CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

ETRURIA MARITTIMA: MASSALIA AND

GAUL, CARTHAGE AND IBERIA

Jean Gran-Aymerich

INTRODUCTION

T

he diffusion of Etruscan products in the Mediterranean is amply documented in the
seventh and sixth centuries (all dates bc), during the “Belle Époque” of Etruscan
civilization. The archaeological discoveries relating to maritime trade confi rm the attestation
of the historian Livy concerning the Etruscans who “had long extended their dominion over
land and sea.”^1 Often we envisage the emergence of this Etruscan Golden Age in an overly
schematic manner. Thus, one might think that the Etruria of the Orientalizing period
marks a phase of opening-up, after a long period of “Proto-Etruscan” gestation when the
Villanovan villages would have lived in isolation from each other and cut off from the wider
world. In the eighth century it was the Greek colonies in southern Italy, and Phoenicians
from Carthage to Sardinia and even up to south-eastern Iberia, who induced a complete
transformation of Etruscan civilization. Etruscan art, and as well the entire culture and
fringe technology, were quite simply transformed based on Greek and oriental models
(see Chapter 6). And so it was only around 670 that the Etruscans embarked on their sea
voyages, which the Greeks, their primary maritime rivals, denounced as acts of piracy.
This vision of the fi rst Etruscans on the sea and of piracy as a fi rst resort and source
of wealth is simplistic and a reductio ad absurdum. In truth, the opening of Etruscan
settlements at the end of the Iron Age has proto-historic precedents. Exchanges in the
Tyrrhenian Sea and relations with transalpine regions had been frequent since the fi nal
phases of the Bronze Age. Furthermore, at the dawn of the Iron Age, Etruria was far
less isolated than one might imagine. Villanovan-style objects appear in transalpine
regions and very far to the east – as far as Greek sanctuaries and perhaps even in Egypt

• but as well to the west (Villanovan ceramics at Huelva), whereas continental (amber),
  oriental (faience, bronze), and Greek (subgeometric vases) objects arrived in Etruria. We
  have only a small percentage of the evidence for this trade, including primary materials
  (copper, tin, gold, silver, ivory, amber, colorants), consumer products (food, wine, oils,
  unguents, perfumes) and perishables (cloth, skins, fur, wood); likewise, the real impact of
  personal and cultural exchange escapes us. The distribution of Etruscan objects far from
  Etruria is not the result of a sudden and unexpected apparition, but rather of an evolution