. And you have this, we must get it, I'd like it across you, tell me, if I'm wrong. that we have a power there. The Etruscans were at that time very wealthy, very powerful,

this men were, well, they could do all the technology. They were exporting wine to France, and they were building these cities, which were, we told, were splendid cities. And so on two, I've said enough. Can you tell us what we know about the society in the 7th and 6th century BC? Well, what seems to happen is from the earlier Etruscan period,

people's individual status, and power seems to be very much focused on the individual. And as the society develops into the into the sixth century, the archaic period, as we call it, power gets more spread through society, should we say, first of all, into sort of family groups, and power becomes a kind of hereditary thing that people have. And so instead of just one individual being able to rule the roost,

it turns into sort of family groups, clans, if you like. I'm not going to use the word mafia, but it's sort of a clan organization of society. So these cities had, in effect, an oligarchy of aristocrats who ruled the city. And there doesn't seem to have been a great sense of federation between the cities. They seem to be very independent. And even when one was attacked, the others didn't race to the rescues because we're all Etruscans after all.

They left them. Oh, that's right. They were all Etruscans, but they didn't necessarily always feel the need to come together as a bloc. And I think part of the reason for that is because it wasn't a nation like modern nations, and it was only barely a sort of ethnic group. They were city-states, in effect. Each individual city was its own political organisation, just like Rome was, or Athens was. And unless there's some pressing reason which there wasn't really ever, they didn't come together as a block. Individual

cities would take on the Syracusans or the Phoenicians, one at a time, or the Romans, indeed. But they didn't come together as a military force or as a national entity. So the elite wealthy oligarchy, a craftsman class, and then slaves? Slaves, yes, certainly in the later period, but we don't know very much about them. Our evidence is so much focused on the elite of society, and that's because of the kind of evidence that survived, particularly the tombs and the rich wealth that they deposited in the tombs to express their social status.

David Ridgeway, another curiosity I seem to come to you, of the two real problems here. The first one was the lack of texts, the lack of literature, which is very, very strange, given everything they did, everything they stood for, everybody they were involved with, the Greeks, the Phoenicians, or Amos, that's one. The other thing is their language, which is not an Indo-European language, it's a language unique to them, so where'd that come from? Well, I think the first thing to say about the Etruscan language,

I may lose some friends here, is that there isn't very much of it, compared to Greek or Latin, for example. And secondly, as we've already said, there's no literature. The conceptual range of the Etruscan writing we have is extraordinarily narrow, because it's limited to just a few thousand short inscriptions and a very few longer texts.

And the longer texts, if you take them all together, they add up to fewer words and we've already used this morning. The short inscriptions are scratched on durable surfaces, so they're on tombstones or painted on wall paintings. They name the occupants of a tomb, official positions, parentage, age, that sort of thing. Other things are on grave goods. put into tombs or on votive offerings made in sanctuaries.

And since there are so many of these very simple inscriptions, we have an awful lot of proper names, and we can trace family relationships, and we can, or somebody has recently done a survey of votive offerings in sanctuary at Vey, and traced people from about 10 or 15, other centres. But still, they had a language sign read from the notes that I got for this programme.

And you know enough about it to know that it was a language. And you know enough about it to know that it was a language different from any of the other languages round about. Now, have you any idea why it was different? No. All sorts of people... See, Herodotus explanation would answer that, wouldn't it? Which has now been...

They came from somewhere else completely, brought their language with them, and there weren't Indo-European, there was something else, and so that's the explanation. Now, that explanation is now under very severe test and mostly overturned. So what was it then? There's nowhere else that's got a language like Etruscan. This is the trouble about that.

I mean no else? No, no. I think what we have to say is that it was probably there in Etruria all the time. And when it got really, written down, the Etruscans used a version of the Greek alphabet that came into Italy with the first Greeks at Pithicousai that Kurena mentioned, Pithecusa and Qumi. So what we're really looking at is one language written in somebody else's alphabet, an adapted version of that alphabet. I think it had always been there by the time the Greeks showed the Etruscans how to write.

One enormously important find backs up what Phil was just saying about the Etruscans not being a nation. These are the Peergy tablets. They were found on gold sheets or tablets at Peergy, the sanctuary of Cherveteri. and we all got terrifically excited bilingual inscription in Nitruscan and Phoenician. It's not a bilingual inscription, it's a quasi-bilingual. It gives the two halves of an agreement that tells us that round about 500 BC,

the king of Cherveteri, one Sephario Velianas, dedicated one of the temples at Piagy to the Phoenician goddess Astana. Now, politically, that's dynamite. It's also very significant in all sorts of other ways. It does really show what Phil was just saying, that the Etruscans were into nation. Each centre could do its own thing. And the fact that Cherveteri was aligning itself with the Phoenicians,

in this case, clearly the Western Phoenicians, that is, Carthage, didn't mean that all the others were. it was a very exciting, a very exciting moment. Can I move on to, I like the idea of it. It's really trivial. The idea of the dedication to a goddessian goddess being dynamited. I know, I agree. I don't know why.

It shows. Anyway, Karina, a lot of the evidence here have comes from Etruscan Graveyards. Now, what do they tell us? Well, the quickest answer would be everything. That's because, in a sense, Etraskan archaeology did develop out of the excavation and the study of the grave goods and the tombs that have been excavated. On the other hand, I think it's also important to say that,

as Phil actually said at the beginning, that in the course of the 20th century, other kinds of sites have been excavated, like cities and sanctuary sites, to the extent that now we're able to reconstruct much about a trust in society from other sites, non-funary sites. But there's no question that the bulk of our evidence

comes from graveyards. And you give us some idea of them, the size of them, the size of them and the... The size of the graveyard? Yeah, and the artistry there in the wealth that they represent and so on. Just give us some... Take one city and away we go. Okay, well, I would take probably Cherveteri only because it's been one of the best excavated cities in southern Etruria.

It's important to note that when we're talking about size and wealth of the cemeteries, this changes dramatically through time. And perhaps these dramatic changes are visible most distinctly in Cherveteri, where we see the increasing wealth being displayed in 7th century tombs. 7th century being the century that we discussed was sort of a period of increasing mobility in the central Mediterranean. One might assume even Etruscan dominance in certain ways, but anyway, the 7th century, a period, a great period for the atrocities.

A great period because we see the emergence of aristocratic groups or elite groups, if you want to call it like that, that displayed their wealth through grave goods and tombs as well, because when we're thinking about the wealth of these tombs, we're not just thinking about the grave goods themselves, but actually the monumental tomb structures that these aristocratic groups had built.

And the paintings on the walls of the tombs inside. Yes, the wall paintings are found throughout the truery, including Cherveteri, although one normally associates, as David mentioned, wall paintings with Tarquina, mainly because that's where we have the bulk of our evidence on wall paintings from Tarquina, although we do have examples of painting tombs in Cherveter, as well. Sorry to interrupt.

Is there a relationship between these tombs and what people now say of Egyptian tombs? Is there a tomb culture that has gone through to a three millennia? Yeah, I mean, this is interesting. The Egyptians are often equated with the... I mean, often not now in the... When I say historical sources, I'm talking about 17 and 18th century sources. Because in a sense, when one compares the Egyptian... and Etruscan culture, one sees that, one has a sense that the tomb becomes the focus for investing in wealth and displaying.

In both Egypt and Etruria. But I think that's where the similarity begins and that's where it stops. Because I think we need to really think about the fact that our visibility, the visibility of these cemeteries in Turia is very much down to the point to the fact that we've all excavated. cemeteries are really the focus of excavation and study. Can I ask you, Phil, what you know about ischuscan religion? Etruscan religion is a very murky subject. And what we know about it is all secondhand via Roman sources. However, what that does tell us is that itrustian religion seems to be different

to other religions in the Mediterranean at the time. Etruscan religion is based on a revelation. The legend goes that a baby in the form of an old man was born from the ground in front of a sacred space in Tarquinia and proceeded to tell the Etruscan people how to behave with respect to the divine. And what he told them was how to interpret signs that came from the gods. Simple as that, that's what we know. And that's different to say Greek religion or Roman origin where you might go along to a god and ask them

what you should do is as is an oracle, for example. Etruscans didn't work like that. It wasn't up to you to ask a God. It was for you to receive the signs, lightning bolts, movements of animals, birds, etc., and interpret them. One of the things that takes on's imagination about the Etruscans' Green River is that the women seem to have a much more powerful place in that society than they had

other societies around the Mediterranean at that time. They're in the paintings. They're with the men in those conversations and so on. Can you develop that? Yes. I think the first answer to that question would be with another question what is it really meant by power

of women in Etruscan society? Because one wonders whether the visibility of women in banquets, for example, is any indication of a supposed power of women in a Traskan society. There's also a myth to dispel, which is that Etruscan society was not matriarchal.

It was a patriarchal society. We know that, as David mentioned, about these name inscriptions, that the family name, the name that passed to the family was in the male line. We have example, well, we know, for example, that women had their own name, their own personal name.

So that's different, for example, from other ancient societies. But there's no question that the family name of women... But in terms of the women's place, the Greeks picked the place of women out as something that completely outraged them. They thought they were degenerate, they drank too much, they were too prominent, they had too much, well, not power, too much prominence.

So that was remarked on. Yes, that was remarked on. But as David rightly said, talking about the Ompos, who was writing in the fourth century, This is a biased account of who the Etruscans were and what women were doing in Etruscan society. So I think that it's important to balance our views of women's social standing in Etruscan society, although it's worth bearing in mind that certain activities

or certain material culture that we associate with women, such as textile-making activities, are indeed associated with women in Etruria as much as in the Greek world, but are important economic activities of the Etruscan household. David Ritzvich, could you tell us a bit about the art and what influence the Greeks had on the art? Well, I think easily the best part of Etruscan art in my view, I don't know if anyone else agrees,

are the earlier range of painted tombs and let's remember that the painted chamber tombs of Eutruria add up to the largest single complex of pre-classical painting anywhere in the classical world. And the fascinating thing about the early ones at Tarquinia, 7th and 6th century, is that the emphasis is really rather modern. The emphasis is on what the deceased person liked doing in life banqueting dinner parties

as Corinna has just mentioned hunting and fishing there's a wonderful set of pictures from the tomb of hunting and fishing Tomba del Pesca cace pesca most

un-greek emphasis on direct observation even cheerful and sometimes quite humorous observation that's miles away from Greek idealisation. I find that one of the most attractive things in Etruscan art.

Where do the Greeks come in with this? Well, some people think that the Etruscan artists were simply trying to be Greeks. I don't think they were. They took what they liked from Greek art and did it their way. Also, the Etruscans were very prosperous, and in the fullness of time, they could engage Greek craftsmen to do things that they wanted. There's some fascinating work going on now with architectural terracottas. This is a thing which is very interesting and rather complex.

Etruscan ideas expressed in Greek techniques, the sort of things that you would put on the roofs of temples, that sort of thing, pedimental decoration, things like that. But they were, I think, their own men and doubtless women. They weren't sort of imitating. It wasn't a sort of tired, second-rate imitation of Greek art without the Greek's genius. They definitely had their own genius.

We're talking about a time of when people are swirling around the Mediterranean, mention is made again and again of the mobility of people and a number of women travelling around the Mediterranean from the records that we have. And the Truscan's trading relations with Greece, with Venetia, the elephant in the room is Rome. I mean, just 12 miles down the road from one of the great Atruscan cities is Rome. Rome is beginning to pull together in somewhere other towards the 7th, 6th century BC.

Now, can you give us an idea of the power play between those two, Phil? Well, at that time, between the six shades into the 5th century BC. Well, the back story to this is that the Etruscans ruled Rome for a certain period of time. So, legendary, quasi-legendary kings of Rome, Tarquinius Priscus, Tarquinius, Tarkinus, Superbus, were actually Etruscans. And when the Romans had their big revolution throughout their kings and set up their republic, that's the point where they started ploughing their own furrow,

shall we say, and moving away from their Etruscan neighbours, I suppose. And as their own political force develops and their own society gathers more power, they conquer their neighbours in turn, first of all going south, and then take on the Etruscans, first of all, their big neighbour they, which they conquer after a large battle, and then following on from that through the 4th and 3rd century, they pick off, in effect, the Etruscan cities one at a time. But we are talking at the beginning, Karina,

about the effect that the Etruscans had on Rome. Can you give us some idea of that? By the beginning, I mean the 7th, 6th and 5th centuries BC. Well, I think that rather than thinking in terms of Etruscans having influence on Rome and vice versa, Once you think about, again, the very level of cultural and social mobility between different societies at that point in time. So we have, for example, a lot of archaeological evidence that shows us the interaction and trade interaction between Etruscan and the Etruscans and the Romans.

We have it at sanctuary sites. There's a famous centricite called Satricum in Lazio, which is not Rome, but nevertheless, it's part of the Roman region, if we can call it like that. That shows votive objects coming from a wide range of areas, including Etruria. We also know that craftsmen moved around between Rome and Etruscan cities. We know that from not just the material culture. that we see sort of in private context like funerate context, but also public contexts like, again, decorative sculpture of temples. We know from the ancient sources that an Etruscan sculptor worked in Rome, Vulca,

coming from Vey on the temple of Jupiter, capital and Jupiter in Rome. So I think that it's important to see as sort of a, equal reciprocal interaction and not one based on hostility as one knows about later. I think that's true, but there's also the point that in Italy at that time, culture was

very, very fluid and mixed and to try and define one thing as Etruscan and one thing as Roman is to try and divide up people's material worlds, their visual worlds, their thought worlds, according to historical criteria which weren't really appropriate. There are criteria that we've imposed on it.

Nevertheless, for a lot of listeners, and for me when I read this stuff, the idea of there being an Etruscan power of the importance that you've already indicated over the last 40 minutes or so was something that we didn't really pay much attention to. And yet right up to the first emperor on Augustus, so we're talking way at the end, just before AD, he has 19 Etruscan families backing him, people from Etruscan. So they're having a direct political influence,

as well as an artistic. I just want to get over that there was this power, and because the Romans and Greeks have written them out of history, that doesn't mean they weren't in history. David? Well, I think around about the time of Augustus that you mentioned, particularly when Augustus was still Octavian, and sort of trying to become Augustus, so to speak,

he was very well aware that he was supported, as you said, by 19 different families of Etruscan origin. They were the old aristocracy, and he knew he wouldn't get very far without them. He really needed those people. So in that sense, the influence lasted in an awful long time. We're talking from the 9th century BC to the end of the 1st century BC. Absolutely, yes.

That's at the top end of society. and the Emperor Claudius, who was the third successor of Augustus, the first of his wives was an Etruscan lady, whether she persuaded him to write his famous lost Tyrenica, we don't know. 20-volume history of the Etruscans, which nobody's heard. There's no trace of that either. No trace of that either, but one does. white part of Etruscan writing.

One does wonder if his wife or helped him go through her friend's archives. It's tantalising. Who destroyed it is what I'm interested in. Yes. There is, of course, the final wipeout of the early Christians, and that's the possible point where the complete obliteration

happened. We know from a historical reference that in 408 when the Visi Goths, Sir Alaric, were about to sack Rome, some Etruscan Harrispex's fortune-tell us came to Rome and said, we can save you from the barbarians, we can bring down lightning on them. And the Pope thought about it

and said yes. But the priest refused because they weren't allowed to do it in public. If they could have done it in private, the Pope would have said okay. So Etruscan religion was around even then. Yeah. Why do you think finally and briefly I'm sadly, Karina, the last

review, what happened? What can we say happen to the Etruscans? Were they absorbed into Rome? Did that have... What happened to them? Well, the traditional stories that, yes, they were absorbed into Rome. They came not just under the

political orbit of Rome, but they were conquered. And the term that is normally used to define or explain this conquest is Romanization. And it's essentially this Traskan cities when they came under Roman political power Romanized. But of course, Romanization

doesn't mean that there were being, they had a Roman culture imposed on them. It was a two-way process where they were... I have to honestly stop now. I'm very sorry. Karina Rieva, Phil Perkins, David Ritchway. Thank you very much indeed. Next week, David Hume, Scottish philosopher,

Enlightenment. Thank you for listening. If you've enjoyed this BBC podcast, why not try others such as the Forum, the discussion programme about global ideas? To find out more, visit BBCworldservice.com slash forum.