9.8 Europe: 600 to 501 b.c.  (Page 3/4)

Italy

The region between Florence and Rome, now known as Tuscany, was populated by the prosperous Etruscans who capitalized on the rich copper and iron deposits of the area. They had twelve cities in Tuscany, additional settlements in the Po Valley and they controlled western Italy down to Cumae. In the north after 600 B.C. Bononia began to produce a great series of bronze buckets shaped like truncated cones and bearing figured reliefs. These have been found as far away as Austria and Slovenia and the Bononian ones may be copies of the latter. On the Adriatic Sea, in this century, several villages were brought together to form the port of Spina, not far from present day Venice. Spina was centered on a long, wide canal which connected the sea to a lagoon. The city covered over 700 acres, chiefly on peninsulae connected to the mainland only by narrow tongues of land. It was peopled by Etruscans and Greeks as well as the more native Venetii, and some of the latter apparently converted to the Etruscan language.

All of the western Etruscan city-states had their individual merchant navies which were active in the Tyrrhenian Sea, trading at the Greek and Cathaginian ports and their trader-pirates were active even in the Aegean, where they may have had a colony on the island of Lemnos. Many elements in their art and religion have been interpreted as Near East in origin, and as previously mentioned, traditionally it has been surmised that at least their rulers were immigrants from Asia Minor, Lydia in particular, but this has now been pretty well disproved. In 1964 there was excavated at Pergi, Italy, a letter written on sheets of gold leaf, in Etruscan, supposedly from Hiram, Lord of Tyre, to the king of Lavinia (near Rome) and Fell (Ref. 65 ) interprets the language as belonging to the Anatolian group and related to Hittite and Urartian. This does not, in itself, prove Near East ancestry for the Etruscan people. (Ref. 68 , 65 )

Originally the people of Rome were ruled by Etruscan kings, who, in turn, appointed or nominated the senate from the patrician families. Throughout most of this century Rome was actually an Etruscan city, even though the common language there was an Indo European one, destined to become Latin. The draining of the marsh for erection of the Roman Forum by construction of the impressive Cloaca Maxima was a typical Etruscan kind of operation. Etruscan metal-work, pottery and armour appeared in Rome, along with Etruscan immigrants. Terracotta friezes are identical in Rome and Veii and the great sculptor, Vulca of Veii, made the statue of Jupiter for a huge temple in Rome. The last of the Roman kings was an Etruscan and when he was overthrown the republic was established. After 510 B.C. the senators were appointed by two elected consuls. One of these, Valerius Poplicola, promoted the Lex Valeria, sometimes called the "Habeas Corpus" of Rome, allowing the plebians to appeal decisions of the magistrates to the general assembly, thus freeing them from the worst class vindictiveness. (Ref. 229 , 75 )