Gli etruschi

Very Short Introductions #389

by Christopher Smith

Gli Etruschi sono stati un popolo che ha avuto un ruolo determinante in Italia tra il 900 e il 400 a.C. e hanno lasciato un’eredità importante, come mostrano le testimonianze archeologiche, significative e affascinanti, dalle pitture tombali, alle sculture, ai gioielli. Ma la loro storia, insieme alla loro cultura, religione, lingua, è ancora piena di cose da scoprire, a partire dal controverso dibattito sull’origine. Andando oltre il mito dei ‘misteriosi’ Etruschi, Smith restituisce un ritratto sintetico e completo, esplorando come vissero e collocandoli nel loro contesto geografico, economico e politico. E indaga infine come siano stati percepiti nei secoli per valutare il loro impatto sulla nostra storia e sull’Occidente in generale.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Ancient History, Italy, Archaeology, Classical Studies, Classics

167 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 26, 2014

Reviews

[Jan-Maat]

I was recently in the British Museum, trying not to collide with the various tour groups, when I found myself in the Etruscan and early Italy gallery. In a glass case, free of currency producing foreign tourists, was a display about the cult site of Diana - the lake at Nemi which inspired Frazer's The Golden Bough. The display labels explained that nothing yet had been found to suggest that it was a site sacred to Diana (Artemis) but that it was clearly an Etruscan cult site in the pre-Roman period, of a sudden a crumb about the Etruscans developed in to a full blown appetite, to my displeasure I found that downstairs the museum authorities had reduced the amount of space given over to selling books and so the museum could not provide me with an Etruscan meal. The first Etruscan book I came across was too dear for my wallet in these austere times so I fell upon this one, and Livy's The Early History of Rome which does not have much to say about the Etruscans for all that the Romans spend so much time fighting them (ten years besieging Veii we are told, in an attempt to bring a properly epic dimension to the early history of Rome).

In line with other books in the Very short introductions series, I found it expensive for what it was, and it was a little too discursive; talking round the Etruscans rather than laying them out on the page, for example Smith mentions that older books often claim that the Etruscan language is not understood, tells us that they wrote (or carved) inscriptions in the Greek script, that their inscriptions are generally comprehensible but not particularly interesting and then leaves it at that, mentioning some inscribed tablets, two calendars of ritual and a linen book 1,500 words long cut up and used to wrap a body, now in Zagreb. Previous reading asked the question of what language group did Etruscan belong to - was it even an Indo-European language, or were they migrants to Europe as the ancient Greek believed - or worse yet, like the Basques, descendants of the indigenous Europeans who reserved the right to the right to tell all later arrivals to bugger off back to where-soever they came from with their carrots and domesticated animals, along which lines I had also read that genetically or physically modern Tuscany has a disproportionately large number of people, like me, of blood group O, which I thought passing strange since blood group O is relatively abundant anyway in western Europe. However Smith leaves us with the mention of 12,000 inscriptions mostly from burial or funerary contexts. Smith is of the opinion that the Etruscans were always there, that they emerged as distinct cultural group from a north Italian context. Smith does like the idea of considering the Etruscans as mysterious, I suppose it is fair to say that of the ancient Mediterranean peoples we know a fair amount about the Romans, the Athenians, and the Jews (although much remains obscure even about these three) while everybody else is relatively more obscure and the Etruscans are by no means the least understood. Still Smith's text, unlike an episode of Scooby-Doo, does not unmask them and render them un-mysterious.

"The etruscans claimed that their religion had been revealed to them. A peasant was ploughing a field near Tarquinia and was astounded to see a child with the face of an old man arising from the furrow. He cried out and all the people of Etruria came" (p.89) after teaching all the people how to read the signs sent by the gods the child disappeared (as they do in these kinds of story). The Romans adopted Etruscan practices in these regards (as well apparently as gladiatorial contests) - reading entrails, observing omens, the Etruscans divided the visual plain into segments, perhaps along similar lines to this model of a sheep's liver,each assigned to a god or divine force - where a bird appeared could then be 'read', obviously this required that the observer had stand at a certain point or one could get conflicting readings - Livy tells of an invalid election - since the tent was pitched at the wrong point for a soothsayer to sit and observe the skies for portents, while in the civil war between Caesar and Pompey apparently the southern Etruscan region backed Pompey - which rather suggests that their soothsaying skills weren't terribly good, purely coincidently says Smith, Julius Caesar, (the Roman geezer) never paid attention to what Etruscan soothsayers had to say about the ides of March. Smith gives over a chapter to the Roman period in which inscriptions in Etruscan disappear still his story about 5th century Etruscan haruspices (soothsayers) suggesting to the pope that they zap the Visigoths with lightening is an indication that parts of their cultural tradition remained strong. Smith says that the Etruscans picked up from the Greeks the idea that the gods had human form, prior to this their conception of them was formless.

The Etruscans developed bronze-hinged sandals (which don't sound terribly comfortable) and cosmetic dentistry - at least golden bridges for teeth survive from the excavated burials. When Hannibal invaded, the Etruscans did not throw off the Roman yoke, the implication seems to be that Etruscan society was stratified between rich and poor, powerful and powerless and had been troubled by social conflict, allowing the Romans to march in and impose stable political solutions (otherwise known as Roman rule).

The social position of women seems to have been different to that in Roman society, and Smith says Etruscans had a different aesthetic to the Greeks, funerary sculpture includes some relatively podgy men for instance as well as depicting men and women together on c. Etruscan Art also included tomb frescos I didn't feel that Smith had much interesting to say about Etruscan Art.

The point which most strongly caught my attention was " By the late 4th century [BC] Rome had geared itself up to a cycle of warfare that at some level already seems obsessive, but her major foe, the Samnites, was behaving similarly. The repetitive and at times highly ritualised form of the warfare is noteworthy.Both sides were in some senses expressing their values of valour and manliness as much as they were achieving real gains " (p104). The ritual element particularly as battles were preceded by the ritual reading of entrails, strikes a cord.

At the end of the book, for me, the Etruscans remain both mysterious and intriguing.

[Michael Huang · Rating 3 out of 5]

Etruscans are often called a mysterious people. Etruria showed social development in late Bronze Age (c. 1300-900 BCE). From 950-750, Etruria underwent a revolution. In 8th c. BCE, there’s a new alphabet. The Mediterranean is full of interactions and networks. The Greeks were probably the most active. They came to South Italy from mid 8 th Century BCE. Etruscans started to build temples like the Greek but they are not just passive receivers. Indeed, their crafts and wares are probably why the Greeks came to trade. Their art (tomb painting, bronze mirrors, jewelry) show Greek style but can be argued to have developed just as early.

For some reason, and it’s not clear why, Etruria didn’t unite to resist the expansion of Rome. Perhaps there’s no unity between the poor and the elite. In Hannibal’s war, Etruscan cities helped Hannibal a little but also Scipio a little too. Once Rome dominance is secured, colonies including Etruria paid the price for Augustus’s land grant.

Calling Etruscans a mysterious people is standard practice in tourism brochures. But there’s plenty of sites and grave artifacts left. We just don’t have written records: Latin replaced Etruscan. Although Claudius’ wife was descendants from Etruscan kings, and he thus wrote a 20-volume account of their life, unfortunately it was all lost. Over time, there’s a gradual move uphill in Etruria. This combined with the early medieval churches gives us the picturesque landscape of Tuscany we see today, especially in those brochures.

[Faustibooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75/5
Fine book about such a fascinating and intriguing culture!! I never knew much about the Etruscans, but this book certainly gave a short introduction that piqued my interest to read more about them in the future :)

Also motivated me to visit the cool sites!

[Grady · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this ebook on sale on impulse - not wise, since I should have been measuring the opportunity cost of the book in time, not money - but the gamble turned out well for this book, which is exactly what it says: a very short introduction to the Etruscans.

In which one may learn:
* the Etruscans are not mysterious, although there remains an incentive for museums and tourist bureaus to present them that way;
* the Etruscans organized themselves along significantly different folkways than the Romans. Politically, they were a hierarchical, agriculture-based society with power divided up among small cities, with an apparently ineffective federation structure for joint decision-making. Materially, Etruscan culture included homegrown technologies and crafts, but also picked and chose some styles (while leaving others) as Greek and Phoenician traders established links around the western Mediterranean.
* Culturally, the Etruscans were modest about their bodies - they did not depict naked people much - but also seem to have been much more down to earth in their relationship to body image than the Greeks or Romans: figures on sarcophagi are frequently pudgy, to signal they had lived well and comfortably.

The author follows the Etruscans into the Roman Empire to make the case that they didn't simply disappear as a cultural unit when they were absorbed, but that elements of Etruscan folkways and agricultural methods likely continued on past the fall of the western Empire. Overall, the book serves its purpose well, and offers helpful suggestions for further reading.

[Brian Turner · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the first of the Very Short Introductions I've been disappointed with. Perhaps it's because I wasn't very familiar with Etruscan history, but I found this book to be meandering and very unstructured.

I was left with the distinct impression that this book was written by someone with a specialty in art history who was trying to fit everything else around that, which means each chapter inevitably veered into the influence of Ancient Greece culture on art and Etruscan tomb paintings.

There were also big statements made without any explanation. At one point it's clearly stated that Sardinia was really important to the Etruscans - but the island is never mentioned again.

Despite specific chapters, each one inevitably discussed Greek art and tomb paintings, and I never really came away with a sense of history unfolding in a linear and constructive way. I appreciate that there is a sense of mystery about the Etruscans, but this book did little to illuminate it.

[Victor Sonkin · Rating 3 out of 5]

(Three is good, do not forget this.) A very sound short introduction to the Etruscan civilization, its composition, its connection to Bronze Age and Villanovan finds in Italy, its (still very poorly understood) tribal/state structure, its language, its art, and the history of its discovery. The author tries to debunk the Etruscan 'mystique', but there is very little to debunk it with: many aspects of Etruscan culture are poorly understood, because the Etruscans are not subjects of history sensu proprio, and their written records are scant and half-deciphered.

For a very short introduction, a good introduction.

[Hank Hoeft · Rating 3 out of 5]

This Very Short Introduction started out a little dry, but then got more interesting after the first couple of chapters. Before reading this, I knew almost nothing about the Etruscans, beyond their reputation of being "mysterious." After reading, I learned that there are still aspects of the Etruscans that remain mysterious--namely, where they (and their non-Indo-European language) came from--but the "riddle" of where they went to, isn't a riddle at all--they were mostly absorbed by Roman culture.

[Demetri · Rating 4 out of 5]

If the Etruscans still arrive in the popular imagination trailing a faint fog of “mystery,” it is partly because the sources invite it – and partly because we have been trained to like the fog. Their own literary voice is thin where Greece and Rome are loud; their most vivid surviving images are painted for the dead; their language is legible but rarely expansive. It is easy, and profitable, to treat all this as a riddle. Christopher Smith’s “The Etruscans: A Very Short Introduction” sets itself a sturdier task: not to banish wonder, but to replace theatrical darkness with workable light.

Smith’s refusal to dramatize ignorance is the book’s governing ethic. It does not drain the subject of strangeness – the Etruscans remain, in many ways, unlike their neighbors – but it denies the reader the lazy pleasures of the unknowable. What replaces those pleasures is method. The book is, at its best, an argument about how to think: how to read ancient authors who are themselves constructing identities; how to interpret archaeological change without defaulting to invasion or mass migration; how to place Etruria in the Mediterranean without letting Rome’s later dominance turn every earlier century into mere prelude.

That stance is established in the opening chapters on origins and language. Smith begins where the clichés begin, but he does not flatter them. The urge to make the Etruscans arrive from somewhere else, preferably by ship, is treated as a problem in ancient ethnography and modern desire. Origin stories in the classical tradition do cultural work; they explain difference, confer prestige, and impose narrative order on the messy fact of human movement. Smith does not need to prove that no one ever moved. He insists, instead, that movement is not the only explanation for cultural change, and that ethnicity is not a fossil buried intact in the ground, waiting to be recovered.

The language chapter performs a similar demystification. Etruscan, Smith reminds us, is not a sealed vault. We can read it; we can recognize its structure; we can identify many recurring forms. The difficulty is that what survives is overwhelmingly formulaic: names, kinship terms, dedications, labels, brief ritual statements. A language can be “known” in its alphabet and “unknown” in its expressive range, because history has preserved the equivalent of receipts and gravestones rather than poems and speeches. The “mystery,” in other words, is often an index of genre loss, not of scholarly incompetence.

With those preliminaries in place, the book’s deeper ambition comes into focus: to make Etruscan history narratable without forcing it into the familiar plotlines of Greece and Rome. Smith’s Etruria is not a waiting room for Latin greatness. It is a region shaped by geography and resources, by city competition and long-distance exchange, by changing forms of inequality, and by the stubborn fact that most of the people who lived there did not leave us literary portraits of themselves. The result is a history that feels less like a biography of a nation than like a study in social formation: how communities become cities, how elites consolidate, how ritual and display stabilize hierarchy, how contact transforms without necessarily displacing.

The chapters on the emergence of the city and the Villanovan period show this premise at work. Smith refuses the fantasy of abrupt founding moments. Urbanization is treated as a gradual process of aggregation and centralization: smaller communities clustering into larger sites; hills chosen for defense and visibility; territories asserted and managed; sanctuaries becoming anchors for communal identity. The city, in this account, is not simply an “arrival” of complexity; it is a solution to problems of coordination and competition. It provides a stage on which power can become visible and a mechanism by which surplus can be organized.

Calling the Villanovan phase a “revolution” could sound like marketing, but Smith earns the term by tying material change to social reorganization. Cremation cemeteries, hut-shaped urns, and the growing differentiation of grave goods become signs of a society in which households and lineages are being reimagined, and in which hierarchy is becoming visible and durable. It is a quiet kind of revolution – not the clamor of conquest, but the steady recalibration of who counts, who commands, who is remembered, and who is allowed to leave traces.

The book’s middle chapters cover the period when Etruria becomes most outwardly visible: the centuries in which Greek and Phoenician contact, expanding maritime routes, and the exploitation of mineral resources helped generate extraordinary wealth. Here Smith is careful with inherited labels that can smuggle assumptions into the story, particularly the idea that “outside influence” must mean cultural dependence. The Etruscans in this narrative are choosers. They borrow and adapt; they translate motifs and techniques into local forms; they deploy the prestige of the imported in the service of local rivalries.

What emerges is not merely an inventory of glittering objects but a picture of how wealth reorganizes social life. Prestige goods are not floating decorations; they are instruments in systems of alliance, rivalry, and display. The ability to build, to sponsor large ritual gatherings, to commission funerary spaces that command attention, to standardize craft production and direct it toward elite needs – all of this belongs, for Smith, to the same historical transformation. Even when the prose remains deliberately restrained, the underlying story is of intensification: more surplus, more competition over it, more need to translate power into durable form.

The chapter on tomb painting and Etruscan art is among the book’s strongest, precisely because it resists the tourist’s temptation to treat the painted tomb as a transparent window into belief. Smith keeps the reader attentive to context. Tombs are elite constructions, curated for memory, saturated with performance. The banquet scenes, dancers, athletes, and mythic episodes are not simply pictures of what the dead hope to do forever. They are images of how the living wish to see themselves: prosperous, socially complete, held within a world that still contains danger and ambiguity. Art here becomes evidence not of timeless “Etruscan character” but of historically situated self-fashioning.

Smith is also attentive to what Etruscan art makes unusually hard to ignore: the body. The images are frank about pleasure and risk, about sport and sexuality, about conviviality and violence. Women appear in ways that complicate standard Mediterranean assumptions, and the visual record pushes the reader to ask questions about visibility and power rather than to settle for easy claims about “freedom” or “equality.” The art chapter, in other words, functions as social history, and it strengthens the book’s broader insistence that culture is not frosting on politics but one of the ways politics is lived.

From there the narrative turns toward crisis, and it is here that Smith’s refusal of melodrama pays off. “Empire, crisis, and response” is not written as the beginning of a sad decline. He acknowledges the pressures that converged on Etruscan cities – competition in the south, shifting power balances in the north, the slow tightening of Roman hegemony – but he resists the tidy morality play in which fragmented city-states are punished for failing to become a nation. Crisis is treated as a historical condition: the environment in which choices are made, alliances recalibrated, resources reallocated, and cultural expression altered. The story becomes not “fall,” but adaptation under constraint.

Religion, one of the sites where “mystery” has been most aggressively sold, is presented as a system of knowledge and authority rather than an exotic curiosity. Divination and ritual practice become ways of organizing uncertainty and legitimizing decision-making. Smith does not romanticize the “Etrusca disciplina,” but he also refuses to sneer. He shows why Roman respect for Etruscan religious expertise is not a quaint footnote but a clue to how cultural influence can persist even as political autonomy diminishes: the conquered can still be specialists, still be necessary, still shape the terms of legitimacy.

The Roman conquest is likewise not narrated as a clean break. Smith gives weight to the long, uneven, negotiated process by which Etruscan autonomy ebbed. That attention to duration is one of the book’s most salutary habits. Too many accounts treat conquest as a switch flipped from “before” to “after.” Smith instead follows the slow movement of power: the founding of colonies, the reworking of landholding, the shifting incentives that encourage elites to align themselves with Rome, and the gradual narrowing of space in which independent Etruscan politics can operate. Loss is real, but it is experienced as process, not as instant erasure.

Perhaps the most surprising chapter, and one of the most revealing, is the one on clothing and the body. Its inclusion signals Smith’s broader intention: to treat identity as something enacted, worn, and read. Dress is not trivia here; it is a code through which status, gender, and belonging are made visible. The Etruscan body, in representation, is frequently unembarrassed – reclining, dancing, ornamented, publicly social. To place clothing beside conquest and religion is to insist that power operates not only through institutions and battles but through visibility and habit, through who may appear where and in what form.

The book’s “Imperial epilogue” continues its anti-vanishing project. By extending the story into the Roman period, Smith refuses the comforting fiction that the Etruscans simply disappeared when their language waned. Language loss is real, and he does not soften it, but he treats it as part of a broader transformation of the region: new economic regimes, new patterns of landholding, new forms of local prestige. The Etruscans do not dissolve into nothingness. They become part of a composite world in which memories are preserved unevenly and often through the very power that absorbed them.

The concluding chapter on the history of Etruscan studies is a fitting coda because it turns the book back on the reader. Smith shows how the Etruscans became “mysterious”: how antiquarianism, nationalism, romantic longing, and the market for the exotic shaped which questions were asked and which answers were made popular. It is not merely institutional history. It is a warning about how disciplines manufacture their own atmospheres, and about how easily “mystery” can become an excuse for intellectual laziness – a way of avoiding the harder work of careful reconstruction.

All of this makes “The Etruscans: A Very Short Introduction” an unusually responsible guide. It has the virtues of its format – compression, clarity, accessibility – without succumbing to the common vice of treating brevity as an alibi. Smith is careful with uncertainty and resists the urge to make every problem yield a clean solution. The result is a book that teaches not only about the Etruscans but about historical thinking itself: how to weigh sources, how to read material culture, how to keep the boundaries of knowledge visible even while making an argument.

Smith’s style suits that purpose. The voice is controlled, lightly skeptical, and occasionally sharp when confronted with inherited bad habits – the habit of treating a lack of long texts as proof of intellectual deficiency, or the habit of calling every imported motif “Greek” and letting that adjective do the work of explanation. The tone resembles a good seminar rather than a guided tour: firm about what can be supported, explicit about what remains contested, and careful not to inflate speculation into story.

That care can make the book feel modest, but it is also what makes it usable. An introduction that pretends to settle debates produces confident readers with brittle knowledge. Smith produces a different kind of confidence: the confidence to say “we do not know,” and then to ask the next better question. The pay-off is that the Etruscans appear not as an exotic exception but as a society with recognizable problems – organizing cities, legitimizing elites, managing inequality, negotiating cultural exchange, and absorbing conquest without becoming a mere preface to Rome. It rewards rereading for most readers.

Still, the same features that make the book admirable also mark its limits. The prose’s controlled temperature can keep the reader at a slight distance. Smith’s sentences do their work cleanly, but they rarely linger long enough to let the non-specialist feel the drama in the body – the clang and smoke of production, the crowded politics of competing cities, the human costs of inequality and conquest. At times the compression produces speed: centuries and sites pass in quick succession, and a reader new to the terrain may wish for more pauses, more scenes, more moments where place and event slow into focus.

There is also the unavoidable constraint of perspective. Etruscan history, as we can write it, is skewed toward elites, toward those who left behind tombs, inscriptions, bronzes, and painted rooms. Smith is candid about this, and he resists easy moralizing, but the absence remains. The poor are difficult to see; the enslaved, who likely formed a portion of the invisible labor underpinning elite display, are harder still. A very short introduction cannot conjure a chorus where the record supplies only faint solo lines.

These are, in the end, criticisms that arise because the book refuses to cheat. It leaves the reader wanting more because it declines the cheap satisfactions that would have made it feel complete: a single origin story, a tidy political blueprint, a simple arc of rise and fall. Smith is better at framing problems than at staging scenes, better at sketching structures than at telling set pieces. For some readers, that will read as dryness. For others, it will feel like integrity – and, in a field long burdened by the seductions of the enigmatic, integrity is not a minor virtue.

On its own terms, then – as an introduction that refuses mystification, that integrates archaeology with social history, that resists Roman teleology while acknowledging Roman power – “The Etruscans: A Very Short Introduction” earns a thoughtful, qualified admiration. My rating for it is 74 out of 100, a mark that reflects how much it accomplishes within its format, and how deliberately it declines to become the grand, immersive book it sometimes tempts us to want.

[Vincent T. Ciaramella · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have read a few books in this series and have walked away feeling like I know something more than I did on the topic. This one, not so much. I feel like I am staring at the Etruscans underwater. Everything is still blurry and out of focus.

The book keeps mentioning that they are not mysterious but to me they still are a mystery. The book seems heavy on the detail but not on the right stuff. I grew bored reading most of it and it was a pain to finish. I did learn a few new things and that's why it gets 2 stars. I will most likely trade this book in as I don't think it will be worth a re-read in the future.

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very useful on literary, archeological, and historiographical issues. It has a section of linguistics, but this I did not find as useful. The more ancient elements are dry reading insomuch as there can be much narrative attached. Overall, worth the read

[Kelly Burns · Rating 2 out of 5]

Extremely difficult to read and I finished it knowing about as much about the Etruscans as I did when I started it. A shame as Volterra is one of my most favourite places in the world for its history and atmosphere, it would have been nice to find out more about the people who built it!

[Birgitta Hoffmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short and informative overview of the current research, but careful it gives very much Smith's views, Italian and German books on the Etruscans differ.

[Ryan Specht-Boardman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is well written and interesting. I’m not sure someone would ever need to read anything more than this unless they are really into Etruscan history. I was surprised by the comparatively little we know of the Etruscans: as a Mediterranean power that was contemporaneous to ancient Rome, Greece, Phoenicia, Carthage, and Egypt, our historical understanding of the Etruscans is quite limited. This isn’t a mark against this book - the author can’t just make up facts - but the general lack of a historical record leaves a bit more conjecture than perhaps your typical history book, especially of a Mediterranean power. But, it makes it a perfect subject for a Very Short Introduction series as I can’t imagine there being much more on the topic than what was covered here.

[Matthew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dry book. I like the Etruscans, I was sad I wasn't able to visit the museum in Rome about them on a recent trip. This book assumes some familiarity with the Etruscans and their reputation, it seems to be responding in part to debates around the Etruscans and their '''popular''' (as popular as the Etruscans can be) reputation. Yet when we discuss a civilization who we have limited written records of, of course there are difficulties in discussing them. And so Smith examines material culture in some very dry ways. He zips through aspects of their history and legacy, but I do not find him an engaging writer. You are honestly better off reading the wikipedia page about the Etruscans.

[Overbooked ✎ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although this book includes interesting ideas and perspectives, it is not recommended as an introduction. It works more like and essay on Etruscan sites and the studies of Etruscology rather than as book on the history and culture of the Etruscans. The author is prone to flights in terms of time and places, and consequently the topic is not presented in a well-organised way, which can disorient the reader and confuse rather than clarify. It lacks even the most basic of chronology or timeline, however, it has a number of maps that are useful as reference.

[Amanda · Rating 2 out of 5]

My first very short introduction book - I think the weakness of it was in the subject matter more so than the writing. There’s not much left remaining of the Etruscans and therefore I imagine it’s hard for any book to give an informed/objective/organized sense of where they came from (this first part of the book alone made me want to stop reading), who they were socially/culturally, what their influences were on succeeding empires, etc

[alice]

interessantissimi i capitoli più antropologici, su arte, costumi, religione, abiti e accessori!
ho fatto invece molta fatica a leggere quelli più storici/geografici/economici (battaglie, conquiste, strutture delle città, commerci e scambi vari….) ma è semplicemente dovuto ad una mia attitudine, non penso sia il libro ad essere scritto male.

[Pete Missingham · Rating 4 out of 5]

A slightly frustrating book. The supplied map does not show where the Etruscans lived. Likewise the alphabet chart does not show the Etruscan alphabet. However, the book does provide the basic foundations to be further researched later.

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Breve introduzione agli etruschi, in cui viene debitamente considerata anche la fase di assimilazione da parte dei romani

[Panaes · Rating 1 out of 5]

Poorly written, not structured, random information on Etruscan civilization...

[Melissa Barbosa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this book.

[Kelly Pavlik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Basic information about a lost culture, Etraria. Covers many aspects of Etruscans and Etruscan lifestyle.

[Mad Juice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for class: beware ITS REALLY DENSE. Highlight what’s important …. Highlights whole page. Good overview wish there were more pictures to illustrate some archeological concepts

[Juan Lopera · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found Smiths work an excellent overview of the Etruscans, with high level exposure to major themes and areas of contention.

Unlike other readers, I did not find the book too dry or plodding.

[P · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps Smith's prose was cut short by a strict editor whenever he threatened to stay too long on any particular hobby horse. The result is a rather disjointed introduction that dwells on how the Etruscans were not mysterious and the romance around the mysterious Etruscans was a modern invention. Most theories attribute their origins to Greece or the east generally speaking; Smith does a creditable job of explaining how the imponderable question of origins is actually more significant in revealing the obsession with ethnicity. He contends that the Etruscans were the descendants of those buried at the Villanovan burial site of an earlier period, suggesting continuous domicile in the region. The reason the earlier people are not identified as Etruscan is because scholarly notions about Etruscans are inseparable from their urbanized lifestyle of the later period.

Since they left little of their own writing behind (barring a few inscriptions), we are forced to rely on accounts by others--often deeply unsympathetic ones. For instance, the Greek Theopompus in his account of the relative gender equality present in Etruscan society characterized this as proof that "Etruscans are bad Greeks; their women are too out of control and their enjoyment of the same kinds of sex as the Greeks enjoyed was inappropriate in occasion and manner" (120-119). Etruscan gender norms within which single women could live independent lives and not serve merely as accessories for men (unlike their Greek and Roman counterparts) somehow coexisted in a world amped up on aggressive masculine display. What became of such women and did popular memory passed down by women commemorate earlier periods of relative independence? These are questions Smith does not pose but which strike one in reading about the Etruscans.

Smith's account of Etruscan culture is hit and miss. Apparently the famous Capitoline Wolf sculpture of Romulus and Remus suckled by a she-wolf is not an Etruscan sculpture as previously thought but a medieval bronze. I was hoping for more about their bronzework, using the lost wax method and about objects from the east which the Etruscan elite began to covet as a sign of cultural upward mobility, learning from the Greeks. These are aspects he does not delve into even though material culture is an important source. The entire discussion about orientalization is terribly vague and frustrating.

We learn that their chief god was Tinia, the god of lightning. Yet even he bowed before the Di Involuti or Shrouded Gods. The Etruscans believed that lightning could be summoned at will and space was divided into quarters from which the emergence of both birds and lightning served as prophetic auguries. Among their priests was an elite order of haruspex/haruspices who divined the future through a reading of sheep's entrails (the liver, specifically) and supposedly warned Caesar about the Ides of March. Ironically, the people who seem mysterious to many of us found their world explicable through predicatable signs and omens.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not just about the people who left Etruscan artifacts, but more generally the place of Etruria in history.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

concise and clear overview of Etruscan history and culture. Particulars good when discussing Etruscan art and metalworking.

[Theodora · Rating 4 out of 5]

Informative and snappy - nice!