The bronze age and the Celtic world - Universal History Library

THE PROSPECTORS 57
portrait statuettes on the alabaster sarcophagi, shows us a type corresponding very
closely to Fleure's description.
The Etruscans are a mysterious people, and various views which have been
expressed as to their origin have led to no little confusion of thought. Leaving out
of account such evidence as may have come down from the neoUthic and early bronze
ages, we find, according to tradition, that the Etruscans arrived from Asia Minor,
probably in the eleventh century B.C., or perhaps a httle later. ^s About 800 B.C. we
have archaeological evidence of the arrival of another people from the north, who
settled near Bologna, where they developed a culture known as that of Villa-Nova. The
Etruscans and the Villa-Nova people certainly exchanged products, and may have to
some extent amalgamated. Later traditions suggest that the Etruscans extended their
empire over the ViUa-Nova area and to the south as well,^* but this, while true in one
sense, may give a very wrong impression.
I would suggest that the Etruscans proper, the Etruscus obesus of the Latin
writers, were the people who so closely resemble our Prospectors, and the fact that
they are said to have come from the east, agrees well with this view. The Prospectors,
wherever we meet them, are merchants and business men, and not the kind of men to
lead warlike expeditions, or to bring all Italy within their empire. On the other hand,
as I hope to show in subsequent chapters, the men responsible for the Villa-Nova culture
were a warlike, conquering tjTpe, given to imperial expansion, and it is far more likely
that if one or other were the conqueror it would be the men of Villa-Nova.
That such was the case seems to be indicated by the frescoes in a tomb, a copy of
which is on view in the garden of the Etruscan museum at Florence. In these we find
depicted a country house, with domestic scenes, and a portrait of the owner, a fair
man with a narrow face, blue eyes and brown beard, wearing a fox-skin head-dress.
This man is totally unlike the Etruscus obesus of most of the other tomb paintings, and
seems to be of that fair Nordic type, which, as I hope to show, formed the ruhng caste,
at any rate, of the Villa-Nova people. It seems probable, too, that the bodies buried
in the Regulini-Galassi and other warrior tombs were also of this type.^' All this seems
35 Dennis (1883) i. xxxv. ; Herodotus i. 94.
36 Dennis (1883) i. xxviii., who quotes various Latin writers.
37 Dennis (1883) i. 37, 264-269, 388, 413, 414, 455.