- Maurizio Sannibale –
emerging new territorial organizations and the formation of large, populous proto-urban
centers in locations that would become the Etruscan cities of the historical age, at the
expense of abandoning older, smaller hilltop settlements scattered throughout the territory.
Already boat-shaped vases, which appear in Late Villanovan (Villanoviano evoluto) tombs,
reveal the early Etruscans’ special relationship with the sea, whether they symbolize the
sea voyage to the Afterlife, or relate to actual navigation. Ancient sources attest to an
actual Tyrrhenian mastery of the seas that delayed the Greek colonization of Sicily and
prevented it moving north of the Bay of Naples, if not from landing on the French coast
and there founding Massalia c. 600 bc.
The reading of the cultural dynamics that will lead Etruria in the age of metals to
develop a complex urban civilization, able to interact with the most advanced peoples
of the ancient Mediterranean, has sometimes suffered from a certain interpretative
automatism. Basically, we have become accustomed to read and believe that given
certain conditions, such as agricultural and agronomic development and availability of
raw materials, the outcome could only be a spontaneous aggregation of villages, the
foundation of cities, the emergence of a ruling class of “principes” that can establish and
control a territory and its increased wealth. A consequence of this would have been a
stimulus to exchange and trade, initially launched through the circuit of gift-exchange
and import of precious objects of craftsmanship, some from distant lands. For many
decades, the notion prevailed that Etruscan Orientalizing constituted only a tumultuous
confl uence of exotic goods, in exchange for raw materials and products from the new rich
of the West, who were deemed to be only minimally involved with the culture that had
produced those same goods.
The mere material aspects – even though they seem to be concrete – require an
interpretive effort to determine what led to the intellectual and spiritual development of
a culture: not all of these immaterial, intangible aspects leave archaeological traces. The
circulation of precious objects and valuable material, of craftsmanship and sophisticated
technology, constitutes, in purely economic perspective, an increase of value. This value
tends to increase in passing from hand to hand through the circuit of gift-exchange and
the consequent custom of hoarding. All this constitutes the intangible component of
goods, linked as they are to the men and ideas with which they have circulated.
To reconstruct the story in the absence of history, that is, written sources, mechanistic
approaches have sometimes been attempted, stating that, from a chaotic state of departure,
a community of people eventually reaches a form of organization, in which there will
emerge a certain percentage of individuals with the character of a leader, and fi nally, that
given certain conditions, such as creating a surplus, the economy is necessarily destined
to expand, increasing the level of trade with ever larger spheres of circulation. In our case
it appears valid to propose a simple historical approach, based on events occurring in the
ancient Near East between the ninth and seventh centuries bc, which led to a movement,
a diaspora westward of heterogeneous cultural components.
Of course a reasonable doubt remains as to whether these artisans, scholars and traders
moving westward were simple “orphans” of a palace and a city, or whether among them
were also the bearers, some even the leading exponents, of a culture. Certainly in exporting
and manufacturing of goods, gifts bringing highly symbolic and complex iconography,
they consciously related to the Etruscan princes as counterparts and potential partners
with much in common. In fact, we know what occurred during contact with the Greek
world, but we cannot exclude the possibility that something similar may have occurred