An interesting thing the article somehow doesn't mention is that the Roman alphabet in which I'm more or less typing this (IN VVHICH I'M MORE OR LESS TYPING THIS) descends from the very scarce Etruscan letters, which descend from Greek. This is why the Roman alphabet revives letters like digamma and qoppa that had been obsolete in Greek for centuries.
“The Latin alphabet evolved from the visually similar Etruscan alphabet, which evolved from the Cumaean Greek version of the Greek alphabet, which was itself descended from the Phoenician alphabet, which in turn derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics.”
I know somebody who wrote a book on alphabets and said the Egyptian alphabet was based on some ancient Indian alphabet, which had its roots in some ancient astrological symbols.
There’s a lot of prehistory that is not well understood.
It's not clear the Harappan symbols were an alphabet (the hieroglyphs certainly weren't) or even written language, though they're clearly symbolic. Nobody has any idea whether the Harappan symbols somehow relate to astrology. My best guess is that they're similar to heraldry, cattle brands, or graffiti tags: ideograms representing personal names or lines of descent. But I'm no expert in the field.
The main thing is that there's a lot of prehistory. The Stone Age was 3 million years long; people have been cooking their food for 1.75 million years; anatomically modern humans are 250,000 years old; behavioral modernity (elaborate graves, fishing, artifact diversity, common figurative art) is from 50,000 years ago, or perhaps as long as 80,000; the first proto-cities like Çatal Höyük date from 10,000 years ago; the city of Eridu is from 7500 years ago.
In places, "history" (in the sense of written records) is only 500 years old; in most of Europe it's less than 2000 years old. Imhotep built the first Egyptian pyramid only 4700 years ago, but in his day, people had already had brains pretty much the same as our own for ten times that long. 90% of the time of people painting pictures and burying their dead happened before Imhotep; half of the time of people living in cities happened before Imhotep. And 99% of the time of people with brains pretty much the same as our own was before Columbus.
That is, the founding of proto-cities like Çatal Höyük was as long ago for Imhotep as Imhotep is for us. But Imhotep didn't have writings from Çatal Höyük to read or archaeologists to investigate it.
The Egyptian hieroglyphics might be derived from cuneiform, but the more popular hypothesis is that they were invented by someone who didn't know how to read or write.
My favourite part of the Etruscan language legacy is the letter "C" ("K" sound).
It was originally a gamma ("G" sound), but the Etruscan language did not need it and they just used it as K.
Then the Romans adopted the Etruscan alphabet, but they _did_ have both K and G sounds and so had to invent a new letter, even tho the original greek alphabet (and all its predecessors) already had it to begin with :)
One, quite famous, Roman surname is Caesar. Unlike the modern english pronunciation of his name, the pronunciation follows what you have written: Kaesar.
In Germanic this morphed into "Kaiser", which is the german word for "Emperor". I find it quite interesting how the status and power of this one man was so widely recognized, that his surname was already used during Roman times (and still is in the German language) as a title for someone holding utmost power. Originally, the name Caesar likely just meant "a hairy person".
Yeah, but it didn't become a title until the Julio-Claudians started using it to designate their heirs. When Augustus took it on, it was just a powerful family name. Once the Julio-Claudians were finished, it was a title.
It seems overwhelmingly likely that when later emperors kept using it, they were referencing the dynasty that Augustus founded, not Julius Caesar personally.
The same way Gaius Julius received it as an inheritance from his forebears. OP is totally right that the name and its power emanates from Octavian’s prestige and domination of the Roman world for near half a century.
For anyone who likes this sort of thing, the initial few episodes of the History of English podcast[1] is amazing. It dives into the history right from Proto-Indo European and in fact covers the Greek and Etruscan influences, and spends time speaking about the people and their culture.
That doesn't sound to me as any news.
Etruscans settled a lot of colonies in the southern part of the peninsula, down to Pompeii (which was founded by Etruscans and taken over by Samnites) and Melfi.
And they were ahead of all other local cultures by far, especially in the metallurgic technologies and writing.
They were not a single kingdom but a group of city-kingdoms.
So I can think of Rome more like a colony that took over the mother city-kingdom first, then the whole peninsula.
Moreover, the names of the first traditional kings of Rome are Etruscans too.
When I was a kid, there was a traveling museum thing about the Etruscans. I will never forget the slogan: “Rome wasn’t built in a day. And it wasn’t built by the Romans.” Genius.
Isn't it a bigger/more important mystery why proto-indo european language was so successful at supplanting the local languages it intermixed with? Rather than why the Etruscans kept speaking their own language.
I'm really curious if there were positive "network effects" of increasingly large populations of neighbors speaking compatible languages (even if they formed a gradient as the Romance languages did from Rome to Portugal and northern France) Otherwise, it would make more sense for a successful prosperous culture to keep their own language and it would not be surprising at all.
It's usually explained away by technological superiority, namely the mastery of horse husbandry and cart-making. But social structures geared towards war and conquest might have played a role too.
The romance languages formed due to the legacy of the Roman empire, so their success is largely due to the Roman success. People say that the roman empire ended, and while indeed Rome lost its central role in many ways, the roman empire's legacy is still felt. Before the Romans though, there have been the greeks as well as the hittites, both speaking indo european languages. Romans pretty much copied a lot of greek culture as well as their strategy of building trading outposts everywhere.
I think a similar argument can be made for the legacy of the indo europeans. You just have to go a bit further back, before greek and hittite and celt and iranian/aryan and vedic cultures where a distinct thing, there was one single culture speaking a single language: the proto indo european people and culture. They had a lot of success (horse drawn carts with wheels, bronze working). They slowly spread east and west and slowly diverged for several millenia until we reach the time frame you were talking about. Those descendent cultures didn't branch and stay isolated forever after; as you correctly point out, they did influence one another again and again in successive waves.
The original question in this thread was: why was PIE culture so successful that it supplanted almost all existing PRE-indo-eurpean languages. Vascon and Etruscan survived (and possibly others), the former evolving into modern Basque, and Etruscan slowly dying out (very likely by the end of first century AD there were no more etruscan speakers)
The steppe people evolved to raid and invade agricultural communities; and those communities evolved to grow larger to fend off the raids.
"pressure from the steppe selected for the unification and scaling-up of agricultural societies into larger groups to more effectively counteract these incursions. This in turn would select for greater size in pastoralist communities, and also other neighbouring agricultural groups who were now relatively smaller and at a competitive disadvantage with their neighbours. This effect would be amplified by the diffusion of such military technology from the steppe"
> Vascon and Etruscan survived (and possibly others)
How about Finno-Ugric? While the Hungarians only arrived about 1000 years ago, the ancestors of the Finns, Sami and related groups have lived in North-East Europe possibly since the last Ice Age (although this is much disputed, and it could be they adopted Proto-Finnic from some later migration).
It depends on how you look at things. The Nordic Bronze age spread around the entire Baltic as well, and genetic markers associated with Finnic cultures appeared much later, and in areas further north and east.
However, as the article mentions, it's unwise to assume there is a 100% correlation between genetic markers and culture/language. The Baltic Sea region has been a trade hub since before the the first indo-european migrations into the area, and some genetic mixing must have been unavoidable.
You’re comment about not assuming a correlation of language and genetics is spot on for this topic. In the linked article (or maybe it was another article on this topic) they mention that genetic research shows that Etruscans shared much of the same step-derived ancestry as the Latin speaking Italians. It appears that, when then step invaders came in, at least one group of them picked up a local non-IE language even while their genetics overcame the original speakers.
This not true. Indo-European diffusion in Europe preceeded Roman influence by at least a half to a full milenium. For example in 500 BC the Celts, the Germans and the Scythians were all speaking indo european tongues while rome was a relatively small republic or kingdom in italy. The italic peoples surrouding the latins all spoke indo european languages except for the etruscans.
> Isn't it a bigger/more important mystery why proto-indo european language was so successful at supplanting the local languages it intermixed with?
Language domination tends to stem from conquest and/or domination of the population or flatout genocide. Also, if the established elites speak it, the population will most likely follow. The spread of PIE probably mimicked the spread of european languages around the world.
Why is english spoken in us, canada, australia, nz, etc? Why is spanish spoken in much of the americas. Why is english, german, portuguese, french, etc spoken all over africa? Conquest, genocide, mass rapes, etc.
The real question is what technology/tool/etc gave the PIE speakers an advantage over speakers of non-PIE languages ( semitic, basque, etc.). Also how were central asians, east asians, southeast asians, etc able to withstand the PIE onslaught.
May be thousands of years before Genghis Khan the hords of steppe people conquered the territory of modern Italy in the same way mongols conquered most of Europe and Asia much later.
The fact Etruscans preserved their language could be either because they fought really well or may be had some diplomatic relations and mutual trade with the “migrants”, or both.
It’s funny we have the names of say Alexander the Great or Genghis but leaders of those long gone civilizations before them are completely unknown. May be they intermarried and the steppe people’ benevolent leader allowed some of the conquered tribes to keep their language, who knows.
History is a very interesting topic and there are a lot of great sources to study; books but also very good youtube channels nowadays. There are a lot of things that we don't know, but there is also a lot we do know; I'd recommend to anybody who is interested to read more about the actual history.
There are so many interesting details that can give more depth to the struggle of human existence; migration, ingenuity, cooperation, dominance, trade, war, culture, religion.
Reducing everything to a couple of famous names is an unfortunate oversimplification that glosses over much more interesting aspects I wholeheartedly recommend to research.
The Etruscans laid the first underground sewers in the city of Rome around 500 BC. These cavernous tunnels below the city's streets were built of finely carved stones, and the Romans were happy to utilize them when they took over the city.
Discovered Etruscan art during a random walk that led past a small museum in Rome. It is elegant, unique, and weirdly anachronistic for its era; has a futuristic feel to me.
The National Etruscan Museum in Rome (https://www.museoetru.it/) holds one of the largest collections of Etruscan art. Do not miss if you happen to be in Rome.
Seems there are collections all thru Italy. I’ve been to two museums with impressive Etruscan collections just in Le Marche alone (Ancona, Sasso Feratto)
I think that all was found there comes not from Etruscan settlements, but rather from the battlefield:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Sentinum
or from the umbri and sanniti, or from the later romans, etruscans were reknown and appreciated for their art, particularly ceramics, even in those times.
Etruscans cities were in central western Italy, mainly Tuscany, and Lazio with extensions to the north (Emilia Romagna and Veneto) and to the south (Campania):
Yes, sorry, Sassoferrato. Thanks for the clarification. The museum and town are a great way to spend an afternoon. You must really have some good stories.
You are welcome of course, only FYI those museums you cite are only very small ones, compared with the "main" ones, if you happen to be back to Italy, and you like the Etruscan art, you should visit the Etru in Rome (I believe it is the largest one) and the Guarnacci in Volterra:
In high school we did a two week tour of Italy. I can really recommend it to everyone. My uncle has taken my nieces for holidays all over Italy for 16 years to show all the nice places and art.
Fourthed - it's also a gorgeous museum, in that it's covered with beautiful Etruscan frescoes, and the grounds feel more ancient and down to earth without pandering. And it's pretty hard to find Etruscan artifacts, so it's a one-stop-shop.
I is funny how few words (more proper nouns though) survived into (or were absorbed into) Latin. One of my favorite Latin words, Uxor, is an Etruscan loan word.
I have always loved it for its alien sound, and then later for its meaning.
They likely dominated Rome at some point, but founded is quite a strong claim given the marked cultural, linguistical and artistical differences. There's no continuity at all to justify a colony outgrow.
What I had heard was that the people of Rome lived around the hills, and the Etruscans sort of did the work of building a city and government, and the native Romans adopted their culture, grew through conquest of neighboring native tribes, and ultimately overthrew the Etruscans - but not before eliminating the legacy of their former masters.
