M. L. ROUSE, ON THE PEDIGREE OP THE NATIONS. 93 



The main part of tlie story is doubtless true : tlie early 

 Lydians, who, as we have seen, were the same as the Carians, 

 must have been venturous seamen : and it is remarkable, when 

 we remember the name of the Lydian capital, Sardis,* that the 

 next land to the southern part of Tyrrhenia is the great island 

 whicli the Greeks called Sardo (Sardinia). That it was 

 Sardinia rather than Tyrrhenia, or Etruria, itself that was 

 colonised by those Lydians may perhaps be inferred from the 

 strange utterance of Histiaios of Miletos to King Darius 

 Hystaspes on a memorable occasion : when the king wrongfully 

 reproached him with the loss of Sardis, which had been captured 

 and burnt by a Grecian force during his attendance at Court, he 

 said that, with royal permission, he would return to the Ionian 

 coast, quell the outbreak, arrest his careless or treacherous 

 deputy, and not change his tunic until he had made tributary 

 to the king, Sardo, the biggest island in the world.f 



But, again, we lind in Lydia, in the valley of the Cayster, 

 in what must have Ijeen the very centre of the country when 

 Lydia and Caria formed one state — in old Maeonian or 

 Thracian times — a town called by the Greeks Tyrrha,^ and 

 therefore most likely in more ancient times, Tyrsa ; so that the 

 emigrants to Italy may well have borne the name Tyrsenoi ere 

 they started. That this name enfolds the name of the Bible 

 patriarch and links together the Thracian stock in another 

 direction, we shall presently see. 



We have seen that the people of Etruria or Tuscany were called 

 by the early Greeks Tyrsenoi ; by the early Bomans they were 

 called Etrusci, and by themselves in classic Latin times Basena.§ 

 Combining Tyrsenoi with Rascna, sve find that the original name 

 must have been Tt/rascna ; and, as -ci was a common ethnic 

 ending in Latin like -lkoc in Greek, and as the initial U- 

 disappears in the later Boman form 2''usci\\ and is therefore 

 probably a mere determinative, there is nothing in Etrusci to 

 militate against this conclusion. Tyrascna was therefore the 

 pristine name of this people. 



" When Bome was in its infancy they were a very powerful 

 nation, with dominions extending from the Alps and the plains 

 of Lombardy, on the one hand, to Vesuvius and the Gulf of 



* Properly Sardeis and declined as a plural word, and so doubtless 

 denoting the original tribe. + Her. V^, 106. 



X And nowTira, § Dionys. Halic.(B.c. 7)i. 30, IPaaiva, var. led. Pao-fwa. 



II On the Engubine Tablets they are called Tursci (Lepsius, Tablets 

 III, 17, Jnscript. Umhr. et Use., p. 15). 



