2.
THE ETRUSCANS.
Æra of their maximum development.—The earlier centuries of the Roman Republic. Veii taken 360 A.U.C.
Historical Influences.—Upon early Rome.
Social Development.—Agricultural, architectural, religious, commercial, artistic. Partially self-developed. Probably, chiefly of Greek origin.
Alphabet.—Derived from the Greek.
Language.—Extant, only in hitherto untranslated (or imperfectly translated) fragments. Considered, by Lipsius, as Indo-Germanic.
The reason in favour of the descent of the Etruscans from the Rhætian Alps has not been put, even by Niebuhr, so strongly as it might have been.
What we find in Livy is something more than an opinion to that effect. It is an express statement that the Rhætian and Etrurian languages were alike.
If so, we have a discontinuous area; an area which—considering that the Cisalpine Kelts were preeminently the tribes of an encroaching frontier—was, most likely, originally continuous.
I believe, then, that the Etrurians represented the maximum civilization, and the Rhætian mountaineers the maximum rudeness of one and the same stock—a stock originally indigenous to Northern Italy, but subsequently broken-up by Keltic and other permanent invasions. Such, at least, is the ethnological view of the question—based upon the general phænomena of ethnological distribution.