Читать книгу Aztec Treasure House - Evan S. Connell - Страница 10
ОглавлениеIN 1828 A PEASANT WHO WAS plowing on the Italian estate of Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, crashed through the roof of an Etruscan burial vault. A bailiff was ordered to investigate, and what he saw underground promptly caused Lucien to start raking the countryside for more tombs. Hundreds were found and looted, yielding thousands of painted dishes, statuettes, jewels, rings, bracelets, and so on. The Vulci necropolis, from which Bonaparte recovered most of this treasure, is thought to have given up more valuables than any other ancient site with the exception of Pompeii.
News of the Vulci bonanza whistled through Italy and across Europe while Lucien Bonaparte’s neighbors began to contemplate their own fields with deep interest. As a result, more tombs were ripped open and stripped of marketable merchandise, and Prosper Mérimée felt inspired to write The Etruscan Vase. The vase that excited him was not Etruscan, it happened to be Greek, either imported or manufactured in a south Italian Greek pottery shop; but Mérimée did not know this, for which we may be mildly grateful. Le Vase Étrusque is not classified as a masterpiece but we need all the literature we can get, even if it’s written under a misapprehension.
One by one the sites and the important relics were catalogued, scholarly papers rustled, and archaeologists took to quarreling over the debris. They still quarrel, mostly because the language cannot quite be understood and because nobody has proved beyond doubt where the Etruscans came from.
At present we have two legitimate theories concerning their homeland, and a third theory which once was greeted with respect but now is not. Wherever they originated, these people dominated the central Mediterranean for several centuries. We are told by Livy that Etruria’s renown “filled the lands and the waters from one end of Italy to the other, from the Alps to the Straits of Messina.”
Herodotus thought they emigrated from Asia Minor:
“During the reign of Atys, son of Manes, there was famine throughout Lydia. For a while the Lydians persisted in living as they always had, but when the famine lengthened they looked for a way to alleviate their misery—some suggesting one thing, some another. At this time they invented dice games, knucklebone games, handball games, and other games—except draughts, which they did not invent. They would play all day for two days in order to distract themselves and on the third day they would eat. For eighteen years they lived like this. . . .”
At last, continues Herodotus, the king divided his subjects into two groups and chose by lot which would remain in Lydia and which must go in search of a new home. The king himself remained, while those who were to leave he put in charge of his son Tyrsenos. Then all those who were departing went down to Smyrna where they built ships, and after loading the ships with their possessions they sailed away and “passed by many nations in turn” until they reached the land of the Umbrians.
Summarizing the exodus in this manner makes it sound like a ten-day cruise. The reality—if we are discussing reality—must have been quite different. Assuming a degree of truth in the legend, it seems unlikely that there could have been one vast embarkation; more probably there would be numerous small embarkations over a period of years, just as bands of Crusaders straggled toward the Holy Land for 200 years, in contrast to the popular view of seven Christian armies one after another clanking through Syria. And Herodotus’ remark about passing many nations in turn could mean that the emigrants settled here and there, then some of their descendants drifted along, and theirs wandered farther, until at last—centuries after Tyrsenos left home—people with Lydian blood and Lydian traditions reached Italy.
That there was famine in Asia Minor during the thirteenth century B.C. cannot be doubted. Pharaoh Merneptah shipped grain to “Kheta,” land of the Hittites, and a communiqué from one Hittite ruler alludes to starvation. There is also the account of a provincial king with an unpronounceable name who led his famished subjects to the court of the Hittite emperor.
Egyptian hieroglyphs speak of an attempted invasion by “Peoples of the Sea” during the reign of Pharaohs Merneptah and Ramses III, between 1230 and 1170 B.C., and it’s possible that among these half-identified sea people were some Lydians. Whether or not this is so, the course of the emigrants is reasonably clear: they sailed past Malta and Sicily, at which point a few might have continued west to the famous city of Tartessus in Spain. A majority, however, must have turned north to the Italian mainland where they settled along the coast between the Tiber and the Arno, north of the marsh that eventually would become Rome. Here, in Tuscany, among a Bronze Age people called Villanovans, they built those cities we dimly remember from school—Cerveteri, Tarquinia, Populonium, and the others—and here they became known to the Greeks as Tyrsenoi, to the Latins as Etrusci.
The evidence for such a theory is persuasive. In the first place, Herodotus was not the only historian to describe an ancient Lydian migration. Secondly, it is a fact, with little disagreement among archaeologists, that during the eighth and ninth centuries B.C. a noticeable change occurred in the Tuscan way of life. This commonly is called the “Orientalizing” period. It included the substitution of burial for cremation and the appearance of chambered tombs beneath a dromo, or mound, very similar to the earliest tombs in Asia Minor. Religion, too, assumed a different form, apparently related to the eastern Mediterranean. Even the Tuscan devils evolved into first cousins of Assyrian and Chaldean devils. And the livers of sacrificed animals were examined for signs, a Babylonian practice.
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 of Etruscan 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 basement of that peculiar Edwardian museum known as the Glyptothek, are several bona fide Etruscan figures: a shattered frieze of black-bearded warriors wearing Trojan helmets and carrying circular shields embellished with a mysterious red, white, and black whirlpool. These thick-legged businesslike fighting men are the real McCoy, and everything about them points east.
So often with Etruscan artifacts one does apprehend these long reverberations from Asia. Nevertheless, a good many prominent archaeologists refuse to buy Herodotus’ account; they consider it a fable. They reject the idea of an immense migration—half a nation sailing into the sunset—and insist unromantically that the Etruscans were natural descendants of some Italian farmers. What a gray thought. It’s like being told the Kensington runestone is a fake—that the bloody tale of a battle between Indians and Vikings in upper Minnesota never took place. One wants to imagine.
Among the cold-blooded exponents of this autochthonous theory none is chillier than Massimo Pallottino, professor of Etruscology and Italic archaeology at the University of Rome. Indeed, Professor Pallottino sounds exasperated that other professionals could be wrongheaded enough even to contemplate the migration hypothesis, which he goes about dissecting with meticulous disdain and a glittering assortment of scalpels:
Edoardo Brizio in 1885 was the first to put this theory on a scientific footing: he identified the Etruscan invaders with the bearers of Orientalizing (and later Hellenizing) civilization into Tuscany and Emilia, and he saw the Umbrians of Herodotus—i.e. Indo-European Italic peoples—in the cremating Villanovans. Among the most convinced followers of Brizio’s thesis were O. Montelius, B. Modestov, G. Körte, G. Ghirardini, L. Mariani. . . . Herodotus may have been attracted by the similarity of the name Tyrrhenian (Tyrrhenoi, Tyrsenoi) with that of the city of Tyrrha or Torrhebus in Lydia. . . .
Nor was there an abrupt change in burial rites from the practice of cremation, typical of the Villanovan period, to Oriental inhumation. Both were characteristic of early Villanovan ceremonies, he tells us, notably in southern Etruria where the idea of cremation predominated. Later, during the eighth century B.C., the practice of inhumation gradually became established—not only in Etruria but in Latium, where no Etruscan “arrival” has been postulated.
“We should now examine the linguistic data. In spite of assertions to the contrary made by Lattes, Pareti and others, a close relationship unites Etruscan with the dialect spoken at Lemnos before the Athenian conquest of the island by Miltiades in the second half of the sixth century B.C. . . . This does not mean, however, that Lemnian and Etruscan were the same language. . . . Further, the onomastic agreements between the Etruscan and eastern languages carry no great weight (as E. Fiesel correctly pointed out) when we consider that they are based upon . . .”
Obviously this is not the stuff of which best-sellers are made, even in light doses, and with Pallottino one is forced to swallow page after page of it. The result is tedium sinking inexorably toward stupefaction, together with a dull realization that whatever the man says probably is correct. To read him is appalling. No dreams, my friend, just facts. Facts and deductions. Deductions followed by occasional impeccable qualifications. One is reminded of those medieval ecclesiastics wondering how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, it is all so academic. The difference, of course, being that these churchmen had not the least idea what they were talking about, while Professor Pallottino knows precisely.
Along the way, before telling us how it actually was, he takes a few pages to demolish that third theory, the illegitimate one. In this version, highly regarded during the nineteenth century, the Etruscans came down from the north. The reason for thinking so was linguistic: traces of an Etruscan dialect had been found among the Rhaetian Alps. But it seems that this material dates from the fourth century B.C., long after Etruscans had staked a claim in Italy.
An additional argument against it, says Pallottino, is the relationship of Etruscan to pre-Hellenic languages throughout the Aegean: “This could only be explained by accepting Kretschmer’s thesis of a parallel overland immigration into Greece and Italy originating from the Danube basin. We would then still have to explain those elements in the ‘Tyrrhenian’ toponymy. . . .”
In other words, let such nonsense be forgotten.
What remains, then, is the not particularly exciting thought that our sensuous, artistic, enigmatic Etruscans were the natural children of Villanova peasants. The name Villanova, if anybody asks, comes from a suburb of Bologna where vestiges of a previously unknown culture turned up: hut-shaped urns filled with human ashes, bronze weapons, amber jewelry, pins and combs. Apparently these ancestors of the Etruscans, if that is what they were, drifted south into Tuscany about the eleventh or tenth century before Christ and overwhelmed whatever inhabitants they encountered.
Perhaps 300 years later the Orientalizing began. This was the time of a Dark Age in Greece, between the decay of Mycenaean civilization and the emergence of those wise marble Pericleans against whom we half-consciously measure ourselves. It was a time when that templed colossus, Egypt, was beginning to crumble. Assyrian armor glinted ominously. Phrygian trumpets bellowed. Phoenician traders drove westward, dipping their sails at Carthage and Tartessus. Fresh currents rippled the length of the Mediterranean.
So, inevitably, the rude Villanova culture was affected. Greek vase painters moved to Cerveteri, bringing the alphabet and other such radical concepts. Pallottino believes that these various intellectual and artistic transfusions have given the impression of Etrurian dependence on the East, an impression to which the ancients—notably Herodotus—succumbed, and which still inhibits the thinking of twentieth-century investigators.
D. H. Lawrence, faced with the cool reason of Pallottino, might have been impatient or just disgusted. His own exploration of the subject, Etruscan Places, did not precede the professor’s Etruscologia by much more than ten years, but Lawrence illuminated a region fully ten light-years away. He was a breast-fed romantic, the Italian a most assiduous scholar. Lawrence plunged into Etruria; Pallottino picks and brushes and trowels away at it.
The experience! cried Lawrence. The experience—that was what mattered. Live! Empathize! Feel!
When he visited Tuscany in 1927, three years before he died, he was quite sick; yet the book gives no hint of it, except indirectly. “Ease, naturalness, and an abundance of life,” he wrote. “The things they did, in their easy centuries, are as natural and easy as breathing.” No need to twist the mind or soul. Death was simply a pleasant continuance of life, with jewels and wine and flutes playing for the dance. Neither an ecstasy of bliss, a heaven, nor a purgatory of torment.
“From the shadow of the prehistoric world emerge dying religions that have not yet invented gods or goddesses, but live by the mystery of the elemental powers in the Universe, the complex vitalities of what we feebly call Nature.”
“The goat says: let me breed for ever, till the world is one reeking goat. But then the lion roars from the other blood-stream, which is also in man, and he lifts his paw to strike. . . .”
This sort of thing annoys Pallottino, who has no time for mystics. Painted tombs littered with jewelry and elegant vases have created around his specialty “a peculiar aura of romantic suggestion, which the books of Dennis and Noël des Vergers helped to spread, never to disappear again. Scholarly uncertainties and polemics on the interpretation of Etruscan inscriptions, on the classification of the language, on the problem of Etruscan origins, gave birth to the notion of an ‘Etruscan mystery’; and this notion, rather than describing, more or less aptly, a scientific situation . . .”
On and on he goes in his oddly dry, convincing prose—much less gratifying than the rainbows whipped up by Lawrence. And what he is insisting is that these people twenty-five centuries ago were neither more nor less enigmatic than you and I; which is to say that they are interesting by themselves, never mind the blather.
Physically they were small, judged by skeletal remains. The men averaged five feet, four inches, the women just above five feet. On the basis of tomb information their life expectancy was about forty.
Early historians denounced them as decadent and drunken, promiscuous lovers intoxicated by comfort, a reputation they shared with the Sybarites. Theopompus wrote in the fourth century B.C. that they copulated publicly and did not consider it shameful. “They all do the thing, some watching one another. . . . The men approach the women with great delight, but obtain as much pleasure from young men and adolescents. They grow up, in fact, to be very beautiful, for they live luxuriously and shave their bodies. . . .”
Posidonius, a Stoic author of the second century B.C., after observing that the Etruscans once were valorous, attributes their degeneration to the richness of the land—its minerals, timber, and so on. Later critics explained the decline with equal facility. Victorians, for example, thought they collapsed because of a perverse religion. Our twentieth century is less positive: we aren’t sure just what happened to their world. From our balcony they appear to be at once naive and sophisticated, artistic and materialistic, radical, conservative, industrious, indolent, foolish, clever, ad infinitum. That is to say, a disorganized bellowing parade of contradictory mortals.
Despite meager evidence we do know a little about their activities and concerns.
Etruscan women liked to bleach their hair—a fancy that has been entertained, it seems, from the female prototype to the latest model. And depilatories were popular. Try this: boil a yellow tree frog until it has shrunk to half its natural size, then rub the shriveled frog on the unsightly area. Now, it’s too bad we have no testimonials from satisfied beauties of Vetluna or Caere, but that does not mean the treatment is useless. These people sometimes equaled or surpassed us in the most unexpected ways.
Etruscan hunters understood the compelling power of music far better than we do. Aelian, who wrote in the third century, reveals that after the nets and traps had been set a piper would come forth playing his sweetest tunes. Wild pigs, stags, and other beasts at first would be terrified. But after a while, seduced, they draw closer, bewitched by these dulcet sounds, “until they fall, overpowered, into the snares.” And we have the word of Polybius, five centuries earlier, who asserts that Etruscan swineherds walk their charges up and down the beach, not driving them as we would expect, but leading them by blowing a trumpet.
In dentistry, too, one must salute these creative sons of Villanova. Skulls found at Tarquinia contain teeth neatly bridged and capped with gold.
Insecticides, which we regard as a small miracle of our century, were commonplace. The agronomist Saserna recommends an aromatic vine called serpentaria. Soak the root of this vine in a tub of water, then empty the tub on the infested earth. Or let’s say you become conscious of ravenous little guests in your bed at night. Should that be the case, dampen your bed with a potion of ox gall and vinegar.
Take an ordinary business such as the production of cheese. Here again the Etruscan surprises us. Do you know those great wheels made in Holland and Denmark? Listen, my friend, Etruscans in the village of Luni fashioned wheels of goat cheese weighing 1,000 pounds.
Yet right along with such innovations they clung obstinately to the mindless beliefs of their fathers. Even the Romans, who are not celebrated for a liberal imagination, had begun to grasp the nature of things more clearly. Seneca, commenting on the difference between Romans and Etruscans, offers this example: “Whereas we believe lightning to be released when clouds collide, they believe that clouds collide so as to release lightning.”
Another difference, more curious, which has not yet been explained, is that the Greeks and Romans and everybody else in that part of the world faced north when attempting to determine celestial influences. Only the Etruscans, those perverse, contradictory individuals, faced south. Why? Tomorrow, if the gods so ordain, we’ll dig up the answer.
You can see them as they were, just as they were, on the ragged stone sarcophagus lids. You see the rich and powerful, of course, rather than the poor, because nobody commemorates the poor; but the features of affluent Etruscans have been studiously registered on their coffins. And there can be little doubt that these sculpted effigies are portraits of unique men and women, not blind symbols.
At least so it seems to an impressionable observer. However, one must be cautious. When making little terra-cotta votive heads the Etruscan coroplasts often used molds, then a touch or two with a modeling tool could give an effect of individuality. In other words, a mass-produced standardized face with a few singular characteristics—let’s say a bobbed nose, a couple of warts, and a triple chin—is not the same as a portrait. Therefore one should regard the sarcophagus sculpture with mild distrust; maybe these figures, too, were only impersonations of life.
Yet no matter how they were done they do give the sense of being particular people. They are quickly recognizable and somehow appalling, like faces on the society page, and they tell quite a lot.
For instance, toward the end—while Etruscan civilization deteriorates—the sarcophagus men and women grow flabbily plump. They project an air of self-indulgence, of commercial success. And they seem strangely resigned or dissatisfied, as though they could anticipate the falling curtain. Yet if you look back a few centuries, not at these phlegmatic inheritors but at the pioneers who lived seven or six centuries before Christ, you notice a quality of strength or assurance like that found on prehistoric terra cotta statues from India and Thailand and Mexico. It is surprising and alarming to perceive what happens to a nation.
The despair these people felt has been reflected also in the late tomb paintings. Gone are the joyous leaping dolphins, the pipers and dancers. Instead, the hereafter looks grim. Mournful processions of the dead are escorted by gray-green putrescent demons with pointed ears and snakes in their hair. Ghoulish underworld heralds brandish tongs, ropes, and torches; they carry hammers and clubs with which to smash the skulls of the newly deceased. Everything seems to prefigure medieval Christianity.
Perhaps the Libri Fatales were responsible, not the minerals and timber, nor a degenerate religion—though it is true that the Fatales were religious texts. These books concerned the division of time, with limitations on the lives of men and women, and they placed a limit of ten saecula on the life of the Etruscan nation. A saeculum was a variable period, averaging about 100 years, and it was up to the priests to determine when each had ended. During the eighth and ninth saecula, while their city-states gradually were being absorbed by Rome, the people must have realized that the end was near, that nothing could save Etruria from extinction. Thus the prophecy became self-fulfilling.
In 44 B.C. when Julius Caesar was murdered a comet gleamed overhead, sheeted corpses gibbered in the street, and the Etruscan seer Vulcatius proclaimed an end to the ninth saeculum.
Claudius died ninety-eight years later—the last high Roman to understand the Etruscan language. His wife Plautia Urgulanilla was Etruscan, and Claudius had written a twenty-book history of them, Tyrrhenica, which has been lost. At his death, we are told, another brilliant comet appeared and lightning struck his father’s tomb, marking the end of the final saeculum. Archaeologists find no evidence of what might properly be called Etruscan civilization after that date.
These ominous books, the Fatales, were part of a complex prescription covering rules of worship, life beyond the grave, civil and military ordinances, the founding of cities, interpretation of miracles, et cetera. Much of it has vanished, but some was transcribed by Greek, Roman, and Byzantine chroniclers, so we have—along with the Fatales—the Libri Fulgurales and Haruspicini.
Because it derives from the verb “to lighten,” fulgurale, the first of these books naturally had to do with divination from objects hit by lightning. According to the sound and color of the bolt, and by the direction from which it came, a soothsayer would deduce which god had ordered the stroke and what it meant. The next step was to consult the Libri in order to learn what should be done. This was not easy. Any of nine gods might have thrown it, and Jupiter himself could hurl three different kinds of lightning. Etruscan skill at interpretation seems to have impressed the Romans; they themselves could recognize only one bolt from Jupiter’s hand. If the regnant god was enraged he struck, and that was that. Consequently they would call for an Etruscan whenever they wanted a truly subtle reading. It was an Etruscan, Spurinna, who advised Caesar against the Ides of March.
In 1878 near Piacenza in the Po valley a unique object turned up: a bronze model of a sheep liver. The surface was divided into forty compartments enclosing the names of various gods such as Cilens, Ani, Hercle, Thuflthas, Muantras, and Satres. Without a Rosetta stone it has been necessary to proceed inchwise, as Mayan linguists do, but still there has been progress and several of these names have been correlated with familiar Latin gods. Others remain incomprehensible. But the significance of the bronze object is understood. The liver, being the seat of life, was a rich source of information. A priest would examine the liver of a sacrificed animal for blemishes or deformity, and after interpreting what he saw he would consult the Libri Haruspicini for an appropriate ritual. The bronze liver unearthed at Piacenza might have been used to instruct apprentices.
How remote it sounds—interpreting divine will through lightning bolts and sheep livers—like something from Stonehenge or the labyrinths of Crete. Yet as late as the fifth century A.D. these services were ordered in Christian Rome: Pope Innocent I, frightened by the approach of Alaric’s Visigoths, consulted Etruscan fulgiatores and haruspices.
How remote, psychically, is Etruria? Well, my neighbor knocks on wood, millions consult the horoscope, and I myself don’t much care for room 13. Interpret that as you please. Now back to the facts.
This incomplete collection of sacred books is just about all the Etruscan literature we have. Otherwise there are only scraps, threads, allusions, and those brief monotonous remarks on funerary items, on mirrors, weapons, and little boxes:
I BELONG TO LARTHIA.
TARCHUNIES HAD ME MADE.
VEL PARTUNU, SON OF VELTHUR AND RAMTHA SATLNEI, DIED AGED TWENTY-EIGHT.
ASKA MI ELEIVANA, MINI, MULVANIKE MAMARCE VELCHANA, which of course means: “I am an oil bottle donated by Mamarce Velchana.”
A contemporary of Cicero mentions some tragedies written by Velna, or Volnius, but that is all we know, not the titles, not even the century. Indeed, there may not have been much Etruscan literature. If there was, it failed to excite the Romans.
In 1964 three rectangular sheets of gold were discovered near the port of Santa Severa. All were inscribed—one in Phoenician, two in Etruscan—perhaps telling a wonderful story, perhaps describing a voyage from Lydia. So, as you might imagine, there was whooping and dancing among Etruscologists. Unfortunately the Phoenician is not a translation of the Etruscan; linguists are convinced of that. Still, the plates have been helpful because the messages are similar: the king of Caere, Thefarie Velianas, is dedicating a shrine to the Lady Astarte in the month of the Sacrifice of the Sun. This ceremony, which must have been widely proclaimed, occurred about 500 B.C.
Latin inscriptions from the period of Roman hegemony often are found on monuments or on the pedestals of statues. One speaks of a military commander who led an army against “C,” which would mean Caere. He led another force against Sicily, thus becoming the first Etruscan general to cross the water, and when he returned from this punitive expedition he was rewarded with an eagle and a golden crown. Clearly he was a great general. His name, almost obliterated, appears to be “Vel X, son of Lars.”
What seems to resist oblivion, outlasting all other created things, including the greatest plays and the most exquisite poems, outlasting murals, statues, bronze mirrors, and stone sarcophagi, is pottery, the humble craftsman’s daily product. It is just about indestructible. Certain plastics may last until the end of the world—maybe longer, if anybody cares—but pottery shards are practically as durable, which is a bit of luck. They are easily glued together, very often they fit to perfection although the object may have been shattered millennia ago, and the most ordinary scraps reveal quite a lot because, almost from the beginning, potters have decorated their pots. Changes of taste, form, and technique accurately measure the passing years. The examination of pots and cups and plates, therefore, becomes a fundamental discipline of the archaeologist.
Kylix, alabastron, rhyton, hydria—Etruscan potters, often adapting Greek forms, steadily manufactured them, century upon century. Thousands have survived intact, or faintly chipped, and we can only guess how many would be around if grave robbers were more considerate.
For instance, the famous blackware called bucchero. Lawrence described these vases and dishes as opening out “like strange flowers, black flowers with all the softness and the rebellion of life.” Another Englishman, George Dennis—the same Dennis of whom Professor Pallottino disapproves—tells of being present during an excavation at Vulci in 1843. Under orders from Lucien Bonaparte’s widow, the workmen divided whatever they found into two groups: jewelry, richly painted Greek vases and so forth, which fetched a good price, on one side; everything of slight commercial value, such as bucchero dishes, on the other side. Whereupon, says Dennis, everything of little or no value was deliberately smashed. Widow Bonaparte did not want to dilute the market. “At the mouth of the pit in which they were at work, sat the capo, or overseer—his gun by his side. . . .”
One is reminded of Genghis Khan destroying what he was unable to use because he could not imagine what else should be done with it. Or Diego de Landa burning the elegant Mayan codices. Or those Mohammedan soldiers who broke into the library at Alexandria and helped themselves to 700,000 books—fuel enough to heat the public baths for six months.
Today what remains of Etruria?
A stone leopard. Dice. Chariot fragments. Several lead discs. An ivory writing tablet. Those three sheets of gold. Odd, mysterious items such as the bronze handle picked up at Fabbrecce, near Città di Castello, which shows a man wearing a crown of leaves, arms raised, with a dog or a lion on the ring above his head—with a human arm issuing from the animal’s mouth! What does it mean? Or the engraved ostrich egg from Quinto Fiorentino. An ostrich egg with Etruscan lettering. What about that?
And the Capitoline wolf—emblem of Rome. We have this wild bronze mother, which probably was cast at Veii during the fifth century before Christ. Romulus and Remus, the sucklings, who crawled beneath her sometime during the sixteenth century, are meant to symbolize how Rome drew nourishment from Etruria.
So we have all this and more. Quite a lot more. But if one item alone testifies to the fugitive existence of these people it must be the ivory writing tablet. On its surface are traces of wax and some very old scratches; therefore we assume that an Etruscan stylus scratched the tablet.
Professor Luisa Banti, terse and formidable, says no. Without qualification: No.
We assume the tablet belonged to a child because of its small size and because an alphabet has been cut into the rim, just as you see our alphabet printed in bold letters on the cover or first page of a child’s tablet.
Professor Banti does not waste time on this sentimental hypothesis. Instead, she offers two explanations, not mutually exclusive, for the small size and for the presence of an alphabet. First, the tablet may have been symbolic. Writing was then a new art in Etruria and the personage with whom it was buried wanted everybody to know that he could write. Second, the tablet might have been used for practice. If you have trouble forming letters you need a model.
The argument that Etruscan adults needed a model abecedary is tenuous but convincing: the alphabet was engraved also on quite a few miniature vases and these vases are thought to have been “inkpots”—containers for the red or black liquid that served as ink when writing on papyrus.
Regardless of who owned this tablet or how it was used, it must have been a delightful possession because one could magically erase the letters by waving a baton of hot metal over the wax. A hole drilled through the handle implies that there was a string, meaning it probably was worn like a necklace.
Such things—objects accompanying a funeral—are the most reliable guide to Etruria, as long as they are studied without preconceived theories. They are the one true Etruscan source, says Banti, “the only one unaltered by personal ideas, or by the interpretations and prejudices of the ancient writers whose works we use as historical sources. Archaeological finds are the archive documents of antiquity, documents that have to be studied patiently in museums and in excavation diaries. They are safer and more credible than the scant information handed down by ancient Greek and Latin historians.”
We could almost fill a railroad train with Etruscan bric-a-brac. Corroded swords, dented bronze helmets, pots, plates, boxes, flasks, cinerary urns, mirrors, figurines, antefixes, cylinders, and so on. And yet, paradoxically, we don’t seem to have nearly enough. We hunt for more and more, perhaps because it’s easy to imagine how much has been lost.
What else remains?
Inside those odd funerary beehives that dot the Tuscan hillsides we come upon stained murals whose colors evoke memories of Crete and Egypt—pink, green, black, white, red, yellow—though the sensibility is Etruscan. Some of them cross the centuries between us like a bolt of lightning. A mural at Chiusi shows a charioteer who has just been pitched out of his vehicle: a moment from now he will land on his head. We can understand this. We appreciate and comprehend his problem. One can empathize with him more easily than with a Cretan acrobat somersaulting over the horns of a bull.
All right, we have these disintegrating murals. What else?
Sundry goods. Everyday merchandise. Scraps of apparel. Here and there a tantalizing curiosity.
In the National Museum of Yugoslavia stands a rigid female mummy shaped like a cudgel, or a Giacometti sculpture, or one of those elongated prehistoric Sardinian bronzes; and what is unique about this mummy is that, although it turned up in Egypt, the linen wrappings are covered with Etruscan liturgical formulas. Furthermore, what was written on the bandages has no connection with the burial. The linen contains 1,185 words, evenly spaced, written in red. Allowing for repetitions and illegible areas, there are 530 different Etruscan words, only a few of which can be translated. Vinum is obvious, and some others are not difficult for philologists: fler meaning an offering or sacrifice, tur meaning to give, ais or eis being the word for god. But most of the text is indecipherable: “cilths spurestres enas ethrse tinsi tiurim avils chis . . .”
Now the red-haired young woman stands naked in Zagreb, her leathery brown body stripped of its last garment, the one thing about her that excited professionals. Nobody knows her name or where she came from. Eca suthi . . . But then what? She could have been Egyptian, she could have been Etruscan. The linen roll probably was brought to Egypt by Etruscan colonists during their migration from Lydia about the ninth century B.C.—assuming such a migration did take place—or brought by a wealthy Etruscan family fleeing the Roman encroachment.
So much for scholarship.
You can visit Etruria with no trouble. Every morning the tourist buses leave Rome, air-conditioned buses with multilingual guides. They will take you to Cerveteri and Tarquinia and other famous sites. Or you can go by yourself and walk along the dusty paths, which may well be those the Etruscans used—because paths, like pots, last indefinitely. And you get the feeling that not much has changed. In midsummer the bloated purplish flies have no fear; they believe they are entitled to stick to your face. Pale blue blossoms of rosemary decorate the low hills, thick with prickly shrubs, and there is a sense of the Tyrrhenian Sea not far off.
You can visit the places where they lived and search the hills and enter the caves and burrows overgrown with trees. Uneasily you look at the cippi—stone symbols outside their tombs, a phallus to show that a man lies within, a house with a triangular roof to indicate a woman. That is to say, you can find the Etruscans—if you pretend. Because of the murals and painted ceramics, because of what you have been told or have read, you dimly perceive them. Almost. But it doesn’t quite work. Imagination fails. There is no authentic Etruscan sound, no touch of an Etruscan hand, nor the odor of a plump Etruscan body. They seem to be present, yet they are not.
At last you return comfortably to Rome on the bus, having been told about Etruscans; or you return by yourself, exhausted and sweaty and confused, knowing no more, the past unrecaptured.
A Roman art dealer named Augusto Jandolo got a little closer. When he was a boy in Tuscany he watched as the sarcophagus of a Tarquinian nobleman was opened. The great stone cover was difficult to lift; but finally it rose, stood on end for a moment, and fell heavily aside. Then, says Jandolo, he saw something that he would remember until his dying day:
Inside the sarcophagus I saw resting the body of a young warrior in full accoutrements, with helmet, spear, shield, and greaves. Let me stress that it was not a skeleton I saw; I saw a body, with all its limbs in place, stiffly outstretched as though the dead man had just been laid in the grave. It was the appearance of but a moment. Then, by the light of the torches, everything seemed to dissolve. The helmet rolled to the right, the round shield fell into the collapsed breastplate of the armor, the greaves flattened out at the bottom of the sarcophagus, one on the right, the other on the left. At the first contact with air the body which had lain inviolate for centuries suddenly dissolved into dust. . . . In the air, however, and around the torches, a golden powder seemed to be hovering.
