Etruscan Kitties

Tomb of the Leopards, Tarquinia

The Etruscans used many animal figures in their frescoes and sculptures and pottery, which feature creatures both real and legendary.  I am particularly enchanted with their depictions of cats - usually big cats - which, like the leopards above, tend to be stylized, sinuous, and exotic.

The famous Chimera of Arezzo

Herakles and the lion

So - were the Etruscans surrounded by lions and leopards and panthers, oh my?  Well, no, probably not.  But what they did have was the little versions - little cats.  Like the one shown on the wall, in relief, in this tomb:

Tomb of the Reliefs, Cerveteri

See the little guy arching his back under a coil of rope, also sculptured in relief, on the pillar?  Some argue this is not a cat, but it sure looks catlike to me.  And this particular tomb is filled with depictions of the objects of everyday life in Etruscan days.

And now, because I have pretty much no time for blogging this week, I'm going to get really lazy and show you some present-day descendants of Etruscan cats, photographed last spring in Tarquinia, Cerveteri, and Orvieto.   Enjoy!

Cat walking past Etruscan tomb (Cerveteri)

Images in this post are either our own, or in the public domain.

In Search of the Etruscans - Part 4: Orvieto

Cippus:  Head of a Warrior, from Crocifisso del Tufo necropolis, Orvieto

Orvieto (Velzna to the Etruscans, Volsinii to the Romans) was one of the  important Etruscan cities that flourished in the seven centuries before the Common Era.  Later a thriving medieval city and then a refuge for popes in the Renaissance, Orvieto is dramatically situated on top of a steep butte formed of volcanic tufa, giving it spectacular views from all sides.

View from Orvieto

At the foot of a sheer cliff on the north side of the city is the Crocifisso del Tufo necropolis.  Only partially excavated, the necropolis consists of over 100 rectangular chamber tombs laid out in orderly streets, sharing walls with their neighbors like townhouses or apartments.  Originally each was closed with a stone door, and an appropriate cippus, like the one shown at the top of this post, placed atop the tomb, which was sealed with clay and earth.  Each tomb entrance is carved with the name of the person interred there.

Row of tombs, Crocifisso del Tufo

Tomb entrance

These are small tombs, most meant to hold a single body, and the townhouse-style graves do not contain frescoes like those at Tarquinia.  They did yield some grave goods, however, such as the oddly lovable gorgon pictured below, and there are some nearby tombs that are larger, more elaborate, and painted, like the Golini 1 tomb, whose frescoes have been detached and are on display in Orvieto's archaeological museum. 

Gorgon

The Etruscan city of Velzna stood apart from the burial area, as was typical.  Velzna was probably located where the modern city of Orvieto stands, which has limited archaeologists' ability to conduct excavations.  Bits of Etruscan buildings do survive, however, such as the fragments of the Temple of Belvedere, below.

Temple of Belvedere

The walk from the city of Orvieto along the steep wall and down to the necropolis below is quite spectacular.

On the way down to the necropolis

 One can look down and see the straight lines of the necropolis, divided into tidy avenues.

Crocifisso del Tufo, from path above

Even the carved names above tomb entrances have yielded quite a bit of information about Velzna.  For instance, it must have been a very multicultural city:  names are not only Etruscan, but Greek, Latin, Umbrian, and even Gothic. Maybe it was that cosmopolitan flavor that inspired me to sit on the grass among the tombs scribbling haiku into a small notebook.

Necropolis at foot of cliff, with Orvieto in background

Heavy with time, crumbling, still, forgotten.
Yet a lizard scampers. 

Necropolis

Ancient names carved over web-screened portals.
Birdsong, trees in blossom.

Row of tombs

In this house of ancient dead
I whisper "Permesso," and descend.

The modern city of Orvieto sits atop a sort of tufa mesa which is riddled with tunnels and caverns.  Many of them were dug by the Etruscans, and then later expanded and stabilized by their medieval descendants.  These spaces include deep wells, to provide water for the city perched so high above ground level, and channels for moving that water to where it was needed.

The tour of Underground Orvieto, which is well worth taking if you get the chance, points out other spaces which may have been Etruscan in origin but were used by medieval people as wine storage and a place to press olive oil (two things that benefited from the constant temperatures underground), and for dovecotes - the birds would nest in niches in the cliffs beneath the city's walls, and all the residents then needed to do to procure a squab dinner was go into their basement and take the young birds out of the nest.  (As our guide pointed out, the birds no longer inhabit those niches:  "Maybe they don't like tourists," she said, "or maybe they got smarter.")

Underground caverns

Olive press, which used to be powered by a donkey

Dovecote

Wine storage (reconstructed)

I have many pictures of the modern city of Orvieto (well, mostly medieval, but it's all relative), and I will do another post soon with those.  I don't really have much in a research motif to say about later Orvieto, but it is a fascinating city, and really, the pictures are too good not to use them.

In Search of the Etruscans - Part 3: Cerveteri

 

Fibula (30 cm long, 7th c. B.C.)

Cerveteri (Caere in Etruscan times) is a pleasant Italian town located between Rome and Tarquinia.  At first glance there isn't much to indicate that it was once prominent among the twelve Etruscan metropolises, the southernmost of Etruria's band of coastal cities.  And yet Cerveteri, with its three ancient necropolises, has contributed a tremendous amount to Etruscan archaeology and scholarship.

Banditaccia necropolis, Cerveteri

 Some of Etruria's most spectacular finds come from Cerveteri, having somehow eluded tomb-robbers over the centuries.  The Regolini-Galassi tomb in the Sorbo necropolis, not open to visitors, yielded such treasures as the large fibula shown above, and the two items shown below, all three displayed in the Etruscan museum in the Vatican Museums in Rome.

In the centuries when Rome and Etruria coexisted, before Rome gained the ascendancy and conquered the Etruscan cities and eventually absorbed the Etruscan people, there was a time when Cerveteri was in closer cahoots with Rome than were the other Etruscan cities.  (What exactly is a cahoot, anyway?  Anybody know?)  In fact, in the year 390 B.C., Rome, under threat of invasion from the Gauls, sent the Vestal Virgins to Cerveteri to keep them safe until the danger was past.  In recognition of that service, Rome awarded Caere honorary citizenship (though without voting rights). The special relationship deteriorated not too many years afterwards.

The Banditaccia necropolis

The necropolis at Cerveteri that is open to the public is called Banditaccia, the largest ancient necropolis in the Mediterranean area at about 1,000 acres (not that the visitor is going to cover all of that territory).  This remarkable city of the dead, with its straight avenues, rows of tombs, and tumuli, was built over the course of 600 years.   Graves there range from the Villanovan period (9th century B.C.) to late Etruscan (3rd century B.C.).

Banditaccia

It is possible for visitors to enter many of the thousands of tombs in Banditaccia.  Unlike the tombs at Tarquinia, these don't have frescoes, but they do contain interesting architectural elements - carved ceiling beams, columns, and furnishings - thus giving us some hint of what Etruscan homes and buildings may have looked like.  Since the Etruscans built in wood, we have no surviving residences, and only fragments of temples.

Here's a look inside a few of those tombs:

There are many simple tombs, of a single chamber, but the great burial mounds tend to contain more complex family tombs, consisting of a corridor (dromos), a central hall, and perhaps several attached chambers where bodies were laid to rest.

A row of simple "dice" or "cube" tombs

A chambered tomb

One extraordinary tomb, the Tomb of the Reliefs, located in the Banditaccia necropolis, has given scholars a lot of information about Etruscan daily life, because it depicts so many everyday articles carved in relief - coils of rope, tools, utensils, cushions, even house pets.  Everything one could possibly wish for in a well-furnished afterlife.

Tomb of the Reliefs

To sum up the experience of visiting this ancient burial place, I'd like to quote D.H. Lawrence, writing in 1927.  He described his reactions to the Cerveteri tombs thus:

"There is a stillness and a softness in these great grassy mounds with their ancient stone girdles, and down the central walk there lingers still a kind of homeliness and happiness.  True, it was a still and sunny afternoon in April, and larks rose from the soft grass of the tombs.  But there was a stillness and a soothingness in all the air, in that sunken place, and a feeling that it was good for one's soul to be there."

Images in this post:  Tomb of the Reliefs photo released to public domain by the photographer; all others are our own photos.

In Search of the Etruscans - Part 2: Tarquinia

Tarquinia's famous winged horses, found in the ruins of a temple in the old Etruscan city

When I first drafted this post, I found myself writing quite a lot about the history of the Etruscans.  That, however, is not the task of this blog, which exists to talk about the process of historical fiction research, not its results.  If someone wants to know about the Etruscans, they have many options available to them, and I hope they will take advantage of them.

But for me, the relevant question here is:  What did I learn from being in Etruscan sites that I could not have learned from books?  What was it that I experienced that brought me closer to my goal - a stronger, more  intuitive understanding of this fascinating culture?

First, I learned something of what it means to live on a promontory.  Yes, I knew the Etruscans built on high ground.  Yes, I knew that they practiced divination by watching the flights of birds and by observing lightning.  But it wasn't until I stood on one of those high hills and looked down at all of the circling, spiralling birds that I had an inkling of how it might have appeared to a haruspex trying to divine the future through those swooping, graceful motions.

It wasn't until I watched a thunderstorm approach us over the plains and valleys and watched the lightning arc over the next hill that I had a feeling of how such phenomena actually looked and felt, and for an instant, I shared with the ancient Etruscans a sense of awe, and of the raw power of lightning.

I've read the disapproving words of the Romans as they wrote about their Etruscan neighbors - too pleasure-loving, too much freedom and power given to women, too violent (and this from the Romans?!?).  It's not exactly fair and balanced.  I've read the modern histories and archaeological reports, with their detailed descriptions of art - Greek influence, meaning, levels of skill.  I've seen the artifacts, removed from Etruscan tombs and displayed primly in museums with informative labels.

But nothing prepared me for the experience of walking down steps into a tomb dug out in the sixth century B.C. and seeing the pictures on those ancient walls:  the dancers, the musicians, the games, the animals, the feasting, the exotic clothing, the activities of everyday life, rendered with a vividness and an exuberance that stuns the observer.  You cannot walk away from those tombs without carrying with you a living, moving mental picture of the Etruscans.  And now that I've had that experience, nothing in the way I view the ancient world - not the Etruscans, the Romans, or the Greeks - will ever be quite the same.

Tomb of the Leopards

There.  That was what was important.  Now I give you the blog as I originally wrote it, for those who are interested.


Tarquinia.  This small Italian city, only about 60 miles north of Rome, has a venerable history.  The town we see today, medieval in appearance, is not situated at exactly the same location as the ancient Etruscan city (which the Etruscans called Tarchna and the Romans called Tarquinii).  Rather, today's city (which is that of the middle ages) is on the edge of the Monterozzi plateau where the Etruscan necropolis is located, and the deserted site of the ancient city is on the next hill over, the promontory known as Civita.

Looking at the site of the old city of Tarquinia from the Monterozzi necropolis

Today's Tarquinia was known as Corneto in the middle ages and renamed Corneto-Tarquinia in 1872, but in 1922 a resurgence of interest in Italy's distant past prompted the return to the ancient name of Tarquinia.  Both versions of the city, old and older, are near but not on the coast; a port called Gravisca allowed the Etruscans to be a major naval power and facilitated trade, yet the Tarquinians lived on a defensible hill nearby, away from the malaria-infested coastal lowlands. 

Tarquinia was a major player, perhaps the major player, among the twelve cities that defined Etruria (see map in previous post).  Fortunately situated in a rich agricultural region and with access to equally rich mineral resources, it became a wealthy and powerful city as early as 750 B.C.

Tarquinia's fertile surroundings

Fellow tourists in Chiusi

When D.H. Lawrence made his tour of Etruscan sites in 1927, he didn't seem particularly taken with Tarquinia as a city.   He complained about officials being officious, about the food, about transportation difficulties.  (At least he didn't have to join a third-grade class in order to get into a tomb, as we did at Chiusi a couple of years ago.)  He did, however, have a great deal to say in praise of the necropolis and its famous painted tombs, which show many exuberant and lively scenes from Etruscan life.


Here's Lawrence on the Tomb of Hunting and Fishing:

"...quick with life, spontaneous as only young life can be.  If only it were not so much damaged, one would be happy, because of the young liveliness of it.  There is nothing impressive or grand.  But through the paleness of time and the damage of men one still sees the quick ripple of life here, the eternity of the naive moment, which the Etruscans knew."

Tomb of Hunting and Fishing

Iron age funerary urns

We, on the other hand, loved the town.  Italy is replete with medieval cities that have been tarted up for the tourists, and Tarquinia is emphatically not one of those.  San Gimignano touts its towers, but Tarquinia has imposing towers as well.  Cortona, the City of Art, seems constantly to be posing for pictures, but Tarquinia is simply a town, a very old town, where people still live.  And when we asked one new friend how long her family had been there, she looked puzzled at the question and responded, with a shrug, "Sempre."  (Always.)  But they live as neighbors to Etruscan tombs dating back to the Iron Age (though the painted tombs first began to appear in the late seventh-early sixth century B.C.), and they live amid massive medieval buildings which often incorporated stones quarried from the ruins of the earlier Etruscan city.

Some images of Tarquinia:

What draws the tourists - though they are probably just day-tripping from Rome - today is the necropolis, and the painted tombs.  Tarquinia is home to perhaps as many as 6000 known tombs, though only 180 of these are painted.   Those 180 tombs comprise about 80% of the known painted tombs in all of Etruria.  (Numbers from Tarquiniia:  An Etruscan City by Robert Leighton.)  Of these, perhaps 30 are currently accessible, and around 15-20 are open to visitors on any given day.

These tombs, dotted all across the necropolis area, each consist of a mound, an underground tomb, and a modern hut leading to stairs down, where the visitor switches on a light and peers through a glass door to view the frescoes, many of which are startlingly vivid, despite their age.  The rich pigments include yellow from iron, blue from lapis lazuli (possibly imported from Egypt; its use is more prevalent in later frescoes), black from soot or charcoal, red from iron oxide, and green derived from some combination of copper, malachite, flint, and calcium.

Etruscan tomb, Monterozzi necropolis

Tomb of the Jugglers

Tomb of the Leopards

The Monterozzi necropolis is now a UNESCO site, with the tomb paintings protected and climate-controlled, but that is a fairly recent development, and centuries of weather erosion and tomb robbers have taken their toll.  Tomb robbing is still going on; there is a market for these antiquities, and it is virtually impossible to police the vast area of the necropolis effectively.  Little to nothing was left in most of the tombs of grave goods or human remains (though some few were, fortunately, discovered still intact), but the paintings remain, though some are badly damaged.  The frescoes from a few of them (the Tomb of the Triclinium, for example) have been removed from their original sites and installed in the archaeological museum in town.

Tomb of the Triclinium

We were fortunate in that during the time we were in Tarquinia it was possible to gain access to several tombs not usually open to the public, by hiring a guide.  We chose to do this, joining a charming Dutch couple, and followed Tarquinia local Claudia into a half dozen more tombs, in an area somewhat distant from the tombs open to the public.  Among these tombs was the oldest we saw, and my favorite, the Tomb of the Panthers.  I do not have a picture to post - we were not able to get a usable photo, and I could not find a copyright-free picture - but if you follow this link you will see these beautiful, stylized cats.

Also on this tour was the remarkable Tomb of the Bulls.  I've given you an image of one of the frescoes, and also our (rather blurry) photo of the tomb as seen from the doorway, to give you an idea of the context.  You will see the image on the far wall.

Tomb of the Bulls

Tomb of the Bulls (note image on far wall)

And with that, we bid a reluctant farewell to Tarquinia, a city I'll return to in a heartbeat if I get the chance. Next time we'll look at a very different kind of Etruscan necropolis, at Cerveteri.

Images in this post:  Winged horses from Wikimedia Commons,  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.  Other images either our own, or in the public domain.