THE ETRUSCANS 59 



time showing such as this affords no help to the inference 

 of a knowledge of the mariner's compass. 



Of the ancient Mediterranean nations, there still re- 

 mains to be considered that strange people which came by 

 thousands and tens of thousands from Lydia, and with 

 their great fleet descended upon the astonished Umbrians, 

 as unexpectedly as if they had fallen from the sky. The 

 Rasenna, as they called themselves, or as we now term 

 them the "Etruscans," "were not like any other nation," 

 says Dionysius, "in either speech or manners," and mod- 

 ern ethnology brings them into the great Finno-Ugric 

 family, and makes them relatives of the Finns, the Tar- 

 tars and the Mongolians. 



Here was a nation which, if it did not undertake the 

 long voyages of the Phoenicians, for which there was no 

 need since, as we have seen, it got its amber by a much 

 more direct road, and probably acquired its other foreign 

 supplies by the simple and convenient process of piracy 

 fostered the sailor and all his arts certainly from a period 

 thirteen centuries before our era. The Etruscans invented 

 the anchor and the cutwater or prow, and stamped the latter 

 on their coins. Likewise they placed on the bows of their 

 ships, small idols pointing the way in advance, and we re- 

 tain them still in the modern figure-head. 1 Their augurs 

 consecrated the spot on which a temple was to be built by 

 marking on the ground and in the air, lines at right angles 

 indicating regions called "cardines," and hence our word 

 "cardinal," and our denomination "cardinal points." 

 These regions were subdivided so that the ground occupied 

 by the building had sixteen points, each giving its peculiar 

 augury. 2 They laid out their roads in straight lines, and 

 built great sewers and tunnels for irrigation, water-supply 

 and drainage throughout their territory; and under such 



'Dempster: De Etruria Reg., Florence, 1723, lib. vii., c. Ixxxi. 441; 

 Suidas: Lexicon, verb. Pattaeci. Herod: lib. iii., 37; Gray: History of 

 Etruria, i., 317, 411. 



2 Gray : History of Etruria, cit. sup. 



