Roman culture…… But where did the Italians get this from?…Read my piece on the Tyrsenian languages here (and have a look at the amazing Camunic rock art here). • There are two main hypotheses regarding the origins of the Etruscan civilisation back in the Early Iron Age. The first is by autochthonous development in situ, out of the Villanovan culture of Etruria in central Italy. The second is via oriental colonisation of Italy, from Anatolia. Helmut Rix’s Tyrsenian proposal is reflective of this ambiguity, relating Etruscan to Rhaetic of the Alps, suggesting autochthonous connections, but also to Lemnian as found on the “Lemnos stele” on the Greek island of Lemnos, indicating either Etruscan presence on Lemnos or demonstrative of westward Tyrsenian expansion towards Etruria. Remember that the Etruscan language was nonetheless isolated and surely of a different family to neighbouring Italic and Celtic tongues, all Indo-European (perhaps even of the same Italo-Celtic branch, as has been controversially proposed and that I seek to verify).Helmut Rix put forward his so-called Tyrsenian family in 1998, finding common features -which have been confirmed by other scholars- in morphology, phonology and syntax. Tyrsenian is considered Paleo-European and to supposedly predate the arrival of Indo-European languages in southern Europe.
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