page_title: Etruscan history
section_title: Origin
hierarchical_section_title: Etruscan history / Origin
caption_attribution_description: Aule Metele is a Romano-Etruscan work in the Roman style and depicts an Etruscan man wearing a short Roman toga and footwear. His right arm is raised to indicate that he is an orator addressing the public. An inscription on the hem of his toga gives his name and parentage.
context_page_description: Etruscan history is the written record of Etruscan civilization compiled mainly by Greek and Roman authors. Apart from their inscriptions, from which information mainly of a sociological character can be extracted, the Etruscans left no surviving history of their own, nor is there any mention in the Roman authors that any was ever written. Remnants of Etruscan writings are almost exclusively concerned with religion.
context_section_description: There are two main hypotheses as to the origins of the Etruscan civilization in the Early Iron Age: either by autochthonous development in situ out of the Villanovan culture of Etruria in central Italy, or via oriental (Anatolian) colonization of Italy. 
  Helmut Rix's classification of the Etruscan language in a proposed Tyrsenian language family reflects this ambiguity. He finds Etruscan on one hand genetically related to the Rhaetic language spoken in the Alps north of Etruria, suggesting autochthonous connections, but on the other hand the Lemnian language found on the "Lemnos stele" is closely related to Etruscan, entailing either Etruscan presence in "Tyrsenian" Lemnos, or "Tyrsenian" expansion westward to Etruria. The Etruscan language was of a different family from that of neighbouring Italic and Celtic peoples, who spoke Indo-European languages.
  Modern archaeologists have come to suggest that the history of the Etruscans can be traced relatively accurately, based on the examination of burial sites, artifacts, and writing. A separate Etruscan culture distinguishable from that of the possibly ancestral Villanovan people emerged in the beginning of the 8th century BC, evidenced by the inscriptions in a script similar to that used for Euboean Greek. The burial tombs, some of which had been fabulously decorated, promotes the idea of an aristocratic city-state, with centralized power structures maintaining order and constructing public works, such as irrigation networks, roads, and town defenses.
caption: The Orator, c. 100 BC, an Etrusco-Roman bronze statue depicting Aule Metele (Latin: Aulus Metellus), an Etruscan man wearing a Roman toga while engaged in rhetoric; the statue features an inscription in the Etruscan alphabet
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