The statistics for this encyclopedic treatment of the Etruscans, and how to study them, are informative: 67 authors from 11 countries, 90 chapters, most, but by no means all, by Italian authors, over 1800 pages. The work stands as a successor to M. Pallottino's guide (320 pages by one author in seven editions from 1942 to 1984 and numerous translations) and in the wake of J.M. Turfa's The Etruscan World (2013), itself over 1200 pages, S. Bell and A.A. Carpino's Companion to the Etruscans (2016) and an increasing flow of monographs, of which S. Haynes's Etruscan Civilization (2000) takes pride of place at the scholarly end, L. Shipley's The Etruscans (2017) at the more popular, and C. Riva's is eagerly awaited. Given that the most commonly held view of the Etruscans is that they were mysterious and unknowable, this explosion of available material is both welcome and a little surprising; none of us predicted that the Etruscans’ time had come. It is worth saying that the timing is also ironic; Etruscology has never been under more institutional threat in Italy, its natural home.
It is easy to focus on some obvious flaws of the work. The English is far from perfect, though rarely misleading. The chapters vary between intensely detailed and rather slight (a standard problem for such volumes, but it is not a one-stop shop for any constituency). There is some overlap between chapters. The work has been long in progress, understandably enough, so is immediately behind on some key recent finds. The Poggio Colla inscription is perhaps the most obvious, though in fairness that is still some distance from being fully understood, and all our accounts will need to be rewritten once the recently recovered Caeretan plaques have been published, since they allow us to rethink internal domestic decoration. On a purely physical level, the unequal distribution of the pages between the volumes (500 in volume one and 1300 in volume 2) makes the second volume hard to use, but I presume it is envisaged predominantly as an online resource. Illustrations are reasonable (black and white in text with a colour section at the end), and the maps were drawn especially for the volume, but we are still far from having the wealth and quality of visual material easily available for teaching purposes that exists for, say, Greek art.
The organisation has been done thoughtfully. The volume begins with some methodological sections, but is substantially driven by material culture (inevitably, given the evidence). Dividing the work's main section chronologically (Early Iron Age, Orientalising, Archaic and Classical, Late Classical and Hellenistic, Etruria and Rome), and then each of those periods thematically (art, handicraft, society, ritual and cults, economy, external relationships) has the advantage of giving period overviews, and the disadvantage of dividing the treatment of continuous themes by what are effectively art-historical divisions. Again, this is not unusual for antiquity as a whole, and the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, but it is striking to see, especially since the other two companions cited above do not divide their material in this way (and risk misleadingly synchronous treatments). In this work, several themes are treated by the same author in successive periods, allowing one to navigate the volume in different ways. A particular surprise will be the distinction between art and handicraft, which is a rather old-fashioned hierarchisation of painting, sculpture and architecture on the one hand and the other arts on the other. Ceramic painting then becomes contentious, largely here elevated to its normal place, in defiance of the argument that it was a high-quantity low-skill imitation of metalwork.
One of the most useful and distinctive elements of the volume is the concentration on the Etruscans outside Etruria, which is also an element of the Turfa volume, but not to the same extent as here. There are some helpful survey chapters both for Italy and for the Mediterranean more generally, and this substantial section gives some support for the editor's contention at the outset that ‘the Etruscans are the third ancient civilization in western Europe after Greece and Rome’ (p. 1).
This is a striking claim. It is not surprising to read it perhaps at the beginning of such a monumental work, but it raises several questions. The most obvious point one could make is about Carthage, and although I assume the distinction of western Mediterranean is meant to exclude the Phoenicians, Carthage alone, with its substantial north African hinterland, has a claim to have contested the western Mediterranean for much of the period when the Etruscans were most active. This is not just a parlour game of ‘which was better?’. Rather it takes us to several definitional issues.
We have become extremely adept at worrying about ethnic groups of late. Although the temptation remains strong to keep to these definitions (see, for instance, G. Bradley and G. Farney's The Peoples of Ancient Italy [2017]); if we look elsewhere, the deconstructionist tendency is strong. The most obvious recent example is J. Quinn's In Search of the Phoenicians (2018). Quinn's careful analysis shows how scanty the evidence is for Phoenicians calling themselves Phoenicians, or anyone else for that matter calling them Phoenicians, before the Hellenistic period. This raises the Carthage issue once again. If Quinn is right, the Phoenicians self-identified by cities more than by what we have traditionally supposed united them, language and culture. One might counter that being Phoenicians ‘went without saying’, but that is precisely the wrong tactic in Quinn's book. Why should we privilege what they did not?
Now if we apply this to the case of the Etruscans, we instantly create an enormous tension. The project is – very importantly – not about the Etruscans –, it is differentiated from the other companions by being an introduction to Etruscology. As such it does represent the field pretty well, and certainly any student who wants to know what it looks like to be an Etruscologist in Italy or Germany in particular will in many ways get a pretty good idea from this book. The heavy emphasis on art-historical periods is part of this story. What is missing, from all three companions on the Etruscans, is a sense of self-reflexive internal critique.
Put bluntly, this is a picture of what Etruscology has been and may indeed continue to be. To criticise that is unfair – we have come to where we are by the means possible at the time. It is reasonable to be aware, as this volume is, of that history, but the next step is to think about where we go now.
One possibility is opened up by that idea of a ‘third party’ to the traditional Greco-Roman division. As indicated, there are other contenders – the ‘Phoenicians’ and of course the Egyptians (both to some extent prisoners of their own disciplinary obsessions), and others who are even more elusive in the material record. If Etruscology were to be offered as an alternative, not only in terms of another group of people, but a different methodological slant, what might that look like? Critically, the study of the Etruscans has to be emancipated from being between the Greeks and the Orient (as C. Riva points out in her forthcoming essay on the contributions by J. Winckelmann and L. Lanzi to the origins of the discipline). As long as we study the Etruscans with the art-historical periodisation of other cultures, there is always a risk that we will fail to do so.
Returning to Quinn's problem over the Phoenicians, we can see a similar challenge with the Etruscans, and at least might want to ask if her solution might be equally valid. How city-centred were the Etruscans? It is actually somewhat to the credit of the volume in hand, I think, that it does not resort to the city-by-city approach that has tended to characterise some accounts, an atomisation that can leave the reader struggling to find common ground. At the same time, positioning Etruscology as a validation of the importance of the individual city, of its ecological niche and its productive choices, would be an interesting way of refocusing away from the traditional regional approach, which was mentioned above. It then remains important not to force the Etruscan city into someone else's ideological framework.
Such an approach would also have a heavy landscape content, and that is another valuable opportunity integral to the nature of the Etruscan evidence. Survey data is beginning to make a difference – though there is a lot more to be done. However, works like L. Pulcinelli's L'Etruria meridionale e Roma. Insediamenti e territorio tra IV e III secolo a.C. (2016) show that even with the evidence we already have one can reveal a good deal about the landscape and its development. Another emphasis in this volume on production emerges from and contributes to a genuine upsurge in high-quality research on artisan behaviour. Taking these together, the new face of Etruscology could be a strategic connection between landscape, industry, economy and ideology (in so far as we can detect it) in the first millennium bc.
My optimistic reading of the quality and quantity of evidence now available is that we could see Etruscology start to generate its own paradigms, to be a builder of theoretical models and not just a recipient. This would justify N.’s positioning of the discipline and move our work from a repetition in different kinds of companions of the same slightly updated information to a strategic and self-confident renaissance of Etruscology, equipped with all the modern tools of archaeology. That of course needs funding and collaboration, and the final question, which this review cannot answer, is whether the flourishing of the companion as a genre is the beginning of that next step or a sign of a loss of confidence and long-term strategy, a step towards the future or just a repackaging of existing knowledge.
