Cemetery of studies
M.I. Finley
The Etruscan Cities and Their Culture Luisa Banti, translated by Erika Bizzarri (Batsford £5.50) Several ancient civilisations, notably the Egyptian and the Etruscan, occupy a special place in our culture. They evoke 'mystery', all because their monumental material remains seem so concentrated on the other world, on death, or rather on life in death. The Etruscan case is a peculiar one. Their settlements, thickest in Tuscany and Umbria but als°, reaching out to the Po Valley in the north an Campania in the south, have been con' tinuously occupied for some 3,000 years, SI) that they are virtually closed to systematic archaeological exploration. Their cemeteries, on the other hand, are inexhaustible treasure. houses, second 'cities' in effect, chiefly tin: derground, stuffed with all sorts of riches fa' beyond the dreams of most living inhabitants of these regions then or now, or in any ill. tervening era. Nothing like it exists elsewhere, whether in, quantity or in tone or in the wild mixture artistic styles. These most"death-ridden" of a, people, in the words of one of the greatest ar; historians of our time, Erwin Panofsky, a way to "satisfy man's ineradicable if illogien,; wish to be dead enough to have peace quiet but alive enough to enjoy them." Ti echo is unmistakable: "Death," wrote D. P: Lawrence, "to the Etruscans was just a na„ tural continuance of the fullness of life', Lawrence was of course no scholar, 0: inquirer; he reacted 'instinctively', and resonance of the two responses points to Or problem of the Etruscans. How does one interpret, or even describe, civilisation when the only evidence consists 0; tombs and tomb furniture? The crux a! Etruscan writing, which has produced on' crackpot pseudo-decipherment after another, is in fact not the puzzle commonly thoile' The script is straightforward and intelligIbLei and a fair proportion of what survives can read with assurance. The real difficulty is t.,19 the texts are brief and uninformative — "tei, Partuna, son of Velthur and of Ramtha 50 nei, died aged 28" — so that even Perfe;e knowledge of the language would tell us lit"( Other contemporary people, the Greeks arl,i the Romans, did not begin to write about Etruscans until long after the latter had iwe only lost their hold in Italy, but had effeie tively disappeared as an identifiable Pe°P,.,( What they report is accordingly marginal a'rt unreliable. Only the material remains 3 I available, and — this cannot be stressed ofted enough — material remains of a special kin wall paintings and sculpture and bric=a-b.,rae locked up in tombs that were designed nev again to be seen by living eyes. The proper title of Professor Luisa Bantile, book is therefore The Etruscan Cerneter,'0, and Their Contents. The word 'culture' published title is not hers (the Italian orig"' Vhe World of the Etruscans), but I doubt
she would object. One of the most
ruted among the older generation of Italian truscologists, Professor Banti works in a (3rld heavily insulated from all modern ve.loPments in art history, cultural history, ,,e,tal and economic history, even 'enaeology and prehistory; a world in which ,scription of details of art objects coupled 1th vague generalities about style and ra,fling, grounded in no discoverable canons ,.Interpretation other than free association 11:1 the accumulated conventions of her 1,°,,fe.ssion, passes for an account of 'culture'. ,I'lglon, writing, language, history, governfit and Etruscan origins are all dealt with in e final, not illuminating, thirty-three pages .t,he book. The rest is a strung-out card file, ll'Irl the following paragraph from the open
Chapter, called 'The Boundaries':
she Etruscans may have arrived [in the Po Valley] .,,a, result of an economic expansion. The '.c,_ involved seem to have been primarily those of "-nern Etruria. Inscriptions testify to the presence 2 Volterran family, the Caecina, at Bologna. It ' the Etruscans who brought the alphabet to the valleY. Marzabotto testifies to the fact that not tit then was the concept of 'city' formed. The dest temple north of the Apennines is the one at arZabotto (5th century BC)."
ihSo obsessed is the author with her sculpture rei bric-a-brac and with the unreliability of lirtrion-Etruscan literary evidence that she klyllY ignores the important new and uentic documentation we now have, three m,3,,ts of about 500 BC inscribed on gold leaf, i„'" in Etruscan, the third in Punic (the Ian'age of ancient Carthage), found in 1964 at 104rIta Severa (ancient Pyrgi) on the coast en2e thirty miles from Rome. "Interesting h'uctions of linguistic and historical aracter have resulted from their analysis," Professor Banti. But not interesting ge)rrIll 8; ha, favouriteit would appear, ctto !othe Etruscans but also the rigid convenoigh prices to museums and private This reveals not only the attraction • ewell , iectors.
tinat h p they can be easily faked, and then sold
ionalitY of their art, and that is the greatest °Penetrable a convention can be, when no rilremPorary clues are available, was h°°k on the culture of Etruscan cities, 1 lantly demonstrated some years ago by
selves communicate nothing whatever, n
e,included among the plates. e notorious fact about Etruscan objects ereas pictures of the texts, which by ek of all to the modern interpreter. How yn Brown in his study of the Etruscan wbeitahr raerpteitsittsionw who D:1Y if ever saw a lion and achieved some etacular anatomical errors. Perhaps o'essor Banti could not have been expected tY attention to Panofsky, who was not an 'uscologist, but she shows no signs of hav'digested Llewellyn Brown's work either, 41-1gh his book is listed in her biliography. we get the meaningless string of cilliar cliches, "much livelier" "enigmatic" Llifinitum in lieu of genuine criticism or 4,,alYsis. ' 4'1,4 unreadable, and fundamentally 3,1,cessary, book has then been made worse ra„`ne combined efforts of publisher and 1i1ator. The latter does not seem at home 'on`tle English language, for she can write 'th.;'',.,ing but approximate data is available," ;", Etruscan domain of the seas," "if possifor "preferably", "foundations" for ph:Anders", "records" for "historiography". oti,:ases are dropped, including negatives, theers are inserted without indication that With are not in the original text, sometimes harm to the sense. References to the e the and maps are persistently wrong. Even , °riginal copyright date is inaccurate. 41. , e,finiey is Professor of Ancient History at 'ridge University.
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