Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/76

64 Lepsius has suggested that the first syllable Tur has dropped out, it appears to me a solution that may be admitted as satisfactory.

Before entering on the examination of these passages I would point your attention to the fact in the first place that Dionysius both by his own statements and by his quotations at any rate confirms the existence of the tradition, though he disputes its correctness. Here then I do not call in question the good faith, but only the judgment evinced. His conclusion is founded upon this consideration, that because the Etruscans of his day were a distinct people in language, laws and religion from the Lydians their then cotemporaries, therefore the ancient Etruscans had not the same with the Lydians of that long anterior period. Between the date of that colonization and the Augustan age in which Dionysius flourished full 800 years at least had elapsed, during which time the most important changes had occurred in both countries. Lydia had been overrun by various hostile forces, and had so changed her inhabitants that Strabo who was nearly cotemporary with Dionysius and is at least fully as trustworthy an authority states "that no trace of the ancient language was then remaining in Lydia." xiii. p. 651. . This Lydian language therefore becomes another mystery to be unravelled, whenever we have sufficient materials from the inscriptions discovered by Sir C. Fellowes and other late explorers to enable us to study them. At the same time with the ancient language the ancient laws and institutions of the Lydians must be supposed to have been eradicated, and others introduced with which the Etruscans could have no analogy. The same change might be supposed to have occurred in Etruria also, and here again we have equal authority for the fact beyond the conjecture. Long before the Augustan age the Etruscans had become a different people from those who had planted the colonies and established the civilization, whose remains so much excite our surprise and admiration. Even in the height of their prosperity they must have had a hostile population living among them in a state of slavery. The last great writer on the subject, the learned Lepsius, has expressed an opinion, that this people the descendants of the original inhabitants, the Umbrians, had in after times recovered sufficient strength to rise in successful rebellion against the Eastern colonists, and amalgamating with them had formed what was afterwards known as the Etruscan nation. But there is neither here any occasion for conjecture, when we have authentic records to inform us. From Polybius to Plu-