Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/752

734 well. In costumes, jewelry, the paraphernalia of war, in painting and statuary they were alike distinguished. Their mythology was very complex, much of the Roman being derived from it. Most of our knowledge of them is derived from the rich discoveries in their chambered tombs, scattered all over Italy from Rome to Bologna. There can be no doubt of a very high type of civilization attained as early as ten or twelve centuries before the Christian era. Roman history is merged in the obscurity of time, five or six hundred years later than this. The high antiquity of the Etruscan Is therefore beyond question.

We know less of the language used by the Etruscans than of many other details of their existence—only enough to be assured that it was of an exceedingly primitive type. It was constructed upon as fundamentally different a system from the Aryan tongues as is the Basque, described in our last paper. It seems to have been, like the Basque, allied to the great family of languages which includes the Lapps, Finns, and Hungarians in modern Europe, and the aborigines of Asia and America. These unfortunate similarities led to all sorts of queer theories as to the racial origin of the people; as wild, many of them, as those invented for the Basques. It never occurred to any one to differentiate race, language, and culture one from another, distinct as each of the trio may be in our eyes to-day. If a philologist found similarity in linguistic structure to the Lapp, he immediately jumped to the conclusion that the Etruscans were Lapps, and Lapland the primitive seat of the civilization. Thus Taylor, in his early work, asserts an Asiatic origin akin to the Finns. Then Pauli and Deecke for a time independently traced them to the same Turanian source. At last, when the Etruscan civilization began to be investigated in detail, authorities fell into either one of two groups. They both agree that the culture itself was of foreign origin. The Germans, with the sole exception of Pauli and Cuno, are unanimous in the assertion that it is an immigrant from the Danube Valley and northern Europe. These authorities regard it as an offshoot of the so-called Hallstadt civilization, which flourished at a very early period in this part of the continent. In a later paper on the Aryan culture we shall have occasion to speak of it more in detail. At the same time they declare the people racially to be of Rhætian or Alpine origin. The second school is disposed to derive the Etruscan civilization from the southeast—generally Lydia in Asia Minor. The relation of