WHO CAME FIRST: THE ETRUSCANS OR THE JEWS?
CONTENTS:
(1) THE MYSTERIOUS ETRUSCANS
(2) ETRUSCAN CITY OF THE DEAD
(1) THE MYSTERIOUS ETRUSCANS
"The Etruscans are at the very beginning of the history book, right near the Egyptians and the Jews."
"But tell me, Dad! Who do you think are older?"
"The Etruscans or the Jews?”
Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi Continis
(Translation: Isabel Quigley)
Giannina, a nine year-old Roman girl, asks this seemingly ingenuous question in the opening paragraphs of Bassani’s great novel, The Garden of the Finzi Contini.
They are on a Sunday jaunt to the Etruscan Necropolis at Cerveteri, barely an hour’s drive from the city.
But Bassani's book is about Jews, not Etruscans. And Giannina's query triggers a flashback in the author’s mind— transporting him to the Jewish cemetery in his hometown of Ferrara.
Then Bassani's real story begins, narrating the weirdly idyllic last days of a coterie of fellow Ferrarese Jews— destined to perish in Auschwitz.
The Etruscans were a distinct people with their own language and culture, famed for their wealth and their luxurious way of life.
They dominated much of Central Italy (and beyond) for hundreds of years (from the 8th through the 4th centuries, B.C.) Then they gradually adopted the Latin language and Roman ways, losing their identity as a unique society.
For Giorgio Bassani back in the 1950s (when the famous excursion to Cerveteri took place), the "real Etruscans" were largely beside the point.
For him, they evoked an incalculable past— outside time and conventional history. (In Giannina's school book, the Italian national narrative evidently begins with the Romans.)
When we hear the word "Etruscan", the first adjective that comes to mind is usually "mysterious". And why is that?
Most immediately, we react to the haunting glamour of a "vanished people"... But Etruria isn't Atlantis and the Etruscans never "vanished" at all.
They were absorbed into the present-day Italian population —and in some places, they allegedly dominate the local gene pool.
Then there is the odd and elusive Etruscan language, which was deciphered by scholars only in recent years.
We have many thousands of surviving texts and inscriptions, regarding religious ceremonies, sacrifices and divination, death and the hereafter. But no popular literature and few records of everyday life.
In fact, our response to the Etruscans is overwhelmingly aesthetic and more than a little romantic.
They look so wonderfully mysterious with their archaic smiles, their aristocratic poise and their seeming indifference to the passage of time.
(2) ETRUSCAN CITY OF THE DEAD
Houses for the Living...
Houses for the Dead...
"Crossing the threshold of the cemetery, each of them [the Etruscans of Cerveteri] possessed a second house."
"Inside this house, a resting place was already prepared. And soon, they would be lying down alongside their forefathers."
"Eternity, therefore, was not a vague illusion. Nor a mere fairy tale. Nor an insubstantial promise by their priests."
Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi Continis
(Translation: Isabel Quigley)
These not-quite-vanished people, who were they anyway? We hear that Etruscan society was rigidly hierarchical —and this is the seeming proof.
Great museums are dominated by such elegant and self-assured individuals, smiling at us from frescoes and sarcophagus lids, re-enacting the pleasures of their privileged lives.
All Etruscans were not created equal, however, nor were all phases of Etruscan history.
Burials took place at Cerveteri over a span of some five hundred years, from the 9th through the 3rd Centuries BC.
There were rich and poor, times of power and prosperity, times of crisis and decline.
How about this elegiac scene? It is easy to read it as an abandoned city in all its complexity, with palaces across the street from more modest row-houses.
But what are we really looking at? Diminishing resources or the increasing urbanization of Etruscan life, mirrored by an evolution in burial customs?
Archeology is seldom simple, in Cerveteri or any place else.
Minimal hole-in-the-rock sepulchers occurred early (back in the 9th Century) then again later, often encroaching on nobler monuments of the past.
As for the humblest layings-to-rest, they must have numbered in the countless thousands over the centuries—but where and how? Maybe meager burials in outlying fields?
As for Giorgio Bassani, he tells us exactly what he is doing.
Speaking through Giannina, he dissolves the border between life and death, embracing memory on his own ambiguous terms.
“Papa,”Giannina asked, “why are old tombs less gloomy than new ones?”
“Well, of course people who’ve just died are nearer to us, so we love them more,” he said.
“You see, the Etruscans have been dead for such ages”—and again he was telling a fairy-tale—“that it’s as if they’d never lived, as if they’d always been dead.”
“But, now you’ve said that,” she said gently, “you’ve made me think that the Etruscans did actually live, you know, and I love them as much as everyone else.”
Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi-Contini
(Translation: Isabel Quigley)
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