734 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



well. In costumes, jewelry, the paraphernalia of war, in paint- 

 ing and statuary they were alike distinguished. Their mythology 

 was very complex, much of the Roman being derived from it. 

 Most of our knowledge of them is derived from the rich discov- 

 eries in their chambered tombs, scattered all over Italy from 

 Rome to Bologna. There can be no doubt of a very high type 

 of civilization attained as early as ten or twelve centuries before 

 the Christian era. Roman history is merged in the obscurity of 

 time, five or six hundred years later than this. The high an- 

 tiquity of the Etruscan is therefore beyond question. 



We know less of the language used by the Etruscans than of 

 many other details of their existence only enough to be assured 

 that it was of an exceedingly primitive type. It was constructed 

 upon as fundamentally different a system from the Aryan tongues 

 as is the Basque, described in our last paper. It seems to have 

 been, like the Basque, allied to the great family of languages 

 which includes the Lapps, Finns, and Hungarians in modern 

 Europe, and the aborigines of Asia and America. These unfortu- 

 nate similarities led to all sorts of queer theories as to the racial 

 origin of the people ; as wild, many of them, as those invented for 

 the Basques. It never occurred to any one to differentiate race, 

 language, and culture one from another, distinct as each of the 

 trio may be in our eyes to-day. If a philologist found similarity 

 in linguistic structure to the Lapp, he immediately jumped to 

 the conclusion that the Etruscans were Lapps, and Lapland the 

 primitive seat of the civilization. Thus Taylor, in his early 

 work, asserts an Asiatic origin akin to the Finns. Then Pauli 

 and Deecke for a time independently traced them to the same 

 Turanian source. At last, when the Etruscan civilization began 

 to be investigated in detail, authorities fell into either one of two 

 groups. They both agree that the culture itself was of foreign 

 origin. The Germans, with the sole exception of Pauli* and 

 Cuno, are unanimous in the assertion that it is an immigrant 

 from the Danube Valley and northern Europe. These authorities 

 regard it as an offshoot of the so-called Hallstadt civilization, 

 which nourished at a very early period in this part of the con- 

 tinent. In a later paper on the Aryan culture we shall have 

 occasion to speak of it more in detail. At the same time they 

 declare the people racially to be of Rhsetian or Alpine origin. The 

 second school is disposed to derive the Etruscan civilization from 

 the southeast generally Lydia in Asia Minor. The relation of 



* Yon Czoernig, Helbig, Hoernes, Hochstetter (for a time), Koch, Miillenhoff, Niebuhr, 

 Mommsen, Seemann, Steub, and Virchow. Taylor, in later work, seems to agree. Com- 

 plete titles will be found in the author's Bibliography of the Ethnology of Europe above 

 mentioned. 



