The Etruscan territory

The Etruscans are one of the oldest civilizations that lived in Italy between the VIII century BC. and the beginning of the III century BC, in the areas geographically attributable today to Tuscany, Lazio, and Umbria, known as proper Etruria, and in the territory between the rivers Tiber and Arno. The apogee of Etruscan expansion was reached in the middle of the VI century BC when they expanded into two new territories, the Po Valley Etruria (coinciding with much of the Po Valley), and the Campanian Etruria.

A brief history of their origins and their diffusion

Etruscans have always been considered a mysterious civilization, and their origin, development, and legacy have been debated for centuries. Since antiquity, various hypotheses about their arrival in Italy and their heritage were discussed. According to Herodotus, a Greek historian of the V century BC, they migrated from Lydia, a region of Asia Minor (now Turkey). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus

For Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a historian who lived between 60 BC and 7 AC, Etruscans originated in the Italian peninsula and moved from the Alpine regions to the central part of Italy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysius_of_Halicarnassus

After the birth of modern archeology and the beginning of a systematic study of finds, it was still believed that the Etruscans descended from the Alpine regions to central Italy. Finally, in the XX century, eminent Etruscologists concluded that looking for a single origin for the Etruscans might have led archaeologists to point in the wrong direction. It had become clear that many processes must have been those that had led to the formation of the Etruscan people, such as different ethnic and cultural origins, numerous commercial contacts, the presence of an autochthonous culture called Villanoviana and the migration of populations arriving in Italy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscology

Scientists have therefore hypothesized that at the beginning of the first millennium BC, an ethnic and cultural “melting together” among people on the Italian peninsula and men and women from the eastern Mediterranean basin, bearers of more advanced cultures and technological knowledge, was happening. At this point, it could have started the formation processes that led to the beginning of a new civilization.

Recently, with the expansion of scientific disciplines, genetic studies applied to Etruscology have produced new elements to re-discuss the origin of the Etruscan people. This is thanks to the choice of genealogical profiles of individuals present in Umbria and Tuscany and the DNA extracted from individuals having lived at different periods in the same geographical area. Among these studies, “The Origin and Legacy of the Etruscan” by Johannes Krause, geneticist, and director of the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, is particularly relevant. https://www.shh.mpg.de/2051535/etruscan-genomes

Indeed, from the DNA extracted from bone finds and examination of blood samples from living populations, it can be concluded that the Etruscans were not of Asian origin and did not come from the eastern Mediterranean. Quoting the conclusions of the work: “The current study, with a time transect of ancient genomic information spanning almost 2000 years collected from 12 archaeological sites, resolves lingering questions about Etruscan origins, showing no evidence for a recent population movement from Anatolia. In fact, the Etruscans shared the genetic profile of the Latins living in nearby Rome, with a large proportion of their genetic profiles coming from steppe-related ancestry that arrived in the region during the Bronze Age”. Therefore, contrary to some hypotheses, the Etruscan genetic heritage does not appear to derive from movements of populations originating in the Near East, as the genetic lineage would appear to have remained stable for at least 800 years from the Iron Age to the period of the Roman Republic.

However, the roots of the Etruscan language remain unresolved and even more mysterious. The idiom is not yet well deciphered and stays isolated from the linguistic context of Indo-European origin in which it was geographically immersed. As stated by David Caramelli, a Professor at the University of Florence: “because genes follow spoken language, that suggests a more complex scenario, as the assimilation of early Italic speakers by the Etruscan speech community, possibly during a prolonged period of admixture over the second millennium BCE”. In other words, contradictory results in non-mentioned genetic research ( some studies would show colonization from the Middle East ) and the linguistic dilemma demonstrate that there is still much to be studied to arrive at a definitive and verifiable historical-evolutionary conclusion about the origins of the Etruscan people. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David-Caramelli