SCIENCE 



NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 30, 1891. 



THE ETEUSCAN-^ELASGIAN PROBLEM.' 



In the wavering twilight of the "dawn of history a myste- 

 rious people is dimly discerned, occupying the peninsula of 

 Greece, — the Pelasgians ; and another, seen somewhat 

 more clearly, owning or controlling the central districts of 

 Italy, — the Etruscans. 



Erudition has been exhausted with argumeuts as to the re- 

 lationship of these peoples to others better known. "Vol- 

 umes have been written to prove them Aryans, Turanians, 

 Semites, Egyptians, Iberians, Celts, and what not ? 



To both is assigned a singular degree of culture, and this 

 with such certainty that we cannot deny that the mighty 

 walls of Tiryns and Fiesole, the delicate gold- work from the 

 tombs of Obiusi, and the exquisite alabasters from the cem- 

 eteries of Volterra, remain to us as achievements in art and 

 architecture before which any thing accomplished in the 

 same direction by Greek or Roman holds the second place. 



Nor were the Etruscans, at least, an illiterate people, or 

 negligent of the holy duty of setting down in permanent 

 records the great and good deeds of the departed. They 

 were indeed "most careful chief in that." Of the something 

 more than six thousand inscriptions in their tongue and 

 alphabet which we already have in hand, five-sixths of them 

 are epitaphs or mortuary comments. 



Yet with all this store of material, with many inscriptions 

 bilingual, — Etruscan and Latin, — and with numerous 

 descriptions in classic writers, we do not know, beyond per- 

 adventure, the meaning of a single word in the Etruscan 

 language. What a tine field, tlierefore, for learned specu- 

 lations ! 



Several such are before us. Dr. Hesselmeyer, already 

 favorably known from an earlier archaeological study, " Die 

 Ursprllnge der Stadt Pergamos " (1885), offers his solution of 

 the problem by identifying the Etruscans and Pelasgians as 

 members of tlie same linguistic family, which family he very 

 positively decides belonged neither to the Indo-Germanic 

 (Aryan), nor Semitic nor Turanian, branches of the human 

 species. Further than this negative position, he will not ad- 

 vance, and denies the possibility of so doing, with our present 

 knowledge. His identification of the Pelasgians with the 

 Etruscans rests chiefly on the famous "inscription of 

 Lemnos," — an inscribed slab found on that island, undoubt- 

 edly Etruscan in origin, and dating from the sixth century 

 B.C. Furthermore, a number of proper names, especially 

 in the Ionian dialect of Greek, point, he contends, to an ad- 

 mixture of the language in early days with another of 

 Etruscan character. 



The most original part of Hesselmeyer's study is his tra- 

 cing the migrations of the Pelasgo-Etruscans. The trend he 

 finds was certainly from west to east, and from the seacoast 

 toward the interior. Their colonies reached the shores of 



' Dr. Ellis Hesselmeyer, Die Pelasgerfrage und ihre Ltisbarkeit (Tiibin- 

 gen, 1890); Dr. Saphus Bugge. Etruscan and Armeniao Researches in Com 

 parative Language (Christiania, 1890) ; Dr. D. G. Brinto.n. Etruscan and Libyan 

 Names A Comparative Study (Philadelphia, 1390); Sir Patrick Colquhoun 

 and H. E. Wassa Pacha, " The Pelasgi and tueir Modern Descendants," 1891 

 (Asiatic Quarterly Review). 



Asia Minor at a very early day, and their stations there led 

 some of the Greek historians to believe the original home of 

 the "Tyrrhenians" (as they were also called) was some- 

 where to the east. As Karl Otfried Miiller has abundantly 

 shown in his classical work, "Die Etrusker," the Etruscans 

 themselves repudiated any such origin, and by their most 

 ancient traditions claimed to have reached Italian soil by 

 sea, from the south. 



Although the leading German authorities wholly disregard 

 this venerable legend, and insist that the ancestors of the 

 Etruscans came across the Alps from some land to the north, 

 an American scholar has recently insisted not less vigorously 

 that the old legend is true, and has boldly connected it with 

 a previously unthought-of origin of the Etruscans. As the 

 result of his travels in ancient Numidia, now the French 

 colony of Algiers, and ancient Etruria, the modern Tuscany, 

 Dr. D. G. Brinton has developed the theory that the Etrus- 

 cans were originally a Numidian or Libyan colony„allied in 

 language to the ancestors of the modern Kabyles or Berbers, 

 — a race who, at the dawn of history , occupied the whole 

 of North Africa, from the Nile valley to the Atlantic 

 Ocean. 



His arguments, if not especially weighty on any one point, 

 make amends by their diversity. They include the physical 

 character, in reference to which he makes both Etruscans 

 and Berbers tall and blond, to the confusion of our ordi- 

 naiy notions of both these peoples; their traditions; their 

 political institutions; their culture; and, finally, their lan- 

 guage. To the last named he gives particular attention, 

 availing himself of the little-known Numidian inscriptions 

 in the " tifinagh " alphabet, dating from about 200 B.C. 

 Perhaps the most striking of his identifications is his inter- 

 pretation of the Etruscan name of Servius Tullius, — " Mas- 

 tarna." This appears to be clearly Numidian, and to mean 

 " great conqueror. " 



Although Dr. C. Pauli of Leipzig, without doubt the most 

 eminent "Etruscologist" now living, has entirely aban- 

 doned the Aryan or Indo-Germanic relationship of the 

 Etruscan language, yet in the last year this effete hypothesis 

 has again been advanced, with new arguments. Dr. Bugge, 

 a learned Norwegian, has developed a suggestion offered 

 thirty years ago by the late Dr. Robert Ellis of London, that 

 the Etruscan was an Armenian dialect; and the odd combi- 

 nation of the president of the Royal Society of Literature, 

 Sir Patrick Colquhoun, and the Turkish governor-general of 

 the Libanus, Pasco Wassa Pacha, have appeared jointly in 

 favor of identifying the Pelasgians with the Illyrians, the 

 ancestors of the modern Albanians, who are also a member 

 of the Aryan, or, as Penka prefers to call it, the " Aryac " 

 family. 



From the agreeable variety of these various learned solu- 

 tions of the problem, all coming out within a twelve-month, 

 it is quite evident that there is abundant chance yet for the 

 learned to sharpen their wits on this much-vexed question. 



Dr. Doremus has recently found, according to The Engineering 

 and Mining Journal of Feb. 7, that sodium fluoride and other 

 fluorides can be used with advantage for softening hard waters. 



