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Where Did The Etruscans Come From?



The clue to this mystery was found on the north-Aegean island of Lemnos, which in recent decennia has held great attractions for holiday-makers as well as archaeologists. Excavations are furnishing more and more proofs for the fact that a settlement in the vicinity of today's Poliókhni -- situated on a hill above Vroskopos bay in the island's southeast -- has been inhabited and developped during the entire third millennium BC. The finds are now shown at the museum of the capital Myrina in the west of the island and suggest that "the earliest European city" (so termed by Italian archaeologists) belonged to the Aegean culture area of the bronze age -- just like that better known city of Troy in Asia Minor. At what date exactly the speakers of the "Lemnian" language, coming from Asia Minor (today's Turkey), did immigrate, remains uncertain. That Asia Minor was their point of depart must, however, be taken for granted as long as the relationship of the Etruscan and Lemnian languages with the Anatolian languages is admitted (see below).



Concerning the history of the island: The settlement near Poliókhni was abandoned after some natural catastrophe around 2000 BC and afterwards only sporadically inhabited. In the Mycenaean age, approx. 1200 BC, the island already carried the very name by which it is known in modern times: on clay tablets written in linear B script female inhabitants of the island were called ra-ma-ni-ya, term allowing to reconstruct the contemporary pronunciation of the island's name as /la:mnos/ and which is continued today as /limnos/. Perhaps for some time the island was ethnically split -- Greeks in the west and "Lemnians" in the east. Miltiades, made famous by the battle of Marathon, conquered Lemnos briefly before the end of the 6th century, organizing afterwards the Attic colonisation of the island. The end of political independence might have meant the end of the native language, too.



A little north of Poliókhni lies that village of Kaminia where, in 1885, as part of a church wall, the so-called Stele of Lemnos was discovered. This stele is generally dated at an epoch (shortly) before the Attic conquest of the island, and is now on exhibition at the National Museum of Athens. Portraying a warrior holding a spear, its paramount scientific and historical meaning is constituted, however, by two inscriptions. They are written in a hitherto unknown variant of the Greek alphabet and a language equally unknown in 1885; which language, from obvious reasons, was called Lemnian.
For the first time there was a testimony at hand that enables us to pursue the traces of the Etruscans back to their Aegean country of origin in Asia Minor by applying modern linguistic methodology. From the start -- as soon as those two inscriptions were published -- a convergence between Lemnian and Etruscan became clear: just like the Etruscan writing, the Lemnian writing has chosen only four vowel characters from its Greek mother alphabet: a, e, i, o (the Etruscans having selected a, e, i, u). Over the years, a huge amount of books and essays analysing the Lemnian language has been published, which unfortunately have produced few substantial results and rather frequently involuntarily amusing translations of the text.

The Stele of Lemnos

Nevertheless, after more than a century of research, the linguistic relationship between Lemnian and Etruscan -- despite the scanty material -- is nowadays established to a large extent as an undeniable fact.
The phonemic systems can not be set to coincide completely, yet it is significant that apart from the already mentioned four vowel system parallels exist in the consonant inventory, too. There are two varieties of s (here written s and sh) and no indications of the voiced plosives b, d, g, while next to each other are to be found in both languages t and th (no aspirate sound like the Greek one, but rather pronounced like ty).
Evident conformities exist in the vocabulary between Etruscan (ET, Ta 1.169:) avils machs shealchlsc (literally: "at (=-s) years at four and (=-c) at sixty"), and Lemnian mav shialchveis avis (literally: "four at (=-s) sixty at years"). The common translation, "at 64 years", is of course depending on the values assigned to the Etruscan numerals. In view of the extremely meagre vocabulary of the Lemnian language possible interpretations must rely almost completely on so far decoded Etruscan expressions. Yet, the interpretation of mav and mach is based additionally on the fact that in the (Indo-European) Anatolian language Luvian the word "four" is called maua.



Grammatical analysis may compare constructions of both languages, which the linguist calls 'morpho-syntactic', e.g. the endings -le and -si expressing the logical subject connected with past forms of the passive voice in Etruscan -u and Lemnian -o (as to the correlation of these two vowels, see above).
Etruscan (Vc 3.2) ...larthia-le melacina-si mul-u "(was) by Larth Melacina(s) given" und Lemnian holaie-si qokiashia-le...evisth-o "by Holaie kokiashia (?) x-ed" are so convincingly matched that they entitle linguists to postulate a common ancestral stage of both languages which may be termed Proto-Etrusco-Lemnian.



Recently, Carlo de Simone, formerly professor at the university of Tuebingen, has again taken up the idea that Etruscans originating from Italy have settled on the island of Lemnos during the 9th or 8th century BC. But there are no archaeological proofs, and, in addition, the languages are too different to be considered as mere dialects.

Further -- which has been only briefly mentioned here with Luvian maua -- there exist enough similarities between the Etruscan and Lemnian languages and the so-called Anatolian languages (in Asia Minor) to show that the roots of the Etruscans in Italy must be sought in the northwest part of Asia Minor -- approximately in the region of Troy. And this might well form the historical core of that myth of Trojan origin, which the Romans have borrowed from their neighbouring nation, in order to claim it for themselves.



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More linguistic research into Etruscan and Lemnian can be found in: Dieter H. Steinbauer, Neues Handbuch des Etruskischen, Scripta Mercaturæ Verlag, St. Katharinen 1999, ISBN 3-89590-080-X, on pages 357-366, as well as strewn in the following text. This book, unfortunately, is so far only available in German.

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