- chapter 6: Orientalizing Etruria –
talk about those Phoenicians, masters of the seas, instructors of the Homeric bards
and so on: and therefore to support the Sidonian or Syriac regions as the sources of
Orientalizing Etruscan art [...] In any case the thesis of high-volume Phoenician
import trade in Etruria [...] is completely unacceptable.^8It makes one refl ect upon the coincidence of certain conclusions with some of the axiomatic
statements that a few years earlier (1938) appeared in the “Manifesto of the Race,” of sad
and shameful memory, conceived by the fascist regime, of which I quote some passages:
The population of Italy is currently, in the majority, of Aryan origin and Aryan
civilization. This population of Aryan civilization has lived for several millennia in
the peninsula, little has remained of the civilization of the pre-Aryan people [...] Of
the Semites who over the centuries have landed on the sacred soil of our Country in
general nothing is left.^9Throughout the second half of the twentieth century it would be necessary to overcome
the ideological confrontation between East and West within paganizing classicism and
recognize not only the presence of genuine goods and merchandise coming from the
East, but also the circulation of people and ideas. Moreover, the same Homeric poems
were recorded and perpetuated through the alphabet, the Semitic invention adopted
by Greeks who themselves participated in Orientalizing culture.^10 To analyze Etruscan
Orientalizing as a whole, yet seek to dissect the Greek from the Near Eastern in the logic
of contrast, could therefore be a false problem.^11
From the time when navigation was developed the Mediterranean joined rather than
separated lands and peoples. These lines of union, which follow the seasonal routes
of winds and currents, are not unidirectional. In addition to the mutual relationship
between the departure and landing sites, infi nite combinations were made possible by
the intermediate stages, as indicated by the diverse array of cargoes of wrecks, from the
Bronze Age onward.
The Orientalizing has been traditionally linked to the question of Etruscan origins,
in particular the Eastern hypothesis (see Chapter 3) supported by the oldest literary
tradition, in supposed agreement with the character of the archaeological record. In
reality, the Etruscan ethnos appears already defi ned in the Late Bronze Age, in anticipation
of the substantial identifi cation of the early Iron Age Villanovans with the Etruscans who
will be actors in the Orientalizing phenomenon. This phenomenon does not emerge out
of nowhere; it connects with the dynamics of trade and contacts, related to the search
for metals that had already transpired in the Bronze Age, and sailing to the west, the
ends of the known world. The agents will be the Levant and the Aegean world and
the large Mediterranean islands, including Crete, Cyprus, and Nuragic Sardinia, with
which Etruria entertained strong and early relationships. Among the documents of
these dynamics is the introduction into Italy of small anthropomorphic clay fi gurines
begun in the Late Bronze Age; their magico-ritual aspects seem to evolve into forms of
veneration in the Iron Age. In this case we should backdate the beginning of the process
of anthropomorphizing the divine, re-attributing it to eastern infl uence.^12
Iron Age material culture, especially in funerary offerings, already attests to the
formation of elites who display weapons and horse trappings as well as pottery and bronze
ornaments in their tombs. This connotation of the warrior classes was readily related to