The Etruscans

Tiras is the seventh and last of the sons of Japheth in the Table of Nations, named in Genesis 10:2 and again in Chronicles, each son standing for a people of the northern and western world. A long-standing line of interpretation identifies Tiras with the Tyrrhenians, that is, the Etruscans, reading the Hebrew name as a form of the Tyrs- of Tyrsēnoí; the identification is included here for that reason, but it is genuinely disputed.

The dispute is old and unsettled. Josephus, the earliest interpreter to address it, makes Tiras the father of the Thirasians, “whom the Greeks renamed Thracians,” pointing not to Italy but to Thrace, and the later rabbinic glosses scatter Tiras variously to Thrace, to Persia, and elsewhere. The Tyrrhenian reading rests on the bare resemblance of the names, with no narrative behind it. Tiras is thus a name that may belong to this page or may not, a single biblical word that the Etruscans have been invited to claim, on evidence too thin to settle and too suggestive to ignore.

The Greek name of the Etruscans, Tyrrhēnoí (in the older Ionic form Tyrsēnoí), and of their land Tyrrhēnía. Herodotus gives the famous story that the Tyrrhenians were emigrants from Lydia in Asia Minor, led west by a prince named Tyrrhenos to escape a famine, a tale modern scholarship treats with caution and most now reject in favor of an indigenous Italian origin. The Greeks knew the Etruscans early and well, as traders, rivals, and pirates of the western sea.

Tyrrhēnoí is the name by which the Greek world placed the Etruscans, and it left its mark on the map: the Tyrrhenian Sea, between Italy and the islands, still carries it. The form appears to share its turs- root with the Roman Etrūscī and Tuscī, so that Greek and Latin, for all their different shapes, may name this people with a single underlying word, one quite separate from the Etruscans’ own Raśna. It is the outsiders’ name that proved fertile, breeding a sea and, through Latin, a region.

The Etruscans’ own name for themselves, Raśna (also rasna), written in their own alphabet from right to left and attested directly in the inscriptions. It is a people-name, “the people” or “the Etruscan folk,” used adjectivally in phrases such as zich raśna, “Raśna writing,” for a document in the language; the Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus preserves it in the longer form Rasénna. The ś is the Etruscan letter san, distinct from the ordinary sigma.

Raśna is the still center of this page, the one name the Etruscans gave themselves, and it is striking for how little it traveled. The Greeks, the Romans, and perhaps the Hebrews and Egyptians each had their own word for this people, and it is those outside names, above all the Roman one, that the world kept; the endonym stayed home, written on tomb walls and mirrors in a script that runs backward, and was forgotten until scholars learned to read it again. A people can name itself plainly and still be remembered by every name but that one.

The Roman name of the people, Etrūscī, beside the equivalent Tuscī and the land-name Etrūria; the Romans knew the Etruscans intimately, as the older civilization to their north from which they had taken kings, engineering, and the reading of omens, and then as the rival they slowly conquered. The two Latin forms, Etrūscī and Tuscī, are variants of one name, sharing the turs- element that also stands in the Greek Tyrsēnoí.

Etrūscī is the name that won. From it English has “Etruscan,” and from its twin Tuscī, by way of Italian Toscana, comes “Tuscany,” so that the Roman exonym survives both as the learned name of the vanished people and as the everyday name of the living region. The Etruscans’ own Raśna is known only to scholars; the word the world uses is the one the Romans, who outlived and absorbed them, wrote down. It is the conqueror’s name for the conquered that the centuries kept.