CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE FALISCANS AND THE ETRUSCANS

Maria Anna De Lucia Brolli and Jacopo Tabolli

FALISCAN CULTURE, EIGHTH CENTURY BC

TO ROMANIZATION

A

t the dawn of the unifi cation of Italy, between the 1880s and 1890s, a large project
for the Archaeological Map of Italy brought to the attention of scholars a particular
region north of Rome, known from literary sources as the Ager Faliscus (Barnabei
et al. 1894, Gamurrini et al. 1972; Cozza – Pasqui 1981) (Fig. 14.1). The Faliscans
were a population of Italic origin, as evidenced by the language commonly spoken
and documented by numerous inscriptions, the oldest of which date from the seventh
century bc. The inscriptions may be traced back to a common Latin origin (Deecke 1888,
Giacomelli 1963, Bakkum 2009).

Figure 14.1 The area of the Ager Faliscus.