406 Nancy T. de Grummond
Most will acknowledge that the story in Herodotos cannot have been correct, since
it places the immigration of the Lydians “during the reign of Atys, son of Manes,” just
after the Trojan War, that is, sometime in the thirteenth or twelfth centuryBCE,when
there is no evidence of an immigrant group from the East in Italy, and certainly not in
the part of the peninsula known in antiquity as Umbria. Herodotos was reporting on an
event supposed to have taken place more than 700 years before the time he was writing,
and it can be safely said that he had no particular knowledge of the immigration himself,
but must have heard the tale on his travels. Further, Dionysios was quite correct about
the differences between the languages. Lydian may be classified as an Indo-European
language, while most scholars agree that Etruscan is a non-Indo-European language.
The archaeological record provides support for the theory of autochthony in that
there does not seem to be any sharp cultural break that would indicate the arrival
of immigrants from the Orient in Etruria, either at the time noted by Herodotos or
later. Some scholars, in the face of the fact that the Etruscans could not possibly be
Lydians, nevertheless persist in arguing that the Etruscans came from the Near East,
and cite other ancient descriptions of the wanderings of Tyrrhenians and Pelasgians
as proof.
Modern Debate
The preceding summary is a highly simplified version of the two contrasting ancient
theories from which one might identify the ethnicity of the Etruscans. Modern debate
on the subject introduced into the discussion a third theory that was never proposed
in antiquity, but has the merit of being based to a certain extent on the archaeological
record (Pallottino 1975; Bagnasco Gianni 2012). In the nineteenth century, when the
early Etruscan Villanovan Iron Age culture of Italy (ca. 1000/900–700BCE) had been
discovered, it was noted that the cremation ritual utilizing ash urns placed in large ceme-
teries of such tombs was shared with an earlier culture in Central Europe north of the
Alps noted for its urn fields. Thus, there arose the “northern” theory of the origin of the
Etruscans, that they had come across the Alps and then by stages moved down into the
heartland of the Etruscans in Etruria, in the territory bounded by the Tiber River on the
south and east, the Arno River on the north, and the Tyrrhenian Sea on the west (Map
of Italy). One problem with the northern theory is that some of the earliest evidence of
Villanovan culture comes from sites on the sea and quite to the south of the hypoth-
esized northern route. Further, the use of cremation and ash urns was a widespread
phenomenon during this period in Italy and Greece as well, and need not imply anything
about ethnicity.
Massimo Pallottino, the leading authority on the Etruscans in the twentieth century,
made a thorough review of the three theories, observing that each leaves something
unexplained or contradicts established facts; he noted that the issue “attracted sharp and
vigorous debate, degenerating at times into sterile polemics on preconceived theses” (Pal-
lottino 1975: 65, 69). The solution lay, he thought, in asking the question in a different
way. Too many scholars were concerned about theprovenanceof Etruscan civilization,