Italy before Rome: Etruscans, Samnites and the DNA that changed everything

Italy before Rome: DNA reopens the Etruscan mystery

For centuries, the question of where the Etruscans came from has divided historians, archaeologists and enthusiasts. Herodotus claimed they were Lydians who fled famine; Dionysius of Halicarnassus considered them indigenous. A genetic study published in Science Advances — carried out by teams from Germany, Italy, the United States, Denmark and the United Kingdom — analyzed the complete genomes of 82 Etruscan individuals and concluded that, genetically, they are the same people who had inhabited the region since the Neolithic. Their culture, however, was another matter.

What the largest genetic study on the Etruscans says

The study, based on samples dated between 800 and 1 BC, argues that there was no mass migration from Anatolia. The Etruscan population shares ancestry with neighboring Italic peoples. However, among the 48 individuals from that period, one shows origins in Asia Minor. A single case. For some, this does not disprove the legend of a military elite arriving from the East: ancient sources speak of warrior aristocracies, not mass invasions.

The debate is not new. For decades of the 20th century, part of Italian archaeology defended the indigenous-origin theory with an intensity that, in hindsight, had a good deal of ideological construction to it. The problem is that the Villanovan culture — considered the first Etruscan stage — shows continuity in settlements, iron metallurgy, black pottery and funerary urns. If they were the same people from the start, where does a civilization come from that invented haruspicy, the Liver of Piacenza and a divinatory religion unmatched in the Mediterranean?

Why the Etruscans were not Indo-European

The Etruscan language is not Indo-European. We knew that. What complicates the story is that their writing has Pelasgian and Anatolian roots, and that the Umbrians, their neighbors and contemporaries, did speak an Indo-European language. If both peoples shared territory and material culture, the linguistic difference demands an explanation that genetics does not provide.

Some point to the Lemnians: on the island of Lemnos, off the Anatolian coast, a stele written in the Greek alphabet and in a language similar to Etruscan was found in 1885. Thucydides, who was in the area as an Athenian strategist around 420 BC, recorded that Lemnian was still spoken on the Chalcidice peninsula. He was not speaking from hearsay. The Tyrrhenian distribution — Etruscan, Lemnian, Rhaetic — supports both a maritime expansion from the east and an overland peine from the Alps.

The Samnites: the great forgotten people of pre-Roman Italy

While attention focuses on the Etruscans, the Samnites are pushed aside. And they shouldn't be. Pompeii, before becoming the Roman city everyone knows, was a Samnite foundation of the 6th century BC. In Campania there were twelve Etruscan cities around 500 BC, and Capua was governed by an Etruscan aristocracy until a rebellion expelled them around 440 BC. The episode bears an uncanny resemblance to the expulsion of Tarquin the Proud and the proclamation of the Republic in Rome.

The Samnites spoke Oscan, related to Latin, with shared grammar and vocabulary though not mutually intelligible. In Oscan, Pompeii was Pumpaii. Even in 79 AD, the year of the eruption of Vesuvius, its inhabitants were still using Oscan. The Tabula Osca and other inscriptions preserve that trace. They were not lowly shepherds from the mountains, however much the Rome-centered narrative has treated them as extras.

Rome as an Etruscan invention that disowned its origins

Rome was, to a large extent, an Etruscan product. Its first kings were Etruscans. The city itself, according to some theses, was an Etruscan foundation. But when the Etruscans aged and declined, anything Etruscan became synonymous with rogues and lowly folk. The Roman nobility preferred to forget that every cultural achievement of their own was an inheritance from the despised Etruscans. That is why the greatest historical work on Etruria, written in Greek by the emperor Claudius — married to an Etruscan woman, as noted in the material — did not survive. Suetonius attributes to him eight books of memoirs and a treatise on dice. The Etruscan legacy was erased from the story.

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This is exactly where the matter gets stuck. Genetics says they are the same people since the Neolithic. Language says no. Archaeology says the Villanovan culture is continuity. Ancient sources say they came from Lydia. And a single individual out of 48 with DNA from Asia Minor resolves nothing, but does not allow the case to be closed either. Whoever has the definitive answer should publish it. Meanwhile, we keep arguing about funerary urns and gold plates.