Religion and mythology
The essential ingredient in Etruscan religion was a belief that human life was but one small meaningful element in a universe controlled by gods who manifested their nature and their will in every facet of the natural world as well as in objects created by humans. This belief permeates the Etruscan representational arts, where one finds rich depictions of land, sea, and air, with man integrated into the ambient. Roman writers give repeated evidence that the Etruscans regarded every bird and every berry as a potential source of knowledge of the gods and that they had developed an elaborate lore and attendant rituals for using this knowledge. Their own myths explained the lore as having been communicated by the gods through a prophet, Tages, a miraculous child with the features of a wise old man who sprang from a plowed furrow in the fields of Tarquinii and sang out the elements of what the Romans called the Etrusca disciplina.
The literary, epigraphic, and monumental sources provide a glimpse of a cosmology whose image of the sky with its subdivisions is reflected in consecrated areas and even in the viscera of animals. The concept of a sacred space or area reserved for a particular deity or purpose was fundamental, as was the corollary theory that such designated areas could correspond to each other. Heaven reflected Earth, and macrocosm echoed microcosm. The celestial dome was divided into 16 compartments inhabited by the various divinities: major gods to the east, astral and terrestrial divine beings to the south, infernal and inauspicious beings to the west, and the most powerful and mysterious gods of destiny to the north. The deities manifested themselves by means of natural phenomena, principally by lightning. They also revealed themselves in the microcosm of the liver of animals (typical is a bronze model of a sheep’s liver found near Piacenza, bearing the incised names of divinities in its 16 outside divisions and in its internal divisions).
These conceptions are linked closely to the art of divination for which the Etruscans were especially famous in the ancient world. Public and private actions of any importance were undertaken only after having interrogated the gods; negative or threatening responses necessitated complex preventive or protective ceremonies. The most important form of divination was haruspicy, or hepatoscopy—the study of the details of the viscera, especially the livers, of sacrificial animals. Second in importance was the observation of lightning and of such other celestial phenomena as the flight of birds (also important in the religion of the Umbri and of the Romans). Finally, there was the interpretation of prodigies—extraordinary and marvelous events observed in the sky or on the earth. These practices, extensively adopted by the Romans, are explicitly attributed by the ancient authors to the religion of the Etruscans.
The Etruscans recognized numerous deities (the Piacenza liver lists more than 40), and many are unknown today. Their nature was often vague, and references to them are fraught with ambiguity about number, attributes, and even gender. Some of the leading gods were eventually equated with major deities of the Greeks and Romans, as may be seen especially from the labeled representations on Etruscan mirrors. Tin or Tinia was equivalent to Zeus/Jupiter, Uni to Hera/Juno, Sethlans to Hephaestus/Vulcan, Turms to Hermes/Mercury, Turan to Aphrodite/Venus, and Menrva to Athena/ Minerva. But their character and mythology often differed sharply from that of their Greek counterparts. Menrva, for example, an immensely popular deity, was regarded as a sponsor of marriage and childbirth, in contrast to the virgin Athena, who was much more concerned with the affairs of males. Many of the gods had healing powers, and many of them had the authority to hurl a thunderbolt. There were also deities of a fairly orthodox Greco-Roman character, such as Hercle (Heracles) and Apulu (Apollo), who were evidently introduced directly from Greece yet came to have their designated spaces and cults.
Origins
Because the Etruscans spoke a non-Indo-European language while being surrounded in historical times by Indo-European peoples such as the Latins and Umbro-Sabelli, scholars of the 19th century examined and debated, often bitterly, the origins of this anomalous population. Their dispute continued into the 21st century but has now lost much of its intensity. A leading scholar in Etruscan studies, Massimo Pallottino, wisely observed that such discussions have become sterile as the result of an incorrect formulation of the problem. Too much emphasis has been placed on the provenance of the Etruscans, with the expectation that there could be one simple answer. The problem is in reality exceedingly complex, and attention should be directed instead to the formation of the population, as it might be, for example, in a study of the origins of “the Italians” or “the French.” Pallottino’s position may be understood more clearly through a brief review of the debate.
The argument began, in fact, in antiquity with the statement by Herodotus that the Etruscans migrated from Lydia in Anatolia shortly after the time of the Trojan War; their leader was Tyrsenos, who later gave his name to the whole race. Supporters of this “Eastern” theory pointed above all to the archaeological evidence of profound Oriental influence on Etruscan culture, such as in monumental funerary architecture and exotic luxury goods of gold, ivory, and other materials. But chronologically the Oriental inundation occurred nearly 500 years too late for the Herodotean migration. Further, it developed gradually rather than making the sudden appearance that would have characterized the arrival of a people en masse; moreover, it is quite easily explained by reference to the trade conduits established by the Euboean Greeks in the 8th century bce. A key document in the Eastern theory is the inscription on a stone grave stela found on the island of Lemnos near the coast of Anatolia that shows remarkable lexical and structural similarities with the Etruscan language. But this curious isolated document dates only to the 6th century bce and thus cannot be interpreted as evidence of an Etruscan way station in the Herodotean migration from Anatolia to Italy. On the contrary, it has now been proposed that Lemnos may in fact have been colonized or used as a trading point by the Etruscans looking toward Anatolia in the 6th century bce rather than as a place they visited moving away from the area.
A second theory on Etruscan origins was proposed by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who rejected the tradition of Herodotus, pointing out that the Lydian language and customs and those of the Etruscans were greatly dissimilar; he argued that the Etruscans were autochthonous (of local origin). Acceptance of this “autochthonous” theory requires that Villanovan culture be regarded as an early phase of Etruscan civilization (a hypothesis now widely endorsed) and, in addition, that there be links with an ethnic substratum of the Bronze Age in Italy (2nd millennium bce). There are indeed stray affinities with the Bronze Age culture of the “Terramara,” with its cremating, sedentary habits, but also with the “Apenninic” culture, which was seminomadic and practiced inhumation. There is, however, mounting evidence of a critical transition period at the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age, in which there are so many important developments that the connections between these two cultures and the Villanovan seem minor. Although the terminology is vexed for this transition period, varying from “sub-Apennine” to “Recent Bronze,” “Final Bronze,” and, most frequently, “Proto-Villanovan,” the social and economic changes are clear. There was an increase in population and in overall wealth, a tendency to have larger, permanent settlements, an expansion of metallurgical knowledge, and a strengthening of agricultural technology. Diagnostic archaeological criteria include the use of cremation (with a biconical ash urn) and the presence of characteristic artifacts such as the fibula (“safety pin”), razor, objects of amber, the ax, and various other bronze weapons. The fact that the Proto-Villanovan archaeological horizon developed gradually rather than suddenly as the result of invasion or large migration might seem to support the theory of autochthony for the Etruscans. But once again the picture is clouded, because the Proto-Villanovan occurs in scattered areas all around Italy, including zones that definitely did not emerge as Etruscan in historical times.