A New York Times-ban jelent meg az alábbi érdekes cikk, amiben a szerző a "The American Journal of Human Genetics" áprilisi számában publikált eredményekre hívja fel a figyelmet. Úgy tűnik, a modern genetikai kutatások igazolják az etruszkok keleti eredetét.
A cikkben említett ókori szöveghelyek: Theopompos FGrH115 F204 (az etruszkok szokásai) és Hérodotos I 94 (az etruszkok keleti eredete).
"DNA Boosts Herodotus' Account of Etruscans as Migrants to Italy
Geneticists have added an edge to a
2,500-year-old debate over the origin of the
Etruscans, a people whose brilliant and
mysterious civilization dominated northwestern
Italy for centuries until the rise of the Roman
republic in 510 B.C. Several new findings support
a view held by the ancient Greek historian
Herodotus - but unpopular among archaeologists -
that the Etruscans originally migrated to Italy from the Near East.
Though Roman historians played down their debt to
the Etruscans, Etruscan culture permeated Roman
art, architecture and religion. The Etruscans
were master metallurgists and skillful seafarers
who for a time dominated much of the
Mediterranean. They enjoyed unusually free social
relations, much remarked on by ancient historians of other cultures.
"Sharing wives is an established Etruscan
custom," wrote the Greek historian Theopompos of
Chios in the fourth century B.C. "Etruscan women
take particular care of their bodies and exercise
often. It is not a disgrace for them to be seen
naked. Further, they dine not with their own
husbands, but with any men who happen to be present."
He added that Etruscan women "are also expert
drinkers and are very good looking."
Etruscan culture was very advanced and very
different from other Italian cultures of the
time. But most archaeologists have seen a
thorough continuity between a local Italian
culture known as the Villanovan that emerged
around 900 B.C. and the Etruscan culture, which began in 800 B.C.
Etruscan culture was very advanced and very
different from other Italian cultures of the
time. But most archaeologists have seen a
thorough continuity between a local Italian
culture known as the Villanovan that emerged
around 900 B.C. and the Etruscan culture, which began in 800 B.C.
"The overwhelming proportion of archaeologists
would regard the evidence for eastern origins of
the Etruscans as negligible," said Anthony Tuck,
an archaeologist at the University of
Massachusetts Center for Etruscan Studies.
Because Italians take pride in the Roman empire
and the Etruscan state that preceded it,
asserting a foreign origin for the Etruscans has
long been politically controversial in Italy.
Massimo Pallottino, the dean of modern Etruscan
studies in Italy who died in 1995, held that
because no one questioned that the French, say,
developed in France, the same assumption should
be made about the Etruscans. "Someone who had a
different position didn't get a job in
archaeology," said Antonio Torroni, a geneticist at the University of Pavia.
Even so, a nagging question has remained. Could
the Etruscans have arrived from somewhere else in
the Mediterranean world, bringing their sophisticated culture with them?
One hint of such an origin is that the Etruscan
language, which survives in thousands of
inscriptions, appears not to be Indo-European,
the language family that started to sweep across
Europe sometime after 8,500 years ago, developing
into Latin, English and many other tongues.
Another hint is the occurrence of inscriptions in
a language apparently related to Etruscan on
Lemnos, a Greek island just off the coast of
Turkey. But whether Lemnian is the parent
language of Etruscan, or the other way around, is
not yet clear, said Rex Wallace, an expert on
Etruscan linguistics at the University of Massachusetts.
An even more specific link to the Near East is a
short statement by Herodotus that the Etruscans
emigrated from Lydia, a region on the eastern
coast of ancient Turkey. After an 18-year famine
in Lydia, Herodotus reports, the king dispatched
half the population to look for a better life
elsewhere. Under the leadership of his son
Tyrrhenus, the emigrating Lydians built ships,
loaded all the stores they needed, and sailed
from Smyrna (now the Turkish port of Izmir) until reaching Umbria in Italy.
Despite the specificity of Herodotus' account,
archaeologists have long been skeptical of it.
There are also fanciful elements in Herodotus'
story, like the Lydians' being the inventors of
games like dice because they needed distractions
to take their minds off the famine. And Lydian,
unlike Etruscan, is definitely an Indo-European
language. Other ancient historians entered the
debate. Thucydides favored a Near Eastern
provenance, but Dionysius of Halicarnassus
declared the Etruscans native to Italy.
What has brought Italian geneticists into the
discussion are new abilities to sequence DNA and
trace people's origins. In 2004, a team led by
Guido Barbujani at the University of Ferrara
extracted mitochondrial DNA from 30 individuals
buried in Etruscan sites throughout Italy. Their
goal was to see whether Etruscans' DNA was more
like that of modern Italians or of people from the Near East.
But this study quickly came under attack. Working
with ancient DNA is extremely difficult, because
most bones from archaeological sites have been
carelessly handled. Extensively contamination
with modern human DNA can swamp the signal of
what little ancient DNA may still
survive.Hans-Jürgen Bandelt, a geneticist at the
University of Hamburg in Germany, wrote that the
DNA recovered from the Etruscan bones showed clear signs of such problems.
With the geneticists in disarray, archaeologists
had been able to dismiss their results. But a new
set of genetic studies being reported seems
likely to lend greater credence to Herodotus' long-disputed account.
Three new and independent sources of genetic data
all point to the conclusion that Etruscan culture
was imported to Italy from somewhere in the Near East.
One study is based on the mitochondrial DNA of
residents of Murlo, a small former Etruscan town
in an out-of-the-way place whose population may
not have changed all that much since Etruscan times.
Mitchondrial DNA holds clues to geographical
origins, because local mutations produced
traceable lineages as people spread from the
ancestral homeland of modern humans in
northeastern Africa. Some lineages are found only
in Africa, some in Europe and others in Asia.
The Murlo residents lineages are quite different
from those of people in other Italian towns. When
placed on a chart of mitochondrial lineages from
Europe and the Near East, the people of Murlo map
closest to Palestinians and Syrians, a team led
by Dr. Torroni and Alessandro Achilli reports in
the April issue of The American Journal of Human Genetics.
In Tuscany as a whole, part of the ancient
Etruscan region of Etruria, the Torroni team
found 11 minor mitochondrial DNA lineages that
occur nowhere else in Europe and are shared only
with Near Eastern people. These findings, the
teams says, support a direct and rather recent
genetic input from the Near East, a scenario in
agreement with the Lydian origin of the Etruscans.
Dr. Torroni said he had data awaiting publication
that are based on Y chromosomes and point to the same conclusion.
A third source of genetic data on Etruscan
origins has been developed by Marco Pellecchia
and Paolo Ajmone-Marsan at the Catholic
University of the Sacred Heart in Piacenza.
Tuscany has four ancient unusual breeds of
cattle, including the giant Chianina. Analyzing
the mitochondrial DNA of these and seven other
breeds of Italian cattle, Dr. Ajmone-Marsan found
that the Tuscan breeds genetically resembled
cattle of the Near East, whereas the other
Italian breeds grouped with cattle of northern Europe.
One explanation could be that people in Etruria
had imported cattle from the Near East at some
time. But given Dr. Torroni222s finding that the
people, too, have a Near Eastern signature in
their genes, the best explanation is that 223both
humans and cattle reached Etruria from the
Eastern Mediterranean by sea, Dr. Ajmone-Marsan
and his colleagues said in a report published
online in February in The Proceedings of the
Royal Society. This explanation fits with
Herodotus remark that the Etruscans brought with them everything they needed.
The data from the cattle DNA has also let the
researchers calculate that the time at which the
Tuscan and the Near Eastern cattle were part of
the same population was 6,400 to 1,600 years ago,
implying that the Etruscans set sail in this period.
The new findings may prompt specialists to look
for an arrival date compatible with the
archaeological and linguistic data, which
essentially means before the proto-Villanovan culture of 1100 to 900 B.C.
"I'm willing to believe that people speaking a
prehistoric form of Etruscan came from the Near
East - who knows where? - and settled in Italy at
some point in the early Bronze Age," said Dr. Wallace.
The Bronze Age in Europe began around 1800 B.C.
Dr. Tuck, the archaeologist, said he supposed
that three clear genetic threads linking a
Tuscan population, human or bovine, to groups in
the Near East is pretty compelling evidence.
If the proto-Villanovan culture signifies the
Etruscans' arrival, it is surprising that no
similar culture is known from ancient Turkey, he said.
Maria Bonghi Jovino, an Etruscan expert at the
University of Milan, said the cultural
discontinuity seen at the beginning of the
proto-Villanovan culture probably represented the
arrival of small groups of traders or prospectors, not a mass immigration.
As for Herodotus, Ms. Jovino said she believed,
liked most modern historians, that he does not
always report real historical facts, often referring to oral tradition.
But at least on the matter of Etruscan origins,
it seems that Herodotus may yet enjoy the last laugh."
(NICHOLAS WADE, NYT April 3, 2007)
